PROBING THOUGHT
On Kurt Kocherscheidt's ideas regarding moments of vision,
surfaces, bodies,
and the ineffable and how pleasantly "Russian" he
felt certain things to be
To write the way Kurt Kocherscheidt painted won't work, though
this question might well have been a topic to discuss with
him. For he would not let a thorough approach be blocked by
allegations of naivete. What was important to him about his
essential element, color, was its potential to come close
to the essence of things and yet to indicate the distance
that remained. And what emerged more markedly with every stage
of the work was his persistent effort to go beyond the literary
as a narrative technique, a method, and to move toward a silence
packed in compact shapes. His paintings keep exploring that
point from which they start to be 'something', when they begin
to have something about them and to emerge from nothingness.
Their mysticism is radically secularized. They need no metaphysical
overtones. They are about unapproachable realities, not about
fictions. They stay ahead of commentary. What may come closest
to the perplexing insight they afford (though they still remain
open to different ways of perception) are persuasive subtexts.
One of Kocherscheidt's central preoccupations was how artistic
thinking could be made productive so as to enable "insights"
- insights of a kind that he himself only had a vague sense
rather than knowledge, of; where they came from remained unclear.
He applied all his efforts to breaking away from aestheticization
and moving into foreign, pathless terrain in order to work
on vision as such and to develop reflective formations stripped
of all messages and translatability.
"There is, it would seem, in the dimensional
scale of the world", Vladimir Nabokov once presumed,
"a kind of delicate meeting place between imagination
and knowledge, a point, arrived at by diminishing large things
and enlarging small ones, that is intrinsically artistic."
(1)
It also seemed plausible to him that, while "the scientist
sees everything that happens in one point of space, the poet
feels everything that happens in one point of time."
(2) This one point is the point
in question here: It is a metaphor representing specific moments
and strived-for positions. It is a speculation about determinant
factors of insight and about the differences between an artistic
and a scientific approach striving to get a grasp of time
and space, fiction and knowledge, vision, thought, and sensation
in their polyvalence. This is the basis of an idiosyncratic
working method to explore what is possible, and what is possible
for oneself. Separate spheres require precision, and channeled
thought cannot but explore the channel.
For Igor Stravinsky (in keeping with notions
derived from Russian constellations which Kurt Kocherscheidt
much appreciated in many ways) composing simply meant "putting
into an order a certain number of sounds according to certain
interval-relationships" (3),
i.e. treating them as points of sound and
time in a coordinate system. One thing was certain for him:
"The more controlled, limited, and tormented art is,
the freer it is." (4)
Dimitrii Shostakovich took a similar view, though with a stronger
emphasis on anticipatory, conceptual thinking and trial: "Composing
a work is a long and complicated process. You
start writing, then consider what you have written. Not
always does it come up to the initial intention. If
the undertaking does not succeed, leave the work as it is
and try to avoid previous mistakes next time." (5)
He admired Stravinsky as one of the "truly great composers
of our age" (6),
but felt estranged by Stravinsky's westernized sense of self-promotion,
for "important moral positions have be abandoned"
(7).
He was
convinced that "music, and art in general, cannot be
cynical." (8)
Chekhov, whom he liked particularly as a highly musical author
propagating an uncomplicated style of writing, was a "model
of purity and modesty" (9)
for him. "He considered immortality, life after death
in any form to be rubbish, superstition. He postulated that
one must learn clear and bold thinking." (10)
For both of them, death was not a subject of their
art, but people who begin to think about death early are "less
prone to folly" (11).
Such messages with Russian postmarks on them could, it seems,
be instrumental to broaden, in time and space, the approach
to Kurt Kocherscheidt's thinking since they evoke intense
recollections of analogous subjects of conversations with
him. For him, it was existential to keep moving, mentally
and spiritually, within "his" geography, always
including the East and the South; always interested in remote
viewpoints locally and intellectually. What he referred to
as "Russian" were all sorts of things that impressed
him because of their un-artificial directness. In "Russian"
combinations of his works, hung plainly next to one another
with no space in between, he created vigorous new ensembles
and kept developing challenging sensibilities for himself.
His large painting entitled "Russian Cabin" of 1985
marked the beginning of his preoccupation with picture-objects.
The production and presentation of his works was meant to
be perceived as labor. Using a painting style that revealed
the act of its creation and grasping that which is concealed
without concealing it , Kocherschedit tried to relate style
to materiality, without using "representation."
He sought to get beyond compositional techniques
like those mentioned. The material quality of intense, accentuated
color is intended to activate sounds of color, spaces of thought,
constellations of sensation. "The paintings get close
to music" (12),
he once said about the basics of his work, close to a kind
of music that integrally incorporates different stages of
reworking into the work, as in the case of his friend Wolfgang
Rihm. While the quest had once been for
"the individual life of the single voice" which
the one tried to find in music, the other "in painterly
form", as Kandinsky wrote in his famous first letter
to Schönberg (13);
the important thing now is to attain the real "materiality"
of a picture or piece of music. For Wolfgang Rihm, invoking
"the free-est" music of the 20th century(music by
Varèse, Schönberg, Feldman, or Nono):
"What is on the paper must not simply be a sequence of
dots, strokes, and relations". He too needed "physical
contact" with his material to give materiality to the
un-nameable. With its "tremendously open and radical
view", Kurt Kocherscheidt's art, he says, "greatly
helped my imagination" (14).
Such were the problems of a New Modernism, - in music, painting,
or language - that Kocherscheidt addressed. Approaching a
material specificity from the fraying edges of these disciplines,
he extrapolated a core of rigorous standards in the shared
territory of visual, sculptural, musical, and literary production.
Sincerity was a keynote of his work. His mental range encompassed
pre-modern influences and the darkness of modernity itself,
capturing them in painting from today's perspective. The stage
of exploration by drawing continued to probe inner and counter
worlds. This spatial outreach is present in many pieces, but
time remains nevertheless palpable, as a moment or an infinite
dimension. Kocherscheidt worked in a very compressed way,
involving many emotional levels, leaving previous stages discernible.
He vigorously attempted to test, in consecutive layers, forms
of indirect, non-representational expression, in which the
laconic, the banal, and the weighty necessitated one another.
Technical matters were a concern for him, but only in order
to get beyond them. His struggle with surfaces made them ever
rougher, wilder, more material. The questions he raised about
art revolved around beginning and ending; around pictorial
sequences; around control; around ways to utilize and to break
automatisms; around simplicity and fragmentation; and around
a view of the world as a whole of spheres invisible to the
eye. "Completing a picture", reads a programmatic
text of his, "is much more difficult than beginning it;
in fact, it is impossible. I see the development of a picture
as a flow of images, halted almost arbitrarily. An
idea, or even just a thought, is ripped open, compressed and
overlaid, splintered and bundled again, readjusted. The moment
when a brief loss of control occurs, a little turn is taken
that interrupts the paralyzing fixation, in short, when the
picture gains independence, finding an opportunity to strike
back, is a good moment to stop." (15)
This assessment of his practice is clearly evidence of the
intensity of his preoccupation with the transitional phenomenae
of seeing, thinking, sensation, and action. What was important
to him in working as an artist was the abundance of possibilities,
the freedom of exploration; a much more open field compared
to other professions which appealed to him precisely because
he was such an analytical and political character. Still,
he had no use for grandiose attitudes. The point for him was
to think as universally as possible, to think in painting
like others do in writing or composing. Implementing this
was something he basically saw as a craft.
Utterly excluding arguments foreign to art would have stood
in his way of addressing transformation processes, his constant
attempt to furnish views of simple things with background
material. To negate this would mean to stylize him into an
artificial figure. Nekrasov's pre-revolutionary maxim still
fit him: "A poet you may not be / but a citizen you must
" (16)
He appreciated the harsh and self-critical
analysis of Isaac Babel, one of his favorite writers, for
the way it undercut the bombastic resonance of such claims;
about the Red Cavalry of 1920; Babel dryly wrote: "Many-layered:
rag-looting, bravado, professionalism, revolutionary ideals,
savage cruelty. We are the vanguard, but of what?" (17)
Daring as Kocherscheidt was, he respected such courage and
missed it among others in the art-scene. A specific state
of affairs could infuriate him, whereas solemn "we"
feelings were something that he, the loner, deeply distrusted.
He advocated tolerance in human relations, but in art, he
thought, it was not good for anybody. Throughout
his lifetime, he found that the political climate accepted
in Austria was stifling, and getting worse in many respects;
the crassest manifestations of this, as were common in Carinthia
where he had grown up, made this particularly evident. "Today,
you can hear people say things, it's inconceivable",
he told me in a conversation published in 1986 (18),
"it is unbelievable what kind of ideas you find here
and how weak resistance against them is." The sanction
that he - and not he alone - imposed on the forces condoning
current politics resolutely distanced himself from them, long
before such measures were deemed appropriate even on an international
scale. He was shaped by social hotspots of a different dimension:
two years in England in the brutal atmosphere of the London
East End, and one year in Latin America where he got to know
"the mechanism in a very direct way."
All this had a lasting effect on his self-image: "If
I should try to give a definition of the artist at all",
he remarked, "then it would most likely be a person whose
profession, as it were, involves the constant reconsidering
of one's own situation, continuously analyzing, continuously
'reworking' it. In the face of the threat all around, one
is continually tempted to give in, to think it's all senseless.
But you have to keep going, keep doing your thing consistently
- as a counterforce - even if it all were over tomorrow."
He wanted clarifications that paved the way for further steps.
The invocation of the cult of pain, death, and self-pity;
of the body and its decay (allegedly a matter of mentality
and hence inescapable in traditionally Catholic environments)
was not for him, though, from his early years, a heart disease
had threatened his life and eventually caused a premature
death. What kept him grounded was to see his oeuvre being
cultivated by the Morat Institute at Freiburg, Germany, with
exemplary and tranquil care. Having reached the point in his
career when he was just about to make his breakthrough to
international attention with his participation in the 1992
documenta 9 (at this time he was long recognized as one of
the most important Vienna-based artists) he only had a few
months more to live. That he would yet have had a most compelling
oeuvre ahead of him is thus reduced to a hollow and hypothetical
certainty. "Literary painting" had become increasingly
impossible for him. To outline his artistic path, he sought
to get beyond aesthetic playfulness, even beyond "the
brushstroke as such", for the sake of an "austere
shape". "I often start from a kind of ornament -
mostly in black and white -", he characterized his mature
approach which aimed for "making the most essential statement
possible in a pure language", "and then close in
on them, covering their complexity up until there is only
left what is supposed to be left."
His studio house in the Austrian province of Burgenland was
reconfigured as he wanted it and he shared it with the photographer
Elfie Semotan, the woman of his life, and their two sons.
It permitted a style of living otherwise only known from Russian
literature, as he sometimes ironically remarked. He enthusiastically
referred to the asphalt patches that could be seen on the
frequently mended narrow road leading up to the house as examples
of a very direct, tough, material style of painting that stands
for itself, simply is there, in anonymous finality, as it
were. The text that I wrote for the Budapest exhibition of
1989, the year of the fall of the Iron Curtain, and in which
I took up this thought, was considered by him as going in
the right direction. "Before intellectualism can seduce
him to sophistries", I wrote, "he rather resorts
to tenacity. This tenacity becomes visible everywhere. Still,
it won't have anything to do with bitterness. Thus are created
shapes beyond memory or invention. Dull, darkish, dim, opaque
colors convey a sense of light as it may have been before
or after some natural disaster. The black-brown-grayish spots
could be sky, earth, water, darkness and cosmic otherness
or something utterly undefinable and hence unreachable. As
surroundings, they close in on the objects that are visible
at a given moment. However, there is nothing threatening about
this - often pervasive - closeness. Any
fear is devaluated, neutralized, chaos is divested of destructiveness
with pervasive warmth. Stark layers of color applied with
coarse strokes let previous reductions shine through. The
surfaces don't seek to be any different from rough-and-ready
house painting." (19)
His mysterious elemental pictures, fragmented landscapes,
object configurations, thought grids and vistas are about
nature only in an indirect way. They are about a nature without
humans, an imaginable humanless world. The absence of humans
from the picture gives rise to the question of what is going
on here: What is happening? The attempt to get beyond the
human gaze, to see things with different eyes, those of some
other being, for example, is an expression of the struggle
for a broadened perspective. The generally human does not
have priority here. The subjective and, as a counterpoint,
the "whole" explore their fragility and questionability.
Nabokov's delicate artistic point, "arrived at by diminishing
large things and enlarging small ones", is radicalized.
The thinking eye itself turns into a microscope, a telescope,
some unknown device, - and even this is only the beginning.
Kocherscheidt's pictures of the world with their dimensional
distortions and strange shapes take unknown viewpoints so
as to actualize depth perspectives and body-surface relations
as perplexing moments of
vision. The impulse to confront - from a situation of indecision
and suspension - the laws of nature and the condition of the
human (the being that is capable of anything while allegedly
the only one acting on a sense of responsibility) and additional
intermediate forms, produce pictures that incorporate this
approach in thought-loaded allusions and signs notwithstanding
any experience of futility. Still, Kocherscheidt can do without
associations of an apocalypse caused by natural forces unleashed
by man, as in Andrei Tarkovsky's "Stalker" (1979).In
fact, they would be all-too prejudicial. His underlying attitude
is that while it may seem that all has been said and done
before, one must rely on one's doubts and convey these feelings
of uncertainty. Striving for perfection would be absurd; in
fact, perfection is the enemy. The point for Kocherscheidt
is not to get things "completed", rather they have
to be "right" in a different way. His formal solutions
verge on disintegration, as they resist categorization. Many
of the colors he uses can be identified in a very broad sense
only. Bold and light colors suddenly reappear. In "Augenecho"
["Eye Echo"] of 1985, with its large macular spots,
viewpoints, eyeballs, which might also be celestial bodies,
the micro- and the macrocosm seem to make themselves heard
simultaneously as spherical sounds. There is something that
vaguely shines through heavy layers of black such as in his
1987 triptych "Große Teichruhe" ["Great
Pond Calm"]. The variations of "Im Raum drinnen"
["Inside the Space"], "Das Schwarze Meer"
["The Black Sea"], or "Chinesische Mitte"
["Chinese Middle"] (all 1991) confront the viewer
with never-before-seen bodies whose magic is beyond all recognition.
What was hidden is brought to the surface from back sides,
undersides, from inner spaces and zones unknown. The fact
that the work nevertheless takes such determinate shape poses
a challenge. Kocherscheidt undercuts familiarization with
such inverted perception using strangely altered, transparent
statics. There is much that seems to come from another world,
from several different worlds.
Kocherscheidt was fascinated by nature not as a refuge, but
as a counterforce with its very foreignness. What touched
him most about the elemental whether in a rock formation,
as lava, in an entanglement of roots or a weathered surface;
in the smallest detail, was this patient and silent power
to create, to alter, and to destroy. His idea was that nature's
shapes and shapeless forms - confronting the eye with objects
not of human making - permit the individual gaze that is preoccupied
with various sensations and influences, a glimpse of things
un-nameable, of things beyond description in the true sense
of the word, outside the reach of language. Clearly, Kocherscheidt
aimed for the artificial, for insight rather than imitation.
He wanted his work to become ever more concrete and complex,
not more fictional. To operate between the spheres made it
possible to advance into yet-to-be-explored zones, beyond
the commonly known. Frequently, he emphasized
the powers that would have preferred to see him leave off;
but he felt that what gives the artist his true social function
was the devotion of his self to things not fully comprehensible
and
the continued commitment to keep working on himself.
As Gottfried Boehm pointed out in an important essay (20)
for the Kocherscheidt exhibition at the Vienna Museum des
20. Jahrhunderts
(1986), Kocherscheidt at some point discovered "nature
as an instance", as "an indomitable force that is
not content to willingly supply raw material to human labor";
his gaze was directed at the "far side of the world",
so as to "comprehend it from the aspect of things",
at "that side of reality that looking cannot bring before
our eyes". Because of the "disharmony
between inside and out", the paintings turn into "sites
of scrutiny, struggle, and failure". Heinz Liesbrock
takes this up in a catalogue text (21)
to state that Kocherscheidt "does not want to speak of
himself, but of an encounter with the world"; "the
painter must create, in the picture itself, the vis-à-vis
he cannot find in the empirical world", "so as to
arrive at the closest approximation to his inner reality",
to enter into a "dialogue with the world" that all
his attempts pursue. This dialogue, one might add, does not
have much to do with everyday interaction, though it may well
deal with everyday issues; nor does it require actual speaking,
no matter in which language; meeting gazes can be of much
greater intensity.
Kocherscheidt countered
the self-referential talk of the inescapability of art's aestheticizing
workings, of the end of painting and the finite picture with
his typically austere subversiveness. For him, color was a
material for experimenting with physical-mental effects. The
fact that painting was considered to be "on the wrong
track anyway" and that only art-scene mavericks went
on with it despite "the painting ban" - two observations
by Gerhard Richter (22)
and Per Kirkeby (23),
which might as well have come from him - could not keep him
from staying his course. Accidentally, Richter found it good
if, in a picture, "all the layers stay as they are, so
that you can see everything, if a dimensionality unfolds that
admits of multiplicity and complexity." (24)
And Per Kirkeby noticed in his own overpaintings
"that the underlying layer always comes through, even
if a new layer on top of it is entirely different in motif
and color". He took special interest in zones "between
nature and art, half belonging to one sphere, half to the
other, moving between states" (25).
In underlying thought and intention, these ideas converge
with those of Kocherscheidt. Their respective results, however
different, converge in a common quality, that is, their mysteries
of persuasion, their power of reflection. In conversation,
Kocherscheidt himself referred to the consistency and purity
of Zubarán, rather than Verlasquez' cryptic symbols,
or to Goya's "Desastres de la Guerra." As Elfie
Semotan remembers, he felt a particular affinity with the
ideas of Robert Motherwell and his handling of surfaces, hard-edged
black-and-white shapes, transitions from staticism to fluidity.
The sculptures/objects he made in his last years are even
more straightforward in seizing space. In these extremely
reduced shapes of raw planks and beams, the material itself,
rather than color, becomes the essential formative element.
They are what they are, leaning, casually against a wall.
There are no platforms or pedestals. Despite the weight -
physical and mental - of these large-format pictures and objects,
they all convey an inner lightness, a sense of stored energy,
a dynamism that might turn into motion any moment. As mentioned
above, this is what Kocherscheidt called their potential to
strike back. His frequent contention that he did what he did
because he could not do - or did not know - anything else
impressively translates upon his works as objects detached
from their maker and sustained by a force of their own. What
remains of all these personal overtones is merely an echo.
The paths that Kurt Kocherscheidt followed
undeviated in his thinking are those Isaac Babel had mapped
out in a draft letter. In perhaps consciously, halting words:
"
the ones will make the Revolution, and I shall,
shall sing of what is on the side, of what sits deeper, I've
felt I shall be able to do this, there will be time for it,
and room." (26)
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