What sort of challenge has Jannis Kounellis mounted in this work? It is an onslaught that emanates from the morgue, or perhaps the funeral chamber. His judgment of the present state of art is severe indeed; his condemnation is expressed through a polemic against the artificiality of today’s trends, and through a comparison of them with a proposal for an alternative sequence of artistic events (his own) which would be a valid offering to the world at this particular time. The self-references (nearly all the elements present in this show have already appeared in different guise in the artist’s previous work) are articulated as if arrayed for attack: insofar as they represent ready-made artistic achievements, Kounellis uses them as positive values. He finds fault, on the other hand, with the context into which they are thrown in a sort of forced coexistence.
Kounellis’ gesture seems to pose a challenge to everything that would prevent the gallery space from inspiring any fresh development. He seems to believe that the artist is in the privileged position of being the agent of change; but if the instruments of art are ready, the material necessary for an unfolding of history is lacking. Thus an open piano, which Kounellis has used in the past, this time offers neither music nor dance. And two canvases on the wall, white and empty, offer no image. Kounellis negates any model of creativity identified with a positive fantasy (the imaginative effort involved in the creation of an image, for example); in this sense, the environment realized here is totally hostile.
For his exercise in violence the artist has chosen a formalist structure which. accentuates the ghostlike immobility of this “funeral chamber.” Nothing, it seems, can happen here, with the exception of fire. A live flame emerges every now and then from open valves head-high on the wall, sited along a black line which is interrupted only by the open upright piano, keyboard in full view, placed along a trajectory formed by rubber tubes attached to gas tanks on the floor. This line and this rhythm of fire, continuing along the entire wall running from the entrance corridor to the central space, constitute a sort of red-hot barbed wire. They keep one at a distance while drawing one in, first toward the center of the environment and then toward a corner of the room set off by two identical square canvases, empty, each of which occupies the end section of its wall. The canvases are framed by smoke-blackened plaster fragments of the faces of classical statues; in the corner is a brick chimney, above which a residue of smoke from whatever has been burned inside spreads out on the ceiling. This second example of fire, then, comes in the form of the impression fire has left behind—a token that fire has died; precisely at the point of intersection, the turning point along the walls, that mediates the repetition of the elements, the chimney establishes for itself a possible association with the mortuary.
Naturally one is dealing with a conditional death here; under the present circumstances the explicit path toward the image is not an authentic one. There is a similar lack of authenticity in the esthetic convention represented by the piano, as well as in the canvases, where one traditionally would expect “proof of art”—and where, instead, the pact between artist and viewer is shattered. One can glean the following lesson: color is not always found in its usual place, nor, obviously, is image. In this sense, polemically, Kounellis seems to delegate color, light, movement, and sign not to gesture or to painterly technique, but fundamentally to the energy and power of fire. All the rest is black or white.
In place of creating new illusions, then, Kounellis seems to argue that this is a period of waiting for a new myth, a new vision, that can exist even in the absence of form. Thus the artist and his or her audience must be able to distance themselves from the current situation in which paintings created within the seemingly positive and affirmative tradition of art, apparently luminous, are in fact merely new obstructions to sight. They must accomplish this even while feigning exaltation of this state of affairs; art must respond with war to these imprisoning manipulations. In Kounellis’ installation the prison is torn down around the gallery-goer, who has come in search of esthetic pleasure—a reminder that nothing is achieved without risk. Kounellis has paid a price for his opinion; he has devoted himself to a vision of art, only to find in it, later on, a poison.
It would be a mistake to consider this show conservative or defensive when in fact it is aggressive, the decisive moment of a battle. Kounellis offers a possible solution to the problem of modes of negation in art today. His refusal to deal in conventional forms (defined as those determined from without) is all the more powerful coming as it does from an artist whose work from the’60s until the present has nearly always been characterized by an extremely direct and intense relationship with the image. In sacrificing expression, Kounellis has chosen to present his work as a “response”; he is responding to an external situation of conditioning, betraying the conventional, expected ritual by turning his back on all its illusions.
—Luciana Rogozinski
Translated from the Italian by Meg Shore.
