Itaru Hirano (Curator, The Museum of Modern Art, Saitama)
When the Self Disappears
translation from Japanese by Richard Sams
Introduction
Artists are often conveniently categorized as painters, print artists, sculptors, photographers, installation artists or performance artists. But when we attempt to discuss the oeuvre of Jürgen Klauke, we find that he is one of the most difficult artists to categorize. We also come to realize that, for Klauke himself, such categories and definitions are meaningless.
It is certainly true that Klauke has produced photographic works, yet he is not a photographer or photographic artist who operates the camera himself. He did performances untill the mid-1980s, yet he cannot be defined as a performance artist who uses his body alone. Klauke has also created other forms of art, including drawings, prints and other two-dimensional works, as well as video works . He has thus moved with complete fre~edom from one medium to another, and has always given these media flexibility and breadth. For this reason, the photographic works featured in this exhibition cannot be explained merely in terms of photographic theory. We have to understand Klauke's photographic works by examining his whole oeuvre and appreciating the working of the mind behind it.
There is another important point one must grasp in order to understand Klauke's works: he is not the kind of artist who directly and clearly pursues the essence of art. Indeed, he deliberately avoids this sort of directness and clarity. To use a visual analogy, Klauke's style is to lightly approach the heart of the matter while twisting round in a spiral, tantalizing us from time to time along the way. Conversely, it is a manifestation of his attitude of taking as his themes phenomena that cannot be clearly expressed or directly connveyed.
Because of these distinctive characteristics, Klauke's works slip through the net, as if the artist is laughing at conventional art historical interpretation and the contentions of art criticism. And even if we can understand some of his works simply in terms of the recently popular arguments in the field of art regarding the body and sex, or in terms of photographic theory, this does not enable us to grasp it as a whole. To understand Klauke's art, more flexible thinking and sensitive appreciation are required. This is no doubt why his works are so stimulating and provide opportunities for discovering new possibilities in contemporary art.
This does not mean, however, that the world reflected in Klauke's art is cut off from the world we live in. On the contrary, his works may even sneak up to the places closest to us. If I may venture a simplification, this is because Klauke's theme is no less than mankind as it is tossed about between life and death.
1. Focusing on fluctuation
In attempting to understand Klauke's art, let us take as our first clue his photographic work Totentanz (Danse Macabre) (fig. 1), a sequence of five photographs. In these photographs, Klauke and a woman dressed in red appear with a skeleton which swings like a pendulum from the ceiling. They move about as if pursued by the skeleton, while red stains appear on the surface. These red stains resemble flames, apparently a metaphor for life in contrast with the skeleton. In the final photograph on the right, the human beings have disappeared and the skeleton continues to swing on its own. This does not represent simply life and death, but rather the fluctuation of life in its dance with the skeleton (death). What is important here is the artist's gaze at the things that fluctuate through the dynamic relationsµhip between life and death.
Klauke is not the kind of artist who pursues fixed, immutable truths. Indeed, he has always displayed a particular liking for fluctuating, mutable things. The approach manifested in his works has been the pursuit of reality within this state of flux. All things appear and disappear, continuously fluctuating and floating, their centerless, relative interrelationship making them impossible to grasp. From this standpoint, Klauke has turned his gaze in on himself and revealed to us the things that fluctuate within by making them visible. It would therefore be a misunderstanding to interpret the works in which Klauke is the main protagonist as narcissistic or as an expression of subjective feelings. What is constantly being stressed in these works is not the existence of Klauke himself but the fluctuating phenomena that can be made visible through the medium of Klauke.
2. From drawings to photographs
In his earliest period of work at the end of the 1960s, Klauke attempted to grasp his internal fluctuations through a series of drawings (fig. 2). Consisting of densely drawn fine lines, they portray images concealed within the artist himself. In these drawings, which the Klauke made continuously like a diary, images of his inner world as it constantly fluctuates from day to day float across the white background. In many of the drawings, strange headless beings appear, adopting sexual poses and sometimes being subjected to cruelty. As has been pointed out, these are reminiscent of the figures in the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch (1) and can also be compared to the work of surrealist artists such as Hans Bellmer. More important here, however, is the fact that the fluctuations of the images writhing like traumas in the inner depths of the self are recorded frame by frame in such fine and delicate detail. In addition to beÁing the sources for images appearing in Klauke's later works, it is important to note that Klauke's examination of his internal fluctuations becomes increasingly sensitive through this continuous diary-like record.
Klauke still makes these line or color drawings and they are an important mainspring of his work. In recent years, however, he has put most of his energy into photographic works. Klauke first made use of photography around 1971, just a few years after he began producing drawings. He used Polaroid for his early photographs, and these are included in a book he published in 1972 at his own expense, Ich & Ich (Me, Myself & I). Half of this book contains the above-mentioned drawings and the other half is devoted to Klauke's Polaroid photographs. The photographs are diverse and the artist himself is by no means always the only theme, but among them there is a sequence of photographs of Klauke's face (cat. 1). These photographs show the transition of his face through the process of being made up as a woman. Careful scrutiny reveals that this is not simply the change of sex from man to woman. While stressing the male face through the facial hair, Klauke emphasizes the female face by means of eye make-up. At the final stage, strongly male and female sexual characteristics weirdly coexist in the same face.
In this first attempt by the artist to portray his own face in photographs, we can already discern two directions that his later work took. One is his use of himself as material and attempt to grasp the transitions within. In these Polaroid photographs, Klauke superimposes another person's face onto his own, thereby highlighting another self. Through the medium of this other self, he makes himself not absolute but relative. He thus views himself not as immutable, but as something in a state of flux between himself and this other self. In this particular work, Klauke's takes the opposite sex as the closest other self.
The other direction indicated in Me, Myself & I is of course the use of the medium of the photograph. As a device for continuously grasping the moment of fluctuation and for making visible what is fluctuating from the aesthetic viewpoint, Klauke chose the photographic medium.2 The recognition that the photograph itself is a medium that undermines the identity of the individual may be another reason behind Klauke's choice. Since modern times, society has come to use photographs as a means of proving individual identity, for example on passports and identification cards. Indeed, we have even come to assign a superior status to the photographs on personal identification cards. Consequently, the more photographs of individuals are duplicated, the more confused people's thinking about personal identity becomes and a situation arises in which absolute, fixed identity is no longer possible. In his 1970s work, Das menschliche Antlitz im Spiegel soziologisch-nervöser Prozesse (The Human Mien, a Mirror of Sociological-nervous Processes) (cat. 14), Klauke highlights his own fluctuating, empty identity by multiplying ID card-type photographs and annotating them. Klauke senses that the seeming reality which the photograph produces makes our thoughts fluctuate constantly. In the words of Peter Weibel, who views this situation as one of the signs of the postmodern age, this early experiment "shows that Klauke, using himself as an example, had already understood at a surprisingly early stage the conditions of the postmodern world and the conditions of the photograph." (3)
These two directions are implemented in Kl auke's photographic works in the 1970s and developed through many variations. In Transformer (cat. 5), he turns his attention to the two sexes living together, using as his foundation the images springing from his drawings (fig. 3). In Begegnung (Encounter) (fig. 4), he deals with the dialogue and discord with his alter ego. In Eine Ewigkeit ein Lächeln (An Eternal Smile) (cat. 4), he uses his own face as its expression changes from laughter to seriousness, then tension and back to laughter again. This idea is further explored in the photo sequence Hiersein (Being Presence) (fig. 5), in which the bursting of a balloon in front of his face seems at first sight to be a kind of amusement. The facial expression gradually changes as he blows air into the balloon and, at the moment the balloon bursts, he makes a face so distorted that even he has never seen it before. This method is rather similar to nineteenth century scientific photographs of the faces of people being given electric shocks (fig. 6) which were taken to study the mechanisms governing facial expression. However, through his casual presentation, Klauke suggests the moment of fluctuation of his own existence and identity.
3. Indirect, reverberative expression
Some critics have pointed out the connection between this method of using himself as material for his works and "body art." But it should be noted that, from the beginning, Klauke's art has had a somewhat different character to body art, which aims primarily at the direct presentation of the body.ÿ The distinctive feature of body art, which was used throughout the world in the 1960s and 1970s, was to display the body directly through performance, emphasizing its materiality. Klauke, on the other hand, is so not concerned with this emphasis on the living body; he is not interested in directly presenting the materiality of the body. He prefers to present the body indirectly and thereby expose its emptiness and fluctuations, and this is why he has chosen to express himself through the framework of the staged photograph. This applies to the performances Klauke has presented since the 1970s. He does not make use of the photographic medium, but displays himself indirectly through the world he presents in these staged performances. In none of them does he directly reveal his body or himself. This difference is probably the reason why Klauke's art has steadily continued and developed up to this day, while most of the body art in the 1970s escalated to extreme acti¯ons followed by a rapid decline. Indirect rather than direct expression is in tune with the situation of today's society, in which information and virtual reality are becoming dominant and concrete forms and substances are losing their significance.
Together with this indirectness of expression, another characteristic of Klauke's art is the reverberative forms of expression he often uses. Particularly distinctive are the jokes and humor he employs in several of his works. Because they exist on more than one level, jokes and humor are undoubtedly among the most difficult kinds of expression to analyze and grasp. For example, joking can involve both detaching oneself from others and making fun of them and also forgetting prejudices and looking at others with compassion, while humor may display the irony of a situation in a roundabout way. Klauke does not allow a one-dimensional, static interpretation; by blending jokes and humor into his works, he provides endless reverberations, accelerating the ıfrequency of the fluctuations. Through these reverberations, he easily avoids the dull monotony one often finds in photographic art, for example in the conceptual art of the same generation as Klauke.
4. Everyday life and the fissures in it
Taking everyday life as the starting point is a major characteristic of Klauke's art. His neither address social questions nor allude to images from art history. Moreover, they are not based on the empty theoretical arguments sometimes found in art criticism. Klauke has always taken the trivial discoveries and impulses of everyday life as his themes, trusting his actual feelings above all else. This is one of the reasons for the repeated appearance in his works of everyday motifs such as tables, chairs, buckets, umbrellas and hats. In this respect, we can perhaps discern the influence of Fluxus.(4) However, there are still fundamental differences between Klauke's art and the methodology of Fluxus, which takes issue with the conventional framework of art‚ by means of happenings and events. Klauke deliberately avoids the kind of unpredictable happenings or events that characterize the work of Fluxus. After meticulously refining everyday occurrences at the production stage, Klauke renders them as perfectly presented worlds in austere forms which might even be called ritualistic This tendency is particularly marked in two major series of works of the 1980s and 1990s, Formalisierung der Langeweile (Formalization of Boredom) and Sonntagsneurosen (Sunday Neuroses).
Formalization of Boredom, produced in 1980-81, is generally viewed as a series which marked a turning point in Klauke's work. In contrast to the colorful, provocative forms of expression in his art in the 1970s, most of his photographic works after Formalization of Boredom are monochrome works in which dark-suited, unexceptional people appear together with everyday objects in a depressing atmosphere. The change is not confined to this new form of expression. Klaus HoËnnef has accurately analyzed the nature of this transformation in Klauke's work, pointing out that, before Formalization of Boredom, the artist's internal world is a mirror reflecting the world around him, whereas from Formalization of Boredom onwards, the world around him becomes a mirror reflecting the artist's inner world.(5) Put simply, the mirror-image relationship between Klauke's inner world and the outward world has been reversed.
This interpretation suggests that the buckets and chairs that repeatedly appear in the series Formalization of Boredom are motifs reflecting some kind of inner world. The buckets in Formalisierung der Langeweile, "Uber Zeit" (Formalization of Boredom, "Beyond Time" ) (cat. 26) are not rendered meaningless through repetition like Andy Warhol's soup cans. On the contrary, Klauke deliberately chooses the bucket as a commonplace motif with a weak raison d'être and attempts to project various contents onto it. However, Klauke never specifically states *what his motifs reflect, or fixes their contents. Sometimes, the buckets may suggest everyday life, but those covering the artist's head in Formalisierung der Langeweile, Tafel VI "Absolute Windstille" (Formalization of Boredom, Plate VI, "Absolute Stillness" ) (cat. 18) seem at times to be no more than props for practical jokes and then, on the contrary, to be motifs suggesting death. The same can be said of the chairs; sometimes they seem to suggest the existence of people and sometimes they evoke a melancholic mood. The chair joined to the artist in one photo sequence in Formalisierung der Langeweile (Formalization of Boredom series) (cat. 25), which might be linked with the headless figure in one of the early drawings (fig. 7), seems to serve as an object that is integrated with the body to create a single form .
Because these motifs are ultimately no more than commonplace objects in everyday use, they do not carry any deep meaning, and the meaning they have changes according to the circumstances in which people place them. They are not motifs that c¯entripetally attract meaning, like Anselm Kiefer's flightless lead airplane with its weighty metaphor and historical allusion. Klauke deliberately focuses on commonplace objects whose meaning changes according to circumstances. In so doing, he attempts to throw light on the emptiness of the fluctuating human beings among these objects.
In the series Formalization of Boredom in which these motifs appear, Klauke, together with another man and a naked woman, perform a pantomime with no plot or ending. In an enclosed indoor space only just linked to society through a TV monitor (6), the hardly dramatic theme of boredom is paradoxically established in the framework of a play. And in these relationships with objects and other human beings, the faintly fluctuating phenomenon of empty human existence is brought into relief.
The 1990s series Sonntagsneurosen (Sunday Neuroses) is viewed as being essentially an extension of Formalization of Boredom. The Sunday in the title is not the Sunday of picnics and d›rives in the countryside. The underlying tone is the melancholic atmosphere of Sundays spent at home in boredom and loneliness. Klauke continues to use the bucket and chair motifs, but tables also appear in most of the works in Sunday Neuroses. In most cases, the table stands side-on at right angles, forming a focal horizontal line providing a base that gives the whole composition austerity and tension. However, these tables are not simply used as a photogenic foundation of the overall composition. We must also consider their other purposes as the stage for various actions and events.
At the table, we eat, write letters, read books and daydream, take naps, talk and argue with our lover. In adult society, the table reflects human relationships through the seating arrangement, while for children it is a good hiding place. The table is thus a neutral receptacle that accommodates various kinds of human activities, and this is probably why Klauke uses it as the stage for mÏany of the works in this series. In fact he calls the table as theÅgworld stage.Åh
Tables do not suddenly appear for the first time in Klauke's work in Sunday Neuroses. They also form the stage for various human activities in many of his color drawings (fig. 8) produced around the same time as Sunday Neuroses, and in several of his sketches in 1976 they are already the main motif (fig. 9). The latter shows that the table, normally used for dining, can also be transmuted into the basis of sexual fantasies. This calls to mind Lautréamont's word, "dissecting table" (7) in both cases, the table becomes a receptacle for fantasies and images.
Referring to these drawings, we can see that the tables in Sunday Neuroses, while being photographed as material objects, sometimes evoke aspects of everyday life and are sometimes places that transcend and deviate from it. Here, it seems, are the hidden fissures through which we may pass back and forth from everyday life to the world beyond it. We ithen realize that other motifs such as hats and canes fulfill a similar function. In some cases these motifs may seem like stereotypical devices symbolizing the gentleman. However, as a certain drawing of Klauke's shows (fig. 10), the gentleman's hat in works like Inneres Milieu (Inner Environment) (cat. 44) can suddenly turn into the image of a huge penis. Similarly, the gentleman's cane in Bedingter Reflex (Conditioned Reflex) (fig. 11) is suggestive of the abnormal sexual impulses explicitly depicted in Klauke's early drawings (fig. 2). The canes in Dritte Wiener Richtung (Third Vienna School) (cat. 40), also recall the sadistic cruelty shown in another of the early drawings (fig. 12). From this we can infer that the refined images of a man and woman in Klauke's major work Heimspiel (Home Game) (cat. 37), which is thought to be a development of the laˆte 1970s series Viva España (cat. 17), are somehow related to the aesthetic of androgynous grotesqueness behind the seeming beauty.
These fluctuations between everyday objects and the fantasies they inspire can also be found, for instance, in a drawing from the 1970s depicting various metamorphoses of high-heeled shoes (fig. 13). In Sunday Neuroses, however, we notice that, through the medium of photography, the two sides Îb everydayness and not-everydayness Îb are closely stuck together and presented as one. Instead of the slow metamorphoses in the drawings, Sunday Neuroses is characterized by sudden reversals of worlds Îb reality and illusion; rational concepts and wild fantasies; the material and spiritual dimensions; the sublime and the ridiculous; grotesque and refinement. These opposites become two sides of the same, constantly spinning coin. Klauke plays the human being who strays into these worlds through the medium of huge monochrome photographs and attempts to draw in the viewer too.
5. The limits of the voyeuristic desire
Among Klauke's works, there are some photographic works made using X-rays, which at first sight look quite strange. These are from the series Prosecuritas produced from the late 1980s and early 1990s. However, an examination of the production process used in this project shows that, like his other works, it is based on his insight into fluctuating phenomena.
When we travel by air, our bags are always screened at the airport using X-rays. This baggage screening is conducted for security Îb to ensure that no dangerous articles are taken into the airplane. The concept underlying Prosecuritas comes from this airport baggage screening. In these works, Klauke places himself or objects selected and arranged by him in an airport baggage screening apparatus and then photographs the images shown on the monitor. Klauke's concept of using of X-ray photography derives not so much from the search for a new medium as fro∂m his concern with everyday things.
The view provided by the X-ray, which penetrates to the inside, enabling us to see things that are normally invisible, constitutes the limits of the desire to see. The night vision device, (8) a motif exhibited as part of the Prosecuritas installation (fig. 14), is a tool which enables us even to see in the dark, thus appearing to symbolize the voyeuristic desire. In fact, in a previous work, Gespannte Spanner II (Tense Peeping Tom II) (fig. 15), Klauke had already dealt with the subject of the voyeuristic urge. Particularly in contemporary society, the desire to peep has become part of the structure of society, as reflected by the cameras that monitor us everywhere we go. In order to dissect this structure of society, Michel Foucault examined the possibilities of the Ågpanopticon,Åh a prison where the prisoners could be observed from any direction without being able to see their observers.(9) The X-ray, like this panoramic monitoring method, may be viewed as one-sided, violent means of viewing spawned by contemporary society.
Each work in the Prosecuritas series suggests the function of the X-ray in society on the one hand, while possessing an aesthetic character similar to painting on the other. This character has been inherited from Klauke`s drawings. A direct line of descent to Pro Securitas can be traced from Das Ineenleben der Dinge (The Inner Life of Things) (fig. 16), a line drawing done before the artist started using X-ray photography, and Griffe ins Leere (Grasping at the Air) (fig. 17), a series of large color drawings. In order to produce the delicacy he achieves in his drawings, Klauke makes use of the feeling of floating that is characteristic of X-ray images. Like photograms, Klauke's X-ray images focus on a floating point on a two dimensional surface, without any perspective.(10)
Klauke's concept of linking the delicacy of drawings with the shadowy fiworld of the X-ray is somewhat reminiscent of the works of Ei-Kyu, the pioneer of the photogram in Japan. Ei-Kyu, who also liked delicate and erotic modes of expression, was an artist who had the ability to move freely between the fine lines of etchings (fig. 18) and the light and shade of photograms (fig. 19). Just as Ei-Kyu viewed the photogram as a bridge towards painterly creation, calling it "photo dessin", (11) Klauke gives X-ray photographs the character of paintings through the medium of the characteristics of drawings.
Whether the X-ray is of an inanimate object or a human being, it strips away the individuality of the outer layer and penetrates remorselessly and violently to the core. Klauke himself, a mask of his face, (12) dolls and buckets are all turned indiscriminately into cast-off shells and released into horizonless, infinite spaces. What we find at the limits of the voyeuristic desire is a world of cast-off shells floating without mercy in a centerless vo‹id. On the one hand, these shells recall the remains of existence and life, while on the other hand they coldheartedly forewarn us of non-existence and death. In short, they lie between the two, perfectly reflecting the state of fluctuation between them. While Klauke accepts this world of cast-off shells, he has also sublimated it almost ironically into the beauty of painting.
Conclusion
We are constantly tossed about between life and death. Sometimes we make a detour, or take a roundabout route. We experience joy and anger, success and failure. We rarely proceed in a straight line throughout our lives, never deviating. At the beginning of this essay, I compared Klauke`s creative process to a spiral and perhaps this may also serve as a metaphor for human life. Through our lives, slowly describing a spiral, we steadily descend and finally disappear. The ultimate destination is death.
This journey can be compared with Klauke's photographic work Gleiche Drehung (Mo”notonous Turning) (fig. 20). Klauke and a woman are depicted in a sequence of photographs playfully sweeping with brooms as they go round an umbrella on a stand. At the far left, a doll descending on a parachute subtly suggests something. What it suggests is not made clear, but it seems to me that it is the fate of us human beings, doomed to descend towards death and finally disappear.
It is not easy to sum up in a few words the essence of the art of Jürgen Klauke, who deliberately avoids clarity, directness and forceful expression. However, one can say with certainty that it lies in the artist's attempt to make visible, little by little, fluctuating human life as it slowly descends toward death. We can therefore discover in Klauke's works fragments of the life of the self which must ultimately disappear.
Notes