ROLF KOPPEL

ROLF KOPPEL

by Paul Henrickson, Ph.D. © 2010 tm

Henrickson in Pohn’pei

It has become increasingly important for me to understand the relationsips between human production and human aspiration, or, to rephrase this matter is to tell how the psyche is from the body’s production. This is not quite the same function as the soothsaying royal physicians of China examaning the Emperor’s stool, but the analogy fits for, generally speaking, if we detect a work of art that offers no evidence of struggle ( am not refering to technical struggle nor am I referring to political illustrations of discontent) but to the very personal kind of uresolved conflict where there is, somehow, present, evidence of the artist trying to “put a name” to the problem. Without such evidence it is my contention we have art only on the craft level.

Although I have known Rolf Koppel for more than forty years when we were both employed by the art department at The University of Northern Iowa in Cedar Falls and later when we tried to establish an alternative learning environment for students from elswhere who wished to determine for themselves they instinctively felt needs. With the exception of the economic dimension there were a few cases where the experiment worked. There were two notable cases where it didn’t. One of them involving a fellow by the name of Cohen from Antioch College who had brought with him all he had learned about survival which was to benefit from someone else’s work and Steven from Texas whose mother was a legal secretary to the fellow she claimed was then President of the American neuro-psychiatric association who had provided the drugs that made it impossible for Steven to make a decision or to initiate action…except self-destructive ones. I considered it a remotely elaborate way to murder an unwanted child, or in this woman’s case, two children, for her daughter had attempted suicide only two months earlier. It was I who gave the effort of “Residence” up.

I did feel guilty about giving “Residence” up, for actually it had been helpful to a few. But since a great part of the concept was to provide a sympathetic an supportive background to the experience of professionl tuition and, for many, a truly alternative experience of living in an unusual tri-partite culural community which Santa Fe, New Mexico truly is with the attendant benefits and disadvantages.

Francis Bacon,foto by anonymous

And during that time in Iowa, a two year period, we were in each other’s company a great deal, not only as faculty members but as friends with several interests in common not least among which was an active interest in sorting out what was a meaningful artistic expression and what was not…and why. We were not alone in that pursuit but the two of us seemed to be the most ardent. Although, and this bservation seems appropriate, I doubt that either of us knew what we were doing or what the results might possibly be. What seemed paramount at the time were the benefits of honest behavior, that is, behavior that seemed consistent with how the factors of social realities were impressed upon us, or received by us…and others as well. In short, what seemed to be operating, what appeared to be the functioning catalyst was the lack of match between what we were expected to do and what we felt was needed. This is an old story, we hear about it all the time, but when it happens it has a very real flavor all its own and it becomes a very insistent stimulous. As in birth, the foetus either gets itself born or it dies …frequently along with its host.

It is this understanding I should like to emphasise and it might well characterize the need of the creative person to bring the appropriate symbolic images into form inorder to gain some resemblance of order into being. Living is a learning experience and to this extent, as I had quite nearly always expeted of Rolf Koppel, he might finally do it.

In this work we find the order, as in the bananas above and in the image of “The Grass”, and the fanatsy of being the mysterious seductive Salome love object of lovers more remote than Herod and less fatally involved than John. In short, it is all about calling attention to and in satisfying the need for unending adoration.

The mask is worn and it is vital. It played its role in the decepive act he created, together with Suzanne Byrd, in order to involve Helen Doroshow in some compliance not fully imagined but using my properties, not his, as stage sets: my christal, my china, my table silver and my kitchen in my house in my expected absence. But events changes and I returned early to find a guest in my house. Automatically, I became the host and it was this that perplexed Doroshow, the possessor of some ethnic and financial power. I had unintentionally removed the mask, destroyed his carefully contrived scene where Suzanne could play the role better than I .

Francis Bacon and Rolf Koppel do not have all that in comon except for the fact that both offer evidence of their need to identify (and thereby control) a psychic irritant. What that might be in either case is a matter for conjecture. It may emerge, I suspect, that Bacon’s concerns may have centered around the doctrines of the church, homosexual drives and bacon being anathema to the Jews. Koppel, I believe, may have , even yet, unresolved role-conflicted bi-lateral expressive demands which, it seems to me, may have found resolution in the repeated presentation of an attractive male form diaphonously obscured either in light, or in shadow and/or accompanied by Salome-like veils inviting a move on the part of any uncontrolled aroused observer.It is, it seems, in this case, an instance of an epoch battle between the control of events and reactions to them through symetrical geometric mirror representations and the submission of this social and personal control to the mysterious demands of fantasy created memoried desire.

This image of grass made subject to geometric, almost parade-like autistic order

stands in opposition to, for example, this transsexual Delilah.

One of the more fascinating and resulting rewarding qualities in watching Koppel work was that he brought existences from distant and very diverse realms into a new configuration bearing a new significance as here with this 19th century oil lamp, shells from Micronesia and grasses (again) from Iowa.

Such images, together with those which present images of times past or souvenirs of adventurous discoveries—provided, of course, they all have compatible forms--- make for an enticing and seductive display and for Koppel a satisfaction in touching the mystery of the beautiful. In short, his work, arising out of the need to identify and attract the gently erotic transmutes into the bait by which he gets thanked for being the best lay someone ever had. In this regard Koppel’s works are similar to the evocative voice of Marlene Dietrich http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vCmMc0ZoLbQ

One of the differences which exist between them is in how they react to the matter of technique.Bacon’s technique virges on the “cliff-edge risky” and Koppel touches upon the classical perfection (a German classical such Casper David Freiderick)

which has been identifiably contamiated by the romantic.

By “cliff-edge risky” I mean an application of the plastic medium (oil paint) to a flat surface which borders on the sloppy and occassinally slipping into chaos but then often dramatically rescued into an orderly form, all of which might keep the observer somewhat apprehensive and , to the extent this may be true, it is the more remot activity of medium application that becomes an aspect of the final message, an indespensible characteristic of the image and not an example of careless workmanship.Koppel is in perpetual ambivalence between the good behavior of objecive symmetry and the romantic uncertainty of subjective dream-like involvment.

Herta Koppel by Rolf Koppel

There are few things which most mothers will fail to do for their sons when it comes to satisfying the son’s, most often, transitory wishes. And if the son also happens to be a creative individual, which Rolf Koppel is, these wishes are not only transitory but all encompassing and as insistently and varyingly repetative as a ninteenth century musical composition. The only limit, it would seem, to the consumption of sensual data, the nourishment for the production of images, is time. From my own experience the imagination is not inactive during sleep. It is then that the mind rather sorts things out and, at the same time, raises new potentials.

It is, I believe, no accident that Koppel directs our attention to the original source.. the umbilical.

A panorama of Nan Modal…a Micronesian mystery all its own. (I regret this is not a good copy)

All in all, my point in all of this being that in the consideration of what constitutes creative behavior it is not primarily how an artist perfects a technique, as such, but how that technique beomes an active player in the reformulation of the player himself.

Paul Henrickson by Kurun Vella (Gozo)

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