They sit in front of you, the rough and craggy rock formations. You look at the rocky detail from a frontal view. Cut on both sides, the surrounding landscape can only barely be recognized. The focus of the camera rests on this piece of nature. The picture is called Penascosa I. A monochromatic white surface that presses up against the rock and triggers a reverie that seems strange for n supposedly documentary photo, the background indicates that the photo isn’t about any mere topographic inventory. To the contrary, this involves a contemporary variation on the landscape genre. Of course this is a representational form that looks back over a tradition that has existed for centuries. As variegated as its diverse image-formulas were, the common label ‘landscape’ has consistently served as a barometer for the relationship between human and nature (the world). Representations of the land, including Penascosa I, are implicitly each methods for the assimilation of reality by humans.
A landscape first develops agriculturally through the intervention of humans in nature. As an aesthetic phenomenon, landscape is thus a human product. As the act constitutive of vision, it is a synthesizing achievement of perception. An image develops out of the available stock of nature. In Kunkel’s serially-composed constellation of photos we encounter an artificial perception of nature as a construct which refers to reality. But the effect of the reality in the picture is a simulated one. With the photographic work that focusses on prehistoric archaeological sites (like Penascosa I), Kunkel looks for places which record cultural developments. In his photoseries, the artist composes pictures of the collective imaginary in the form of a landscape.
According to Vilém Flusser there have been two fundamental caesura in the history of cultural memory. The first break happened with the development of linear writing and the second with the invention of the technical image. In his photoseries of prehistoric dig sites, Kunkel brings the two together. The technical image -- the photograph -- provides a view of the location of the first processes of mental abstraction by humans, a view of the sign at a time before the alphabet. Through a gesture of showing that is nearly paradoxical, the artist transforms writing back into a picture. If writing is a medium by which images are explained through concepts, a reverse-synthesis of this process takes place in Kunkel’s photoseries. His images return that procedure of abstraction taking place in human perception and knowledge back to consciousness qua image. In this calculated staging, which is cleverly made to disappear through the pseudo-documentary stance of the photograph, we cast a glance at how the images that mean ‘the world’ are developed. In this way Kunkel’s photos become topographies of the very process of civilization. Civilization took place long ago in the layers of rock that have apparently been there untouched. The signs hatched into the stone are scenes of the earliest attempts to create systems of order. The gaze of the observer slowly moves over the surface of the picture, seizing one element after another and becoming a documentary gaze. In perceiving the scratches, the perception of the observer comes into direct contact with history. The observer becomes a part of process that has been going on for over 20,000 years. This is the conceptual point of contact between this work and an earlier series of cave photos which take as their subject other cultural-historical phenomena. The sober recording of the interior of a mountain is a visual descent into the prehistoric world. In a world without memory, it is necessary to have an artificial reconstruction of the one who is remembering, ie. of the consciousness that is preserving the memory. As a metaphor for a human development in the process of constantly differentiating itself, Penascosa I is a gentle stimulus against the advance of entropy.
The first impression of the photos is deceptive. They aren’t so much about pieces of nature that are so unprocessed and untouched as to appear nearly utopian. In fact they are about culture.
Kunkel’s latest series of film pieces also play with the tension between artificiality and naturalness. Four independent episodes are composed out of four short loops that are each 2.15 minutes long. These episodes possess narrative structures in accordance with the medium. All shot on the same location (the Spanish desert region of Tabernas), the four video sequences are connected to each other through their content. In one of the loops one sees a mobile drilling rig boring a hole into the earth in the hilly expanse of the barren landscape. With minute detail, a close up depicts the process in which the drilling device comes into contact with the sandy ground. The iron device opens up violently, clawing into the uppermost layer of the earth so as to thrust deeper into the interior. After the drilling has been carried out the sequence ends abruptly. The process itself is absurd. Without any apparent meaning or goal, the hole in the desert ground is milled. Indeed the very reason for the action seems to be something that makes no sense. It recalls the theater of the absurd. Even here, in the documentary relationship of the camera to its object, a dramatic magic emerges that seems to run counter to this stance. Not only does the materiality of the ground become tangible in the picture, but the viewer also believes herself to be an audience to the revelation of something that is concealed and remains invisible. The photos of caves possess a similar atmosphere. Looking into the interior of the earth, the viewer believes that he has come close to the neuralgic point of knowledge. In this procedure it is he himself who first and foremost winds up in the gaze.
The moment of the absurd returns in the next loop intensified. It captures the same piece of landscape, but this time without the threatening machine. Nothing happens for nearly a minute and a half. The same statue sits still in front of the viewer. Suddenly in the middle of nowhere an explosion occurs, made visible by the sand fountain which shoots up. The spectacular is folded into the picture almost provocatively. For the tiniest of moments, a sensational event comes out of nothing, surfacing as unexpectedly as it then once again disappears. The landscape’s calm beauty which the eye of the viewer had just began to get used to is radically interrupted. Torn out of this twilight of the senses, the explosion activates the apparatus of vision. The loud explosion from the interior of the earth is irritating. When observed causally, the nonfunctional has a mysterious effect. But the spectacular aspects of the event deconstruct the imaginary world of the natural and the mystical. Already in Grimm’s dictionary the concept of spectacle indicated theatrical performances of all kinds. Kunkel stages a play. He films what appears to be a natural event, but what turns out not to be natural at all. The picture of the film reveals its fictional character. The dramatic tableau directs attention towards the formal. The explosion, as with the drilling, achieves aesthetic autonomy as a pure form by means of camera shots which are calculatedly selected for compositional ends.
Yet another sequence takes this approach as its subject, but this time through a different means: an interview with the technician responsible for carrying out the explosion. She talks about the beauty of explosions and affirms through her words the creative aspect of the purposeless form that she sees genuinely manifested in the explosion, even if this form is only realized for a few seconds. For just as senseless as the explosion itself is, the speech about the explosion is equally senseless. Instead of getting a logical explanation, the viewer is confronted with irrational arguments.
A further loop leaves behind the terrain of the other pieces. The camera scans the region, moving over delapidated film backdrops. The site that Kunkel has selected for filming has already been the site for countless western films. Sergio Leone produced his epics about the New World here. In being shot from behind the backdrops reveal their false nature. They served as a simulation for a world of the West that doesn’t at all exist in reality. Through the deadpan recording of a backdrop city that was once impressive, the artist decodes his own compositional means.
Pictures of the world are projections, whether they take Nature (available as a landscape) or anything else as their theme. But pictures of the world also create meaning and order, and as a result are irreplaceable. In his works Kunkel doubles this aspect of the image. He designs projections of models of projection.
