The Brooklyn Rail

Jannis Kounellis’s maritime works are not as cinematic and in-your-face viscerally assertive as everyone’s favorite horses (as in the infamous Untitled [12 Horses] of 1969, that spectacularly featured the participation of a dozen living equines stationed inside the gallery), which accounts for their lesser recognition—and yet, more than perhaps any other within Kounellis’s oeuvre, they stand apart for tapping into the one archetypal thematic that is among the most quintessentially central of history’s running currents. Seafaring is an ur-metaphor. French philosopher Bernard Stiegler called seafaring the technique that divides the sea from the land—the difference between them is contingent on the techniques and technologies that they circumnavigate. German political theorist Carl Schmitt would describe world history as the history of the wars waged by maritime powers. “The sea is a special kind of medium for modernism,” writes Rosalind E. Krauss in The Optical Unconscious, “because of its perfect isolation … its opening onto a visual plenitude that is somehow heightened and pure, both a limitless expanse and a sameness, flattening … into the no-space of sensory deprivation.” With his ship-shaped works, as with every other subject he has ever found worthy of comment, Jannis Kounellis comes onto this blank modernist space of perceptual isolation and teases out of it his oeuvre’s foundational triad of myth, metaphor, and icon.

The exhibition at Es Baluard Museu d’Art Contemporani de Palma presents several chronologically dispersed manifestations of this recurring subject for Kounellis: a Venetian sail installation, a line-up of steel-plate-based wall pieces featuring ship hulls and sails, a seashell crucifixion, and a collection of black-and-white drawings, all under the collective title Labyrinth without Walls. This cross-decade thematic journey underscores the way that Kounellis’s own biography lends itself to a seafaring metaphor—a circuitous odyssey of sorts, from the artist’s native port of Piraeus to his adopted place of elected self-exile, Rome—from one cradle of civilization to another. One is tempted to, in that context, read the 2001 assemblages, all titled Senza titolo (Albatros), as a coda of sorts: the nearly seventy-year-old artist, a ship worn down by wear and time, coming to rest on the iconic bed of his origins. The works are composed of broken-off, worn-down partitions of fishing boat hulls mounted against the backdrop of square steel “canvas,” measuring about the size of a standard European king bed, hung against the wall at an askew angle redolent of the configuration of Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square (1915).

In his own writings and interviews over the years, Kounellis has always invoked the legacy of Malevich as his most pivotal artistic influence. From the Russian he takes his grounding in the realm of icons: “In Malevich’s white, there is yellow because the memory of gold is at the back of it,” Kounellis wrote, alluding to Malevich’s grounding in the legacy of Russian Orthodox icons. If the Italian avant-garde of the late 1950s to early 1960s, coinciding with Kounellis’s arrival in Rome, can be described as stuck at the crossroads between the transcendental and the cynical modernisms of Malevich and Marcel Duchamp, respectively, Kounellis’s alternative solution to either picking a side or locating a dialectical resolution to the dichotomy was to put that paradox itself on display within the body of the work. While Arte Povera (with which, for reasons of convenience of geographical and chronological proximity, Kounellis is usually grouped) is commonly associated with the elevation of banal materials to the stratum of fine art, Kounellis’s main contribution lies in bringing the high symbols and metaphors of “fine thought” (fine art’s linguistic equivalent) down to the level of the banal, and rendering them literal. Literalness, indeed, is what has always distinguished Kounellis’s output as so unique and paradigmatic, so pivotal and singularly insightful. His literalness is not that of a tell-don’t-show immediacy (in literary scholar Anna Kornbluh’s definition of the term) but that of demystification by way of literalizing.

Originally created for the 1993 Venice Biennale (if ever there was a place packed to the rafters with the baggage of maritime history), Senza titolo (vele) (1993) consists of nine Venetian sails. The sails are arranged in a partially overlapping formation, and the effect on the viewer is that of being caught up in the midst of an armada, like what you imagine being in the center of a grand historical seaborne procession, quest, or battle must have felt like, or, more to Kounellis’s point, what all the J. M. W. Turners and the Théodore Gericaults have taught us it must have felt like. The sails’ massive hulk is towering and overwhelming, disorientingly and unexpectedly so for a land-dwelling modern person accustomed to the more accommodating dimensions of contemporary convenience. One looks up at them in an altar-side stance of worshipful neck-craning—leaders and banners, guideposts and icons of historical outward venture. It’s hard to imagine Kounellis didn’t think of that parallel when he selected one of the sails to be depicting a crucifixion. He solicits this performance again with 2007’s untitled assemblage of a seashell-covered strip of canvas hung over an 18-foot-tall wooden cross: one is arrested looking upwards at the seafloor, peering up into the ocean of connotations and metaphors. Simultaneously elegiac and literal to the utmost extent, like the rest of the show, indeed the rest of Kounellis’s singular mark on art’s history, these works render their underlying subjects, thematics, and connotations unequivocally literal, bringing the whole shebang into the physical realm of in-your-face-ness and hefty physicality.