Wolfgang Voigt – Rückverzauberung Exhibition (2021)
I am part of the part that once was everything, Part of the darkness which gave birth to light.
Mephistopheles, from Faust.
Wolfgang Voigt is back with a most complex and powerful work, cementing his status as one of the most captivating contemporary artists, not just in the field of electronic music, but as conceptional artist overall. His sublime release Rückverzauberung Exhibition (2021) is a celebration of orderly abstraction and controlled symphonic chaos, and a powerful invocation of an alternative reality, a philosophical counter-concept calling for the reversal of the origins of post-modern men’s malaise and doom. Once again, Voigt evaporates the boundaries of his art form and transcendentally lays out the rich, mythical and uniquely poignant German vocabulary he inhabits, and that without one spoken word on the record. From an interdisciplinary art perspective, one can only compare this articulate and imaginative richness of Voigt’s art to the likes of an Andrei Tarkovsky, who managed to invoke profound philosophy and a deeper cosmic narration within his cinematic images that lack a classic narration. Voigt gives us the same cosmic kiss.
Like in his outstanding works with his project GAS, we enter the mythical Teutonic forests with the first dissonances and heavy fogs of sound, an alchemistic drone that moves the listener towards the hypnotic world of a cold fever dream as if in trance: the album’s title, Rückverzauberung Exhibition, immediately invokes the Grimm‘s eerie and captivating folktales. “Rückverzauberung” insufficiently translates to “re-enchantment”. The German word is not as positively marked as it is in the English language, but raises connotations to witchery and a certain sinisterness and malaise. In the Grimm’s tales, there is always a negative occurrence or enchantment first, like a spell turning a Prince into a frog, until the Princess initiates his “Rückverzauberung” with her kiss, re-establishing the original, aspired state.
Things become more difficult with the “Exhibition” part of the title- is it an “exhibition of re-enchantment”, or maybe rather the “re-enchantment of exhibition”? The cover art by Theo Ellsworth suggests that it is the latter in showing the outlines of a transparent face, or interface, which has turned into a panopticon inhabited by a human figure who is covering his organic eyes, but connected to multiple external eyes and mouths. This might as well depict the uniquely new, psycho-political panopticon of today’s exploitation society as Byung Chul Han manifests it in his Transparency Society (2015): the last incarnation of capitalism in which the surveilled and exploited subject is not just victim and product, but a functional element, even perpetrator who feeds the system with its involvement in digital exhibition.
The album’s cover works as an antidote to the one-dimensionality and plainness of the classic Grimm’s tales’ characters. These didn’t survive all trends and time despite their one-dimensionality and lack of psychologization, but because of it. Today, Hansel and Gretel and Little Red Riding Hood would navigate their ways through the forest with GPS while Snow White is exercising in selfies and Cinderella in photogenic exhibitions of suffering, chronicling her daily enslavement on social media. Hence, the last two decades’ crisis of literature, and of all art. Contemporary art is doomed to nurture from a hell of banality and the ignorance of the radical duality of all things. It is doomed to feed from emotional (self-)exploitation and an all-flattening positivity in which the negative as energy of challenge, defiance, creativity and renewal is weeded out and makes place for collective narcism and its trademark malaise, depression.
Suffice to say that Voigt’s art is not in danger of being in any crisis. The forests he invites us into are majestic and rich, but simultaneously, just like the ocean’s surface, repetitive and poor on details for the habitual human eye, and thus becoming an abstraction. Resonating the lack of realistic and ornate detail in the Grimm’s tales that makes for a somnambule abstraction, Voigt’s is a universe opposed to the obscene information overflow of the digital age, but one with a tendency towards contrast, duality, shadow, and mystery. It is afterlife and underworld; it is a kingdom in which primal forces like death reign, not mundane zombiedom. Mephistophelean introspective and evil is lurking through every sound of Rückverzauberung Exhibition, danger and sexuality through all of its pores. A sexuality that remains wonderfully veiled and vague, with no flesh and faces exhibited, but feasting on tales on how once „straw was spun to gold all night“ by strange creatures, and for three nights in a row.
The last enchantment of our time was digital technology and exhibition, the first of spells in which we do not dwell, but rush into a mental abyss. All that glitters is not gold~ the seductive promises have not been kept, and the faults and damnations of technology emerge like corpses of the living dead floating on oceans of banality. Voigt’s work is an invocation of the reversal of this false enchantment, without ever touching its layers of profaneness. It is one of the rare and invaluable gates guarding the return to a completing negativity and dissonance. Rückverzauberung Exhibition is part of the darkness which gives birth to light, indeed.
Faust. Well now, who are you then? Mephistopheles. Part of that force that always wills the evil and always produces the good.
by Saliha Enzenauer
https://kompakt.fm/releases/rueckverzauberung_exhibition