Although the spectrum of Kai Althoff's work is broad, certain themes recur throughout and form the basis of his artistic project. One of these, as demonstrated in his recent exhibition 'Ich meine es auf jeden Fall schlecht mit Ihnen' ('In Any Case I Wish You Ill') at the Kunsthalle in Zürich, is the individual and his or her relationship to the world, as well as the hopes and conflicts that result from that relationship.¹ Programmatically, the title of the exhibition hints at this tension, and it strikes a more melancholic tone in the small, boudoir like room with the installation Solo für eine befallene Trompete (Solo for an Afflicted Trumpet, 2005): a nearly messy collection of found objects such as bibelots and draperies, paintings by Althoff, some pieces of furniture and several life-size dummies dressed in the style of the nineteenth century. This environment on the one hand, could be the inanimate testimony of a private seclusion, filled with discarded dreams and memories. On the other hand, it has the quality of a glimmering demi-monde that attracts with its mysterious, androgynous figures and the appeal of decadence. In its stage-like character, the installation points to a fundamental issue in Althoff's work - the intricacies of individual desire when exposed to the perception of the world outside.

But while invested in the construction of individual subjectivity, Althoff's works do not adopt a general, universalising perspective; they instead offer idiosyncratic, and often extreme visions of the human condition. In his renderings he makes his figures highly expressive, and in so doing looks at the particular forms and mechanisms through which the individual subject comes into being, as well as the conditions under which both experience and social exchange are possible. As seen in the Zürich exhibition - for example, in a bold mise-en-scène that included the use of smell - Althoff not only deals with these questions as subject matter, but he also evokes situations that try to expand the viewers' perception by appealing explicitly to their physical - and sometimes psychical - experience. These extremes are present in the figurative drawings and paintings discussed in this text - they present configurations of gestures and attitudes conceived not as an expression of individuality (either that of the characters in his pictures or his own), but rather as a way to set a stage on which the individual might be located.

While Althoff's work up until the 1990s suggested that happiness was possible (in the form of a bohemian lifestyle alternative to conventional social organisations), the world of his recent works has become darker and more troubled. Irreconcilable psycho-social conflicts are pursued with unyielding obsession, and the need for intimacy and social contact is confronted with a threat of isolation and violence. Faces rendered in his work shift between apathy and horror; groups of people are caught in a state of paralysis, and 'collections of brooding men holding or tormenting each other in hazy surroundings [are] jotted down in nervous painting, tied together with the patient line of the expert illustrator'.² These scenes play out an entanglement of male comradeship, homoeroticism, ritual and hierarchy in the midst of social processes of exclusion and inclusion. From the start, the works' ambiguities - initially revealed by their formal composition - expose the difficulties of engineering collectivity or emancipation, and even where stereotypes and explicit references dominate the scene, opposing or 'incongruous' signs appear and suspend any sense of certainty or coherence. The identity of the characters and their intentions and demands remain in the dark, as does the general narrative context. This vagueness is not only a function of a particular choreography of signs; it is the effect of a dramaturgy which hints at the narrative potential of a given scene, only to immediately suspend it in imponderable tensions - so, for example, any type of social gathering could always take a turn to the catastrophic. The threat of this potential is immanent to the scenario, while at the same time ambiguously expressed. And the more the representations and codes become unreadable, the more the images take on a paranoid quality. As a result, polar opposites - good and evil, redemption and damnation - evoked by the images can no longer be clearly identified but rather blend together to the point of indistinction.³

In this context, to use Althoff's own expression, 'the authentic possibility to comprehend well' breaks down.⁴ This tension between immanence and expression circumscribes what seems to be the central ambition of Althoff's work - i.e. the study of how perception and experience are configured, both on the level of the viewer's reception of the work and as a subject matter of the depicted situations. From both perspectives, the atmosphere of the scenes appears to be simultaneously understated and heavily encoded. Never mind how deeply the figures are involved in the situation depicted - for example, Untitled (2001) shows a group of black-clad men gathering around a table - they seem to be cut off from it almost to a point of paralysis: what is going on around them eludes any coherent experience and, as a result, their taut attitude makes them look as if they are longing for redemption, sometimes painfully, sometimes in comic solemnity. The complicity between interior and exterior perspectives is already present in the figures' physical expression: they display awkward, dramatic gestures showing bewilderment or the struggle for the possibility of experience to the extent that, using Walter Benjamin's words, we could say that it is 'not … possible to tell any stories' from their vantage point.⁵ In fact, this problematic reminds us of one of the central themes of the critique of modernity that Benjamin is associated with: the degeneration of experience, gestures and narration within an alienated world threatened by catastrophe. In Althoff's work, the diagnosis of that decline is related to the living conditions of the present, and avoids general statements on the broader historical and political context.

The conclusions his work draws from a 'damaged life' pass through contingent and obscure reformulations which are reflected in certain 'damaged' forms of depiction that confront the unconfirmed catastrophic tendencies in the pictures with a vague and equally unconfirmed messianism.⁶ By focusing on the characters' subjective viewpoints, the pictures emphasise their idiosyncrasy and reflect the desire for intensified forms of experience - an attitude that, in Althoff's words, 'grew into a completely radical, subjective, esoterically political and anthroposophical position that drained the body and battered the mind'.⁷

Physical expression is of the utmost importance for Althoff's aesthetic practice. The gestures and attitudes of his characters are not intended to bring to light a deeper, inner or higher universal truth about the subject on view - nor do they try to identify the body as the place where natural and innocent expression is possible. Rather, the pictures' expressive potential is at the same time part of the intelligible and beyond; this contradiction, according to Pierre Klossowski, is precisely what makes it possible to bring together opposing experiences - in the form, for example, of somebody who either 'died of laughter or laughed himself to tears'.⁸ In this respect, the expressive nature of Althoff's work can be seen as a way to multiply the number of indeterminate states in which images can conclude. Considering the way in which the figures' expression is integrated into traditional stylistic forms, this expressive nature can be understood as an attempt to understand the conditions of the possibility of gesture as such, precisely by distorting classic artistic forms. As Tom Holert says, 'In fact, [Althoff] seems to utilise the resources of earlier expressionisms to establish a kind of sub-expressionism, downgrading the grandiloquence of these historical models to upload a lower realm of expressive possibility.'⁹

An example indicative of this method can be found in the coloured-pencil drawings from the installation Aus Dir (Out of You, 2001), which shows a group of five figures in a desert-like landscape, four of whom are recognisable as monks, in a composition reminiscent of Annunciation scenes. Three of them stand close together in the middle of the picture, while a fourth occupies the right edge of the drawing with his arms stretched out towards the central figures. This gesture sets the tone of the picture, evoking the welcome made by the Mary-like figures in the centre, although it is difficult to tell whether or not the gesture might not be one of aggression. The expressions on their faces and in their attitudes are difficult to decipher. They are covered by oversized brown and black habits, the detail in their faces and hands standing out in contrast to the rest of the almost abstract image. The three monks in the centre stand so close together that the three heads look as if they could all originate from one torso, the three habits fusing together and crowned by a triad of black, red and gold tonsured heads. Their hands seem dislocated from the rest of the brown-clad bodies, with the disproportioned contours of the habits either deforming the anatomy of the figures or revealing body parts and joints that are out of place. We are close here to other monstrous figures who populate Althoff's universe, for example the 'Naysayer', a bald man with both paramilitary and glam rock elements whose left arm has mutated to an oversized sickle.

Although there is no universal idiom of body language in Althoff's works, there is a common denominator in the recurrent use of anomaly and deformation. These elements point at the relationship between Althoff's pictures and Klossowski's drawings that was suggested earlier - especially in terms of Klossowski's conception of gesture and attitude. Klossowski describes attitude as a 'physical' or 'mute idiom', a form of expression in which expressiveness and silence meet.¹⁰¹¹ For Klossowski, this model is based on the relationship between the gaze, the word and the body, and it runs throughout all his work - in his literary and theoretical texts as well as in his drawings. Describing Klossowski's erotic pencil drawings, Gilles Deleuze wrote: 'And in his own drawings, canvases of great beauty, Klossowski willfully leaves the sexual organ indeterminate, provided that he overdetermines the hand as the organ of solecisms.'¹²¹³ Deleuze sees the presentation of the body in those half-pornographic scenes as surpassing Freud's almost exclusive focus on the sexual organs. Thus, the naked body as presented here is not simply bound to the schemes of exhibitionism and voyeurism - by surpassing established codes in this manner, Klossowski foils a modern discursive model that promoted sustainable forms of intelligibility. A similar kind of subversive shift seems to be at stake in Althoff's 'faulty' and 'impoverished' aesthetics. 'But,' as Deleuze asks in regard to Klossowski's drawings, 'what precisely is the positivity of the hand, of its ambiguous gesture, or its "suspended gesture"?'¹⁴ What the hand represents is the irresolvable 'dilemma' that rules over the relationship between language and the body and, in this way, is necessarily ridden by mistakes and deformations.

Because of this, gestures and attitudes are capable of producing chimeras in a reality otherwise conditioned by stereotypes, which opens the door for the renewed obsession of the phantasm with no place in the conventional everyday codes. The beauty of these works lies precisely in this incongruity that, according to Deleuze, 'emerges from the hand, subtly changing the appearance of the body as a whole'.

Althoff's figurations are shaped by a similar dilemma. Their specific illegibility closes the distance between antitheses - whether between damnation and redemption, love and betrayal - up to the point where what occurs is both the 'here and now and the beyond of violence'.¹⁵ This brings about a peculiar congealment of reality within these scenes, allowing the viewer's imagination to shift towards either end of the spectrum. But unlike with Klossowski, the structure of Althoff's works is closely interwoven with a widely varied collection of scenarios, stylistic vocabularies and thematic fields. Althoff's parade of freaks, Burschenschaftler and tragicomic hippies veers towards caricature.¹⁶ The grotesque aesthetic serves as a well-tested formula that sometimes blatantly and often less directly reveals the interpenetration of the exterior world and the individual. The abandonment of any personal or corporal integrity reaches a ridiculous extreme, whether in carnivalesque escapades or in the profane exaggeration of the body, entangled in material and militaristic-reactionary stances. And so white fluid drips from the figures' mouths in Aleph (1999), or a long-haired figure lays comatose after vomiting his spaghetti dinner in the installation Reflux Lux

(1998). The creatural qualities of these characters, presented here as a threshold, are juxtaposed with an accumulation of conventional signs, such as the nationalistic and Christian symbols that point to their emblematic character. Because of this, like in the drawing of the monks, a narrative spectrum is not only delineated but kept in the same abeyance as the expressive gestures of the figures so that, while there seems to be communication between the characters, it is rather an often dissonant communication of forms.

The same principle is at work in Althoff's paintings on the other side of the stylistic spectrum, such as the meditative, watercolour scenes included in the exhibition 'Hau ab, Du Scheusal' ('Fuck Off, Evil Spirits').¹⁷ Here, the typical undefineable elements in Althoff's works take on a sensitive and more restrained tone. The scenes are dominated by an introspective viewpoint in which schematic figurations blend together and the borders between figures and background become porous. In the hallucinatory indiscernibility of these pictures, the delicate touching of two hands appears both elusive and fateful. This touch could represent both happiness and mourning, meeting or parting. Still other works suggest the blurred transition between a figure and its surroundings. Scenes such as these evoke a mysterious dynamic of self-transgression, containing spiritual moments as well as the vestiges of profane everyday-life practice. The specific idiomatic tenor of these evocations returns in a narrative in which Armin Krämer, an occasional collaborator of Althoff's, identifies a feeling of being 'disconnected and yet entirely present; it seemed to me that I might dissolve and that a part of me would buzz off.'¹⁸

In any case, it is not only the physical capacity for expression that is at stake and, reciprocally, the logic of the gesture does not only affect the depicted bodies, but the composition as a whole. There is a constant interpenetration of the physical expression of a figure with, on the one hand, its individual, social or cultural disposition and, on the other, with the chosen reservoir of stylistic forms. In Althoff's work, it is from this ground that the structure of the dilemma between the capacities and incapacities of the body and those of language and forms emerge, whereas for Klossowski the 'logical precision' of language is key.¹⁹

For both artists it is important how the content of a picture is related to its formalisation within the picture frame, and in both we find the same choice: eclecticism. Althoff is indebted to artists such as Giotto, Matthias Grünewald and Brueghel the Elder, although beyond their historical contexts and codes. Expressionism and neo-Primitivism also serve as a reservoir of forms, providing an alternative ground for comparison to the affective rhetoric of Althoff's works. The intentional stylistic incoherence of his work not only undermines the idea of composition, but also works against any notion of perfection or completion. In spite of the obvious precision of the work, any appearance of virtuosity is immediately denied by a deskilling gesture. The 'low-tech, low-everything approach' that has been identified in his work brings to light the inappropriate and awkward in order to draw from them an ambiguous, often utopian poetry and beauty.²⁰

These 'faulty' tensions are present in a similar way in Klossowski's work: the French artist provoked his critics with the lewd motifs of his drawings, and a technical approach that stood in glaring incongruity to his subject matter. He created a bizarre stylistic amalgamation of academic, lifeless forms and the naïve gestures of an amateur. For 'Pierre, le maladroit', as the affronted Klossowski described himself, these pictures were an attempt at developing an ingenuous, childlike perspective.²¹ Most of all, he sought the familiarity of the stereotype; or more precisely, in his own words, the 'institutional and conventional stereotypes of what can be said and what can be represented' are to be imitated, simulated and surpassed in order to exploit them, i.e. to employ and at the same time to undermine their usual function.²² Behind this move there is a distinction between two different meanings of stereotype: in the realm of everyday perception stereotypes are the normative patterns that determine ordinary life, protecting it from any kind of phantasmagoric surplus, while it is exactly this normative function which reveals them as necessary for any type of perception, consciousness or communication. Secondly, from the perspective of art, 'the stereotypes are only residues of phantasmatic simulacra that have sunk to the level of popular use and have had to yield to a common interpretation'.²³ Stereotypes also maintain their unsurpassable power in art, but they are open to 'idiosyncratic interpretations', that is to the production of illusions or chimeras which bring the hidden phantasms back to life.²⁴ But herein lies the difference between the line of transgression called upon by Klossowski and the diffuse messianic crossing of limits evoked by Althoff. The idiosyncrasy of Althoff's work is not only the result of a specific interpretation of stereotypes, but always an attempt to devise anew an aesthetics that corresponds to a highly particular and fragile subjective form of expression. The desire for transgression and redemption finds its promise in this intermediate space. This field is not shaped by Klossowski's pure, authentic intensity but rather by the many vicissitudes and short-circuits that thwart the strivings for fulfilment. With the premise of such ambivalences, the situation may end up like this: 'And that psychological effort was followed by a physical discharge, by puking into the light, the light they saw as heralding the last breakdown, which would lead to peace.'²⁵ It is the idiomatic form of pathos, grounded on faulty eclecticism, that combines the opposite notions of what might be the good and the evil conditions of living - employing a 'damaged' aesthetics in order to save its beauty.

- Alexandra Heimes