Sculptural Identity: Matthias Alfen's Abstractions and Figures

By Donald Kuspit

Matthias Alfen began his career, in the late eighties, making rather insular, solid, ruthlessly geometrical sculptures, usually based on the cube. If they were not so concentrated and self-contained, whatever the indentations of negative space that balance their projecting planes – both curved and straight, sometimes juxtaposed to heighten the tension - and thus implicitly as well as explicitly monumental and massive, giving them a certain inner power, they could be read as strictly formal constructions. It is hard to think of Komposition I, 1987 and Kubus, 1988 -- the former deceptively simple in its geometry, the latter more complex (a duality continued in the early nineties abstractions) -- in any other terms. Grosse Stele, 1989, of concrete, and Grosses Kreisornament, 1990, of resin -- the dense, inert, heavy material makes the geometrical masses that compose them all the more emphatic - add cultural meaning to the geometry, but the meaning seems incidental compared to the vigorous geometry it conceptually adorns. Alfen’s sculptures have an aura of permanence, stability, and universality independent of the cultural meaning conferred on them by their titles. Since human beings first philosophized about them, geometrical forms have been recognized as eternal objects, to use Whitehead’s term. Geometrical intelligibility is transcendental, universal, and unchanging; the memorial and sacramental functions of geometry -- Alfen’s stele and cross -- confirms its innate sacredness, and are credible only because of that sacredness.

But unexpectedly, in the New Millenium--as though making a break with his own past as well as the modernist past of geometrical abstraction (regarded by Alfred Barr, along with gestural abstraction, as the grand climax of modernist achievement)--Alfen began making very human figures. Some are female, some are male; some are standing, some are walking; some are falling; some are Janus-headed or Janus-bodied, that is, divided against themselves. Some are fragmented, as in The Unmaking of a Goddess, most are whole, like the Madonna figure, and one has disintegrated, leaving only a burnt out residue and shell of itself, as in Standing Void. The figure in Hic Rhodus, hic saltus is clearly heroic and derived from classical models of masculinity. It alludes to the Colossus of Rhodes, a gigantic statue that stood at the head of the harbor of that island in antiquity. A symbol of titanic power, it was one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. It collapsed during an earthquake, perhaps as a warning from fate not to challenge the gods. Alfen now uses softer materials--clay, plaster, polymer, wood—although a few sculptures are in bronze, like several of the geometrical sculptures. Virtually all of the figures are naked, and however twisted and self-contradictor--the Hic Rhodus figure is exemplary--remain full-bodied and whole. They are clearly less stable and balanced than the geometrical sculptures.

Clearly there has been a major change in attitude, sensibility, form and expressivity--a basic change in heart and style. Alfen’s turn away from abstraction to figuration--whatever residues of modernist abstraction are incorporated in the figure, for example, the cavity that serves as the right breast of Standing Woman (an inversion or denaturalization of female form evident in many Cubist sculptures, e.g., Archipenko’s dancers)--signals a turn from art for art’s sake to art for life’s sake. Goethe’s Faust said that two hearts beat in his chest, acknowledging his split personality. Two languages beat in Alfen’s art; until recently the language of the human figure was repressed by the language of geometrical abstraction. Alfen seems to integrate them, as the interplay of concavity and convexity in his new figures (male as well as female) suggests. But the body subsumes the geometry that informs it. The body is not reduced to geometry; instead, Alfen uses inorganic geometry to convey the complex dynamics of its organic space. In short, the negative and positive spaces--the “ins and outs”--of the geometrical sculptures have been transposed to the figurative sculptures, but they now have visceral rather than only formal significance. They suggest the mysteriousness of the lived body. Turning the body inside out, as it were, Alfen turns the body into a kind of Mobius strip. Inner space and out form flow into one another, almost becoming indistinguishable and interchangeable. Alfen’s figures involve the same paradoxical coordination of inner and outer as his cubes, but in a more perplexing, intense way.

I can’t claim to know exactly why Alfen made the change--why he broke sharply with his past. It is a revolution in form--certainly a repudiation of modernism. Perhaps Alfen realized that geometrical abstraction had become clichéd after a century of use, although he showed that it could still generate intriguing effect. By art historical default, as it were, the figure, and with its representation, became freshly important. But Alfen’s sudden change of sculptural direction--a change from abstraction to empathy?, the play on Wilhelm Worringer’s famous distinction--can’t be as deliberate as it looks. Such a basic change in artistic consciousness signals an existential crisis. Alfen’s New Figure, whatever its allegorical import, is above all about the body--a clearly disturbed body, as the twists and turns that distort it indicate. If the body is the first ego, as Freud said, then it is the site where the problems of existence--and ultimately a sense of its problematic character--first make themselves felt. They are expressed through the body because without the body there is no existence. The ruthless split in Alfen’s bodies and heads, indicating a self divided against himself--a self that is a precarious structure of opposites, and thus perpetually on the verge of coming apart--suggests the inherently traumatic character of human existence. The split implies that the threat of disintegration is innate. But without inner integrity or wholeness, the outside world is also threatening, which is perhaps why many of Alfen’s male figures face it with clenched fists and tensed muscles. They are ready to do battle with it because there is nothing they can do about the conflict built into them.

I think the crisis in Alfen’s art suggested by his rejection of abstraction and affirmation of representation was also a crisis of self-confidence. It involved the realization that geometry inhibited his creativity and expressivity, however creatively and expressively he used it. Alfen’s figurative sculptures have more creative nerve--are more creatively daring--than his geometrical abstractions. The body offers a more difficult kind of creative challenge than simple geometry: it is more physically and expressively complex, and has immediate human import. Figurative sculpture invariably engages us because it makes us conscious of our own bodies, which we tend to take for granted as long as they are healthy. Perhaps the germ of the change from geometrical idols to psychological figuration appears in Alfen’s 1993 Schriftpsychogramm drawings. An intense abstract handwriting, loosely hieroglyphic it is clearly meant to have psychological import, however obscure. But the truly psychological had to wait a decade to come into its own in Alfen’s work.

The geometrical sculptures are self-identical, however much they are constructed of unidentical spaces, but the figurative sculptures have no clear formal identity, implying that human identity is always a question. Allegorizing “doubleness”, Alfen suggests that human beings can never be held to one identity. They are in perpetual identity crisis. Alfen’s Falling Man suggests its consequences. The Fall of Man is a Biblical them, and existential philosophers remind us that we are constantly falling towards death. Alfen’s figures usually stand upright, but they are destabilized into doubleness, implying they are ripe for a fall. Standing Void shows that out bodies will rot to nothing, however upright we stand. The ironic-tragic implications of Alfen’s Janus figures and heads are lacking in his geometrical abstractions, however monumental both are.

Tragic irony is explicit in Alfen’s Fossilmenschen series, 2002-2003, his most expressively daring works to date. Alfen seems to be suggesting that human beings will become extinct, victims of their own uncontrollable violence and brutality, signaled by the display of teeth in several mouths, opened wide as if in a scream but also, ambiguously, in anger and rage. Will we bit each other into oblivion? Is Alfen saying that they, we will survive only as archeological finds displayed in the natural history and/or art museums--what greater art than that created by nature?--of post-human beings? The figures embedded--sedimented--in Alfen’s rusting walls suggest as much. Violence is explicit in Untitled #19. It looks like a scene out of hell. Has the bleeding central male figure had his heart ripped from his chest in some sacrificial ritual? Several of the figures seem to be self-portraits, as though Alfen--the artist--is the exemplary victim.

Many of the Fossilmenschen are nightmarish and grotesque, especially the surreal stoneware heads. They are masterpieces of agony and doubleness, all the more ironic because it proliferates seemingly ad infinitum. Alfen has outdone himself, both expressively and formally. They are his most complicated constructions. Subtle color adds to their resonance. In the current exhibition, heads float in a charcoal river, confirming their morbid meaning: the river is black with the death—and perhaps also forgetfulness, to refer to Lether, the mythological river the dead crossed in antiquity--in which humanity is drowning (There is a classical, heroic aspect to many of Alfen’s heads, confirmed by their epic look; many are in effect archaeological fragments). The Guardian Head that watches over the twentieth century--many historians have said it is the most barbaric, brutal of any century--are epitomized by the black charcoal. It is a powerful symbol of death and despair: one has only to light the charcoal to start a conflagration--a holocaust.

I want to conclude by focusing on two stoneware heads, one female, the other male, both made in 2003. Doubleness has become morbid and dangerous: the double has become a tumor growing out of the side of the head, multiplying with cancerous rapidity. Doubleness has become a monstrous sickness unto death, a mutant growth that parasitically preys on the head it emerges from. Alfen’s pathological heads, presented without pedestals--their absence gives the heads greater presence and immediacy--gives expressionistic power to Alfen’s isolated figures. They take the isolation of Alfen’s Madonna figures--one has her head bent downwards in despair, the other is bent upwards as if wishing for a redemptive sign--a decisive mad step further. The dividedness of Alfen’s two Madonnas conveys terrible suffering, and the desperate need for faith, but the heads suggest inescapable demonic possession by a violent altar ego, and the horror of being without faith, which reconciles one with God, who has allowed so much suffering, and with oneself, who has helplessly suffered. Unable to heal the split in their personality--it literally tears Alfen’s figures apart, showing that they are destroyed body and soul--Alfen’s figures suggest the inevitability of insanity in a violent world. His heads protest it even as they embody it. They are a major contribution to--a brilliant extension of--the “art of the scream”, as German Expressionism was called when it emerged at the troubled beginning of the twentieth century. Alfen’s doomed heads indicate that there is still a deep need for it in the twenty-first century.