Kounellis likes to pose an Odysseus, who, having left Ithaka
against his will, and relentlessly striving to come home again, only
becomes entangled in never ending adventures. Let us follow him on his
wanderings…
THE INGLORIOUS END OF THE PARROT
Kounellis begins his career in 1959 with paintings that no longer showed
an image, but – as a late echo of Klee – mere letters, numbers, arrows,
and mathematical symbols. As if he wanted to provide an illustration of
the semiotic view of that time - defended in Italy by Eco* - that art is
not more than a (sign) language.
When we hear of him again in 1966, there is no longer question even of
signs. Kounellis has adopted the then popular idea that art should be
replaced by life itself. This time, reality itself is shown - albeit no
longer on the canvas, but in a gallery. Reality is represented by
burlap, iron, cotton, a parrot, cactuses. The painting seems to undergo
a metamorphosis: canvas turns into steel panel, brush into cutting
torch, paint into burlap; the frame is first replaced by a painted frame
or an iron construction to eventually be wholly omitted. Real objects
come to be placed before the iron plates, or just against a wall, if not
on the ground. Or to sit, like the parrot on its stick: the painting as
a mirror is laughed off as a business of parrots. The choice for a
parrot is telling: it speaks! Unlike Narcissus, who looked - speechless
- at his own mirror image.
Kounellis’ anti-mimetic/anti-painterly gesture comes to its apogee in
1969, when he exhibits real horses in the galleria l’Attico. Horses as
such are no statues, nor signs referring to reality, but reality itself
– smell and sound included. But Kounellis’ horses are not grazing in a
pasture, nor resting in the stable: they are exhibited in a gallery.
Precisely therefore, they cease to be reality and are transformed into
signs: according to Fuchs (1981) they refer to the horses of the
Parthenon, of Saint Marc in Venice, of Ucello and Leonardo, of Géricault
and Delacroix, and of Picasso (p. 32). But that does not prevent the
direction of the reference to be reversed: whereas the ‘imitations’ of
academic art were supposed to refer to the real world, Kounellis’ real
horses refer to art...
Reference, then, restored, but in reversed sense. And, through the
exhibition of reality in a gallery, also the mirror - rather: the parrot
- is reinstated. Whereas in Kounellis’ first paintings ‘verisimilitude’
was replaced by reference through abstract signs, he now uses lifelike
originals as signs. Kounellis’ burlap, metal, coal and wool are, just
like his parrots, cactuses and horses ‘icons’: the term borrowed from
Peirce by which the then current semiotics designated signs that
resemble their own meaning. And is there any sign that does more - even
more than an imitation - resemble its meaning than the thing itself?
Both reversals - that of the direction of reference and that of the
‘abstract sign’ to ‘the icon’ - are the heralds of a new practice: the
formulation of statements in ‘icons’ – iconic language. And since the
then popular theoreticians equated art with philosophy and science, via
the equivocal word ‘world view’**, this new practice could easily pass
for art. The term ‘icon’ itself provided an impressive credential: it
linked this ‘iconic language’ with the icons of the orthodox church -
even with Malewitsh.
The images on the canvas, first equated with letters on paper, are in a
second move replaced by the ‘iconic’ antipodes of the latter: real
objects in a gallery. As Fuchs phrases it in no uncertain terms: ‘These
diverse elements are the morphological fragments of a lexicon that
substitutes the art of painting’ (Fuchs 1981, p. 27). In those times,
also other artists developed a language of their own: it suffices to
remind of Beuys, who did not use wool, burlap or steel, but fat, felt
and copper.
THE UNSTOPPABLE ADVENT OF THE ICONS
Once their credentials established, the icons begin to act more rashly.
To be sure, in the beginning they continue to refer wisely to art. The
parrot on his stick is soon joined by the iron plates with oil lamps
before them: in person the very light that traditional painting could
merely suggest. Or of a candle before the same iron plate – Georges de
la Tour’s candle light live! Or of windows and doors filled with stones:
the painting as a window on reality literally barricaded by tangible
reality itself. Or of real smoke on the wall of the museum, suggesting
that something has been burned – with the Futurists in mind we surmise:
the paintings that were hanging on the wall….
But soon the icons feel called upon to really conjure up a world, just
like art itself. That already manifests itself in the unstoppable
expansion of the lexicon of icons. From 1969 onward, burlap, iron,
cotton, parrots and cactuses are joined by stone and wood, coffee, fire
(from a candle, oil lamps, a cutting torch), plaits of hair, eggs, rope,
rats, beetles, crows, beans and all sorts of grain, gold, smoke,
mattresses and sewing machines. With this expanded lexicon Kounellis
begins to concoct more complex combinations, in an obvious attempt to
tell us something. A random selection: a mattress with a cutting torch;
a woman wrapped in cloth with a tongue flame on her heel (1970); a
yellow canvas, a sewing machine, the needle of which pricks the
silhouette of a woman and a frame of photographs (‘Manifesto for an
utopian theatre’, 1973); the self-exhibition of the artist with a mask
of Apollo, sitting on a table upon which the fragments of a cast of the
statue of the ancient god, and a flutist playing Mozart (1973). Thus,
the short ‘one-icon-statements’ are replaced by veritable narrative
installations, or ‘one-acts’, as Kounellis prefers to call his
‘installations’.
THE ICONIC IDIOTICON
The problem with these ‘one-acts’ is that the icons do not belong to a
conventional language, such as heraldry or Christian symbolism. There is
no room here for an iconography à la Panovsky: we have to do with an
newly invented personal language (Froment, 1990, p. 29) – in technical
jargon: an idioticon. The beholder is supposed to play the role of a
Champollion: he has to decipher the stone of Rosetta. As it is customary
with signs, all these objects begin to organise themselves in
oppositions. Some discern the opposition between the organic and the
inorganic. Others prefer the four elements. Moure (1990) sees an
opposition between organic and artificial, itself embedded in a broader
range of opposites (p. 15). Roelstrate (2002) mentions the oppositions
between ‘man and nature, reason and feeling, man and woman, crowd and
individual, life and death’ (p. 38).
Many a commentator contents himself with such elementary organising of
the signifying material. As if we already understood a verbal
communication by merely stating the fact that its acoustical materials
belong to a system of oppositions. Gloria Moure (1990) holds that we
have to do with ‘accumulations of evocative relations’ and sees in the
impossibility to grasp a meaning with ‘linguistic exactitude’ a critical
potential (p. 13). Which does not refrain her from filling in the
lexicon: ‘Verticality means: consistency; stratification: history;
weight: contingency and affirmation; fire: behaviour; gold: lay worship’
(p. 13).
Man cannot help to descry meaning wherever he can. That is why many an
interpreter does not resign when faced with the resilience of Kounellis'
signifiers. The entire literature on Kounellis brims over with
interpretations, most of the time on the basis of free associations on
isolated elements. Take, for instance, the traces of smoke on the wall.
This reminded me of the Futurists – after all, they cover a brush and a
palette or an etching of Hamburg. But Fuchs (1981) links them up with
Hephaistos and Prometheus – after all, Kounellis is a Greek. Moure
replaces Hepaistos’ forge and Prometheus’ flame with the ‘Heraclitean
fire’ (p. 66). And Roelstrate (2002) transforms this Heraclitean fire
not only into the oven of the alchemists, but also into the ‘exchange
rate of life and death, destruction, salvation and resurrection’ (p.
22).
In short: there are probably as much interpretations of this iconic
language as there are interpreters. Since all those interpreters borrow
form their predecessors, their comments develop like glosses on the
Talmud. In the end, that cannot fail to produce something like a
canonical lecture.
DIE GEBURT DER LITERATUR AUS DEM GEISTE DER MUSIK
In their pursuit of meaning, all these interpreters give their thoughts
free rein. But this is merely the epiphenomenon of a process that -
apart from every attempt at interpretation and as its very breeding
ground - is unleashed by every installation: many an object does not so
much ask for an interpretation, but rather conjures up images in the
mind. The alienating combination of commonplace materials only fuels
this process, all the more since the attempts at interpretation are
doomed to failure.
When they conjure up images in our mind, assemblages of icons come to
resemble the verbal signs used in literature: also in poetry do signs
conjure up images – albeit that these images are here far more strictly
determined than in Kounellis’ iconic idioticon. From the ashes of the
art of painting, doomed to death, a new art form arises, a kind of
‘iconic poetry’. The art of Kounellis is not so much a way of painting
with objects on the museum as a canvas, but rather a kind of poetry that
does not use letters on paper, but objects in a space. Overnight, the
painter has become a poet.
But also the image, banned from the canvas, comes back through the back
door: not as a real object in the museum, but as a representation in our
mind. The real objects have only been the catalysts in this
metamorphosis of painting in iconic poetry. The irony of the whole
proceeding is that precisely the real object, the very cornerstone of
arte povera, disappears behind the representation it conjures up, not
otherwise than the paint or the canvas behind the image that they make
visible. A sweet revenge of the ‘mirror’ on those who were so stupid to
think that one would look in a mirror when the real thing stood right
before his nose.
That does not prevent this dimension of the whole process to escape from
the artist’s consciousness. Kounellis continues to emphasise that he is
a painter! His works continue to be exhibited on the floors and the
walls of the museum and on steel plates that borrow their measures from
an academic drawing sheet. This cannot but betray a bad conscience about
his betrayal of painting. Some consciousness of the metamorphosis of the
painter into a poet seems to shimmer through in Kounellis’ flirting with
theatre and opera: as when he calls his ‘installations’ ‘one-acts’. But
this insight is immediately eclipsed in that he understands the
metamorphosis in terms of ‘integration’: it takes more to create a ‘Gesamtkunstwerk’
than add the smell of the horses to their sight! If not in terms of the
replacement of conjured up space through real space – from the painting
as a window on reality to the museum as a stage – or: an amphitheatre
for a Greek tragedy.
Also art critics and philosophers continue to stress the link of
Kounellis' installations with the art of painting. Fuchs can not help to
join Kounellis in an ever changing series of ancestor painters. Many a
commentator continues to deliver one or another variant of the highly
intelligent assertion: ‘Coals are to Kounellis, what potatoes are to Van
Gogh’.
Anyway, with Kounellis the art of painting turns out to be not so much a
Greek tragedy as veritable ‘litérature’ pur sang. However much Kounellis
- in the best tradition of abstract art - may continue to deliver his
works with the caption ‘untitled’, not only the comments on it, but also
the representations on it are without any doubt highly narrative.
Despite the fact that Kounellis demonstratively sealed his lips with
silence’s gold, no parrot’s babble can possibly surpass the
tittle-tattle rattled by his entire host of iron plates … The funny
thing is that the same modern art, that owed its credentials to its
anti-narrative, anti-literary pathos – in an effort to equal the example
of music supposedly ‘referring’ to nothing – eventually turned out to
produce in its most radical forms the most coarse narrative, referential
art one can possibly imagine: sheer allegory! And it is Fuchs himself
(1981) that reminds us of that on occasion of the exhibition of a
chimney in the museum: ‘The Ciminiera of Kounellis is an allegory of
progress’ (p. 42). The umpteenth return of the repressed: a veritable ‘Geburt
der … Literatur aus dem Geiste der Musik!’.
ITHAKA IN SIGHT!
But there is more.
In ‘Unitled’ (1971 Castello di Rivoli) we see a chamber wherein a bunch
of gas cylinders with gas tubes ending up in gas burners spitting
virulent tongues of flame in the same direction. Before our very eyes
those industrial paraphernalia are transformed in a quasi mythical
procession of fire-spitting monsters attacking something with their
fiery tongues. In ‘Untitled’ (1985) we see the same tubes with tongues
of flame aimed at the shaft of a cross. Before our same eyes the same
industrial paraphernalia metamorphose in burning arrows underway to the
body on the cross.
Burning torches turning into fire-spitting snakes or in burning arrows …
again we have to do with a metamorphosis. This time the real objects do
not disappear behind the representation they conjure up, but behind the
image that appears in their stead. Does that not makes us think of
another metamorphosis: paint that suddenly evokes the image of a parrot?
Is this not precisely the very ‘mimesis’ that modern art so desperately
tried to ban? The finesse of making the materials speak included: just
as Van Gogh gives impetus to the flow of his cypresses through the
tormented movement of his strokes, just so Kounellis lends his arrows an
extra sadistic dimension through letting them burn like a burning torch.
Granted, we have to do with a rather primitive business: rather than of
a Titian, it reminds us of the Egyptians trying to save the deceased
bodies from decay: the mummy as the predecessor of the statue.
But we are nevertheless saddled with pure mimesis! The self-denying
painter, after having flirted with signs and icons, and having courted
poetry, eventually finds himself in front of the old mirror reflecting
an inexistent world… After so long and evasive lingering – and like
Oedipus: unwittingly – Odysseus, at last back home with good old
Penelope!
IN KOUNELLIS’ FORGE
Burning torches fired at a crucified body… Is it not surprising that all
those trains of thought spun around Kounellis’ oeuvre leave the most
obvious themes undiscussed? Or should we rather say: burry them under
the weight of tons of coal and steel?
In the context of crucifixion and piercing, how should we understand the
persistent appearances of Apollo in Kounellis’ work? It will certainly
not suffice to oppose the plaster of an academic cast to the raw
materials of industry. Let us in our turn give our musings free rein…
Never does Apollo appear in the full radiance of his beauty: we only get
to see the fragmented statue, buried under layers of earth, through
which it seems to try to trickle upwards. That results in the metaphor
of the lost ancient world, buried under the weight of industrial
society. Not so much a Marxian utopian view, rather the romantic longing
for ancient Greece, as with Heidegger or… Cavafy***.
An echo of the idea of the fragmented body can be heard in ‘Untitled
1970’, where a cast of Apollo’s statue is cut in pieces laid out on a
table. The artist is seated behind the table and holds Apollo’s mask
before his face, as if he were a actor in an ancient tragedy. On his
right side sits a flutist playing Mozart and on his left side a crow.
The artist himself poses as Apollo! This ‘one-act’ irresistibly reminded
me of the story of Martias and Apollo. Martias challenged Apollo for a
duel on the flute, and when the god lost out to the satyr, Apollo had
him skinned – as can be seen on the magnificent painting of Titian.
A skinned satyr hanging upside down on a tree… Does that not remind us
of the equally skinned, but this time also chopped up carcasses (of
beef), hung up by Kounellis against a series of twelve steel plates in
Barcelona (Untitled, 1989). Carcasses not only are skinned and chopped
up: also the head, the hoofs, the genitals and the entrails are removed.
The entrails remind us of the canopes, wherein the Egyptians preserved
their mummies – they only left the muscles and the skeleton, just like
Kounellis, whose carcasses in Barcelona, however, were not mummified,
but left to decay. An echo of the canopes can be heard in the amphoras
of ‘Untitled 1981’, one of which was filled with blood. And we suddenly
understand where the idea of a chopped up body stems from: not Apollo’s
body, but Osiris’ was chopped up and spread to the four winds – his
penis was never recovered. Behind the beautiful body of Apollo, not only
the skinned body of Martias, but also the fragmented body of Osiris
shimmers through.
The penis is laid out in multiple on the rather impressive catafalques
(‘Untitled’ 2000, Castello Colonna) – one the better ‘mimetic’ works. No
mummified muscle here around a skeleton, but man-sized phalluses,
covered with a shroud serving as foreskin. And the metal shaft – more or
less like Fontana’s canvas – fiercely ripped.
It is not only the intestines removed from the carcasses that resurge
here and there in Kounellis’ works, but also the hoofs. In ‘Untitled
1985’, on a series of ten iron plates we see a beam, that turns out to
be the lower part of a cross, where the hoofs/feet of the crucified
belong. And that brings us, from Apollo, via Martias and Osiris, to
Jesus Christ. It is well known how the mutilated body of Christ has been
oincted by myriads of women through Maria Magdalene. Also by myriads of
men, albeit that they preferred another mutilated body: that of Saint
Sebastian. Only this further metamorphosis of Christ can explain the
presence of eight tongues of flame, mounted as eight arrows fired at the
body that is supposed to hang on the cross. They are the descendants of
the spear that pierced Christ’s ribs, the retroactive echo of which is
to be heard in the cuts in the shaft of Osiris’ penis – through the beak
of Horus, which in his turn attends the laying off of the fragmented
body of Apollo in the guise of a crow…
Apollo/ Martias, dissolving in Osiris in the past and in Christ and
Sebastian in the future: that lends a new dimension to the romantic
longing for ancient Greece. It turns out to be the longing for the
shameless cult of the foremost male body accompanying the equally
shameless bloom of mimesis in ancient Greece – ànd in the Renaissance.
The taboo on mimesis also affects what appears in the mirror: through
Apollo the fine arts as well as the body beautiful are aimed at.
But it also sheds new light on the violence unleashed against the body
of Apollo – the way in which the mimetic taboo is implemented. The first
targets of this violence are objects: steel plates cut by the burning
torch, burlap sacks crushed by steel beams, coals burned, coffee beans
grinded, not to mention everything that has been hanged on hooks. But in
other cases it is clothes that are maltreated: jackets wrung around
steel beams, coats crushed between the sharp edges of steel plates. And
via the clothes we arrive at man himself: the needle of a sewing machine
pricking in the drawing of a woman (Manifesto for an utopian theatre,
1973), the sharp blades threatening to attack the beholder, the knives
skinning the carcasses and the chain saws chopping them up, the cuts in
the bodies/penises on the catafalques, the tongue of fire spitting from
the heel of a wrapped woman, the same tongue of fire protruding from the
mouth of the master himself, the burning torches aimed at Saint
Sebastians body… That compels us to change our interpretation of the
‘industrial’ violence unleashed in Kounellis’ forge: we rather seem
landed up in Piranesi’s ‘Carceri’, where torturers are performing their
sinister proceedings in dark corners. To equally protect ourselves
behind a metaphor.
Victims are the canvas as well as the beautiful body that so dearly
wanted to appear on it. After all, it is not only in Apollo that art and
the beautiful body are united, also Kounellis links up the body with
art: his steel plates have the size of drawing paper, if not of… a
double-bed. Behind the steel plates not only the canvas is concealed,
but also the skin. Burning, crushing, grinding, hanging, piercing,
cutting, skinning, chopping: granted, these belong to another order than
the smooth brushing of oil paint on the canvas and the caressing of the
skin. It suffices to read back from the marks to their creation – as
with Pollock, whom Kounellis admired – to understand how creation has
been debased to a crude sadistic orgy. In the skinned carcasses, rather
than in coal and steel, is spoken out the secret of Kounellis’ oeuvre:
after skinning has removed the beautiful skin and laid bare the gory
(and smelly) flesh, the body is chopped up with a chain saw.
What Kounellis is supposed to scorn, has in fact penetrated the inmost
core of his whole being: the artist himself as the ultimate mirror of
reality.
HEAVY FIRE
Not only the manipulations are characterised by violence, also the
dimensions partake of the sledge-hammer. Not to mention composition,
that never is more than the roadroller of repetition. Our feeling of
being overwhelmed is only enhanced through the literal weight of all
those heavy works and the violence needed to transport them, let alone
to have them hanged on the walls. Let us hear what Kounellis (1999, 12)
himself has to tell about the latter:
Bam Bam Bam, the soldiers enter through the left door before the iron
plate called ‘Arbeit für Budapest’.
Bam Bam Bam, the infantery had penetrated the territory of the iron
statue called ‘Arbeit für die Psychiatrische Krankenanstalt’.
Bam Bam Bam, the cavalry comes within the view of the big iron with the
white paper called ‘Arbeit für den palazzo Reale’
Bam Bam Bam, the partisans of art enter through the right door, and,
after a fierce battle man-to-man, crash the armies of the enemy and
erect the statue anew …
The sovereign artist as a pre-Greek pharaoh laying the lash over the
slaves doomed to erect his pyramid…
The drone of soldiers boots, that cannot fail to shock me deeply…
© Stefan Beyst, May 2002.
* See 'Danto' and 'Goodman'
** See: Are Rubens and Beuys colleagues?
*** See: Cavafy: surviving immortality