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Beauty is a fleeting phenomenonHans Günter Golinski
published: Pneuma Monoxyd, ISBN 978-3-938847-11
Thomas Köner’s music and pictures are characterized by an almost dramatic emptiness; in his art, real sequences of events are transformed into uneventful proceedings. We recognize everyday situations and noises but visible and audible interventions to remove their already minimal temporal and spatial context have allowed them to evaporate. His audiovisual work in particular, stimulate a process of visual hearing and audio seeing without allowing more to become visible than we hear – and vice versa. Instead of illustrating each other, the music and the pictures are concentrated into autonomous sound pictures and picture sounds. The picture acquires its capacity, inherent in sounds, for developing and dissolving itself in time through the medium of film or video. States of movement and repose, sounds and silence are combined to form a nonhierarchical continuum. Using this individual concept, this media artists provokes various different attitudes in his viewers and correspondingly controversial interpretations, with readings ranging from media-critical discourse to the experimental techno picture, from a boring lifestyle to spiritual contemplation. Thomas Köner should be adequately familiar with Paul Virilio’s "Aesthetics of Disappearance" since the latter’s apocalyptic visions are present as a not-to-be-ignored warning enabling representatives of his generation to manifest a considered proficiency in and even a certain matter-of-fact instrumentalization of the new media. Seeing a criticism of civilization, a symbol of the victory of technology over mankind In a work such as Banlieue du Vide, as Ute Vorkoeper suggests in an article in weekly magazine Die Zeit, would mean imputing moral or ideological tendencies to this art. Admittedly, Virilio does complain about the way that the new media desensitize the eye, but despite minimal changes and its slowness, Thomas Köner’s video work does not restrict itself to the function of an alternative "exercise in perception". It does not attempt to be didactic. On the other hand, with her sensitive description of the viewer and listener and of the effect of the video work on the senses, the author does hit upon a crucial aspect of Köner’s work. "A wall of sound and pictures do not illustrate each other. […]
Instead, he has worked through both media, video images and sound, independently for himself and shaped them into a whole where one element complements the other. The weird thing about this is that traditional expectations have been switched. For in the pictures Köner consistently produces the kind of spherical expanse and emptiness that are otherwise associated with sounds. The sound becomes almost physically tangible […]." As a contemporary media artist, Thomas Köner follows in the traditions of art history. Ute Vorkoeper interprets the deserted winter landscape as an antique or baroque memento mori. By means of fast motion and cross-fading the way that snowy streets ice up and the way the ice melts is visible as a continuous metamorphosis. This constant change in nature could be read as a symbol of transience. The trilogy Périphériques shows schemata of people that solidify into pictures only to evaporate again and vice versa. Here, too, a symbolic interpretation with religious motivation would seem obvious, "commemorating death" but this only matches Thomas Köner's intention to a certain extent. His art has no religious background even if some images can be imputed to Christian ideas. The movements and formations of people in his videos produced in Harare, Belgrade and Buenos Aires may be reminiscent of religious processions – the human schemata and shadows could be seen as souls. But Köner's spirituality remains abstract, if anything, comparable with that of a Barnett Newman. For him, as a painter from a Jewish background, the presence of the divine is to be found in boundless space, space from which shapes and things and, in the final analysis, material itself are banned. Formal similarities between the paintings and the video work are to be found where the linear axes can be continued infinitely upwards and downwards or where surfaces extends to all sides beyond the edge of the picture. The intersecting lines and the open areas have an intangible appearance. In Barnett Newman’s pictures, color frees itself from the function of illustrating or pointing out. They thus allow transcendence to be experienced through immateriality. Something similar could be said about the work of Thomas Köner. The fleeting quality of his pictures and sounds give rise to "emptiness". This state of affairs could equally be paraphrased with the Western idea of the sublime and with the Asian "Nirvana", the subjective nothingness.
In the kind of emptiness striven for in Zen philosophy things lose their fundamental boundaries. Without ontological boundaries all things flow together, reflecting one another in the infinite expanse of nothingness. The specific thing about Thomas Köner's work, the continuum, displays aspects of this Eastern world view. Different times and various locations, people and things permeate it without resistance, "come into being from one another like ghosts and die away again."
Both his music and his ‘sound films’ and video-works are permeated by a melancholic undertone. Melancholy, a constant theme in art history, is not typified by a depressive sense of impotence, but by a refined refusal to accept purely rational thought. In his print Melencolia I Renaissance artist Albrecht Dürer presents an encrypted reflection on art and existence. That engraving marks the beginning of the Modern age, comparable with a dramatic change in history, similar to that Virilio discerns in the present. The Christian faith falls out of certainty into the dubious multiplicity of signs. We see a turn toward the subject, and a consciousness arises that includes a form of melancholy which no longer finds redemption in the insightful ascent to God. Dürer contemplates this, without feeling sinful, desperate or to have failed. In this context, the media artist takes a stance that is in principle close to that of Dürer and specifically to the latter’s approach to time. Hartmut Böhme points to the symbols of time in Dürer’s image: the hour-glass, the bell, the Jupiter panel. This connotation gives rise to an impression of "time halted". "For this moment, when time stands still – ‘time between times’, this too can be melancholia." Thomas Köner expressly distances himself from an art that points to "past and future points in time" in order to achieve a "direct confrontation with sound that references the contemporary world" and thus an image. Melancholic contemplation on art and existence is also to be found in the work of Caspar David Friedrich, whose pictures Monk by the Sea and Sea of Ice might come to mind when watching Banlieue du Vide just as might the landscapes so drenched in meaning as were painted by Edvard Munch. The people hurrying past one another in Périphériques (Belgrade) who unwittingly look into the camera or view us viewers without seeing us, are similar to Munch’s frontal, outlined faces in Four girls in Aasgaardstrand or The family at the road. Finally, in this connection let me quote Gottfried Benn, who defined the "vantage point of the ego" from the midst of melancholy: "No one [...] has risen up out of nothing, which we try to escape, dissolving into nothingness that closes around us.[...] – a matter of a day, so ephemeral." Thomas Köner is interested in precisely this "ephemeral state of being", for what he wants to create is a "sound that references the contemporary world", and this likewise applies to his audio-visual art. He develops a method that differs strongly from the customary avant-garde in order to eliminate anything event-like from his art. Instead of repeatedly lining up new aural and visual relationships, working with melody and rhythm, he relies on the principle of redundancy – aesthetically balanced between "pure kitsch and random aural presentation". This radical concept enables the senses to consciously experience the fleeting moment and creates completely new ideas of music and images. At the same time, we can read this as the realization of traditional philosophical and aesthetic notions, to which, for example, Zen philosophy aspires. Thomas Köner himself gives the trilogy Périphériques the subtitle Annica, a notion taken from Buddhism and which we could translate as instability or transience. Japanese philosopher Daisetz T. Suzuki writes on its meaning: "I do not know whether this sense of transience is unique to the Japanese mindset or to a certain extent can be traced back to the Buddhist world view; but beauty is a phenomenon of the moment and where we do not perceive and grasp it in the moment of its full vibrancy, there it is mere memory, its vibrancy lost. Beauty is so vibrant because it knows neither past nor future, only the present." Thomas Köner succeeds in creating a form of art that is designates some event intrinsic to art and does not refer to such. Image and sound are "self-satisfying". "The very positioning of two essentially different sounds next to each other creates a dialog that I do not want in my works. These contrasts that generate tension and then possibly dissolve it merely reduce the intrinsic effect of the sounds." By synthesizing sound and video to form a "self-satisfying" artwork, thanks to the use of new media he offers the viewer an unknown aesthetic and yet existential experience comparable with a painting such as Barnett Newmann’s Who is afraid of red, yellow and blue. Experiencing color as pure color, sound as pure sound can be a horrifying experience as it brings with it via the potential confrontation with this emptiness the danger and opportunity of encountering yourself in the direct present.
By realizing "self-satisfaction" in his works, Thomas Köner has also achieved a state of intentionlessness. In the metaphorical sense, his concept can be considered to have an aspect to it critical of the media and of society; cameras that serve surveillance become instruments that enable us to experience freedom.
Beauty is a fleeting phenomenonHans Günter Golinski
published: Pneuma Monoxyd, ISBN 978-3-938847-11
Thomas Köner’s music and pictures are characterized by an almost dramatic emptiness; in his art, real sequences of events are transformed into uneventful proceedings. We recognize everyday situations and noises but visible and audible interventions to remove their already minimal temporal and spatial context have allowed them to evaporate. His audiovisual work in particular, stimulate a process of visual hearing and audio seeing without allowing more to become visible than we hear – and vice versa. Instead of illustrating each other, the music and the pictures are concentrated into autonomous sound pictures and picture sounds. The picture acquires its capacity, inherent in sounds, for developing and dissolving itself in time through the medium of film or video. States of movement and repose, sounds and silence are combined to form a nonhierarchical continuum. Using this individual concept, this media artists provokes various different attitudes in his viewers and correspondingly controversial interpretations, with readings ranging from media-critical discourse to the experimental techno picture, from a boring lifestyle to spiritual contemplation. Thomas Köner should be adequately familiar with Paul Virilio’s "Aesthetics of Disappearance" since the latter’s apocalyptic visions are present as a not-to-be-ignored warning enabling representatives of his generation to manifest a considered proficiency in and even a certain matter-of-fact instrumentalization of the new media. Seeing a criticism of civilization, a symbol of the victory of technology over mankind In a work such as Banlieue du Vide, as Ute Vorkoeper suggests in an article in weekly magazine Die Zeit, would mean imputing moral or ideological tendencies to this art. Admittedly, Virilio does complain about the way that the new media desensitize the eye, but despite minimal changes and its slowness, Thomas Köner’s video work does not restrict itself to the function of an alternative "exercise in perception". It does not attempt to be didactic. On the other hand, with her sensitive description of the viewer and listener and of the effect of the video work on the senses, the author does hit upon a crucial aspect of Köner’s work. "A wall of sound and pictures do not illustrate each other. […]
Instead, he has worked through both media, video images and sound, independently for himself and shaped them into a whole where one element complements the other. The weird thing about this is that traditional expectations have been switched. For in the pictures Köner consistently produces the kind of spherical expanse and emptiness that are otherwise associated with sounds. The sound becomes almost physically tangible […]." As a contemporary media artist, Thomas Köner follows in the traditions of art history. Ute Vorkoeper interprets the deserted winter landscape as an antique or baroque memento mori. By means of fast motion and cross-fading the way that snowy streets ice up and the way the ice melts is visible as a continuous metamorphosis. This constant change in nature could be read as a symbol of transience. The trilogy Périphériques shows schemata of people that solidify into pictures only to evaporate again and vice versa. Here, too, a symbolic interpretation with religious motivation would seem obvious, "commemorating death" but this only matches Thomas Köner's intention to a certain extent. His art has no religious background even if some images can be imputed to Christian ideas. The movements and formations of people in his videos produced in Harare, Belgrade and Buenos Aires may be reminiscent of religious processions – the human schemata and shadows could be seen as souls. But Köner's spirituality remains abstract, if anything, comparable with that of a Barnett Newman. For him, as a painter from a Jewish background, the presence of the divine is to be found in boundless space, space from which shapes and things and, in the final analysis, material itself are banned. Formal similarities between the paintings and the video work are to be found where the linear axes can be continued infinitely upwards and downwards or where surfaces extends to all sides beyond the edge of the picture. The intersecting lines and the open areas have an intangible appearance. In Barnett Newman’s pictures, color frees itself from the function of illustrating or pointing out. They thus allow transcendence to be experienced through immateriality. Something similar could be said about the work of Thomas Köner. The fleeting quality of his pictures and sounds give rise to "emptiness". This state of affairs could equally be paraphrased with the Western idea of the sublime and with the Asian "Nirvana", the subjective nothingness.
In the kind of emptiness striven for in Zen philosophy things lose their fundamental boundaries. Without ontological boundaries all things flow together, reflecting one another in the infinite expanse of nothingness. The specific thing about Thomas Köner's work, the continuum, displays aspects of this Eastern world view. Different times and various locations, people and things permeate it without resistance, "come into being from one another like ghosts and die away again."
Both his music and his ‘sound films’ and video-works are permeated by a melancholic undertone. Melancholy, a constant theme in art history, is not typified by a depressive sense of impotence, but by a refined refusal to accept purely rational thought. In his print Melencolia I Renaissance artist Albrecht Dürer presents an encrypted reflection on art and existence. That engraving marks the beginning of the Modern age, comparable with a dramatic change in history, similar to that Virilio discerns in the present. The Christian faith falls out of certainty into the dubious multiplicity of signs. We see a turn toward the subject, and a consciousness arises that includes a form of melancholy which no longer finds redemption in the insightful ascent to God. Dürer contemplates this, without feeling sinful, desperate or to have failed. In this context, the media artist takes a stance that is in principle close to that of Dürer and specifically to the latter’s approach to time. Hartmut Böhme points to the symbols of time in Dürer’s image: the hour-glass, the bell, the Jupiter panel. This connotation gives rise to an impression of "time halted". "For this moment, when time stands still – ‘time between times’, this too can be melancholia." Thomas Köner expressly distances himself from an art that points to "past and future points in time" in order to achieve a "direct confrontation with sound that references the contemporary world" and thus an image. Melancholic contemplation on art and existence is also to be found in the work of Caspar David Friedrich, whose pictures Monk by the Sea and Sea of Ice might come to mind when watching Banlieue du Vide just as might the landscapes so drenched in meaning as were painted by Edvard Munch. The people hurrying past one another in Périphériques (Belgrade) who unwittingly look into the camera or view us viewers without seeing us, are similar to Munch’s frontal, outlined faces in Four girls in Aasgaardstrand or The family at the road. Finally, in this connection let me quote Gottfried Benn, who defined the "vantage point of the ego" from the midst of melancholy: "No one [...] has risen up out of nothing, which we try to escape, dissolving into nothingness that closes around us.[...] – a matter of a day, so ephemeral." Thomas Köner is interested in precisely this "ephemeral state of being", for what he wants to create is a "sound that references the contemporary world", and this likewise applies to his audio-visual art. He develops a method that differs strongly from the customary avant-garde in order to eliminate anything event-like from his art. Instead of repeatedly lining up new aural and visual relationships, working with melody and rhythm, he relies on the principle of redundancy – aesthetically balanced between "pure kitsch and random aural presentation". This radical concept enables the senses to consciously experience the fleeting moment and creates completely new ideas of music and images. At the same time, we can read this as the realization of traditional philosophical and aesthetic notions, to which, for example, Zen philosophy aspires. Thomas Köner himself gives the trilogy Périphériques the subtitle Annica, a notion taken from Buddhism and which we could translate as instability or transience. Japanese philosopher Daisetz T. Suzuki writes on its meaning: "I do not know whether this sense of transience is unique to the Japanese mindset or to a certain extent can be traced back to the Buddhist world view; but beauty is a phenomenon of the moment and where we do not perceive and grasp it in the moment of its full vibrancy, there it is mere memory, its vibrancy lost. Beauty is so vibrant because it knows neither past nor future, only the present." Thomas Köner succeeds in creating a form of art that is designates some event intrinsic to art and does not refer to such. Image and sound are "self-satisfying". "The very positioning of two essentially different sounds next to each other creates a dialog that I do not want in my works. These contrasts that generate tension and then possibly dissolve it merely reduce the intrinsic effect of the sounds." By synthesizing sound and video to form a "self-satisfying" artwork, thanks to the use of new media he offers the viewer an unknown aesthetic and yet existential experience comparable with a painting such as Barnett Newmann’s Who is afraid of red, yellow and blue. Experiencing color as pure color, sound as pure sound can be a horrifying experience as it brings with it via the potential confrontation with this emptiness the danger and opportunity of encountering yourself in the direct present.
By realizing "self-satisfaction" in his works, Thomas Köner has also achieved a state of intentionlessness. In the metaphorical sense, his concept can be considered to have an aspect to it critical of the media and of society; cameras that serve surveillance become instruments that enable us to experience freedom.
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