Régis Durand
Jürgen Klauke: energy, signs and metamorphoses
As I was beginning to think about what form my response to Peter Weibel’s invitation to contribute to a Jürgen Klauke catalogue should take, the news arrived of the passing of Pina Bausch. Now, it happens to be the case that the two are closely associated in my mind around the discovery, in the late 1970s, of radically new forms of relationship to the body and its staging. Clearly, this association is an entirely personal matter and, no doubt, of questionable theoretical value. So much so, indeed, that it would be absurd to list all the elements that make it implausible. But it seems to me that some lessons can be drawn from a coincidence of this kind and from such a piece of personal history for a better understanding of certain aspects of the work of Jürgen Klauke – and particularly of some of his recent work. Ultimately, what, apart from personal circumstances, justifies a comparison of two such dissimilar artistic practices is precisely this: that both of them give us the experience of complexity, of something that cannot be reduced to a simple idea, form, or genre and that runs, in reality, through the whole work. The fact that Pina Bausch’s work takes the form of public stage performance (her “dance theatre”) and Jürgen Klauke’s the form of a private “theatre” intended entirely for the construction of a fixed or moving image is clearly not insignificant (I shall come back to this point). But this remains secondary to a shared experience. I shall refer to two main aspects of this: the importance of the dispositif or dispositifs, on the one hand, and the radical transformations carried out on the figure – and very idea – of the subject on the other. I shall attempt to give a sense of this here, focussing essentially on Jürgen Klauke, rather than pursuing a parallel which, as I have said above, forced itself upon me and deserves to be treated with some caution.
SOME DISPOSITIFS
In Pina Bausch’s Tanztheater the idea of a constituted individual subject shatters into fragments, being endlessly thwarted by the play of doublings, inversions and, so to speak, by the “humiliation” (however affectionate and funny this might be) inflicted on it, which the audience is called upon to witness. But, despite this, each of these fragments continues to carry with it a degree of authority and mastery. The elegance of the movements, the powerful character of the music, the precision of the sequences – all these things point to a theatricality that is willingly accepted with a maximum of rigour and the greatest flamboyance. With the result that, however fragmented and labile it may be, the subject remains for us the one who exists in “another sphere of life.”[1]
In the work of Jürgen Klauke, the protagonist is intensely absorbed in the actions he accomplishes or the postures to which he submits. But strangely (I mean, also, despite the strangeness of these actions and postures), he is in our “sphere of life”. This does not mean we recognize ourselves in him, but that he unfolds before us a multitude of possibilities that concern us and that we are capable of receiving other than as fictional personae.
In Klauke’s works we are, admittedly, presented with a kind of private theatre. But the striking thing is what Michael Fried has described as absorption – that capacity the protagonist has not to concern himself with the spectator or not to be aware of him, concentrating totally, as he is, on a particular activity. And when he looks in our direction, he is in fact signalling to the camera, as if to ensure that the posture currently being developed will match the image he wants to give of it, including its particular effects and affects.
Similarly, we may take the view that the multitude of shots in a single series expresses a slide towards the moving image or, at any rate, a tension between photographic fixity and a desire for the continuous, for continuous variation during which the posture evolves, refines itself, revives, and essays a kind of micro-narrative. In these successive “takes”, I see the imprint of a profound absorption in a pursuit of the enigmatic object, to which only the title of the series gives a clue. By a paradox that we shall have to explain, the most heightened theatricality tips over into radical absorption. This obviously has to do with the private character of the staging (which is clearly distinct from any idea of public performance) and also the photographic nature of this work, with its elliptical character, and the tension between the continuous and the discontinuous to which I have just alluded.
It is true, as Peter Weibel has forcefully reminded us, that the result is “an absence of constant identity”, a “multiple and polyvalent self.”[2] However, I remain unconvinced by the idea (originating with Gerhard Johann Lischka and taken up by Peter Weibel) that what is involved here is “the limning of a self-portrait as a portrait of society.” The reference was to the works of Klauke’s youth, but even so, I find it more fertile to see here the etsablishment of a complex dispositif that exceeds questions of identity, either individual or collective.
But what, precisely, is a dispositif? Gilles Deleuze gave the answer: “It is, first, a tangle, a multilinear ensemble. It is made up of lines that are each different in nature.”[3] The reference to the line clearly makes sense in this case, literally and metaphorically, when one thinks of the importance of ties, threads and cables in Jürgen Klauke’s universe. But it also enables us to overcome the aporias linked to the question of identity and to argue, from this point on, in terms of process: lines of force, fracture, flight and variation.
Two recent series, over which I shall linger for a moment, present us with a remarkable concretization of these processes in operation. In Ästhetische Paranoia, for example, it is the enormous head of hair that serves as signifier for (and operator of) the variation, transforming the subject into a variable-geometry tool, at times the apparent master of this appendage, at others transformed into an object by it – a kind of living sculpture. Different “becomings” form and unform: becoming-table, becoming-bed etc. And at times the “head of hair” gains its autonomy and seems endowed with a life of its own: it is a tentacular tangle, an erected column or, in Ästhetischer Aufruhr, a furious mass, an implacable Medusa. Its role recalls that of the cables obsessively present in some of the other series, such as Experimentelle Neurose, for example, or the lines or rays of light of Freiflottierende Episode or Parasympathischer Vorgang.
The titles of each of the series clearly have a humorous value (one cannot overstress the comic, burlesque dimension of Klauke’s work). Yet they also refer to core principles, to generators of particular sign-regimes. Ästhetische Paranoia, the aesthetic paranoia, is one example, seeking as it does to make visible, like nineteenth-century spiritualist photography, the tracks of the energies at work in the artist’s mental universe.
SIGNS AND THEIR GHOSTS
Following the great pioneers of nineteenth-century psychiatry, Deleuze and Guattari have produced a remarkable analysis of several types of madness, each corresponding to a particular sign-regime.[4] I shall not go over these analyses again here, but simply say that they are not in any sense concerned with establishing a “diagnosis”, but with determining how sign-regimes function. And that the two main semiotic regimes they distinguish practically never operate in the pure state, but almost always in hybrid form. Having said that, one can see the advantage of identifying a dominant mode of operation in a given series of works: “The first regime is defined by an insidious onset and a hidden centre bearing witness to endogenous forces organized around an idea; by the development of a network stretching across an amorphous continuum, a gliding atmosphere into which the slightest incident may be carried…”[5] The photographic series, which is Klauke’s most frequent modus operandi, offers a twofold advantage in this regard: each – still – image pins down a number of moments, which are like a dance around a “central core”; but their sequencing, variable in time and space, reconstitutes a disturbing, “floating” pseudo-continuity that is unpredictable in its development. This is how the head of hair or the skein of threads or lines that substitutes for it, becomes a variable-geometry and variable-use prosthesis. As we have seen, from being a mere extension of the body, it becomes an autonomous sculpture, to the point where it separates itself from the body, or even swallows it up, since, on some photographs, it is quite simply absent, as though it had been digested by this “tracery”. The sign proliferates in a rather monstrous way, the subject’s identity vacillates, the face seems intermittently hazy, as though decomposing. In the series (we might say the “episodes”) of Freiflottierende Episode, the “attractor” becomes virtually invisible and the organic materiality of the head of hair dissolves also into a floating trace, an ectoplasm reminiscent of the emanations that nineteenth-century spiritualist photography tried to pin down. This is what remains of the “attractor” (Attraktiver Attraktor) – if not, indeed, what remains of the subject, of its inwardness, its “soul” and its consciousness.
The use of the term “attractor” is clearly interesting. Deleuze and Guattari use it often, borrowing it from the physics of chaos, displacing its meaning somewhat. Yet even in that usage, it retains something of the idea of chaos that is associated with it, as well as of the forces (the “attractors”) that operate in that phenomenon. The attractor, if I have understood this highly complex notion correctly, is what makes a system “deterministically chaotic”, rather than merely “chaotic”. In other words, the “strange attractor”, as it is termed, is one of the variables (with the limiting circle and the fixed point) bounding the behaviour of a system which would otherwise be entirely chaotic…
I have no idea what Klauke knows of this (for me at least) obscure branch of physics. But I can easily see why this notion of the attractor would have interested him (if that was why he chose it) or, failing that, why it is relevant to his work (if it is there for other reasons). Where the body tends to dissolve to the point of disappearing from the image, various elements reinstate or evoke something of its presence and attest, in a sense, to its (albeit catastrophic!) reality or, let us say, to the reality of its disappearance. Hence the importance of the external connections in this work: in Experimentelle Neurose, we see the subject implode under the impact of flows that dismember it, dissolve it into ectoplasmic streaks and literally cast it out of the frame. At times the fluid seems to be drawing it irresistibly towards its source; a fierce struggle seems to be going on with the “electromagnetic” force and the waves by which it is encircled, as in Gegen den Tag. The socket or multi-socket board seems to be the site from which these forces emanate, attracting the subject to the point of literally swallowing it up (Verdichtungsvorgang), so that nothing remains but the forces themselves, a gloomy, troubling ‘electrophysiological’ scene. Has the experiment succeeded or failed? Or do these terms no longer really have any meaning, susceptible as they are of changing into one another? Has there been “excess” (of intensity, of potency), as Elektrophysiologischer Exzess seems to suggest? In that case only the System itself subsists – cold, ordered and triumphant. Something may perhaps have malfunctioned, by excess of intensity or through a wrong connection? With Wackelkontakt, it is clear that the system is no longer functioning properly; it has veered off into a crazed replication of its own inner workings, before, one assumes, returning to equilibrium, regenerating itself and optimizing itself as intelligent systems are capable of doing (Sich selbst optimierendes System).
We have here one possible theoretico-narrative sequence that speaks to us of the clash with certain forces and the disappearance that ensues. But there is (at least) another possible sequence, namely the one that makes the subject himself an energy-source, a source to which a light-bulb can be hooked up, for example, as in Intern generierter Suchprozess. Or which can move objects remotely (as in Vorstellung/Distanz). Floating and levitating – a great dream that haunts Klauke’s work from its beginnings...
This “electromagnetic” energy also materializes in the photographs, as we have seen, by way of “emanations”, “waves” or milky trails that surround the subject like a field of forces that are indistinct but capable of leaving a mark upon the film. Sometimes, as in Reiz Reaktionssystem, these marks are invisible, but reveal themselves in their effects: objects fly, the body is knocked off balance by an energy that draws it into a frenzied dance. It is difficult to say precisely what tone predominates in these works or what is the exact nature of the artist’s “communication with himself.” In the writings of Antonin Artaud, for example, “this luminous point where all reality is rediscovered, only changed, transformed…” was subject to long and detailed self-analyses, which in fact became the very heart of the work.[6] In Jürgen Klauke, the analysis tends to come more by way of a physics or an “electrophysiology” of the states of being, rather than through psychology. The subject is a terminal, linked to countless connections. In these remarkable series we have spoken of here, one quickly sees that, if there is technology, it is rudimentary, barely anything more than an agent through which the subject achieves his constant mutations and oscillations as his anxieties and neuroses renew themselves – his neuroses, his beloved neuroses, which have accompanied him from the beginning and which he stages with the aid of the most varied dispositifs. A rudimentary technology, then, but in the service of pointed, resolutely topical statement, without the slightest pathos or lamentation: Man is but one element among others in vast integrated systems, an element that is also capable of being “optimized” or, in other words, of no longer offering resistance and enabling the system to work better, at the cost, perhaps, of his disappearance.
One may, admittedly, offer a gloomy interpretation of this work, despite the fun and humour within it. But I see it, rather, as the (temporary) culmination of a long series of experiments on and with subjects, with their polarities, their connections or branchings, and their intermittences (“Proust described the “heart’s intermittences”. We must now describe the intermittences of being.”[7]).
What are we to think, then, of the videos – worthy of much longer consideration – which might seem to introduce a form of continuity (where the photographs played on rupture and the non-present), a form of simulation of direct experience? The time given here to the body seems like a possibility of resistance to rupture, to the photographic Blitz. In the video, the notion of “nomadization on the spot” acquires meaning. Nothing is established, nothing is sure or safe (the notion of insecurity is important in Klauke’s work). But during this brief space, this little window of time, something might happen. We are put in mind of those particular moments to which Kleist drew our attention, when ‘the permeability of the physical and moral worlds’ is manifested.[8]
Translated from the French by Chris Turner
[1] The expression is Michael Fried’s in an essay on Jeff Wall. See M. Fried, “Jeff Wall, Wittgenstein and the Everyday”, in: Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before, Yale University Press, New Haven, 2008, pp. 63-93. The Notion of absorption referred to further on in this article is developed in Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1988.
[2] Peter Weibel, “L’art de Klauke – Entre politique corporelle subversive et actions performatives”, in: Jürgen Klauke, Le Désastre du moi – Oeuvres récentes 1996-2001, Maison européenne de la photographie, Paris, 2001.
[3] Gilles Deleuze, “What is a Dispositif?”, in: T. J. Armstrong (ed.), Michel Foucault, Philosopher, Harvester Wheatsheaf, New York, 1992, pp. 159-168. On this notion, see, for a more strictly Freudian analysis, the writings of Jean-François Lyotard from the nineteen-seventies, such as Des dispositifs pulsionnels (10/18, Paris, 1973), particularly the essay “La peinture comme dispositif libidinal” (op. cit., pp. 237-279) which inspired my own title here. Note particularly, “the important thing is energy insofar as it is metamorphosis” (op. cit., p. 241).
[4] Among other places in chapter 5 (“587 B.C. – A.D. 70: On Several Regimes of Signs”) of A Thousand Plateaus, Athlone, London, 1988, pp. 111-148. See, especially, pp. 117-121.
[5] Ibid., p. 120.
[6] Antonin Artaud, “Nerve Scales”, in: Collected Works. Volume One, translated by Victor Corti, John Calder, London, 1999, p. 72. See, more generally, “Umbilical Limbo”, ibid., pp. 49-65 and “Nerve Scales”, ibid., pp. 69-116.
[7] Ibid., p. 43.
[8] I refer here to an essay by Antonia Birnbaum, “Kleist sténographe. Une anecdote politiquement explosive”, in: Retour d’y voir, 1-2, MAMCO/Les Presses du Réel, 2008. Birnbaum draws particularly on Heinrich Kleist, “Über das Verfertigen der Gedanken beim Reden” [On the Formation of Thoughts in the Process of Speech], in: Werke in einem Band, Carl Hanser, Munich, 1966, pp. 810-814.