subversive art: arnulf rainer, amos vogel, and me
Arnulf Rainer’s works are part of dual exhibition with Antonius Höckelmann at Michael Werner on the Upper East Side (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
I have written before about how an undergraduate college course popularly known as “Monday Night at the Movies” at the University of Pennsylvania changed my life. Little did I know at the time — it was the 1980s, well before the internet and social media — but the professor, Amos Vogel, was one of the most important figures in moving pictures, bringing experimental and foreign works to America as founder of Cinema 16 and cofounder of the New York Film Festival. After applying to grad school, I was surprised when I was accepted into NYU’s master’s program in cinema studies but eventually realized that it was Professor Vogel’s recommendation that certainly had more than something to do with it. For years, I would see him at NYFF and remind him that without his help, I would not have been there or at any other festivals and screenings, writing about film and other forms of art and culture, particularly those on the cutting-edge, that push boundaries and set off chains of associations.
One of the films that struck me in those long-ago Monday nights at Penn was Peter Kubelka’s 1960 Arnulf Rainer, which was commissioned by Rainer himself, an Austrian abstract painter and friend of Kubelka’s. The six-and-a-half-minute stroboscopic flicker film consists exclusively of alternating transparent (white) and black 35mm frames accompanied by silence and loud white noise; the soundtrack is rarely in sync with the images, resulting in a frustrating yet mesmerizing audiovisual experience that, if stared at, can leave you with aftereffects of ghostly hints of color.
Professor Vogel also introduced me to such seminal experimental works as Tony Conrad’s 1966 The Flicker, Paul Sharits’s 1968 Razor Blades, Hollis Frampton’s 1970 Zorn’s Lemma, and Bruce Conner’s 1968 A Movie, which helped transform my understanding of what the language of film, and art, could be. There’s a reason why the professor’s book was called Film as a Subversive Art. “This is a book about the subversion of existing values, institutions, mores, and taboos,” he writes.
Ever since that class, I have been drawn to the above filmmakers’ works; I felt a personal connection when I saw MoMA’s outstanding 2016 exhibition “Movie in My Head: Bruce Conner and Beyond,” I followed Conrad’s career, and I developed a fondness for Rainer even though for a long time I couldn’t figure out how Kubelka’s film related to the painter’s oeuvre.
Through February 11, Michael Werner on East Seventy-Seventh St. is presenting “Antonius Höckelmann / Arnulf Rainer,” a dual exhibition of works by the German Höckelmann, who died in 2000 at the age of sixty-three, and Rainer, who is now ninety-three. (You can take a 3D tour of the gallery here.) The show features twenty-nine works by Höckelmann, made between 1969 and 1989, and twenty-eight paintings and drawings by Rainer, spanning 1955 to 1998. It includes the kinds of pieces I first became familiar with after seeing Kubelka’s film at college, canvases on which Rainer paints over photographs, usually self-portraits, deforming and obliterating his face and body. One wall at Werner contains six such works, featuring such titles as Balance, Overdrawing Self, and Face Farce.
Arnulf Rainer, Untitled (Finger Painting), oil on cardboard mounted on panel, 1982/87 (photo courtesy Michael Werner)
Two of the other walls in that room contain oil paintings in which Rainer creates palimpsests that look like he is destroying his own paintings underneath, using brash and bold brushstrokes (initially with the tools of his trade, to be replaced by his fingers, toes, and limbs) to cover them up; several of the works are nearly all black, while others explode with bursts of red, yellow, blue, and green. “I realized that the quality and truth of the picture only grew as it became darker and darker,” he has explained.
He doesn’t just paint over his own work — sometimes because he is indeed unhappy with what he’s done so far, revisiting a piece decades later, as he is only “finished” with a piece when it is bought by someone, meaning he no longer has access to make changes — but also that of others, often canvases he purchased at flea markets. Werner is displaying one of a series Rainer did of overpainting drawings by Gustav Klimt, a startling form of destruction and reconstruction. At times it is as if Rainer is a graffiti artist throwing over his and others’ tags until only abstract images are left. Don’t bother searching for the head in Head, the figures in The Green Water Frog, Man, and Woman, or the tree in Tree; they could all be called, as the one behind the reception desk is, Untitled (Chaotic Paintings).
However, you can make out the chilling face in the black-and-white Wellington from Rainer’s Death Mask series, acrylic overpainting of a photograph mounted on wood. “I was interested in the ideology of psychic automatism. So I decided to close my eyes and discover something new, something subconscious,” he has said.
Arnulf Rainer’s overpaintings create palimpsestual imagery of life and art (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
In her exhibition essay “Antonius Höckelmann and Arnulf Rainer: The Dream of a State of Possibility,” curator and author Julia Garimorth writes, “As if driven by a fear of emptiness, by a ‘horror vacui,’ [Höckelmann] sought to cover the surface of the paper almost entirely. His faces, for example, are enlarged until they are cut off by the edges of the support, leaving no breathing space whatsoever. This same ‘horror vacui’ is apparent in Rainer’s earliest works, those influenced by surrealism. But instead of starting from nothingness to eventually reach something as Höckelmann does, Rainer started from something to gradually approach nothingness. Painting on already existing images was a means of making a tabula rasa from existing things. This return to a primitive stage was also, for him, an affirmation of identity.”
The subconscious and the concept of possibility, in life and art, are key parts of Kubelka’s film, which contains no images whatsoever, as if the director overpainted each frame to remove all color, with only black and white left, primitive stages. The film finally makes complete sense to me; it only took me nearly forty years to get there, like Rainer working on one of his overpaintings. In 2012, Kubelka took another look at Arnulf Rainer and made Antiphon, a full reversal of the first film, making all the white frames black and the black frames white, turning the silence into noise and the noise into silence. Watching the two films side by side, I see life and art in a whole new realm, and I owe it all to “Monday Night at the Movies.”