Zwischen Leben und Tod [Between Life and Death]: twenty-two pieces after images by Peter Weiss // by Michael Hersch

Die Maschinen griefen die Menschheit an

I first learned of Peter Weiss’s (1916-1982) artwork almost a decade ago while reading W.G. Sebald’s (1944-2001) On the Natural History of Destruction. Sebald’s writing -- as it has on many others -- made a deep impression on me, so much so that fragments from his poem After Nature form a framework for my horn and cello work, Last Autumn (2008). Isolated lines, or groups of lines, from the poem came to mind as I was writing the piece. Particular verbal images captured in shape or texture much of what I felt. When Last Autumn is performed, however, Sebald’s texts are not sung or recited; it is purely instrumental music. I placed the texts at designated junctures in the written score before various movements of music. The texts did, and still do, represent a kind of private communication between me and Sebald’s words. This kind of dialog between composers and poets is nothing new, of course. There are many examples across the centuries of composers writing music with outside texts in quiet co-existence. 

Some five years later, the artwork of Peter Weiss had a similar effect on me, but Weiss’s paintings and drawings had a more direct impact on the music. Weiss’s spectrum of color and motion, of proportion and spacing, struck me as particularly musical, and I found this both provocative and inspiring. While Sebald’s texts had acted as companions which reinforced and heightened my own state of mind, Weiss’s environments included both familiar and alien worlds that I wanted to capture directly in sound. In either case, I felt at home. For the first time, I felt compelled to engage directly with images through music. 

I had only known of Peter Weiss as a playwright before reading Sebald’s essay about him. While I was familiar with some of his searing stage dramas, I did not know that from the time he was a young man he was a serious visual artist as well. One of his earliest works, Selbsporträt zwischen Tod und Schwester (Self-portrait between Death and Sister), was completed in 1935 after the death of his sister in an accident. The drawing has many hallmarks of his later writing and artwork: pronounced disquiet, looming threat, wistfulness. I find compelling that Weiss, from one work to the next, takes an active or more participatory, or more passive and detached, stance toward his subjects - especially in the paintings expressing what appears to be terror or grief, or both of these states simultaneously. Throughout his work there are also recurring images that seem deeply meditative; for example, animate and even inanimate subjects lost in thought. 

Selbsporträt zwischen Tod und Schwester

In his essay on the artist, subtitled On Memory and Cruelty in the Work of Peter Weiss, Sebald discusses several of the paintings, including Das grosse Welttheater (The Great World Theater), which he describes as 

“... a pandemonium of transgression in front of a background of capsizing ships and lit by the reflection of a conflagration ... it denotes a now permanent state of destruction. What is seen, here and now, is already an underworld beyond anything natural, a surreal region of industrial complexes and machines, chimneys, silos, viaducts, walls, labyrinths, leafless trees, and cheap fairground attractions …” 

Das grosse Welttheater

In Weiss’ Gartenkonzert (Concert in the Garden) Sebald sees

“... figures with lowered eyelids ... including the young harpsichordist with his blind gaze, are among the harbingers of a life surviving at best only in the sensation of pain, in unreserved identification with the despised, scorned, crippled, and fading, with those who sit weeping in their concealment …” 

Das Gartenkonzert

Though each of these paintings is quite different, below the surface similar tensions roil. 

Zwischen Leben und Tod is a program-length work for violin and piano. The music is structured in twenty-two movements, each movement corresponding to a particular image by Weiss. This is my third work that has had a relationship with visual art; the others are Images From a Closed Ward (after etchings by Michael Mazur) and Black Untitled (after a painting of the same name by Willem de Kooning). Of the three pieces, Zwischen Leben und Tod is most closely intertwined with the artwork, while my approach in Images From a Closed Ward and Black Untitled was closer to that of Last Autumn. 

While I did not know him personally, W.G. Sebald gave me two great gifts: his writing itself which has been, and continues to be, a source of solace and inspiration, and an introduction to Peter Weiss’s artwork. I am neither an art historian nor literary critic. But I hope, as Sebald did, that more people may discover the artwork of this extraordinary figure. 

At the conclusion of his essay, Sebald quotes a passage from Weiss’s Ästhetik des Widerstands (The Aesthetics of Resistance): 

“O Herakles. The light is dim, my pencil blunt. I would have wished to write it all differently. But the time is too short. And I have run out of paper.” 

Junge im Garten

Translations of W.G. Sebald into English from the original German by Anthea Bell  

Der Krieg

Michael Hersch (b. 1971) is a composer and pianist.

Michael Hersch's Zwischen Leben und Tod: twenty-two pieces after images by Peter Weiss receives its world premiere on February 26, 2015 at the Blair School of Music, Vanderbilt University, performed by violinist Carolyn Huebl and pianist Mark Wait.

Kevin Tuttle at the Martin Art Gallery, 2012

Altar to an Unknown God, 1989-91

Kevin Tuttle's Comings and Goings ran from August 29 to September 23, 2012 at Muhlenberg College's Martin Art Gallery. Below is the artist statement that accompanied the show.

Soto! Explore thyself!

Therein thyself shalt find
The "Undiscovered Continent"—
No Settler had the Mind.

-- Emily Dickinson

The work presented here is selected from about a 30 year time frame. It chronicles a journey from decorative, to reductive formal, to subject-narrative driven work. However, even in the decorative work there was the beginning of subject matters that would unwittingly resurface over the span of many years.

There are a number of influences in the work from literature and poetry; and from Greek/Roman and Chinese/Japanese painting and sculpture to contemporary artists such as Christopher Cairns, Jonathan Silver, and Anselm Kiefer. I have tried to have no fear of influence. I have been guided by statements from other artists such as Goethe and Matisse who advocate for the possibility of being influenced. In particular I’ve been guided by Matisse who felt that an avoidance of influence is an act of insincerity. I also have taken courage from his ability to periodically re-form himself especially during the period of 1915-1917. While one of the preeminent artists in the world, and at the age of 45-47, he undertook a belated response to cubism and also reaffirmed his much earlier statement and heritage, “if Cezanne is right, then I am right.”

But possibly the primary linkage between the work shown here is not a development of ideas from one point to another. Rather, it is that due to both scale and general homeliness there likely is no future for these works. So, thank you to the Martin Art Gallery for the opportunity to see the work together for the first and last time.

A Death blow is a Life blow to Some

Who till they died, did not alive become—

Who had they lived, had died but when
They died, Vitality begun.

-- Emily Dickinson


Click on photos to enlarge.

Le Tombeau de Baudelaire

Voyage to Cythera



Blackwater - Exsanguination



Uselessys, 1988-89



        Palatine Hill (detail, Uselessys), oil on panel, 12" x 8", 1994



In Light Of (Interior)



Herm'unculus



Almost Aquamarine, 1985

 

 

Death of Artists



In Light Of (Interior)

Photos courtesy of Kevin Tuttle.








Charlie Angermeyer on Christopher Cairns

Poet and writer Charlie Angermeyer wrote this piece on the occasion of Christopher Cairns' 2005 show at Haverford College, Closing Time. It was posted at the entrance to the gallery. Cairns and Angermeyer met in 1963 at Oberlin College.

The Sculpture of Chris Cairns: An Appreciation by an Old Friend

CREATION plus “M” equals CREMATION. I don’t know why I thought of that now. For me, it seems original, but I know everything is derivative, and it probably has occurred to some poor devil who writes crossword puzzles or some Scrabble players in a think tank. I stand in my crow’s nest. I imagine F-16s buzzing my head, youth in Asia, old punctured love dolls wishing they were dead. I know “Dial M for Murder”, but I don’t stop eating M&M’s. But art is imagination under some kind of control. Words and labels can’t change what’s already done. I don’t judge it. Art should be beautiful, but never in competition any more than slaves bought with gold.

I watched Chris in our first college art class draw his first melted choir boys. We rented separate rooms in Mrs. Morgan’s house; she was a sweet old lady with a short memory. One cold winter night, Mrs. Morgan opened the door, recognized me, and said, “Who is your friend?” (Chris had his scarf wrapped around his head.) I said, “This is my sister.” “What a surprise! How long will she be staying?” Mrs. Morgan said. Then, after Chris took his first sculpture class, he started tracking in plaster dust. He had it all over his shoes and clothes. He loved drawing and making figures, and he’s still at it as you can see. Bones are made of plaster, and bronze makes fine, expensive, caskets. Thus, there was the Bronze Age. Maybe we’re in the Drywall Age. When you get old, the back bends, and your skull feels heavy. Pinch yourself. Feeling alive right here, right now? Some old philosopher wrote, “Existence precedes essence.” Your body was a thing before it thought. It’s all in Sartre’s novel Nausea, if you have the stomach to read it. Chris is more tactile than most people—Mr. Touch, I’d call him.

Try looking at these things on display as if you just woke up but you still feel like you might be dreaming or watching T.V. Think about the space you are filling now and what happens to it after you leave. For me, these sculptures are all music and light—the way water flows around a stone or flames dancing or the way the wind shifts sand dunes. Chris gave me a big, coal black, bronze head. It sucks up all the light in my room. It’s so damn dead it makes even me feel almost alive! You are part of the show. The content may be at first disturbing, but, for me anyway, it quietly becomes beautiful as the content recedes while the form overwhelms. I wrote a poem that fits, I think:

If looks could kill,
then all the dead
would be beautiful.

Charlie Angermeyer lives in Tokyo with his wife, Mari, and his cat, Nicky. He is currently working on three books and a screenplay.