Politiken der Innerlichkeit — Anna Kipke on Emma Kunz (2021)

Master's thesis by Anna Kipke, Leuphana Universität Lüneburg, Kulturwissenschaften – Culture, Arts & Media. Submitted 10 May 2021. First examiner Prof. Dr. Beate Söntgen, second examiner Hon.-Prof. Dr. Julia Voss. 89 pages.

Full title. Politiken der Innerlichkeit. Über Emma Kunz und die Möglichkeitsbedingungen einer künstlerischen Praxis des Heilens — Politics of Interiority. About Emma Kunz and the Conditions of Possibilities of an Artistic Practice of Healing. The title page is bilingual. The body is in German, with many quotations in English.

About this file. The original is filed as sources/ingested/Master_2021_Kipke_Anna_Politiken.pdf. This file is a digest, not a full translation. Part 1 gives the passages that describe how Emma Kunz made her drawings and how the pendulum worked in them, in the original German with an English translation made for this wiki. Part 2 summarises the thesis chapter by chapter. Kipke quotes most of these passages from earlier literature, and the source of each is given. Page numbers refer to the thesis.

The wiki's reading of this source is distributed to Entfaltung (under The research, Stage three, Stage four and The pendulum and the parameter), Entfaltung on Paper and Algorithmic Archaeology.

Part 1 — The process, in the sources' words

The sequence of a sitting

Bonnefoit and Petrucci (2020), paraphrased by Kipke (p. 41). Starting from a concrete question or problem, Kunz used a pendulum to locate single points on graph paper lying flat on the table. From them she drew, with pencil and ruler, so-called Schwerpunkte and Schwerlinien (centres of gravity and lines of gravity). Her questions ranged from politics through philosophy to personal matters. On the lines of gravity she then built and layered geometric forms: crosses, circles, stars, parallelograms. With a wide range of colours she picked out single forms and flat bundles of lines, and coloured areas with coloured pencil. The physically demanding sittings lasted up to 24 hours, until the drawing was, in her own sense, complete. The results include fine line constructions, animal and human figures, plant forms, polygons, circles and crystals.

Peter Burri (2018), an eyewitness, treated by Kunz as an eight-year-old in 1943 (p. 47).

„Bei meinen Besuchen sah ich Penta auch zeichnen. Es war unglaublich, mit welcher Geschwindigkeit sie Punkte auf Millimeterpapier setzte. Das ganze Blatt war mit Hunderten von Punkten übersät. Deren Lage bestimmte sie mit dem Pendeln. Es war rätselhaft für mich, wie sie wusste, welche Punkte anschließend zu verbinden waren. Jedes Bild entstand in einer »Sitzung«, auch wenn sie Tag und Nacht dauerte. Sie sagte mir auch, dass sie zu Beginn nie wisse, wie das fertige Bild aussehen würde, es sei aber die komplette Antwort auf ihre Fragen. Sie äußerte sich nie zu dessen Inhalt."

"On my visits I also saw Penta draw. It was incredible how fast she set points on the graph paper. The whole sheet was strewn with hundreds of points. She determined their position with the pendulum. It was a mystery to me how she knew which points were then to be connected. Each picture was made in one 'sitting', even if it lasted day and night. She also told me that at the start she never knew what the finished picture would look like, but that it was the complete answer to her questions. She never spoke about its content."

Kipke adds (p. 48) that Kunz located many points with the pendulum and joined only a selection of them with straight lines, and that Burri could not follow the choice.

Heiny Widmer (1974), curator of the first Kunz exhibition, Aargauer Kunsthaus 1973 (p. 15–16).

„Emma Kunz benutzt das Pendel als Stimulans, so wie andere Künstler sich durch geeignete Maßnahmen in einen der Arbeit günstigen Zustand zu bringen versuchen. Sie erzählte oft, plötzlich seien in ihrer Vorstellung geordnete Systeme von Punkten aufgetaucht. Sie haben sie sofort als Grundmuster einer neuen Figur aufgefasst und niedergeschrieben. In unermüdlicher Arbeit baute sie dann das Grundmuster aus, reicherte es an, Pendel und innere Gesichte befragend. Manchmal schien es, als ob sich das Bild außerhalb ihres Bewusstseins vollende, als ob die Hände geführt würden. War ein Werk dann fertig, so stand die Malerin selbst voller Erstaunen davor und beschrieb, aus fernen Tiefen zurückkommend, neugierig staunend das Gefundene. Dieser Ablauf der Arbeit: Vision – kompositorische Fixierung – Zeichnen – Anreichern – nachträgliches Interpretieren, zeigt deutlich, dass in Ansätzen zumindest ein Fall von medialem Malen vorliegt. In Ansätzen und nicht vollständig deshalb, weil im Gesamtwerk von Emma Kunz eine Entwicklungstendenz abzulesen ist, die deutlich jene nur beim wirklichen Künstler zu findende Wechselwirkung zwischen Bewusstsein, bewusstem Verhalten und fast unbewusstem Hinhorchen zu den Müttergründen signalisiert."

"Emma Kunz uses the pendulum as a stimulant, the way other artists try by suitable means to bring themselves into a state favourable to work. She often said that ordered systems of points had suddenly appeared in her mind. She took them at once as the basic pattern of a new figure and wrote them down. In tireless work she then built out the basic pattern and enriched it, consulting the pendulum and inner visions. Sometimes it seemed as if the picture completed itself outside her consciousness, as if her hands were guided. When a work was finished, the painter herself stood before it full of astonishment and, returning from distant depths, described with curious wonder what had been found. This course of work, vision – compositional fixing – drawing – enriching – interpretation after the fact, shows clearly that this is, at least in its beginnings, a case of mediumistic painting. In its beginnings and not fully, because the oeuvre as a whole shows a line of development that signals the interplay, found only in the true artist, between consciousness, conscious conduct and an almost unconscious listening for the realm of the Mothers."

The two accounts disagree about where the points came from. Burri saw the pendulum set them. Widmer reports that they appeared in Kunz's mind and that the pendulum was a stimulant, consulted during the building-out.

The state

Burri, on the healing session (p. 45–46). „Sagen Sie nichts! Ohne ein Wort zu verlieren, begann sie zu pendeln. Sie war hochkonzentriert, jedes Wort war eine Störung." — "'Say nothing!' Without a word she began to work the pendulum. She was highly concentrated; every word was a disturbance." And: „Das Pendeln nannte sie immer »Arbeit«. Es war Schwerstarbeit." — "She always called working the pendulum 'work'. It was the hardest labour." When he moved during a sitting, she corrected him sharply (p. 47).

Kipke (p. 40–41). As an activity done sitting or standing, the pendulum sessions demanded hours of mental concentration and physical endurance. Besides technical skill, repetition and concentration were what let her read the pendulum's fine movements and their deviations. The pendulum needs a still hand and arm.

Reading the finished drawing

The orientation board (p. 34, figs. 13–14). A wooden plate, 8.7 cm square with rounded corners, marked with a cross whose vertical opens into a V at the top. The vertical runs from "the earthly" up to "God, the heavenly" and is labelled "I, the vertical to be striven for". The horizontal runs from "evil" to "good" and is labelled "II, the crossbar of the cross to be overcome". The diagonals carry fire, air/light, earth and water. Kunz worked the pendulum over this board, and "from the deviations and emphases of the respective directions she interpreted the insights the drawings conveyed to her." Szeemann called it a "grid of redemption" (Erlösungsraster), Althaus a "compass", Szeemann elsewhere an "ordering scheme".

The drawing as a store (p. 48). In her later years, Burri says, Kunz "drew" far more than she "practically" healed. When asked to heal, she took one of her many drawings and looked out the corresponding "case". „Sie sagte einmal, in diesen Bildern sei die Antwort enthalten, auch wenn die Fragestellung bei der Entstehung eine andere gewesen sei." — "She once said the answer was contained in these pictures, even if the question when they were made had been a different one." Finished and evaluated drawings hung ten to twenty deep in her workroom. Drawings she used often have small holes from being pinned to the wall.

The instruments

The pendulum (p. 34). Silver, with a jade stone. In the photograph (fig. 13) it is a chain with a jade ball at one end and a silver ball at the other. She used the jade for spiritual questions and the silver end for material ones (television report by Karin Kägi, 2020).

The laboratory (p. 35). She owned a Geiger counter and an old microscope, given to her by a chemist who later brought her medicines to test with the pendulum. According to Szeemann, in the first years of working the pendulum, up to the outbreak of the Second World War, she established measures of radiation and vibration, with a particular interest in gamma rays. At the waxing moon she cast small lead plates to be laid under a bed or a workplace as shields.

Without the pendulum (p. 41). Through years of repetition she no longer needed the pendulum by the end of her life (Burri).

The general mechanics of the pendulum, after the sociologist Hubert Knoblauch (p. 36–37). The pendulum is "the gentler sister of the dowsing rod". Its movements (standstill, swinging, circling) have to be distinguished from barely visible changes, which needs a still hand and arm and long practice. The practitioner sets the meaning of movements by asking, for instance that a clockwise turn means yes and an anticlockwise turn no. The rod points at a place; the pendulum is connected to its target only through the question. "The sign of the pendulum's movement is legible only to the person who set the sign and asked the often unspoken questions."

The method in print (1953)

Kunz published one booklet under two titles, Das Wunder schöpfender Offenbarung (The Miracle of Creative Revelation) and Neuartige Zeichnungsmethode (A New Drawing Method), both subtitled Gestaltung und Form als Mass, Rhythmus, Symbol und Wandlung von Zahl und Prinzip (Design and form as measure, rhythm, symbol and transformation of number and principle). The two editions differ only in typography and in a few illustrations; the texts are identical (p. 54). It was printed by Dr. Hermann Schläpfer in Waldstatt. It contains an introduction, an explanation, and a selection of drawings with short legends: basic forms, then line constructions from circle, triangle and cross, and crystal, prism, structure and parabola figures (p. 62).

The introduction (p. 62–63).

„Ich befasse mich mit diesem Zeichnungsproblem seit 1938 und besitze hunderte von Figuren und Bildern. Dadurch ist es sehr schwer, einzelne auszuwählen, um von der Mannigfaltigkeit derselben in Form und Wesen einen Begriff zu geben. In Anbetracht dieser Schwierigkeit habe ich für dieses Bändchen nur den Kreis und die gerade Linie gewählt. Den Schlüssel zu dieser neuartigen Zeichnungsmethode einmal bekanntgegeben, ermöglicht jedermann, die Erstellung solcher Gebilde, vorausgesetzt, daß er mit der Zahl umzugehen weiß. Dieses Bändchen soll zugleich als Dokument und als Einführung gewertet werden, mit dem Wunsch, daß es vielen zu einem Begriff des freien Schaffens und der Freude werde."

"I have been occupied with this drawing problem since 1938 and own hundreds of figures and pictures. This makes it very hard to choose single ones to give an idea of their manifoldness in form and nature. In view of this difficulty I have chosen only the circle and the straight line for this little volume. Once the key to this new drawing method has been made known, it enables anyone to make such figures, provided he knows how to handle numbers. This little volume is meant to be taken both as a document and as an introduction, with the wish that it may become for many an idea of free creation and of joy."

The introduction refers to an article, "Die Schönheit der mathematischen Formel", in the Lucerne daily Vaterland of 22 August 1953, on the reform of mathematics teaching in the United States. It reproduced a "diamond pattern made by drawing all the diagonals of a regular 24-gon" (fig. 18). Kunz says her figure Der Kreis und seine Entstehung (The Circle and Its Emergence) is the same figure, made by a different method (p. 62). Kipke reads the reference as evidence that Kunz did read, against the received view that she learned everything "by way of self-experience" (p. 63).

The premise and the claim to novelty (p. 63). Every form, circle and parabola alike, consists of straight lines. „Neuartig ist die Methode, auch deshalb, weil sie nicht ein Objekt als Vorstellung wählt, sondern umgekehrt – die Wahl von zwei Zahlen miteinander verbunden und entfaltet, bestimmt die Art der Form und Gestalt." — "The method is new also because it does not choose an object as its idea, but the reverse: the choice of two numbers, connected with each other and unfolded, determines the kind of form and figure." A few drawings contain three-dimensional coordinate systems with numbers. The legend to Werk Nr. 113 reads: „Wohl dem Eingeweihten, der den Zusammenhang zwischen den Zahlen und dem Werk herzustellen mag." — "Happy the initiate who can make out the connection between the numbers and the work."

The four factors of form (p. 63).

„Die Zahl als Gesetz und Maß;
Das Wort als Wandlung (wenden), Entfaltung (entfalten);
Die Zeichensprache als Symbol in Gleich und Mal;
Die Bildekräfte in Wesensart und Form als Kristall, Pflanze, Tier und Mensch."

"Number as law and measure; the word as transformation (to turn), unfolding (to unfold); sign language as symbol in equals and times; the formative forces in nature and form as crystal, plant, animal and human." Kipke traces number to Pythagoras by way of Rudolf Steiner, the word to the Gospel of John (Kunz's 1930 poem "Im Anfang war das Wort"), and the formative forces (Bildekräfte) to Steiner and Paracelsus.

The basic forms (p. 68, fig. 19). The first plate, Grundformen (Werk Nr. 019, undated, 103 × 94 cm, on graph paper), develops the circle on one sheet. The top row has a single circle, an open half-circle and two intersecting circles. The second row has polygons and star polygons inscribed in circles on the number series three, five, seven and nine; the third row six, twelve and eight. The last row divides circles and draws tangents. Looked at in the reproduction, the last row includes a vertical stroke, a +, an × and an = drawn in circles, the "equals and times" of the third factor. The sheet is in the Emma Kunz Zentrum's work catalogue, which lists it as pencil and oil crayon on blue graph paper.

The practice tableau (p. 68–69, figs. 20–21). An untitled sheet first shown in Kosmos Emma Kunz (Aargauer Kunsthaus, 2021): dozens of figures and variations side by side on graph paper, large figures surrounded by small circle and crystal forms, some outlined, some opening into their surroundings. Some forms carry dates and numbers: a cube is marked "1939", a star figure "22.4.1962". Kipke reads the sheet as the residue of years of repetition, in which concentration learned at the pendulum carried over into construction as a procedure of "automation and depersonalisation".

Unpublished. Three workbooks of geometric constructions and notes on symmetry in nature survive at the Emma Kunz Zentrum in Würenlos; Kipke could not consult them (p. 4–5). At the end of the 1953 booklet Kunz announced a fuller "demonstrative explanatory brochure", which never appeared (p. 53).

On the source of the order

„Alles geschieht nach einer bestimmten Gesetzmäßigkeit, die ich in mir fühle und die mich nie lässt zur Ruhe kommen." — "Everything happens according to a particular lawfulness that I feel within me and that never lets me rest." (Kunz, quoted by Widmer 1973; p. 3, 54.)

Kunz did not believe in miracles. She looked for lawfulness, which could be found in one's surroundings and in oneself (p. 15). She was convinced that everyone had spiritual resources and forces to channel mental and physical illness through energies and vibrations (Teicher 2005; p. 15), and that these forces had been "buried by our top-heavy intellect and our materialism" (Anton C. Meier; p. 47).

Physicalists and mentalists (p. 39). In the 1920s and 1930s, Knoblauch shows, radiesthesia split into two schools. The physicalists held that natural forces acting on the body cause the swing; the dowser is a transducer of a world of fine vibrations, and the theory leans on electron, wave and cosmic-ray physics. The mentalists placed the cause in the psyche or the unconscious of the person holding the instrument; the vibrations are results of inner processes. Knoblauch stresses that the line between them was fluid. Earlier, experiments had shown that the rod moved only in a person's hands, and around 1900 the causes were sought in the person: a "subjectivation of the rod's swing" (p. 38).

Theory of form (p. 44). The critic Theo Kneubühler (1979): „Formen sind wandelbare Resultate eines gleichbleibenden Gerüstes, oder: Das Gerüst ist gesetzmässig gebaut, die innere Konstruktion ist logisch, doch die Resultate davon verändern sich oder sind veränderbar." — "Forms are changeable results of a constant scaffold; or: the scaffold is built according to law, the inner construction is logical, but its results change or can be changed."

Part 2 — The argument, chapter by chapter

Introduction (p. 3–11). Kunz's estate has over 400 drawings, almost none dated. Her own writings are a book of poems, Leben (1930), and the 1953 booklet; most of what is known about her process comes from anecdotes collected by Widmer and Harald Szeemann in the 1970s. Werk Nr. 20, long dated 1939 and read as a prophecy of the atomic bomb, was made in 1959 according to Widmer's notes and shows "a point of light that God gives". The reception history runs from outsider art (Der Fall Emma Kunz, 1973; Szeemann's Junggesellenmaschinen, 1975) to exhibitions with contemporary art (Oh! cet écho!, 1992; Massimiliano Gioni's Ghosts in the Machine, 2012, and Venice Biennale, 2013; Visionary Drawings, Serpentine, 2019) and to histories of abstraction (3 x Abstraction, Drawing Center, 2005; Weltempfänger, Lenbachhaus, 2018). Kipke's question: how are Kunz's spiritual, abstract drawings bound into material and bodily practices, and conditioned by them? Her thesis: looking at the practices of the pendulum and of healing shows the drawings as spiritual images bound up with material processes, and these "weak" practices carry their own reflexivity and critique.

1. With and against modernity: rooms and practices (p. 12–31). Kunz understood herself as a researcher (Forscherin) and worked as a healer. From 1938 she brought the pendulum, healing and drawing together and called herself "Penta", a popular etymology for working the pendulum. She grew up in Brittnau, the sixth of ten children in a family of hand-weavers. In 1911 she sailed to New York, where her entry papers give her occupation as "dressmaker"; from 1912 she worked in the J.J. Künzli knitting mill in Strengelbach. Sara Petrucci sees the textile background in Werk Nr. 107, a flower bouquet built like counted cross-stitch on the grid. From 1923 to 1939 she worked summers as housekeeper and companion for the painter and critic Jakob Friedrich Welti in Obwalden. A friend, Charlotte Gugelmann, introduced her to the dowsing rod and the pendulum between 1930 and 1936. After conflicts with physicians she moved to Lungern in 1947, near the shrine of the mystic Nicholas of Flüe, and in 1951 to Waldstatt in Appenzell Ausserrhoden, whose health law has guaranteed free healing since 1871. Photographs by Werner Schoch (dated 1958 in the text and summer 1953 in the list of figures) show her workroom: a ruler raised in her hand, drawings layered on the wall, a sheet weighted at its corners on the table under a lamp. In her hallway hung a man's coat, hat and walking stick, a prop to protect a woman living alone. Kipke frames the method with Michel de Certeau's distinction between strategies, which have a place of their own, and tactics, which work in the place of the other, and with Ruth Sonderegger on the critical potential of "weak" practices. Anecdotes and bodily testimony count as historical material.

2. The pendulum: a magical practice transformed by modernity (p. 32–44). Following Knoblauch, dowsing runs from Renaissance mining (Agricola, 1530) through Romantic "sensitivity", water-finding in nineteenth-century agriculture, and the medicalisation and commercialisation of the 1920s and 1930s, to the grid systems of the 1930s (the Hartmann grid). Magic does not vanish in modernity; it changes the references that legitimate it. In Kunz's work the pendulum becomes, after Petrucci, "an extension of the body" and a procedure of "depersonalisation and automation", comparable to the automatic drawing of Hilma af Klint and The Five. The graph paper is coordinate system and ordering structure. With Rosalind Krauss's "Grids" (1979), the grid lets us think we are dealing with materialism "while at the same time it opens a back door to belief"; for Kunz it is mediator and transformer, and the forms both fit into it and resist it. Susanne Leeb: Kunz's images are abstract, but they are results of material processes and are steered back into them, since she used her energy diagrams to heal. Bracha L. Ettinger contrasts Paul Klee, who tames cosmic forces in the drawing, with Kunz, who uses the drawing as a springboard to release them into a flow between herself, the work and others.

3. Healing from modernity? (p. 45–53). Burri's report of his 1943 iodine poisoning is the case study. Kunz did not want the medical diagnosis; she worked the pendulum for half an hour, named a "severe medicinal poisoning", stayed several days, and prescribed cold compresses, garlic milk and, by telephone, cream, butter, eggs and lemons, obtained during the war from smugglers. Kipke reads the report with Knoblauch's "communicative form of healing": because laws against quackery forbade diagnoses and promises, radiesthetic healing took narrative form, and its success is told, not felt in the session. With Foucault's Birth of the Clinic, medicine gained a place of its own; healing like Kunz's has none. Her drawings were instruments in healing, stores and diagrams that could be consulted again, and objects for meditation. Georgiana Houghton shares her belief in the transformative force of images. Birgit Pelzer: "Emma Kunz's drawings are charged with a will to usefulness."

4. "Abstraction in transition" between cosmology and grammatology (p. 54–69). Earlier readings cast Kunz as medium (Szeemann's "theosophy become image"), as cartographer of invisible energies (Susan Klein compares the drawings to Marshall Islands stick charts, readable only by their navigator), and as researcher in mathematics and geometry ("magic geometry", Fritz Billeter). Catherine de Zegher places Kunz between Hilma af Klint's cosmologies and Agnes Martin's pure perception, as a phenomenon of transition. Kipke analyses the 1953 booklet (Part 1 above) and finds Christian, theosophical and anthroposophical sources in its four factors: the circle, cross, square and triangle of Helena Blavatsky's Isis Unveiled, Steiner's formative forces, Paracelsus, whose writings Kunz read with a friend until about 1950. Kunz kept her distance from organised groups and never visited the Goetheanum in Dornach. According to Meier, she turned down three invitations from Sri Aurobindo to teach in India, saying her place was in Switzerland. Her answers were "always specific and singular" (Teicher). The basic-forms plate and the untitled practice tableau place her in the tradition of grammars of form, from Owen Jones's Grammar of Ornament (1856) to Wassily Kandinsky and Klee.

5. Outlook (p. 69–72). The 1953 booklet left posterity Kunz's "key to revelation". The other key, which the booklet does not mention, lies in her practices. Kunz is an abstraction in transition between "cosmologies of invisible forces" and the search for explanatory models in mathematics and grammatology. Healing produces a temporary, open relation between healer and recipient, made in the act itself. Kipke ends with Sun Rise | Sun Set (Schinkel Pavillon, 2021), where a Kunz drawing hung with Max Ernst and Pierre Huyghe, and asks why new-materialist debates turn to spiritual positions like Kunz's, and what hope is attached to them.