Kafka Wired: In the Penal Colony and The Metamorphosis by Martin Senn

A good friend of mine over at Carleton, Stuart Murray, was showing me a mock-up of a “fact sheet” that the university was putting together on his work. Clearly the design folks over there were at a loss as to what image to use for the big splash page, since they had copped a lo-res picture of some statue of Plato (or Socrates) from iStockphoto, blew it up, and slapped it in, watermark and all. He’s at a bit of a loss, since his work crosses a number of fields and topics: “What says “biopolitics” and death and ethics and medicine and prison and . . . ?” Remembering that he taught Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony” one year at Ryerson, in a rhetoric course on “Free Speech,” I did a quick troll on Google and found this great work by a German artist named Martin Senn, an illustrator and painter who also does fantastic work with wire sculpture.

Martin Senn. Franz Kafka: Der Eigentümliche Apparataus der Erzählung “In der Strafkolonie.” [Franz Kafka: The Peculiar Apparatus from the Story “In the Penal Colony.”] Wire and modeling clay. 50cm x 35cm x 25cm.

 The “peculiar apparatus” is used in the Penal Colony to carry out an inmate’s sentencing. The condemned lies flat on a bed and has the content of his sentence cut into his body by the “Harrow,” a vast array of quivering needles driven by an electro-mechanical device called the “Inscriber.”

Martin Senn. Franz Kafka: Der Eigentümliche Apparataus der Erzählung “In der Strafkolonie.” [Franz Kafka: The Peculiar Apparatus from the Story “In the Penal Colony.”] Wire and modeling clay. 50cm x 35cm x 25cm.

I suppose its up in the air as to whether or not Carleton would want something like this on its promotional material, especially when its promoting one of their new Canada Research Chairs.

In any event, I find Senn’s representation of the device from Kafka’s tale remarkably evocative of the absurdly inhuman inscription of the Law upon the human subject. Bits and pieces of found materials twist together in a largely empty form to bring incredible violence upon the body of the condemned. And we are, all of us, in Kafka’s world, condemned.

Just ask Gregor Samsa!

Martin Senn. Franz Kafka: Das Ungeheuere Ungeziefer aus der Erzählung “Die Verwandlung.” [Franz Kafka: The Monstrous Vermin from the Story “The Metamorphosis.”] Wire and modeling clay. 30cm x 30cm.