In many ways, I was lucky to find this small work by Paul Klee among the vast numbers of Picasso’s in the Berggruen Museum, a private art collection rendered available to the public via the cleanly whites and baroque architecture of the historically sited state funded gallery, a space very different from Sammlung Boros’s rough concrete walls and floors, retained as found so as to produce the immanent “authentic” of the hip and moneyed. I say lucky, because the figure of the drawing, “Wissen Schweigen Vorübergehen,” the title spread along the bottom of the drawing as if it were a Mallarmé, seems to be one who is viewing or at least cognizant of Benjamin’s “angel of history,” an angel drawn from Klee’s “Angels Novus,” as our class is no doubt familiar. While that figure is surrounded with golden hue, this person, or image of a person, is placed within the brown and grey mist of hazy decay, the dust of the old: books, scrolls, ruins, swampy and polluted waters.
The figure, genderless or of mixed gender, is torqued at the hips, turning to face the viewer, arms held to the temple and chest in a dancerly gesture of shock and surprise, as if the title of the painting had suddenly approached from behind. Yet, because of the position of the eyes—one which looks directly at the viewer, the other slightly skewed to an indeterminate point behind whom ever is looking at the work—an observer of the drawing is inclined to make the same gesture, to turn one’s body in the same manner as the body of the drawing, to look behind at something unknown, something startling and untoward in its challenge to subjective stability. This sense, of course, was only discovered after a long gaze. If it is indeed that “Wissen” and “Schweigen” have crossed behind you, a viewer of the work is interrogated as one possessing the same challenged access to the title of the work, access only granted by looking somewhere else. The surprise of the new is spread out into an indeterminacy of unknown origin, a constant behind, something that shocks and swiftly escapes, leaving one destabilized and unsure, an affect further reflected in the complicated rendering of the legs: it could be two that are spread out in stability, or two sets in different times, one standing upright, the other on the edge of falling: Motion and in stasis are held in tension.
Besides the obvious reasons for this being a work of “degenerate art,” this clear statement of modern and complicated self reflexivity speaks to a questioning that fascism, at least in the manner it emerged in Nazi Germany, could not tolerate or reabsorb into its sense of self. The separation between the subject and the work is directly interrogated through the shock of the figured observer’s surprise, a surprise cast upon the viewer’s consciousness of their own possible bodily reaction.
Here’s a link to a web based image of the work:
http://www.kunstkopie.de/a/paul_klee/wissenschweigenvorueberge.html