This series is round one in a wrestle with Kafka’s early Description of a Struggle. A second round will engage with the depiction in the story of the sky and in particular its clouds, references to which are made in this story most frequently in the whole of Kafka’s oeuvre (the mountains are cloudlike, the clouds at one point “hewn out of grey stones”, at another point like glued-on hearts on a fleeting blue Parisian sky). By then a slow count may have deemed this particular struggle, always provisional, to be over, for the while.
The photographs in 'Unfinished Landscape' were chosen for the pragmatic reason that I had them already printed and at hand, and for the formal reason that in their distortions (through a dark glass bottle) they appear to return a "real" landscape to an imaginary construction of elements that together make a picture. In the "unfinished landscape" of Kafka’s story, trees and sky and mountains and paths are put together on a seeming whim by the narrator, only for them to carry him deeper into his interior wanderings. This series may thus be thought of as an undoing.
The arrangement of the cut-out text fragments – gestural descriptions obtained by subtraction from Kafka’s story – is subject to chance (à la cut-up), serendipity (within and across each series, for example in the alignment of knees) and design (the fragments at the top strung together make a passage from the story). Inasmuch as Description of a Struggle, in one of its facets, is, to use Reiner Stach’s words, about the entanglement between description and the struggle for making one, so the sequence of assemblages here are emblematic of the writer’s struggle to hew out of grey words the heart of the matter.
