Then and today

by Dr. Susanne Rockweiler

Beyond sciences, measuring the development in certain areas, certain cultures, in different moments of history, by picturing the progress of any development, artists focus on what might be a science of choices, in which the mystery of consciousness reveals itself, providing insight into realms mostly undiscovered before; sometimes even in three timelines: Past, present and future.

Immediately going in medias res, without any pre-delay, directly into the heart of the matter. The Odyssey, Science-Fiction and painting are the core-topics of Katrin Kampmann’s (born 1979 in Bonn, Germany) current exhibition, showing approximately 30 works, dated between 2003 and 2020. The exhibition’s title was certain since February 2020: Katrin Kampmann. Odyssee. A Journey it must be.

Having been translated into many languages, the perception of the Odyssey has become a synonym for wisp-wanderings and adventures. The Iliad, referred to Homer, narrates the adventures of king Odysseus of Ithaka and his fellow companions on their journey back home from the Trojan War, being one of the oldest and most influential poetic works of Occidental literature.

For many years, literature, music and movies have been sources of Katrin Kampmann’s creations. Her work particularly oscillates around the genre of Science-Fiction. Goodbye Tomorrow being the title of her 2011 exhibition in Beverly Hills, USA, Zeitreise leicht gemacht (Time-travelling made easy), 2013 in Wiesbaden, Germany, The Future of an Illusion 2016 in Auckland, New Zealand, and Wir sind die Roboter (We are the Robots), 2018 in Vienna, Austria.

Her paintings conjure up vague perceptions. The titles provide a hint to intepretation. They are able to guide the beholder’s associations into a certain direction. Thus, anybody assuming of being able to decipher those paintings by having discovered a reference or citation, must fail. There always seem to be more questions than answers to be found. Some examples:

In Brave new friends, the painting is defined by a mountainscape, held in blue-green-white. On the left side of the painting one can see artificially-appearing animals, maybe robots, three in count, or, as far as one’s imagination reaches, even more; on the right side there is a boy, pictured from behind. He covers two thirds of the painting’s right-hand surface in height and breadth, and yet he’s nearly invisible, as delicate and airy and floating as he is. With his transparency and his widely opened arms he becomes an integral part of the landscape. His airiness makes him appear to be happy and without any care in the world. Is he an artificially bred super-child from a world, as Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) described it in 1932 in his dystopian novel Brave new world as a future-vision of an only presumably beautiful world? There, in such world, poverty, sickness or age do not exist, whilst sex and consumption serve as guarantors for good mood; monogamy, privacy, family and history are prohibited. Have the animals in the painting therefore become his new friends? Is his floating caused by the happiness-drug Soma, extinguishing any sorts of problems? Or is this boy the half-wildling, reciting verses of Shakespeare:

O wonder! How many goodly creatures are there here!

How beautiful mankind is!

O brave new world, that has such people in’t!

(The Tempest (1610-1611), act 5, scene 1)

Maybe the painting is entirely referring to Shakespeare’s The Tempest, the storm, which evokes the basic question of genuine truth about the foundation of this world and being human with all inherent contradictions: Humor, sorrow, gruffness, meanness, radiance, the high and the low. True art, Susan Sontag says, is able to render us anxious.

So, the painting may also be a metaphore for a search: For one’s self, your own preception and the encounter of divinity, in a dream or inebriated by a mystical potion, as described in the Rig Veda, the oldest of the four basic scriptures of the Hindu Gods, written in the second millenium B.C. – or else ...?

Katrin Kampmann is a painter to the core. Paper or canvas are her picture- and idea-bearers and palimpsest for the most different stories in each and every painting. Oscillating between abstraction, figuration and overlays, they always result in something mysterious. Trying to reduce the elements of composition in the centre of this exhibition to just a few words, one would most probably come to these: Coincidence, rhythm, overlay, fragmentation, color.

Her paintings are coincidental in a way of being concomitant by-products of the processes performed at the beginning, and unintended in a way that nothing which is happening during the further process may be predicted in advance. Thus, nothing is predetermined, as each working-process starts with the pouring of thin-fluid color on canvas or paper. The pouring of color is an unsystematic matter. The same process, with the same material and the same degree of efficiency, may always lead to variable and surprising outcomes.

Kampmann engages with this process and benefits from the results produced by the colorflow. Then she joins in with the rhythm of printing, spraying and painting. Painting as an expressive ductus. Cross-fadings (as overlays), fragmentation by indications, which may be or may be not visible, always depending on the eye of each individual beholder. All paintings appear to be kind of a collage, comprising of different techniques and materials. Kampmann uses acrylic-, oil- and/or watercolor, india-ink, color sprays, stencils and linoleum as her materials. She uses those materials for the creation of monotypes, a technique used by artists since the 17th century, whereby the artist draws or paints on plates made of glass, metal or linoleum, and – as long as the color is still wet – by using a press or by rubbing it manually, mirror-inversely prints the motive onto the canvas or paper. The One converges into the Other. So, on the one hand the impact such techniques are able to have on the composition of a painting becomes evident, on the other hand the dissolution of rigid painting structures of composing.

What is most important to her? Color. Karl Horst Hödicke (*1938), whose master-class student she has been in 2006 at the Berlin Universität der Künste(University of the arts), would say: A painting is nothing else than a battlefield on which color is treated. Kampmann’s world of color is illuminately gay, yet fragile and dreamlike. There exist nearly no exact boundaries between the different colors. Following the traces, courses and overlays of color, they all might end up in an object, become such concrete object, or lay themselves upon it like a haze. Even the background of the painting, the raw white, may so become an outline, or a sign, in the meaning of possibility or sujet itself.

Kampmann’s art of color is not abstract, as it is with Katharina Grosse’s oeuvre. A lot of codes and messages exist in the paintings, however, there is always a ‘definite maybe’, a contradiction, an ambiguity behind all of that.

The great ‘lockdown’ in the middle of March 2020. An Odyssey to unexplored areas, all over the world: Staying at home, home-office, shutdown of shops, gastronomy, theatres, concert-halls, museums and country-borders; daily news via the ‘corona-ticker’ on recent pandemic developments, interviews, statements, mandatory legal guidelines; insights and outlooks from virologists, discussions about health-safety versus fundamental rights, conspiracy-theories versus scientific findings.

Wir sind die Roboter (We are the Robots). A painting from 2018, watercolor, india-ink, linocut and acrylic on canvas. A gay and fragmented landscape in blue, green, purple, white; at least four figures moving. Let us examine the painting in reading-direction – on the left side of the painting a robot, opposite on the edge of the right side a woman, sensually dancing – does the fundamental step of future evolution lie in regressing from a ‘homo digitalis’ to being just a mere human-being again? Or is it a completely new relationship between a human and his/her mental capacities, being negotiated? The painting as a sign of change in the narrative tenor of Covid-19? Or is it just an allusion to the song Die Roboter (The Robots) of the group Kraftwerk from 1978?

Wir sind die Roboter

Wir funktionieren automatik

Jetzt wollen wir tanzen mechanik

(We are the robots

We are the robots

We are working automatic

Now we wanna dance mechanic)

In 2004, Kampmann gave one of her works the title Odyssee im Weltraum (Odyssey in Space). Immediately, a milestone of movie-history pops up and comes into mind: 2001. Odyssey in Space (1965-68), by Stanley Kubrick (1928-1999), based on Arthur C. Clarkes (1917-2008) short-story The Sentinel (1951). A cult-movie and science-fiction classic, asking the fundamental questions aboutevolution, humanity, extraterrestrial life and intelligence, or the beginning and ending of what defines ‘being human’. It is encoded in multiple layers – philosophically, technologically, religiously and psycho -analytically – and an attempt of thinking nearly without any spoken language, only in spheres of music and space.

Yet the movie only opens up a small window of being able to grasp a hint of what the painting might be about. In a simplified view, its background structures itself from the above-side in one third of each, white, blue and grey. In the foreground (and centre) of the painting there are two human beings; the female figure is sitting on her lower legs, blue india-ink flowing up to him or her – the standing figure – from her uterus. He or she is at the glimpse of grabbing something, maybe the sitting female. However, no physical contact develops. Two, being near and far from each other alike. There

is no readable facial expression, as both faces are as if pixelated (often a characteristic feature of Kampmann’s creatures in her large-scaled painted tales and stories). Do we see the early prophecy of two lovers’ Corona-Odyssey after the overall-lockdown, or Gabriel Faurés’ opera Pénélope, which gives the Iliad a new angle? Is it a history of waiting itself or the waiting ones?

Everybody waites, though nobody likes waiting. Who has enough money or power, usually buys him- or herself out from having to wait. But in times of Covid-19 we all are equal. The question is how we wait: resigned, patient or happy. Pénélope is also waiting. She is the very destination of her husband Odysseus’ Odyssey. She keeps staying true to Odysseus, whilst as a ‘waiting one’ she is forced to conquer unexplored new shores. It is an inner process. The Odyssey lasts for 20 years. When the two of them finally meet again, it is a slow rapprochement of two strangers. Each character has to find back to him-/herself first. Then and today.

Visually tangible tension is arousal in a painting. Structures and rhythm are closely linked together. In Jahr ohne Sommer (Year without a Summer, see page 58), this large, two-pieced painting, repetitions of the same or similar basic-patterns already presented, become the contents of rhythmicity. Whilst structure may become comprehensible under the aspect of plane and space and abstract figuration, in beholding the painting temporal elements add, a color set in modification of positive to negative, from bright to dark, from cold to warm, as the whole painting-process on the one hand side seems intuitive, but is strictly being followed on the other. The painting could stand as the quintessence of the journey, a bridge over time, leading to a whole new era.

English translation by Dr. Philipp Marouschek