Abject Dreaming: The Art of Herbert Pfostl and Roberto Kusterle
By:
March 20, 2009
Herbert Pfostl is an artist we’d like to know more about.
His work combines found images and text with figural notions of animals and herbs, half-finished rubbings, and archetypal blots and smudges.
Pfostl’s drawings and mixed-media works invoke a library dear to hilobrow–Blake and Dickinson, Benjamin and Bataille. But Pfostl reads them with stained fingers. Like the great Czech animator Jan Svankmajer, Pfostl makes highbrow art with dirty fingers.
Images like these may be found at Pfostl’s blog, where they are accompanied with the quotations that inspire and animate them. Pfostl’s book To Die No More is a compendium of quotations and images in the same vein.
Although Italian photographer Roberto Kunsterle’s medium and methods differ, his enigmatic monochromes are similarly compounded of dreams, abjection, and mythomania.
In her essay “The Pornographic Imagination,” Susan Sontag calls the obscene “a primal notion of human consciousness, (not merely) the backwash of a sick society’s aversion to the body.”
These artists remind us that hilobrow is not nobrow; it’s not an easy way out. Abjection, horror, humiliation, obsession — these are aspects of consciousness that middlebrow tries to domesticate. But they are universal; they will have their art.