Letters from Vienna #136
Jürgen Messensee
The Painter as Philosopher
“In the 2-dimensional representation one escapes the tyranny of the de facto 3-dimensionality, which enchains us to what is apparently known” the Austrian painter Jürgen Messensee said a few years ago[1]. “I have always attempted to understand the problem of spaces or spaces, at first instinctively, later consciously” he continued. “Aware that our environment is not what we believe we are seeing, the formulation of this questioning has grown increasingly more complex. That is one of the cardinal questions of artistic thinking. If everything is interlinked with everything, this problem naturally also relates to the volumes, structures and constructions operating in these spaces. These are consequently represented again in spatial structures. The question is hence universal.”[2]
In the same way that both Gerhard Richter and David Hockney are preoccupied with fundamental issues (see letters #105 & #64) so Jürgen Messensee is concerned with questions which one might term “philosophical” or even “metaphysical”. Indeed, his ideas are more akin to those of the “Upanishads” than those of the superficial and materialistic “Zeitgeist”:
“He who perceives all beings in the Self alone, and the Self in all beings, does not entertain any hatred on account of that perception.”
“When a man realizes that all beings are but the Self, what delusion is there, what grief, to that perceiver of oneness?”
“That (Self) is all-pervading, radiant, bodiless, sore less, without sinews, pure, untainted by sin, the all-seer, the lord of the mind, transcendent and self-existent.”[3]
His ideas have long found reflection in the work of the likes of Fritjof Capra, who also happens to be Austrian. In the 1970s Capra wrote:
“The exploration of the atomic and subatomic world in the twentieth century has revealed an unsuspected limitation of classical ideas and has necessitated a radical revision of many of our basic concepts. The concept of matter in subatomic physics, for example, is totally different from the traditional idea of a material substance in classical physics. The same is true for concepts like space, time, or cause and effect. These concepts, however, are fundamental to our outlook on the world around us and with their radical transformation our whole world view has begun to change.”
“These changes, brought about by modern physics, have been widely discussed by physicists and by philosophers over the past decades, but very seldom has it been realized that they all seem to lead in the same direction, towards a view of the world which is very similar to the views held in Eastern mysticism. The concepts of modern physics often show surprising parallels to the ideas expressed in the religious philosophies of the Far East. Although these parallels have not, as yet, been discussed extensively, they have been noticed by some of the great physicists of our century when they came in contact with Far Eastern culture during their lecture tours to India, China and Japan. The following three quotations serve as examples:”
“The general notions about human understanding . . . which are illustrated by discoveries in atomic physics are not in the nature of things wholly unfamiliar, wholly unheard of, or new. Even in our own culture they have a history, and in Buddhist and Hindu thought a more considerable and central place. What we shall find is an exemplification, an encouragement, and a refinement of old wisdom.”
Julius Robert Oppenheimer
“For a parallel to the lesson of atomic theory . . . [we must turn1 to those kinds of epistemological problems with which already thinkers like the Buddha and Lao Tzu have been confronted, when trying to harmonize our position as spectators and actors in the great drama of existence.”
Niels Bohr
“The great scientific contribution in theoretical physics that has come from Japan since the last war may be an indication of a certain relationship between philosophical ideas in the tradition of the Far East and the philosophical substance of quantum theory.”
Werner Heisenberg
It should thus not come as too great a surprise that Jürgen Messensee is a close friend of Anton Zeilinger (for whom science is all about “breaking the wall of illusion”[4]; for Messensee art is exactly the same thing) or that it was Zeilinger who gave an introductory talk to his exhibition in the Kunstforum[5]. For both Messensee and Zeilinger: science and art are simply too sides of the same coin.
[1] p.6 Messensee, Beyond Contradictions
[2] p.8 ibid
[3] Isavasya Upanishad, translated by Vidyavachaspati V. Panoli