Beuys applies the organising method of stacking and storing ideas and conceptions in the felt piles of his ‘Fond’ works, mostly uniform blocks of gray layers of felt, each of which is covered by a copper plate, as in the ‘Fond III’ work found in the ‘Beuys Block’. In this stacked arrangement, the organic substance of felt is turned into a store and transformer of energy, a battery that is not connected to an electric model. While the issue for Beuys is the warmth generated by energy or emotion, Knoebel’s stratifications store new pictures. Thus the forms of ‘Odyshade C7’, 1995, screwed firmly in place and cut irregularly, or the loosely stacked, coloured woodpiles of ‘Genter Raum’, 1980, evoke the possibility of an experimental combination of forms, colours and new proportional relationships, and thus the idea of new depictive forms stored in woodpiles, awaiting transformation.
While Beuys, for instance, turns the stereometric forms in ‘Vor dem Aufbruch aus Lager I’, 1970/80 into metaphors of crystalline thought, the objects in Knoebel’s work refer literally to themselves and are not subservient to any non-artistic claim. This is in accordance with Malevich’s demand that art ‘can only have itself as a theme’ and ‘not the idea of anything’. Figurative and psychological associations are excluded; the room becomes an area of meditation, the picture a pure object of contemplation. In the monochrome brown colouring of the hardboard panels and the layered, stacked arrangement of the plain squares, cubes and the empty canvas stretchers hanging on the wall, Knoebel links ‘principles of sculpture and painting’ in a dialogue. Knoebel’s canvas stretchers stand in direct correspondence to Beuys’s upright canvas stretchers in ‘Room 1’, which lean against the wall with their backs to the viewer. These recall Beuys’s 1985 manifesto: ‘The fallacy already begins the moment you set out to buy stretcher and canvas.’ This is the articulation of a 1960s standpoint, which questioned the legitimation of the traditional canvas painting and turned the picture into an object of pure contemplation.
While the smooth material of hardboard in his installations ‘Raum 19’ and ‘Genter Raum’ have a distancing effect and tend to reject any semantic references, his later works from the early 1980s show that Knoebel went beyond the formal vocabulary of Minimalism and Constructivism. In this assemblage, he has recourse to found materials that are marked by traces of use. The elements of ‘Radio Beirut’, 1982, thus named in memory of the beginning of the Israeli siege of the Lebanese capital, are almost exclusively made up of industrial, sawed up, welded and bent building materials such as iron pipes, T-beams and chipboards. The title and the material evoke the destructive image of war and introduce a critical potential to the work. This procedure, which is similar to Beuys’s, whose titles and materials strike metaphorical chords and trigger a certain associative potential, is however subordinated to the central theme of non-figurative painting.