EIN BILD ROMAN STÜCKEN A Pictorial Novel In Pieces - Captain ...

PICTURES DON’T SLEEP
“Captain Pamphile” – an exhibition
about proliferation
Captain Pamphile —the exhibition, the novel—just like
the life of the novel’s author, Alexandre Dumas, is about
accumulation, proliferation, and expansion. Originally
conceived as a collection of short stories, the novel, first
published in 1839, generates an inordinate abundance
of obscure incidents and outlandish adventures, curious
characters (preferably animals), allusions, and references.
In addition to reworking countless literary sources,
Dumas relentlessly drops names, sprinkling his narrative,
almost tabloid-style, with
characters from contemporary
life: natural scientists, painters,
sculptors, poets, writers, doctors,
and even a tightrope walker make
appearances. The roguish captain
of the merchant frigate Roxelane,
too, is mainly occupied with accumulating.
“Captain Pamphile,
while undertaking grand speculative
ventures, by no means despised
smaller transactions,” the
novel laconically remarks about
the buccaneer’s maniacal business
acumen, which makes him look
like a sort of prototypical stock
exchange speculator. Yet Pamphile
is not just a representative
of unbridled capitalism and a wily
daredevil in any of life’s situations, he is also the “mightiest
hunter before the Lord.” He collects animals the way
some others today deal in art—out of economic calculation
and a zest for speculation, for reasons of style and
a little for the love of collecting, or simply because an
opportunity presents itself. Pamphile’s inventor, Alexandre
Dumas, harbored entrepreneurial ambitions not unlike
those of his novelistic hero. He operated a serial production
of literature, subcontracting some of the work,
and his form of market-oriented writing enabled him to
collect fantastic royalties—quite a bit of which, inciden-
Esther Buss
Ballad-monger at a Spanish mystery play, 1965
tally, he later lost in speculative financial ventures. And
last but not least, the exhibition likewise pursues a sort
of ‘mass production’: it accumulates images that in turn
depict, or hide, or resonate with, this whole story.
We might regard this form of ‘image hoarding’ as a metaphor
for Captain Pamphile’s voracious pursuit of loot. At
the very least, the exhibition’s flood of images is an accurate
reflection of his penchant for material and capital
growth. A shipload full of paintings,
amassed during a cruise over
waters that were now stormy,
now placid, and a congeries of
different styles, signatures, pictorial
and narrative techniques,
and types of images. And yet the
ongoing cumulative acquisition
of pictures conducted by the two
other captains, Gunter Reski and
Marcus Weber, should probably
not be seen as a response to the
market’s intemperate appetite for
figurative painting. In a certain
way, the Pamphile pictures even
distance themselves from the autonomous
panel painting as they
enter into the service of a curatorial
concept or an overarching
text, hardly allowing us to read them as instances of selfsufficient
and unabashed subjectivist expression—even
though that is what, as individual works, they may well
be. They are commissioned works whose content has
been dictated, not so much images as bespoke illustrations,
translations from text into images, from imagistic
writing into images bearing subtitles or intertitles.
The assignment—a passage to be ‘interpreted’—defines
a framework in terms of content, no more and no less,
but there are no limits on how the artist engages with
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