Leicht wie Nebel / Schwer wie Blei / Musik ergibt sich / Strömt wie Gas / Eine Lichtung / Schweres Gepäck / Einstand im Jenseits / Der Tod hat sieben Katzen / Weltkulturerbe Rausch / Endlich Unendlich
Wolfgang Voigt (2018)
Das Ich denke, Ich bin, ist, seit Cartesius, der Grundirrtum in aller Erkenntnis; das Denken ist nicht mein Denken, und das Seyn nicht mein Seyn, denn alles ist nur Gottes oder des Alls
Friedrich Schelling (1805)
The sun is slowly setting when the young man places his bicycle against a fence and walks into the entrance of the nature reserve. He walks briskly. Uphill. Into the woods. Slope down. The forest is getting thicker—a sudden open space. The man walks toward a tree. He puts down his backpack and leans against the ancient trunk. He smiles, puts a small piece of paper under his tongue, and closes his eyes. Then, there is that feeling of being and not being. He feels part of the cosmos. He opens his eyes and looks up at the tree branches, the leaves that move with the wind. He feels them. Those branches and leaves. As if they are part of his body. He feels his body merging with the tree, trunk, branches, and leaves. With the earth. The forest. He is one with nature.
That young man is Wolfgang Voigt (1961). The forest is Königsforst. Plagued by ADHD and hypersensitivity, Voigt seeks peace as a teenager. He walks for hours through Königsforst, the vast nature reserve east of his birthplace, Cologne. He experiences his first LSD trip there. Feels connected to nature. That connection goes further: he feels one with the past, with the future. A soul without a body. He is. Voigt experiences how essential drugs are in understanding the world honestly. Replace drugs with art, especially music, and Voigt’s career tells itself.
Voigt and I have met regularly over the past two decades. We discussed his childhood experiences in Königsforst during his ‘Gas’ project, released on the Raster-Noton record label in 2008. That period marks the awakening of the artist in Voigt. Or rather, the reawakening. During the first years of this century, the work at the record label Kompakt, which he runs with Michael Mayer and Jürgen Paape, took up his time. Making music and art himself are on a low flame. Between 1996 and 2000, Voigt released four albums under the pseudonym Gas. More than ten years later, he feels that same energy flowing through his body and mind again. Call it the urge to create, Voigt feels the need to create. This time, he goes a lot deeper, he explains. Lately, he has been delving into the past. He fell in love with the atonal music of Arnold Schönberg. Music can unite worlds, make connections visible, and open the eyes. Yes, like a drug.
Voigt approached fifty in 2008. Yet, it does not sound like he wants to relive the innocence of his youth. Becoming one with nature is more than a unique experience. It is the essence of existence. With the four Gas albums, he tried to convey that essence through music, but now — almost ten years later — he is further along. Wiser, more experienced. His project ‘Kompakt’ is finished. He has made an ecosystem out of it. Earlier, I spoke to Kompakt co-founder Michael Mayer, who laughed at the profound way Voigt has structured the organization: “For me, it’s about the music; for Voigt Kompakt, is much more than that. It’s a family, a way of life, a haven for everyone who is part of it. He is very fanatical about that.” Kompakt is not just a record company. It is an ecosystem that adapts to its environment and remains true to its ideals.
Thanks to Voigt, who has guarded the vision with a firm hand since the foundation in 1993. He is not a tyrant, as confirmed by the employees and artists I have spoken to over the years who adore him. For him, Kompakt is a family that revolves around much more than music. For example, they eat together as much as possible — organic and vegetarian — and Kompakt life takes place on the five floors of the building on Werderstrasse. Downstairs, the studios, on the ground floor shops and storage, first and second floors offices, meeting rooms, kitchen and dining area, above that living space for employees and guests.
“In Cologne, people sometimes call it a sect,” says Hans Nieswandt with a wink during our breakfast at Café Franck in the trendy Neuehrenfeld district sometime in the summer of 2015. Nieswandt is an ambassador for the Goethe Institute, has written several books on house culture, was an editor for pop magazine Spex, scored a massive hit with ‘From Disco To Disco’ as Whirlpool Productions, and stayed true to Cologne when everyone moved to Berlin. “Just like Kompakt. That was important for Cologne. When many artists and performers left the city, Kompakt stayed true to the city.” That paid off for the label. Kompakt dictated the aesthetics of pop techno for a long time. It elevates pop to art, Nieswandt summarizes. “The store looks like an art gallery, is spacious and minimalist. The design is sleek, reminiscent of Bauhaus and Braun, and harks back to a kind of fifties futurism. If you live in Toronto or Mexico City, that’s the image you have of German techno.”
Voigt guards that aesthetic. The meeting room is furnished with sleek thirties and fifties furniture. Beautiful and spartan. No frills, no frills. The Kompakt logo is just as elegant. Tradition and modernity merge into each other. Voigt embodies that contrast: the urge to move forward is great but from tradition. For Voigt, that is not a contradiction—the narrative he has devised for Kompakt and himself is non-linear. And then we are at the ‘assignment’ that Voigt took up again in 2008, resulting in the masterpiece ‘Rausch’ in 2018: place yourself as a human being back in nature, in the ‘everything.’
The Western divide between man and nature arises during the Enlightenment. Man frees himself from God and seeks new ways to understand and explain reality. In ‘Kritik der Urteilskraft’ (1790), Immanuel Kant attempts to bridge the gap between freedom and nature by using art. According to Kant, art can bring together the opposing dimensions of nature and freedom. An aesthetic judgment does not provide factual knowledge, but it does give a position to bring nature and freedom into harmony. This harmony is expressed in the work of art.
Nevertheless, for Kant, the causally determined world of nature (the observable sensual world) and the world of moral action characterized by freedom (the supersensible world) remain essentially incompatible, as he describes in ‘Kritik der reinen Vernuft’ (1781) and ‘Kritik der praktischen Vernuft’ (1787). The contrast that Kant introduces has had a significant influence on Western philosophy. It is too easy to blame him for our current human/nature dichotomy, as is often done in Object-Oriented Ontology circles. The reinforcement of the dichotomy is mainly due to the lack of resilience of later philosophy.
Many German idealists inspired by Kant reject the existence of Kant’s ‘Ding an Sich’ – the status of an object as it is, independent of representation and observation. There is no unknowable reality. Observable reality exists only in the realm of ideas. Johann Gottlieb Fichte emphasizes that only the human component — the I — is relevant to philosophy. Nature, therefore, does not matter as ‘nicht-ich,’ not-I. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel agrees with Fichte in this respect. Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling places different emphases. In his thinking, he is strongly influenced by Kant, Leibniz, and Spinoza. Fichte sees the latter as a dogmatist. For Schelling, nature and spirit are equal only to differ in quantity. Like the mind, nature cannot be reduced to purely material and is not comparable to a machine. Nature ‘flows’ and changes continuously. The instrumental way in which the then-modern philosophy approaches the world leads irrevocably to a disappearance of nature, according to Schelling. Ironically enough, the nineteenth-century romantics, inspired by Schelling, did precisely that.
Like Kant, Schelling sees a tension between the human condition and nature. He also places humans outside of nature. Art can, like Kant, bridge the gap between mind and nature. A work of art unites the conscious with the unconscious and is the synthesis of mind and nature. It shows infinity in something finite. The work of art lifts the separation between nature and mind that arises in the search for human freedom. Nature and mind coincide again. Interestingly, Schelling does not see nature as inherently good or beautiful. It is the work of art that attributes those properties to nature.
This criticism of prevailing thinking is a recurring theme after Schelling. The Frankfurters, Max Weber, Martin Heidegger, and Marshall McLuhan’s criticism is mainly directed against the instrumental character of the Enlightenment and modernity. One could argue that it is a more sociological and profound analysis than contemporary philosophy can carry out.
Fast forward to now.
Enter Timothy Morton.
For the webzine FRNKFRT, I wrote earlier about this British thinker closer to Schelling than Hegel and Kant. However, Morton goes one step further. He not only breaks down the wall between nature and mind, he denies that there is such a thing as nature. Nature is, and here he shakes hands with Schelling, a false representation of things necessary to distinguish us from that nature, from the ‘Ding an Sich’. Morton advocates an ecology without nature. He is not alone in this. In that ecology, everything is equal. Philosopher Slavoj Žižek and sociologist Bruno Latour have a similar ideology.
Morton supports object-oriented ontology, which assumes that humans and non-humans are equal. He relates his ideas to the Anthropocene, a concept that describes human intervention in ecology as so great that its influence can no longer be ignored. This condition calls for a radically different approach to our environment. It includes rejecting Kant’s opposition between mind and nature, especially in vogue with the neo-Kantians.
We still live in a society that cultivates the idea of man’s opposition to nature. Morton believes that this has to change, and art can help. The ‘Dark Ecology’ project of the Amsterdam organization Sonic Acts is a good example. Morton was involved in it and simultaneously wrote a book about the concept.
We need artists to investigate our relationship with our environment, argues Ruben Jacobs in his book ‘Artonauts: On expedition in the Anthropocene’. He calls these artists artonauts, a concept he has used for several years in his articles and lectures. Jacobs is a sociologist affiliated with the Utrecht School of the Arts and writes for various platforms. His way of thinking is certainly not as extreme as Morton’s. Jacobs stays closer to modern philosophy and emphasizes that doing something about the climate crisis is not about saving our world but about saving humanity. His work is humanistic and deviates from Morton’s posthumanism, perhaps even antihumanism. They find each other in the importance they attach to art. Following Marshall McLuhan, Jacobs believes an artistic attitude can contribute to reframing problems. After all, the essence of that attitude lies in shaking off the accepted frameworks of thought in society, which is necessary to arrive at real solutions.
Jacobs uses the metaphor of the ‘nauts’. Argonauts, aquanauts, aeronauts, and astronauts went on a voyage of discovery in unexplored territories. Artonauts use an artistic attitude to re-engage the framed world as if it were a new wild world. And that is not reserved for artists, but for everyone who can let go of existing frames and thus examine and reinterpret our relationship with our ‘nature’.
Wolfgang Voigt is an artonaut.
His Gas project questions our relationship with nature. Unlike the romantics, he does not paint a positive, aesthetic picture of nature. In Voigt’s view, nature is part of us, but it doesn’t feel that way. And then again, it is. Voigt confronts us with the consequences of modernity: we can no longer think outside the rational, objective systems we have created ourselves. Gas’s oeuvre is impressive, but ‘Rausch’, released six years ago, succeeds best in this respect. In a piece of music lasting an hour — divided into seven acts — Voigt expresses our inability to be part of our nature. To create an environment in which humans coexist with all non-human components. That is relatively confrontational. ‘Rausch’, therefore, hits home hard. And gives hope. It evokes an urgency that no climate report full of abstract figures can match. It oppresses, embraces, seduces, repels, confronts, creates a rush, and leaves the listener disoriented and nauseous afterward.
‘Rausch’ is more of a confrontation than a possible solution. We must first go through the mourning phase, in which we finally say goodbye to modern thinking. ‘Raush’ is the soundtrack, Voigt, the modernity exorcist.
This is how loneliness in our self-built illusion sounds and feels.
Sources and further digging
Jos de Mul (2007). Het Romantic Verlangen: in (post)moderne kunst en filosofie. Kampen: Klement.
Rüdiger Safranski (2007). Romantik, Eine Deutsche Affäre. München: Hanser.
Timothy Morton (2007). Ecology Without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Timothy Morton (2016). Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence. New York: Columbia University Press.
Ruben Jacobs (2018). Artonauts: Expedition in the Anthropocene. Rotterdam: V2.
Theo Ploeg (2016). ‘Dark Ecology and our perverse view of the climate’. FRNKFRT. October 27, 2016.
This article was published in Dutch in FNKFRT on January 24, 2019.