The Things Of Life

by Alexander Stumm

The Things of Life is a reference to the film by Claude Sautet of the same name. Unravelled somewhere between a state of dreaming and recollection, the story reveals the reflections and retrospections of a dying man and constructs thereby, in seemingly peripheral episodes, a model for a life of fulfilment. Katrin Kampmann grapples with like dualities in her dyptich arrangements of water colours and pinhole camera photographs. Hélène portrays Romy Schneider, with a detached gaze and strained smile, riding in Michel Piccoli’s car (which, a few hours later, would become the scene of an accident). The accompanying photograph presents the overexposure of a film still from Wim Wenders’ Paris, Texas, superimposed by an Attic vase, which, in turn, depicts the first encounter between Hélène/Helena and Menelaus (as sung in Antiquity by the verses of Homer). The watchful warrior lets his weapons fall in the face of Helena’s great beauty. A flying Eros heralds the arrival of fortune, only later to have triggered the legendary war after Paris had stolen away Helena’s love, by means of divine intervention. Indeed, the image of the naive beauty is one that Romy Schneider was bound to battle with throughout her lifetime; thus, the ‘seeming’ of the represented figure (at the level of reception) leads toward the ‘being’ of the actual person. The counterpart to the likeness of Michel Piccoli, alias Pierre, cites the still life as constituting a traditional motif that recalls the inevitability of mortality. A clock, cigarettes in an ashtray, and the illustration on a magazine cover depicting a death by accident are all recorded here as modern references which aim at forecasting the end. The painting Tag ohne Schatten [Day without Shadows] presents the beholder with an idealisation of happiness—an unperturbed, exuberant cycling excursion. With Kampmann, the scene—painted in oil and water colours—becomes blurred into abstract colour fields. The notion of an unfinished state, of what yet remains to be concluded, constitutes a main thread that runs through her work. The figures in the negative appear as though phantoms, as though mere sentiments that hover between a dreamlike state and the presence of a memento. In Undine, we encounter the likeness of a woman who is occupied with throwing things into a river. She knows that she, robbed of her memories, is to return back into the water as a nymph. In hopes that these objects, upon her rediscovering them at the bottom of the river some day, will help her to regain a sense of recollection, she throws the things of this life into the water, thus charging the latter with the task of data-storage. Januskopf #3 (Hélène | Pierre) engenders an allegorical reference to the irreconcilable antagonisms that are presented by the things of life and, thereby, finally toward the fundamental subject of this current series of works. To close with a quote by René Pollesch: ‘Perhaps, through love, we could unearth the secret behind our interchangeability — the secret behind the interchangeability of our singularity in this community’.

English translation by Nathan Moore