Paradise Circus: Sprüche und Widersprüche

by Gianluca Ranzi

Sayings and contradictions, nature is not in what you think of it but

in how you think of it. The “flock of independent spirits,” as per

Harold Rosenberg’s definition of the New York School, can bring

together men and animals, Mice and Men, provided we think of life not

only as harmony, but also as contradiction, decentralization and conflict.

Pirandello in his Henry IV, Act I: “Life is full of absurdities, which

brazenly do not even need to seem veracious; for they are true…”. Instead

of circumscribing the discourse on Markus Willeke’s Paradise Circus,

why then not have it deflagrate into a flock of un-reasoning notes that

do not seek completeness and systematicity, but prefer a form of chaotic

disorder? Chaos in Hesiod’s Theogony, is the original place, it’s the

moment from which the elements and the first beings of the cosmos, the

animals, originated, taking shape by clumping with transparent colours

on the wrinkled texture of the paper of life.

(One could try to start with irony): Difficult…after all, circumscribing the

discourse on Willeke’s painting is like being a mosquito in a nudist camp,

one knows what to do but not where to start.

(Perhaps a personal memory? ): It must have been 2001, on a frosty Berlin

night, passing by an illuminated gallery window on Tucholskystrasse, when

the colours of a large painting by Willeke caught my eye, one of those

surprises so sudden that they almost make one wince: the icy wind suddenly

ceasing to be felt and the nose finding itself glued to the glass, savouring the

liquid shapes of those bright colours, fluid and warm as if they were sips of

Laphroaig, those spirited South Park characters, benevolent and devilish

together. For there is no firmness of place in the artist’s work: the saying

coexists with its contradiction.

(Maybe historicize?): Animals and the circus: first there was Apollinaire,

with his Les Saltimbanques, accompanying Picasso and Jacob to the

Medrano, and then Léger in the 1950s, with his Cirque where drawings and

words were flowing together like the rapids of a river. Léger was already

an ecologist: “Un chêne que l’on peut détrouire en vìngt secondes met un

siècle à repousser”, until Calder’s circus, with its carriages and big top,

finally arrived: feverish lines and free scribbles drawn through the air by

bending iron wire. In Willeke’s work animals often return, with that strange

mirroring power of theirs, materializing drives as it had been with the

South Park series. Circus Paradise makes life and death, individual and

species, nature and culture, emotion and repulsion, aggression and docility,

dance embraced. In the artist’s personal zoological catalogue these aspects

are made to play until they tip over each other, swap and blur. Here what

we see is often only what we think we see: a trap-picture that challenges

the viewer’s reading.

(Bartleby The Scrivener flashes into my mind): Beginning with the

manipulation of his subjects, the distance from his sources and from the

original context, Willeke de-territorializes images. The animals here, just

as Melville’s Bartleby does, do not reject and do not accept, advance and

retreat, according to a formula that is devastating because it eliminates the

preferable and any non-preferred. Willeke stages an endgame that remains

open-ended, a filmic script without nexus that provides different endings

depending on who is watching. Animals for animals and no longer animals

for humans, animals for painting, art as art, for here a bee stings like a

black on black by Ad Reinhardt and a frog has all of Constable’s clouds on

its back. The hyena peeps into a zone of indeterminacy, the fox is a canoe

floating in nothingness: they create a vacuum in language, animals without

punctuation, a Circus Paradise in which every move is possible and in the

end the tamer will be mauled by the big bear, and he will like that infinitely!

(Floating around the text): Animals isolated and floating in the void of the

paper sheet, suspended, even from human projections. Friends and foes,

innocent and guilty, meek and ruthless, duplicity and ambiguity, language

resonates in the void, along with the cut-out of a film caption that makes

image out of a noise, turns it into a deaf word, reading its silence. As in

Schiele, these figures do not have Bergsonian cadences, they don’t follow

a progression, do not have evolutionary linearity. Willeke’s animals are

suspended, bound to an instant, to a frame that crushes them onto the skin

of paint, onto the iridescent play of watercolour ink. Willeke here uses his

sensitivity to capture a condition whose contradictory pleasure comes from

the loss of thereassurance of photographic classification. Because nature

has neither innocence nor perversion and what remains on the scene are

the bodies, framed or pushed to the border, protagonist or extra, restored to

new life by the artist’s colours and brush.

(I provoke with Rilke’s middle spaces and Poltergeist): Compounded by the

dazzling beauty of Willeke’s painting, everything counts and nothing counts,

beginnings and endings remain open and everything seems to become

possible simply by skimming the surface of the paper with your gaze, just

as when Carol Anne, the little girl in the horror fantasy film Poltergeist,

stares at the television screen to open wide a suspended threshold to the

world of the possible/impossible. Live to live, express to express, play to

play, without practical or functional aim. I think of each of these animals

and I’m reminded of Rilke in the first of the Duino Elegies: “Yet, when

alone, we entertained ourselves with what alone endures, we would stand

there in the infinite space that spans the world…”.

(One more encounter with a Willeke work on a Berlin street…): Walking

along a sidewalk a huge billboard shows a sparrow floating in the emptiness

of the white background. It is not a photograph but a black-and-white

drawing of monumental size. There are more questions than certainties.

But is that sparrow alive or dead? Is it languishing? Is it jumping to fly

away? What is that drawing doing on a billboard, with no writing and no

background? What is it for? Who put it there?

(I could play the part of the historian of philosophy): There can be no

separation and isolation; animals depend on the photosynthesis of plants

and these on the carbon dioxide produced by animals and microorganisms,

thus regulating the entire biosphere and making life possible. Animals

kill, even cruelly, and they carry blood on their paws and snout as

Willeke’s polar bear does after eating. As Hegel reminds us, they kill to

feed themselves, while humans do it to gain recognition of their power

and the idiotic presumption of their superiority. Heidegger wrote as early

as 1927 that man has changed his perception of nature from a home

in which to live to a source of raw materials to be exploited, moving

“from use to exploitation” of land and animals. And Günther Anders:

“Humanity that treats the world as a commodity to be thrown away will

eventually treat humanity itself as something to be thrown away.” How

can we not see all this under the lights of the big top of Paradise Circus,

with its animals and guns and the Shell logo that becomes Hell? Paradise,

after all, is underlain by Hell. Paradise Lost or Paradise Regained, which

one of Milton’s poem awaits us in the future?

(What about Goethe to end it all, to the tune of the Massive Attack?),

“Nature! It surrounds us. Without being begged and without warning, she

ravishes us into the vortex of her dance and let go with us, until weary we

fall from her arms. We live in her bosom and are strangers to her; nothing

matters to her about individuals. She always builds and always destroys;

she knows neither past nor future. The present is its eternity.” These are

Goethe’s words, but today it’s Willeke who places them in image, showing

how everything is connected. In this Paradise Circus we’re both actors

and spectators, its big top is the sky over our heads. This world has the

oblique gaze of the hyena and resonates of another Paradise Circus, the

one by the Massive Attack: “Oh well, the devil makes us sin, but we love

it when we’re spinning in his grip.” The show has begun, the end is a

surprise and it may be closer than we expect. Soon we’ll find out, as soon

as the penguins tidily leave the stage.