Days of Our Lives

At the end of the day the most pressing question is how to live your life. It’s a difficult one to answer, particularly when you seem to live more than one life and to have more than one face and more than one friend, when you can do more than one thing, and when there are things that you can’t seem to do (yet) but that you insist on trying anyway. How do you inhabit the existential condition of your own possibilities and limitations in a culture you share with others? How do you go about celebrating, railing against, transgressing and laughing at your own potential and limitations in the public sphere of that shared culture? What is at stake is an ethics of creating a life for yourself and others that seems worth living, a politics of becoming a voice that speaks not just in the presence of but potentially also for and with others, and an aesthetics of operating from a position that is embedded in a singular practice of artistic production.

All of these questions are central to the work of Jutta Koether. Since the early 1980s she has been active as a painter, writer and musician, her work in each discipline enough to constitute a career in itself. What makes her approach unique, however, is the way she allows the logic and source material of each of these distinct practices to spill over into the others. Writing infiltrates painting, installations become backdrops for music performances, and various insignia from musical culture are collaged onto canvases. The boundaries between Koether’s singular voice and the plurality of voices in the culture she inhabits are subject to constant negotiation. While her style of painting, writing and music can be reclusive and personal to the point of opacity, it can also be highly communicative, involving friends and reaching out to a broad public. Her art expresses personal thoughts and feelings about her work and life and is intimately linked to writing about other people’s art and music – which then often results in collaborations with various artists, writers or musicians.

Along with the written reflections, poems and manifestos that crop up in and around her work, Koether is a regular contributor to the German art journal Texte zur Kunst and publishes critical essays on alternative music. (Her monthly column that appeared in the music magazine Spex throughout the late 1990s was written from the perspective of a ‘Mrs Benway’, the fictional wife of William Burroughs’ alter ego.) Reena Spaulings is another persona assumed by Koether, in the collectively written novel Reena Spaulings (Bernadette Corporation, 2004). The book comprises the confessions of a young New York urbanite who lives in a ghostly flat and leads a glamorous life dedicated to fashion, art, sex and survival. Koether’s own concerts and musical collaborations mostly take the form of ‘noise rock’ performances; her associates have included Steven Parrino, Tom Verlaine, Kim Gordon and Rita Ackermann. With Gordon and Ackermann she also formed the group Freetime to produce a series of collective paintings for the show I Love New York at Museum Ludwig in Cologne in 1998. (New York and Cologne are the two cities that Koether has lived and worked in for many years.)

At the heart of Koether’s practice, however, is a distinctive attitude and humour that are indebted to the ethics, politics and aesthetics of – to avoid using the term ‘Punk’ – a certain critical and celebratory spirit of feeling blessed with the gift of being bad at what you think you do best. This stance is about transcending your own limitations by rigorously pursuing the practical potential of your weaknesses and about allowing the level of noise in your work to rise to the point where sharpness and precision acquire a new meaning because they now emerge, suddenly, in the form of motifs that jump out at you from fuzzy audio-visual textures with the embarrassing directness of an unexpected personal remark. It is also about maintaining a high level of intensity by using an emphatic mode of articulating yourself. With Koether, however, this intensity is paired with a humour that reveals itself in the acknowledgement that speaking emphatically means employing rhetorical tropes, assuming dramatic personae and thus ‘speaking in tongues’ that are not necessarily only your own. Perhaps you could say her stance is about finding authentic ways to inhabit inauthenticity.

Writing this, I am thinking of paintings such as Homohomo (2002). Painted in bright shades of yellow, red and green, the picture shows the sketchy outline of a face with big eyes and curly hair emerging from watery clouds of paint. Rays of coloured light emanate from it, but where the mouth should be there is just an opaque silver square. The oval red shape that could have been a mouth has dropped from the face to the bottom of the picture and sits there flanked by two pink pancake faces with red-rimmed eyes that look surprisingly untouched by the epiphanic explosion above their heads. Koether uses the rhetoric of portrait-painting to full effect, filling the entire canvas with faces. At the same time, however, the cartoonish mask-like counterfeits ridicule the idea of portraiture. A matchstick man/messiah/Madonna figure spouts forth a provocatively empty sign, a sparkling square. This touch of mockery, however, in no way curbs the emotional impact of the picture. The silver square reads like a strong message devoid of content – the painting addresses the viewer in the rhetorical mode of pure emphasis. In its dramatic luminescence it insists on the potential force of something that must be said but whose meaning is unclear; just as, when you hear its title, Homohomo, you may not know what it means but you grasp right away that the stakes are doubled. It is like an imploring invocation of the human in whatever form. But it also sounds like a funny, onomatopoeic name for a hitherto unknown creature.

Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt write: ‘Beyond the simple refusal, or as part of that refusal, we need also to construct a new mode of life and above all a new community. This project leads not toward the naked life of homo tantum but toward homohomo, humanity squared, enriched by the collective intelligence and love of the community.’1 Indeed, Koether’s portraits are almost always enriched by a variety of characters. Two moon-faces frame the protagonist of Homohomo, and in Mède (1992) two figures emerge from a thick emerald texture of swooshes and scratchy strokes. One points upwards in a theatrical gesture, while the other clutches her thighs as if to hold herself down. A huge smiley with sun-glasses is painted on top of these figures, so that it looks as if they are living in its big head. There is a whole social scene happening behind the smiley’s shades. Not as emphatically dramatic but no less existential in its humour is Unvollendete Sympathie (Unfinished Sympathy, 2002). The picture is covered in translucent blue, red and yellow moon-faces. Their expressions seem neither altogether happy nor entirely sad; these are everyday faces. The outlines of two big yellow eyes hint at the presence of a bigger spectral ego, but it recedes into the background. Instead, the moon-face people take over centre-stage. Surprisingly, this is a comforting vision, implying, as it does, that, however singular you may feel as an individual, you live in the company of many other such singularities in the undramatic conviviality of the everyday.2

Living with others outside and inside your head and body is a state that Jean-Luc Nancy calls ‘being singular plural’ – a mode of being that Koether’s work celebrates. ‘I will explore you and mine you and you will redraw me according to your will. We shall cross one another’s boundaries and make ourselves one nation (J.W.)’ are lines scribbled in white letters over the head and across the long hair of a woman without a face drawn in loose, nervous white lines onto the black background of the poster Need Change (Ladies of the Rope) (2000). The title refers to a secret society of female members, called The Rope, which convened in Paris in the 1930s to experiment with the spiritualist techniques of G.I. Gurdjieff. The series ‘Ladies of the Rope’ comprises a set of portraits of female heads without faces framed by quotations and sketched in white scraggy lines on canvases covered in thick black paint. A red strand of wool hangs from a hole in each canvas as if to symbolize a bond whose exact nature, however, remains difficult to determine. It seems like a sinister bond, commemorating the scary moment of letting other people get under your skin. At the same time the portraits are clearly a heartfelt homage to friendship and a strong invocation of an imagined community of clandestine women.

In Koether’s recent paintings black is more than a tone, it’s a rhetorical trope used to evoke the cultic, clandestine and sinister. Volume 13 (2005), for instance, is a canvas covered in a flurry of black brushstrokes. On top of the black paint all sorts of glitzy materials are glued to the canvas by a layer of molten glass poured over the picture. There are metal studs, some Monopoly money and the kind of eagles and skull badges that adorn bikers’ jackets. Musikalischer Liebhaber (Musical Lover, 2005) is a similar composition, but here black chains and a sticker of the Statue of Liberty are also attached. The paintings are like visual sourcebooks for a Kenneth Anger movie. As such, they speak about the immanent intensity of surfaces. In fact, they consist entirely of surfaces – of the canvas, the paint and the glass. Surprisingly, there is life between these layers, a world of signs that promise freedom open up a deep space of lived experience in and among the flat layers of visual texture that the paintings are made of. It makes you see that the meaning of the things and signs that power your dreams and thus shape your life may reside within the infinite depth of their surfaces.

These signs are, of course, tropes of a second-hand visual rhetoric. Still, there is a power in their flatness, and this power is all about the way in which Koether makes them address and touch you. The rhetorical mode of the paintings is geared towards intensifying the visual impact of their content. Yet they also reveal their own rhetoric. By simultaneously imposing and exposing the effects of this rhetoric on and to you, Koether makes you feel how the emotional truth of these signs lies in the way they touch you. How to create this touch, however, is not a matter of rhetorical techniques or recipes. Every body and every mind responds differently to touch. It is rather about finding the right sound by changing it, adding effects, tweaking the filters and raising the noise; and, as such, it is the subject of painting, writing and making music as a continued practice of looking for the right touch.

Jan Verwoert is a contributing editor of frieze and teaches at the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam. He has recently published a book Bas Jan Ader – In Search of the Miraculous (Afterall Books/MIT Press 2006).

1 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2001, p. 204
2 This acknowledgment, I believe, also sets Koether’s work apart from that of some of her (male) contemporaries, who felt they had to burn themselves at the stake to authenticate their status as heroic individualists.
3 The poster announced the eponymously titled show at Galerie Buchholz in Cologne, Spring 2000.