Eternal Return of the Ever-Other

The Birth of Spiritual Images from the Spirit of Music

Thomas Mießgang

In the last few years, life has become quite ghostly. After the ‘end of history’ diagnosed by the unfortunate Francis Fukuyama at the beginning of the 1990s, a great deal of history has again taken place that celebrates the return of the same old thing that civilisation had long since deemed to have overcome. Keyword: Ukraine. Good times, one would think, for hauntological entelechies as instruments for diagnosing contemporary sensitivities. The term hauntology, a portmanteau of haunting and ontology, by Jacques Derrida, links haunting with the doctrine of being and has enchanted both historical scholarship and the cultural milieu, which likes to be intoxicated by ghosts from the past, for about two decades. It is about the ghostly persistence of elements from the past that protrude into the present like aliens. Or, as it says in “Hamlet”: “Time is out of joint.” Now Ronald Kodritsch’s ghostly images are by no means the direct result of a hauntological worldview. It is not about the semantics that are linked to the idea of the ghost, but about the form itself, the artist emphasizes: “For me, this is an abstract motif. I can concentrate more on painting and colour variations once the form is there.” Kodritsch has already produced quite a few series in which a given motif is declined through a series of variative patterns, including “Bikinimädchen” or “Stanley Road”, where tractors are put into the picture in different ways. Nevertheless, it cannot be denied that the spirit of the times of a ‘Mal du Siècle’ leaves shadowy traces in the meanwhile already extremely large cycle of ghost pictures. Kodritsch began this casually composed series as early as 1999, prescribing different shapes and forms of appearance to his stylised sheet ghosts. Often the scenery in the pictures is bathed in a poisonous dark violet, the shadowy figures seem to be engaged in dull activities that cannot be fully understood and are occasionally virtually swallowed up by the equally tenebrous background. In this supernatural milieu, there are genies, painter’s ghosts, those who appear as doubles and others who grow almost Cronenberg-like extensions from their cloth-covered bodies. It may also be that there are some among them that you called and now can’t get rid of again.

Ronald Kodritsch has long pursued his painting techniques on the theme of “There`s a ghost in my House” as a playful jumble of stereotypes and his respective personal moods, whereby the treatment of the motif was a rather permissive one. Lately, the ghosts have not disappeared, but their depiction follows different, stricter, more reductionist parameters. In the subchapter “Ghost on Couch”, which has also already encompassed numerous works, precisely the programme promised in the title is realised. This brings more structure and consistency to the ghostly round dance, at the same time freeing the artist to concentrate on colour application, colouristic finesses and micro-calibrations in artistic design. And there, within the framework of the minimalist basic conception, there is an abundance of variative digressions. Sometimes the ensemble of figure and reclining furniture flashes out as a white spot from a background made with rough strokes and kept dark, then again the séance is staged as a cosy home story with living room lamp and strongly contrasting colour valeurs. Sometimes the whole scene is immersed in an inky blue lightened by white streaks, so that only the contours of the titular ensemble remain recognisable, or the brochure, against which the couch stands out in obscene shades of brown, looks as if Jackson Pollock had painted it, albeit with an extended colour palette, in the manner of action painting.

If you look at the entire Ghost on the Couch series as an ensemble, which is by no means complete, then the individual modules seem like self-contained units, but they only unfold their full effect when they interact. The self-confessed music freak Ronald Kodritsch himself establishes a connection to the one-to-three chord punk of the late 1970s, whose formally extremely reduced acoustical sensory units only became that swelling buck song in the interplay with a youth movement that is still fondly remembered today. Even more suggestive, however, is the connection to classical minimal music, which at the height of the post-serial glass bead game of contemporary music designed a Pacific-influenced acoustic counter-programme that aimed at repetition and trance-like sound compression. In the context of “Ghost on Couch”, the terrace harmonics of Philipp Glass or the phase-shifting aesthetics of early Steve Reich are less relevant than the art of Terry Riley based on microcellular concatenations, in particular his groundbreaking 1964 work “In C”, composed for any number of unspecified performers.

The composition consists of 53 short, numbered musical phrases with detailed playing instructions by the componist: each phrase can be repeated as often as desired, each musician decides for himself when to move on to the next phrase. The result is a highly complex fabric with rhythmic shifts and tonal overlaps, but the basic form, driven by a continuous pulse, always shines through as a permutating archetype. So it’s not about the originality of melodic ideas or the sophistication of compositional execution practices with the sacred text of the score as the basis for a performance practice true to the line, but about a liberated form of juggling with a basic acoustic shape. This becomes particularly obvious when one takes into account that “In C” is not dependent on a defined orchestral apparatus like the symphonies of Gustav Mahler, for example, but can be realised in any imaginable musical environment. Just as “Ghost on Couch” transposes the simple basic constellation through a multitude of colour and form variations, Terry Riley’s composition has materialised in the most diverse sound forms in the course of its almost 60-year history: Of the almost unmanageable mass of recordings, only a few particularly striking ones are singled out here: The Shanghai Film Orchestra released a record in 1989 in which the work was recorded on traditional Chinese instruments with alternative tunings and unusual timbres. The piano ensemble Piano Circus followed in 1990 with a production using only this instrument, and the Japanese psychedelic rock ensemble Acid Mothers Temple & the Melging Paraiso U.F.O. gave it a spin into hallucinogenic in 2003. However, the most unusual recording to date, and the one furthest removed from the original text, is that of Africa Express from 2015, where African musicians like Adama Koita and Cheick Diallo teamed up with Western pop stars Damon Albarn and Brian Eno to realise a transgressive sound from the diaspora. “The piece sounds too dramatically different from performance to performance,” says the website Pitchfork.com, “that it can never grow old.” (1)

1) Joe Tangari: Africa Express presents ….Terry Riley`s In C in Mali, https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20145-africa-express-africa-express-presents-terry-rileys-in-c-mali/

Just as in “Ghost on Couch” the sheet ghost on the reclining furniture is only a template and pretext for unleashing a game of very different painterly turbulence, so the minimal phrases of Terry Riley’s “In C” can be seen as a point of departure from which the journey can go in all possible directions and existential dimensions.

Thus, aesthetics based on variative repetition, such as Ronald Kodritsch’s, the original punk musicians, the minimalists, and of course the producers of techno or Goa trance musics, are all about the continuous reappearance of something that is already artistically fixed. In this context, one can quote Friedrich Nietzsche: “How if one day or night, a demon crept up on you in your loneliest solitude and told you: ‘This life, as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live it again and countless times; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every pleasure and every thought and sigh and everything unspeakably small and great in your life must come back to you, and everything in the same order and sequence.” (2) Friedrich Nietzsche: Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, Viertes Buch, Aphorismus 341 (KSA 3, 1980, S. 570).

“Ghost on Couch” is not about the return of the same old thing, but about the frequent appearance of a different old thing that performs artistic tap dances on a formally defined basic pattern. As a comparative material, Ronald Kodritsch brings another theme into play: “The blues, too, is a simple archaic form that has been refreshed and revived for decades. In the blues, too, there are trance moments that you can tip into.”

And in the person of minimal pioneer LaMonte Young, a confluence of dispositive blues and minimal music even occurs. For the composer, who is one of the most important propagators of just intonation, i.e. a system of pure tuning that makes micro-intervallics an essential part of sonic production, founded the “Forever Bad Bluesband” in 1993, which amalgamated the blue notes of traditional blues music with his compositional theories located beyond the dodecaphonic system, thus producing a hallucinatory sound that reconciles the archaic with the ivory tower. “Two Hours, one song.” Rolling Stone said at the time. “The closest so-called art music had ever taken me to true groove heaven.” (3) David Fricke, Rolling Stone, zit. nach https://www.melafoundation.org/fbbpress.htm

Let us balance the situation: Starting from the Ghost on the Couch series, we have worked out a paradigm in relational approximation to the system of music that can generate a hurricane of existential turbulence under the simplest conceptual conditions. When a motive, both acoustic and visual, is so clearly marked that it virtually disappears through over-presence, a projective space is created that can be filled with very concrete sound or image events on the one hand, but also with different evidence from the canon of desire on the other. The tense expectation of the eternally unexpected new, as we know it from Netflix productions or Tarantino films, is extinguished and instead a fine-tuning takes place that transcends all semantic and metaphorical connotations of the motif and opens up a new space in which the signs relieved of meaning begin to float and can be identified as material traces. The insistence of the chain of signifiers, as Lacan would say, unfolds its hypnotic power and opens up a game in which questions of representationalism or abstraction become superfluous and painting as a pure force, if not appears, is at least denoted. Nietzsche again: “The eternal hourglass of existence is turned over and over again – and you with it, little dust of dust!’ – Would you not prostrate yourself and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you ever experienced a tremendous moment when you would answer him: ‘You are a god and I have never heard anything more divine! If that thought gained power over thee, it would transform thee as thou art, and perhaps crush thee; the question by all and sundry ‘wilt thou have this again and innumerable times?’ would lie as the greatest weight upon thy action!” (4)

4) Friedrich Nietzsche: Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, Viertes Buch, Aphorismus 341 (KSA 3, 1980,S. 570).