PUBLIKATION KONRAD ROSS

THE HAND
The recurrent image of the disembodied hand in Konrad Ross’s works contains a host of contemporary references but appears simultaneously
rooted in a ghostly longue durée. As the performance at the exhibition highlights, the hand is both the source of the image and the agent
executing the drawing. The tracing, the stencilling, of the hand returns the practice of art to its source in the body, rather than privileging
merely the eye and its location in the centre of the face. And this embodied anthropological approach has the advantage of revitalizing a
prehistoric artistic technique that has not aged a day. But the sheer repetition of the motif can also be interpreted as an archaeological reference.
The allusion could be to the silhouette hands at the Cueva de las Manos (Cave of the Hands) in Argentina (several populations created
the hands here between 13,000 and 9000 years ago), or to the 1500 handprints found in caves on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi (works
ranging in age from 10,000 to 39,000 years), or to the hands found in the caves on the island Borneo (one reddish-orange hand stencil was
created 52,000 ago, another roughly 37,000 years ago, and the oldest mulberry paintings, including decorated hand stencils, were made
between 21,000 to 20,000 years ago 3 ), or to the 71 hand stencils found in the Cave of Maltravieso in Cáceres, Spain (perhaps 64,000 years
old, thus among oldest found so far, although the dating is very controversial). 4 Were a cave on the island of Borneo a museum, one could
rightly conclude that a continuous production of hand stencils had been exhibited there over a period of thirty thousand years, all before the
Neolithic revolution.
But just as we acclimatize ourselves to the uncanny lesson in the archaeology of art that Konrad Ross may be offering us, the artist is apt to
simultaneously time-warp us into an epoch closer to home: perhaps with colour alone, as in his Lemons, where the garish fauvist yellow
(say, of Henri Rousseau) underscores the aesthetic syncretism lurking in many of his works, or with titles embedded into the image that lead
inexorably to our modern era (Power, Beg, Pope, and so on). References in other works are highly topical: Gjakmarrja alludes to the Albanian
tradition of “honour killing” that has survived into the present. In this disturbing drawing, the connection to an idealized antiquity turns out to
be an illusion. As in the critical human sciences, here there is no return to a nostalgic bygone origin. Instead of using distant epochs as
marketing strategies for supposedly “natural” lifestyles (today’s fashionable Stone Age diets and Palaeolithic family planning 5 ), the first question
in archaeology, for authors from Hermann Usener via Ernst Cassirer to Michel Foucault, is always how the past shapes the present. As Giorgio
Agamben writes in the preamble to a recent essay: “My reflections are guided by the idea that only archaeology provides access to the present.
As Michel Foucault once wrote, historical research is merely the shadow that the interrogation of the present casts upon the past.” 6 So let’s
take a look at this shadow:
3 See M. Aubert et al., “Palaeolithic cave art in Borneo,” in: Nature, vol. 564 (7 November 2018).
4 See D.L. Hoffmann et al., “U-Th dating of carbonate crusts reveals Neandertal origin of Iberian cave art,” in: Science, vol. 359 (23 February 2018), pp. 912-915.
Note that this early dating, which predates the current estimate of the earliest arrival of humans in Europe by 20 thousand years and could thus imply that Neanderthals were the artists,
has been called into question by Maxime Aubert et al., “Early dates for ‘Neanderthal cave art’ may be wrong,” in: Journal of Human Evolution, vol. 125, December 2018, pp. 215-217.
There is at present no evidence of representational Neanderthal artwork.
5 For a critique of “peleo-fashions” see Marlene Zuk, Paleofantasy: What Evolution Really Tells Us About Sex, Diet, and How We Live, New York/London, 2013.
6 Giorgio Agamben, “Archäologie des Befehls,” in: Friedrich Wilhelm Graf and Heinrich Meier (eds.), Politik und Religion: Zur Diagnose der Gegenwart, München, 2013.
Just such an archaeology is a central goal in Agamben’s 10-volume project, Homo Sacer. For Konrad Ross, Agamben is one of countless sources of inspiration.
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