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GERMAN
Julia Höner
The Face is Politics
On some works by Clemens Krauss
In the
jargon of film criticism the term “American” refers to a specific camera
position in which the actors are shown from their head to below their
hips.With its origins in the Western, that mighty genre from early
American cinema, the “American” shows just enough to capture the cowboy
pulling his Colt from his holster.
In the
series of works, Das Körperkörper-Problem (The Bodybody-Problem),
by Clemens Krauss, the aforementioned quality of cinematic framing is
transferred to painting. Krauss himself performs as a model for his
work, in which various human gestures are acted out. Most of them stem
from political incidents, depicting people from areas of international
conflict, which are re-enacted by the artist. The visual models for
these various body-positions are taken from the pool of globally
circulating media images.
This
continues to exert an influence on his work, and in consequence we
approach them at first with a perception formed by our visual experience
regarding mass media images. We scan the surface for traces of visual
narration or content-based dramaturgy. Krauss’s work, however, does not
deliver a story. Rather, it deals with the representational capacity of
the image as such, and therefore shifts into an in-between space, in
which the mimetic function of mass media is replicated – while at the
same time avoiding representation.
In his canvases, Krauss situates large and small figures wearing
T-shirts and trousers, the global youth uniform. The impasto paint with
its organic, fleshy character creates volume and mass that allows the
figures to emerge from the canvas and reinforces their material
substance, though not in the sense of a fully plastic physicality that
alludes to an external reality, in the way that occidental art has been
attempting in painting for centuries. The clusters of color, consisting
of brief brush strokes, have more of a voluptuous quality – indecisively
oscillating between becoming a form and insisting on their materiality.
In this
way Krauss is able to draw attention to the process of creating an image
and reveals the human body to be the result of a formal setting and a
quality of the painting medium itself. Nevertheless, the body in
Krauss’s painting is not only the result of formal decisions; the artist
also alludes to the concept of a body as a political construct. This
appears clearly in the faces of the figures, which avoid all
disclosure.
For Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, the face is not a natural
condition, but rather must be understood as a cultural phenomenon. It
reflects both clerical power and the politicization of life. The
submission of the subject to the law and rules of a community begins,
again following Deleuze and Guattari, with the Christian calendar where
the “true face of god” becomes an overarching concept for the human
face. Subsequently, the face of “Jesus Christ Superstar” is confirmed in
the face of the average white European. In the dynamic of social
integration and exclusion, simplified notions of what is normal and what
is abnormal can also become criteria used by the State to control its
subjects. As Deleuze and Guattari assert, only through the
deterritorialization of the face, withdrawing from any clear
declaration, can the subject escape from social control.
If Clemens Krauss seizes on painting as a medium of cathartic salvation
for his figures (a liberation through the deprivation of meaning, in
which the subject is released from the chains of representation within
social orders) he also reflects upon the artistic medium: his paintings,
in which rioters look like sport-fans, produce consumable appetizers out
of political documentation. Images from the media, which appear
disguised as authentic but can never be identical to reality, are once
more overemphasized and scrupulously distorted by Krauss.
In his
work, an abstract body that is mediated through print media or
television, is overlaid with the image of Krauss’s own body. Inherent to
this hybrid construct is the basic idea of the constitution of the
subject, in which the image of outside and inside overlap: The “Ego”
that I paint is not identical with the “Ego” that paints, even if the
former aims at representing the latter. It’s no coincidence that this
notion of the body as a semantic field, in which various meanings
overlap, is prevalent in Krauss’s paintings. The artist is licensed in
medicine and familiar with the body not only as a symbolic system, but
as a real physical organism.
During the evolution of his iconic language, his figures stepped out
from the canvas onto the gallery walls. Finally they were cut from the
canvas and displayed in large glass cabinets. This evolution shows an
unorthodox approach to the underlying material, since this particular
notion of painting can be applied and re-appear again and again in new
contexts.
The glass cabinet as an
instrument of scientific order, as a display method and intimate frame,
enters with its own symbolic weight into Krauss’s artistic cosmos. This
is notable in how the figures gain materiality, when put in glass
cabinets and are literally buried. What previously followed the canon of
the Christian panel and flirted with the bourgeois notion of art, now
lies dissected in a glassy mausoleum. The glass cabinet understood as
storage space that archives the artistic material and deprives it of its
topicality, but at the same time enables its reactivation. Consequently,
it opens the space for new surgical interventions on the canvas.
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