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MAGIC AS A MATTER OF COURSE

In my "library of incidental fragments", as I tend to call the monitor connected to the internet on my writing and reading table, I first leafed through some pages on Jean-Jacques Rousseau and on the almanac Der blaue Reiter in search of a somewhat dated yet "modern" opening quotation for my article on Michael Vonbank's art - Rousseau because of his pioneering role as a critic of all social-theatrical forced masquerades, Rousseau because of his pioneering role as a critic of all compulsory social-theatrical masquerades which, in his opinion, alienate the individual from himself and thus deform him, and the Blue Rider because, according to co-editor Franz Marc, this fine little compendium of pictures and texts encompasses "the latest painterly movement in France, Germany and Russia" and shows "its fine threads of connection with the Gothic and the Primitives, with Africa and the great Orient, with the so expressive original folk art and children's art, especially with the most modern musical movement in Europe and the new stage ideas of our time".(1) But before I could delve deeper into these literatures, the search engine unexpectedly put a contemporary blue rider - in the form of a journal of philosophy published in Stuttgart - on my screen.

Magic wisdom as wisdom knowledge

"We feel that even when all possible scientific questions have been answered, our life problems have not yet been touched at all", Aleida Assmann quotes here from Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus, in order to subsequently demonstrate that our scientific knowledge, since it only makes up a small part of our knowledge, should be supplemented, among other things, by a "wisdom" knowledge, which the author divides into four main categories. One of them she calls "magical wisdom", which is characterised as follows: "Magical wisdom refers to a secret knowledge that not only has insight into hidden world connections, but is also able to intervene in them. Whoever is in possession of magical wisdom shares certain secrets of the Creator God and puts himself in his place."(2)

Anyone who has ever experienced one of the rare and unpredictable situations in which Michael Vonbank spontaneously delivers texts, poems, "condensed" texts, will have felt, as I did, that these articulations gush forth from an unfathomable depth, as it were, penetrate to the outside as verbalised firings of synapses lying deep in the brain and, as word links and sentence structures, seem to follow a logic of their own that is capable of establishing different and more connections than those linear ones, such as those inferred by a sentence like this one, for example. For the moment of such Vonbank´s productivity, the beer table in the Viennese Beisl where we may be sitting at the moment becomes a place of concentrated attention, even "devotion", because something special is happening here, something that is not alien to us and yet puzzling, because beyond rational explicability and interpretability it seems at the same time completely "reasonable" - and for which we have no better or worse word ready than "magic". And something else happens, perhaps even more interesting: "magic" becomes something quite natural at the same time, because we experience it here without any mystification, staging or "evaluation". It is there, at the beer table, and that is a good thing; it is, in Aleida Assmann's formulation, part of our "wisdom knowledge" and thus part of our knowledge/being as a whole. That we are so rarely aware of it is another matter.

About the Image-Text-Object Installation by Michael Vonbank

From this basis, Michael Vonbank's work can perhaps be more easily understood or described than through comparative searches on the Internet or in art history, whose influences, as Peter Gorsen has already pointed out, the artist "repels" anyway. When we stand in front of a picture, a drawing or even in a picture-text-object installation by Michael Vonbank, we are standing in or in front of a magical action in the above sense that is expressed in aesthetic signs. However, we do not experience the temporary creative act itself, but its (conservable) transcription. If we get stuck on the "surface" of these aesthetic signs, they link up in our minds with comparable signs from other "surfaces" because they have similarities. Then we might end up with the eye masks and crosses from Adolf Woelfli´s Skt. Adolf Riesen-Schoepfung, with God/devils and human dung-births by August Walla or many other pictorial and written/textual wallpapers, depending on the stock of images we can call up from the cultural history department. If this is extensive, we presumably hop across times and cultures, roam through Roman catacombs as well as through exhibitions of classical modernism á la "From Rouault to Picasso". This is quite enjoyable and also makes it clear that we cannot simply nail down Vonbank's work anywhere within this archive of images.

But there is another archive whose contents are not so easy for most of us to bring out into the daylight of memory. Vonbank's art, however, explicitly helps us dig and rummage in this other archive, which is not filled with other people's images, but with our own, "virtual" (and yet situationally very real) images of dreams, imagination, fantasy, fear and happiness ... which are in any case our own creations (not written down on the outside). Vonbank's configurations, if I am not completely mistaken, stem to a large extent from his own "virtual" images and thus have archetypal qualities, and it is precisely these that can have a catalytic effect on the correspondence with the stocks of our archives of self produced images, since these also have "archetypal" components.

From another level, Michael Vonbank's art can also be seen as exemplary of artistic thought and action as a particular form of articulation in which reason and emotion are instrumentalised and expressed on an equal footing and together. For example, Agnes Neumayr writes: "The arts are [...] a presentative form of cognition that opposes the discursive cognition of the sciences. The 'other' of artistic cognition is revealed in the fact that it knows neither a hierarchy between intellectual and emotionalactivities nor a degrading and exclusionary valuation between reason and emotion. Both stand here in an equivalent, processual and dynamic relationship to each other. Viewed from this perspective, the arts abandon all forms of violence that are immanent to the binary oppositional logic of reason and feeling as such, i.e. ethnicisms, fundamentalisms, sexisms or nationalisms"(3).

Some of Vonbank's statements, as he makes them in his poems or installations, may be and seem so direct that we might miss the part of "reason" in them in the sense of reflective after-thought, but these statements are put into perspective again in the structure of their pictorial correspondences. A sentence such as "I'm standing on the cross" (from the installation "Eating the cross") is immediately broken by the literal representation of a loinless figure standing on a cross, looking up to heaven but not necessarily blissfully. Contradictions are not opposites, one could say, which must lead to polarisation; rather, contradictions are self-evident and may exist in parallel.

Vonbank's work is thus also about acceptance, about tolerance, without, incidentally, expressing any particular appreciation of such ethical virtues. They, too, have to be taken for granted in the end - the conflictual is depicted, but at the same time broken in an often ironic/comical way. Thus, on the floor of the all-round painted/labelled/labelled room of the Installation "Sweet Dreams" lie two couples who come from two cultural backgrounds: Western/Central Europe (Austria) and "Orient (foreign country)". All are caricatured exaggerated with their respective regional attributes and thus culturally distinct from each other, but they all dream the same dreams, which are drawn on the walls and ceiling. "Sex me", "smoke me" or "gemma Abzugsbilder schaun" are written between the dream figures, which cannot be assigned to any cultural circles.

The video series "Somewhere in Europe" deals with a similar theme using completely different means, namely "enclaves, double societies in the middle of Europe. It is about 'foreign' cultures that have already become an integral part of Europe, especially of large European cities."(4) The first scenes are from a market in a "foreigners' quarter", as they say in Vienna. For Somewhere in Europe could be set anywhere in Europe, but demands by certain politicians such as "planned squares against illegal foreigners", "no voting rights for foreigners", "stop the abuse of asylum" are par ticularly common here, because, according to the party most committed in this regard: "The number of 100,000 foreigners living illegally in Vienna is constantly increasing due to organised abuse of asylum". The FPOE rejects the 'multi cultural society' aspired to by the socialist party (SPOE), conservative party (OEVP) and the green party.(5) In this respect, Michael Vonbank is more oriented towards opinions such as those held by Hannah Arendt, who wrote: "It is not man who inhabits this planet, but men. The majority is the law of the earth."(6) Thus the following videos again show scenes of this Viennese market, between which statements by "nationals" living in this neighbourhood are inserted. Two interviewees are real, two others are fictitious, hidden behind masks. The first two speak in the sense of Arendt/Vonbank, the other two speak in the sense of moderate or direct xenophobia, as it is found not only in the party quoted above and some of the "highest-circulation" print media, but also in broad circles of the population. Representatives of the latter, however, do not "come out" in front of the camera, they prefer to do so among their peers or behind closed doors. Speakers masked by banks thus represent the voice of the people who do not speak out loud. All those who speak here, however, have to do so in English, which is not always easy for them. Not only because the language is foreign and therefore difficult, but also because they themselves become strangers, "strangers in their own land".

This text was edited in the catalog "Michael Vonbank. Counterworlds - A Meeting. Works 2002 - 2008" Edited by Michael Vonbank with texts by Lucas Gehrmann, Peter Gorsen, Sonja Traar and Michael Vonbank. BUCHER publishing house, Hohenems 2008, ISBN: 978-3-902512-43-4