Drawing (51) from THE BASIS OF MAKE-UP

"Hamburg, 1976. Getting totally plastered, three stages of drunkenness: sipping, slurping, binge drinking like there's no tomorrow. Excessive levelling of one's own and another's body fluids. The inner horizon, the ninety-degree power relation between horizon and gravity, turned inward and directed outward. Leading a spiritual existence as short comic at the place The United States of Aggregation. To be transported: the site-specificity of thoughts and, as their result, the possibility of their uprooting appeared to me as the essence of a trip. The thoughts surfaced at the same speed they were spit and jetted out, like wandering clouds. I cannot pack, but about that, too, I cared increasingly less. Instead of packing I kept buying new suitcases in all different sizes. Hopelessly sobered I stored the suitcases in each other like Matryoshka dolls and departed. At every border, suffering from strong feelings of loss, I left a suitcase at customs." (From: The Travel Almanac Nr. 4, 2012).

 

(1976)

Drawing (52) from THE BASIS OF MAKE-UP

"A theater of gazes with two naked German spies on a boat in the Mediterranean at the time of World War II. We see one gaze that is rapacious, one mediated by technology, one curiously contemplative, and one that negates its very self. The men are being observed by a woman who has pushed her sunglasses up on to her bald head. Way back, she herself used to stand naked on the deck, her long hair obscuring her view of the peaks of the waves. Now her gaze carries a quiet sadness that may well arise from her exclusion from the world of man and their useless projections. The spy in the flat cap is filming a distant scenery that lies beyond the frame. The spy with the wet hair is at peace with himself and is squinting at the sun. He is in the grip of an animal interest that is attempting to grasp the respective representations of the two female figures according to a before and after schema. He then broods over his failure." (From: arsenal, july august 15)

(1976)

Drawing (53) from THE BASIS OF MAKE-UP

"Two cyclists whose silhouettes cast shadows on a straight road photographed by Silke Grossmann in Amsterdam at the end of the 70s, with a section of her profile visible to the right. She is looking into a historically defined space of infinite depth and height in which British parachutists float down from the sky during the Normandy Invasion of 1944. Many of the soldiers were shot straight out of the sky. At the time, there were still allotments on the site of what is now Schiphol Airport, complete with sheds where Swiss art lover and hotelier Hans Obrecht and subsequent director of the Stedelijk Museum Willem Sandberg kept Jewish children hidden. Thirty years later, Obrecht painted a door on the ceiling of his sick wife’s bedroom at the Hotel Amstelrust on Amstel 252, as she was confined to the bed and suffered upon awakening from the feeling of being trapped in a room without any way out. The power of the imaginary was supposed to overcome the realism of fear and did so indeed." From: arsenal, may 17

(1977) 

Zeichnung (54) aus DIE BASIS DES MAKE-UP

"Hamburg an der Elbe, Ende der 70er Jahre. Die Bänke aus Beton vor dem Spiegel-Hochhaus an der Ost-West-Straße waren von einem Lastwagen über den Haufen gefahren worden. Man hat sie daraufhin mit Stahlplatten aneinander geschraubt. Am Morgen meiner Abreise fuhr ich aus einem  Alptraum hoch, der von einem Glas Bier handelte: Zuerst erschien das Glas zur Hälfte voll mit Bier ohne Schaum und bis zur Füllhöhe außen schwarz angemalt. Die Oberfläche des Bieres wurde mit einem Schokoladenkeks abgedeckt, auf den eine dicke Schicht Butter aufgetragen wurde. Der Rest des Glases wurde dann mit Bierschaum aufgefüllt, der über den Rand hinunterlief, und oben mit einem weiteren, schwarzen Keks abgedeckt. Dann wurde auch der obere Teil des Glases außen schwarz angemalt. Alles wie in einem Trickfilm, menschliche Protagonisten hatte der Film keine. Es ist ratsam, vor Träumen dieser Art die Flucht zu ergreifen. Ihre Geschichten steigen aus den Innereien auf und kehren die Zeit um. Ein Rachefeldzug der Exkremente, deren Ausscheiden unmittelbar bevorsteht." (Aus: Zeichnung oder Film, 2013).

(1978) 

Drawing (55) from THE BASIS OF MAKE-UP

"A chest of drawers from the Gründerzeit rammed into the floor at an angle formed part of my 1988 exhibition Bismarck’s Shipwreck at the Zwinger Galerie in Berlin, which was about the Bismarckian social legislation and the fate of the crew of the battleship of the same name. The sawn-off part of the piece of furniture was hung on the wall over it, with the rustic metal fittings of the lectern from the Bundestag in Bonn on the ceiling. An image of Petra Nettelbeck in a wheelchair, drawn with a mouse using the still pixelated version of MacPaint from back then, who is turning around on the upper landing of the detested stars that lead to the gallery’s office space. The outlines of two caves drawn in black from the South Pole passage of the novel Arthur Gordon Pym by Edgar Poe. When the state demands your life and lets you go under, the game of democracy has reached an end. Sacrifices and solutions to puzzles about to happen than no one is interested in any longer. Too early, too late and off-point: the revolutions that take place without us." (From: arsenal, november 18). 

(1988) 

Drawing (56) from THE BASIS OF MAKE-UP

"Single, double, and broken lines, arrows and crosses marking the last journey, the last battle, and the sinking of the battleship Bismarck on May 27, 1941. The wreck dragged 2104 men trapped in its steel plates to the bottom of the North Sea. Two parts of my work The Sinking of the Bismarckfrom 1988 hanging on the wall of the Zwinger Gallery in Berlin that called into doubt the continuation of the basic principles of Bismarck's social welfare legislation: the quarter of a sawed-apart desk from the period of German post-war 'baroque' and a satellite map of the Gulf of Nantucket, the homeland of Arthur Gordon Pym. In an experimental set-up, four rabbits locked up in boxes must smoke cigarettes until they die. All this under the assumption that animals don't have a consciousness. The poet Christoph Derschau in a state of exhaustion at the finish of a marathon. '9' was the number on his shirt. He died in 1995 from a pulmonary infection that had spread rapidly among the runners." (From: Black Blocks, Cinema Scope #46, 2011).

(1988)

Drawing (57) from THE BASIS OF MAKE-UP

"For practicing purposes: the silhouettes of 32 fighter planes on an identification panel for jet pilots. Recognizing the enemy and the reactions drawn as a consequence must take place as quick as lightning and as if in a state of trance, in the sense of traditional predator qualities. Three still-living rabbits connected to tubes in shoeboxes, the lids of which have been closed behind their heads like neck collars, are meanwhile waiting for medical experiments to be conducted on them. A prescribed passivity at the service of human monoculture and its unique selling point. The sad eyes of Bonn: In 1987, a man with drooping warts on his eyelids and wide-open pupils looked into my train compartment from the main station's platform-directly into my as yet healthy eyes. I felt caught unaware, like the laboratory rabbit of an ill humanity, and have since suspiciously observed my eyelids. Who really wants to know, or hear from someone, that he is a violent animal." (From: Black Blocks, Cinema Scope #46, 2011).

(1988)

Drawing (58) from THE BASIS OF MAKE-UP

"FRI – Friday, January 24, 1975, in Brooklyn, under anesthetic after eye surgery. The unwritten pages of a generational contract as a fragile architecture, outlined on the letter paper of a Whereabout (Incorporated), which lived in the rooms before I did. Somebody wants to pass on some mysterious MIT MIT to someone else. Instead of one tower, two towers, a reversed and then exceeded Morgenthau Plan. Between the pages, the broken eye of a rabbit as mediator and gray cloud. Monopoly capitalism after the tendential fall in the profit rate, no more asynchrony and no more hideouts in the world from where one can observe what's going on. But we're not that far yet, there are still connoisseurs. The attack on a single-family home by a fighter jet that can't return to its carrier. A damaged airport building, a steel transmission mast somewhere in a dusty part of Africa. The opposite of a clear thought, but agriculture is not an option." (From: Black Blocks, Cinema Scope #46, 2011). 

(1988)

Drawing (59) from THE BASIS OF MAKE-UP

"SAT – A Saturday in Brooklyn, 1975. A drill placed at the bridge of a sleeper's nose for eye surgery, accompanied by Bob Dylan's Blood on the Tracks. The new thermal power station and the bunker with a slanted roof from WWII, its front side slit open-buildings which one could see when taking the train from Achim to Bremen. Two shots of a soldier, an untargeted (no matter) and a targeted (certainly), at the body of a man with raised hands at the edge of an precipice. Adjacent, three soldiers' graves marked by steel helmets on rifle barrels. An Inc. sign at the centre of a painting of an avalanche. First, Avalanche by Liza Béar in Manhattan, and then Avalon by Bryan Ferry in Katharina's Toom Peerstall in St. Pauli. In 1973, Ferry's version of Dylan's A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall got me into a fit of laughter and marked the definitive end of an era. Only much later did I realize that it must have been involuntary humour on his side. Dylan remained inaccessible." (From: Black Blocks, Cinema Scope #46, 2011).  

(1988)

Drawing (60) from THE BASIS OF MAKE-UP

"Two sections of intestine hang on sticks like swords of Damocles over a domestic setting.   I’m sitting with Sheila McLaughlin on the floor of a gray-green corridor on the 4th floor of 100 Hudson Street, NYC, around the end of 1974. This is drawn according to a photocopy by David Larcher, into which part of the seal he used back then has been etched. This snapshot is bordered to the right and left by two models that are supposed to represent nerve fibers. When we were forced to move out of the dilapidated office building, we flooded the entire floor by means of the fire department hose hanging on the wall. The twelve-story building had already been rundown and was waiting for speculators to revamp it into luxury accommodation. Years later, I was standing on the street below and looking up at what used to be my wall of windows when someone shouted down at me “It’s nice up here”, his voice full of derision. I have no idea how much damage the building subsequently suffered when the World Trade Center collapsed." (Aus: arsenal, december 15)

(1997)

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