translated from the German by Susan H. Gillespie

Interior Views

What is it that enables us to recognize, at a glance, things we have never seen, never felt? How is it that Benno Schmidbaur’s sculptures can make us gasp as if we had caught a glimpse of ourselves emerging from all the millennia?

“I have no questions left to ask” is the name of one of Schmidbaur’s sculptures. No more questions. Horror has turned the world inside-out, yet the inner torment, the feeling of pain, has still not come to light. The one who is tortured, the martyr, the sufferer, remains inaccessible. He alone knows what he endures.

         Benno Schmidbaur’s work is not so much an indictment of torture, of an infliction of suffering, which would be too pragmatic and self-evident. What we are given instead, is the actualization of what we have always known: from torture to torture, from martyrdom to martyrdom, an unconscious memory has been stored up in humanity where the suffering recalls itself from within.

         The whole of humanity’s history consists in our turning away from it; doing it, but not wanting to know anything about it. And yet we know that this suffering that has been inflicted, this slight happenstance on a scaffolding lost in an endless landscape, is larger than the world, and that someday, ultimately, the world will be swallowed up by the stored-up suffering.

         Now along comes someone, Benno Schmidbaur, who with an unimaginable shudder has heard the screams from within himself, has paid heed to this nearly imperceptible pleading that surrounds us. This dying, this horror, this boundless pain, which is known only to those who actually endure it, and which no one — understandably — wants to acknowledge: Benno Schmidbaur experiences it in his work. Torture can only occur from within this unreachable place — and as a result it is always already too late. The first time a human being was put to death, it was already, forever, too late. For someone prepared a site for it to happen. Instruments, procedures were devised. Spectators gathered, and in their midst the unthinkable, the unimaginable. If it had been truly known, experienced from within, the history of the world would have followed a different course from the beginning. But Benno Schmidbaur has heard this cry and given it form with scarcely endurable precision. What he created he has never seen, but he has turned inward, deep within himself , listening, and heard voices that have cried out from the stake and the scaffolds — voices that have become rigid, frozen, whose echoes have already been stilled, he has preserved for our time. They resound from the torn ligaments and pulsating flesh of his figures.

         What is astonishing about these figures is that they have been created from within. Beneath the various surfaces of forms and mass, we see how these martyred bodies are still themselves. Our gaze moves into them, from the inside out. We know everything about the gored, perforated body, the harshly illuminated nights, the nuit blanche, the taking possession, the holding-still in order to survive, how the ropes cut into the thighs, how you stand when you are only enduring.

         Pain transformed into matter, living fusion of pain, is stretched out and punished on hobby-horses. Boiled, twitching, burned body parts are spanned over wooden racks, until nothing more remains to be asked: “The light of childhood glows over the abased body.”

         Shackled down, the sufferer’s corporeality is extruded from him.

         Hence, in spite of all this, or perhaps because of it, the mysterious, guiltily erotic quality of these sculptures in which the spectator participates as if he himself were being flayed, “filed into shape” like the still-breathing body of Heliogabal which, as shown by Antonin Artaud, delivered itself, gave itself, offered itself up, in order to feel, as most intimately his own, what was growing into him.

         The onlooker experiences within himself his own holding-still, his motionlessness as the martyred “figures” hang, lie, or bend around their torture racks and expose themselves to their most intimate, innermost cores.

         It is this innermost core that is made visible by Benno Schmidbaur, this holding-still in the inaccessibility of the pain, as if his sculptures contained the universe’s primary matter in concentrated form, as a thinking inward, as a memory of pain.

         The monstrous nature of the pain suffered by one small body in the enormous expanse of space is, in its unimaginable horror, the negative anti-world which weighs heavier, in a single point of pain, than the mass of the whole universe. The pain of the tortured, as represented in the work of Benno Schmidbaur, preserves for us the sanctity of the human face, for it is no accident that his figures have no faces. Faces are the innermost essence, beyond all pain, all suffering, the uncharted inaccessibility that all torturers are trying to reach, as if they wanted to climb into the inaccessibility of the one they are torturing, as if they knew of his sanctity.

                                                                      Georges-Arthur Goldschmidt

                                                                      Paris, November 1994

Georges-Artur Goldschmidt

Innenansichten

Aus welchem Blick heraus erkennt man denn sofort das nie Gesehene, nie Empfundene: wie kommt es, dass die Skulpturen Schmidbaurs einem den Atem benehmen, als sähe man sich selber aus allen Jahrtausenden heraus?

“I have no questions left to ask”  heißt  eine Skulptur Schmidbaurs. Es gibt nichts mehr zu fragen; das Entsetzen hat die Welt aus sich selbst herausgestülpt und doch ist die innere Qual, das Empfinden des Schmerzes immer noch nicht ans Licht getreten: immer noch ist der Gefolterte, Gemarterte, Gequälte unerreichbar: er alleine weiß von dem, was er leidet.

         Nicht so sehr eine Verurteilung des Folterns und Abquälens enthält das Werk Benno Schmidbaurs, was doch ziemlich programmatisch und geradezu selbstverständlich wäre, als vielmehr die Darstellung des schon immer Gewußten. Von Qual zu Qual, von Folter zu Folter hat sich ein unbewußtes Gedächtnis in der Menschheit aufgestaut, in dem sich von Innen die Qual an sich selbst erinnert.

         Die ganze Geschichte der Menschheit bestand darin, sich davon abzuwenden, es zu tun, aber nichts davon wissen zu wollen und doch weiß jeder, daß die Qual des Gefolterten, dieses winzige Geschehen auf einem Holzgerüst irgendwo verloren in der unendlichen Landschaft größer als die Welt ist, daß die Welt am Ende von der angehäuften Qual einstmal verschlungen werden wird.

         Und nun kommt einer, Benno Schmidbaur, der in unglaublichem Erschauern dieses Schreien aus sich selber heraus erhört hat. Er hat auf dieses kaum wahrnehmbare Flehen, das uns umgibt, aufgepaßt. Dieses Sterben, dieses Entsetzen, diesen maßlosen Schmerz, den einzig diejenigen kennen, die ihn eben erleiden, das keiner - was auch verständlich ist - wahr haben will, den erlebtBenno Schmidbaur in seinen Arbeiten. Gefoltert wird nur aus dieser Unerreichbarkeit heraus, daher ist es von jeher zu spät geworden: als man zum ersten Mal einen Menschen hinrichtete, war es für immer zu spät. Man errichtete nämlich eine Stätte, wo es geschehen sollte. Es wurden Instrumente, Vorgänge erdacht, Zuschauer stellten sich da herum und in der Mitte das Unvorstellbare, Undenkbare. Hätte man es wahrgenommen, selber von Innen erwußt wäre von vornherein die Weltgeschichte eine andere gewesen, aber Benno Schmidbaur hat ja eben jenes erhört, gestaltet, von innen heraus in kaum ertragbarer Genauigkeit. Was er darstellt, hat er nie gesehen, aber er hat es in sich selbst zurückerhorcht und die Stimmen vernommen, die auf den Scheiterhaufen, den Schafotten geschrien haben. Ihre Stimmen, die erstarrt, eingefroren sind, aber dennoch, obgleich verhallt, gegenwärtig, aufgehoben. Jenes Raunen hat Benno Schmidbaur vernommen, es klingt aus den zerrissenen Sehnen, aus dem pochenden Fleisch seiner Gestalten heraus.

         An ihnen, diesen Gestalten, ist das Erstaunliche, dass sie von innen heraus hergestellt worden sind, man sieht unterhalb der sonstigen Oberfläche der Formen und Massen, wie diese gemarterten Körper sie selbst sind, Der Blick des Zuschauers sieht von innen heraus, wie in entgegengesetzter Richtung. Er weiß alles bereits vom durchstoßenen, durchbohrtem Körper, von der Besitznahme, von der “nuit blanche”, vonder Reglosigkeit des Durchlebens, wie sich die Fesseln in die Schenkel einprägen, wie nur noch im Erleiden gestanden wird.

         Materie gewordener Schmerz, lebendige Schmerzschmelze wird auf Steckenpferden bestraft. Zerkochte, zuckende, verbrannte Leibstücke auf hölzerne Foltern gespannt und es bleibt nichts übrig, wonach man noch fragen könnte, wie es heißt und “Licht der Kindheit glüht auf dem erniedrigten Leib.”

Es schließt sich eng um den Gefolterten, aber es steht dennoch die Körperhaftigkeit aus ihnen heraus.

         Daher, trotz allem oder gerade deswegen, das rätselhaft-schuldig erotische dieser Skulpturen, an die der Körper des Zuschauers teilnimmt, als erlebe er sich geschunden, “zurechtgefeilt”, wie der noch atmende Leib Heliogabals, der, wie Antonin Artaud es gezeigt hat, sich auslieferte, sich hingab, sich anbot, um in sich als das Eigenste zu fühlen, was in ihn hineinwuchs.

         In sich erlebt der Zuschauer die Unbeweglichkeit, die in ihm steht. Die gemarterten “Figuren” hängen, liegen oder biegen sich an ihren Foltergerüsten und entblößen sich bis zum Innersten.

         Und gerade jenes Innerste wird bei Benno Schmidbaur sichtbar als die Unbeweglichkeit in der Unerreichbarkeit des Schmerzes, als enthielten seine Skulpturen die Ursubstanz in konzentrierter Form, als Hindenken, als Gedächtnis des Schmerzes.

          Die Ungeheuerlichkeit des Schmerzes, die in der riesigen Weite des Weltraums ein einziger winziger Körper erleidet, ist in ihrer unvorstellbaren Furchtbarkeit die negative Gegenwelt, die in einem einzigen Schmerzpunkt schwerer wiegt als die ganze Weltmasse. Der Schmerz des Gefolterten, wie ihn die Werke Benno Schmidbaurs darstellen, bewahren uns die Heiligkeit des Antlitzes des Menschen, denn nicht von ungefähr haben seine Figuren keine Gesichter, die Gesichter sind nur das Innen, diesseits allen Schmerzes, allen Leidens, die unermeßliche Unerreichbarkeit, wonach alle Folterer trachten, als wollten sie in der Unerreichbarkeit des Gefolterten steigen, als wüßten sie um seine Heiligkeit.

                                                            Georges-Arthur Goldschmidt

                                                                 Paris, November 1994

The Harmonies of Hell

Benno Schmidbaur’s figurative wood sculptures — scorched, encrusted with straw and feathers, and trussed in ropes — resemble tortured bodies brought back from the dead. These Christomorphic figures — headless, often limbless and sometimes castrated, tied to beams that could be fragments of the cross, perched on bases suggesting primitive conveyances, or suspended in frames or boxes culled from the institution — express a psychic suffering of such intensity that one associates them with the horrors of the holocaust. Indeed, the formal sensibility and death imagery of Schmidbaur, who was born and raised in Augsburg, Germany, share a kinship with the art of his countrymen Anselm Kiefer and Georg Baselitz. Schmidbaur’s burnt, wrenched torsos could have been exhumed from the smoking black furrows painted by Kiefer in Your Ashen Hair, Shulamite, and the goulish cargo of Sometimes I Hallucinate the Harmonies of Hell could have been harvested from Baselitz’s landscapes of devastation. Indeed, Schmidbaur’s expressionistic roots go back to the 1970s, when he began making abstract sculptures of forged iron whose warped, punctured, and thorny forms prefigured his figurative images of anguish.

On closer inspection, however, Schmidbaur’s work defies easy categorization and definition. Through the imaginative richness of his formal means and intensity of vision, the artist reveals disturbing dualities and ambiguities that simultaneously beguile and discomfort the viewer. His mutilated and tormented torsos are charged with eroticism, their exploitation by the oppressor bordering on exhibitionism; decapitated double heads, resting in cradle-like plinths, sightlessly mourn their loss of mind and individuality; mummified flesh is tensile, alive; and inanimate objects, such as the fetish Madman’s Drum, whose phallic form is incised with a reddened, feather-stuffed slit, pulses with animalistic life, even as its sexual forces are inane and repellant. Seldom have images of death, decay and mutilation resonated with such life, sensuality and vitality.

The sculptor began his foray into figuration a decade ago. The first of these pieces, an upright, blackened figure with nails radiating out of its headless neck like a spiky halo, is definitive. It confronts the viewer with a terse, ritualistic frontality of an archaic Greek kouros. It is entitled Unity, a name with a certain ironic twist considering it lacks a head and arms and the ravaged flesh is devoid of any unique identifying characteristics. Its origins seem mysterious and ancient, suggesting a relic excavated from the earth rather than a consciously willed creation.

In Unity, Schmidbaur introduced the protagonist of the tortured self. Over the next decade, his exploration of this theme included not just the punishments but also the seductiveness of the victim, the depths of his powerlessness, rage and call to pity, and the strange triumph of his beauty. Subject to the horrors of the plague and the rack, toyed with, split by the ax, buried, and hoisted onto the mast, his figures enact the cycles of dying and rebirth with Promethean persistence. They are emblems of spiritual longing and achieve a kind of catharsis: the victim as life-affirming archetype, where flesh is a stand-in for the soul

The stoic, rather static figure of Unity becomes animated and more blatantly Christ-like in Closing In: the tattered figure, whose rippling musculature twists and strains with the fierceness of an El Greco nude, hangs from a crosspiece, its shoulder firmly in the authoritative clutch of a huge hand. In I Have No Questions Left to Ask, a sacrificial victim is stretched on a rack, its hands fluttering above its tied wrists like an anguished cry. Below it extends a spare metal scaffold bearing candles, which invites reverence, even as it suggests coercion from the religious powers that be.

The mannerist treatment of the forms and the Gothic starkness of the blackened wood are replaced by a very different, almost inverted vision in Nuit Blanche. The wood has been brushed with white paint — Schmidbaur says he was inspired by the light of the beaches of Long Island, which he had recently visited — and the upright figure, its legs wrapped in ropes, seem to stand spectral-like in the moonlight. It is an after-image that haunts the insomniac. The hushed quality of the piece is reinforced by the disembodied hand, which covers the groin in a gesture that speaks both of abeyance and probationary authority. Here the message is more ambiguous. The ropes are almost decorative, and the sense of restraint is reinforced by the “primitive” style, which emphasizes the protagonist’s generalized, heroic stance. The piece reverts back to the totemic power of Unity— in the archaic frontality of the figure, the inclusion of an attribute that could be a simple instrument, weapon or tool, and the metal fragments and scalp-like tresses of hemp that turn the hacked wooden base into a pagan altar. The victim is armed, intact, on his feet, and sexually alive, as conveyed in the sensuous curve of the buttocks above the confining loop of rope.

Nuit Blanche’s use of the “primitive” demonstrates one of the strategies Schmidbaur employs in his quest to uncover and reveal the first order of things — the essential being revealed in the stripping away of the conditioning, coercion, and distractions of modern society. The influence of non-technological, non-Western cultures such as Africa and New Guinea (a nail fetish from the Congo adorns Schmidbaur’s bedroom) is displayed not only in the rough, ceremonial style of works such as Nuit Blanche, but also in the transparency of his process and tactile use of organic materials.

While his carved torsos contain passages of undulating grace, the bodies are cracked and broken, the wood surfaces often roughened and distressed, scored with nails and plastered with feathers. Soft materials, such as hemp, which hangs from many of the suspended torsos like dripping blood or a damaged wing, are often juxtaposed against hard substances such as lead or iron, suggesting the crude tools or machines of an early industrial age, creating a kind of visceral shock. The effect is heightened by the human scale and the literal use of rope to bind the figures, which cause the sculptures to intrude upon the viewer’s space. Found objects, such as bullet-pocked boards that were once part of a policemen’s shooting range, are part of his repertory, and the conveyances, platforms, gateways, and tables that support his figures always suggest a pragmatic purpose.

Schmidbaur rejects art making as a formalist end game. He’s not interested, for example, in exploiting the beauty of the wood as an end in itself: It’s a Gift to Be Simple, It’s a Gift To Be Free, the one piece in which the wood is left alone, is comprised of a flawed piece of sycamore, which split and splintered in the process of carving. The artist’s magic is transforming materials into works that vibrate with spiritual intensity, and yet connect with the viewer in a very physical way. Through both the content and assault on the viewer’s senses, he recruits us to his vision — waking us up, jolting us out of our complacency. There are pleasures to be had along the way. In Fourth of July, for example, the gouged and painted wood of the double heads, with feathers stuck in the gouged-out eye sockets, resembles rubbery flesh, although the texture of carved-wood rivulets and soft feathers plays upon the senses as keenly as do the lush brushstrokes observed in a Manet.

Form and content amplify and inform each other, breaking down distinctions between the two. In It’s a gift To Be Simple, It’s a Gift To Be Free, the long pike that extends from the base of the raised platform not only suggests a weapon or boat keel, but also creates a horizontal momentum that counteracts the central mass of the stooped, rounded form of the figure. His sets of double heads, as in Fathers, Esopus Elegy and Mother’s Cradle, are subtle variations in symmetry, with each head gazing in a different direction, creating a shifting movement. In The Erl-King’s Game, the contrast between the whitened, Caravaggioesque torso and the rough, splintery boards, jagged metal chain, and lead box of the torture machine in which it lies highlights the body’s vulnerability. But it also reads as a slash of light in a dark setting, conjuring up baroque drama and depth.

The worn and straw-encrusted surfaces, the details of splintered wood frames, torn cloth coverings, the unlovely wrappings of lead sheeting (a deadly material) don’t just create formal interest and concrete immediacy, they also evince a history. Missing limbs and tortured bodies evoke past horrific events and the debilitating passage of time. Still encrusted with the mud and straw of the ground, the figures have only recently been exposed to the light of day. The presence of feathers and suggestion of wings point to the figure’s celestial origins — or perhaps the tragic, failed aspirations of Icarus. The fallen protagonist’s youthful contours and glistening whiteness in some of the pieces suggest a lost innocence.

The artist, who majored in Assyriology at Berlin and Munich universities, playfully refers to his work as artifacts that provide clues about a mysterious culture — cannibalistic, warlike and ritualistic, as evidenced by his spears, his collection of heads, feather fetishes, and sacrificial altars. “I want them to look as if they came from an archaic society, where the figures could be dug out of the sand”, he says. “The objects point to something beyond themselves.” Predominant in this invisible universe, of course, is the oppressor, whose god-like presence is briefly hinted at in the huge disembodied hand that appears in several works.

Sharing that space of the other is the viewer, who is in an uncomfortable position. Not only are we helpless when confronted with the victim’s pain, but we are also implicated — particularly in the series of white, supine torsos of young men that lie passively at hip’s level awaiting the torturer’s delectations. We are forced to gaze down upon them from the perspective of the oppressor. We feel pity that verges on the maternal, given the infantile passivity of the figures and the criblike proportions of their prisons, yet voyeuristically regard their exposed genitals, laid out like delicate fruits for display.

“I want to disturb the usual vision of people”, says Schmidbaur, who describes his work as “wrenching classicism”. One way he achieves this is his reconciliation of the “primitive” with the high-art tradition of the Western canon. A recurring motif is the fragmented figure, inspired by broken pieces of ancient Greek and Roman statuary. Schmidbaur was steeped in classical culture as a schoolboy. Having received a classical education, which included the study of ancient Greek, at his Augsburg gymnasium, Schmidbaur’s exposure wasn’t just intellectual: the school’s hallways and lunch room were lined with Roman classical fragments that had been excavated from the town. “It was like growing up in Rome”, he says

The clenched torso and tensed musculature of a shoulder, as portrayed in the Greco-Roman fragment Torso Belvedere, achieve a force of pure expression, isolated as they are from identification with the particular. This idea reached its apotheosis in the late works of Michelangelo; like the mannerist master, Schmidbaur transforms flesh into feeling. The artist also explores the implications of the shattered perfection of the fragment itself: the crude breakage of carved marble torsos of breathtaking finish and proportion caused by the fall of civilizations becomes, in Schmidbaur’s work, the shattering of the individual. The taunt and twisted torsos, elemental in their aloneness and nakedness, are gestures of despair, as well as objects of erotic longing.

The influence of Michelangelo’s Captives and late Pietas, which are half-imprisoned in their blocks of stone or whittled down to the barest corporal existence, is most evident in It’s a Gift To Be Simple, It’s a Gift To Be Free, in which a bent figure partially emerging from a hunk of wood struggles to rise from a litter-like platform. His left knee is raised and pulls against the ropes that bind him, but the downward weight of the upper body, with the half-defined arms lifted above the body to the ground in a gesture of grief and supplication, conveys defeat and sorrow. Indeed, Schmidbaur says the figure was inspired by the plaster casts of people who died at Pompeii, which record a struggle at the moment of annihilation.

In contrast, Pest Cart, in which a pale, pustule-spotted corps sprawls theatrically in a cart-like conveyance, throbs with perverse energy and dark tension. The cart’s two rough-hewn wheels are suspended in an iron armature that lifts them off the ground, rendering them useless. (However, Schmidbaur insists on a practical function, saying the design possibly refers to the deep mud of a place like Auschwitz, which would require a special type of conveyance.) The burned wood of the cart identifies it with the charnel house, but there’s a surprise: the tip of the shaft, which follows the alignment of the body’s leg and torso, resembles a red, pulsing phallus — a grotesque extension of the prostrate corps that transforms the cart into a locomotive of lust.

The line between pain and pleasure, passivity and struggle, is thinly drawn. In Swept Away, for example, the body, flung against the base of a mast like one of the dying survivors in Gericault’s Raft of Medusa, is scored by nails. The nails, however, follow the line of the spine up the center of the chest, forming a beautiful arc and underscoring the spinal cord as the life-affirming axis of the body. The strength of the protesting, ecstatic gesture of the torso is in turn undermined by its hollowness, which reveals it as nothing but a flayed skin. 

Schmidbaur’s quest for the authentic has also led him to explore the fears and desires of pre-urban Europe in Grimm’s Fairy Tales. In mining the archetypal themes expressive of the European subconscious mind, Schmidbaur found a vehicle for his own rage and dread. In Rumpelstiltskin, the little man, who threatened to take away the princess’s first child if she couldn’t guess his name, is transformed into a fiery red shaman with hoofs, a hide cloak, and a starved-child’s face. The figure stomps on a supine torso — it represents the only female in Schmidbaur’s repertoire — leaving a circular red wound over her breast. Rumpelstiltskin is the self’s angry child wreaking retribution on the earth-mother — although, according to the story, in the end it is he that is destroyed (once the princess guesses his name, Rumpelstiltskin flies into a rage and tears himself to pieces).

In Snow White, one of Schmidbaur’s most disturbing works, a bloody corps is displayed in what could be an actual glass casket draped in a torn German flag. The beautiful princess of the fairy tale, who after arousing the wicked queen’s jealousy was tricked into eating a poisonous apple, fell down dead, and was sealed by the dwarves in a glass coffin, is grossly changed. The torturer has finished with his prey and buried the remains. Encrusted with feathers, the battered torso evokes a violent contrast of associations — the birdlike being who has fallen from its airy perch in the sky and a poultry slaughterhouse. The coffin has just been opened and icy cold air, suggested by the slight frosting of the glass, is escaping from it: the casket is lined with soft white threads, which convey the stealth and anesthesia of snow. No magic wish or preservation process has saved the victim, whose wounds have festered and decayed in the airtight seal of forgetfulness.

As it turns out the fatalism of Snow White, in which the putrefying remains cry out “too late”, isn’t the last word. In Schmidbaur’s most recent work, Blue Angel, the upright figure reappears after a long absence, rekindling the hope expressed in Unity and Nuit Blanche. He is transfigured, his unharmed body painted a luminous, midnight blue, and he bears a pair of wings — one half lifted, the other gently caressing his body. His raised shoulders, elongated upper body and bent knees pull him upward, and the rope loosely draped around his chest and hip seems more a fashion statement than constraint.

He is poised for heaven, although this is no ethereal creature; of all  Schmidbaur’s figures, Blue Angel is the most solid and concretely physical. He hovers over the remnants of a rusty iron plow, which connect him to the earth and whose heavy wheels suggest movement of a different kind. Is his possible ascension just a pose — a glamorous exhibition to be trundled out for the vicarious pleasure of others? In Blue Angel, Eros steps to the fore. The tormentor has receded, and the protagonist’s sensuous beauty has been restored. He dazzles and seduces us, and we don’t want him to get away.

2/11/2002

Burnt Bodies

         “Strange, how wrong it feels to be alive” is the opening line of a poem I wrote in response to my first view of Benno’s new, explosive figurations. Even now, after nearly a decade of repeated viewing, the strangest impression still lingers, beyond reason, that Benno’s “figures” are alive, and quite wrongly. How can they be? Maybe they can be regarded as figures, as bodies, but just barely, because there’s nothing anatomically correct, or intact, about them. Most of them are only suggestive of human form, and of a maimed human form at that. Carved in wood, burnt, polished with wax or smeared with tar, studded with nails and feathers — the list of materials goes on and on, and yet none of these surface features and textures describes them in total, because they are fragments only. There’s a torso or a limb, or an occasional hand we can identify, or a grinning skull propped up on a bench opposite a twelve-inch penis wrapped in rope. Otherwise, we as viewers unconsciously fill in the rest: a wooden stump is sufficient for us to interpret as an “arm.”

         But aren’t we tempted to tell a story about them, don’t they seem to radiate an aura that’s as life-like as a narrative? We have to assume they’re depictions of something — of torture, or martyrdom, or some obscure ritual murder, or, in the obvious case of It closes in on him, crucifixion. They’re victims, obviously, and we can say for certain that they’re male, or at least derived from the male figure. We can’t help but identify with them, because their drama is wrought on such a human scale — none of them measures beyond nine feet. They’re lean, youthful — probably adolescent. Their size, their scale, their setting (two of them are lit by votive candles) have all the impact of theater, of dramatic rite, but it’s a theater of enigma and nightmare, an ongoing drama that never seems quite over, never is fully explained. The enigma can’t be rationalized, neither can the nightmarish suspense of held breath, of not knowing, of never knowing. So even without the advantage of understanding exactly what these sculptures depict, we are drawn in as guilty voyeurs made uncomfortable with our own fascination with them. They hint of something that shouldn’t be seen, shouldn’t be so nakedly exposed. They’re irresistible to look at, precisely because it seems wrong that they exist at all, that they can endure so much, and still cast off a ghostly radiance as in the bleached Nuit Blanche (White Night, or Sleepless Night). Or that they can lie exposed and punctured with steel rods and still appear so defiantly alive, as in “I have no questions left to ask.” Their deformations can’t disguise what they once were, either. The abstracted Heliogabal, for example, is so de-humanized (like a long slab of bludgeoned muscle) that it’s almost unbearable to look at, and yet it hints of a compacted strength that can’t be suppressed and that might at any minute burst out of its constraints.

         What is it that makes Benno’s work so compelling, that we cannot be distanced from it, that we cannot be any less than intimately engaged? The artist doesn’t hold anything back, for one thing, and neither can we. The work cries out to be touched, pondered, communed with. The monumental Einheit (Union) and Nuit Blanche literally lean forward, beckoning to us. “Sometimes I hallucinate the harmonies of hell” resembles an aged treasure chest salvaged from a shipwreck, with its lid open, inviting us to reach in, to look and touch. (On closer examination, we find a pile of skulls, each one individualized, with a different shape and expression) Nothing is closed-off, or hidden, everything is exposed, broken open, fragmented, left vulnerable: this is what all that “exposure” entails, along with the fragmentation of forms — the torsos are voluptuously rendered even while the’ve been gutted out with a chain-saw; the hands are still reaching for something, even when there is nothing but a broken shoulder, or a fistful of straw, to reach for. The sculpture “I have no questions left to ask” has the plaintive eroticism of a Gothic effigy, charred black, stretched to the breaking-point across an iron rod, and framed by the soft glow of candlelight. These are figures that have been ritualized, but still retain some essential mystery that defies exposure — this is another reason why they’re irresistible to look at, because they are not complete, because they suggest something that hasn’t yet been actualized, that can only be intuited but can never be satisfactorily explained. The titles, also, might clue us in to a narrative that reaches beyond the banally representational. Heliogabal is a reference to the mad Roman emperor memorialized by Antonin Artaud who, along with Robert Musil, is the dramatist/poet that’s inspired much of Benno’s work. (The title, The light of childhood glows over the debased body, is actually a sentence taken directly from Musil’s novel, Young Törless.)

         But beyond subject-matter, and whatever our own inclinations are, to settle upon an interpretation, the artist’s use of his materials and the cumulative effect of surface details will ultimately put the value on these works. Everywhere the eye rests, there is a bountifully textured surface, a constant contrast of texture and materials, of weight and volume: feathers and lead, wood and straw, steel and hemp, wax, bleach, tar. A torn remnant of a german flag is attached to the figure’s thigh in Einheit; a pile of skulls is buried in straw in “Sometimes I hallucinate the harmonies of hell.” Elsewhere, streaming lengths of rope are glued together like tangled locks of hair, nails are dipped in tar; iron bars are splattered with white primer. Some surfaces are sand-papered smooth, or given a polyurethane sheen with a thin undercoat of bleach; others are left in the raw, with clear signs of wood rot. Even the smoothest surfaces seem weathered, giving the illusion of passing time. The iron is rusted, dented — used. Dust settles in the cavities of wood, among the piles of straw, in the feathers and ropes. This is what makes these sculptures seem at once rooted and off-balancing: the artist’s hand is at work everywhere, and yet the sculptures themselves seem to be works of decay, left to the designs of time, forgotten and abandoned for years, and only now retrieved out of some cave of consciousness we vaguely cognize. We get the feeling of re-discovery when we see them: the materials are primary, elemental — the materials of a farmer, the blacksmith, the carpenter, the earthy bric-a-brac of nature and the village craftsman. In terms of form, there’s a constant pull between the vertical and the horizontal: another technique for keeping the viewer off-balance. The streaming ropes lead the eyes downward in It closes in on him (the ropes also reinforce the impression of the figure “dripping” off the cross) while the hand suspended in the air seems to be rescuing the figure from the pull of gravity. Similarly, in Light of childhood, there’s a bundled mass suspended horizontally above, while below, thirteen vertical rods, topped with votive candles, point skyward. In Nuit Blanche the glowing, bleached surfaces contrast with the blackened rope at the base, making a study of shadow and light. The central focus is the brightened arm pointing downward, but a nailed plank rises to the height, joining the entire sculpture with the darkened concave on top.

         Nuit Blanche is the only one in this early series (1990-1993) that hasn’t been left in its burnt state, and it signals the change that is to come in Benno’s work, when later sculptures in the 1990s will incorporate color. “Burnt bodies” — burnt wood — will no longer be the modus operandi. What will follow is a series of Grimm’s fairy-tale renderings splashed with paint and bleach and some installations where the figure won’t predominate. But “burnt bodies” remains the opening phase, as shockingly beautiful and haunting as anything to come.

Extract from Humunkulus by Robert Roth

published (NYC 2004) in And Then, Volume 11

         It was less than a month earlier that I first met Benno Schmidbaur. He invited me to his studio in Saugerties, N.Y. Sculpture work of horror, torture, pestilence and death. Pieces made from wood, metal, stones, feathers. There was a harshness and a delicacy to it. Looking at the work, surrounded by it really, I flashed on the ugly intimate knowledge that the torturer has of the inner psyche of his or her victims. The peculiar erotic dimension to its cruelty. We can see this in the soft poetic face of Osama bin Laden. Or in the heavy breathing, flushed, almost adolescent face of George.W. Bush. In the spectacular brilliance of the World Trade Center attack. Or in the relentless and brutal response to it.

         And there off in a corner of the studio, was a figure half human half devil lying somewhat on its back somewhat on its side. It was called Humunkulus.

         Humunkulus had hooves and pointed ears and a red face. He was lying on something that looked like a platter with protruding nails around its edges. He looked half asleep. I felt a surge of tenderness towards him. A kind of protectiveness as I wondered what his life would be like. And I wondered what type of relationship I could have with him.

"Reaching Deep into Intuitive Realms" -Mwalimu

"The feathers are tattered and the scull gleams white in the center of a sculpture exuding a feeling of decay and feal. But its purpose is not only the evocation of gloom. "

"It's a tragedy of the most enormous proportions that do many ancient cultures have been destroyed by the ravages of the West, and that in another fifty years so few will remain. Benno S. has taken on the tasks of helping to open our eyes to the beauty of those cultures and the finality of their destruction."

Katalogvorwort einer parallel zur Art Basel 1997 geplanten Ausstellung 

Benno Schmidbaur

“Wir behaupten gar nicht, an den Sitten der Menschen etwas ändern zu können, aber wir haben uns vorgenommen, ihnen die Zerbrechlichkeit ihrer Gedanken klar zu machen und auf welch unsicherem Grund, über welchen Kellern ihre schwankenden Häuser ruhen.”

                                                                                          - Antonin Artaud -

Vordergründige Schönheit, Lebensfreude, Glück sind nicht die Themen Benno Schmidbaurs. Ihm geht es um die Keller, um die Fundamente, auf denen unsere so sicher scheinenden Häuser ruhen. Verstümmelung, Folter und Tod sind das nur Bilder in den allabendlichen Nachrichten aus aller Welt, schrecklich, aber doch weit entfernt? Oder reichen ihre Wurzeln bis in unser Leben, bis in uns selbst hinein? Zeigen sie nicht Strukturen und Mechanismen in einer letzten und äußersten Konsequenz, die auch unser Leben bestimmen? Die Beziehungen von Mann zu Mann, von Mann zu Frau, westlicher Welt zu dritter Welt, die Zerstörung der Natur?

Benno Schmidbaur betritt mit seinen Skulpturen eine der am meisten ausgegrenzten Tabuzonen: Sexueller Mißbrauch, Demütigung und Vernichtung sind feste Bestandteile dieser Welt, in der Männer die Täter und die Opfer sind. Benno Schmidbaur ergründet mit seinem Werk ihre Wurzeln, ihre inneren Zusammenhänge. Seine Skulpturen haben wenig Lebendiges an sich. Sie sind geprägt von Selbstzerstörung und Todessehnsucht. Ihr Schmerz und ihr Sex-Trieb scheinen bereits durch den Tod überwunden, in Todesstarre erkaltet ihre letzte Erektion. Von den Leibern abgetrennte Köpfe stehen symbolhaft für die Trennung von Kopf und Seele - Symbol für das Patriarchat. Für Homer war der Verstand noch im Zwerchfell lokalisiert. Die vorpatriarchalische Gesellschaft kannte die Trennung von Kopf und Seele nicht. Erst mit Sokrates zeigen sich eindeutige Spuren dieser Trennung. Das Christentum hat sie übernommen und unser sprachliches und begriffliches Ausdrucksvermögen ist bis heute geprägt davon. Benno Schmidbaur hat dies zum Leitmotiv seiner Arbeit gemacht.

Symbolhaft ist auch der Entstehungsprozeß seiner Werke. Aus natürlich gewachsenen Materialien formt er junge, männliche Körper, die erst in einer grausamen Behandlung mit Feuer und Stahl zu den gequälten und gemarterten Gestalten werden, die charakteristisch sind für sein Werk. Seine Arbeiten mögen auf manche abstoßend und schockierend wirken, sie haben gleichzeitig eine andere Seite: Ihre stille Ruhe verspricht Erlösung von allen Qualen, die Erlösung nach dem Tod.

All dies sind wesentliche Aspekte unsere abendländischen Kultur. Benno Schmidbaur läßt sie sichtbar werden. In der kritischen Auseinandersetzung mit dieser Geschichte glimmt jedoch ein Funke der Hoffnung, daß es wahre Schönheit und Glück auch vor dem Tod geben muß.

Zitate der Gravitation

(Katalogvorwort 1978)

Sicherlich gehört es zur Charakteristik der modernen Kunst, daß die Grenzen zwischen den Gattungen durchlässig geworden sind. Um jedoch ein spezifisches Moment der Entwicklung erkennen zu können, mag die Typisierung plastischer Werke als raumfindende Kunst von Nutzen sein.

Alles, was den Raum bewältigen oder mitspielen läßt, steht in besonders inniger Korrespondenz zur Vibration dieses Zeitaugenblicks: entweder den Wunsch nach Steigerung der Geschwindigkeit verstärkend - wir wollen schneller fahren, fliegen, die Orte verlassen, wo wir nicht sind - oder die Kraft des Mittelpunktes suchend.

Entsprechend der Struktur dieser beiden Antriebe fanden die modernen Bildhauer ihre Ausdrucksmöglichkeiten. Zum einen erschlossen sie mit geometrischer Analyse den Raum für die zentrifugale Bewegung, zum anderen ordneten sie den Raum mit den Signaturen der Kräfte, denen sie auf der Suche nach dem Mittelpunkt begegneten.

Unsere Aufmerksamkeit soll der synthetischen Bemühung gelten. Die Kräfte, die hierbei ausgeformt und kombiniert wurden, spiegelten unterschiedliche Zustände des universellen Bewußtseins: Mineral, Pflanze, Tier, Mensch und Numinoses waren schwächer oder stärker beteiligt, je nach dem Grad der Offenheit, den das Individuum bot, das sich ihnen näherte.

Zu de echten Wagnissen, die ein Künstler auf diesem Weg der Annäherung eingehen kann, zählt das Vordringen bis zur Zone der Elemente - Elemente verstanden als die vier Qualitäten der vorsokratischen Philosophie. Denn hier bedarf es nicht nur des schöpferischen Mutes, wie ihn der Avantgardist hat, sondern ebenso der Ehrfurcht vor der Eigenmächtigkeit, die in den Elementen lebt und die den Formwillen des Künstlers aufzuheben sucht. Die Einbeziehung der elementaren Kräfte in die Arbeit verlangt also in hohem Maße eine Sensibilität für jene Gravitation, die kennzeichnend ist für den Raum, in dem Titanisches und Demiurgisches zu flüchtiger Harmonie gelangen.

Will man sich mit den plastischen Arbeiten Benno Schmidbaurs auseinandersetzen, ist es gut, sie in solchem Zusammenhang zu sehen. Denn ob Holz oder Eisen als Material gewählt wurde, immer finden wir sie in einem Gravitationsprozeß so zitiert, daß ein Raum angedeutet wird, der seinen Bezug zum Elementarischen erkennen läßt.

Bei den geschmiedeten Eisenplastiken beispielsweise empfinden wir sehr deutlich, wie Schmidbaur das Feuer als Partner seiner Arbeit akzeptiert: sehr behutsam nur entspricht er seinem eigenen Formwillen, stets bedacht, das Gleichgewicht mit dem Element anzuspielen. Daß es auf einleuchtende Weise gelingt, verdankt er hierbei seinem Vertrauen auf die Spontaneität und nicht auf das Kalkül. Dieses kommt woanders wieder zu seinem Recht, wenn er Holz oder auch Stein mit härterem, terrestrischem Stoff angeht. In Holz etwa, dank seiner organischen Beschaffenheit geschmeidiger als das Eisen, aktiviert der Bildhauer Formen, bei denen der prägende Wille die notwendigen Akzente setzt.

An diesem verschiedenartigen Anteil von Spontaneität und Kalkül im Umgang mit jeweils anderen Elementen können wir ablesen, daß Schmidbaur sich einer dialektischen Methodik bedient: er geht auf die Qualität eines Elementes ein, indem er komplimentär das Mittel der Bearbeitung, das Feste für das Geschmeidige oder umgekehrt, anwendet. Eine solche Arbeitsweise erfordert nun jene Sensibilität für Gravitation, die erwähnt wurde. Ebenso verlangt sie aber auch einen Betrachter, der neugierig genug ist, um sich an dem Abenteuer des Aufspürens unbekannter Räume zu beteiligen.

Die Kunst Benno Schmidbaurs verleitet nicht zum Träumen, sie bietet auch keine ästhetische Unterhaltung, sie ist vor allem modern: denn sie entdeckt Neues. Und in diesem Neuen kommt zum Bewußtsein das elementarische Alte. Wer es sehen will, muß wach sein.

translated from the German by Susan H. Gillespie

Thoughts on the Millennium. The Source of the “Burnt Bodies”

Saugerties, 12/14/1999

In the evening, returning home from New York, I always cast a final glance at the skyline as the bus mounts the big curve after it leaves the tunnel. On the far side of the Hudson, the skyscrapers glitter in the gathering dusk as if set with thousands of diamond splinters, their contours sharply etched against a sky that is steel blue, almost black, and cold. Glass facades glow magenta red in the sun’s last rays.

On this evening, too, one senses the pulsing of the city, the beating life of the Colossus. Colored points of light dart back and forth along its underside, reawakening it to life along its full length, like a giant monster lying with its jagged back on the island of Mana Hatta. Invisible threads from all over the world converge here and hold it fast. At this very instant, it is sending its messages around the world, deciding the fate of peoples and nations. It is truly the caput mundi of the end of the 20th century, a shimmering site of majestic beauty and frightening ugliness, arousing horror and fascination, not like the old cities of Europe from eras of human-size proportions, human scale; New York is immoderate, vulgar, uncultivated like the era that it dominates.

I had arrived 20 years ago, to live and work here. I had felt an affinity with this city, this extreme life feeling, this high and low, the conscious confounding of all emotions, which never lets you rest. New York is a mirror that catches the joy, suffering, and pain of humanity, in which it regards itself in its power and its weakness. Often, the mirror blurrs the edges, but it is never empty.

Thus I recognized myself in it. In 1990, I began to carve figures, the human form, a subject that had never interested me before. At first I saw these bodies as something entirely outside myself. They had a certain affinity with the Greek kouroi, the holy statues of the Gothic period, moor corpses, the suffocated dead of Pompei, and African nail fetishes. As soon as I had finished sculpting them, I burned them, added twine, nails, cuts, tar and feathers, poured lime over them, defaced the clear, carved surfaces until they were scarcely recognizable beneath the destroyed surface. It was the reversal of previous ways of working. Not smooth beauty as the goal of sculpture, but rather the perfected form as the starting point for destruction - destroyed innocence. How far was it possible to go without destroying the divine spark in the work, without making the viewer recoil from it in disgust, driven off and left cold by it. This was the challenge, to plumb the boundaries of aesthetics.

For some time I had been intensively observing my own development, and it was clear to me that many experiences from my childhood flowed into these figures. My daughter was also born at the same time that I abandoned abstract forms. What influenced what I shall not attempt to determine. But I would see in everything a materialization of a thought, something coming into reality in the realm of the visible.

A second influence, along with my personal past, which I have already described in “Cuts into Flesh” (1998), is undoubtedly the context, the era in which I now live and with which I must engage, the present. I cannot tell wether these two influences are clearly distinguishable in a given work.

Some time ago a woman came into my studio and broke out in violent sobs as she looked at one of the sculptures. Although strong emotions are not unusual among viewers, nevertheless her reaction moved and disconcerted me especially. Perhaps it was more the comment that she made, when she asked how I could make something like this in such beautiful surroundings. Did I, then, not have a right to touch people’s most intimate feelings? Should I, instead, cast a veil over unattractive truths that lay under a decorative surface? Were we living entirely in this so-called “fun society,” in which such things are unwanted and only shallow entertainment is desirable? Or was it not, to the contrary, that the sculpture contained something reflecting the onlooker’s own experience, at least as a feeling with which she could identify? The work of art, after all, is only the concretization of an emotion, an idea, on a general level that can be absorbed by the human senses, in other words that is only comprehensible between viewer and artist when both stand within a comparable experiential horizon, speak a similar language. This, precisely, is the secret of artistic perception, this invisible bond between two human beings who are utterly unknown to each other, mediated by an object, a lens as it were, that brings the two together on a trans-personal level.

But what is the generality, the non-specifically-individual thing that brings us together through the medium of a specific sculpture? First, probably, the external circumstances of life within which we all exist, which unite us all, weld us together, make our lives even possible. If one considers these external life circumstances in recent years, one discovers a striking trend that becomes more and more evident, the concentration of money and power in ever few hands. The majority of human beings, who were promised greater choices and more democracy by television and the Internet, find themselves enmeshed in ever stronger and more complete manipulation, which is sold to them as freedom by the consumer ideology media. The quantity of choices among hundreds of television channels that scarcely differ from each other replaces the quality of a few actually divergent programs. The same is true of the products that are offered to us. Instead of genuine diversity we find a great quantity of useless objects. National corporations turn into multinationals, competing firms gobble each other up. Why should the few that remain at the end offer a real choice, when there is no longer any competition? And who, finally, will be the consumers when all the money has been sucked up, into the pockets of a few? These anti-democratic, centralizing forces are already visible. The One World Movement permits no limitations, no deviation, no exception that could stand in the way of the tendency towards total maximization of profits. And what is the result on an ecological, cultural, and moral plane? The same impoverishment of human expressive possibilities, the same destructive tendencies as in the economic realm. The consumer product is holy and Mammon is god. Every moral awareness, every spiritual development is corrupted, in its stead violence and perversion spread like cancers through the world. Capitalism is victorious and finally it is eating itself. Centuries of humanistic progression are blotted out, ideals of a meaning-filled life for the individual that remained valid until now are erased, replaced by the principle of profit maximization run amok in consumer civilization.

Against this background now, the series of “burnt bodies”: flayed flesh, blackened rumps, torsos without extremities. The human being as victim of a dissociated development. Hence, consciously, old materials (wood, wax), old-fashioned methods of working them, as a means of resisting this progress. To recall what a human being once possessed and still retains by nature: his five senses, his emotions, his soul, which he is about to loose. Perhaps this conscious return to the old, in these means by which my sculptures represent themselves, is precisely a vision of the future. An apparent contradiction, which only makes sense against the background of New York, this image of the future, which can already be experienced here and now, out of the contrast with it. New York, that is the idolatry of money, the destroyer of the culture of the individual, the final end of the progression in which we find ourselves. And yet it also has lightening flashes of beauty, in the evening twilight, when the monster puts on its jewels, adorns itself with a sparking diadem, and bewitches us. Are these nothing but mirages, does the city, at this moment, become a Lorelei, or is it merely a question of the proper distance, the particular angle from which we view it? How do we define beauty? Or do we have to change our standards of value, to make them conform to a new era, in a revaluation of all values by which we define beauty? Are our old ways of thinking no longer applicable to a reality that we scarcely imagine but in which we are already living?

This was always a problem of aesthetics, that the beautiful is only graspable through its antinomy, and it would be a true squaring of the circle if we could unite beauty and ugliness - an old, familiar challenge for every artist, the alchemy of transformation.

Hence the beautiful bodies burned, carefully carved and then disfigured, until the beauty disappears, the ugliness appears and in an almost endless wave movement the one becomes exchangeable with the other. This at least is my which, to approach very close to the river of life, which does not know these differences between ugly and beautiful, which bears both within it, which also accepts and comprehends both, as does our soul.

This is why I always turn around after the long passage through the tunnel, the long dark tube under the Hudson, when the bus passes through the long loop, lumbers up the ramp, until I see the skyline on the other bank, trembling in the individual light points of its atoms, stiff in the sharp edges of its silhouettes, a perfect paradox of hardness and motion, hideousness and beauty. And then in a blink of a moment, in which the enigma seems to be solved, I feel at one with the pulsing of life.

Benno Schmidbaur                                          

Gedanken zur Jahrtausendwende.

Die Herkunft der “verbrannten Leiber.”

Saugerties, den 14.12.1999

Abends, wenn ich von New York nach Hause zurückfahre, werfe ich jedesmal einen letzten Blick auf die Skyline, in der grossen Kurve, die der Bus nimmt, sobald er den Tunnel verlassen hat. Drüben auf der anderen Seite des Hudson glitzern im einsetzenden Dämmerlicht die Wolkenkratzer wie von Tausenden Diamantsplittern besetzt, die Konturen scharf gestochen vor einem stahlblauen, fast schwarzen kalten Himmel, die Glasfronten magenta-rot glühend von den letzten Strahlen der Sonne.

Auch aus diesem Abstand spürt man das Pulsieren der Stadt, das pochende Leben dieses Kolosses. Farbige Lichtpunkte zucken an seiner Unterseite hin und her, erwecken ihn auf seiner ganzen Länge zum Leben, wie in riesiges Untier, das mit seinem gezackten Rücken auf der Insel Mana Hattas liegt.

Unsichtbare Fäden aus aller Welt laufen hier zusammen und halten es fest. Gleichzeitig sendet es seine Botschaften um die Erde, das Schicksal von Völkern und Nationen bestimmend. Es ist tatsächlich das Caput Mundi am Ausgang des 20. Jahrhunderts, ein schillernder Ort gebietender Schönheit und erschreckender Hässlichkeit, grauenerregend und faszinierend, nicht wie die alten Städte Europas, aus Zeiten menschengerechter Maßstäbe, mit menschlichen Proportionen, New York ist masslos, vulgär, sittenlos wie die Zeit, die es beherrscht.

Ich war vor 20 Jahren hergekommen, um hier zu leben und zu schaffen. Eine Affinität hatte mich getrieben zu dieser Stadt, diesem extremen Lebensgefühl, diesem Hoch und Tief, Oben und Unten, der bewussten Verwirrung aller Gefühle, die einen nicht mehr zur Ruhe kommen lässt.

New York ist ein Spiegel, in dem sich Freude, Leid und Schmerz der Menschen verfangen, in dem sie sich erblicken in Stärke und Schwäche. Oft verzerrt er die Ränder, aber niemals ist er blank.

So fand auch ich mich in ihm wieder. 1990 fing ich an Figuren, die menschliche Gestalt, zu schnitzen, ein Sujet, das mich vorher nicht interessiert hatte. Ich sah diese Körper zunächst als etwas völlig ausserhalb meiner selbst liegendes. Sie hatten Anlehnungen an die griechischen Kouroi, die Heiligenstatuen der Gotik, Moorleichen, die Erstickten von Pompeji und afrikanische Nägelfetische. Sobald sie fertig behauen waren, brannte ich sie ab, fügte Schnüre, Nägel, Schnitte hinzu, Teer und Federn, goss Kalk über, zerstörte die klar geschnitzten Formen, bis sie kaum mehr erkennbar waren unter der vernichteten Oberfläche. Es war die Umkehrung der bisher gültigen Arbeitsweise. nicht glatte Schönheit als Endpunkt der Bildhauerei, vielmehr die vollendete Form als Ausgangspunkt der Zerstörung - vernichtete Unschuld.

Wie weit konnte man gehen, ohne den göttlichen Funken im Werk zu vernichten, ohne den Betrachter abzustossen, so dass er sich nicht in kaltem, ihn kalt lassenden Abscheu abwandte. Das war die Herausforderung, die Grenzen der Ästhetik auszuloten.

Schon lange hatte ich mich intensiv mit meiner eigenen Entwicklung beschäftigt und es war mir klar, dass viele Erfahrungen meiner Kindheit in diese Figuren einflossen. Auch wurde zur selben Zeit, in der ich die abstrakten Formen aufgab meine Tochter geboren. Welches was bedingt hat, lasse ich offen. Ich würde jedoch alles als Materialisierung eines Gedanken sehen, als Wirklichkeitwerden im Sichtbaren.

Ein zweiter Einfluss neben meiner persönlichen Vergangenheit, die ich schon ausführlich 1998 in “Schnitte ins Fleisch” beschrieben habe, ist zweifelsohne das Umfeld, die Zeit in der ich jetzt lebe und mit der ich mich auseinandersetzen muss, die Gegenwart. Ob sich diese beiden Einflüsse in einem Werk genau trennen lassen, kann ich nicht beurteilen.

Vor einiger Zeit kam eine Frau in mein Atelier und brach bei der Betrachtung einer Skulptur in heftige Tränen aus. Obwohl starke Emotionen bei Besuchern nicht selten sind, hat mich ihre Reaktion doch besonders berührt und verunsichert. Dabei war es wohl mehr ihr anschliessender Kommentar, wie ich so etwas in einer solch schönen Umgebung machen könne.

Hatte ich also kein Recht die Menschen in ihrem Innersten anrühren zu wollen? Sollte ich lieber unliebsame Wahrheiten verschleiern unter einer dekorativen Oberfläche? Lebten wir nun also vollends in dieser sogenannten Spassgesellschaft, in der solche Dinge unerwünscht sind und nur noch seichte Unterhaltung genehm ist? Oder war es nicht eher so, dass die Skulptur etwas widerspiegelte, was der Besucherin als eigene Erfahrung aufstiess, zumindest als eine Empfindung, mit der sie sich identifizieren konnte? Das Kunstwerk ist ja nur die Konkretisierung einer Emotion, einer Idee auf einer allgemein durch die menschlichen Sinne aufnehmbaren Ebene, in anderen Worten nur verständlich zwischen Betrachter und Künstler, wenn sich beide auf einer entsprechenden Erfahrungsebene befinden, eine ähnliche Sprache sprechen. Das ist gerade das Geheimnis der Kunstperzeption, diese unsichtbare Verbindung zwischen zwei sich völlig unbekannten Menschen vermittelt durch ein Objekt, einen Brennpunkt sozusagen, der beide auf einer transpersonalen Ebene zusammenbringt.

Was aber ist das Allgemeine, nicht spezifisch individuelle, was uns über eine bestimmte Skulptur verbindet? Zuerst wohl die äusseren Lebensbedingungen, in denen wir alle existieren, Umstände, die uns alle verbinden, aneinanderschweissen, uns das Leben erst ermöglichen. Wenn man nun diese äusseren Bedingungen der letzten Jahre betrachtet, fällt auf dieser ökonomischen Ebene ein Trend in die Augen, der immer deutlicher wird, die Konzentration von Geld und Macht in immer weniger Händen. Die Mehrheit der Menschheit, welcher von Fernsehen und Internet erhöhte Wahlmöglichkeiten und Demokratie versprochen wurde, findet sich einer immer stärker um sich greifenden Manipulation gegenüber, die ihr von den Medien der Konsumideologie als Freiheit verkauft wird. Die Quantität der Wahl zum Beispiel zwischen Hunderten von Fernsehkanälen, die sich kaum voneinander unterscheiden ersetzt die Qualität einiger weniger tatsächlich unterschiedlicher Programme. Dasselbe trifft auf die Produkte zu, die uns angeboten werden. Statt einer echten Vielfalt finden wir ein Übermass an Nutzlosem. Aus nationalen Multis werden internationale, die Konkurrenz frisst sich gegenseitig auf. Warum sollten uns auch die wenigen, die am Schluss noch übrig bleiben eine wirkliche Auswahl anbieten, wenn es sowieso keine Konkurrenz mehr gibt? Und wer sollen letztendlich die Kunden sein, wenn alles Geld abgesaugt ist, in die Taschen einiger weniger? Schon jetzt sind diese antidemokratischen zentralistischen Tendenzen sichtbar. Das One World Movement erlaubt keine Einschränkungen, keine Abweichungen, keine Extratouren, die die Tendenz zur totalen Profitmaximierung aufhalten. Und was ist die Folge auf der ökologischen, kulturellen und moralischen Ebene? Dieselbe Verarmung der menschlichen Ausdrucksmöglichkeiten, dieselben zerstörerischen wie auf der wirtschaftlichen. Die Ware wird heilig und Mammon Gott. Jegliches moralische Bewusstsein, jegliche seelische Entwicklung wird korrumpiert, statt dessen breitet sich Gewalt und Perversion wie ein Krebs über die Erde. Der Kapitalismus hat gesiegt und frisst sich am Ende selbst. Jahrhunderte eine humanistischen Progression werden ausgelöscht, bisher gültige Ideale eines sinngefüllten Lebens für den Einzelnen durch das amoklaufende Prinzip der Profitmaximierung in der Konsumzivilisation aufgehoben.

Vor diesem Hintergrund nun die Serie der “verbrannten Leiber”: Geschundene Körper, verkohlte Rümpfe, Leiber ohne Gliedmaßen. Der Mensch als Opfer dieser sich verselbstständigten Entwicklung. Daher bewusst alte Materialien (Holz, Wachs), überholte Bearbeitungsmethoden als ein Sichgegenstemmen gegen diesen Fortschritt. Zu erinnern an das, was den Menschen einmal ausgemacht hat und immer noch von Natur aus in ihm steckt: seine fünf Sinne, seine Emotionen und seine Seele, die er im Begriff ist zu verlieren. Vielleicht ist gerade diese bewusste Rückbesinnung auf das Alte in dieser Art und Weise der Darstellung bei den Skulpturen meine Art der Zukunftsvision. Ein scheinbarer Widerspruch, der eben erst vor dem Hintergrund New Yorks, diesem Bild der Zukunft, die hier schon heute erlebbar ist, einen Sinn macht, eben aus dem Kontrast heraus.

New York, das ist der Götzenkult des Geldes, der Zerstörer der Kultur des Einzelnen, der Endpunkt der Progression, auf der wir uns befinden. Und doch hat es eben auch Momente blitzartig aufleuchtender Schönheit, abends im Dämmerlicht, wenn das Monster seine Juwelen anlegt, funkelnde Diademe überstreift und uns bezirzt. Sind das nur Augentäuschungen, wird die Stadt in diesen Momenten zur Loreley, oder kommt es nur auf den richtigen Abstand, den besonderen Blickwinkel an, aus dem wir etwas betrachten? Wie definieren wir denn Schönheit? Ist da immer noch die überlieferte Dreieinigkeit des Guten, Wahren, Schönen? Oder müssen wir unsere Wertmaßtäbe ändern, anpassen an eine neue Zeit, in einer Umwertung aller Werte, Schönheit neu definieren? Sind unsere alten Denkweisen nicht mehr anwendbar auf die Realität, von der wir kaum ahnen, dass wir schon in ihr leben?

Dies war immer schon ein Problem der Ästhetik, dass das Schöne nur durch sein Antinom erfassbar ist und es wäre wahrhaftig die Quadratur des Kreises, wenn wir Schönheit und Häßlichkeit vereinen könnten - eine altbekannte Herausforderung für jeden Künstler, die Alchemie der Transfiguration.

Daher die schönen Leiber verbrannt, penibel geschnitzt und dann verunstaltet, bis das Schöne verschwindet, das Häßliche erscheint und in einer fast endlosen Wellenbewegung das eine für das andere austauschbar wird. Das zumindest ist mein Wunsch, dem Fluss des Lebens nahezukommen, der diese Unterscheidungen nicht kennt zwischen häßlich und schön, der beides in sich trägt, der auch beides akzeptiert und in sich birgt, ähnlich wie unsere Seele.

Daher auch blicke ich mich jedesmal um nach der langen Tunneldurchfahrt durch die dunkle Röhre unter dem Hudson, wenn der Bus die lange Schleife ausfährt, sich hochschraubt auf die Rampe, bis ich die Skyline am anderen Ufer erblicke, zitternd in den einzelnen Lichtpunkten ihrer Atome, starr in den scharfen Kanten ihrer Silhouette, ein perfektes Paradox von Härte und Bewegung, Scheusslichkeit und Schönheit. Und dann in dieser kurzen Zeitspanne, in der das Enigma gelöst scheint, fühle ich mich eins mit dem Pulsieren des Lebens.