Annette Tietenberg Desiring machines from the vast expanse of space

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Annette Tietenberg
Desiring machines from the vast expanse of space
“I would like to have a robot who
would say good morning, how
beautiful you are, I love you.”
Kiki Kogelnik
In the universe, there is no up and there is no down. Thinking outside of the Cartesian system of
coordinates is difficult, even for space travellers. Richard Buckminster Fuller, for example, reported
that the NASA astronaut Charles Pete Conrad, who—as part of the Apollo 12 mission—was the third
person ever to step on the moon, went down in history when he radioed to the world that he was “up
here on the moon”. The US president congratulated him subsequently on the trip “up to the moon and
back down to earth again”.1
Planets, satellites and stars are perpetually in motion; they rotate upon their own axes and orbit one
another. Not everybody can visualise these alternating constellations in infinite space. Kiki Kogelnik,
who commuted her whole life between New York, Vienna and Bleiburg, and was therefore always “on
the move” as Peter Noever describes her,2 doesn’t seem to have had any difficulty in painting the
vastness of space, black holes, red giants, white dwarfs, wormholes and globular clusters. For one, that
may be to do with the fact that she was captivated by that time-specific enthusiasm for space travel,
which prompted artists, such as Robert Indiana, Robert Rauschenberg and Mel Bochner in the 1960s,
to turn to the story of NASA, rocket launches or the aesthetics of planetaria. Furthermore, Kiki
Kogelnik never forgot the stories that she heard as a child in Bleiburg and Klagenfurt, tales which told
of transformations, the transcendence of time and space, as well as supernatural powers. And so when
describing how she broke free from the strictures of the Vienna art circle after having finished her art
degree at the academy, it was not by chance she chose the metaphorical language of a fairy tale
metamorphosis: “Vienna was the centre of the world, you almost never went outside it, because all the
important things happened here. This city shaped my early life, this is where I learnt to breathe. Until
one day I ate something forbidden and suddenly grew wings.”3
The sensations of floating, flying and transformation that a person experiences when he or she is
released from the fetters of gravity and plunges into the sphere of infinity, be it that of the universe or
of his or her own imaginative powers, constitute the central themes of art in the 1960s, whether they
1
Cf. R. Buckminster Fuller: “Das totale Kommunikationssystem des Menschen”, in: Buckminster Fuller,
Bedienungsanleitung für das Raumschiff Erde und andere Schriften, ed., Joachim Krausse. (Dresden, 1998), p.
126.
2
Peter Noever, “Commedia dell’arte, die Komödie der Kunst”, in: Kiki Kogelnik. Retrospektive 1935-1997, exh.
cat., Österreichische Galerie Belvedere im Oberen Belvedere. (Vienna/Cologne/Weimar 1998), p. 141.
3
Kiki Kogelnik: Preis der Stadt Wien, 1995. In: Kiki Kogelnik. Retrospektive 1935-1997, exh. cat.,
Österreichische Galerie Belvedere im Oberen Belvedere. (Vienna/Cologne/Weimar 1998), p. 160.
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are labelled Pop Art, psychedelic art or space art.4 Kiki Kogelnik wanted to take off as well. Otherwise
she wouldn’t have allowed herself to be photographed with a headsquare adorned with the silhouette
of an aeroplane rather than Che’s ubiquitous, five-pointed star of revolution. Surrounded by
shimmering silver sequins on a black background and reminiscent of Yayoi Kusama’s “polka dots”,
but also as a kind of profane version of the night sky full of stars, the aeroplane is taking off vertically
in the air. The artist’s gaze is drifting off questioningly into the distance. Is she dreaming, like so many
musicians, artists and filmmakers from her generation, of boldly exploring new galaxies, which no one
has ever seen before?
Already in 1962, long before millions of viewers avidly watched the Apollo 11 mission on television
and the enthusiasm for the rocket-propelled expansion of the human sphere for activity and thought
had reached its zenith, Kiki Kogelnik began to comment critically upon the connection between the
adoration of technology and the mindset of conquest. With her “Bombs in Love” —a daring
construction comprising missile casings decommissioned by the army—she abandoned the illusional
spatial gradations of her early painting and, in New York, turned to “a trade traditionally characterised
by a profoundly virile stylisation—namely that of sculpture”,5 thus akin to Eva Hesse.6 This vertical
montage that not only underlines the phallic, cylindrical missile casings, but also the formal similarity
with the conventional rocket shape, is an unequivocal reminder that the achievements of the space age
come at a high price, namely an increasingly technologised arms race under the auspices of the cold
war. Nevertheless, the way in which Kiki Kogelnik installs the missiles in pairs, not only envisions the
horror of mutually assured destruction, but also a cheerful flight of erotic fantasy. For Kogelnik has
veritably defused the missiles with a series of dangling hearts and seductively shiny bells, readying
them for love by the application of stencilled legs spread wide apart. Characterised by colour and the
raw charm of bricolage, they duly enter the universe of a form of art not restricted merely to “retinal
art” that owes its volatility to the marriage of the readymade with the erotic dimension of technology,
very much in the vein of Marcel Duchamp and his reception by American Pop Art.7
It may well be a coincidence that Kiki Kogelnik’s sculpture “Bombs in Love” was devised in the very
year8 when the Soviet Union succeeded in its “space rendezvous”, with the manned space flights
Vostok 3 and Vostok 4: two spaceships simultaneously circled in space and approached within a few
kilometres of one another. However, the timing here is definitely telling, for Kiki Kogelnik’s thinking
4
Cf. Nicola Tiscott/Rob La Frenais, eds., Zero Gravity: A Cultural User’s Guide (Gent, 2005).
Benjamin Buchloh, “Einheimisch, Unheimlich, Fremd: wider das Deutsche in der Kunst?”, in: Kasper König,
ed., von hier aus. 2 Monate neue deutsche Kunst in Düsseldorf, exh. cat. Düsseldorfer Messehallen. (Cologne,
1984), pp. 162-179, here p. 168.
6
Cf. Annette Tietenberg, Konstruktionen des Weiblichen. Eva Hesse – ein Künstlerinnenmythos des 20.
Jahrhunderts (Berlin, 2005).
7
Cf. Hal Foster: “Die Crux des Minimalismus”, in: Gregor Stemmrich, ed., Minimal Art. Eine kritische
Retrospektive (Dresden/Basel, 1995), pp. 589-626, here p. 619 ff.
8
The sculpture was devised in 1962. Therefore it cannot refer to the Vietnam War. This conflict escalated in
August 1964 with the provocation that took place at the Gulf of Tonkin. The slogan “Make Love not War” was
not coined until 1967.
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about her art—as a European artist living in New York—was closer to the utopias of Russian cosmism
which resonated with Suprematism than to American colonially-minded, conquest-driven fantasies.
Indeed, J. F. Kennedy, in his speech on 25 May, 1961 entitled “New Frontier”, effectively couched US
space exploration in the language of the pioneers and settlers of the Wild West, attempting thus to
revive the mentality of the Founding Fathers. By contrast, the parameters of Soviet space policy in the
1960s also drew upon the dreams of freedom that the Russian rocket pioneer Konstantin Eduardovich
Tsiolkovsky propounded in 1883 in the treatise entitled “Free Space”. For Tsiolkovsky, the cosmos
was an invitation to embrace weightlessness. The geologist Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky argues in
the same vein; his essay entitled “The Scientific Idea as a Planetary Manifestation” published in 1939,
speaks of a noosphere, which is capable of producing “planetary consciousness”. It was his hope that
through space travel, man would not be lifted “upwards” spatially speaking, but elevated onto a
completely new evolutionary plane.9 Whereas NASA was planning the conquest of Mars10 and
fomented fears of an imminent defensive war against hostile extraterrestrials,11 there was still a
glimmer of romanticism in the no less bellicose Soviet space program (Wojenno Kosmitscheskije Silui)
in the mid-twentieth-century: by breaking into the cosmos, as Vernadsky phrophesied, time and space,
disease and death could be overcome for all time and the goal of globally reconciled humanity become
a palpable reality.12
Kiki Kogelnik’s “Pop-Related Paintings”13 tackled in 1963, exude a similarly effusive optimism.
Astronauts’ helmets, planets and body parts commingle in a wild, garish relational maelstrom in which
categories, such as “high and low” are invalid. Two- and three-dimensional anthropomorphic figures
float and glide through the universe. They touch, divide and duplicate themselves without fear of loss
or transformation. They allow atoms, rockets, suns and planets to penetrate their molecular structure,
they change colour, shape and aggregate state seemingly effortlessly. For Kogelnik, all-over painting
is much more than just a painterly principle. It is a highly sensitive foil, a kind of interface which is
capable of receiving and transmitting signals from space via every sensory channel. Kogelnik’s allover paintings by no means reproduce earthly boundaries: they are neither geographical nor national,
neither hierarchical nor gender-specific. They sound the clarion call to universal love, a love which
neither excludes nor monopolises. And where else should this unfold but in the vast expanses of space
9
Cf. Vladimir I. Vernadskij, “Der Mensch in der Biosphäre”, ed., Wolfgang Hofkirchner (Frankfurt am Main,
Berlin, Bern, New York, Paris, Vienna, 1997). In the USA, the notion of ‘planetary consciousness” enjoyed
more resonance than in the NASA control centres. Gene Roddenberry, the director of the pop pot-pourri of myth
that constitutes the original series of Star Trek (1966-1969), drew on the Soviet model of friendship between
nations, multiculturalism and a classless society. Cf. Andreas Rauscher, Das Phänomen Star Trek. Virtuelle
Räume und metaphorische Welten (Mainz, 2003), p. 56 ff.
10
The foundations for these ideas had already been laid during the Second World War. Cf. Wernher von Braun,
Das Marsprojekt. Studie einer interplanetarischen Expedition (Frankfurt am Main, 1952); Ray Bradbury, The
Martian Chronicles (New York, 1950).
11
Cf. Tommaso Pincio, Die Außerirdischen. Der größte Mythos des 20. Jahrhunderts (Berlin, 2007).
12
Cf. Vladimir I. Vernadskij, ibid..
13
Cf. Kiki Kogelnik, Monographie, with contributions by Arnulf Rohsmann, Jan E. Adlmann et al.
(Klagenfurt,1989), p. 23 ff.
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and in the passageway of art. As The Beatles put it, “All You Need is Love, Love”. And what is the
title of Kiki Kogelnik’s leitmotiv? “Falling In Love Again” (1962). As green as hope itself, she has
written the words in spidery verses inside a red heart.
The debate as to whether Pop Art was an affirmation or a critique of product aesthetics and consumer
culture14 has effectively skewed alternative perspectives of the genre to this day. According to her own
statements, Kogelnik was not particularly fond of the egalitarian spirit of Pop which defined itself
through brands and prompted Andy Warhol to comment: “A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money
can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same
and all the Cokes are good.”15 By contrast, Kogelnik confessed without much ado that a fizzy drink
wasn’t enough for her, but instead she considered that the start of a better future lay in the present:
“I’m not involved with Coca-Cola ... I am involved in the technical beauty of rockets, people flying in
space and people becoming robots.”16
One might call this euphoria a trifle naïve, bursting onto the scene as it did in the 1960s in the fields of
art, architecture and design, and unleashing a wave of enthusiasm for new materials and machines.
However, one should not frivolously log it as embarrassing and exclude it from the debate, otherwise
there might not be much left over of the art from the 1960s, other than its market value and a simple
sequence of styles which can be cited as sources for the forming of tradition in contemporary art.17
Even if there was much talk superficially about the technological innovations of the twentieth century,
the Pop era was concerned with nothing less than the expansion of consciousness – and thereby the
development of what Vernadsky had once called “planetary consciousness”. For example, the designer
Paco Rabanne, who was able to rivet and weld clothes with a space-age look using Rhodoid,
fibreglass, aluminium and steel, recalls that he discovered “an immaterial world” that “was juxtaposed
with our world in the best meaning of the words ‘magical universe’. A close-knit nexus of
relationships existed between both worlds, these two different vibrational levels; one was traced from
the other so that the world felt like a hologram to me, i.e. my body in its infinite microcosm was an
image of the cosmos in its infinite vastness.”18
Like Richard Buckminster Fuller or Paco Rabanne, Kiki Kogelnik was also at pains to perceive her
own physical body in a cosmic context, to comprehend physicality and psyche as an energetic unity.
She counters the uniformity, functionality and smoothness of technologically manufactured objects
from the machine age in the manner of a trickster, by clearly highlighting their manifestly handmade
and improvised aspects. Indeed, Kogelnik brought heterogeneous subject-objects to life with her
14
Cf. Thomas Crow, Die Kunst der sechziger Jahre. Von der Pop-Art zu Yves Klein und Joseph Beuys
(Cologne,1997); Was ist Pop? Zehn Versuche, eds., Walter Grasskamp, Michaela Krützen and Stephan Schmitt
(Frankfurt am Main, 2004); Thomas Hecken, Pop. Geschichte eines Konzepts 1955-2009 (Bielefeld, 2009).
15
Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and back again) (London and New York, 2007),
p. 101.
16
Kiki Kogelnik, in The Fashions (New York, 1966), quoted from: Petra Schröck, “Short Cuts. Die inszenierte
Bilderwelt der Kiki Kogelnik”, in: Kiki Kogelnik. Retrospektive 1935-1997. exh. cat., Österreichische Galerie
Belvedere im Oberen Belvedere. (Vienna, Cologne, Weimar, 1998), pp. 27-36, here p. 31.
17
Mike Kelley refers to the fact that the 1960s were declared to be the ‘dark ages’ in the USA in retrospect. Cf.
Mike Kelley, “Tod und Verklärung. Ein Brief aus Amerika”, in: Texte zur Kunst 8 (December, 1992), pp. 43-49.
18
Paco Rabanne, Das Ende unserer Zeit. Aufbruch in das Wassermann-Zeitalter (Munich, 1996), p. 22.
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sculptures, such as “Lover Boy” and “Spaceship” (both 1963), that deny neither their mechanistic nor
affective provenance. Félix Guattari fittingly called such constructions the desiring machines, indeed
“machine désirante”19 that “open up far beyond the body and familial relations to social and cosmic
ensembles and all types of universes”.20
What happens to the desiring machines when these desires are fulfilled? It is hardly surprising that
Kiki Kogelnik’s space art phase, which essentially fed upon comic figures endowed with supernatural
powers and a collection of toy robots, came to an end at the very moment man first walked upon the
moon. Kogelnik, who had decided upon a hovering, floating existence, considered all types of
landings suspect. Accordingly, she staged a “Moonhappening” on July 20, 1969 in the Galerie Nächst
St. Stephan in Vienna. As Neil Armstrong uttered the pathos-filled words “that’s one small step for [a]
man, one giant leap for mankind”, which Norman Mailer had penned for him, Kogelnik followed the
proceedings on television. She translated what the men on the TV screen were saying into written
images in real time: “I can see my footprints.” Peter Noever recalls: “I met her for the first time when
she staged her ‘Moonhappening’ at the Galerie Nächst St. Stephan on the occasion of the Apollo 11
moon landing which was being transmitted live on a set of monitors: she produced screen prints
featuring the first words spoken by the astronauts, in synch with the phases of the landing as it was
actually unfolding. This game with what was currently happening, so typical for Kiki, showed me for
the first time something, which subsequently would be confirmed frequently, namely that she never
confined art into disciplines or categories and that her work was perpetually a part of an overall
strategy, a large, self-renewing experiment in which life and art are inextricably combined.”21
Ubiquity, convergence and consonance of sound, image and text, the temporal coincidence of image
production and reception, but also the loss of experience in the here and now—all of these perceptual
conditions ushered in by the media age were reflected by Kogelnik in “Moonhappening”.22 It could
certainly have continued in this manner, had Kogelnik striven for a career as a media artist. No sooner
had she, along with 600 million others, been witness to a process, during the course of which
weightlessness mutated into a cultural spectacle, than she bade farewell to space travel. However, it
must be said, she did not take her leave of “planetary consciousness”. For the cycle of works entitled
“Womans Lib”, she picked up her scissors and turned to the question of gender categorisation—and
thereby the idealisation of the body as a spatially delimited whole.23 There are photographs of her
actually performing “gender”, on one occasion clad in authoritative evening dress, or at another time
19
Kiki Kogelnik’s “desiring machines” were introduced into the consumer world of Pop in order to promote the
desire to buy. They were used in the window display of the New York department store Bergdorf-Goodman.
20
Félix Guattari, “On Machines”, www.apomechanes.com/readings/OnMachinesFelixGuattari.pdf
21
Peter Noever, “Commedia dell’arte, die Komödie der Kunst”, in: Kiki Kogelnik. Retrospektive 1935-1997.
exh. cat., Österreichische Galerie Belvedere im Oberen Belvedere. (Vienna, Cologne, Weimar, 1998), p. 141.
22
Cf. Thomas Miessgang, “Kiki Kogelnik”, in: Gerald Matt and Angela Stief, eds., Power up. Female Pop Art,
exh. cat. Vienna Kunsthalle (Vienna, 2011), pp. 185-186.
23
Cf. Judith Butler, Bodies that matter. On the discursive limits of ‘sex’ (New York, London, 1993).
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wearing a white costume rather like a clown. The signature, at one time the guarantee of identity,
becomes an ornament adorning the ankle: KIKIKIKIKIKI. How else could it be? The universe knows
no beginning and no end.