Bernd Künzig: Steinskulptur – Steinlandschaft 2007
Bernd Künzig: Introductory speech at the opening of the exhibition “Jochen Kitzbihler, Steinskulptur - Steinlandschaft”, Gallery in the Artforum, Offenburg 2007
I would like to open with a question: What is the material of a sculpture? There doesn't seem to be a clear answer to this at the moment, because sculpture and sculptural thinking are currently on the rise because they no longer adhere to material specifications. Everything seems to be possible: from sand, melting wax and moldy bread to bales of old clothes and synthetic materials. Instead, it is more about concrete images that can be created with these different materials. Sculpture today is narrative and substantive - something of an anti-traditionalist and yet also somewhat conservative. In contrast, sculpture oriented towards classical abstraction seems to have a difficult time because, in contrast to so much openness, it is still oriented towards the concept of material. This position thus seems to embody a tradition. But even the anti-tradition is not possible without its opposite, because it rubs up against it and works against it.
Anyone who even superficially perceives Jochen Kitzbihler's stone sculptures will quickly realize that his sculptural thinking stems from the tradition of the material discussion. It is a continuation of classical positioning without being traditionalist. After all, what would a traditional sculptor be other than a descendant of Michelangelo? The beautiful story is told of the latter that he had already chosen the material in the quarry according to what was present in him: one of those titanic colossal figures with which Michelangelo went down in the history of the image of the individual. What was once recognized in the stone only had to be uncovered, carved out. In this context, Jochen Kitzbihler is an anti-traditionalist, because he is by no means interested in carving. Rather, he is an artist of leaving things as they are, who only approaches a material with extremely cautious gestures, which apparently cannot be confronted with restraint at all. The titanic, ingenious struggle with the material leads to the colossal, which is also not Jochen Kitzbihler's thing. In respect for what is given, the opposite of the so significantly European subjugation and mastery of the material can be recognized. Auguste Rodin dreamed of stone sculpture as Michelangelo's ruin by returning the figure to the quarry. Jochen Kitzbihler, on the other hand, never came out of the quarry because he already thinks and understands it as a sculpture. For him, removing the stone from the quarry is already a sculptural gesture in the original sense, which means nothing other than a subtractive process of removal. The further this process of removal is taken, the more emptiness is created. It is therefore not form that is the objective of the sculptural process, but emptiness. To think in this way is to exchange the Western concept of artificial creation with that of the Far East, where emptiness, not fullness, is at the center of the debate. Form is only a means to grasp this emptiness, to give it a vessel.
Such a mindset ultimately becomes clear when looking at the stone sculpture “Clap of a hand”. The massive presence of the black stone reveals the strategy of leaving things as they are: the stone is a found object, as it was cut from the quarry. This seemingly mechanical, industrial cut is a sculptural gesture of removal, to which the two half boron holes left at the edge refer. The surface of the stone is accurately polished smooth. The largest part of this polished surface is taken up by a depression that forms a basin for water. It is an empty space that is filled with the opposite character of the stone: the supple water meets the hardness of the stone, and yet gives an indication of the geological process by which the water gives the stone the form to which Jochen Kitzbihler refers with his shaped empty space of the water surface: “Constant dripping hollows the stone".
The surface filled with water is a gentle breath compared to the present body of the stone, which nevertheless proves to be of abysmal depth. The surface of the water not only acts as a mirror of the surrounding space in which the body of the stone is located, but rather absorbs it as if it had penetrated the interior of the stone and lends it a depth that is not present, but is inscribed as the appearance of another space. It is minimalist gestures that prove to be highly effective: the cutting of the stone from the quarry, the grinding of the surface and finally the filling of water that give rise to a sculpture whose spatial presence and charisma go far beyond this minimalist gesture. For all its simplicity of technical explicability, the sculpture retains a mystery in which the view into the reflective surface of the water remains an unfathomable one that cannot be fully fathomed: the true core remains locked inside, while the water only creates the illusion of a glimpse into this inner space, in which it merely reflects the mirrored exterior. In contrast, the title “Clap of a hand” is only an apparent continuation of the sculptural secrets. Like all linguistic paraphrases of works of visual art, it persists in the symbolic gesture that is characteristic of these verbal expressions. Just as the “clapping of a hand” in empty space can be a minimalist gesture of great acoustic efficiency, the minimalism of this stone sculpture also creates a great effect, the meditation on which raises fundamental questions of being in space and body.
In contrast, the 'bildstein is only seemingly more stringently formed. Although the cuts are more concentrated here and the edge is much more shaped to create a kind of frame, the core of the stone remains intact. The cutting and grinding of the surface serves to create an image layer whose surface remains a natural drawing of the geological formation. When we look at this surface and try to read it, we get what we already have. Images are primarily created in the mind and what we recognize in them, we read into them. Anyone who looks at the polished surface of the “picture stone” and sees a view from above of a landscape with valleys and mountain heights may, on the one hand, recognize the macrocosm of its origin in the stone mountains in the microcosm of this stone surface, as if it were a confirmation of Goethe's idea of metamorphosis, according to which the whole of the great is contained in the small, the leaf is already a tree, the stone is already a mountain. On the other hand, this image also remains a fictitious interior, as in the case of “Clap of a Hand”, the interior is simulated by the water surface, in which he inscribes the exterior into the apparent interior of the stone.
Fascinated by the pictorial quality of the found stone surface, Jochen Kitzbihler's research into the complex pictorial relationship between microcosm and macrocosm has recently turned to the medium of photography. The sculptural approach remains the same. If we describe Jochen Kitzbihler more as an artist of finding than of inventing, who, even in stone sculpture, allows what he finds to exist rather than subjugating it formally, then the photographic apparatus also serves him more as a medium for finding images than for inventing them. Looking at the mountain formation, an image of stratifications and folds emerges, which also become recognizable when looking at the detail, the surface of the ground or the individual stone. As in the stone sculptures, microcosm and macrocosm are intertwined in these stone landscapes. Likewise, the sculptures are not only a part of the landscape, but contain it in their core, just as the photographic stone landscapes can already be sketches and pictorial drafts of the sculptures.
What appears artificial in the exhibition space and context is only seemingly natural in the ostensibly documentary gesture of photographic image-making. Equally appropriate is the inversion, according to which the photographic image is much more of an artificial artifact, because it only reproduces the natural, while the sculpture with its artificial interventions of shaping is much more true nature, because it leaves it as it was found in part. This complex interweaving of natural and artificial by means of the pictorial appearance - be it three-dimensional, sculptural nature or two-dimensional, photographic print, this interweaving is conceptually intensified in the series of pictures created for this exhibition. The series is based on an overall image that uses a computer simulation to reproduce an altered representation of measurement data of an Austrian mountain valley in a pictorial invention that has excluded vegetation and civilization in a model-like manner. What remains is a bird's eye view of a purely geological landscape that is the stone sculptor's dream and nightmare: an inhospitable, artificial paradise in which stone has come into its own. From here it is only a short step to the pure stone surface of the Moon and Mars.
Jochen Kitzbihler has subjected this modified overall picture to his elementary sculptural gestures of cutting and grinding. Details have been detached to form individual images whose surfaces have been shaped by cutting and sanding. As in the sculptures, the difference between taking away and leaving standing is also evident here. Comparable to the sculptural found object, Jochen Kitzbihler has treated the measurement data and its altered implementation as such, which becomes an artifact through the sculptural treatment of cutting and sanding, which is nevertheless not completely robbed of its original relationship to the natural space. In this case, sculpture is not determined by the material attachment; the stone is not sculpture per se and the photograph is not an image. Conversely, the stone can also be an image and the photograph a sculpture, because they are both based on the strategy of taking away and leaving standing, of cutting and grinding. And without great astonishment, Jochen Kitzbihler's sculptural thinking proves to be no less anti-traditionalist than that of a completely different kind of sculpture, which is indifferent to the material. For Jochen Kitzbihler's sculptural thinking, the material is also indifferent. It only becomes a formed sculpture through the meticulous balancing of taking away and leaving standing. In contrast, there is a difference between finding and inventing. And Jochen Kitzbihler is without doubt one of the silent but great finders. This is his significant artistic surplus within an inventive throwaway society. In this he is ultimately a traditionalist after all.