Stephen Bann

Stephen Bann has a huge critical investment in Janis Kounellis, and this thoroughly engrossing and elegantly written book represents a handsome return for the time and effort he has devoted to this artist. Janis Kounellis could also be considered a summation of Bann’s own interests throughout his career. For instance, like Kounellis, the Greek born, but Italian-speaking surrealist/conceptual artist, Bann is deeply interested in modernism’s relationship to the art of the past. During the course of this odyssey through time, history and memory, Bann visits many intellectual ports of call, although ultimately, the voyage returns to its original point of embarkation: the modernist myth of the Homeric journey with its implicit homecoming, a device that structures Kounellis’s art.

Home and the question of origins are problematic for Kounellis, emphasised by his decision to speak Italian instead of his native Greek, a traumatic decision with consequences. But defining identity by nationality is not the issue here since Bann sees Kounellis’s art as ‘Mediterranean’, a category that evokes a broader definition of culture and, more importantly, an alternative to the more prevalent urban, metropolitan construction of modern art. A key and anti-urban theme in Kounellis’s art is ships and shipping which, as Bann argues, suggest a ‘self-enclosed environment’ for the private reflections of Kounellis on his birthplace, the port of Piraeus. Even more than defining a site of artistic contemplation, boats suggest the incessant circulation of cargo, which could be taken as a metaphor for Kounellis’s own strategy of continually exchanging materials that appear in his constantly re-configured display spaces. Something of this displacement is even transposed to the level of language, as in Kounellis’s ‘installation’ art of the 1960s. The painted lettering, some naming commodities such as tobacco, seems to imitate the bold characters of liners and transport vessels, as Bann astutely observes.

Kounellis’s ‘installations’ feature humble materials such as burlap sacks, coal, bricks, and timber, the aesthetically overlooked of art history which found a place in the Arte Povera movement. However, Bann’s reading of Kounellis’s contribution to the recent Arte Povera exhibition at Tate Modern in 2001 suggests a lack of fit between the display strategies of Arte Povera and Kounellis’s own ‘installations’. Characterising Arte Povera’s engagement with Tate Modern’s gallery space as ‘ironic’ or ‘utopian’, Bann focuses on how Kounellis’s art escaped either of these two categories. This re-interpretation of Kounellis’s display strategies proves to be merely a prelude to a much greater engagement with the concept of ‘installation’ art, a category that doesn’t sit comfortably with Kounellis. Still, unlike many of the pessimistic French critical theorists that he cites, e.g., Julia Kristeva, Bann is noticeably upbeat about the relation of the ‘installation’ to its contemporary setting. This is mainly because, in the case of Kounellis, his physical appearance in these ‘installations’ suggest to Bann a constructive dialogue with memory and the past, the latter mediated by the classical masks Kounellis occasionally wears in his ‘installations’. In some of these, such as a 1969 work which featured the artist with a burning propane gas flame in his mouth, Kounellis seemed to be using nature not to fill the spectator with a sense of sublime dread, but to convey the artist’s, and also the spectator’s emancipation from the constraints of the everyday. But where does this escape route lead? Does it take us back into a false past, or a truer one waiting to be liberated from the tyranny of history? For Kounellis, there are no easy answers; he is deeply suspicious of art history and its attempts to re- map the past on the basis of prevailing academic or art historical trends.

In place of ruling art historical orthodoxies, Kounellis advocates the process of ‘accumulation’ in the development of European art history. Thus, in conversation, he seizes on the example of Bernini’s Elephant and Obelisk in Rome, a singular monument that combines classical archaeology, Raphael’s designs and a baroque conceit in one solid mass. Bann’s gloss on Kounellis’s ‘accumulation’ is optimistic in tone, quoting T.S. Eliot’s ‘shoring up fragments’ against ruins, but it is difficult not to think of another commentator on the fragments of history, Walter Benjamin, whose angel of history witnesses the inexorable heaping up of debris, a deeply pessimistic symbol of progress. Indeed, perhaps Kounellis does not share Bann’s hope that ‘accumulation’ may suggest a possible way out of the current situation of postmodern fragmentation endlessly re-played. Kounellis’s critical itinerary seems to have petered out into an aporia or pathless path; he has not volunteered any further views on the critical destination of ‘accumulation’ since the 1979 interview.

Aporia is a term used in literary theory, but it could equally apply to the modernist art of the early twentieth-century, especially Malevich’s Black Square which Kounellis seems to have in mind in his interview when he declares that ‘the square totally eliminates the process of accumulation’. The Black Square looms large in a fascinating work of 1973, a black-painted canvas surrounded by eight fragments of plaster cast heads. Such a work might explain Kounellis’s respect for Caravaggio. According to Bann, the entry of ‘black space’, -a term borrowed from Louis Marin who describes Caravaggio’s studio as a tomb- into the painting is the result of a tendency seeking to banish objects from the picture to the outside. To this reviewer, Kounellis’s black square surrounded by classical masks, suggests aporia and silence, although Bann chooses to interpret it as a way of opening up the void of modern art to new viewing perspectives. Paradoxically, this depends upon the elimination of perspectival space within the picture which is replaced by ‘the representation of a single instant’, a Medusa-like moment in which time is petrified, an idea that Bann schematically extends to the female heads surrounding Kounellis’s black square.

So, does Kounellis’s voyage turn into a kind of paralysis, the antithesis of all this restless travelling and searching represented in the ceaseless play of projects and ideas? Such a view is held by Gloria Moure, one of Kounellis’s commentators, who sees Kounellis’s project as a ‘peregrination without an itinerary’. This view is clearly untenable to Bann since it casts Kounellis in the role of a postmodern wanderer with ‘no direction home’, thus ill fitting the thesis of a ‘Mediterranean’ artist concerned with the question of origins. Whatever one’s reservations about Bann’s conclusions, it is indisputable that he has constructed a new account of the modernist artistic voyage, which will surely inspire work on the subject of both Kounellis and contemporary art in the future.… (mehr)