Andreas F. Beitin
The Violence of the Factual and the Beauty of the Terrible: Schlachtfelder by Jürgen Klauke
“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent” reads the sentence concluding Ludwig Wittgenstein’s epochal work Tractatus logico-philosophicus.[1] Be this as it may, much has been spoken and philosophized about on the subject of death, which, remaining the only certainty in life, lies beyond all experience, and in spite of the fact that one cannot say anything about it from one’s own experience, since “death is not an event of life” [2]. One may speak of dying, about killing as well, but not about death itself, because it lies beyond empirical boundaries. It is the inconceivability of death that not only induces anxiety, but has over the years led to a veritable flood of pictures. Hence, as medium of presentation, only the signs can be shown, the effects of death, of the deceased or the violence of death, or else visualized by way of representatives or symbols. Conditioned, among others, by advances in technology, that is, through the introduction of the so-called new media, in this connection there has been an increasing number of portrayals of death in contemporary art. In their most recent publications, Thomas Macho and Kristin Marek have taken this as occasion for advancing the thesis of a “new visibility of death.” [3]
Should one ignore the circumstance that one cannot see death itself and, for the sake of convenience, that one were to define it here as the sum of its visible signs or effects, then one may observe with respect to the presence of death in society a diametrically developing tendency over the course of history. Earlier, namely, in pre-modern times, death as immediately perceptible form by war, illness, the public enforcement of sentence, the high rate of mortality and, above all, dying within the confines of the home belonged to the normal everyday experience of society. Against the background of Christian piety, one defines death as the termination of earthly existence and considers it as at sort of transitional situation to the divine eternity. During this pre-modern period it had been primarily the preserve of art to visualize symbolic representations of death or pictorial presentation of killings in paintings, drawings and in graphics. Whereas today, in our secular society death is primarily conceived as something final, and is thus seen so far as possible as the repressive end of existence, and that immediate experiences of dying and death have largely disappeared from both the public as well as the private sphere by being confined to institutions – 70-80 % of all people die within the West in hospitals, nursing homes or in hospices [4] –, death, as represented in medial worlds, is omnipresent. Never before in any given culture has death been so present by way of virtual or simulated killing, as it is presently the case in western culture. Whether in cinema or television films, in computer games or in the Internet, the simulation of killings is all-pervasive. Alone on German television in the numerous series and films, an average of 70 murders are committed each day. [5] But real killing and actually occurring death is also made visibly accessible to all – one thinks of 11th September 2001 at home in front of the television set following the death of countless victims of the attack or, for instance, the murder of kidnap victims at the hands of Al-Quaida terrorists on the Internet. In connection with the first wartime reporting perceptible to media from Vietnam, Susan Sontag refers to a “new tele-intimacy of death and destruction” [6]; and yet, neither through this is death really close, but lies far more in the virtual distance, in medial distance. What remains clear is that by virtue of the frequency of its presentation in the various media, death has lost a part of its horror, while on the other hand, by virtue of the diverse developments in the areas of technology and medicine, an invulnerability or ability of self-regeneration is suggestively attributed to the body. The direct witness seems all the more drastic and shocking whenever death and killing are real and directly perceptible, when in an unaccustomed manner death comes within threatening proximity to one’s own existence. Everyone can confirm this: hundreds of accidental deaths in the Far East effect one far less than ten within one’s own city or than one occurring on one’s doorstep.
Whereas, today, life in the Western world is characterized predominantly by medialized or virtual death experiences, one may experience death first hand in slaughterhouses: analogous to death, slaughtering is similarly an occurrence which has successively disappeared from everyday life since the emergence of industrialization. Where, in former times one would have slaughtered according to need or at sacred festivals in the village itself, in the city or in the farmsteads, today, by contrast, industrial production sees to it that the supermarkets are filled to the brim with meat at all times and at a price per pound that on occasions amounts to less than a packet of paper handkerchiefs. Should ever one have had occasion to visit a slaughterhouse in which the sweet smell of blood hangs in the warm moist air, the impression made on one through the combination of the olfactory and visual senses is a uniquely penetrating and enduring one. Even though production animals are the victims here, what is disturbing aside from the act of killing itself, is above all the dimensions of this machinery of death far removed from the public sphere. The process of killing remains at a considerable distance to the human beings’ social environment, such that in the majority of cases meat has become an abstract food which appears to stand in no connection whatsoever to its producers, and should remain that way. George Bataille analyzed this already back in 1963, “The slaughtering and selection of cattle generally revolts people today: the meals served must on no account recall this.” [7] Prior to this, in 1929, he had determined the tendency of distancing oneself from the real experiences of death in his article “Abattoir” for the journal Documents:
“And yet the slaughterhouse of our day is alienated like a ship affected by cholera, and placed under quarantine. Now, the sufferers of this curse are neither the butchers nor the animals, but the good people themselves, who, in this way have arrived at the point of only being able to stand their own ugliness, an ugliness which answers to a morbid compulsion for cleanliness, acrid pettiness and boredom: the curse (which only shocks those who pronounce it) encourages them as far as possible to vegetate about the slaughterhouses...” [8]
Bataille not only complained of a loss or a reduction of existential life, and hence of the experience of death by suppressing the existence of slaughterhouses, but also a sublimating compensation of knowledge about death and of mortality by an exaggerated cleanliness. It is meant to efface the filth, the ugliness and also an inner ugliness, that shows itself to the light of day by excretions or – just to remain with Bataille’s example of the slaughterhouse – by the slitting open of the body, since everything that comes from within is a reminder, or cautions of decay, transience, death. Transferred to our social reality, today his critique would also include the fanaticism for youth and the increase of artificial beauty, which, by extension, suggests that the individual in questions is immortal.
In Jürgen Klauke’s new complex of works the Schlachtfelder (2009/10), the presence of death constitutes an essential element in a number of ways. The twelve tableaus of the series are each composed of twelve photographs; they illustrate alternately staged photographs by the artist as well as pictures of blood and innards. These slaughterhouse photographs “were the result of a principle of pleasure” and without specific intention in with respect to an immediate use; initially, Jürgen Klauke’s primary interest was for the “discharge and transitional mode of the shit.” [9] The photographic works show organs such as bladders, stomachs and intestines, tissue and blood; whole animals or the act of slaughtering itself do not feature. Klauke shot the pictures during nightly visits to a Cologne slaughterhouse. The photographs were then shelved in the artist’s studio for a period of about four to five years, before he then decided to arrange them into large tableaus together with other, already existing photographs. Rather uncharacteristically, in this new series Klauke works with color photographs (that had played a role especially in his earlier works of the 1970s), as well as with the medium of fragmentation and abstraction. Those among the Schlachtfelder photographs appear abstract that portray the sprayed blood of the animals on the floor, on trays or on equipment, which in its colored opulence has now become partly encrusted and coagulated or else dried out. One espies the artist in fragments to be seen only in sections and in serial repetition in three different positions. Empty chairs are seen swinging on one fourth of a total of the tableau’s 144 photographs.
It is the photographs of innards that draw the most attention in the Schlachtfelder, showing organs either lying in metal trays or on the blood-stained floor. Their bloody tissue is penetrated by veins. The moist surfaces of the differently colored lumps glisten in the glow of the florescent lamps, which bathe the working areas of the slaughterhouse in a cold light rendering the pastel toned appearance of the innards all the more wan. In stark contrast to this is the vivid red of the blood. The naming and localization of most of the photographed organs is hardly possible; as a result of the slaughterer’s destructive craft, they have been reduced to formless and functionless parts. At the focus of Klauke’s attention are especially the spherically formed inflated stomachs the form of which bears a semblance to the human skull. Here, the camera angle provides the viewer of the photographs with the perspective of a pathologist showing a skinned body. Every so often these organs exhibit incisions, neat and very aesthetic, as if produced by Lucio Fontana, not through canvas but through skin, flesh and fat. What then emerges here is not the black depths of a metaphysical, imaginary space, but the predigested remains of the last feed; at the end of the series, the camera’s gaze concentrates on the structures of networks reminiscent of marble of fine veins against a light background. About the debatable, or more precisely, ambivalent aesthetics of the pictures Klauke says, “For me, the slaughterhouse pictures are highly aesthetic, for others, they are intolerable. The question is what we experience as aesthetic or beautiful. The beauty of the terrible is no unfamiliar concept.”
Through the presentation of the innards of the slaughtered animals, which most people find dreadful, disgusting or repulsive Jürgen Klauke has recourse to the provocative category of ugliness, a category, which in connection with its apparent opposite, beauty, has always been the subject of heated debate in the evaluation of the quality of art works ever since antiquity; in the 18th century, for instance, in the so-called Laokoon dispute between Lessing and Winkelmann. The discourse finally reached a climax during the 19th century: one of its exponents was Karl Rosenkranz. In the debate as to the whether and how of the ugly in art he attempted in his Ästhetik des Hässlichen [Aesthetics of the Ugly] in 1853, to reconcile the dichotomy of the aesthetic poles of beauty and ugliness by tolerating ugliness so long as it serves beauty. A few years later in the literary world – and later, as is frequently the case, then influential on the fine arts – one of the early pioneers, almost fallen into oblivion, of the examination of the ugly, the abysmal and the morbid, the Comte de Lautréamont appeared on to the scene, who with his Songs of the Maldoror (1868) was to play a major role for the Surrealist generation. And even in the second half of the 20th century the aesthetic category of the ugly, in connection with Abject Art continued to be controversially discussed, especially in the USA.. [10]
Through his photography, Jürgen Klauke makes visible in two ways what otherwise cannot be seen; a practice, which he had applied, for instance, in series such as Prosecuritas (1987) or in Aesthetics of Disappearance (1992/93). In the Schlachtfelder he turned the internal outwards, that of the slaughterhouse as well as that of the animal, “when our most internal part is immediately externalized, the result is abhorrent,” points out Slavoj Zizek with reference to other works by Jürgen Klauke. [11] Against this background the fact that in the slaughterhouses animal organs and innards can be seen also plays no role, since the human does not look that different. Klauke is not seeking to initiate a consumer critique or a campaign for vegetarianism with the Schlachtfelder, but is far more interested in the fundamental themes of existence. While by way of technological progress the forms of human life have substantially changed over recent decades, we still essentially continue to lead the same biologically determined lives as animals: we are born, give birth, eat, digest and die. Thus, life as a whole is the duality of 0 and 1, of “on” and “off,” of being asleep and being awake, subject to life and death – a duality which is to be detected in a plurality of ways on the Schlachtfelder.
In addition to the oscillation in the appeal of looking and turning away in revulsion, apart from colored polarity of grey-blue and red the Schlachtfeld tableaus are above all dominated by presence and absence. On the one hand, the slaughter parts are present, portrayed in more or less abstract form; there are also the photographs of the non-identifiable, blood-stained corners of the slaughterhouse as well as the pictures of Jürgen Klauke himself. The absence is visualized on the other hand by the empty chairs pendulating in empty space. In this connection Klauke refers to a “very present absence.” A paradoxical paraphrase, though one which, by its very ambivalence hits the mark precisely, since it is through the repetitive, serial presentation of empty chairs each of which are positioned in the center of the photographs that the non-existence of a utilizing person is indeed very present. As in so many others of his previous works, here Klauke also draws on the medium of the dynamic, which becomes evident through long-term exposure: he not only shows a chair in space, but has it swinging, suspended on cables, whereby the immediate presence of an impulse-giver is implied. At the same time, herein lies a parallel for the improvised symbolic representation of death in the fine arts, since death is likewise never “here” within the scope of experience of the living, but can only be present indirectly, through the presence of the dead.
Thus, what is present is the violence of the factual, the slaughtered pieces and the blood. The drastic destruction, the physical decay conveys a shock also beyond the end and hence also to the uncertainty of one’s own existence. As in several of Franz Kafka’s works in which, comparable to Jürgen Klauke’s Schlachtfelder on the depiction of ghastly, apparently inevitable givens (in the narratives in the Penal Colony, an Old Leaf or a Country Doctor, for example) this shock constituting the basis of the stories as subtext is also to be found. The swinging water bag seen on several of the photographs of the Schlachtfelder with its ambivalent movements of controllability and non-controllability, which oscillates freely in space or else which appears to optically unite itself with the artist, stands no less as symbol for the instability and limited maneuverability of life. The glistening “skin” of the bag, which on the material level, analogous to the biological skin functions like a protective surface, like a living body refuses the gaze to the inner and to the “foreign territory of death” that lies beneath. [12] All the named elements, the presentation of formless body parts of dead animals, the abandoned swings, as well as the water bags all point to a synergetic interplay much like a memento mori, on the fragility of existence and the finitude of (individual) existence. In Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time this is put forward such that the general “one dies” “conceals what is peculiar in death’s certainty – that it is possible at any moment,” since “the “they” provides a constant tranquilization about death.” [13] Jürgen Klauke‘s Schlachtfelder is disconcerting in the sense that it de-collectivizes and thereby subjectivizes the “one” by way of directly and emphatically addressing the viewer. When contemplating the Schlachtfelder one becomes aware of this aspect of life, at least for a moment, and is reminded of the decay lurking towards death beneath the surface of the skin.
Alongside presence and absence a further pair of opposites is to be found in this new work series: the spontaneously produced photographs at the slaughterhouse as a part of social reality and the composed photographs in which the “the idea as world” of Jürgen Klauke is visualized. This type of comparison had already been undertaken once before in 1972 in a similar way in the publication Jürgen Klauke. (Ich & Ich) erotografische tagesberichte. Here, the artist realized a comparison of composed Polaroid photographs with documentary photographs of auto-erotic occurrences with fatal consequences. In the Schlachtfelder this comparison is included in a separate work complex and may be abbreviated to the pairs reality and imagination, facticity and composition, to life and art.
As in all of his works, so also in the case of the Schlachtfelder, Jürgen Klauke precisely selected the title and reveals a spectrum of the most diverse associations. With “Schlachtfelder” (battlefields) one initially associates sites of martial confrontation. Over the course of time, the theaters of war, in Middle High German still heroically and euphemistically referred to as Walstatt, wal (= selection of the fallen warriors by the pagan god Odin) became sites of mass reciprocal slaughter in spite of enlightenment and advancing educational levels and to territories of technical battles of matériel. The substantives contained in the word “battlefield” “battle” and “field” combine a temporally limited, hostile action within a specific location. The verb “slaughter”, by contrast, is used in contemporary parlance almost exclusively for the killing of animals. The two different spheres of action are united in this verb; what they share in common is the destructive. Today, however, contrary to topographically unambiguously determinable slaughterhouses, warlike actions increasingly evolve into “battlefields as spaces within the mind,” as Bernd Hüppauf emphasizes, “it is only in the present-day that war has become possible without spatially designated battlefields. [...] It combines the abstract of the virtual with the hyper-concrete of a specific locality and leads to disorientation...” [14] A development which may be presently observed in the temporally and spatially difficult to define confrontation of the Western world with Islam, for instance. Furthermore, in contemporary German slang “Schlachtfeld” (battlefield) is also employed as a synonym for chaos, for material disharmony. The chaos of the destroyed countryside, the wounded body, thus finding entry in the language and conceptual spaces of the everyday. However, Jürgen Klauke’s precisely applied battlefield tableau are far removed from chaos.
Were one to look back over the forty year creative productivity of Jürgen Klauke, the battlefields dovetail both in terms of content and form not only in the line of his oeuvre, but at the same time represent a logical, innovative further development. From the outset, Klauke is an artist who has mastered a thematic range in his works, which, condensed into the most essential aspects, touch upon several of the most important questions of human existence and that have in some cases anticipated social as well as scientific discourse. Thus, from the early 1970s, Klauke posed fundamental social, individual or existential questions, and, especially in the area of the (sexual) investigation of identity, achieved everywhere recognition for his pioneering artistic work. In addition to the theme of gender, it is above all the motif of death and the mode of one’s own existence with its inevitable transience that constitutes a central point of emphasis in his work. Eros and Thanatos thus comprise the two sides of the same proverbial coin: while Klauke has most recently been examining the roles of the sexes and the (also social) attendant functions of the genitals in photographs and drawings, what we have here in addition to the socially relevant aspect – especially through the linking thematization and motif of human re-productive organs with its transience – is a theme of death. In the final analysis, it is death that according to Heidegger, first gives life its meaning and defines life as the “being-towards-death.” [15] As paradox as the thesis may sound, but without death we would be subject to the “boredom of immortality.” [16] Among others, it was Elisabeth Bronfen who pointed out the relationship between tedium and death, in that she emphasized that by an over extend presence in temporal and spatial dimensions, one can find oneself in “a border situation resembling a death-like paralysis or atony.” [17] Jürgen Klauke had carried out similar detailed research on this special aspect of human existence already in 1980/81 in his series of works Formalisierung der Langeweile (The Formalisation of Boredom). He impressively visualized his comments on this theme, of being too long in spaces, in numerous photographs, for example, in the spatial absorption of the body as the extinction of existence. In different forms of production, Klauke has again and again taken up the theme of death in his work, whether in an ironically macabre manner in the presentation of the various suicide scenes – thus Die Lust zu leben (The Desire to Live) (1976; exhibited a year later at the Documenta 6) –, or in Stilleben (Still Lives) (1983), from the series Auf leisen Sohlen (On Tiptoes) through the use of real slaughter material, which he, en passant, photographed in India. And later clear motifs similarly emerge repeatedly with a death symbology. Aside from the last single case just cited, all works are to be allocated to the areas of composition and imagination. In the case of the Schlachtfelder Jürgen Klauke now goes beyond this by departing, at least to some extent, from the artificial world of self-dramatization, as well as from the studio as the site of picture production, and goes into a slaughterhouse in order to photograph real life while, at the same time no less, real death – something which becomes visible though the mass of unformed bodies and organic parts.
The motivic use and representation of slaughtered pieces in art goes back to the 16th century, to the vanitas- and ornamental still lives during the golden age of Dutch painting. In the 20th century Chaim Soutine and Francis Bacon created several impressive representations of this kind. It was especially Bacon who, like Klauke, felt attracted to the aesthetics of flesh, to its colors and who consistently discusses the theme of death. Through the use of real slaughter material, the Vienna Actionists introduced a caesura in this area during the 1960s, and in so doing transgressed the limits of shame and nausea. In their provocative actions they used both smaller animals and entire oxen, which as part of his mystery plays Hermann Nitsch would then have disemboweled. In his Schlachtfelder Jürgen Klauke’s objective is not a performative, actionist application or haptic and olfactory perception of slaughter materials, but an aestheticization of the factual, the “beauty of the terrible.” Whereas numerous artist colleagues such as Paul McCarthy, Matthew Barney or Cindy Sherman use artificial flesh and body parts in their works – Jürgen Klauke had already began practicing this back in the early 1970s, such as is in Selbstperformance (self performance) (1972/73), or Dr. Müller’s Sex Shop (1977) –, his Schlachtfelder thus bridge the distance to the reality of the represented through their immediate visual presence. For Klauke this is not dependent on a voyeuristic shock effect or abhorrence, quite to the contrary. Neither is he concerned with downplaying, or superficially beautifying the otherwise brutal reality of slaughter. It has far more to do with thematizing the personal approach to death, of the consciousness of one’s own transience and the fragility of existence. In spite of the aestheticization due to the focus on only a few details of innards or blood, the violence of the pictures is to remain preserved, which is why unlike other photographs of the tableaus, Jürgen Klauke forwent the use of coloring, so as not reduce the authenticity of the complexion.
“We cannot reach ecstasy if we do not – if only at a distance – see death, the destruction, before us,” wrote Bataille, in 1956, in the forward to his narrative Madame Edwarda, in which he presents a unique kaleidoscope of taboos, transgressions, ecstasies, physical externalizations and self-dissolution through to death. [18] Such terms as these would apply seamlessly to the work of Jürgen Klauke. The Schlachtfelder, which presently constitute the end of Klauke’s photographic–archaeological examinations of the (human) body, are in their complexity only penetrable within the context of the entire oeuvre. They comprehend, among other aspects, the desire for the formless organic, for the aesthetics of mucosa-like moist surfaces, for the transient. In the direct confrontation with the almost seventeen-meter wide tableau, in the photograph’s violence of color, the binary code of life becomes inevitably clear: existance and death.
[1] Ludwig Wittgenstein, “Tractatus logico-philosophicus,” transl. C.K. Ogden, Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd, 1922, 6.54 (Dover Publications, New York, 1999, p. 108).
[2 ]Wittgenstein 1984, 6.4311.
[3] Thomas Macho und Kristin Marek (ed.), Die neue Sichtbarkeit des Todes, Munich, 2007.
[4] The details on this vary depending on the source. What remains certain is that at least 70 % of people do not die in a domestic setting. Cf. e.g..: Franz Frielinger, “Das institutionalisierte Sterben. Sozioökonomische Aspekte des Sterbens,” in: Focus NeuroGeriatrie, March, 2009, 6; or: Sterben in Deutschland. [Interview with the sociologist Reimer Gronemeyer], in: http://www.ard.de/themenwoche2008/gesundheit/sterben-in-deutschland/-/id=742958/nid=742958/did=767940/rozgyz/index.html (incidentally without further source information).
[5] Günther Müchler, “Medien und Gewalt. Durch Abschalten verweigern,” in: Die Politische Meinung, June 2002, 5-10, here 6. Müchler refers to a survey carried out by the television journal Hörzu, in 1998. Meanwhile, the number must have significantly risen; to this must be added the relevant scenarios in computer games.
[6] Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2003.
[7] George Bataille, Erotism: Death and Sensuality, transl. Mary Dalwood, City Lights Books, 1986.
[8] George Bataille, “Abattoir,” in: Kritisches Wörtebuch. Contributions by Georges Bataille, Carl Einstein, Marcel Griaule, Michel Leiris et al, German edition & transl. by Rainer Maria Kiesow, henning schmidgen, Merve, Berlin 2005 p. 33
[9] This and all further information on the Schlachtfelder, including the artist’s quotes derive, when not otherwise noted, from a discussion between the author and Jürgen Klauke, which took place on 10 December, 2009 in Cologne.
[10] On this, see e.g.: Anja Zimmermann, Skandalöse Bilder – Skandalöse Körper. Abject art vom Surrealismus bis zu den Culture Wars, Berlin, 2001.
[11] Slavoj Zizek, “Jürgen Klauke oder die Abschirmung des Realen,” in: Absolute Windstille. Jürgen Klauke – Das fotografische Werk, exhib.-cat. Bonn, St. Petersburg, Hamburg, 2001/02, Hatje Cantz, 2001, p. 228.
[12] Birgit Richard, “Inkarnation der Untoten? Virtueller Tod und Leichen in den digitalen Medien”, in: Macho/Marek 2007, p. 593.
[13] Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, transl. John MacQuarrie & Edward Robinson, Blackwell 1962, p.298.
[14] Bernd Hüppauf, “Das Schlachtfeld als Raum im Kopf. Mit einem Postscriptum nach dem 11. September 2001” in: Steffen Martus, Marina Münkler, Werner Röcke (eds.), Schlachtfelder. Codierung von Gewalt im medialen Wandel, Akademie Verlag, Berlin, 2003, p. 207, 208.
[15] Heidegger, 1977, here, p. 235-267: “Dasein’s Possibility of Being-A-Whole, and Being- Towards-Death.”, p. 302.
[16] Bernard Williams, Problems of the Self. Philosophical Papers 1956-1972, London, 1973.
[17] Elisabeth Bronfen, “Das schöne Scheitern der Sterblichkeit. Zur hysterischen Bildsprache Jürgen Klaukes”, in: exhib.-cat. 2001, p. 178.
[18] George Bataille, forward to “Madame Edwarda,” in: the same, Das obszöne Werk, (German translation and epilogue by Marion Luckow), Reinbek near Hamburg, 2002, p. 59.