Sitename

DAIMONION
On the Demonic in Michael Vonbank's Work

In texts on Michael Vonbank's artistic work, it is repeatedly emphasised that any attempt to claim inspiration from art history for his pictorial worlds and style of expression is a futile, even nonsensical endeavour - insofar as one wants to approach his work in this classical way. "Vonbank rejects all art-historical and environmental influences," writes Peter Gorsen (1) for example, and Sonja Traar suspects that in Vonbank's work "art that cannot be dissected in terms of art history, that demands words and thoughts that have not yet been found - and that are perhaps far too simple, far too strong to be mouthed" (2).

What is going on? Hardly have we allowed ourselves to be convinced, after centuries of cultivating the cult of genius, that an idea, an idea does not result from itself, but is rather the result of a circuit of synapses within a complex neuronal network of archived data, of impressions, images, of parts of the world that originally came to us and into us from outside, when we are now supposed to be led to believe that there is an autonomous language of art that formulates itself solely from the person of an artist who is, as it were, isolated?

I would like to leave this contradiction here for the time being and take up a second remark that is often made in texts about Michael Vonbank: the matter of the "demonic". Goetz Bury, for example, speaks of the "demon or human being" (3) that we encounter in the artist's paintings; for Carl Aigner they are at least "occasionally somewhat demonic" (4), and Peter Gorsen, in turn, thinks of Vonbank's so-called "beak heads" as the "grotesque cathedral sculptures of the Middle Ages, which were intended to ward off hostile spirits as a defence against demons and fear" (5).

So are these "demons" frightening figures, or do they deter the terrible? What is it about the demonic?

In ancient Greece, "daimon" stood first of all for a mysterious power that allotted man his lot in life. The allotted amount made the individual happy, "eu-daimon", or unhappy, "kako-daimon". The demon was therefore not originally sinister and dangerous, but strictly speaking it determined the nature of the individual's character and thinking - in other words, his "individuality".

Herakleitos then spoke of the demon as the inner state that each of us has to master. In this sense, then, it is something by which we are "possessed" and on which we are also completely "obsessed", because this something constitutes us because it is therefore ourselves. (6)

For Socrates, finally, the "daimonion" was (according to Plato) his inner voice, which served him as a decision-making aid when he was uncertain. Every person has his or her own daimonion; you just have to listen to it, allow its voice. Socrates sometimes interrupted his actions, his speeches, to let his daimonion speak to him.

Michael Vonbank not only produces visual works, he also produces texts. His texts, however, are not "constructions" created in the process of reflective writing, but transcriptions of tape recordings of spoken texts. Strictly speaking, these texts are documentations of spontaneously arising, "unintentional" and unplanned verbalised flows of thought, which the artist and author himself is not able to reconstruct or memorise completely. That is, he "functions" here, as it were, as a medium of his inner voice.

Is it his daimonion that lets him speak these texts? And, we would then like to ask: how do his pictorial formulations come about? At any rate, not - and this may now seem more credible - as a result of an examination of phenomena and theories of surrealism, art brut or whatever else we can think of on the subject of automatism to "conditional art".

Rather, we could assume that artists like Alfred Kubin, Max Ernst, Picasso or Jackson Pollock, to name but a few, have been inspired by artists like Michael Vonbank. With the aim of tracing the subconscious, the source of creativity and spontaneity - without ever being able to express them out of themselves with that unbroken intensity. Tachisme, gestural painting, Informel - all these directions are ultimately based on the search for access to a "limbic system", a reservoir not controlled by reason. But since this search is based on rational thought, it is already no longer free of any controlling reason.

For Aristotle, the initial moment of all thinking - and thus probably also of the creation of ideas - was amazement. In the moment of wonder, we rid ourselves of all the ballast of knowledge and at the same time open up possibilities of access to things that remain closed to us when we look at them from a distance. Heidegger called this basic state of bein "Befindlichkeit" - not understood as a fleeting emotional situation, but as a way of opening up; a way of opening up and appropriating the world. The state of mind first makes clear "how one is and becomes" - and is then the medium in which our thinking and acting takes place. However, the medium in which our thinking and acting takes place is never "neutral". Like wonder, our state of mind is also individually colored.

Perhaps these thoughts that others have contemplated are useful in removing the contradiction mentioned at the beginning of this essay from its contradictory nature. From this point of view, Michael Vonbank's works do not have to be "autonomous" in the sense of being absolutely unrelated to images and impressions from the world, and at the same time they can be considered as phenomena transformed free of their cognitive analysis.

This text was published in the catalog "Michael Vonbank. Demon Theatre. Works 1986 - 2015. An Overview"
Edited by Beate Sprenger with texts by Christian Ludwig Attersee, Daniela Gregori, Lucas Gehrmann, Anton Herzl, Margareta Sandhofer, Beate Sprenger, Florian Steininger, Michael Vonbank and Vitus Weh.
Verlag fuer moderne Kunst, Wien 2022 ISBN: 978-3-9035-7269-9