You may be surprised if I don't start with the artworks around us, as is customary, and I apologise if I limit myself to just one or two works by the four artists, as a "pars pro toto", given the limited time and the abundance of works on display. Firstly, however, I would like to ask you two questions. The first: Do you remember the last time you were amazed? And the second: Do you remember who or what triggered your amazement?
I.
I suspect that your answers reflect the different meanings and various nuances associated with the term "staunen", because it is not so easy to define. The etymology dictionary explains that "staunen" corresponds to "to wonder" and also means "to look in amazement", and goes on to point out that the old Alemannic "stunen" actually described "to stare dreamily" or even "to freeze". According to the Duden dictionary, "Staunen" was only adopted from Switzerland into the High German written language in the 18th century.
Perhaps this is why the Lutheran translation of the Bible uses the Greek term "thaumázein" instead of "to marvel". After all, "the miracle" is assigned to it. The noun "thauma" stands for "wonder", as well as for "amazement" and "astonishment". It can even be translated as "marvellous sight" and even "feat", which is the poetic title, or shall we say motto, of the double exhibition: In the moment of wonder, the self becomes one with the world.
So let us venture a link with this poetic title in view of the works of art, which at least addresses a deeper level of perception. In the moment of amazement, the distinction between the perceiving person as subject and the observed as object disappears. Those who marvel do not objectify. They do not measure what they see against their own imagination, but are open to surprises, to wonder. "He who marvels does not know, or: does not know completely, he does not comprehend. He who understands does not marvel," writes the philosopher Josef Pieper in his essay On Marvelling, and, one might add, is ready for unconditional, unevaluated perception. Then, if it succeeds, the ego becomes one with the world. Of course, this requires giving up one's own ideas. To throw them overboard.
Amazement requires an inner attitude, a decision to expose oneself to something unknown without reservations.
When you came to the Academy, you passed something previously unknown. But what, you might ask, is it? A sculpture, or a sculpture? Is this delicate structure made of simple materials a body that imagines volume? Or is it a kind of implied architecture? In any case, Markus Zimmermann has placed this airy installation on the square "in the way" of passers-by - as they say. Discreet, not intrusive, and open to associations, open in both the real and figurative sense. Perhaps you were surprised by the work, astonished by the "foreign body". Or perhaps you simply noticed it in passing as a work in public space, or maybe your thoughts were elsewhere. They may also have paused and discovered that you can enter the installation from different sides. Markus Zimmermann has placed it on the square in front of the academy as a kind of abstract passageway, a gateway that can be passed through from almost all sides. The artwork is balanced between openness and recognisability, between airy spatiality and visible physicality. In view of the installation, when does a gate become a gate? In any case, a gate mentally offers a before and behind, depending on the point of view, and opens up space, connects space, interrupts space. Whoever passes through the gate enters another - usually new - space.
At least that is the general idea. That is why, religiously speaking, the gate symbolises the passage between the old and the new. Here in front of the academy, however, there is no clearly defined space that the gate could delimit or open. This installation stands in a square, and even if we perceive it as a gate, it seems to refuse any symbolic clarity.
But you could also see it differently if you don't separate the spaces, the spheres, but see them as a unit and the passage through the gate leads into the same space. Then, following the symbolism, earthly and heavenly, life and death would be one space. This very experience would then be the moment in which the ego becomes one with the world. Undoubtedly an inner process. Angelus Silesius, the Silesian poet and mystic, summarised this experience in a famous two-liner: "Stop, where are you going, heaven is within you; if you seek GOD elsewhere, you miss him for ever and ever."
These are questions, nothing more than an expanding suggestion. I don't want to take over art by interpreting it. It should remain open to every view. That applies to all the works here.
II.
Nevertheless, we started out from amazement. Let me remind you of the sentence quoted at the beginning by the philosopher Josef Piper: "He who marvels does not know, or: does not know completely, he does not understand. He who understands does not marvel.". This can be accompanied by the sentence of the unknown mystic (Carthusian) from the 14th century, who wrote the famous book The Cloud of Unknowing and wrote that one should detach oneself from all ideas and thoughts, starting from, literally, "a darkness, a cloud of unknowing"...in order to "feel a desire for GOD stripped of everything". The dark cloud of unknowing. You could also say, in Piper's sense, of not understanding, indeed of not wanting to understand. Please see this as a perhaps useful association on my part when you turn to the diptych 2 Leonardo by Toni Mauersberg in the entrance area: On the one hand, a painting loosely based on Salvator Mundi. The original is said to be by Leonardo da Vinci or from his workshop and was auctioned not so long ago for a record price of over 450 million US dollars: Jesus Christ blessing as the Saviour of creation, holding the heavenly sphere, the entire universe, in his hand as a crystal ball. The fate and symbolic wealth of this original alone could fill an entire book.
Here is just this much: the artist has not only changed the colours in her adaptation. The blue of the merely suggested cloak is paler, more translucent, the skin colour of the hands almost ghostly. Above all, however, Toni Mauersberg has concealed Christ's chest, neck and head in deep darkness, indeed in a completely opaque black. What remains is the gesture of blessing and the crystal ball in his hand. But do we even know what Christ looked like? And is that essential? Let's go one step further: what do people marvel at when they look at portraits of Jesus? How skilfully they are painted? How someone appears to us as a painterly individual whose attributes we know, whom we can therefore recognise as Jesus, whose situation we can perhaps empathise with because we know the stories? Icons, on the other hand, and there is much to suggest that the Renaissance painting Salvator Mundi refers to an icon of Christ in its basic composition, icons are ultimately abstract despite their representational nature and embody the heavenly in the secular, are beacons of present-day holiness, are windows to heaven. Once again, we encounter complex themes that are impossible to discuss here for reasons of time alone. Reference should be made to Romano Guardini's fundamental work On the Nature of the Work of Art and its distinction between cult and devotional images.
Toni Mauersberg has now chosen her own special path with her work. She confronts us with a blank space, and therefore with questions - for example, in view of the uncertainty as to whether it is a "real" Leonardo or a work from his workshop. And it makes us wonder what actually determines the value of a work of art? What do we marvel at? About the 450 million dollars? About the Saudi royal family, strict Wahabi guardians of the holy places of Islam, who have acquired an iconic Salvator Mundi for themselves? Who is hiding in the darkness? Is it the dark cloud of ignorance that, as we have heard, prepares the ground for the experience of God's closeness? Is this also a miracle? These are only possibilities that I am questioningly suggesting. Toni Mauersberg shows amazement itself in the second picture of the diptych, the counterpart: Leonardo di Caprio, the millionaire star with the cap, who became famous with the film The Sinking of the Titanic, of all things, this symbol of the megalomania of technical invincibility, and who today is actively involved in climate protection. She also shows him strangely pale, a little ghostly. Leonardo di Caprio, whose mother named him Leonardo after the painter because, according to legend, he kicked her in the stomach as a baby when she was standing in front of a Leonardo painting in a museum. In any case, the artist shows the film star as if he is frozen in his gaze, looking at the darkened Salvator Mundi. It almost seems as if he is marvelling at the face of Christ out of the blackness.
The Greek church father Gregory of Nyssa wrote in the 4th century: "God's name is not recognised, but astonished". Does this also apply to her other diptych Altar for Atheists? All that can be seen is a tired, exhausted person who, according to the artist, stands for Jesus, the Son, and in the second picture next to it: an empty space between heaven and earth, between brightness and the redness of the sky. Once again an empty space without the Father, without a visible God. Where is God? But: can we see God? And the Holy Spirit? What Toni Mauersberg shows with her second, provocatively titled diptych is ultimately an expression of apophatic theology. God is beyond all concepts, although he encompasses everything. Only Jesus is visible, fully human and fully God, free of all the usual religious attributes of art history. Now one step further. We, the viewers, stand in front of the works and look into another, imaginary world that these pictures open up. Beholder subject - seen object. How can wonder arise in us and the ego become one with the world? Is there therefore a mediated, in this sense an indirect amazement?
III.
When the Lumière brothers showed a short film of a train pulling into a station for the first time in front of an audience in a Parisian café at the end of 1895, people are said to have jumped up in extreme excitement and left the room in a panic. It is said that they feared that the railway would crash into the café. In any case, it was the shock of this obviously unreal and at the same time realistic film sequence that made people run outside. Amazing and astonishing at any rate.
What Lukas Sünder shows almost 120 years later in his White Sunday video no longer surprises us today: the celebrating priest, without a congregation due to the coronavirus. Just as - I assume - people were able to see it on the internet. Or should I say: witness it? I would have my doubts about that, because does the media and digital distance that we have long practised allow us to really experience it, which usually involves physical immediacy?
Much has been discussed and written about this. The streamed mass - an emergency solution. But the artist chose a special date. He chose the "White Sunday", the second Sunday of the Easter season, when it is precisely the co-experience, the empathy, the presence, the miracle of presence, the physical togetherness that is presented in the Gospel reading. The resurrected Jesus - already the greatest and most astonishing miracle - enters the room despite the closed doors and in the midst of the disciples, shows his hands and his side, i.e. the wounds, and breathes on them, saying: "Receive the Holy Spirit".
Miracle after miracle. But that's not all, because this is also read. Eight days later, he invites the doubting Thomas to touch him, to place his hand in his side. Astonishment. Thomas recognises and says "My Lord and my God!" The verses from the Gospel of John are well known. Closeness cannot be expressed more directly, more intimately, more overwhelmingly, a miracle cannot be experienced. What a contradiction to digital distance.
Lukas Sünder also introduces another level by bringing the recorded Eucharistic celebration, which is the past, into the present of the exhibition as a work of art. If you like: as an image of the image of a faded mass, a mystery, a sacrament, celebrated in the enforced solitude of an empty church. A reflection of the reflection of the real thing. Reflection of this miracle of the simultaneity of heavenly and earthly space?
Of course, one could also ask why one should not be able to marvel at the sacred that was present in this Eucharistic celebration and is now repeated as an image of the image in the chapel of the Academy. Let us leave the question open.
What the religious scholar Mircea Eliade writes about what he calls "homesickness for paradise" in view of the paintings of Paul Gauguin, for example, fits in with this, and he formulates it as "the longing for something inaccessible and hopelessly lost". This brings us to Alwine Baresch's pictures, these invented worlds that also include things that have been seen, things that seem familiar but then appear strange and sometimes threatening in a new context. A path of wonder perhaps, along paths of abundance.
Let us look at her painting Under Palm Trees as an example. With this picture, which at first seems to defy amazement, the painter does not present us with a landscape of longing, a tropical idyll, a romance or a sentimentally romanticised view. Palm trees, yes, but how and where. Bluish and cold, thin and almost fading, arid, pressed to the edge, between darkness and on a cloudy, wispy, streaky white-pink-blue, cool and disappearing upwards into nothingness. Is it really a landscape? Hardly.
Alwine Baresch treads a fine line between figuration and abstraction. She places colours next to and behind one another with great dynamism, allowing space between bursting movement and deep, unfathomable blackness, between burning fire tones and greenish water or sky spaces to enter into tension with one another. The picture is full of polar references, even in the horizontal and vertical movements. Fields of colour seem to become dark shapes, and shapes dissolve into fields of colour.
A paradise? Probably not. If so, then it is more likely to be associated with creation maltreated by man. But perhaps such interpretations are not appropriate in view of Alwine Baresch's pictures, but rather a lingering gaze and the question of what this contemplation, this abandonment to the picture, triggers in you. Perhaps this is the path to amazement when one discovers correspondences in the self. For could pictures like this one, in their tensions and dissonances, in their paradisiacal moments, in their moments of longing, not show an expression of inner turmoil, as it exists in most people, including us, in all its force and dynamism?
St Makarios, a monk father in the 4th century who lived in the Egyptian desert, is credited with the following saying about the heart of man: "The vessel may be small, but lions and dragons, poisonous beasts and the treasures of evil dwell in it. There are rough and uneven paths and yawning chasms / God is also there with his angels, the life and the kingdom, the light and the apostles, the heavenly city and the riches of grace - everything." Amazing, I think, and thank you for listening.
