
Marcus Jansen - AFTERMATH 2018
By Prof. Dr. Manfred Schneckenburger who was a German art historian and curator of modern and contemporary art. He was the curator of the documenta art exhibition twice, documenta 6 in 1977 and documenta 8 in 1987. He was the only person outside of the exhibition’s founder, Arnold Bode to have led documenta twice. Schneckenburger examined Jansen's work in 2017 and was a curator of his museum introduction in Germany and author for his first bilingual book Aftermath.
Questions about the identity and destiny of a self-confident, expanding nation are a strong undercurrent running through American painting. Celebrations of the “American myth” in exalted pictures with changing messages have long since become secular icons. They span some four hundred years, from the earliest period through the westward expansion, the rise of cities, and their penetration by technology and the American way of life. More recently they have also adopted a more sinister aspect, with warnings about a future that has perhaps already begun. Milestones of this art include the founding examples of a specifically American landscape painting by the English-born Thomas Cole and his successors, Frederic Church, Albert Bierstadt, and others, and the shift from the infinite expanses of unspoiled prairies and mountain peaks to the crowded cities of the Ashcan School around Robert Henri and the skyscraping urban wonders translated into sheer dynamism by John Marin and Frank Stella, and into noble architectural abstractions by Charles Demuth and Charles Sheeler. In this way, the “perception of the Technological Sublime [ arose ], America’s counter to the visible and God-given sublimity of its own landscape. The works of man are seen to rival those of God.” 1 “It is not necessary to paint the American flag to be an American painter,” the satirical illustrator and etcher John Sloan insisted as early as 1908.
“As though you didn’t see the American scene whenever you open your eyes! ” 2 He pictured young women on shopping sprees or people arguing on fire escapes. Two generations later, artists dove head over heels into the hustle and bustle of the metropolis, above all New York. In the 1950s the young Robert Rauschenberg prowled the blocks of downtown Manhattan and carried his finds back to his studio: torn posters, rusted traffic signs, discarded cardboard cartons, broken umbrellas, and faded postcards. From these he produced his “combine paintings” — those complex monuments to urban folklore, remnants of a throwaway society. At almost the same time in Los Angeles, Edward Kienholz was making seemingly surreal relief assemblages with a political point, using items found from rummaging in flea markets or dumps. Rauschenberg’s discarded materials in New York and the grotesque memento mori in California undermined the predominantly progressive optimism of many contemporaries, as well as the beautiful illusion of the Pacific sky with its balmy pleasures. The admonition “Go West!” reached its natural limit at the western ocean. The American myth needs to be reexamined in the twenty-first century, even rewritten.
One of the most important contributions in this regard is being produced by the American Marcus Jansen. With Caribbean and German roots, he is a painter through and through, a painting diagnostician with a gaze as comprehensive as it is incisive. He radically disposes of the early American myth of undeviating progress. His results are disconcerting, and they can be frightening. Whereas in the 1830s the founder of a genuinely American landscape painting, Thomas Cole, pictured the Course of Empire 3 from its savage beginnings to its ultimate decline against a backdrop of classical facades and rows of columns ( under the influence of a famous book by the historian Edward Gibbon ),4 in Jansen’s work, destruction has come to cast-iron architecture and wooden beach shacks, organically curved structures or a skewed Disneyland. Or to a large loft with missing walls, while the occupant broods over his forced evacuation. That picture ( pp. 20/21 ) was painted in 2008, at the height of the real-estate bubble. Jansen’s America finds itself in dire shape, at the mercy of more than just natural forces.
In itself it is decaying, weak, marked by signs of disintegration. The brushstroke that was an expression of painterly and existential freedom for Abstract Expressionists such as Pollock and Motherwell now functions as disruption, eradication, destruction. Swipes of color obscure objects and the corners of rooms; in many paintings the foreground colors become only vague, approximate, and blend into a mirroring emptiness that relegates objects and people to the middle distance. As a result, the structure begins to sway and fall to pieces. Yet it is not only the endangerment and decline of an architectural, urban universe that troubles Jansen. His expansive grassy landscapes can also be seen as direct responses to the endless prairies of the Midwest that inspired Church and Bierstadt. Secret Gardens ( 2011, pp. 24/25 ) extends across the entire horizontal format. There are two hedge-like horizontal barriers. At the upper edge of the swamp-like foreground, in smears of a blackish green, two toadstools as tall as trees flank a derelict shack. Farther back a third lies on the ground as though having been chopped down.
A continuous black wall blocks off the horizon near the top edge. Part of it has collapsed in the center, exposing the silhouette of a chaotic building site. The apparent idyll of secret gardens is ominously contaminated ( the poisonous toadstools ) and on the verge of environmental catastrophe. Nevertheless, a few people, extremely small and distant, are busily going about their puzzling activities on the grass. Golfers? Gardeners? A climber? To all appearances the chalky green also radiates disaster, hermetically sealed off and exhibiting an artificial calm as if nothing has happened — or ever could.
This expansive view clearly has a very different meaning than the settled landscapes of the Hudson River tradition, though it shares with them the use of tiny figures to enhance the impression of vast distances. The same landscape appears in the painting Monocultural Farms ( 2010, p. 26 ), parceled out by barriers similar to those of Secret Gardens, but with two grazing sheep. Both animals are marked with small targets. The same symbol appears on the stable, which is marked “PRIVATE.” It identifies the sheep as animals meant for slaughter, and it appears repeatedly in this context. Landscape as miracle from the dawn of creation has thus been transformed into a place dedicated to the routine supply of mankind with meat and wool. In America this is closely associated with the dubious blessings of genetic modification and its hybrid creations. For example, the artist paints sheep with pigs’ heads; pigs with the heads of sheep ( p. 27 ); a pink zebra next to poisonous mists in the wilderness; a pig with the head of a rabbit, wearing a neckerchief ( p. 28 ); and an albino pig beneath a cloud of sooty smoke ( p. 29 ) — in every respect a total reversal of the Garden of Eden as dreamed of by the Hudson River School. Artificial rain falling on dunes from colorful, pink-edged clouds in a black sky is equally contrary to the laws of nature. Whether nature will respond with tornados, blizzards, and disastrous floods to an extent never seen before only science can decide. In any case, storm damage is a recurring misfortune in Jansen’s work. For example, he depicts a building — a weather-monitoring station, of all things, meant to issue storm warnings — in tatters and with a missing roof ( p. 31 ); the employee attempting to prop it up with a much too slender pole perfectly symbolizes man’s helplessness. The fact that the current American president considers global warming and melting polar ice to be inventions of the Chinese only doubly confirms Jansen’s warnings.
Other works emphasize even more pointedly the contrast with the untouched landscapes of the pioneer era. In 1826 Thomas Cole painted waterfalls in the Catskills, emphasizing their overwhelming size by the inclusion of a tiny distant Indian. Waterfalls were a popular elemental motif in early American landscape art. So it is unsurprising that Jansen updates this motif as well, picturing its most recent, dismal state. Impeach Each ( 2008, pp. 32/33 ) shows a dam that has burst, producing a waterfall. The raging torrent brings with it used tires — symbols here, as in many other paintings, of a polluted environment and the unresolved removal of waste. On the base of the concrete wall a graffiti artist, now running away, has just left his call for impeachment. As the spray can and the work’s title assure us, we are all guilty. But for families on outings, even real waterfalls have lost the frisson of the “sublime”; they are only good for recreational purposes and are given just a brief glance by the children. Even if it were conceivable to return, with great effort, this America of exploited landscapes, hybrid animals, artificial rain clouds, and broken dams to the untouched spaces of the nineteenth century, there is no way back from the collapsed wooden shacks and dilapidated walls, severed power poles, and hidden antennas — not even to the trash-filled backyards of the Ashcan School, and certainly not to the visions of the technology-mad painters around Frank Stella. Even motifs actually in harmony with the optimistic American dream now lie in ruins. In Playground ( 2009, p. 34 ) and Disneyland ( 2006, p. 37 ), all that remain are abandoned
structures and empty cars up on blocks. Tangled slides, severed wires, and dead antennas doze, stripped of their function. A solitary mother and her child stand lost in the midst of the wreckage.
Are the Disneyland visitors running away from the debacle? An almost cheerful catastrophe scenario is presented under the ambitious title E Pluribus Unum ( 2008, pp. 38/39 ), a potpourri of motifs from the famous children’s book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz : 5 arrayed around a derelict pavilion the cast of the fairy tale, from very small to tiny, scurries about. On what seems to be a roof, above a starry triangular shape, stands the wicked witch. The dog Toto is next to her, atop a pink bubble, while on a lower plane we see small Dorothy with her basket, the traveling carnival wagon of “Professor Marvel,” and whatever else is up to mischief in the magical land of Oz, as well as in the White House. With his tail Toto has scrawled the word “SURRENDER” against the sky. There are countless additional details, as in a painting by Hieronymus Bosch. I could well imagine that the artist painted this work for his own amusement and that of his children. For again and again Jansen comes through as paterfamilias, and his sympathies lie with children in general. Homeland Security and The Doodler ( both 2014, pp. 40 and 41 ) portray a single girl in virtually the same pose. She sits self-absorbed in the one case, drawing lines on a step in a stairwell in the other. In both paintings, a zone in the colors of the overcast sky stands above the girl — once as a broad beam that illuminates her from above and once as an opening to the outside, above the stairs. In the courtyard the beam breaks off before it reaches its object, disappearing into the brightly colored back wall, above which an antenna bends into the void. By contrast, in the stairwell the child maintains active contact with the wisps of smoke in the sky: their loop corresponds with a red tangle she has drawn on the step. Technological surveillance from the air runs into obvious difficulties, while the child on the step establishes a connection to the sky as if by herself.
Even if such emphasis may overshoot its mark, it does show how precisely Jansen’s paintings can be read, and how even minor details are meaningful and tell stories. In Transitions ( 2013, p. 42 ), an arc of cloudless blue sky opens up through rafters before another small girl, veiled in white. It would seem that if the artist holds any hope at all, it is
with children. Is this why he so decisively turns against the playful anticipation and simulation of war even in childhood? One of his most revelatory depictions is Resistance and War Games ( 2015, p. 43 ).
It reveals a bombed-out, bullet-ridden cityscape, a ghastly rubble field of destroyed apartment buildings, gaping window openings, and heavily damaged lines of streets with their buried infrastructure exposed. Bomb craters and torn-up paving cover the ground with a network of destruction, and the building on the far right exhibits the shadow of monstrous contamination. Recognizably collaged sections lend the sharpness of cutouts to the destruction. A scenario between chiseled simulation and anticipation of the gruesome reality of Aleppo. The events and figures in the painting don’t match, but belong to different levels of reality. A child’s toy recalls the heavy machine used to remove blocks of stone. Above the twisted water pipes sits a sort of lead soldier — part of the game.
To the left are the grandmother, mother, and child trio from Picasso’s painting Massacre in Korea ( 1951 ),6 an explicit quote representing another secondary reality that draws parallels to recurrences of massacres. Next to the left edge an outsize graffito — a cat wearing a pink ribbon — crouches, twice the height of the figures. Around its head curls a text balloon about the relationship between power and powerlessness: appealing street art and message in one. On the right side, next to the irradiated building, a little girl holds a balloon with white polka dots. The only creature that is not a part of the deadly game, but makes her own way through the rubble? All in all, a tableau of the devastation of war in a future possible at any time, evoked with the artificial unscrupulousness of a computer game! America between playful preparation and self-fulfilling prophecy!
How far it has already come is suggested by the phalanx of heavily armed warriors with skull-like gas masks and full-body shields moving like a wall against a lone protesting woman in Code Pink ( 2008, p. 45 ). Her white sock, like several balloons in the sky, carries the peace symbol. A sign held up high shouts “NO!” A kind of pink parasol towers above the heads of the fierce attackers, and even on the shields there are shimmering pink reflections. Is this bellicose march directed against peaceful anti-war protesters who resist with a delicate pink out of the can ( precisely in the center of the painting )? Is the power of nonviolence having its effect? Can the visionary and doomsayer Jansen occasionally invent a world in which things go right? Here we hit upon the innermost political, moral core of Jansen’s work.
Painting is the most intimate form of waging war, he says in an interview.7 One might add: that also extends to the ruin that gives rise to wars and the ruin they leave behind. The art historian Brooke Lynn McGowan emphasizes in Jansen’s painting his artistic examination of what the World War general and later American President Dwight D. Eisenhower described as the “military-industrial complex.” 8 Eisenhower foresaw the fatal collaboration between the powerful armed forces and the armaments industry. In almost every decade since then, for whatever reason, a powerful America has been engaged in warfare. In 1990 Jansen, then a career soldier, was sent to the war in Iraq. In 1997, having become increasingly disillusioned, he left the military. In that same year, as a trained commercial artist, he began his artistic career in Aachen. To this day his paintings profit from that early training: enamels and spray paints continue to be just as important as bits of collage and oil pastels. Even without academic study, the painter was soon able to repeat his successes from before his military service and be exhibited in important galleries all over Europe.
Paintings like Imminent Threat ( 2013, pp. 46/47 ) deal directly with war, although in this case the scene appears to illustrate not so much merciless reality as pious legend. In the desert two tanks halt in front of each other, one filled with soldiers ready to fire, the other apparently without a driver and mired in the sand. Between them, leaning against an air mattress, an infant sits on the ground. Another few feet and the child will be crushed. The red target on the baby’s diaper blurs into an imaginary whorl above the head of the tank driver on the right, while the guiding beam continues to aim at the baby. The situation is more than surreal; a miracle will be required. Is Jansen — who took part in “Desert Storm” and witnessed a devastating rocket attack — hallucinating an extreme case so as to more easily deal with his experiences? As a narrator he leaves the ending open. In 2008/09 Jansen confronted the most extreme contrasts: in War Games ( 2008, p. 49 ) a table is covered with skulls in extremely delicate colors in front of a night-black ground; in Friedenstaube ( 2009 ) the dove of peace, comparably rendered in red and blue, perches on street sweepings. A larger overview, beyond metaphor, is provided by the work Puzzling Wars of the World ( 2013 ), however: a jumble of small-scale military materiel — batteries, automobile tires, bombs with fuses — but also puzzle pieces, painting utensils, brushes, and palettes. This expansive topographical site establishes focal points like colored alarm signals: a distant view of part of a world whose one half is beginning to burn while the other has already been consumed? Battlefield ( 2011 ) translates war into a wholly ( electrifying? ) painterly event. Has he here reached a boundary where conflict and warfare transmute into sheer storms of color? Or does Jansen mean it when he says that painting is the most intimate form of waging war? It is unsurprising that Jansen compresses the gloomier aspects of his worldview into richly detailed and distinctly catastrophic paintings. In Spotlight on Education ( 2009, p. 50 ) a school bus has suffered a terrible collision; its empty seats suggest deaths.
Collision ( 2010, p. 51 ) shows an ocean liner tipped on its side, sinking. A giraffe, a zebra, and a pig swim in the water, lending the symbolic weight of Noah’s ark to the accident. The Rescue Rings That I Found Close By ( 2015, p. 53 ) features a desolate rocky coast. A shipwrecked man sits alone in the sand next to his life preserver. A second life preserver has washed up onto the beach a few feet in front of him. Has the person who wore it died? Is the man we see the sole survivor? In its retrospective concentration, this is one of Jansen’s most intense, most gripping works. The actual event plays out wholly in the memory of the seated man and the viewer’s reconstruction of it. As is often the case in Jansen’s art, the worst has already happened, and it weighs heavily on the present situation. Even when Jansen turns to other themes, war and its consequences continue to lurk in the background. For example, there are lines running from the military enlightenment to the threat of the surveillance state. Cyber Surveillance on Wasteland ( 2009, pp. 54/55 ) heaps a tangle of cables around two simple huts, one on a central knoll, the other on the periphery. Broad, sky-blue beams clearly distinguished from the surrounding gray fall on both dwellings.
Small targets hover far above, probably symbolizing satellites observing the buildings. The decomposing chaos of ripped-out cables and switches heaped around the huts is set apart from these sharply outlined beams. The central one spills down the hill and disappears in the darkness. Does the pile of cables indicate the end of an outmoded system that has become useless through cyber surveillance? Does this painting explain the light-blue patches in Resistance and War Games as satellites that continue to survey the war zone? So much for an overview of Jansen’s subjects and motifs. They all have to do with convictions and arguments relating to politics, the military, the economy, and ecology. Even so, their depictions
draw as much on personal experiences as on a very American environment.
His changing places of residence also serve as sources of observation. For Jansen isn’t illustrating lead articles: he paints emotional pictures, passionately captured, angry, cautionary examples of danger, of misguided developments, of curtailment of freedom. He paints with the sweeping brushstrokes of the Abstract Expressionists, reinterpreting them as destructive, obliterating, canceling forces. In The Apprentice ( 2009, pp. 58/59 ) a young painter stands as though transfixed in front of the wild, uncontrolled tumult of overlapping colored strokes that seem to be fighting each other on a giant canvas. One thick streak of pigment escapes the format and pours out into the atelier. The painter is much like Goethe’s sorcerer’s apprentice, incapable of quelling the forces he has evoked. Jansen is aware of the energetic potential of painting and abstraction and employs it in his critical, diagnostic pictures. He knows that painting can also be an expression and medium of destructive forces. The Final Walk ( 2011, pp. 60/61 ) captures this in an explosive burst, presumably of an oil well. Chunks of earth are sent flying, pipes are severed, people and poultry race away in all directions. The only figure holding still is Dorothy, carrying a sunflower. No less important are the order and disorder of his paintings in general: his compositional style.
Jansen tends to employ expansive horizontal formats — though not exclusively — for cityscapes, interiors, or their interpenetration. Again and again, we gaze at a projecting picture window. It is reminiscent of a stage, not the traditional peep show, but an expansive cityscape or landscape. A deliberately vague, broad stripe in the foreground serves as a veritable proscenium before the middle ground and an obstructed back wall. The foreground, a blurred no-man’s-land, does not block obstacles but pushes them aside. Our gaze passes unhindered across the empty apron of the stage: the entrance to the picture becomes a flyover. It is only in the middle distance that we encounter people and objects. Only here is the space logically organized by perspective, becoming the scene of the action. One critic 9 has rightly called this a trap that opens up to our perception and then snaps shut again. The Futurists claimed that they placed the viewer in the center of their paintings, and even though Jansen has nothing in common with those early-modern Italian avant-gardists, their boast applies to his work as well. This feeling of being sucked into the painting contributes greatly to the distinct sense of space in his lofts, attics, and receding streets. It enhances the formidable presence of even the tiniest figures seen from the back, which also help to draw us into the depth. At the same time he situates the seemingly scattered symbolic vocabulary of worn-out tires, polka-dotted balls, and targets calling for precise aim.
The faceless portraits are individual and yet clearly related. If Brooke Lynn McGowan’s assertion that “only innocence has a face” 10 is correct, then these portraits touch on the central concept in Jansen’s visual politics. Francis Bacon is not far removed, to be sure, but in place of his tortured bodies the American painter presents us with dignified costume dolls and characteristic poses from the world of finance and the military hierarchy. At first there were Wall Street bankers dressed in business suits and ties, representing criminal money hunger beneath their deformed round heads ( pp. 62 and 63 ). They were soon joined by military figures in uniforms bristling with medals ( p. 64 ). The contribution of research and science was then exhibited in the Illuminated One ( 2015, p. 65 ), whose head is replaced by a light bulb, and the Faceless Professor ( also 2015, p. 67 ), whose convoluted thought processes have burst through his skull and taken possession of his head like an octopus.
The result of this explosion of brain power can be read at the side: “5 + 5 = 11.” Jansen’s opinions about the elites in a repressive system are as comprehensive as they are scathing, opinions that he clearly expresses in his entire oeuvre.
By Prof. Dr. Manfred Schneckenburger who was a German art historian and curator of modern and contemporary art. He was the curator of the documenta art exhibition twice, documenta 6 in 1977 and documenta 8 in 1987. He was the only person outside of the exhibition’s founder, Arnold Bode to have led documenta twice. Schneckenburger examined Jansen's work in 2017 and was a curator of his museum introduction in Germany and author for his first bilingual book Aftermath.
Questions about the identity and destiny of a self-confident, expanding nation are a strong undercurrent running through American painting. Celebrations of the “American myth” in exalted pictures with changing messages have long since become secular icons. They span some four hundred years, from the earliest period through the westward expansion, the rise of cities, and their penetration by technology and the American way of life. More recently they have also adopted a more sinister aspect, with warnings about a future that has perhaps already begun. Milestones of this art include the founding examples of a specifically American landscape painting by the English-born Thomas Cole and his successors, Frederic Church, Albert Bierstadt, and others, and the shift from the infinite expanses of unspoiled prairies and mountain peaks to the crowded cities of the Ashcan School around Robert Henri and the skyscraping urban wonders translated into sheer dynamism by John Marin and Frank Stella, and into noble architectural abstractions by Charles Demuth and Charles Sheeler. In this way, the “perception of the Technological Sublime [ arose ], America’s counter to the visible and God-given sublimity of its own landscape. The works of man are seen to rival those of God.” 1 “It is not necessary to paint the American flag to be an American painter,” the satirical illustrator and etcher John Sloan insisted as early as 1908.
“As though you didn’t see the American scene whenever you open your eyes! ” 2 He pictured young women on shopping sprees or people arguing on fire escapes. Two generations later, artists dove head over heels into the hustle and bustle of the metropolis, above all New York. In the 1950s the young Robert Rauschenberg prowled the blocks of downtown Manhattan and carried his finds back to his studio: torn posters, rusted traffic signs, discarded cardboard cartons, broken umbrellas, and faded postcards. From these he produced his “combine paintings” — those complex monuments to urban folklore, remnants of a throwaway society. At almost the same time in Los Angeles, Edward Kienholz was making seemingly surreal relief assemblages with a political point, using items found from rummaging in flea markets or dumps. Rauschenberg’s discarded materials in New York and the grotesque memento mori in California undermined the predominantly progressive optimism of many contemporaries, as well as the beautiful illusion of the Pacific sky with its balmy pleasures. The admonition “Go West!” reached its natural limit at the western ocean. The American myth needs to be reexamined in the twenty-first century, even rewritten.
One of the most important contributions in this regard is being produced by the American Marcus Jansen. With Caribbean and German roots, he is a painter through and through, a painting diagnostician with a gaze as comprehensive as it is incisive. He radically disposes of the early American myth of undeviating progress. His results are disconcerting, and they can be frightening. Whereas in the 1830s the founder of a genuinely American landscape painting, Thomas Cole, pictured the Course of Empire 3 from its savage beginnings to its ultimate decline against a backdrop of classical facades and rows of columns ( under the influence of a famous book by the historian Edward Gibbon ),4 in Jansen’s work, destruction has come to cast-iron architecture and wooden beach shacks, organically curved structures or a skewed Disneyland. Or to a large loft with missing walls, while the occupant broods over his forced evacuation. That picture ( pp. 20/21 ) was painted in 2008, at the height of the real-estate bubble. Jansen’s America finds itself in dire shape, at the mercy of more than just natural forces.
In itself it is decaying, weak, marked by signs of disintegration. The brushstroke that was an expression of painterly and existential freedom for Abstract Expressionists such as Pollock and Motherwell now functions as disruption, eradication, destruction. Swipes of color obscure objects and the corners of rooms; in many paintings the foreground colors become only vague, approximate, and blend into a mirroring emptiness that relegates objects and people to the middle distance. As a result, the structure begins to sway and fall to pieces. Yet it is not only the endangerment and decline of an architectural, urban universe that troubles Jansen. His expansive grassy landscapes can also be seen as direct responses to the endless prairies of the Midwest that inspired Church and Bierstadt. Secret Gardens ( 2011, pp. 24/25 ) extends across the entire horizontal format. There are two hedge-like horizontal barriers. At the upper edge of the swamp-like foreground, in smears of a blackish green, two toadstools as tall as trees flank a derelict shack. Farther back a third lies on the ground as though having been chopped down.
A continuous black wall blocks off the horizon near the top edge. Part of it has collapsed in the center, exposing the silhouette of a chaotic building site. The apparent idyll of secret gardens is ominously contaminated ( the poisonous toadstools ) and on the verge of environmental catastrophe. Nevertheless, a few people, extremely small and distant, are busily going about their puzzling activities on the grass. Golfers? Gardeners? A climber? To all appearances the chalky green also radiates disaster, hermetically sealed off and exhibiting an artificial calm as if nothing has happened — or ever could.
This expansive view clearly has a very different meaning than the settled landscapes of the Hudson River tradition, though it shares with them the use of tiny figures to enhance the impression of vast distances. The same landscape appears in the painting Monocultural Farms ( 2010, p. 26 ), parceled out by barriers similar to those of Secret Gardens, but with two grazing sheep. Both animals are marked with small targets. The same symbol appears on the stable, which is marked “PRIVATE.” It identifies the sheep as animals meant for slaughter, and it appears repeatedly in this context. Landscape as miracle from the dawn of creation has thus been transformed into a place dedicated to the routine supply of mankind with meat and wool. In America this is closely associated with the dubious blessings of genetic modification and its hybrid creations. For example, the artist paints sheep with pigs’ heads; pigs with the heads of sheep ( p. 27 ); a pink zebra next to poisonous mists in the wilderness; a pig with the head of a rabbit, wearing a neckerchief ( p. 28 ); and an albino pig beneath a cloud of sooty smoke ( p. 29 ) — in every respect a total reversal of the Garden of Eden as dreamed of by the Hudson River School. Artificial rain falling on dunes from colorful, pink-edged clouds in a black sky is equally contrary to the laws of nature. Whether nature will respond with tornados, blizzards, and disastrous floods to an extent never seen before only science can decide. In any case, storm damage is a recurring misfortune in Jansen’s work. For example, he depicts a building — a weather-monitoring station, of all things, meant to issue storm warnings — in tatters and with a missing roof ( p. 31 ); the employee attempting to prop it up with a much too slender pole perfectly symbolizes man’s helplessness. The fact that the current American president considers global warming and melting polar ice to be inventions of the Chinese only doubly confirms Jansen’s warnings.
Other works emphasize even more pointedly the contrast with the untouched landscapes of the pioneer era. In 1826 Thomas Cole painted waterfalls in the Catskills, emphasizing their overwhelming size by the inclusion of a tiny distant Indian. Waterfalls were a popular elemental motif in early American landscape art. So it is unsurprising that Jansen updates this motif as well, picturing its most recent, dismal state. Impeach Each ( 2008, pp. 32/33 ) shows a dam that has burst, producing a waterfall. The raging torrent brings with it used tires — symbols here, as in many other paintings, of a polluted environment and the unresolved removal of waste. On the base of the concrete wall a graffiti artist, now running away, has just left his call for impeachment. As the spray can and the work’s title assure us, we are all guilty. But for families on outings, even real waterfalls have lost the frisson of the “sublime”; they are only good for recreational purposes and are given just a brief glance by the children. Even if it were conceivable to return, with great effort, this America of exploited landscapes, hybrid animals, artificial rain clouds, and broken dams to the untouched spaces of the nineteenth century, there is no way back from the collapsed wooden shacks and dilapidated walls, severed power poles, and hidden antennas — not even to the trash-filled backyards of the Ashcan School, and certainly not to the visions of the technology-mad painters around Frank Stella. Even motifs actually in harmony with the optimistic American dream now lie in ruins. In Playground ( 2009, p. 34 ) and Disneyland ( 2006, p. 37 ), all that remain are abandoned
structures and empty cars up on blocks. Tangled slides, severed wires, and dead antennas doze, stripped of their function. A solitary mother and her child stand lost in the midst of the wreckage.
Are the Disneyland visitors running away from the debacle? An almost cheerful catastrophe scenario is presented under the ambitious title E Pluribus Unum ( 2008, pp. 38/39 ), a potpourri of motifs from the famous children’s book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz : 5 arrayed around a derelict pavilion the cast of the fairy tale, from very small to tiny, scurries about. On what seems to be a roof, above a starry triangular shape, stands the wicked witch. The dog Toto is next to her, atop a pink bubble, while on a lower plane we see small Dorothy with her basket, the traveling carnival wagon of “Professor Marvel,” and whatever else is up to mischief in the magical land of Oz, as well as in the White House. With his tail Toto has scrawled the word “SURRENDER” against the sky. There are countless additional details, as in a painting by Hieronymus Bosch. I could well imagine that the artist painted this work for his own amusement and that of his children. For again and again Jansen comes through as paterfamilias, and his sympathies lie with children in general. Homeland Security and The Doodler ( both 2014, pp. 40 and 41 ) portray a single girl in virtually the same pose. She sits self-absorbed in the one case, drawing lines on a step in a stairwell in the other. In both paintings, a zone in the colors of the overcast sky stands above the girl — once as a broad beam that illuminates her from above and once as an opening to the outside, above the stairs. In the courtyard the beam breaks off before it reaches its object, disappearing into the brightly colored back wall, above which an antenna bends into the void. By contrast, in the stairwell the child maintains active contact with the wisps of smoke in the sky: their loop corresponds with a red tangle she has drawn on the step. Technological surveillance from the air runs into obvious difficulties, while the child on the step establishes a connection to the sky as if by herself.
Even if such emphasis may overshoot its mark, it does show how precisely Jansen’s paintings can be read, and how even minor details are meaningful and tell stories. In Transitions ( 2013, p. 42 ), an arc of cloudless blue sky opens up through rafters before another small girl, veiled in white. It would seem that if the artist holds any hope at all, it is
with children. Is this why he so decisively turns against the playful anticipation and simulation of war even in childhood? One of his most revelatory depictions is Resistance and War Games ( 2015, p. 43 ).
It reveals a bombed-out, bullet-ridden cityscape, a ghastly rubble field of destroyed apartment buildings, gaping window openings, and heavily damaged lines of streets with their buried infrastructure exposed. Bomb craters and torn-up paving cover the ground with a network of destruction, and the building on the far right exhibits the shadow of monstrous contamination. Recognizably collaged sections lend the sharpness of cutouts to the destruction. A scenario between chiseled simulation and anticipation of the gruesome reality of Aleppo. The events and figures in the painting don’t match, but belong to different levels of reality. A child’s toy recalls the heavy machine used to remove blocks of stone. Above the twisted water pipes sits a sort of lead soldier — part of the game.
To the left are the grandmother, mother, and child trio from Picasso’s painting Massacre in Korea ( 1951 ),6 an explicit quote representing another secondary reality that draws parallels to recurrences of massacres. Next to the left edge an outsize graffito — a cat wearing a pink ribbon — crouches, twice the height of the figures. Around its head curls a text balloon about the relationship between power and powerlessness: appealing street art and message in one. On the right side, next to the irradiated building, a little girl holds a balloon with white polka dots. The only creature that is not a part of the deadly game, but makes her own way through the rubble? All in all, a tableau of the devastation of war in a future possible at any time, evoked with the artificial unscrupulousness of a computer game! America between playful preparation and self-fulfilling prophecy!
How far it has already come is suggested by the phalanx of heavily armed warriors with skull-like gas masks and full-body shields moving like a wall against a lone protesting woman in Code Pink ( 2008, p. 45 ). Her white sock, like several balloons in the sky, carries the peace symbol. A sign held up high shouts “NO!” A kind of pink parasol towers above the heads of the fierce attackers, and even on the shields there are shimmering pink reflections. Is this bellicose march directed against peaceful anti-war protesters who resist with a delicate pink out of the can ( precisely in the center of the painting )? Is the power of nonviolence having its effect? Can the visionary and doomsayer Jansen occasionally invent a world in which things go right? Here we hit upon the innermost political, moral core of Jansen’s work.
Painting is the most intimate form of waging war, he says in an interview.7 One might add: that also extends to the ruin that gives rise to wars and the ruin they leave behind. The art historian Brooke Lynn McGowan emphasizes in Jansen’s painting his artistic examination of what the World War general and later American President Dwight D. Eisenhower described as the “military-industrial complex.” 8 Eisenhower foresaw the fatal collaboration between the powerful armed forces and the armaments industry. In almost every decade since then, for whatever reason, a powerful America has been engaged in warfare. In 1990 Jansen, then a career soldier, was sent to the war in Iraq. In 1997, having become increasingly disillusioned, he left the military. In that same year, as a trained commercial artist, he began his artistic career in Aachen. To this day his paintings profit from that early training: enamels and spray paints continue to be just as important as bits of collage and oil pastels. Even without academic study, the painter was soon able to repeat his successes from before his military service and be exhibited in important galleries all over Europe.
Paintings like Imminent Threat ( 2013, pp. 46/47 ) deal directly with war, although in this case the scene appears to illustrate not so much merciless reality as pious legend. In the desert two tanks halt in front of each other, one filled with soldiers ready to fire, the other apparently without a driver and mired in the sand. Between them, leaning against an air mattress, an infant sits on the ground. Another few feet and the child will be crushed. The red target on the baby’s diaper blurs into an imaginary whorl above the head of the tank driver on the right, while the guiding beam continues to aim at the baby. The situation is more than surreal; a miracle will be required. Is Jansen — who took part in “Desert Storm” and witnessed a devastating rocket attack — hallucinating an extreme case so as to more easily deal with his experiences? As a narrator he leaves the ending open. In 2008/09 Jansen confronted the most extreme contrasts: in War Games ( 2008, p. 49 ) a table is covered with skulls in extremely delicate colors in front of a night-black ground; in Friedenstaube ( 2009 ) the dove of peace, comparably rendered in red and blue, perches on street sweepings. A larger overview, beyond metaphor, is provided by the work Puzzling Wars of the World ( 2013 ), however: a jumble of small-scale military materiel — batteries, automobile tires, bombs with fuses — but also puzzle pieces, painting utensils, brushes, and palettes. This expansive topographical site establishes focal points like colored alarm signals: a distant view of part of a world whose one half is beginning to burn while the other has already been consumed? Battlefield ( 2011 ) translates war into a wholly ( electrifying? ) painterly event. Has he here reached a boundary where conflict and warfare transmute into sheer storms of color? Or does Jansen mean it when he says that painting is the most intimate form of waging war? It is unsurprising that Jansen compresses the gloomier aspects of his worldview into richly detailed and distinctly catastrophic paintings. In Spotlight on Education ( 2009, p. 50 ) a school bus has suffered a terrible collision; its empty seats suggest deaths.
Collision ( 2010, p. 51 ) shows an ocean liner tipped on its side, sinking. A giraffe, a zebra, and a pig swim in the water, lending the symbolic weight of Noah’s ark to the accident. The Rescue Rings That I Found Close By ( 2015, p. 53 ) features a desolate rocky coast. A shipwrecked man sits alone in the sand next to his life preserver. A second life preserver has washed up onto the beach a few feet in front of him. Has the person who wore it died? Is the man we see the sole survivor? In its retrospective concentration, this is one of Jansen’s most intense, most gripping works. The actual event plays out wholly in the memory of the seated man and the viewer’s reconstruction of it. As is often the case in Jansen’s art, the worst has already happened, and it weighs heavily on the present situation. Even when Jansen turns to other themes, war and its consequences continue to lurk in the background. For example, there are lines running from the military enlightenment to the threat of the surveillance state. Cyber Surveillance on Wasteland ( 2009, pp. 54/55 ) heaps a tangle of cables around two simple huts, one on a central knoll, the other on the periphery. Broad, sky-blue beams clearly distinguished from the surrounding gray fall on both dwellings.
Small targets hover far above, probably symbolizing satellites observing the buildings. The decomposing chaos of ripped-out cables and switches heaped around the huts is set apart from these sharply outlined beams. The central one spills down the hill and disappears in the darkness. Does the pile of cables indicate the end of an outmoded system that has become useless through cyber surveillance? Does this painting explain the light-blue patches in Resistance and War Games as satellites that continue to survey the war zone? So much for an overview of Jansen’s subjects and motifs. They all have to do with convictions and arguments relating to politics, the military, the economy, and ecology. Even so, their depictions
draw as much on personal experiences as on a very American environment.
His changing places of residence also serve as sources of observation. For Jansen isn’t illustrating lead articles: he paints emotional pictures, passionately captured, angry, cautionary examples of danger, of misguided developments, of curtailment of freedom. He paints with the sweeping brushstrokes of the Abstract Expressionists, reinterpreting them as destructive, obliterating, canceling forces. In The Apprentice ( 2009, pp. 58/59 ) a young painter stands as though transfixed in front of the wild, uncontrolled tumult of overlapping colored strokes that seem to be fighting each other on a giant canvas. One thick streak of pigment escapes the format and pours out into the atelier. The painter is much like Goethe’s sorcerer’s apprentice, incapable of quelling the forces he has evoked. Jansen is aware of the energetic potential of painting and abstraction and employs it in his critical, diagnostic pictures. He knows that painting can also be an expression and medium of destructive forces. The Final Walk ( 2011, pp. 60/61 ) captures this in an explosive burst, presumably of an oil well. Chunks of earth are sent flying, pipes are severed, people and poultry race away in all directions. The only figure holding still is Dorothy, carrying a sunflower. No less important are the order and disorder of his paintings in general: his compositional style.
Jansen tends to employ expansive horizontal formats — though not exclusively — for cityscapes, interiors, or their interpenetration. Again and again, we gaze at a projecting picture window. It is reminiscent of a stage, not the traditional peep show, but an expansive cityscape or landscape. A deliberately vague, broad stripe in the foreground serves as a veritable proscenium before the middle ground and an obstructed back wall. The foreground, a blurred no-man’s-land, does not block obstacles but pushes them aside. Our gaze passes unhindered across the empty apron of the stage: the entrance to the picture becomes a flyover. It is only in the middle distance that we encounter people and objects. Only here is the space logically organized by perspective, becoming the scene of the action. One critic 9 has rightly called this a trap that opens up to our perception and then snaps shut again. The Futurists claimed that they placed the viewer in the center of their paintings, and even though Jansen has nothing in common with those early-modern Italian avant-gardists, their boast applies to his work as well. This feeling of being sucked into the painting contributes greatly to the distinct sense of space in his lofts, attics, and receding streets. It enhances the formidable presence of even the tiniest figures seen from the back, which also help to draw us into the depth. At the same time he situates the seemingly scattered symbolic vocabulary of worn-out tires, polka-dotted balls, and targets calling for precise aim.
The faceless portraits are individual and yet clearly related. If Brooke Lynn McGowan’s assertion that “only innocence has a face” 10 is correct, then these portraits touch on the central concept in Jansen’s visual politics. Francis Bacon is not far removed, to be sure, but in place of his tortured bodies the American painter presents us with dignified costume dolls and characteristic poses from the world of finance and the military hierarchy. At first there were Wall Street bankers dressed in business suits and ties, representing criminal money hunger beneath their deformed round heads ( pp. 62 and 63 ). They were soon joined by military figures in uniforms bristling with medals ( p. 64 ). The contribution of research and science was then exhibited in the Illuminated One ( 2015, p. 65 ), whose head is replaced by a light bulb, and the Faceless Professor ( also 2015, p. 67 ), whose convoluted thought processes have burst through his skull and taken possession of his head like an octopus.
The result of this explosion of brain power can be read at the side: “5 + 5 = 11.” Jansen’s opinions about the elites in a repressive system are as comprehensive as they are scathing, opinions that he clearly expresses in his entire oeuvre.