Manfred Peckl

until 31 May 2025

Performance with Götz Bury: May 24, 2025

Christine König Galerie
Chapter III
Schleifmühlgasse 1A
1040 Wien

There is a record by Christian Marclay with the title “More Encores”: the sounds that one can hear on it are fragmentations and recompositions of recordings by Johann Strauss, Jimi Hendrix, Maria Callas, Serge Gainsbourg/Jane Birkin, et al. Not made by computer edit – we’re talking about the year 1989 – but at that time with the aid of a turntable, offering variable speeds and every other type of possibility of manipulation: a bizarre theatre of sound made of acoustic disruptions, skewed frenzies of rhythm, and musical palimpsest structures.

In the work of Manfred Peckl there are some similarities with the aesthetic of approximation, with which he illuminates the work Die Blumen des Bösen [Les Fleurs du Mal/The Flowers of Evil] by Charles Baudelaire. He plays with the cycle of poems, in that he contrives a radical new configuration: “I read the ‘Flowers’ again with the intent to transform the leaves into blossoms, grasses, and herbs: Dieb Lumen des Bösen.”

Dieb [thief] points to the fact that the notion of appropriation art at least plays a role as a background impulse in his project. Lumen [light], in turn, reminds us of the Lumen Christi, a calling from the liturgy of the Easter vigil that celebrates the light of Christ after the darkness of the period of fasting.

Manfred Peckl also makes it clear that he is aware of the forbidden, the abomination, and the amoral aspects of Baudelaire’s poem cycle. The strophes of “The Flowers of Evil”, which the artist places as a foundation for the text-image assemblages, appear in authentic facsimile, yet are interspersed, shredded, and superimposed. Thus, language formations arise that stand for botanical allegories for a life, “where a magic breath senses everything, even the greyness.” 

His approach shares aspects of tangible poetry; meaning and form interact and generate new leaps of synapses: “in many of the leaves, the plants read like a part of the poem, take up a textual and formal position, while in others the factor of disruption is dominant, as if thoughts penetrate thoughts.”

Occasionally, entire strophes from “The Flowers of Evil” are identifiable, and then again particles of meaning such as “…sounding richly successful”, “…and full of joy”, “…up to shaving” flare up in a superimposed arrangement of letters. In this manner, the verse lines by Charles Baudelaire are shaken up once again in the word mixer; the poetical desire for intricate expression experiences its conceptual hypostasis in the metaphorical linguistic remix. “Image and poem coexist in varying degrees of emphasis,” Manfred Peckl writes, “but always constitute a unity.”

In a similar fashion to the musical example cited at the beginning, he explains the work of another artist on his material: “The texts are not illustrated, but [function as] an image for the metaphor for themselves.” And “The Flowers of Evil” are transmuted, in their botanical symbolic form, into Dieb Lumen des Bösen. In order to express it with the words of Baudelaire in their manifestation translated into the biomorphic symbolic form:

“And you can in the slumbering of her mouth/…/with kisses over faded charms slip away.”And if the word plant / plant word branches out, the following conceptual bifurcation arises:“…to the nothingness/…/Endymion from evening until morning.”

(quotation after Thomas Miessgang, 2025, translation by Sarah Cormack)