Conjunctions 65: Sleights of Hand

by Sleights of Hand- The Deception Issue (retail) (epub)

  ICEMAN

  I am the iceman, crushed by yesterday. For fuck’s sake, I fell flat on my face. Toppled like a wedding cake. This wasn’t just a small disruption—a low tire, the insurance company’s error—it was a travesty, quite serious. And now, as in forever, my body drapes the boulder like a shroud, a mother’s cupped palm. (Meanwhile, back on planet earth. What with the ascent of man and the rise to power and the conquering of civilizations.)

  All right, let’s think about this. Here is how my body lies: with one arm squashed underneath. There was the brief flurry: that soaring free fall from life to death, from what seemed like forever to forever itself, no more twigs and seeds for lunch, not one more even blah installment of the monthly saber-toothed tiger hunt with my reluctant, moody cohort, no more pitiful explosions with my lady friend, her snatch so very contemporary. I heard some kind of trance music—I saw colors of such delicate gradation, such perfect oval symmetry—

  And then, OK, forever. I shall be forever. I shall lie here on this boulder, my arm at an (what would be laughably) uncomfortable angle. I shall not close my eyes but hold the grass palace in my retina, the shadow that is Asshole coming to retrieve his arrow. (At least let me keep the arrow. It’s so tacky to take the arrow.) And here comes a mountain to lie upon me. Oh, wait: This is a little heavy. The slow shovel of earth, the patient gravedigger, the patient artist, an extravaganza, a sobering bounty. Waves of all you could possibly wish for: the sleek bones of that snatchy lady, the desiccated remains of my enemy’s child, the most abundant harvest of fava beans you’d ever want to see, and mountain laurel and lupine and elderberry. Here is a glorious parade of hilarious rabbits, running as if to their own deaths, and here is the tinder of a thousand houses, the rupturing of windows created at great expense, the invention of glass, and here is a telescope with which a pirate found a white-frocked soft spot on a faraway sea, and here is the certificate that stupid state school gave me, saying I could read.

  Did the weight of water ever occur to anyone, when they were puzzling this thing out? Did anyone ask me if I wanted coffee?

  —the mountain with newspapers in it, the bland-faced judges’ final decrees, the Polly Pocket dolls, presidents, labor organizers, fat ladies—

  —wolves, lesbian deer, lions on the threshold of glory—

  The weight did elongate. I become rather long and thin. The fighty ones with their hot instruments came and said my stomach was up by my armpit now—well, what of it? Wouldn’t your stomach have moved too? We get used to having our insides stay in one place, but I’m telling you, it’s all a jumble in there, seriously. You think you’re one thing: just a man on a mountain with a plan for the day—and before you can even take one more breath you are an explosion of flowers, deep and bright purples and lacy whites and bruised reds and streaks of yellow, and when before you could hardly do a box step you are now Mr. Tall, step-sliding across the night sky.

  Beyond the Veil of Vision: Reinhold von Kreitz and the Das Beben Movement

  Peter Straub and Anthony Discenza

  AN INTRODUCTION: AGAINST THE TIDE OF REASON

  The latter half of the nineteenth century witnessed an overwhelming proliferation of developments in science and industry. The seeds sown by the Enlightenment had given rise to a host of technological advancements, many of which were to have far-reaching consequences in the hundred years to follow. As the second wave of the industrial revolution swept across Europe and America, new discoveries and theories were emerging that promised to revolutionize the conception of the origin of life and the nature of the human mind. No secret seemed beyond humanity’s grasp.

  Yet alongside the advancing tide of reason—and sometimes deeply intermingled with it—there was a commensurate surge of interest in all things spiritual, mystical, and occult. Whether this renewed fascination represented a reaction against rationalism, or whether it proceeded from a belief that the mysteries of existence would soon yield to the tools of reason is open to debate. A claim could be made, however, that the imaginative advances of the physical sciences had left mankind in a reduced, contingent position. The rapid strides in astronomy and physics made in the prior century had already left the old heliocentric model of the universe on history’s scrap heap; the emergence of Charles Darwin’s theories now threatened to depose humanity from its starring role in God’s divine creation. No longer the center of the universe, humanity was suddenly confronted with the image of itself as the product of a mindless and ongoing evolutionary process, creeping along on a minor planet in a vast and uncaring cosmos, with possibly no Creator in sight.

  Beneath the certainties espoused by the rationalists, a deepening unease about mankind’s newly diminished status could be seen in the development of the Romantic movement. In both fiction and the visual arts, images began to arise of a world brought face to face with terror, radical doubt, and elemental chaos. In the work of painters such as Caspar David Friedrich, J. M. W. Turner, and Théodore Géricault, we confront a vision of humanity rendered impotent before the vast, impersonal forces of nature. The 1818 publication of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus provided the world with an indelible image of the potentially horrifying consequences of mankind’s arrogance, one that still retains its potency and relevance. By the end of the century, literary works such as Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw would demonstrate certainties of every kind being called into question and found wanting, not least by a destabilizing narrative technique foregrounded by the immediacy of the storytelling—that is, by its clear status as storytelling. The self-propelling voice, flickering from moment to moment between alternatives that ironize the concepts of “reality” and “truth,” positions us within the impossibility of any decisive location: an embodiment of that “contradiction” claimed by the members of the obscure artistic movement known as Das Beben to be the essential component of any valid artistic process.

  DAS BEBEN: A LOST HISTORY

  In the complex tapestry of nineteenth-century Europe, the history of Das Beben (The Tremor) could be seen as a stray thread that has come loose and fallen away from the main body. From its first incarnation in Mannheim, Germany, in the 1850s, to the disastrous end of its second manifestation in southern England four decades later, the group would seem no more than a minor footnote to the artistic developments of the late 1800s. Even the most dedicated scholar would be hard-pressed to identify any books of art history that acknowledge Das Beben or any of its unfortunate members. Beyond a handful of brief references to their work that turn up in the writing of more notable historical figures of the time, there is virtually no credible record of the group’s existence.

  Were it not for the curious position Das Beben occupied in relation to the century that was to follow, along with the odd circumstances surrounding its near total effacement from history, there would initially seem to be little of interest in the group other than a collection of lurid details. What few accounts exist are incomplete and contradictory, characterized by disturbing episodes that belong more properly to the realm of fiction than to historical fact. Yet when the frayed and scattered strands of the Das Beben story are rewoven, a strange and fascinating picture emerges—a picture that, much like the work of its members, is filled with shifting outlines and unsettling significance.

  Research into an art movement that deliberately cultivated an air of hermeticism, and which even at the height of its activity was barely known outside a few small circles of artists, writers, and eccentrics, poses a significant challenge—one exacerbated by the fact that, with the exception of a single painting that has been locked away for decades, all the group’s work has been destroyed or lost. Indeed, it would not be an exaggeration
to say that the concrete instances of the work of Das Beben seem to have been withdrawn from history’s scrutiny at the exact moment of the group’s being revealed to it—almost as though its existence had been deliberately expunged from the historical record by some agency that sought to insulate reality from its members’ images and ideas. Faced with such an absence of documentation, we have attempted to fill in the story with such fragments as we have been able to locate—references found in private journals and correspondence, along with the occasional review or commentary from publications of the time. Given the nature of what they reveal, it is perhaps peculiarly appropriate that these ephemera comprise the only means of access to Das Beben.

  ORIGINS

  The history of the group begins in 1851, at the Schmidt-Bauern Kunstakademie in Mannheim, Germany, a city noted for both its industry and its liberality. It was here that a group of rebellious young artists first coalesced around the charismatic Reinhold von Kreitz, a recently appointed professor of painting who, almost from the moment of his arrival in the city, stirred rumor, speculation, and the suspicion of political subversion. However, the professor’s artistic and moral transgressions were to prove of much greater significance than his politics.

  In some ways, the history of Das Beben may be read as the story of Reinhold von Kreitz: a bizarre, fantastical figure who might have sprung from some tale by E. T. A. Hoffmann. Of von Kreitz’s early years, little is known; born sometime around 1807 in or near Vienna, he had apprenticed as a typesetter before taking up a career in the arts. A brief and unhappy marriage, terminated by the sudden death of his wife, Alma, was succeeded by a long period of wandering throughout France and northern Europe. In the course of his travels, von Kreitz encountered a wide array of radical thinkers, writers, and artists, and by the early 1830s, he was in possession of a considerable body of knowledge concerning painting, philosophy, and metaphysics. The year 1832 found him in the Netherlands, where he conducted an intense study of the work of the mysterious seventeenth-century Dutch painter Geoffrey Schalken, of whom so little is known. It was during this time that von Kreitz began to formulate many of his unorthodox theories regarding the as yet untapped potentialities of painting.1

  Perhaps reflecting the influence of Kant and other post-Enlightenment philosophers on early nineteenth-century thought, von Kreitz was convinced that the world revealed through our visual perception represented a profound falsification, a barrier that concealed a deeper, truer reality. Perceiving this more fundamental reality, and recording some essence of what might be glimpsed there, was the task of the true artist—an act that could only be achieved through a rigorous process of “unseeing.” To accomplish this, it was necessary that the distorting screen of physical reality be systematically broken down in order to free one’s vision from the tyranny of mere appearance. For von Kreitz, the failure of conventional painting was not simply that it continually falsified through its means of representation of the world, but that the very thing it was attempting to represent was itself already a lie, an obfuscating veil that must be breached, by any and all means.

  VON KREITZ & EDMUND MOORASH

  Certain of von Kreitz’s singular ideas about painting appear to have been informed by the work of the American painter Edmund Moorash, whom von Kreitz had met on a journey to London in 1834. The two had met by chance at a salon in Kensington hosted by the unfortunate and now-forgotten painter Henry Mitre.2 What particularly impressed von Kreitz was a certain odd sense of dislocation—what he called “a lack of contact”—in Moorash’s notebook sketches for William Pinney (1829) and the rough, wild violence of the drawings toward Rat Krespel (1835), a painting then still in progress.3 After discovering their mutual appreciation for the disgraced Mitre’s work, the two men had fallen into intense conversation and found that their artistic goals shared many elements. “Painting as painting,” said Moorash, “yet painting as possession too.” “Contradiction,”murmured von Kreitz, to which Moorash replied, “Yes, that is the next step.”4

  Over the next several years, Moorash and von Kreitz maintained a sporadic correspondence. For von Kreitz, Moorash’s intransigent and revolutionary vision represented a different—though superficially bolder—approach to a common goal. Moorash did not attempt to unravel the world directly, as von Kreitz would; rather, the “lack of contact” and “violence” found in the work of the American painter were created by careful and constant adjustment of the means necessary to produce the desired effect in the viewer’s perception. While it seems clear that Moorash did not share von Kreitz’s metaphysical leanings, his ability to produce such effects, especially in the last phase of his career, suggests something of this same ability to violate not only painterly convention but the act of seeing itself.5

  MANNHEIM, 1851

  It was not long after his appointment to the Kunstakademie that the magnetic von Kreitz began to attract a following. He had come to Mannheim for its intrinsic orderliness and its focus on manufacturing and mechanics; for von Kreitz, the city’s rational, mechanistic worldview was precisely the quality that rendered it an ideal location for the forces he described as “the engines of the irrational” to flourish and gain power.6 The generative tension produced by a force giving rise to its opposite was a necessary component of the energies von Kreitz believed were required to “tear the veil asunder.” In the notes for one of his earliest lectures at the Akademie, he asserts: “contradiction is the essential principle of that elemental and final reality we can but glimpse.”

  During what proved to be a short tenure at the Kunstakademie, von Kreitz created an atmosphere of contention in the otherwise staid institution. Unpredictable and short-tempered, he generated controversy as a matter of course. His lectures were lively, even chaotic affairs in which he would frequently wander far afield from mundane matters such as perspective and human anatomy, assaulting his bewildered students with lengthy disquisitions on philosophy, mathematics, physics, and other less identifiable disciplines.7

  Given this sort of behavior, it did not take long before von Kreitz began to draw unwelcome attention from the directors of the Akademie. Confronted with increasing interference and censure from the school’s officials, von Kreitz, in a typically flamboyant move, abruptly resigned his position. Taking up residence in the Blue Goose, an old rathskeller in the poorest quarter of the city, he began presenting impromptu lectures on painting and a variety of other subjects to anyone who cared to listen, using a back room of the tavern as his informal lecture hall. These lectures, which were known to continue until long after midnight, soon began to draw an unlikely audience from Mannheim’s more disreputable citizens. Thieves, beggars, madmen, would-be revolutionaries, defrocked clergy—all seemed to discover a powerful attraction in von Kreitz’s curious pedagogy, and before long the Blue Goose had become a hub of unruly activity.

  The inner core of what was to become the first incarnation of Das Beben consisted of a group of young painters from the Akademie who had fallen under von Kreitz’s spell. Of these, four were most prominent: Lutz Schlicke, Busso Hobemuss, Franz Veertz, and perhaps the most talented of the group, Klaus-Maria Klappenburg, a handsome, voluble young troublemaker from Baden-Baden.8 These four were always in attendance at von Kreitz’s lectures, and it was not long before they had taken up residence alongside their master in the rooms above the tavern, which had essentially become Das Beben’s center of operations.

  THE DAS BEBEN AESTHETIC

  Any discussion of the visual style of a group of painters whose entire output appears to have been wiped from existence confronts the researcher with obvious problems. The available i
nformation about Das Beben’s work exists only in a handful of descriptions written by artists and critics of the time who had seen the work firsthand and were either moved or disturbed enough by the experience to write about it. However, through a careful analysis of this material, it is possible to make some general observations regarding the unique visual sensibilities of the group’s Mannheim incarnation, as well as the peculiar ethos and methodologies that informed their work.

  From the very start, the Das Beben painters were deeply preoccupied with a radical reimagining of the capabilities of visual art. In line with von Kreitz’s singular ideology, they utterly rejected the idea of painting as mere representation. The only true role of the visual arts, they believed, was to function as a conduit to higher orders of existence, to reveal what lay “beyond the dull walls of sight.”

  To this end, the group brought a fierce rigor to every aspect of a painting’s creation, from the medium’s most basic aspects—such as the grinding of pigments and the preparation of the canvas—to the development of a complicated set of principles governing composition, lighting, and even the specific angles from which certain objects ought to be represented.9 In their obsessive quest for greater control, much research was undertaken regarding the obscure chemical properties of various pigments, and the group continually experimented with complex formulations of the relationship between color, composition, and perspective.10