Sitename

Peter Gorseen

PAINTING AS A MAGICAL MASTERY OF THE ENVIRONMENT

Michael Vonbank had already spent seven years as a self-taught draughtsman and painter (and even writer), naïve in the best sense of the word, unimpressed by any thinking fashions, before he was admitted to Attersee's master class at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna in 1991 - at the age of 27. He acquired a foundation in craftsmanship here and graduated with honours four years later. Despite the academically acquired cultural knowledge and the expansion of his view to contemporary themes and technologies of image production, his artistic work is still committed to the introverted world of psychological states and crisis-like ego identity. Vonbank rejects all art-historical and environmental influences. His painted fantasies, he calls them "the flip side of my being", are dictated by instinctive, inner necessity like the soul landscapes of Art Brut. He feels a kinship with their outsiderness.

The flip side of being: lust for life, murderousness and lust for life

Similarities between his painting and the bird and horde pictures of Max Ernst from the 1920s or the mythical-fantastic animal fantasies of Asger Jorn and Karel Appel from the 1950s are therefore purely coincidental in terms of art history. What the above-mentioned artists have in common, however, is a gestalt-like way of seeing that does not depict reality, but rather hallucinates figurative and physiognomic elements: grimacing faces, masks, enlarged, partially separated eyes, holey heads and bodies, chimeras uniting man and animal with eerie, predatory bird beaks, zoomorphic pairings that can be interpreted as lust for life, murderous lust and lust for life as well as symbols of defence against fear. Both aspects occur, complement each other and, seen over the whole work, are in balance. On the one hand, we encounter a weak self that shields itself from the stimuli of the outside world with a magical defensive spell; on the other hand, in ever new metamorphoses, we are shown an animalistic and sexual will to assert oneself, a violent hunger for life. The fear of disintegration and dismemberment is contrasted with the desire for a change of form and a crisis of form. The respective artistic emphasis changes biographically and conditionally.

Conundrum-like forms, hermaphroditic Eros, masks as totems

The work begins in the 1980s with pencil and oil pastel drawings. Initially, an impulsive, rhythmic-ornamental handwriting filled the sheet sizes to the brim. In the 1990s, expressive figurative compositions prevailed, which now sought to unite hallucinatory, gestalt representation with mimetic, imitative reality. This leads to collisions and breaks within the picture. But it also frees Vonbank up for narrative and satirical forms, which he restricts again at the end of the 1990s. Vonbank has been using oil paint for his large and medium-sized canvases since his academy studies. He structures the large formats with ambivalent, vexed, partly emblematic forms, which represent a double-barrelled hermaphroditic Eros, making use of both manic and depressive emotional worlds in the chosen colour tones. In the longer cycle of paintings from 1995-96, the mimetic aspect of representation na almost evaporated. The formal suggestion is now attempted by seeing gestalt-like colour forms in the surface. In the series of medium-sized acrylic paintings created around 2002, such as Faces and Men in black, Vonbank experimented with overlapping, transparent, strongly outlined facial and bodily contours that are reminiscent of spellbinding masks and totems. They partly oppose the viewer's gaze like defensive and protective barriers. Black, boldly applied, energetic contours take possession of the powerful colour entries, whose glow is, as it were, locked inside the ego icon. Unintentionally, one finds oneself in the neighbourhood of Picabia's Transparences and Jawlensky's painted Meditations of Mystic Heads. Among the most impressive works of recent years are the physiognomic hieroglyphs of the 40-part Men in black series, completely immersed in the triad of white, grey and black.

"Human, Animal or Demon: The Flip Side of My Being" (Vonbank)

A hasty classification of Michael Vonbank's works in the context of contemporary art, e.g. in post-informal figuration or the neo-expressionist painting of the "Neue Wilden" must fail because of the personal style of this painter, which is historically little or not at all conveyed, who does not primarily deal with reality in an art-historical or conceptually reflective way. His main impulses come from psychological self-consciousness. The similarity with other surreal and expressive pictorial worlds is therefore coincidental and does not result from a closer formal engagement with other artists who also take a third path between representationalism and abstraction. One does not find any direct borrowings from the semi-figurative and semi-abstract painting of Christian Ludwig Attersee, who was, after all, his academic teacher. A critical examination of competing stylistic languages does not touch Vonbank at all. His reservoir of fantasy and motif is, as I said, his own state of mindThe emotional driving forces of his painting include manic excitement, a desire for disinhibited, occasionally automatic self-expression, a feeling of being followed or of being observed, and the memory of being threatened by schizophrenia. The dramatic and crisis-ridden biography forms the main drive. The earlier pencil drawings in particular are eloquent and revealing in this respect: vegetative and curvilinear, intertwining and embracing forms that fill the page to the brim or are confined to insular fields. We find in the drawing, as in the painting, a thoroughly sexualised world, the mating of invented creatures that suffer or enjoy all kinds of metamorphoses, whether bird, fish or human.

The pencil drawings of the 1980s show figurations with white recessed fields for the eyes, the staring large pupils. What is typical of Arnold Schoenberg's drawings also applies here, with some reservations: they are pictures of gazes, portraits in a motif of persecution. The pursuer and the pursued are united by the same gaze, which captivates and cannot be avoided, almost a reminiscence of pandemonism, which had a traumatic significance in the Catholic upbringing emphasised by the artist himself. The magic of glances and eye contacts, however, has a cheerful aura in addition to the anxious, melancholic one. The small series of body photographs taken by a friend shows the artist naked and disorientated, but at the same time in an appropriation of vegetative gestures, which he shapes into an emotive body language with which he prostitutes himself before the aesthetic viewer. He invents a sinuous plant-like gesture of supplication that performatively expresses the desire for attention and companionship. These are almost exhibitionist danced feelings as in expressive dance. The large and medium oil, sometimes acrylic paintings of the 1990s can be garishly coloured and rich in contrast, like the small-format oil crayon drawings of the late 1980s, or have a more monochrome colour composition dominated by one main tone or three or four colours (white, yellow, red, black). With this intuitive colour keyboard, the entire ambivalent spectrum of sensitivities from aggression to depression can be played with.

Headed creatures, masks and grotesque falsifications

The formal motifs are, if one puts many pictures next to each other for comparison, not unlimited, but extremely varied. Much of it is repeated, but it always enters into new grotesque couplings. The figurations appear materially less solid and outwardly unarmoured, they are rather thin-skinned and holey, perforated, dissociated beings, reminiscent of Max Ernst's painted Urhorden, with which, however, Vonbank has not dealt. The motif that trumps all other figurations is the head, or rather a headed entity that can exist independently and separately from the rest of the body in the fluidity of the painting, occasionally appearing as a cephalopod or physiognomised torso or caput mortuum. These uncanny heads come very close to grimaces and masks in primitive cultures and in psychotic art. The widened eyes spy and impale their counterpart or are covered by larvae and spectacle forms. These then provide protection from unpleasant looks and probes from outside or from a sudden sexual fright. Like the fixating stares, the open mouths and probing beak heads, which unite the anthropomorphic and the zoomorphic, probably have an apotropaic function. As a defence against demons and fear, they are well known in art history, especially in the grotesque cathedral sculpture and facade decoration of the Middle Ages, which were intended to scare off hostile spirits and intruders. The entire decor of the head monsters suggests a magical defensive spell - now, of course, no longer only in a religious but in a psychological function. Ultimately, in all and behind all of the difform head creatures and grotesque depictions, there is the artist himself who, with them and his magical art as a whole, has created a protective spirit and, as it were, armour against hostile reality. Psychologically understood, defence and protection must be constantly repeated and renewed in order to remain effective. Thus the repeated head portraits and entire group portraits with heads, invented grotesque aggregates of severed heads and larvalised gazes are created out of inner impulse and in the interest of the artist's own psychological stability. If we want to participate in this aesthetically and profit from it, we must also be prepared to experience Michael Vonbank's nightmare fantasies as a psychodramatic scenario and magical coping with the threatening environment.

On the poems and picture-text collages by Michael Vonbank

In the picture-text collages and poems created simultaneously since 2004, the leitmotif of the painting, the threat posed by the environment and its magical defence, is continued. The series of tobacco pictures (2004) is a satirical response to the prohibitive health policy that tolerates smoking only as a private passion and, like alcohol consumption, places it under suspicion as an intoxicating drug. In this respect, man finds himself deprived of his previous voluntariness. "He experiences his thinking and doing as a must. He must memorise something, must remember something, must think the right thing, must obey an order, must comply with the threat, if he does not want to risk massive disadvantages." (Wolfgang Sofsky, Defence of the Private. Eine Streitschrift, Munich 2007) Part of the current image and language policy is the suggestive fear-mongering about illness, pain and death, which is not compatible with enlightenment. The public smoking ban is propagandistically placarded in black-edged labels on cigarette packs. Vonbank has incorporated the frightening slogans of withdrawal into his figurative typefaces in a menetekel-like manner. They are testimonies to the fear and moralisation of the individual in the prohibitive society and signal a social doom.

Intoxicating Desire for Pleasure and Happiness in Painting and Poetry

Likewise, rebellious hedonistic impulses of an intoxicating desire for pleasure and happiness can be found in Vonbank's work. His lyrical production, which he has been indulging in since the mid-1980s and which now becomes an accomplice to magical painting, opens up the prospect of a "new spectacle" and utopia in which we view the previous world "from above", from a distance, "this time not so reduced" and without phobias, transfigured, as it were, into a Dionysian setting that leads us away from prohibitive reality and sobriety with ecstatic-happy feelings, embraces, kisses, small narcotic pleasures, a drunken "bit of life that the body leaves us". The fear-happiness dialectic that defines the pictorial work is now also articulated linguistically, enabling a correspondence between image and text, representation and poetry. In both media, the melancholic and the utopian, intoxicating attitude to life, depressive and manic moods perform an interplay. The opposites come together in an erratic synthesis that is immediately denied again. Following the discontinuous, automatistic rhetoric in Surrealism, the principle of incoherence, the "disconnectedness of speech", the "stringing together of small units of meaning", which is also typical of the speech incoherence of the schizophrenic (Theodor Spoerri, Sprachphänomene und Psychose, Basel 1964), is brought to flower, as expressed in the short prose text Das Zwischenreich. "Many loaves of bread I ate at noon today. Long loaves, thin loaves, darkened loaves, barred loaves. I long for the breadless everyday, sometimes here sometimes there, everything without commitment, chew a little but don't pray, live but don't love bindingly."

Artistic Formalisation of the Linguistic Material in Vonbank's Poetry

Vonbank's poems are not reflective poetry. Their comprehensibility and magic are due to the artistic formalisation of the linguistic material. It is an original creation of order through rhythmic repetition, combination or fusion of words (new word formations) - parallel to the fusion of images in the montage character of painting, which - understood psychologically - serves to ward off affect, as the poem The Glances >> The Glances shows; its last emotionally charged lines read: "Do not look so sharply, look decently, and let me gaze and enjoy the view." Another order of the linguistic material is based on its physiognomisation. Physiognomic impressions and experiences are associated with certain words. Words are then conceived not only as designations of things, but themselves as things whose expression one should be able to understand immediately, without reflection. In Memoirs in Blue, Vonbank writes: "The whole world, meanwhile, a globe with a hole, invents in us the farewell pink for the nucleation of the pear in the farewell stroke.

About the room installation "Kreuz verspeisen" (Eating the cross)

Michael Vonbank's creativity functions in the awareness of having to protect oneself against the hostile environment. The need to invent a magical defensive spell against their threats and all dangerous situations is continued in the late picture-text montages, murals and poems. Psychoanalysis has shown how the "defence mechanisms of the ego" are directed against everything that can provoke fear: equally strong drive claims, feelings of disgust and shame as demands of the superego. The latter are always more or less present in the form of religious commandments, moralising authorities and civilising sanctions in the work populated by daunting demons and other apotropaic protective figures. In the spatial installation "Kreuz verspeisen" (Eating the Cross) from 2006, which combines video, sound, wall painting and self-performance, the religious content of the Lord's Prayer is inverted and designed, as it were, as a parody of the (the artist's) frightening creed. In the image-text montage titled "Eating the Cross", the demonic spirits of life, the temptation of evil are called upon against the promise of good. The human need for redemption together with its Christian symbolism of crucifixion, obedience to the divine will and the expectation of the kingdom of God are rejected as values of suffering theology. Life is equated with pleasure and happiness. The aggressively blasphemous affront of the feeding of the cross, which the aforementioned installation stages, appears as a magical defensive fantasy of the ego against the life-threatening, restrictive, asexual authority of God. It is inverted into a diabolical world creator responsible for suffering and catastrophes, on whom the intercession for redemption from evil is now focused: "NO temptation is too strong for us to redeem ourselves from evil. AMEN." The Redeemer-God is transformed into a tempter-God. The hostile, the chaotic, the temptation of evil are therefore willed by God. So much for the religious outsiderism of the artist. Anna Freud described the "inversion into the opposite" as a psychological defence mechanism against external dangers and aggressions. Seen in this light, Michael Vonbank reverses the roles in his performatively involving installation: The attacked (visually pushed into a corner of the room) turns into the aggressor (changes into an offensive posture). To a certain extent, he physically and morally imitates the person of the aggressor. The "identification with the aggressor" (Anna Freud) is aesthetically comprehensible in his work. He draws him ambivalently, as a person who suffers and mocks at the same time, who is hurt and wounded: either female with the sign of the cross covering the sex, annulling the sexual, and a mouth opened in an aggressive manner, sticking out a long tongue, or male with an obscenely exposed member and a cross shape crowning the martyr's head. The sign language of these mocking figures is familiar to us from medieval depictions of the Passion, the "Zannern" and "Bleckern" of Romanesque cathedral sculpture, who ward off disaster. Vonbank has given the magical overcoming of the powers of the outside world, which can be traced back far in art history, its own original, unconsciously found aesthetic formulation.

This text was published 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