Some notes on Per Kirkebys black tables by Bo Nilsson Among modern artists, Per Kirkeby is as close as you can get to a full-blooded Renaissance figure. He is a many-faceted artist who expresses himself through architecture, the visual arts, and writing. If you add to this his versatility in his use of artistic media such as painting, sculpture, drawing and graphics, his achievements looks even more impressive. But that is not all. Within each of these media there are subsections emanating from a specific material and its precise means of expression. Kirkeby works with distinctive artistic lines of production, one next to the other. But sometimes the lines get crossed, which leads to a very special dynamics. The black tables are an example of such cross-fertilization. The black tables have a complex identity. They oscillate between painting and drawing, with graphic dimensions. They are unlike anything else in Kirkebys production. The black tables have their roots in Renaissance thinking. Their designation does not as one might think stem from a painting tradition, but from the word for table, tavola. However, not any old table, but a very special table, which was employed in the service of the new science. In the world of medicine the table was used for dissections of the anatomy of the human body. To give anatomy students in the traditional lecture halls a better view, it was discovered that one might tilt the table so that the students could better follow what went on at the table. The spatial displacement from the horizontal to the vertical occasioned by this move made the table look almost like a picture. The black table also developed into the blackboard, which all we who belong to the older generation know as a classroom aid. The origin of the artistic use of the black table is teaching. In the beginning of the last century the Swiss anthroposopher Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925) gave more than 5000 lectures to his disciples in anthroposophy all over Europe. He used black tables as an educational aid to teach classical cosmology, nuclear theory, new ideas of colour, light and energy. A large number of the annotations on the black tables were preserved for posterity. Steiners black tables have a complexity of text and image, which is almost indecipherable even for the most initiated connoisseurs of Steiner. We have reason to believe that they were canonized by his disciples as relics bearing witness to the genius of the master. I do not think that these tables were originally meant to be meaningful in themselves. I believe they should be seen as part of the choreography of Steiners teaching, visualising the charismatic teaching situation. It is this complexity, which has contributed to giving them status as art or at least artistic statements rather than aids in the search for knowledge. In practice they were also very important for the establishment of the abstract artistic idiom of Mondrian and Kandinsky. At the end of the 1960s, Joseph Beuys developed an interest in Rudolf Steiners black tables. It can hardly be doubted that this contributed to Steiners elevation to the rank of artist. Beuys was particularly interested in Steiners anthroposophy and how his teachings could be fitted into his own world picture. According to Beuys, it was an important task to develop art from a marginalized role in capitalist society to become an active social force with the ambition to emancipate mankind, teaching that within every human being there is an artist. Beuyss interest in teaching is particularly well documented through his professorship at the academy of art in Düsseldorf. His entire artistic work is one long process with its roots in actions where the artist himself teaches his audience in real time. There is a didactic element in Beuyss artistic endeavours and in his teaching which is linguistic rather than visual and often results in black tables containing postulates such as art = capitalism. Per Kirkebys black tables do not have their roots in a teaching situation as do both Steiners and Beuyss. In spite of the fact that Kirkebys black tables have not been produced in front of an audience, paradoxically they probably have a more open attitude and invite a dialogue with the viewer. Above all, Kirkeby uses an integrated pictorial idiom in his black tables. The synthesis of image and language is fluid and ephemeral rather than iconic as with Steiner and Beuys. It is as if Kirkebys pictures could be erased at any moment, in spite of the fact that they have undoubtedly been sprayed and fixed according to all the rules of the trade. But thus the creative moment is emphasized: it seems more electric than in the work of Steiner and Beuys. This could also bee seen as a scenario, which demands more participation from the viewer. There are didactic elements both in Steiners philosophical and religious anthroposophy and in Beuyss more socially oriented attitude, and these elements come to constitute a sort of creed. In Kirkebys synthesis of image and language there is a more ambivalent attitude to knowledge derived from a contemporary world picture, whose postulates do no longer seem as self-evident as the scientific ideals of former times. This uncertainty is becoming in our time when all definitive postulates are often disavowed before they have won scientific legitimacy. The background of this more cautious approach is in all likelihood Kirkebys multifaceted knowledge base. Kirkebys knowledge is derived from empirical studies of the sciences, historical studies of the role of art in different civilizations, individual and archetypical ideas of the humanities today, but extends even into the metaphysical field, the interest in which he shares with Steiner and Beuys. Kirkebys attitude could be called holistic as well as comprehensive. In the holistic perspective, which has become widely accepted in recent years reality appears as a complex combination of matter/spirit, history/past and science/poetry. Communicating vessels, as it were, working as a unit to establish the world picture of today. In the holistic paradigm it is not just a strong creator who pronounces on the state of affairs. The creator is also the first viewer of his own work, both emotionally and analytically. It places the creator at our side as a spectator. It is an engaging attitude, which changes us from passive viewers to participants in the all-encompassing dialogue in which all human beings today must take part.
Posted on: Wed, 19 Mar 2014 06:28:25 +0000
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