Artist: Manuel Knapp
For the past four years, Manuel Knapp’s artistic work has largely been determined by nature, the topos of the forest. To create his forest projections, he enters the forest in absolute darkness, preferably during the new moon, with a projector and camera, in order to project and record specially created b/w animations. Since then, however, the forest has also served as the “primal source” and conceptual figure of other works comprising the exhibition Non-Transient. Knapp’s forest projections as well as his metal objects and ink paintings have their basis in the forest, in a contemplative, process-oriented, and reflective way. The topos of the forest is not necessarily depicted in the works. Rather, the forest represents an expanded, radical, perceptual setting. It functions as a fundamental condition of seeing and, even more importantly, as an entity that broadens the familiar ontological order.
The forest as theme was by no means “planned” for Knapp; his way of thinking and seeing, as he himself describes, “landed” him in the forest, beyond cultural, social conventions such as those of the studio, the gallery, and institutions. On a friend’s property near Alland bei Klausen-Leopoldsdorf in Lower Austria, he found the opportunity to work undisturbed in the forest, even in total darkness, away from urban structures and routines.
For Knapp, the forest is not just a cultural-historical topos, a place of latent uncanniness, of danger, a place of a different order. It also harbors an archetypal dimension that transcends time. Knapp also thinks of entering a (dark) forest as fundamentally psychological experience. This was also why he wanted to better know and understand the nighttime blackness—which often even takes on a material quality. “Opening yourself up to the darkness,” says Knapp, “does something to you. You lose yourself in it but you also find yourself. You discover something different, see and hear different things because certain senses are switched off and others are activated.” The forest is not only a special space of augmented, and invariably fundamental perception, it is also a dimension that links times together, forming a relationship between what’s given and that which is becoming. Knapp’s fascination with a deep-night setting, one that enables a radical confrontation between the perceiving self and the world (faced with cosmic darkness, stars), is emblematic of a philosophical questioning about the existential relationship of the self to the world in existence since Greek antiquity.
Although none of the aforementioned nighttime forest projections are presented in the exhibition, the one-hour-long sound work In die Dunkelheit (Into the Darkness) confronts the viewer with darkness, albeit in an altered manner, or more precisely with the transition from day to night. In an unedited recording (field recording), Knapp exposes the viewer to the onset of darkness, the twilight in the forest. While natural sounds, especially the singing of birds, can still be heard at the beginning, the articulated happenings slowly give way to an almost noise-like continuum of moderate wind sounds. The listener, here a contemplative-imaginary observer, becomes a witness to the gradual transformation of the area of the forest that is audible. Apart from a few sounds of cracking and movement, the viewer is ultimately confronted solely with the silence of the dark forest. Contrary to the beginning of the audio piece, hardly any animal sounds can be heard. But appearances are deceptive. Even if ornithological communication falls silent, the forest at night, Knapp says, essentially belongs to the animals. It belongs to those creatures that can perceive in the dark. Or rather, those animals whose senses are equipped and adapted for the dark. Here the nighttime forest—almost as something elemental, as a space of natural sound—becomes an imaginary entity that seemingly defies the senses. In this respect, the sound work, in order to do justice to the theme of darkness, is perhaps even more direct and more related to its essential being than any visual or filmic attempt to capture its ultimately mystical character.
Manuel Knapp is primarily an experimental artist. He does not work towards a specific outcome that is directed, produced, i.e. designed, but instead creates a perceptual setting, an aesthetic framework—in this case the forest—in which he defines certain parameters and allows others to freely intersect and interact. He sees the artistic process at its core as a collaboration with the forest. With regards to the location and the “condition” of the forest, this also means exposing oneself to elementary conditions. Knapp leaves behind the secure and ostensibly neutral framework of the studio to work with the elements of the forest, with trees, wind, water, and sun. In doing so, he not only seemingly strives to access an expanded spatiality and temporality, but is also, in the truest sense of the word, seeking out dimensions and orders that transcend what’s given.
The square-shaped metal objects in the de anima series have their origins in sound experiments and working with metal plates, which Knapp, also active as a noise musician for many years, makes audible using piezo membranes. However, the process of grinding and polishing a heavily aged plate, which the artist was refurbishing in order to turn it into a resonating body, led him in a different, decidedly pictorial and object-like direction. The process of manually grinding and polishing the plate gave it a unique, very special mirror-like quality that became the basis for Knapp’s metal objects made of steel, brass, and copper.
The square-shaped mirror-objects made of metal plates ground in numerous passes are not to be misread as simple mirrors; rather, they represent “individualized” objects. Knapp grinds the metal plates with increasingly finer grains until an individual sheen develops. The plates feature geometric surface shapes, such as rectangles or squares, polished in part using a burin and then carefully buffed, creating a contrast with the surrounding matte raw metal. The respective metal not only reflects light, but also seems to have its own unique sheen. Each plate thus has its own reflection, its own “look.” The metal mirror thus takes on a life of its own, but its object status is by no means static; it also changes. It “remembers” every touch and ages through oxidation. Almost in an animistic sense, in that of a counterpart, the plate does something for the viewer, but also requires attention and care if it is to retain its aesthetic capabilities. In the sense of a medium that starts out pristine, one susceptible to showing residual traces and markings, it requires protection and “reprieve.” Knapp constructs, akin to a protective shell, a wooden case for one of the mirrors, in order to protect it but also so that the mirror-objects can be brought to different locations, to different settings. Ultimately, the case also serves as a resting spot for the metal mirror, as a place of reprieve, where it doesn’t have to be seen or viewed.
In such a mirror, you see and recognize yourself differently. Knapp’s mirror-objects always produce slight distortions. You see yourself, the world, in a more irregular, indistinct way, instigating reflection on what is being reflected. The characteristics of the mirror depend on the light but also the type of metal. The warmth of copper gives it a very personal, even intimate quality. The copper mirror in particular produces a view that seemingly goes deeper than mere superficial visibility. Steel, on the other hand, reflects differently, in a cooler and more sober way than copper or brass. The steel mirrors are also those that Knapp brings with him into nature, into the forest, so they their effects can be seen and viewed there.
Inherent to Knapp's mirror-objects is a fundamental questioning of first-order visibility. Precisely because the plates reflect what’s seen in latent, irregular ways, it becomes clear that it is not (any longer) about the superficiality of appearances, about banal forms of mirroring, of seeing and observing oneself, nor about forms of aestheticizing observation. Rather, a subtle space of difference is seemingly revealed between image (mirror image) and reality, a kind of ontological gap that is not to be compensated for by greater perfection (of reflection), but which points to other, deeper levels of seeing—in the sense of recognition.
The properties of the mirrors vary in indoor and outdoor spaces. In both cases, each plate seemingly presents the world in its own way. But while the indoor mirrors reflect a view of more personal things, including forms of the self, when outdoors, in nature, they create a space within space. Their effects unfold in ambivalent ways, in the contradictions of various spaces—of the visible and the invisible. Knapp’s metal mirrors are less visual mirrors than they are membranes that transcend visibility and relate different states of being in reality to one another. They form interfaces between physics and metaphysics. And yet they always contain a basic, simple instance of perception-based contemplation. Like a window onto another ontological order, the metal mirrors allow the here and now of what’s being reflected, what’s visible to enter into a relationship with its deeper essence. Knapp therefore understands the individual mirrors not as optical, aesthetic instruments, but rather as metaphysical membranes with inherently soulful qualities.
In the ink paintings of the de natura series, Knapp confronts the viewer with excerpts from a painterly process that takes place not only in nature, but with it. Knapp works here with all aspects and elements found in the “setting” of the forest; he works with light, wind, branches, but also with the heat of the sun. Here, the artist is not an articulate subject who uses the material, but rather, in a manner typical of Knapp’s experimentalist approach, creates conditions in which the existing, given forces and agents interact and interfere with each other.
The painting, which always starts out being sprinkled with water, ink, and at times oil while laid flat, undergoes various stages. The dispersal of the paint, for example by painting with branches, is probably most reminiscent of painting in a classical sense. The reapplication of water onto/into the drying ink also adds an international quality. Apart from these rather invasive interactions, however, Knapp also makes use of the effects of gravity, which affects the running or drying of the paint, e.g. by slowly moving the painting around. He also works with the effect of the sun, which heats the deep black ink up significantly, thus strongly impacting the look of the painting, and also works with the wind, which influences the color process. Here, the genesis of the image is seemingly left more and more to the autopoiesis of natural influences and processes, whereas the subject recedes into the background.
Underneath the black ink covering large parts of the picture when laid flat, under the dark mirror effect showing the reflected trees when working in the forest, the work seemingly paints itself, partly in the manner of a "blind painting.” Evaporation accelerates the drying of the blackness of the ink. Lighter, watery areas dry much more slowly and thus remain lighter. In this respect, one could certainly speak of a certain “burning in” of the darkness. The final work, which only becomes visible after rinsing and drying, thus resembles more of an uncovering, a kind of excavation, than a directed, formed pictorial phenomena.
Manuel Knapp describes the moment in which the work is stood upright and the not-yet-dried or absorbed paint is washed off as radical, as a cessation and freezing of the process. With this cut in time, the genesis of the painting is arrested and, as it were, fixed. This impetus requires courage, given its irreversibility and finality, which ultimately reflects and accumulates fundamental questions about the work. The question of the “right” moment soon leads to the question of what, the question of form, of the shape. But such premises are not reflected in Knapp’s work. The artist does not create, does not articulate, but rather seeks a dialogue with materials and nature. The courage is thus equally about allowing, thus suppressing his own intention. And yet this is not about the dissolution of authorship, of the intentional. Rather, Knapp creates an aesthetic framework for action in order to pursue the dialectic, even partial contradictory nature of doing and not doing, of form and non-form. This is not about negating the self, but rather about wrestling with the limitations created by the very agency of the will, as well as the limitations of the gaze, which, in hasty anticipation of one’s own internal rules regarding “successful” form, the “good” image, often sacrifices the spiritual qualities of seeing and recognizing. In this respect, Knapp is not at all interested in repetition, let alone in achieving a certain form. On the contrary, where something “successful” appears, a shift, a displacement of the activity must occur immediately, precisely in order to not hold on to what has been successful, or in the worst case the desire to repeat it. The individual tableau is therefore never a designed image, but an extract of complex, intertwining processes, first of the physical (gravity), the chemical, then of the non-directed, autopoietic, and finally of the invisible, transcendent. The tableaux are therefore neither an écriture automatique of nature nor subjective action, they occur in the field of interactions between subject and nature/world, intention and non-intentionality (non-directedness). Knapp understands nature as a magnitude and order that invites him to work with it. His painting is a dialogic-indexical writing and painting with the forest, with the conditions of nature. This is not about an either/or, but about the interweaving of opposites, of process and form, action and contemplation, form/order and chaos (noise), the material and the spiritual. Ultimately, the artist is concerned with a fundamental sense of freedom, a freedom that does not pertain to the individual, to mere will, but to his encounter and relationship with nature, with the world.
From the viewer's perspective, Knapp’s pictures reveal complex, dense structural occurrences and formations that often overwhelm the eye, oscillating between micro and macro structures, between closeness and distance, sharpness and indeterminacy. Any attempt to encounter the structural occurrences with familiar ordering schemes and spatial concepts (physics, triaxiality), to reify them, amounts to nothing and is doomed to failure. The pictorial, extremely evocative b/w formations refuse to be pinned down, to be ascribed a clear interpretation. They reveal themselves as something that has come into being, not something that has been created; they are not articulations that have been placed into the picture and worked, but rather structures and figurations that have come into being.
From the standpoint of reception aesthetics, there is simply no final image here; the gaze can invariably anchor itself elsewhere and continue reading. Visibility occurs spontaneously, in situ—reflecting, as it were, the dialectic of action and contemplation in Knapp’s aesthetic undertaking. The sense of sight functions here to a substantial extent as an independent instrument, as a productive force. Far removed from any arbitrariness or mere coincidence, it is about producing a visibility of things and forces that elude the immediacy of perception, that have more to do with the nature of the elements and forces that Knapp collaborates with here, with forest, gravity, wind, sun. The image seems to extend outward toward the invisible, the fundamental, toward a dimension that transcends matter (and nature). The question of the authorship, creativity, shifts subtly and yet radically in the direction of the mystical, nature, the world.
Knapp’s works are not about mere limits of perception. Rather, they make use of the edges and extremes of perception to provoke forms of ontological regroupings. In this sense, his forest and metal works evince radically perceptive configurations in order to reflect on the order of things but also to put existential categories of greater depth up for discussion. Viewed in this way, forest, light, and darkness are not perceptual phenomena, things that can be seen and quantified. For Knapp, they represent phenomena that he understands in a primary way, like elements, and his experimental configurations call into question their essence, indeed their meaning, in an aesthetically direct, aestheticological way.
Knapp's works enable the viewer to apprehend their own relationship to perception and being as permeable and challenging, as one that is never certain or given. The works strive for an expanded, permeable, and yet invariably reciprocal relationship between perception and the visible, between visible and invisible. These works are by no means solely concerned with sensorial aspects, perception, or liminality, but rather, via an expanded perception provoked by changes in sensory phenomena—indeed perception itself—about the moment of transcendence in seeing and perceiving. Nothing is in the mind that has not previously been perceived by the senses (Thomas Aquinas). But it is also true here that what the senses pick up appears immediately in perception as an abstraction, as a noumenon, as a domain that per se eludes (once again) immediate perception.
Text: David Komary
Translation: Erik Smith
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