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“Patched and Pieced Together Like a Fool’s Jacket”: Bonaventura’s Night Watches and the Visual Worlds of Cornelia Renz

From the catalogue ‚Night. Tail. Pieces.‘, The Green Box, 2011, on behalf of the confirming with exhibition at Kunstverein Konstanz

Heinz Stahlhut

A romantic novel serving as a model for contemporary art? That might seem absurd at first, for there is truly nothing romantic about our contemporary culture. Tightly organized work flows that increasingly extend into our leisure time due to modern communication technology, the commercialization of more and more realms of everyday life, and not least our distance from nature leave hardly any space for the values central to romanticism: the poetic, naturalness and an ethics contrary to immediate utility. 

But looking more closely we can see that Cornelia Renz’s works have far more in common with the specific incarnation of romanticism embodied in Night Watches than we might initially think. 

In sixteen episodes, the rounds of the night watchman Bonaventura Kreuzgang through a sleepy small town offer a panorama that includes all the ingredients of gothic horror: effusiveness and despair, sleeplessness and fever dreams, courageous soldiers and devious priests, treasure hunters and demons, death watches and conspiratorial meetings under the protection of night.

With a clearness of view that verges on nihilism, Kreuzgang subjects his contemporaries to ruthless criticism, sparing none, neither the profit-hungry, self-satisfied middle-class gentleman nor the idealistic-quixotic poet, living only for his unprofitable art, can stand up to his harsh verdict. He holds a mirror up to all, or even forces them to self-recognition by way of little tricks of Socratic cunning.

In so doing, the author used quite various literary techniques and motifs. Elements of the fairy tale can be found as well as the gothic novel; the work delves as much into the description of artworks as it engages in critiquing contemporary writers. In a text that borders at times on the feverish and delirious, the book directly combines things otherwise remote from one another, thus proving to be a virtuosically assembled patchwork, quite in the sense of Bonaventura’s worldview. “In this erratic age, all things absolute and autonomous are avoided; this is why we neither like true amusement nor true earnestness, why we can no longer bear true virtue nor true evil. The character of the time is patched and pieced together like a fool’s jacket, and the worst of all is that the fool would like to appear serious.”[1]

This lack of an identifiable signature might have contributed to the fact that the work, which was published anonymously in 1805, had been attributed to renowned writers such as Clemens Brentano, Caroline Schelling, E. T. A. Hoffmann and others, and it was only due to the discovery of a random note that it could be attributed to Ernst August Friedrich Klingemann.

This lack of a signature is another characteristic that Night Watches and Cornelia Renz’s large format works have in common. The material used—felt-tip pen on acrylic glass and KömaTex—is already one of the most extreme artificiality. Although already introduced almost a century ago, as a support for painting or drawing acrylic glass and related materials still represent a disturbance of our conventional art taste in contrast to canvas or paper, and in so doing take on the decided character of a ready made, clearly setting the art and the artist apart from one another.

The use of the felt-tip pen also makes clear that the artist did not want to abet the notion of personal expression in the drawn line. The felt-tip pen allows for controlled, precise lines: this is why it is primarily used for technical drawing. The surface of the acrylic glass that the artist chose as a support for her drawing gives the hand a fixed background, but does not offer the any resistance due to its smoothness, allowing the drawing to be executed in a highly regular fashion. In so doing, Renz proves to be an eager pupil one of modernism’s great masters, Marcel Duchamp, who decided already early on: “I couldn’t go into the haphazard drawing or the paintings, the splashing of the paint. I wanted to go back to a completely dry drawing, a dry conception of art. And the mechanical drawing was for me the best form of that dry form of art.”[2]

Renz’s lines accordingly reveal no irregularities that can be read as the artist’s own affective sensations about her quite ambivalent world of motifs. The contours of the objects and figures represented exude an almost classicist severity, clarity and elegance: even the cross-hatching, that in the back and forth would have offered the opportunity for motoric outbursts as testimony to emotionality, attest to a cool regularity that recalls the forced systematicism of the early modern drawing of artists such as Albrecht Dürer.

This is all the more surprising since the motifs chosen by the artist—as has already been hinted at—provide all the more reason for excitement: In a network of visual elements, overwhelming in its plenitude, naked figures mix with representations of animals and skeletons, luxuriant floral and ornamental patterns, geometrical constructions and text to form absurd and in part horrifying figurations.

In Wendy for example, a voluptuous child rides on a horse skeleton rearing its head, which for its part is vaulted by the skeleton of a child. At its feet, partially open children’s bodies are embedded on oval, white surfaces. The mere direct linkage of childhood, youth and death—in other cases, as in Subrosa, it is the combination of children’s bodies and eroticism, explosive for other reasons—surely has a disturbing impact on many beholders, if not a repugnant one.

Another cause for disturbance is the combination of these scenes with the objective style in which they are presented. Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes at least had the odd scenes of his Caprichos appear in the twilight of aquatint, and Max Ernst set his fantastic saints and monsters in an equally unreal, garish light of expansive, bare landscapes. The fact that the fantastic in the work of Claudia Renz, in contrast, is presented so matter-of-factly, so soberly, is what makes it so baffling.

Upon closer inspection, however, we discover that the images are largely montaged from preexisting motifs from all realms of visual production. There are motifs from the world of high art, like the central group from Bronzino’s puzzling Allegory (1545) at London’s National Gallery as well as illustrations from anatomy textbooks or advertising logos. The dramatic pathos of suffering in the figures from Niccolo dell’Arca’s Pietà (1462/3) at Bologna’s Santa Maria della Vita seems all the more disturbing in Renz’s Zampano because it is denied its original object, and thus seems to be without foundation. The flittering folds of garments that in the original state augment the expression of suffering to the extreme, here fit seamlessly into the filigreed bellows of fabrics and cascades of ribbons that dominate the composition in the background.

In general, the ornament in Cornelia Renz’s compositions is given the function of linking the motifs, which are so often contrary to one another, smoothly with one another. Herein lies the subversive function of the unusual opulence of her works, alongside the conscious unsettling of modern taste.

This function can take over the ornament, for its elements inserted in a repeating pattern lose their figurative significance. To clarify this, consider Ernst Gombrich’s interpretation of Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe (1962), according to which the individual portrait loses meaning after a series of 20 copies are placed next to and on top of one another on the canvas, becoming part of a pattern. This leads Gombrich to the conclusion that a gain in order is to be had at the expense of a loss in significance, and vice versa. Order and significance seem to him to be the two central elements of ornament that strive in two different directions.[3]

This midpoint between depiction and abstraction is also taken by the numerous logos and labels that Renz interweaves again and again into her images. In the framework of packaging design, they are accepted by the beholder as graphic design elements of lesser significance. Now divorced of their original content and placed in new contexts, a motif such as the horse head in Hengst (Stallion, 2011) gains a meaning all its own and a visual potency.

In so doing, the special achievement of the artist is to discover in the contemporary flood of images motifs that are “worthy” of the image (not in a moral or art-theoretical sense) and to combine them in such a virtuosic way that they appear to be harmonious figurations at first glance, and yet generate a sense of the uncanny on the subcutaneous level.

Towards this end, Renz utilizes tactics of both the surrealists as well as pop artists. While the first took individual elements from their prior contexts and placed them in other ones, in part allowing them to take on contrary meanings, the representatives of pop art introduced the visual world of the mass media and advertising to high art and thus dissolved traditional hierarchies.

In her artistic production, Cornelia Renz not only fuses motifs from various visual worlds, but at the same time renews the artistic strategies of two significant currents of the past century.