Rappel à l’ordre
On Michael Kunze’s Special Call to Order Les Messieurs d’Avignon
International Style
The most beautiful thing in Tirana is the Biennale. The most beautiful
thing in Istanbul is the Biennale. The most beautiful thing in
Berlin is the Biennale. The most beautiful thing in Tapei is the Biennale.
And whoever does not yet have something beautiful is more
and more preoccupied with obtaining it. One immediately engages
agents – one calls them curators – and has it organized. What they
always have in mind is: one of the showplaces picked up from
clubbing, an artist list that has been the same for days and years
and a motto, which the local color some time ago swapped for
clichés. If the curator-person subsequently thinks of Wittgenstein
in Vienna and Borges in Buenos Aires, then the International Style
is right at home. The only difference between curators and tourists
is a matter of quantity; the latter are more numerous.
The art-world representatives thereby gladly clothe themselves
in a metaphor of especially enforced authenticity, and enthusiastic
about the danger, one throws oneself into a nomadic lifestyle.
This jetting existence is in no way threatened by hunger, and
the watering place in a few kilometers has in principal another
dimension than the necessity of the next internet connection. For
the shepherds and the herds it is not just that it makes little difference
where they find themselves. Their gaze is strictly adjusted
to the possibilities at that location, and thus the opposite of any
diffusion to which the art market in its uniform intent lends a
forum. Place specificity, the famous swan song of the ‘80s, faded
away long ago.
Hommage
Under the generic term of Les Messieurs d’Avignon, Michael
Kunze has gathered together a gallery of painters, literati and film
directors who appear to him to be exemplary in their oppositional
stance with respect to the mainstream – the lineal straightness
and the managerial mentality of the cultural present. Picasso is
one of the code names that everyone memorizes when they mean
a worldwide aesthetic, and he has brought his Demoiselles
d’Avignon (as it hangs today in the Museum of Modern Art) along
with him in his classic career as a global player. Yet Kunze’s gathering
is exclusively composed of representatives of »the white
male,« and the rejection of affirmative action bound up with that
flirts with the scandalous. In addition, it is titled in French – a language
that says »ordinateur« rather than »computer« – which also
has something of the insubordinate about it. And beyond that,
Kunze’s 60-pictures-strong series from the lives of famous people
connects with an equally strong and long-lived ad acta principle:
it is a homage.
»One feels strong, he who finds pictures which require his
experience. There are many—it could not be all that many—for
their sense is that they maintain collective experience.« That was
written by Elias Canetti, who does not appear in Kunze’s list of
people but who would be a candidate in his orthodoxly European
character. One needs pictures, Canetti says in his autobiographical
report Die Fackel im Ohr (Torch in the Ear), in order to concentrate
one’s own manner of appropriating the world; there must be many
of them but not too many, and they furnish literal identification
with the medium. Michael Kunze provides such pictures. The people
and constellations that he offers explain themselves via tradition
not through their usefulness; they exist out of refusal, not
suitability; and they are carriers of disagreement, rather than delivering
labels, logos and images for a widespread functioning of the
pin-up principle. Kunze’s way of painting makes a contribution via
the glassy, waxlike, old master-likeness of the flesh and the hieratic
artificiality of the postures. One must let oneself get involved with
such a homage.
Kulturelle Logik
In 1977 Michel Foucault titled an article The Life of Infamous People,
in which he let his favored personnel pass in review one more
time: delinquents, the insane, convicts, the sexually conspicuous.
That such a favored representation of the Other, difference and
marginality – these existences countering good repute – long ago
earned fame and took on a mainstream character. It was spoken
about by 17-year-olds who were trying to be different but still
victims of society, products of fundamentally bad conditions. The
attractiveness today in taking hold of a victim role (attractive as it
has not since the martyrdom cults of late antiquity) says volumes
about the narcissistic conformity of their all-too-small distinctions.
There is in fact a cultural logic of late capitalism, as Fredric
Jameson explained in 1984, and the logic of an avant-garde is a
part of that. Since some time ago, opposition has been among the
ingredients of a sufficiently complex status quo. In Jameson’s
case, he offered in his then very effective jargon how »not only
locally delimited, alternative forms of anti-cultural resistance and
guerrilla tactics, but also open political interventions in any kind of
way secretly disarmed and absorbed by a system, as part of which
it also must be reckoned in the end, precisely since it cannot distance
itself from that«. These days every cell phone user knows the
mechanism: whoever wants only the device, without turning himself
over to the company for years, must pay for it; whoever makes
himself responsible to a network receives it for free. Thus those
people who want to refuse the economy must pay for it; they cannot
in turn see themselves exactly validated by that.
If Michael Kunze now exhorts representatives of an alternative
to global happiness, it can only take place in the thought that
these have for the longest time already been a part of this felicity.
In the untiring rotation of the offerings to the senses and sensuality,
at some time out of each ugliness and out of each hatred will
come beauty. Outsider-ship worries about making a sensation and
supplies an outstanding product within the world-wide economy
of attention.
Rappel à l’ordre (call to order)
The lingua franca of the present is bad English. Apparently instruction
in English has not gotten very far, hence Michael Kunze’s suggestion
in an interview (to switch from English to training in classical
Greek) would be worth putting into effect. A transposition (if
not in education, then in an artistic oeuvre) is precisely what Kunze
has prescribed.
Kunze practices hermetics, he devotes himself to education
and tries out fruitlessness and incomprehensibility in scholarship.
In an over-corrected present these are altogether invectives. Also
the personal politics that he pursues in Les Messieurs d’Avignon
has retained a measure of agitation, in that Ezra Pound, Martin
Heidegger or Salvador Dali-figures pass in review, in the course of
which intercontinental half-knowledge excites the aesthetic qualities
calculated by a weakness for fascism.
Ten years after his Demoiselles, Picasso’s work had revealed
a facet that up until then had not brought forth its most
offensive inclination. The master became classical, classicistic,
Mediterranean and statuesque; he began to quote where up until
then he had pulled apart. He suddenly took possession of his figures
via formation and not deformation. With such a shift in the
direction of the conventionally normative, Picasso now fits astoundingly
well into Kunze’s objectives. An awakening took place, and
it has gone into cultural history as Rappel à l’ordre (call to order).
The expression itself comes from Jean Cocteau in 1923, but it had
been articulated five years earlier with the publication of Après le
cubisme by Amedee Ozenfant and Le Corbusier. The call to order
was a summons and not a turning point; the notoriety of reactionism
remained under the aegis of the »isms«. The linear, the progressive,
the worldwide-directed, the élan of the century, these
would not suffer any delay.
Après le cubisme (After Cubism) had put forward the demand
for a new Pythagoras, and wherever possible it exactly connects
here with Kunze’s conception. Such a philosopher figure
should also be new in the way that Kunze expounds. But at least
he or she should be able to speak classical Greek.
Les Messieurs d’Avignon, Cologne 2007, S. 21