Sitename

Daniela Gregori

IN-BETWEEN: A CONDENSATION

In the profession of writing about art, it is a privilege not only to know or have known a work personally, but also its author; it is by no means a matter of course. However, the certain impartiality that comes with a view of a work detached from its author may also hold opportunities. No memories, no impressions, no anecdotes, not even a first-hand apercu had settled in me when I first encountered Michael Vonbank's work in his former studio. Christian Ludwig Attersee, his teacher at the Vienna University of Applied Arts, could be consulted as an authority and judged: "For me, in any case, a highly talented person with an independent handwriting and high intelligence excellent". After all, Vonbank was one of two students with whom Attersee had ever ventured into collaborative work. For almost two years now, since my first visit to Michael Vonbank's studio, my thoughts have revolved around what I saw. Texts were read again and again, works and groups of works were compared, attempts were made to establish connections with seemingly disparate articulations. Always with the feeling of not having perceived, or not having perceived enough, something obvious that could serve as a key.

Exterritorial Soul Landscapes

"Mensch, Tier, Daemon: Die Kehrseite meines Seins" (Man, Animal, Daemon: The Other Side of My Being) is the title of his diploma thesis, with which he graduates from Attersee's master class in painting, soon to apply to Bruno Gironcoli's class in sculpture with the sculptural work series "Daemonen 1-6". The former may not just be the subject of one work, it is the central theme of Vonbank's drawings and painting. It is this interaction of beings, sometimes human, sometimes animal, sometimes fantastic, always clearly delineated, usually boldly coloured, never fear-inspiring. Their appearance is archetypal, the (pictorial) field on which they move is undoubtedly merely a section of a bustling activity on vast terrain. The artist, one might think, cultivates an understanding relationship with the other side of his being and one is inclined to use the concept of the landscape of the soul for this insight. But this personnel acts with an extremely familiar and reassuring self-assuredness. Here is one side, there is the other, the border is drawn by the artist just as he sets the direction, who else should define such things from time to time? And so Vonbank not only creates stages for his own action with paintings on the walls or lets the cutouts of his enchanting archetypes do their thing in our reality, he also creates walk-in spaces with canvases. The daemons that have become sculptures seem to behave similarly, albeit in a temporal sequence. The container of an alcoholic drink has been emptied, but on the other side of the glass papier-mâché forms a genie and thus becomes synonymous with spirits and their effects. Here & There, what separates the two, finds its connection as an artistic gesture. This remains the case with the works from 2002-2008, summarised and published under the title "Gegenwelten - eine Zusammenkunft". In daily life, the subtle artist is confronted with completely different parallel societies on the subject of migration. Here, too, two positions are equally found; here, too, it is the artist's intervention that connects. Don't couples have the same sweet, even sexually connoted dreams, regardless of their national origin or denomination? And, if one forces the xenophobic native to express his slogans in a foreign language, the articulations sound similarly awkward as those of the group of people he is attacking. Whether dealing with the flip side of being or with groups of people perceived as foreign, egalitarianism for Michael Vonbank is a standpoint from which to look in all directions.

Immediacy of language and line

In a contribution to the catalogue "Gegenwelten - eine Zusammenkunft", Lucas Gehrmann recalls the privilege of witnessing one of these spontaneous situations of productivity at the beer table of a Viennese pub. "Anyone who has ever experienced one of the rare and unpredictable situations in which Michael Vonbank spontaneously delivers texts, poems, "condensed" material, will have felt, as I did, that these articulations gush forth from a depth that is, as it were, unfathomable, 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, which is capable of establishing different and more connections than those linear ones, such as those inferred by a sentence like this one, for example. " This is rapid thinking, a flood of associations, a gallery of word-forms, hardly catchable. Kairos, the personification of the shining moment, has to be caught by the forelock of his shorn head, Vonbank takes this into his own hands when he grants us insight into his world of thought and image. Texts are noted down spontaneously or preserved on tape for later writing down, and in comparison to the pictorial works, it is most striking here that his figures are also formed from a continuous line. Writing as well as figure emerge in a rapid immediacy from thought to its textualisation and visualisation. Didn't Vonbank himself speak of "condensation" in this context? Is this not perhaps the "missing link" to the work of an artist who works in a variety of media, whose oeuvre appears to be sprawling and yet is formulated so precisely that rationality and emotion are given equal justification?

The studio as a time capsule

Finally, the path leads back to the place of my first contact with Michael Vonbank's work, his studio in Vienna's 5th district. The alley, an uncrowded residential street, the studio at ground level, entering the flat - a step into another world. Michael Vonbank hardly left his rooms during the last years of his life. Communication with the outside world often took place via the window to the street by means of small arrangements that could be taken along en passent, as it were. Canvas piles up on shelves and in the room. But what is even more striking apart from the abundance of artefacts - every cm² of the walls is described here, like a medieval palimpsest, layer upon layer of memorable and remarkable things are written down here along with the date of completion. It is probably this compilation of intellectual wealth into a measure that can be understood by others that Vonbank has left us in his work. At the same time, his environment was quite literally condensed into an almost compact cocoon by this delicate web of words that was laid over and over again. It is a very intimate place in which one experiences almost physically what compression can mean. The images, meanwhile, colourful and haunting as they are, are waiting to flutter up and away - to whatever worlds.

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