Re: [-empyre-] in memoriam Thierry Kuntzel

[Timothy Murray <tcm1@cornell.edu>]

> Sean,

I deeply appreciate your posting such a deeply 
moving tribute to Thierry Kuntzel who was a dear 
friend and superbly smart and subtle artist. 
Yesterday, at the same moment Thierry was being 
laid to rest in the Père Lachaise cemetary in 
Paris, I happened to be giving a lecture to my 
students in Introduction to Visual Studies on 
queer video in the age of AIDS.  This is a 
lecture that fits well with our -empyre- theme of 
TechnoPanic: Technology and Terror since so many 
of the tapes made in collaboration with ACT UP 
and other  international AIDS activist groups 
turned to the technological experimentations of 
video to grab back, through form and content, the 
discourse on AIDS from the media panic generated 
around the disease in order to make thoughtful, 
provocative, and sometimes wistful interventions 
on the complicated terrain of desire and disease. 
As, Isaac Julien urged his viewers, "feel no 
guilt in your desire."  At the opening of this 
class, I suddenly realized that I was screening 
Julien's sublimely gorgeous and melancholic tape, 
"This is not an AIDS Advertisement," at the 
precise  moment of Thierry's funeral.

Just as coincidental as Julien's evocation of 
loss in the face of death, and so uncanny  that 
tears filled my eyes in front of my class, was 
that I follow this tape every year with a 
contextual explanation of independent art 
production in the age of AIDS, a lecture that 
opens with images from Robert Mapplethorpe's 
Black Book and my retelling of  Mapplethorpe's 
memorable account of how most of the black boys 
he photographed  in the seventies had preceded 
him in death by the late eighties because they 
lacked the access to and financial resources for 
the experimental drugs that kept Mapplethorpe 
alive with HIV a little bit longer.   As I was 
recounting this anecdote to my class,  I stood 
with amazement when I realized that an image 
filled the screen of one model who survived 
Mapplethorpe, Ken Moody.  Those of you familiar 
with Thierry Kuntzel's later work in video 
installation will appreciate the uncanniness of 
Moody's presence on the screen, at that very 
moment marking the celebration in Paris of 
Thierry's friendship and artistic and theoretical 
accomplishments.  It was Ken who collaborated 
with Thierry in his complex video adaptation of 
Poussin's Four Seasons.  Most telling is the 
sublime image from the installation, "Winter: The 
Death of Robert Walser" that haunts me still this 
afternoon.  This 3 track installation depicts the 
body of Ken Moody, wrapped in a scrimlike shroud 
whose folds envloped in white light come to rest 
momentarily on his suddenly opened eyes.  The 
track of Moody's deathlike body  is framed on 
either side by screens of cobalt blue (the cobalt 
blue that happened also to mark for Derek Jarman 
the wistfulness of his own gradual blindness and 
subsequent death from AIDS).  In an article about 
this installation, I make the connection between 
the wistfulness of perceiving "Winter: The Death 
of Robert Walser" from within the cobalt haze of 
Jarman's Blue and his own death at the sime time 
period.

Now I find myself again enveloped in video's 
inhuman field of touch and techne. I now find 
myself again witnessing the electric cobalt blue 
borders of Thierry Kuntzel's Winter while haunted 
by my projections of his own enshrouded figure as 
it speaks to us from something like Derek Jarman 
who described his crypt of Blue:

"Blue protects white from innocence / Blue drags 
black with it / Blue is darkness made visible / 
Blue protects white from innocence / Blue drags 
black with it / Blue is darkness made visible . . 
. For Blue there are no boundaries or solutions. 
/ How did my friends cross the cobalt river, with 
what did they pay the ferryman?  As they set out 
for the indigo shore under this jet-black 
sky--some died on their feet with a backward 
glance.  Did they see Death with the hell hounds 
pulling a dark chariot, bruised blue-black, 
growing dark in the absence of light?"

The lively specters of these sounds and images 
add melancholic weight to my cherished memory of 
Thierry Kuntzel as read through the cobalt traces 
of his cinematic brothers and sisters whose 
memory resides with his in the quiet of Arcadia.

Tim

> there is the awful leaden weight of death over 
> the thought of Heidegger. what is so depressing 
> about it is the absurdity which he gives it: the 
> meaninglessness. I don't mean that deatth is 
> intrinsically meaningful, but that it has many 
> meanings, for specific dyings. And each is 
> embedded in a locale, in a world, among the 
> living and the dying, for whom it means immensely
>
> Thierry Kuntzel's Nostos is currently showing at 
> ACMI in the Beaubourg touring video 
> retrospective. It is a lovely thing, the 
> inhabitance of a room with light, recorded in 
> greyscale, on a bank of (memory supplying 
> details) nine monitors in a 3x3 grid  (might be 
> 4x4). They are heritage boxes, and the light 
> trap is excellent, so you are alert to the 
> fading of light, the flare in the camera - which 
> would have been a tube camera, liable to comet 
> tails and saturation - and the sluggish decay of 
> the phosphors in the old tubes, longer and 
> slower than the modern ones, and longer and 
> slower than the simple line scan overwriting a 
> flare of brightness. Because the light trap is 
> so good you're aware of the blaze of light - you 
> are basically in night-vision mode, all rods, 
> few cones, straining after the photons, but when 
> they burst your rods flare out and carry the 
> afterimage.
>
> These beautiful artefacts (as engineers will 
> call them - unexpected or unwanted products of 
> the technology) are integral to the devices it 
> is shown on (I recall seeing a single channel 
> version years ago at the Institut Francais in 
> London, in a dimmed but ambient-lit room, very 
> differently - i recall a blue tone to the image 
> there, but that might be a trick of memory). 
> These screens will eventually lose the capacity 
> to show the work, and it will be reconstructed, 
> in a new form on new screens. With luck it will 
> be around for years to come, transferred to new 
> storage media. Perhaps the archivists will try 
> to register some of these artefacts - tone the 
> screens with an ambient grey to denote, or point 
> towards, the off-black quality of video black 
> back in the day.
>
> The archive of digital materials points us 
> always to the fundamental ephemerality of this 
> seeing, this version, this event, this mounting 
> and staging, this moment of viewing which is so 
> tragically tied to time, but which makes its 
> statement against panic by offering, as the 
> obverse of tragedy, the utterly now.
>
> Kuntzel's Nostos is its own tribute to the way 
> electronic media more perhaps than any other 
> except performance -- which Nostos records in 
> the actions of the woman in the room we see 
> passing light over the walls -- , or the media 
> of everyday interactions, kisses, kindnesses - 
> the way electronic media can, if they wish, 
> announce their own fading as integral to their 
> experience.
>
> In this way Nostos teaches us not to mourn, or 
> to mourn in the knowledge that life is for the 
> living, but dying is for the living too.
>
>
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--
Timothy Murray
Acting Director of The Society for the Humanities
Professsor of Comparative Literature and English
Director of Graduate Studies in Film and Video Studies
Curator, The Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art, Cornell Library
A. D. White House
Cornell University
Ithaca, New York 14853