Michael Kunze

What is metaphysics? is a cycle, consisting of fifteen artworks (oil on canvas). Initial point for this series is the famous interview "Nur ein Gott kann uns retten/Only a god is able to safe us" between Rudolf Augstein and Martin Heidegger, induced by the german magazine Spiegel in 1967 (first published in 1974, after Heidegger's death). The interview took place in Martin Heidegger's library. There are only a few press photos which document this meeting, showing a mysterious sit-in of three men - namely Augstein, Heidegger and Wiegand Petzet - in front of a huge bookshelf in a dark room. The conversation, more a confrontation of opinions of two different generations, seems to take place in a nonentity. While Heidegger trys to discuss metyphysical questions, Augstein debates on critical incidents of the past. Two great possibilities to hush up the 20th century are brought into contact in a strange, but maybe significant way: On the one hand Wittgenstein's ahistorical dictate of silence, on the other hand Heidegger's silence caused by history.

The oils of the cycle What is metaphysics? are developed in conjunction to these press images and are further related to the TV series "Geister/Ghosts" by Lars von Trier in 1994. There, the spooky atmosphere ( concerning as well the visual as the level of content) seems to be treated in another way: By gaps and deletion of time, conversations which aren't possible anymore are transmitted into a sphere in which modern criticism is transformed into a modern hospital, confusing not only the credulous contemporaries. Here, Trier creates different accesses for creatures which are neither here, nor there, disturbing and awing the scientific cosmos of hospital through its abysms. These accesses brighten the shisms in a delusional and momentariliy necessary way. Those constituted the first metaphysical questions - which are constitutive for Kunze' s What is metaphysics?: Which way will I go? Or: Is it even possible to decide?

Michael Kunze
Was ist Metaphysik?