Viral Visions
The Art of Infecting Perception
Picture Vienna at the turn of the last century: an imperial city, home to the Habsburg court, a city between pomp and decay, caught (as if off guard) between the waning days of a centuries old monarchy and a budding bourgeoisie. Picture a city radiating outward from the Ringstrasse, a then recently constructed wide boulevard circling the old inner city, a stately city in shades of grey, flanked by hills in the West and North. The Danube, a wet afterthought to urban planning, rolls past the city, its sluggish, silty, massive waters on their way toward the Southeast and on to the distant Black Sea. Picture a city with streets lined by four-storey houses whose facades are permanently discolored from the soot of so many people crowded together and heating with coal. (In the forty years between 1870 and 1910, Vienna more than doubled its population, exploding from 840,000 to around two million inhabitants of ethnicities and faiths as diverse as the Habsburg empire: Austrians, Hungarians, Croats, Slovaks, Czechs, Poles, Serbs, Ukrainians, Jews, and Christians.) Picture a city that barely emerges from dense, clammy fog in autumn, the kind of stealthy, frigid humidity that creeps under your skin, into your very bones, and stays there for a woefully long time.
Imagine a city whose monochromatic palette bursts into color in the golden, light-soaked paintings by Gustav Klimt, a city whose dirty exteriors give way to the lavish ornamentation of everyday objects—think forks, tea sets, grandfather clocks, even wallpaper–pursued by the artists of the Wiener Werkstaette, the Austrian harbinger of Art Nouveau. This is the city whose polite repression explodes across Oskar Kokoschka’s canvases and the very city that provided the early human raw material for Sigmund Freud’s studies in psychoanalysis. In literature, Arthur Schnitzler elegantly probed the hidden passions of bourgeois lives in his novellas, while Egon Schiele scandalously captured juvenile eroticism in his boldly drawn figures. Alma Mahler-Werfel, a tantalizing femme fatale, loved, married, and divorced the brilliant men of the time—including Walter Gropius, Franz Werfel and Gustav Mahler—while composing her own noteworthy music. Architects such as Josef Hoffmann, Otto Wagner, and Adolf Loos changed the look of the city, while Arnold Schoenberg revolutionized its Walzer-loving ears with his 12-tone system.
In the midst of this whirlwind of intellectual and creative revolutions, Alfred Kubin, an artist mostly known for his drawings, lived a reclusive life, often only remaining in touch with the bustling Viennese scene through epistolary exchanges with luminaries such as Klimt. Like the city he avoided as much as he could, Kubin expressed himself in shades of grey: elaborate ink washes, sprayed on paper, and fine, detailed line work make up the basics of his visual vocabulary. Kubin’s imagery is always sinister, morbid, and even grotesque. His attraction to writers such as Edgar Allen Poe, E.T.A. Hoffmann, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky comes as no surprise: there is an aesthetic affinity here, an eagerness to delve into the dark, angst-ridden, oppressive realms of the psyche. Kubin’s work shares the intense interiority of Freud’s approach to the human unconscious and the quasi-pathological obsession with sexuality. He has been called “absurdly apocalyptic,” which rings true after visiting the first major retrospective of his work in the U.S. at the Neue Galerie in New York. Entitled Alfred Kubin: Drawings, 1897—1909, the show pays ample tribute to Kubin’s morbid genius. Looking at his work today, it is striking these early drawings seem to prophesy the two world wars the artist lived through.
It is rare that the artistic sensibility of the work on display is so well suited to a particular space. Built in 1914, the building of the Neue Galerie resembles an Austrian mansion from the outside. Inside, the Café Sabarsky simulates the aura of an old-style Viennese coffeehouse: dark wooden chairs, marble-topped small round tables, a grand piano in the corner, and Austrian papers (albeit five days old) to read. Various Viennese coffee drinks are on the menu and, with Central Park outside the windows, it is easy to give in to the tempting illusion of having time-traveled to imperial Vienna. (Yet unlike fin-de-siècle Vienna, Café Sabarsky is not clouded by the haze from countless pipes, cigars, and cigarettes). The Kubin exhibit is housed on the third floor and, for reasons I hope to clarify in a little bit, it pays to start at the top.
Having ascended through the bright marble stairway with its old-fashioned wrought-iron railings, visitors first encounter a black and white photo portrait of Kubin in an ornate gilded frame: a shy looking man with delicate features. Once you enter the exhibition, the world turns black and white, with all sorts of subtle shades of grey in between. The carpeted floors are black. The walls are painted dark, the rooms separated by heavy, draped velvet curtains. The windows are blinded with milk glass and subtle silhouettes of ravens. The music is strictly time-period appropriate: Mahler, Schoenberg, Brahms, and Schubert.
Other period pieces add to the uncanny atmosphere: Lit from above, a black cloak, hat, and walking stick, displayed in a glass vitrine, cast ominous shadows in one room, while a grandfather clock next door somberly tracks the fleeting time. (Kubin, of course, had his own morbid vision of time as a clock-face whose figures, human heads, were severed by the cruel sword/hand of time). Kubin’s death mask is here, too, in a coffin-shaped glass box, sitting on an elegantly ruffled velvet cloth that seems to suggest that the body, ghost-like, has disappeared, with only the final impression left by the artist’s face remaining.
Looking at Kubin’s drawings, this theatrical vanishing act may have been to his liking: his drawings reveal anxiety, even fear of the body, its vulnerability and resistance to control, especially when it comes to sexuality. The drawings show bodies in states of agony and mutilation, in strange, idiosyncratic parables about the world: in Die Mutter der Welt (Mother of the World) a pregnant woman scattering seeds leads the way of a death parade. It is hard not to read autobiographical details—such as Kubin’s sexual encounter with a pregnant woman when he was 11 years old—into his apparent horror of the pregnant body. In Kubin’s work, female anatomy becomes a threatening, all-engulfing, absorbing space—a fear most literally articulated in Todessprung (Death Jump). Autoerotic acts, on the other hand, are represented with horrifying consequences (think rolling heads, lolling tongues).
Nature appears in the guise of virile, powerful creatures that perch on altars and allow humans to worship them. When Kubin shows humans exercising power, they are oblivious to anything but their own might, blinded by their strength, or led astray by their basic and—it seems, in Kubin’s mind—rather stupid desires. In his most famous novel, Die Andere Seite (The Other Side), Kubin describes a social experiment of communal living gone horribly wrong, a utopian promise transformed into a dystopian, deadly quagmire that only the narrator and a few others are lucky enough to escape. Human nature, it seems, is doomed, perennially out of control, but nonetheless persistent in pursuing the illusion of control.
At first, Kubin’s vision may seem impossibly dark. But the longer you linger with his work, the more familiar the recurring motifs of these twelve years of drawings become, the more compelling and strangely coherent they seem. The colors, sounds, and textures of the exhibit conspire to create a most effective sheath for the work.
Even after leaving the dark world of Kubin’s drawings for the second floor, where Klimt’s famous painting of Adele Bloch-Bauer is housed, the sinister edge casts a shadow, as if Kubin’s morbidity were contagious: suddenly, looking at Schiele’s Der Schwarze Federhut (The Black Feather Hat), it seems outright peculiar that I never before paid any attention to the color of the spectacular hat in question. Kokoschka’s portrait of Martha Hirsch from 1909 likewise becomes infected by the blackness around her head, which suddenly morphs into the defining feature of the painting. Klimt’s beautifully vacant faces seem extravagantly, outrageously aestheticized in comparison—and, in the shadow of Kubin’s work, they exude their own brand of desperation by retreating into the world of myth and eternity from a world increasingly unbearable to their creator. Schiele’s incomplete figures, defined by the artist’s thick black lines, seem to break free of the monochromatic backgrounds before being sucked back into them, fading and bleeding into the emptiness that surrounds them.
The power of Kubin’s art lies in this strange, virus-like contagion of perception: Kubin transforms the gift-shop-happy familiarity of Klimt along with the popularity of Schiele’s troubled subjects, and effectively defamiliarizes these icons of Art Nouveau. Despite its fatalistic hyperbole, Kubin’s work, today, serves as a counterpart to the blatant beauty of Klimt’s paintings, and as a reminder that those times and days were not as golden as we may be tempted to believe when face to face with the sheer visual power of Klimt’s work.
Thinking of viral vision in New York and happening upon Catherine Opie’s retrospective at the Guggenheim inevitably bring up another virus that has transformed the world we live in: HIV. It is hard to imagine Opie’s photographs of transgendered people occupying this revered place in the U.S. art scene if it was not for ACT UP’s insistence we take notice of queer people and queer questions and queer concerns, that this society, in fact, make them part of who “we” are. Rather than exorcize Opie’s subjects from the social body as abject, freakish, and threatening to the basic myth of two mutually exclusive sexes, in this retrospective Opie’s subjects take center stage—with the artist among them, as in Self-Portrait/Nursing (2004). The show’s title, “Catherine Opie: American Photographer,” posits Opie as just that—an American photographer, not a photographer of any particular marginalized subculture. Just like that, Opie and her subjects are declared part of that elusive “US:” part of the rich diversity this country vows to honor rather than pathologized as abject outlaws. Seeing the experiences, self-presentations, and gender performances of these subjects validated by an institution as prominent as the Guggenheim suggests nothing so much as that the art world’s vision has been infected by the desire to embrace, to—for better or worse–normalize those who have been treated as outcasts far too long.
Across town, in the New Museum, “Live Forever: Elizabeth Peyton” is on view. The artist’s paintings offer a compelling counterpart to Opie’s photographs: her portraits of pop cultural icons–most of them young, male, and androgynous to the point of effeminacy– suggest a longing for that ever-evanescent shade of glory these avatars of pop culture cast. But, after experiencing Kubin, the preternaturally beautiful faces double as eloquent memento mori’s: Peyton intimately captures a beauty doomed to fade. (Dorian Gray gives his regards.) On her canvases, though, these faces, identified only by their first names—Jarvis, Matthew, Ben, Keith—may indeed live forever. Or at least for a long, long time. Pop culture acts as a virus here, infecting Peyton’s work in these deceptively intimate portraits. In turn, audiences cannot help but react to the contagious familiarity of these avatars of visual culture, proliferating, and feeding on the connotations and cross-references they trigger.
Back in the here and now, after so much imaginary and real-world traveling, my mind still reeling from so much art in so little time, I bear a hunger for looking closely, for diving in, unafraid, for allowing myself to be seduced by vision and, with a little luck, spreading that infectious desire of making meaning in and with and through art. Kubin’s mysterious and disturbing art has survived and spreads its dark wings in a new century. Viral visions proliferate, cross-pollinate, and create potentialities for what has never been seen before.
This essay first appeared on The Thousandth Word, a short-lived visual arts blog for Secrets of the City, in November 2008.
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