Nothing in Karin Kneffel’s paintings is as simple as it seems. When
in her earlier days she painted fruit and animals, it may have appeared at
first to be just that. And yet this apparently simple form of mimesis was
already in fact a sophisticated
illusion—like so much in her paintings, whose motifs are so mysterious
and have been extracted from the world, or in which something alien appears
to be preventing us from taking to them spontaneously and fitting them into
our accustomed framework. So the first impression the viewer gains of Karin
Kneffel’s
paintings remains to this day one of artifice staged with great virtuosity,
and of the insurmountable uncertainty and frailty of our visual approach to
the world.
IN THE LABYRINTH OF THE PICTURE
We have abolished the real world: what world is left? The apparent world perhaps?
… But no! with the real world we have also abolished the apparent world!
Friedrich Nietzsche1
Karin Kneffel’s paintings do not radiate a feeling of calm and comfort.
What they show is not designed to dispel our doubts about what we see; nothing
seems really familiar or to be simply there in any dependable way. Instead,
her painting dupes or
devours its motifs time and again, and in this permanently questions its own
doing. Already in the early animal portraits—small works squeezed into
square sections and often presented in the form of a grid—the creature
remains all by itself. The eye of the beholder is unable to bring them to
life in all their foreignness, or to effortlessly fit them into his or her
notion of a portrait. Much the same is true of the landscapes. Instead of
encountering a terrain whose sublime vistas are food for our eyes, everything
seems parched or aflame. Sometimes dogs, huddled in a pack in the utmost alarm,
remain timidly in the foreground in front of gaunt hills, or in another instance
they crane their necks and bay, without anybody knowing why. Wrought iron
railings shaped like tendrils bar our way to the picture space while the oversized
plums, grapes, peaches, and cherries—enticing yet at once monstrous—suddenly
appear no longer to be fruits of nature but of painting. Carpets transform
into a stylised echo of nature and twist into labyrinths of ornaments in which
our eye loses its orientation. Stairs, no longer with erotic nudes descending
them, lead up to somewhere and nowhere while a dog trots like a fata morgana
across the gleaming surface of a floor. Whatever Karin Kneffel paints it remains
a paradigm of disorientation inscribed with the struggle to find our bearings.
Our gaze remains captive in the painting, and not a path leads out. In fact
the beholder finds himself increasingly ensnared in a game in which he evidently
must discover whether and how one can distinguish between reality and appearances,
although the rules of the game seem to exclude all possibility of making such
a distinction.
How are the things connected? What is the ontological status for instance
of the room in which there is a TV in front of the bed with an image on the
screen? Has the young girl with the rifle who we can make out on the painted
television picture slaughtered the white leopard that now ekes out its existence
in the world of art as a bedside rug? Has the dog jumped onto the wooden armchair
because it has been startled by a shot from the girl, or has it been scared
by the flayed animal? Has the flowerpot beside the bed shown in another painting
from the same year been smashed during the fight on TV? Are there in fact
any causal relationships inside these rooms? Why is, in another painting again,
the sleeper sleeping inside the television and not in the bed from which we
see him asleep? And what is it that the dog has scented in the ornamental
garden of the carpet? Is it the artifice of art? Is this art about art? Painting
about painting?
Little is certain: that the painted idyll, assuming it even is one, is deceptive;
that this purported “realism” is not one; that this kind of painting
avoids constructing any perspective that grants us a foothold; that within
these shimmering multiple perspectives every form of warmth and security is
dashed.
So Kneffel’s painting does not depict some psychology of the uncanny,
nor a surrealist game with the unconscious that has been revived through a
critical look at the medium. The gaze that manifests in her paintings does
not penetrate beneath the carpet under which an aching soul has swept its
unconscious fears and wishes. It sticks solely to the carpet and its many
patterns, to the mystery of the surface. And what the gaze perceives there
seems to be very near and yet hard to grasp. It is neither heaven nor hell,
but aglitter with a bewildering impassiveness. No recognisable attempts are
being made here to arrive at a subjective truth through painting. Instead
this is a celebration of the astonishment engendered by the power of appearances
that ceaselessly confront our mind. It is as if our perceptions, narcotised
by habit, suddenly blossom and become more acute, more varied. The fine skin
of appearances is so taut it is as if these paintings have manifested on the
smooth surface of a river and still continue to exist when a stone is cast
into the waters. What is visible may seem mysterious and dubious to us, but
as a picture it proves to be stable.
A LOOK OUT OF THE KITCHEN WINDOW
The addiction to recognition generates a dizziness that does not permit or
retain the memory images. Nor the impressions. Merely expressions of a passing
feeling which with every look arises anew. That inheres to the lines that
are inscribed in them. One will never manage to keeping looking to the end.
And ultimately the lines point solely to themselves. The truth is decided
in them.
Bettina Blumenberg2
A mighty chimney stack set against a pale grey sky, in front of that as if
growing from a horizontal anthracite strip are three lanky, cone-shaped poplars
bending in the wind. Beneath that nothing but six severe strips of colour
extending horizontally across the whole girth of the picture, gently modulated
at different heights in shades of dark brown, ochre, dark brown, aubergine,
pale grey, and anthracite.
It is not what the small-sized painting from 1987 shows that is decisive,
but the way it transforms the view from Karin Kneffel’s one-time kitchen
over the wall and yard to an obstructed horizon, and denotes that the picture
is oscillating between the view from the window—long since a metaphor
for painting that is testing itself on reality—and abstract colour field
painting, which points solely to itself and its means.
In recent decades, bringing together various modes of painting like this in
one painting, and thus producing a tension in the viewer’s perceptions
of pure surface and illusionist space that he is unable to resolve, has become
almost a standard part of the repertoire. What is remarkable about this painting
from
Kneffel’s earlier output is something else. For she has not devised
a picture by mimetically depicting a slice of reality and then destroying
the illusion by means of coloured stripes that have no “depth,”
and by which all reference to everyday life is expunged. Rather the recognisable
already makes its appearance here as a fragment. In Kneffel’s picture
it does not exist in its own right, but appears first and foremost to arise
from a demonstration of the possibilities of painting. It is this intimate
interlocking of possible means of perceiving and depicting that Karin Kneffel
has teased out with increasing clarity throughout her work. Not that this
has led to an elegant aestheticism, but rather to a form of painting that
is abreast of its times, both conceptually and as regard theories of perception.
CONFUSING THE GAZE
“Everything is false, everything is permitted!” Only with a
certain obtuseness of vision, a will to simplicity does the beautiful, the
“valuable” appear: in itself, it is I know not what.
Friedrich Nietzsche3
Enlargements, as if under a microscope, in recent year chiefly mirrorings,
visual echoes, and superimposed picture planes, as well as various nested
perspectives that exist side by side—Karin Kneffel’s paintings
prick the viewer’s curiosity just as they plunge him as perceiver into
rank confusion. Forever new and bewildering angles challenge his sense of
orientation, and after all manner of attempts to discover a valid vantage
point, ultimately nothing remains for him but to admit that he cannot find
his bearings. All the echoes and resonances, paradoxes and confusion make
one quite giddy. And yet the painter has not placed us in a hall of mirrors.
She merely constructs a painting out of fragments and lures our gaze along
trails that lead nowhere—or simply to paradoxical situations and constellations
that are hard to unravel.
What was already hinted at in the early landscapes becomes quite manifest
in the works relating to Mies van der Rohe’s Haus Esters in Krefeld:
unlike a landscape or a bourgeois modernist villa, the space in the picture
proves in essentially to be a multilayered, multiperspectival terrain that
reveals itself solely to the eye, as a place where sensory perception feels
at home but cannot find its bearings. When a herd of cattle in a painting
from 1989 huddles together before a sweeping landscape, is banished as it
were from the landscape or does not dare set foot in it, this is more than
the depiction of a bizarre situation. What in fact is
articulated here is the way the creatures startle at the power of the picture,
which makes something stiff and dead from what is alive, while giving this
the appearance of life. Which is why animals act like bridging figures that
stand between the changeable realm of the viewer and the order of the picture,
and mark the boundary between art and life.PAINTING AS MIRROR
The painter who plies his trade with routine and merely the eye, but without
thought,
resembles a mirror which reflects
all things without knowledge.
Leonardo da Vinci4
“The mirror,” as Jurgis Baltrusaitis wrote in his monumental
work on catoptric phenomena in science, religion, and art (titled Der Spiegel:
Entdeckungen, Täuschungen, Phantasien), “is an
allegory both of exact reproduction and observation, as well as of rumination
and the work of the mind that keenly tackles a problem from all sides. Does
not reflectere also mean to ‘cast back’, to ‘mirror’
and to ‘reflect and meditate’? The mental process of critical
reflection is described using optical terms.”5
So the world in the mirror seems to be orchestrated by hidden aspects that
reveal themselves solely in their image. Thus
reflection and its variants—faithful reproduction and perfect
representation—link up quite perfectly with illusion and self-reflection.
How could that fail to be a challenge to Karin Kneffel? She uses reflections—whether
in a polished floor or in a window pane—first as a terrain on which
her painting can prove how precisely and subtly she can depict the phenomena
of
reflection and translucency. But since the properties of a mirror solely resemble
those of mimetic painting, she accompanies this by another “mirror”:
the distorting mirror of the illusionary image. In this way not only do various
kinds of “mirroring” communicate with one another, the picture
also links up representation and concept, doing and thinking. Painting becomes
self-reflective.
On no account is Karin Kneffel simply performing catoptric experiments. Rather
her paintings reveal amid the often merry game of appearances and reflexes
the relativity of our perceptions and their gullibility. By casting not just
one eye on the things and offering the eye of the beholder more than one sight,
she amalgamates the optical puzzle with both a reflection on painting as well
as with a critique of all true worlds.
“From now let us be more wary, my dear philosophers,” notes Friedrich
Nietzsche, “of the dangerous old concept-mongering that came up with
a ‘pure, will-less, painless, timeless subject and knower’, let
us guard ourselves against the tentacles of such contradictory terms as ‘pure
reason’, ‘absolute spirituality’, ‘knowledge in itself’—an
eye is always demanded here in order to think, one that cannot be thought
up, an eye that should have no direction whatsoever, in which the active and
interpretative powers are to be quelled, be missing, but which first allows
seeing to be seeing-something, such that nonsense and fallacy are constantly
demanded of it. There is only seeing in perspective, only ‘knowing’
in perspective; and the more affects we allow to have their say, the more
eyes, different eyes we are able to train on the self-same thing, the more
complete our ‘concept’ of this thing, the more complete our ‘objectivity’
becomes.”6
Karin Kneffel takes this kind of perspectivism to the extreme. Using a multitude
of reflections and transparencies, she does not simply outwit the paradigm
of the picture as window. In the chimerical quality of her picture spaces,
in which almost everything becomes illusion, appearances also no longer prove
to be a fortuitous outcome of the real, but an element in the very midst of
things. Everything is appearance in the picture. And even if one is tempted
to discern neo-Romantic leanings in her tendency to let the real vanish into
the infinity of its reflections, ultimately it is all concerned with savouring
the vitality of the world of appearances and the deregulation of the sense
of vision. But in that case, is the eye still the dog that guides the sightless
mind? Or is it like a director who has free reign over these images? One thing
is clear: Karin Kneffel’s pictures do not entice us into the realm of
appearances in order to demonstrate the arbitrariness of visual sense data,
but in order to record all the miracles that the eye as director is able to
stage, and to tell of the astonishment that they prompt in the viewer.
A PAINTING CONTEST
If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would
appear to man as it is: Infinite.
William Blake7
As we study Karin Kneffel’s paintings and lose our gaze in them, we
find less to say about apples and grapes, about dogs on the shiny parquet
of art, about tables that seem to do headstands and about stairs that lead
up to nowhere than about the differences between images on television screens
and canvases, before and behind real and imaginary panes, about models and
copies, about curtains that cordon off our gaze and about cross-fades. Because
here we no longer have painters like Zeuxis and Parrhasius competing with
one another by painting deceptively real looking grapes and curtains; the
contest here is between
reality and appearances, perspectives and picture concepts. And there is no
longer one sole victor. Instead the gaze dissects the real and creates facets
in it by means of its perspectival optics, and so thoroughly so that it can
no longer find a place from which it can look “objectively”. What
remains is a chaotic multiplicity of the real that is hard to fathom, in which
artistic semblance leads to or suggests at least a meaningful order. But what
function does the semblance of a meaning have in this which,
for want of truth, can no longer be translated into semblance?
Indeed, Karin Kneffel’s paintings demonstrate nothing so vividly as
the old artist’s adage that appearances are anything but arbitrary.
Even though there is no release from the game of mirrorings, foldings, and
facets, this game is a merry one—even if now and then it harbours a
hint of the uncanny. And above all the appearances are useful, for they create
nothing less than a reality in its own right which, attested to by contemplation,
reconciles life—in the picture at least—with its chaotic circumstances.
There can be no talk of tragic fatalism here. The fabrication that allows
an overhead light appear both inside and outside at one and the same time,
the simulation of patently contradictory vantage points, the virtuoso mingling
of different means for depiction and paintings—all this mocks the factuality
of the real. Which makes it clear: the painted picture can achieve more than
a mirror.A MIRROR OF HISTORY
Kind of subtitle / delay in glass / Use “delay” instead of picture
or painting; picture on glass becomes delay in glass—but
delay in glass does not mean picture on glass …
Marcel Duchamp8
Looking at the paintings that were done specially for Mies’s Haus Esters
and which reference the building and its architecture, we can study Kneffel’s
approach in all its variations. And her playful glee is not only to be seen
in the painting in which we seem to be looking at the inside of the building
in a fogged mirror, on which a grinning face has been painted as if by a child.
Above all the painting—whose panoramic shape matches the window that
Mies placed in the brick facia beside the entrance to the villa, and which
we are looking at through precisely that window—can scarcely be topped
in its sophistication. Not only does it appear as a doubled or “mirrored”
window, it also repeats the gaze from outside in. Albeit simply in order to
invert it many times over, to distort it and release its anchor in reality.
Let us examine the individual facets: the curtain on the right hand side of
the painting obscures our view both of the outside and the inside; but only
seemingly. After all, we see the shimmering blue and turquoise folds of a
curtain. If we look at the left hand side of this diptych-like work, (which
may well show the rear side of the window veiled by the curtain), we see the
whole of the window with its three sections which we look through into the
hall in Haus Esters. What we can distinguish here is a temporal mirroring,
because the view shows the original interior, as we know it from photographs.
We even feel we can make out the five lithos by Oskar Kokoschka above the
bookcase set in the wall, and the painting by Otto Müller on the wall
opposite.9 But immediately our gaze leaps back to the other side of the mirrored
window. Because in front of this we see not only the shoot of a Virginia Creeper,
but also a standard lamp whose white shade is reflected by the window and—surprisingly—also
the brickwork. To cap it all, a television picture also seems to be hovering
in front of the pane. But where does the white armchair belong, temporally
and spatially, whose arm is likewise mirrored in the outside wall? Are we
looking perhaps at Haus Esters through the glass pane of an imaginary room
with curtain and television, which must be assigned to a later date? Are we
looking through or at a window? What is reality, and what echo? What is represented
and what imagined? Is the real disappearing behind its simulation, or is it
sprouting the latter from its own self like a strange blossom? Is the real
simply a reflection of the unreal, is being the outcome of appearances?
Let us take another example: what does it mean when Karin Kneffel paints one
of the interiors, the room belonging to Mrs
Esters with its original furnishings, as a hazy photograph in the style of
her teacher Gerhard Richter, but marks it as unusable by applying a thick
red cross to it—the way a photographer deletes a photo on a contact
sheet? Is she bringing her reflections on painting together with an appraisal
of Modernism? In 1927 Willi Baumeister used a red cross to delete a photograph
of a middle class living room for a poster for the Werkbund exhibition Die
Wohnung.10 Modernism, as is shown precisely by the furnishings in Haus Esters,
which are not in tune with the Neues Wohnen [New Living] style, not only opposes
tradition, it also bears it within itself.11 Neues Wohnen has been contaminated
by what has been handed down, like a style of painting that adheres solely
to the “mirror” of photography. So Kneffel’s picture distances
itself
both from the gesture of photographic representation—and with that from
the earlier paintings by her teacher Gerhard Richter which were done from
photographs—and from the half-heartedness of Modernism when it literally
arranges
itself in and with the old.
Here, too, the meaning lies not in the things but in the perspective we take
on them. They do not appear for their own sakes, but are recognisable in their
historicity. Evidently it requires the whole wealth of what is perceived in
time and space for the visible to be once again represented in its historicity.
Thus the transformation of factuality into appearance perplexes the viewer
not only visually; almost as disturbing is that what we think we know about
reality is the product of a historical semblance which we create in much the
same way as a pictorial
illusion.
Art, or painting at least, always arrives too late when it is a question of
keeping abreast with life. What we perceive as artifice in Kneffel’s
painting is nothing but her distance to mundane existence. Not wishing to
be anything but paintings—and clearly to evince this—ties them
to the real and at the same time liberates them from it. As an illusionist,
simultaneous space, many facets appear in the picture; many gazes are compacted
in it
and many historical layers are concurrently activated. Not only a lamp hanging
in a room returns outside in mirror form like a
refrain in the picture, all of the ambivalences of Modernism
re-emerge as well. Now as echo and resonance, as delayed sound. Or as an image
in which the visible has been delayed and for that very reason is recognisable.
Because the real is nothing but an aesthetic echo.
IN THE HOUSE OF VIEWS
Life is a continual distraction which does not even allow us
to reflect on that from which we are distracted.
Franz Kafka12 By tying themselves to a concrete location—Haus Esters—and
referring to it, Karin Kneffel’s paintings have gained a considerable
poignancy. The objection that she has merely presented aestheticised exercises
is unfounded. It becomes clear rather that we are dealing with complex parables
focused on perception as it oscillates between reality and appearances. That
this
is not a free-floating form of perception, but remains bound to a concrete
space and its historicity, is shown in the way that aspects of Mies van der
Rohe’s architecture have slipped into Kneffel’s paintings.
The Krefeld paintings do not simply gather up the shards of a shattered mirror
and piece them together anew. Rather they form differing views into the villa
and from these a tableau in which reflections on painting are united with
both the bewilderment arising from one’s own vantage point as well as
from Mies van der Rohe’s built Modernism. Karin Kneffel’s painting
has not only found an attractive, highly significant place of inspiration
in Mies’s at times “open” architecture, but also an equivalent
which allows her to work though her own questions with profit. Which means
that Haus Esters is more than a fortuitous location or the replaceable backdrop
for an exhibition. As an icon of modernist architecture, it is literally the
showplace for a critique of Modernism.
Here in Haus Esters, Kneffel’s paintings meet up with a complex arrangement
of rooms full of transitions, that evince a precisely worked out relationship
between inside and out, between elements such as windows, glass, light, and
fittings, and with which she herself works concretely and metaphorically.
In this way what we find in the villa returns, fixed, transformed, and taken
to the extreme in her paintings. “The outside space,” writes Julian
Heynen, “is thus not only present as a counterpart in the shape of various
(window) pictures, but also through a harmonisation in the way the boundaries
and transitions between most sections of the space are articulated. To put
it another way: when one moves about the building, the outside as a surrounding
space thinks and sees in tune with us, without the factual difference being
belied.”13
Mies, too, plays with similarities and differences in his staggered spaces,
he too works with reality and appearances, with opening and closing, and he
too guides our perceptions when, to quote him, he aspires not to “a
series of individual rooms but to
a sequence of spatial effects.”14 The way he works with reality and
appearances is most apparent when one considers the
elements of his building: an iron framework as the support, which is concealed
behind a skin of brickwork. Here we find a constructional paradox15 that mediates
between tradition (brick) and the avant-garde (support).
Where Mies opens up and plays over the hierarchy of the rooms in the way they
are perceived, Kneffel questions this fundamentally and in principle. Although
she too makes successful use of the tension between convention and bafflement,
in her case this is done to organise the picture. And just as Mies’s
Krefeld villas are not open plan—unlike the Barcelona Pavilion or Haus
Tugendhat—Kneffel’s painting is free of “free” fabrication.
Karin Kneffel’s knots of perception may be described, but not untied.
Her paintings for Haus Esters are a symptom of an underlying confusion in
our perspective on the world and the impossibility of capturing this in a
picture. Nothing exists except fragments and any number of perspectives. But
even if we are unable to clasp on to one single standpoint—with regard
neither to form nor content, neither to spaces nor pictures and surfaces,
neither to the roles and conventions of bourgeois living in the Modern era
nor to the connection between furnishings and gender—these do not remain
concealed. Even if they are simple appearances. Because anyone who simultaneously
looks through the window and at its frame, in the mirror and through it, can
see themselves looking.
1. Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols and Antichrist, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Harmondsworth, 1968), p. 41.
2.
Bettina Blumenberg, Vor Spiegeln (Munich and Vienna, 1983), pp. 16–17.
3. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power: in Science, Nature, Society and
Art, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale
(New York, 1967), p. 326.
4. Leonardo da Vinci, trans. after G. Gronau, Leonardo da Vinci (London, Dutton, New York, 1903).5. Jurgis Baltrusaitis, Der Spiegel: Entdeckungen, Täuschungen, Phantasien (Giessen, 1996), p. 9.
6.
Friedrich Nietzsche, “Zur Genealogie der Moral”, 12, in: Nietzsche,
Werke in drei Bänden,
Karl Schlechta, ed., vol. 2,
pp. 860–61.7.
William Blake, “The Mar-riage of Heaven and Hell, A Memorable Fancy
(II)”, in Blake, Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake (London,
1967),
p. 187.8.
Marcel Duchamp, The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even, A Typographic
Version by Richard Hamilton of
Marcel Duchamp’s Green Box, trans. Richard Hamilton (Stuttgart, 2002),
unpag.
9.
Cf. Nina Senger and Jan Maruhn, “Architektur und Kunst: Mies van der
Rohe baut für Kunstsammler”, in Mies und das Neue Wohnen: Räume,
Möbel, Fotografie, Helmut Reuter and Birgit Schulte, eds. (Ostfildern,
2008), p. 61.
10.
Cf. Kent Kleinman and Leslie Van Duzer, Mies van der Rohe: The Krefeld Villas
(New York, 2005),
p. 45.11.
Cf. ibid., pp. 40–41.12.
Franz Kafka, quoted from Johannes Pfeiffer, “The Metamorphosis”,
in Kafka: A Collection of Critical
Essays, Ronald Gray, ed. (New Jersey, 1965), p. 58.
13.
Julian Heynen, Ein Ort
der denkt: Haus Lange und Haus Esters von Ludwig Mies van der Rohe: Moderne
Architektur und Gegenwartskunst (Krefeld, 2000), p. 26.14.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, quoted from ibid.,
p. 38.15.
“In the Krefeld villas it is not possible to apprehend any spatial moment
without simultaneously comprehending a material paradox; the two are inextricably
linked.” Kleinman and Van Duzer, 2005
(see note 10), pp. 98–99.