Image And Insurrection:Jannis Kounellis @ Tate Modern

"I have seen the sacred in the common object. I have believed in weight as the right measure ... I want the return of poetry by all means available: through practice, observation, solitude; through language, image and insurrection" - Jannis Kounellis, 1987

 Untitled (Hanging Knife) (1991)

Knives, bells, toy trains, coal, steel, chickpeas, kidney beans, lentils, old beds, bricks, chairs, rope, sewing machines, and dead (stuffed) birds. If you're looking for a definition of mixed media then Jannis Kounellis (whose work is currently showing, for free, at Tate Modern) is just the man to give it to you.

It's easy to see what he made his work from and it's easy enough to understand why but the reasons he chose to make THIS art with THOSE materials is a little bit more confusing. In some ways his art means absolutely nothing at all. In other ways, and if you're pretentious enough - and sometimes I am, you can read multiple interpretations into his work. I'm happy for it to mean nothing - and lots of things. At the same time.

Untitled (Sack with Z) (2001)

Kounellis (1936-2017) was born in the Greek port city of Piraeus but lived and worked in Rome from 1956 where he found himself, eventually, becoming part of the Arte Povera ("poor art") movement along with Alberto Burri, Mario Merz, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Luciano Fabro, and - my favourite - Alighiero Boetti.

The Arte Povera group used ordinary, everyday, materials to create their art in the hope of bringing the art closer to most people's normal lives. As Italian society was undergoing a rapid transition and people were torn between industrial and agrarian lifestyles there were clashes - both in society and its reflection in the art of the Arte Povera.

Kounellis reflected this by making art works that combined steel (industrial) and wood (agrarian) but he also made works that considered other juxtapositions and pondered other ways of trying to resolve, or even intentionally leave unresolved, dichotomies that were springing up in both the art world and in society at large. Even though he considered himself a painter (despite there not being a lot of painting here) he expanded his artistic vision to include sculpture but also smell and sound. Hence the coffee beans and the church bells.

There are hints and illusions in his work (the sack with a Z on it does not refer, twenty plus years in advance, to the Russian army's use of that letter during their ongoing invasion of Ukraine but the sack of coal is believed to be a reference to the trade and commerce of the port of Piraeus) but they're not always clear. Sometimes quite the opposite.

Untitled (1960-98)

Untitled (1960)

Before he'd fully got involved with, and inspired by, other Atre Povera artists, Kounellis was attracted to numbers, words, and graphics found in street signs which he'd reduce to ever more basic symbols and arrange them, seemingly on a whim, against a plain background. It's mathematics by way of abstract expressionism (Kounellis admired both Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline - the latter's work not being massively dissimilar to this) but though I looked for meaning and tried to decipher some kind of code I was unable to. 

Which was a little frustrating. But is there even a code there? Is it just a pattern that appealed to Kounellis sense of aesthetics? I don't know. Sometimes he would "expand" these paintings into "performances" by reading them out loud. It doesn't sound like one of the most thrilling of events to have attended.

Preferable, to this visitor at least, is the steel bedframe that Kounellis has hung from a meat hook and hung in front of a painted yellow square (a cheeky reference, it is suggested, to Kasimir Malevich's iconic Black Square of 1915). Meat hooks and beds? Is Kounellis trying to say something about sex as a commodity, something you buy and sell, something you trade in, bodies as meat? Or is he just teasing us. I was quite surprised that the artist himself, because of the use of yellow, claimed the work to be inspired by Van Gogh's sunflower paintings.

Untitled (1993)

Untitled (2005)

Untitled (1969)

And what of the work that consists of seven sad looking burlap sacks (sad sacks, quite literally) left on the floor, as if waiting taking in following a delivery, and containing coffee beans, lentils, peas, maize, and kidney beans. These are, one would imagine, similar to products that a young Kounellis would have seen arriving, or leaving, Piraeus as a boy and it's quite possible that the burlap sacks would have been used to.

Again, it seems to be an exercise in reflection on times gone by and a nod to the work done by the lower classes of Greek society. Like it or not, and I rather did, it is very much an Arte Povera piece. The same could be said of 1971's bricked up doorway but that also shows a more playful, pranksterish, side to Kounellis - which is always good in the often po-faced world of art.

Untitled (1969)

Every time the work is displayed it is always, on Kounellis' instructions, installed in a doorway where it performs a physical art of 'blockage', blockage of the 'threshold' if you will. Kounellis also insisted that the curators, or whoever is responsible for replicating this piece, use stones that are sourced locally to the venue of installation. Which is nice.

Another more fun work, also called Untitled - you're getting the hang of it I suspect, shows a chair and an abstract expressionist adjacent green canvas with feint music notation depicted on it. In 1971, when this work was first exhibited, a cellist would sit on the chair and repeatedly play from that notation. Which is an excerpt of Bach's oratorio St John Passion (composed in 1723-4). If I'd attended on a Saturday, rather than a Friday, and been lucky with my timing I could have heard a presumably different cellist getting to grips with Bach. It is suggested, by the curators, that I could imagine the music by simply looking at the notes but I don't know who they think their average visitor is. All I could hear, as ever, was the internal, and infernal, monologue inside my head.

Untitled (1971)

Bells (1993)

Bach, or church bells, would have been preferable. I'm not religious but churches look great and church bells, unless it's too early on a Sunday morning - in which case there ought to be a law against them, sound great. Kounellis thought so too. He was particularly interested in the presence, omnipresence even, of church bells in the Southern European communities he grew up and lived in.

When 1993's Bells (a work not called Untitled - wonders will never cease!) was first exhibited in Pistoia in Tuscany, that city's impressive cathedral was visible through the gallery windows creating a visual, if sadly not aural, echo. Kounellis believed that bells represented "language, a magnified human voice - and the enthusiastic roar of liberation". He really ought to let us visitors have a ding on them.

Untitled (Sewing Machine ) (2004)

Coal Sculpture with Wall of Coloured Glass (1999)

Untitled (Scissors) (2004)

Untitled (Hair) (2004)

Untitled (Coffee) (1989-91)

Other works, some of which - disappointingly - have my gormless fizzog gurning back at me in their reflection, reminded me a little bit of a pared down Joseph Cornell. There's a sewing machine and a crumpled blue coat (sadly not a famous blue raincoat) which is said to be a comment on industrial manufacture and, because of the anchor on the buttons of the coat, naval life.

There's a pile of coal (that and iron, according to Kounellis, are the two materials, that best reflect the industrial revolution), a paraffin lamp (like one that would have been used for mining), and a doorway of glass lumps that look very pretty even if I'm not sure what they are meant to represent. Let's just say that as a juxtaposition, and as an aesthetic piece, it works very well. Which sometimes seems the main point of Kounellis' work.

Then there are three cabinets containing, variously, scissors, hair, and coffee beans. All things you may encounter in a hairdressing salon I suppose. Though I doubt that's the intention. Scissors, like the hanging knife that heads up this review/blog/total waste of time, can be used for violence as surely as they can for tonsorial purposes.

Hair is something most of us like. It looks nice on people's heads. But when it's removed from their head it can look a bit weird - especially if placed in a steel and glass box and put in a gallery for people to look at. Hair cutting, we're informed, is not always a good thing (though when I had my hair - and David Bellamy style beard - shorn recently it was definitely for the best) and can sometimes be used as a punishment or signify trauma or even illness.

Coffee smells good (I actually prefer its smell to its taste) and, for Kounellis, "the smell of coffee ... is painting - because it's a reality". Which brings us right back to the point I was making earlier about pretension. But I prefer pretension to the use of dead animals for art purposes so 1979's stuffed birds (a jackdaw and a hooded crow) is an unhappy view for me.

It's not clear if Kounellis had the birds killed or just stuffed already dead ones and I'd like to know as it would help inform my view of him as a person if not as an artist (not that he cares, he's dead). As an artwork, I will admit it's one of his most powerful. Some abstract prints and an industrial looking townscape where there is, and you can see, an influence of Giorgio de Chirico in his metaphysical pomp.

It speaks of transformation, decline, regeneration, and disappearance and, like much of Kounellis' work it is frustratingly difficult to get a grip on. There's something there but you can't quite work out what it is. After attending this show one suspects that's exactly how Jannis Kounellis used to like it.

Untitled (1979)