TIME
SHARES
HEALS
Gregor Jansen, 2013
Translated by Tim Connell
The essence of language is the search for meaning. For Martin Heidegger, it is imperative that the truth about Being is spoken and that our thinking coalesces in this language. For him, the fundamental question of philosophy relates to the meaning of Being. In order to ask a question, you first have to speak. According to Heidegger, we humans are always talking. Man’s dwelling place is language. For Roland Schappert, the process of something becoming a visual image is also an act of speech and the canvas of language a primary existential condition. Thus, his works in church buildings are governed by a special reference to Being and meaning. So which primary conditions do we start from?
The church is a house of God, a place of community, a place where people congregate, pray, speak and sing. Language is the source, the beginning of all being – for in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God. Thus, theology, the teaching of God, the very word of God, rules a house of God. It determines the way life is led in the dispensation of faith. So ultimately, Being and the meaning of life would seem to be securely cradled in this love, this divine, infinite love for humankind. FEWER LOVERS MORE LOVE
As far as Martin Heidegger is concerned, we humans are imbued – as God’s beloved creatures, this much we can say in view of the previous paragraph – with a preontological understanding of Being. In other words, we have always understood what Being means. For Ludwig Wittgenstein by contrast, we always know how to participate in linguistic games – besides, all philosophy is ultimately the critique of language – and as far as Roland Schappert is concerned, all art, too. A commentary on articulate Being. SPRICHT GOTT DEINE SPRACHE (DOES GOD TALK YOUR TALK)
Everyday phenomena remain hidden from us precisely because they are, by their very nature, quotidian, always there. With a nod in the direction of Freud, the ontic universally known is viewed ontologically as something alien. In their individual ways, Wittgenstein and Heidegger describe a wonderful path, which leads to the descriptive exposure of meaning’s very conditions of possibility – as it were, to the ineluctable revelation of the whole of human Being. It is a kind of alternative programme to the existential promise of salvation on the part of religion(s). The double meaning of Versprechen is itself a (wondrously) sore point – which Freud famously summed up as an un/subconscious truth – both a promise and a revelatory slip of the tongue in the same breath. If human existence means the reference to self and the world, then our linguistic conditionality, the equiprimordial phenomena of world and linguistic constitution, belong to the very shape of our Being. In Wittgenstein’s case, language is the equivalent of cognitive faculty. And in this sense, culture enters the game together with language and constitutes the articulate entity at the heart of Being.
In the Düsseldorf churches of St Anthony in Oberkassel and St Sacrament in Heerdt, Roland Schappert deploys not only diverse forms of pictoriality, language and linguistic image, but also the act of speech itself. In St. Anthony’s, he stages a mural by means of accentuated light, effectively forming a kind of detachment of the side apse; the letters, applied as though with fluorescent, Day-Glo lipstick, spell out the sentence FEWER LOVERS MORE LOVE. It looks like a graffiti artist’s tag or a line of graffiti one might see in a public space. Transferred to the environs of a holy place, the text seems disconcerting and aggressive. At the same time, it has been applied in luminous pink and bathed in an extremely bright light. In conjunction with the symmetrical, blue-red church windows above it, it fits harmoniously into a beautifully proportioned and attractively curved section of the church, across which the reading eye roves curiously. Schappert literally plays with language, introducing the alien entity of graffiti into an ecclesiastical context and supplementing or transforming some of the written elements, such as the tally marks, the underlining of the letters WE, or the L inside the O of the word LOVE. FEWER LOVERS MORE LOVE: is it a truism, a question, a provocation, a profound statement? We don’t know, but we start to question the meaning of the mural and language itself, we allow it to take effect – and are aware that we have taken our place as readers slap bang in the middle of Messrs Heidegger and Wittgenstein.
Schappert has also painted a piece of monumental graffiti in Bunker Church in Heerdt: SPRICHT GOTT DEINE SPRACHE (DOES GOD TALK YOUR TALK). Letter after letter, across a twenty-two-metre-long wall – an oracle whose meaning can be read, in the ambivalent German syntax at least, as a question or a condition. Accordingly, as participants in linguistic games, as God’s talking creatures and as beings constituted in the ‘meaning of World’ God must speak our language or we his. A peculiar constitution – above all, on his premises.
‘World’ is no longer the object of experience in this place, but rather a transcendental form of life. UHR KNALL (BIG BANG OF TIME). We have always had a world, we have always been thrown into the world. The world is not a container; it is not material space in which somehow we spend time. It is up to us to elude this deprivation of freedom in the surviving Cartesian image of the difference between subject and object, because when res cogitans was introduced as a substance, our view was misaligned. Ever since Descartes, the true presence of the mind has opposed the body as a separate entity. This dualistic doubling was followed by the reductivity of a materialist monism. IN SEARCH OF A SUBJECT. Man becomes a (biological) machine. Wittgenstein and Heidegger present critiques of these models of the relationship between man and nature, and refer to the categorical difference between the talk of man and figurative predications. They retreat behind this idea by performing the reversal of the traditional pre-eminence of the uninvolved. For man has always been in the world, involved in events and situations, pre-occupied and harnessed in the practical pursuit of life. HAPPINESS AND HOMESICKNESS.
In view of the pronounced, alternating mediality of Roland Schappert’s works, we are confronted – on the textual, linguistic surface of the materials – with a form of experience of the world and a reification of our self-image, which achieves a special effect within the system of art and the system of the church respectively. Regardless of whether we are dealing with ceramics, fired clay with glazes and scratchings, painting on canvases, murals or painting on metal plates – or indeed, whether the artist has someone talk about the history of a particular place (as is the case at Bunker Church, in the form of an audio piece by Michael Ebmeyer): Roland Schappert’s artistic processes allow us to frame the true presence of the object as a continually re-askable, modifiable question regarding the thing itself and the meaning of its statement. Starting from the chequered and, for over a century at least, also painful history of painting, the artist is interested in the means of its nonconformist extendibility: the treatment of and approach to painting, but also the transition to temporally-based media, such as poetry, sculpture or spatial objects, video and light. In so doing, Roland Schappert understands painting conceptually, abstractly, concretely and figuratively, and, by means of the integration of temporal and spatial elements, develops a concept of painting that enjoys a close reciprocity with space. “As far as I’m concerned, every image – not just painting – exists in a number of spaces: in the space of thought, in the space of memory, in the space of imagination, in medial space and in the exhibition space,” as he defines it. “I am concerned with painting in my compositions or compositional spaces, which cannot be viewed from one standpoint alone, a form of painting which urges you to move – intellectually and spatially.” He has truly succeeded in this enterprise in his three previous exhibitions in church spaces. They constitute extreme layerings, interventions that elude an all too easy comprehension and assimilation, but in their very complexity, they embody those moments of the real and the intellectual that almost defy representation. In this instance, language is more indirect and eschews any would-be scouting for illumination, itself a scarcely profitable venture; especially therefore, because of the interesting role that morality plays in this anti-enlightenment context. Morality is a value to which everything is supposed to ultimately subordinate itself. More than good will – an obligation. There’s no lack of commitment here. But the problem is this: who is in a position to evaluate it normatively? This is where language’s deficient clarity falls short of the mark. In this instance, the words that make up one particular abstract painting, dating from 2012 and comprising acrylic paint, wire, fluorescent vinyl paint, casein, canvas, metallic effect pigments and pigments on canvas, measuring 150 x 230 cm, are even more crucial: AT THE END OF THE DAY NOBODY IS INTERESTED IN THE MEANING OF WHAT IS SAID.
RE LOVE, Katalog von Roland Schappert, Hardcover, 64 Seiten mit 45 Farbabbildungen und Text von Gregor Jansen, deutsch/engl., Salon Verlag, Köln 2013, ISBN 978-3-89770-433-6
