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The
Body and the Baroque
Mark Gisbourne in conversation with Clemens Krauss on temporary wall
paintings.
MG: Two themes appear to be very strong in your work. The obvious one is
what we would call the phenomenon and physiology of the body, issues of
body art, issues of your own background and in particular what seems a
very Austrian subject, namely the body and the baroque. This work is
going to be eventually destroyed. Destruction of art is not a general
practice, but as this is a temporary installation it will be erased.
This takes us back into the notion of the role of the artist in relation
to the art market and the role of the artist in relation to the
production of art. George Bataille referred to art as pure luxury or
excess. Art is considered as one of the most valuable things in Western
culture, because—following Bataille—it is totally unnecessary for human
life and is pure extravagance. Does the destruction refer to this idea
or does the artist just have to be smarter than the market, to use one
of your quotes?
CK: Why “destruction”? Whether this is the right word, at all, has to be
discussed in the first place. I believe that the concept of a wall
painting as an ephemeral project can be realized only through removing
the wall painting after displaying the work. In consequence, this might
have much more to do with construction rather than destruction. The idea
of doing something which is temporary came up when I was invited to do a
project which relates to both my painting and a certain space. And I
wanted to do a piece which is not for sale. One of the most burning
questions for me still is, in which direction the whole situation of
upcoming painting will swing. I would suggest a certain slow down.
However, doing something temporary, an ephemeral painting, involved a
moment of personal reflection and deceleration.
MG: The whole notion of the art market and the hype is a recurrent
phenomenon that was also a big issue in the 1960s and 1980s. But what
about the concept of pure luxury and that artists are always valued and
framed within economic terms? Art has always been valued because it is
redundant with regard to immediate social and cultural necessities. If
there is more disposable income about you inevitably get this inflation
or hype.
CK: In general I would agree that art is pure luxury. In a way you can
compare it with philosophy, which always tended to flourish in epochs
and societies of wealth. What irritates me is the current increasing
willingness to satisfy a certain demand for luxurious goods. A medium
like painting has inherent qualities that are to its advantage, compared
to other media. One should use these qualities with care. Can fashion
and saleability be the only reason for choosing a medium? Economic
success is quite often confused with content. In that sense I conceive
the temporary work as a comment on the whole situation. It is all about
what remains. In what way will it all survive and what will survive, at
all? What remains of the temporary?
MG: One of the features which is obviously strong in your work is the
theme of the body. What you are presenting here is, in a certain way, a
body-performance related piece. What will remain in the aftermath are
vestiges of what has happened. You can go often enough to Sotheby’s or
Christie's and you can see the vestiges of performance art which are
sold and marketed. When you take this off the wall how will you use this
material? Will there be the aftermath of a performance intervention and
will you put up the material remains for sale?
CK: The remainder of an ephemeral piece is one of the crucial elements
of the phenomenon itself. To what extend can something be ephemeral at
all, if there are numerous residues? Many people have asked me what is
going to happen with the paintings. There is an obvious need of
preserving something non-recurring. Technically, of course, it would be
possible to cut the figures out and preserve or conserve it
professionally. But I don’t want to spoil the initial concept. The whole
piece works because it stays a temporary phenomenon. Documentation and
memory or for instance this talk we have here now will be the vestiges.
I believe in the aesthetic potential of the fleeting and volatile. You
want to catch it, but you can’t. Nothing remains but the idea and the
memory and a lump of paint. Maybe we can use the oil in times of oil
crisis since I used more than 50 kilograms of oil paint. No, but
seriously, the decision is definite and the paintings will be taken down
and dumped.
MG: The volume of paint you use, this takes us back to the issue which
seems to be central to your work: the body concept. What does the
Bodybody concept in your paintings refer to?
CK: The work 21 + 4 Bodies is part of the series Das Körperkörper
Problem, the Bodybody Problem. This painting series, which I am working
on now for almost two years, is briefly about a kind of critical
representation of the body—not only the human body and certainly not
just about mimetic representation. It is about the body as a model for
more complex phenomena such as contemporary history, society, or the
human body and its relation to reason and perception. 21 + 4 Bodies is
an attempt to extend the Tafelbild, the panel. Not only in the sense of
making a painting three-dimensional, but also in the sense of
questioning the panel itself. The white cube, normally displaying
canvases, turns into one single extended canvas. Everything becomes part
of the work, also the white parts of the wall, which have been left
unpainted. This is one aspect, that painting is translated and
transformed into the context of a space. Not just this particular space,
the museum, is important but the expansion of two-dimensionality and the
fact that a space is provided for an immersive experience. The other
aspect, which refers more to your question, is the personal performative
use of one's own body and how we deal with the corporeality of our own
body. For the situations here on the wall I pose myself and re-enact
poses from contemporary image sources such as magazines, TV or Internet.
We might all be familiar with these situations since we know them from
the media but here they are camouflaged in a sense, since they have been
“digested” through re-enacting and painting. Everyone here would
probably recognize the original image in the original situation.
MG: What is very interesting, also, is that there is very little
interactivity amongst the figures. The groups are actually single poses
juxtaposed.
CK: In the first place the most obvious interactivity happens between
the bodies on the wall and the audience. Probably more visitors than we
think will touch the figures when they feel they are not being watched.
It is about the immersive quality of the room – where one can see and
feel and touch and even smell the paint—that is an important aspect.
This is also part of the interactivity. Of course, the figures itself
are initially isolated. What I am interested in is to what extent they
start to open up systems of communication and situations of interaction
amongst themselves, since each single figure apart is anonymous.
MG: Usually human figures are represented with legs. What we see here
are fragmented torsos and upper bodies—you are obviously interested in
the post-structural-related fragmentary form and therefore you leave
parts of the torso isolated. This evokes the notion of the fragmented
body that is central to Lacan and his post-structural psychoanalysis.
But then you come from Vienna which is also central to the history of
psychoanalysis. What is the psychological significance in your work of
this fragmentation of these bodies? Does being Austrian generate this
notion of a fragmented body?
CK: Fragmentation is an expression of the discontinuity of a process –
indeed a very fundamental natural phenomenon. I conceive my whole work
as a process. In this sense also the figures have no concrete beginning
and no end. We find this process-related approach also in the text and
the serial set up of all my recent works. The text inserts a
non-physical layer but the language element remains a cutting—i.e. it is
unfinished, incomplete. You might pick up some words or part of
sentences but these never add up to what would be the complete
information. Finally, there is the white of the canvas or of the wall
which has been left unpainted and as such is part of the work and the
process the work represents.
MG: You are talking about fragments as signifiers and how these function
as signifiers. You represent the language elements as virtual, partly
illegible texts and the body elements as fractional materiality.
CK: The structure of separating text and body elements goes back to my
earlier work, in which I never combined text and body within one image
at all. This series consisted of numerous combinations of canvases
revealing a process of their own body and how the body alters over a
certain period of time. This formal fragmentation of the image
carrier—or information carrier—refers to the idea of our common
dualistic concept and the construction of body and mind. So this concept
is reflected in the impastoed way I painted the body parts (or body
fragments) and the juxtaposition of screen printed canvases representing
the different layers of—let’s say—the mind. Here we find the same
situation but within one image—or one room.
MG: You are juxtaposing opposing varieties of perceptual experiences:
the material—i.e. the fracture—and the immaterial—i.e. language?
CK: Of course I am playing with this Western concept of the dualism of
body and mind. In this context, materiality and the materiality of paint
can be very helpful.
MG: This reminds me of the baroque—which brings us back to Vienna
again—in a sense that the baroque is always very florid, expressive and
material. But in baroque art there is a highly conceptual structure of
either that which is theatrical (i.e. performative) or a fluid
parallelism (Leibnitz's monads). It casts that which is conceptually
materialised and that which is phenomenological into a wider and extreme
narrative—movement as distinct from renaissance stasis?
CK: Baroque, of course, has to do a lot with body and lust, and sex and
religion—basic concepts of materiality and immateriality. I think my
work is very much about that, too. Particularly if we talk about the
flesh and the ephemeral.
MG: This concern with the body seems to me particularly Austrian. Let’s
think of the Viennese Actionists or painters like Maria Lassnig, for
example. Why do you think Austrians have such an addiction to the body
as a thematic?
CK: I think this might have to do on the one hand with Austria’s history
as an empire and its blooming period in the Baroque. The arts have been
highly developed in the baroque epoch in Austria, music and
architecture, for example, and of course painting. On the other hand
Austria is a traditional Catholic country with all its ambivalent
relations to the body. This ambivalent relation echoes in the work of
the Viennese Actionists. Their use of the body has been quite political
and their attitude was mainly about body and protest. Nowadays the
function of the body is totally different to the 60s. But for me it is
easier to work with the body as a theme after the Actionists’
achievements. But another general question I have to ask myself is: What
do I have in common with Austrian art only due to my Austrian
citizenship in the context of a globalized art world, at all? A
background and a personal biography are existential fact, of course, but
in the debate I can see an equal correspondence for example with
Latin-American or Chinese artists.
MG: There is an increasing conflict between the figure and the body. The
body seems to be of a particular interest in the post-existential world,
a phenomenon of the body as a material concept. The body seems to have
become an issue in the last 30 or 40 years. It wasn’t so much of an
issue earlier, when only the figure as form was the issue of
“figurative” art. Has this to do with the modern world's concern with
articulating our identity, and with the presence of our phenomenological
identity in the an increasingly global and dehumanized world?
CK: We are witnessing definitely an increasing interest in the body—not
only in the arts. Particularly people in Western culture feel a sort of
cumulative incompleteness of the body in respect of biological and
medical cognition. Revolutions happen in plastic surgery and so-called
body contouring. The shift in the media plays a crucial role as well.
The traumatized body in all its aspects is the theme of my work. The
human body is an extraordinary complex phenomenon. If you have some idea
of how the body works and parts of it, e.g. sexuality, the mind, etc.,
you can apply your knowledge to other systems such as politics and
society. That may provide a new perspective of what happens in
contemporary culture and history. Art has always been obsessed by the
body—once more, think of the baroque—but probably its function and
meaning have altered in different eras. Likewise, in society the body
has always been an issue, even though its use and exposure have changed.
Bodies are mind-providers, sex objects, warriors or suicide bombers.
MG: The “body in crisis” describes this condition as posthuman, a
condition that is known to result in death. The body has become
extremely politicized. This idea recurs often in your work. In this
case, where we are faced with a temporary wall painting, there is a
destabilisation of roles with regard to your performance here in a
museum, and as an artist creating a painting. Can the artist only be an
artist because there are galleries? Long ago, Foucault already taught us
that the analyst can only be analyst if there is someone who plays the
part of analysand. So painting on the walls in the museum is a kind of
role play. You are playing the role of an artist.
CK: The performance within the museum started with my first arrival in
this room and will end with the removal of the paint. Then the initial
concept of the ephemeral art work will have been realized. We should
think of the aesthetics of the ephemeral in the same way we think of the
aesthetics of something that is alive—the body, too, is doomed to decay.
They are twenty-five bodies and the painted objects return as corpses
and end in the tomb of waste. That tells a lot about us and the times we
are living in.
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