Christian Katti and Ursula Frohne
Parapathological Séances
“Symptomatology is always a question of art.”
(Gilles Deleuze [1])
In order to derive a clear understanding of the role and essence of the photographic in the work of Jürgen Klauke, it is first helpful to make an almost classical tripartite distinction in the creative process and among interrelated visual genres. It ranges from the drawing by way of the posed photograph on to the tableau and the multipart, large-format photographic work or series. Sometimes, of course, intimate drawings or large gouaches have the status of autonomous works in his oeuvre, just as there are also videos, performances, acoustic spaces, and so on, whose documentation in photographs (or videos) has a very different status than that of the large series of photographs. In his tableaus and multipart photographic works, Klauke does not operate as much with narrative as he does with variations. His presentation features great narrative pathos, which can also be expressed in laconic forms, but not a strict plot sequence. Instead, he spreads out various possibilities, which settle and deposit themselves around a condensed core, around a thematic epicenter. This core of smaller and larger “sensations” spans existential dimensions, on the one hand, and ironic distancing, on the other, which is necessary not only because “the words have lost their power,” especially the all too big ones, such as “death,” “happiness,” “desire,” and certainly that of existence as well – “from the sublime to the absurd” is no longer even one step these days.[2] Rather, the affirmative existential gesture always risks succumbing to its tendency to the unintentionally comic, involuntarily slipping back into the autobiographical in the process. The quotidian tragédie humaine starts to develop precisely in the defense mechanisms and safety nets of the very identities that determine the grotesque “inadequacy of existence” and the particular “beauty of failure.” In his effort to “bend the zones of the ineffable into pictorial ideas,”[3] Klauke is interested in a specific intensity that both constitutes the deferred subject and its models for identity and constantly cuts through them. His tableau scenarios emerge as an infinite play of reflections in which the actor and the viewer enter into an alternating relationship between voyeur, accomplice and even denouncer. All of this happens without any evil intent whatsoever, since anxiety and paranoia are external neither to the freedom of the artistic nor to the general situation. Anything that had to walk the long road of cultural sublimation can no longer escape “aesthetic paranoia” but has just as little reason to object to it as Sacher-Masoch would to Kafka’s Penal Colony, which famously offers an overdrawn allegory of justice – albeit a very brutal one.
Photography in Jürgen Klauke’s oeuvre is more than just a technically neutral means to the end of creating images. Freud and even before him his teacher Jean-Martin Charcot were already using photography as an epistemic model for the psyche [4], and in twentieth-century literature it has repeatedly served as an allegorical figure of reflection and the intensification of poetic processes.[5] The sensual sensitivity of the photographic plate makes it particularly valuable for diagnostics, and it was not just the French neurologist of the nineteenth century who identified this as the grounds for photography’s function as ontological proof. It fills out observation and provides access to the hidden threshold values of human emotions. Photography brings out even the tiniest flaw and conveys subcutaneous shifts of the affects, bringing the incongruities of the subject to light with an unerring gift for observation, dislocating and typifying the individual. It records the symptoms and in its tableau condenses them into pathological signs, ciphers of the passions, as Georges Didi-Huberman superbly demonstrated in his fascinating study of the series of images in Charcot’s Iconographie photographique de la Salpêtrière.[6] Against the historical backdrop of such methods of photographic documentation that used body language to give visible form to the inner movements and the most mysterious anatomies of the soul, the performance of body-object choreographies takes on a distinctive concision in the cycle Ästhetische Paranoia that only acquires its pictorial specificity by being realized in a photograph. It is not scenes or sequences in the sense of a narrative structure that unfold here but rather pictorial séances in which people and objects appear schematically in the movement of the action out of the dark and then, like ghosts, vanish again, resembling those demonstrations of levitations and parapsychological illusion that overcome gravity or unite with or against one another in connections that are as phantasmatic as they are systemic. The human and nonhuman actors do not simply face one another like living beings and the life world but are rather engaged in a process of constant exchange through technical mediation and performative translation of gestures of thought into body language.[7] The actual transgression of boundaries occurs in the aesthetic fusion between the dynamic presence of the bodies and the dramatic silhouette of their hallucinatory character. For even if the blurred traces of the gestures and objects make us think of the random moment of a snapshot, this impression is contradicted by the precision of their choreographic realization and the hermetic framework in which the act of artistic creation is subject to very clearly repeated “séances de pose.”[8] The intention here is not the depiction of an excessive reality but rather an excessive depiction of reality. In these works photography functions not only as an established guarantee of reality, as an epiphanic apparatus, so to speak, but rather as a kind of apparitional drug into which life’s absurdity and intensity – its être de trop – are condensed.
Playfully but also uncompromisingly, Klauke opposes to contemporary evocations of the “authenticity of the self” his experiments with the “conditions of existence of personal masks.” He sketches figures of a nonunified subject “that does not coalesce with its images, but rather remains the precarious agent of flight through these masks.”[9] It is not his visual testimony that produces these masks; in fact, they show that their visual function is a necessary vehicle in the play with obsessively paranoid attempts to make counterfactual norms and systems positive. Any possible way out of these systems is just as invalid as the hope they can “optimize themselves” and us over the long term. That is, however, by no means cause for despair, even if the life world and all its protagonists do not emerge entirely unscathed from the experimental processes and cases of damage. Only in these cases and false identifications of the subject and its objectives do certain symptoms of contemporary culture and of its subjects emerge. Only by transcending self-conscious intentions does it become possible to experience the stakes of the game; only here do masks and performances testify to the archaic power of fetishism. Expressionism and Surrealism tried to transform these energy fields into the aesthetic sphere of the fragmented work, which necessarily had to conform to a certain colonization of mental and perhaps also historical convulsions.
Pathos and Pathology
“Being photographed triggers a strong sense of nonexistence.”
(Philippe Garnier)
Living processes can only be studied by dissecting them alive. But there are limits on vivisection with full consciousness. Charcot already found himself confronted with this problem. Penetrating the pathological sides of life means killing it, as Didi-Hubermann has written of the spectacle and scandal of visibility in Charcot’s clinic. “Must one restrain oneself to observing without touching, and to merely observing the surface?” asks Didi-Huberman.[10] As he demonstrates in his analysis of Charcot’s method for putting a face on the symptoms of hysteria and naming the theory of this invention, theater and photography open up possibilities for “experimental observation.” Through representation they make accessible precisely those irrational levels that remain opaque to the disjoining logos only and cleave their way as pathos, in passions, in obsessions, in the pathological case and condense into an aesthetic of symptomatology. Perhaps the trick lies in “putting to work”[11] these nonsensical drives of existence as a moment of aesthetic experience, as Jürgen Klauke’s series Ästhetische Paranoia attempts from the artist’s androgynous standpoint. In contrast to the visual theater of fin-de-siècle psychology, however, which staged the suggestibility of the “perfect” symptom – naturally tied to power relationships as an instrument to obtain medical insights – Klauke’s works again and again suddenly turn into a mocking, anarchistic game with the pathologies of human nature and its life world. The utopian dimension that clings to this topos in literature and visual arts since the nineteenth century, as a kind of incubation period of cultural internalization and elevation of the symptom to a characteristic of genius, is addressed by Klauke as a rift between the historicity of the concept of the subject and today’s economies of the self. Rather than joining the chorus of famous evocations of the emancipatory power of the pathological, from Baudelaire by way of Breton or Genet to early Foucault, his more recent works reveal a shift and congealment of the heroic deviation toward pathos. Against the backdrop of an increasingly aestheticized life world, the aesthetic figure itself triggers paranoia. The artist’s aesthetic mission is saved by evoking the dramatic-theatrical absurd and takes place without being determined by mourning for the loss or polemical suspension of authenticity. Just as the prefix “para-” implies in its semantics, the artist watches from the wings the pathologies of the time and, “[i]n contrast to the auto-criminology current in today’s art of questioning oneself, which entangles itself in questions concerning ethnic, sexual, and other biographical identity” his work reflects “on the ‘structural inauthenticity’ of even the most authentic masks.”[12] These paranatural bodies, which have, as it were, blurred into an emblematic écriture, coagulate in fact to a deceptive rhetorical figure, chimera of the imagination. They revolve around the state of deception in spiritual affinity with the simulacra-like visual practices of the likes of Pierre Klossowski, which can only approximately be captured with terms like pathophany – that is to say, the visualization of suffering from desire and human instinctual nature – and insinuate, discretely but unmistakably, the artistic sphere of discourse. Much like Klossowski’s literary images act in text and images as differential doubles, we experience the appearance of actors in Klauke’s photographs as a doubling of performance and pictorial form – the adaptation of the spectacle dramatique by way of the spectacle pictural. The image, in its rational, technical genesis resulting from the photographic process and the staging, itself becomes a fetish, so to speak. Representation and dissimulation turn out to be powerful principles of the sublimation of a series of actions executed in the image rather than in life and in no way seek to be merely a substitute action. “The subject is on the run through the identifying masks; the change of masks is its autonomous kind of movement.”[13] The Latin word persona can, famously, mean “mask” as well as “role” or “character” and “personality” or “individuality.”
Transformer: Figures of Transformation
“Incidentally, reality first finds its truth in its reproduction; only fiction makes existence authentic.”
(Pierre Klossowski)
Despite their sometimes existential topoi – sexuality, gender, identity, melancholy – what we encounter in Klauke’s works is a kind of “uncanny” humor, in the Freudian sense, which does not defy the passionate-obsessive dimension but derives its effect from it, which has been a signature of aesthetic modernism from Beckett to Thomas Bernhard or from Kafka to Joyce that asserted itself above all in the break with so-called postmodernism. With the large bloc of works known as Formalisierung der Langeweile (Formalizing boredom), themes of gender and the “resistances of the 1970s”[14] recede somewhat into the background: the poses, excesses, hypertrophies and crises radiate out onto the minimalist rigor of the experimental systems and the circular structures of the new series. They represent the anthropological resonance chamber in which the artist vanishes almost to the point of invisibility, as a “man without qualities,” as it were. As chimerical actor in elaborate scenes, he moves along the boundary between the poles of Vorstellung/Distanz (Idea/distance) – a title of the only (in part) color photographs in the Ästhetische Paranoia portfolio – and of exposition. The momentary capture of photography polishes these scenes into facets of an apparent typology, located between repetition and variation, theatricality and absurdity, between minimalism and exaltedness to form a symptomatology of the parasympathetic transformation of stimuli. Paul Virilio’s pioneering description of the connection between acceleration and perception should be refined here to encapsulate the aesthetic experience of this state of suspense between movement and constancy, between repetition and impulse, between stimulus and response. The surprisingly minimalistic patterns and structures of the new series of photographs – such as Elektrophysiologischer Exzess (Electrophysiological excess), Wackelkontakt (Loose contact), Sich selbst optimierendes System (Self-optimizing system) – take up the reduced formal language of the 1960s and overexpand it into technocratic aesthetic systems. The motifs of the sequence, repetition and emptiness are imposed on the viewer as an unexpected impulse of experience, in which the hypermodern horror vacui of obsessive avocation, manic communication dictate and excessive networking become equally legible as an icon of growing world poverty as much as stereotypical systems can be seen as a way to reclaim concentration or niches for realization of one’s existence. As with his early works, it would be mistaken to understand them as a commentary of cultural critique, however, because they all derive from the intention of transforming the precarious interrelationship between excess and control, between obsession and reflection, into a process of self-perception and the realization of normative social and aesthetic structures via physical and psychological acting out. The pictorial quality of Klauke’s tableaus emphasizes the insight that sometimes inherent in the aesthetic experience is a negative epistemology, which as an emancipatory process leaves open the possibility of self-determination. By contrast, the increasing aestheticizing of the life world turns out to be unconscious consent to a monopolizing system that is in principle always superior and dominant.
The scenes, sensations and variations that emerge from the large thematic blocs produce their iconic events from an unstable equilibrium of control and stereotypical rules, on the one hand, and improvisation and deviation, on the other. The codified forms of mass production and technology, the electrical outlets and cables produce serial arrangements of empty forms, neuroses of an apparently “self-optimizing system” that contrasts again and again with the idiosyncrasies of the artist-subject. That is because the drill of the systems does not monopolize the protagonist completely. His interventions in the clear discipline of the machine aesthetic expand the spectrum of modalities and break through the stimulus-response schemes by creating an unpredictable series of actions with its own dynamic: the raster pattern dissolves as soon as the cables begin moving. The “loose contact” becomes the apparently contingent failure of the order and of the cabling, in which the human being (re)produces both the standards and the deviation from them. Ritual and obsession, order and chaos, reason and paranoia, calculation and naïveté, rigor and exaltation intensify each other and thwart the system’s claim to discipline; they allude to the collision between individual and institution. In this conception, measure and exorbitance interrelate in a strange complementary way, oscillating in a new kind of “Über-Maß” (“over-measure”), a transformation of units of measurement, since Klauke develops in the photographs of the Ästhetische Paranoia series an intensity of expression that likewise obtains its momentum from the pendulum swing between constancy and polymorphous eventfulness, locating the basic conditions of paranoid existence as much in the affirmation as in the provoked failure of the order.[15] The basic theme of the Sadean universe is precisely this distinction between two natures, and it returns in Klossowski’s phantasms of desire and in the destruction of the universe as a metamorphosis into another order, indeed as its inversion into procreation. “Secondary nature is bound by its own rules and its own laws,” writes Gilles Deleuze of the totalizing idea of negation in Sade’s writings.[16] This reveals the meaning of the repetition, of monotony, which in the form of presenting evidence “coldly accelerates and condenses,” balances out the distance between the system and the natural, as is strikingly revealed in the monumental tableaus of Schlachtfelder (Battlefields), exhibited here for the first time. The abstract textures and glazing color effects of photographically dissected entrails that Klauke made during forays through the rendering piles of slaughterhouses, where meat that cannot be processed is set aside, are set in the grid of a strict pictorial order in which the amorphous, the formless quality of nature is starkly contrasted with the mechanical form and the crystalline surface of the floating chair. These images turn the inside out, bring to light the abject, rejected body that confronts the self with its boundaries and its negativity.[17] Georges Bataille spoke of this “bas” (“low” or “base”), the formless, as the epitome of the infamous. The base finds no place on any chair; it falls under it. It destabilizes the organizational principle of significant form, offends narcissism and puts into play the fundamental difference between figure and ground, between self and other up to the threshold of the obscene. It seems to negate every frame, indeed the very authority of the image, whereby it becomes, despite all its deformity, form-less in the emphatic sense (l’informe).[18] This process of negation emerges on a horizon of meaning against which Sigmund Freud also investigated “foreclosure” and “disavowal.” Nevertheless, it also stands in a converse relationship to the fetish, which wants to make the image the substitute for an imperiled faith in one’s own influence and ability to act. The image embodies the ideal, so to speak, and at the same time serves to neutralize knowledge of reality.
The Captivating Power of the Fetish
“The fetish is therefore not a symbol at all, but as it were a frozen, arrested, two-dimensional image, a photograph to which one returns repeatedly to exorcise the dangerous consequences of movement, the harmful discoveries that result from exploration.”
(Gilles Deleuze [19])
The convergence of fetishization[20] with the neurotic in Ästhetische Paranoia reaches its climax when the faceless actor is bedizened with an overpowering and not quite unambiguously feminine patch of hair, which already serves as one of the preferred fetish objects in Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs, producing an eroticizing state of uncertainty by the suspension of the belief in its factuality. Even if one hesitates to treat the psychoanalytically intensified dovetailing of hair, femininity and castration as absolute, hair and sexuality represent an inseparable connection that has a long tradition in the “motif of desire, entangling, rescue and melancholic staging” from mythology through literature to the visual arts.[21] However, the ambiguity that can be caused by hair in particular – as a sign of obscuring, shifting and covering up gender identities (queering) – presents the imperious form of the thick, black column of hair as a unmistakably phallic symbol, which is revealed, just as unambiguously, to be something artificial, once again evoking the topos of the mask. The sense of being trapped in scenarios of the melancholy of the life world, right down to the obedient depression of waiting alone on the edge of the bed, feeds on our knowledge that the scene is staged and should not be confused with a contemporary diagnosis or a statement about the nature of desire that would offer allegedly metaphysical truths. This is also true of the absurd struggle with the octopus-like wig and of the abreaction to the tangle of cables, which pulls the plugs out of the wall or seeks a connection to the electrical circuit in “experimental neurosis.” The “beauty of failure” is victorious even where the desperate experiments succeed or where Ästhetische Paranoia, as a seductive aphrodisiac of unnaturally long hair, transforms into a withering Medusa’s head.[22] The extremely stylized strict heroine falls back into her “second nature.” Once freed up, the phallic column of hair becomes an “attractive attractor,” and the unbridled form ultimately vents in an autoerotic convulsion of rage of “aesthetic revolt.” Fictional character and hetaera, caricature and congealment, partial object and entanglement encircle the metamorphoses of a supernatural cult figure into the picture of formless disintegration and transformation. Her surreal hairdo and the partial object of the phallic column of hair turn the figure into the yearned-for image of herself, against which the law of her “second nature” has to discharge itself masochistically in “aesthetic paranoia.” This figure seems to reflect a self-imposed imprisonment in the creative process by means of her own image, her anonymous portrait. The transitions between obsession and art, between fetish and work become deliberately fluid, without being held up by an ultimate objective, a definition or a final masklike meaning. The fetish of the natural, of erotic allurement and the attractiveness of the nevertheless dead hair oscillates in the horrible beauty of art and in its equally absurd and self-evident unnaturalness: “come art, art come.”
Notes
[1] Gilles Deleuze, Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty, trans. Jean McNeil, Zone Books, New York, 1991, p. 14. See also Peter Weibel (ed.), Phantom der Lust: Visionen des Masochismus, 2 vols., exhib. cat. Graz, Belleville, Munich, 2003.
[2] “Du sublime au ridicule il n’y a qu’un pas (French), ‘from the sublime to the ridiculous is just one step,’ a remark made several times by Napoleon I to de Pradt, his ambassador in Warsaw, during his retreat from Russia in December 1812. The idea can be found even earlier in similar form.” Meyers Großes Konversations-Lexikon, vol. 5, Leipzig, 1906, p. 314. Jürgen Klauke’s performance Aspekt – Die Wörter haben ihre Kraft verloren, took place at the International Art Fair in Cologne, on October 28, 1977.
[3] Jürgen Klauke in a public discussion on October 11, 2009, at KunstSalon, Cologne.
[4] Sarah Kofman, “Freud – The Photographic Apparatus,” in: idem, Camera Obscura: Of Ideology, trans. Will Straw, Athlone Press, London, 1998, pp. 21–28.
[5] Appropriations in literature and literary theory are reconstructed by Irene Albers, “Das Fotografische in der Literatur,” in: Karlheinz Barck, Martin Fontius, Dieter Schlenstedt, Burkhart Steinwachs and Friedrich Wolfzettel (eds.), Ästhetische Grundbegriffe: Historisches Wörterbuch in sieben Bänden, Metzler, Stuttgart and Weimar, 2001, vol. 2, pp. 543–551. See also Irene Albers, “’Der Photograph der Erscheinungen’: Émile Zolas Experimentalroman,” in: Peter Geimer (ed.), Ordnungen der Sichtbarkeit: Fotografie in Wissenschaft, Kunst und Technologie, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt/M., 2002, pp. 211–251. On the photographic practice of literary writers, see Thomas von Steinaecker, Zur Funktion der Fotografien in den Texten Rolf Dieter Brinkmanns, Alexander Kluges und W. G. Sebalds, Transcript, Bielefeld, 2007.
[6] See Georges Didi-Huberman, Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpêtrière, trans. Alisa Hartz, MIT Press, Cambridge/Mass., 2003.
[7] Bruno Latour, “A Collective of Humans and Nonhumans: Following Daedalus’s Labyrinth,” in: idem, Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies, Harvard Univ. Press, Cambridge/Mass., 1999, pp. 174–215.
[8] See Philippe Garnier, Une petite cure de flou, Presses universitaires de France, Paris, 2002, p. 142.
[9] See Sebastian Egenhofer, “Theatre and Violence,” in: Catherine Sullivan, exhib. cat., Aachen, Aachner Kunstverein; Braunschweig, Kunstverein Braunschweig; and Zurich, Kunsthalle Zurich, Ringier, Zurich, 2007, pp. 13–28, esp. p. 13.
[10] See Didi-Huberman 1997, p. 20 (italics original).
[11] Didi-Huberman too addresses this aesthetic dimension of observation when he notes that Charcot had “the art of putting facts to work” when he practiced his method of visually essentializing the symptoms of the body. See Didi-Hubermann 1997, pp. 19–20. The problem could also be reformulated differently on the level of language. See Gilles Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco, Univ. of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1997.
[12] See Egenhofer 2007, p. 24.
[13] Ibid.
[14] See Uwe Martin Schneede, “Körper, Figur, Bild: Zu Jürgen Klaukes fotografischem Werk,” in: Absolute Windstille: Jürgen Klauke, Das fotografische Werk, exhib. cat., Bonn, St. Petersburg and Hamburg, 2001, pp. 109–117.
[15] Interestingly, Jacques Lacan’s work on paranoia clearly preceded his interest in psychoanalysis, as his dissertation reveals. See Jacques Lacan, De la psychose paranoiaque dans ses rapports avec la personalité, Navarin, Paris, 1975 [orig. pub. 1932]. Translated by Hans-Dieter Gondek as Jacques Lacan, Über die paranoische Psychose und ihre Beziehungen zur Persönlichkeit und Frühe Schriften über die Paranoia, Peter Engelmann (ed.), Passagen, Vienna, 2002.
[16] See Deleuze 1991, p. 27.
[17] The concept of the “abject” has been famously and influentially discussed by Julia Kristeva in: Pouvoirs de l’horreur: Essai sur l’abjection, Éditions du Seuil, Paris, 1980; translated by Leon S. Roudiez as Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, Columbia Univ. Press, New York, 1982.
[18] See Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss (eds.), Formless: A User’s Guide, exhib. cat., Paris, Zone, New York, 1997. See also Georges Bataille, Das obszöne Werk, Rowohlt, Reinbek-Hamburg, 1972; idem, “Informe,” in: Documents 1, (critical dictionary) 1929, no. 7, p. 382, reprinted in: Œuvres complètes, vol. 1, Premiers écrits, 1922–1940, Gallimard, Paris, 1970, p. 217; translated by Alan Stoekl as “Formless,” in: Georges Bataille, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939, Univ. of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1985, p. 31.
[19] See Deleuze 1991, p. 31.
[20] See Hartmut Böhme, “Fetischismus im 19. Jahrhundert. Wissenschaftshistorische Analysen zur Karriere eines Konzepts,” in: Jürgen Barkhoff, Gilbert Carr and Roger Paulin (eds.), Das schwierige neunzehnte Jahrhundert: Festschrift für Eda Sagarra, Tübingen, 2000, pp. 445–465. See also Hartmut Böhme, “Das Fetischismus-Konzept von Marx und sein Kontext,” in: Volker Gerhardt (ed.), Marxismus: Versuch einer Bilanz, Parerga, Magdeburg, 2001, pp. 289–319, available online http://www.culture.hu-berlin.de/hb/static/archiv/volltexte/texte/fetisch.html (accessed March 16, 2010). In it Hartmut Böhme characterizes fetishism as “a rhetorical concept that uses the alien and other to debase and persecute one’s own practice.”
[21] On the iconography and symbolism of hair, see Inge Stephan, “Das Haar der Frau: Motiv des Begehrens, Verschlingens und der Rettung,” in: Claudia Benthien (ed.), Körperteile: Eine kulturelle Anatomie, Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg, 2001, pp. 27–48, esp. p. 31.
[22] Sigmund Freud’s literary remains included a brief fragment from 1922 titled “Das Medusenhaupt,” in which he explained the horror of the Medusa’s snake hair in terms of the castration complex. See Sigmund Freud, “Das Medusenhaupt,” in: Internationale Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse 25, no. 2: 105–106, translated as “The Medusa Head,” in: Sigmund Freund, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Group Psychology, and Other Works, vol. 18 of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey, Hogarth Press, London, 1953–74, pp. 273–274. See also Inge Stephan, Musen & Medusen: Mythos und Geschlecht in der Literatur des 20. Jahrhunderts, Böhlau, Cologne, 1997.