The Lasting Effects of War
“Johannes Kunst Hiding from the Nazis,” Center on Contemporary Art, curated by Matthew Kangas, September 5-28.
Alice Dubiel “Landscape Tales,” Center on Contemporary Art in Collins Pub, 526 Second Ave. Open 11:30am to closing until October 31.
Nothing is easy to understand or predictable in these two exhibitions, both sponsored by the Center on Contemporary Art (COCA). Matthew Kangas’s curated exhibition of the work of Johannes Kunst, presents a constantly changing style and iconography, while Dubiel’s “Landscape Tale” juxtaposes maps, literary quotes and reproductions of 19th century landscape paintings to provoke us to find connections between them.
Johannes Kunst, from the Netherlands, hid from the Nazis in an attic during the war because non-Jewish young men were forced into slave labor. After the war he came to the United States, served in the army, then became a graphic designer in California, where he was an art director for the regional planning commission of Los Angeles for 25 years. At the same time, he went to two different art schools briefly in 1959 and 1980. His painting in the 1970s called the “Attic Series” refers to his experience of confinement in an attic during the war. Strange puffy figures with no features, against a dark background or in cubicles are immobilized in the spaces.
If we jump forward to the 1990s another approach entirely emerges, with outlines dominating a quirky hard-to-decipher iconography. One is Red Bird/Face, and indeed we do see that, but what it means is another story. A huge bird with an odd shaped head and wings seems to be standing on the head of a man in profile with a large nose.
“War Series” continues the outlined style with again a strange surrealistic juxtaposition of a bird, a face, a submarine, or the Red Cross.
Also, in the early 1990s Kunst created a series of paintings, several of them self-portraits. These painful images, especially the Artist as a Young Man, with its jagged red cheek that spills into space, gives us a direct expression of Kunst’s experience during the war: it is intensely sad.
The artist has stated “The war affected my whole life. You never get rid of it. You live it every day. I must use my art to express my feelings and deep compassion to humankind.”
The disconnectedness of Kunst’s various styles as well as his imagery does indeed suggest the traumas of a wartime, when nothing feels safe. Kunst’s work is deeply felt and highly original. Although the work is no longer on display, you can get a catalog from the Center on Contemporary Art. It is a timely exhibition that brings home what is happening in so many places today.
Alice Dubiel’s “Landscape Tales” presents entirely different challenges, although equally difficult to summarize in a sentence. Hung in a dark café, which somehow seems appropriate to the exhibition, are large maps of cities, like Seattle or London. Above the maps are reproductions of 19th century landscape paintings with elaborate frames.
Interspersed between these are quotes from many sources about landscape and its relationship to colonialism, exploitation and what Raymond Williams called “agrarian bourgeois art.” So, the urban maps show us end point of this landscape control in which nature has been entirely subsumed. The distance between the fantasy made reality in nineteenth century landscape paintings and our contemporary cities, both of which exclude humans even as they display human control, is not as far as we think. Look at the map of Paris for example, in which the only natural element is the river, barely surviving through the city’s bridges and streets.
Of course, one thinks of Frederick Law Olmsted who brought the bucolic landscape into the center of the city, but he does not figure in this work. There is no compromise between the imagery of 19th century landscape control and the twentieth century cities in which we impose our grids without thought of nature.
The many quotes that Dubiel has provided speak to some of these contradictions ranging from Shakespeare “Are not these woods more free from Peril than the envious court,” Jane Austen speaking of “improving land,” to Edward Said: “The actual geographical possession of land is what Empire in the final analysis is all about.”
Both Johannes Kunst and Alice Dubiel address the threats to our lives as we continue to wage war and destroy the land in the name of development. Their work seeks to help us rethink our actions.
~Susan Platt, PhD
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