Drawing (140) from THE BASIS OF MAKE-UP

"Five pornographic sculptures from Aquitania in front of the sketch of a column base in the Cistercian Maulbronn abbey. From the Petite Grammaire de l'obscène by Christian Bougoux, who was the first to copy them and list them encyclopedically. The original site of their placement beneath the roof ridges and on the exterior walls of medieval churches appears logical: the mortal sin had to remain outside the door, but had to be taught in a vivid manner all the same. Pornography has always been self-help and a social necessity. Who else sees to the indisputably existing, excess energies? What is not allowed to be must be placarded larger-than-life to demonstrate the nothingness of the consumers and their emotions. Here, the displays protrude on bars from the stone rosettes of an archway, at the foot of which a motorcyclist had an accident. Next to it, The Resurrection of the Flesh by Luca Signorelli in the Orvieto Cathedral celebrates in an enraptured way the naked back of one of the resurrected humans." (From: Schwarze Blöcke, SchwarzHandPresse 2010).

(1996)

Zeichnung (141) aus DIE BASIS DES MAKE-UP

"Ein Hotel in Galveston, Texas 1989, das Ende der Welt. Ein Sturm fährt durch die verbrannte Landschaft von Iwo Jima. Eine Riesenwelle ist im Anmarsch auf eine Hütte auf Stelzen. Darüber ein dicht über dem Boden schleifendes, enthäutetes Gesicht, dessen Stirn in die schwarzen Orkanwolken hineinreicht. Aus dem Antlitz quellen Adern, Nervenstränge und Muskeln, an denen wilde Hunde zerren. Die Augen sind geschlossen, das Gesicht verharrt in gleichgültiger Trance. Der Wirt und die Bedienung der Melancholie ist der Mensch. Er vererbt und überträgt sie. Die Zeit als einen Stoff begreifen, der verschiedene Texturen aufweist. Sie gleitet vorbei, und sie ist sperrig. Die Verwahrlosung der Zwischenräume. Ich sah mich wochenlang zu festgesetzten Zeiten am Tag den Hund ausführen. Dazwischen eine Raserei von Zeit, die es mir unmöglich machte, mich an irgendetwas zu erinnern. Ich lebte in einem Zeitraffer. Ich habe spät begriffen, daß die Zeit ein Geschenk ist. Aber dieses Wissen konnte sich gegenüber ihrem Tun nicht behaupten." (Aus: flypaper #5, 2010).

(1997) 

Drawing (142) from THE BASIS OF MAKE-UP

"In an office, two women feel each other’s lymphatic glands to diagnose a possible HIV infection. In the background visible rough data used to measure the cortical field of the brain at the start of the 20th century. What’s put on the table has to be read. The fear of one’s own microcosm is projected into the macrocosm, and the macrocosm into the finger tips, which do not augur well. Six heavily magnified mouches volantes glide over the surface of the image, disguised as the smallest entities of life. On the top left hand side, a simple knot in a single black hair, blown up massively. The fact that we can choose the standards and relations that govern our perceptions is the result of the human spirit of discovery. Interpreting them after that still remains an art. Thoughts have the habit of getting lost in something, that is their work. But rather than to just stand there lost in thought, most people stop too soon and turn towards the sickness of self-righteousness. Those that remain stand there alone or just go their own way." (From: arsenal, november 17)

(1996) 

Drawing (143) from THE BASIS OF MAKE-UP

"Thirty-four notebooks falling from the inside of a passenger plane flying upside-down with a part of its roof torn away. A Spanish peasant- photographed by Georg Riesner and Hans Namuth in 1936-stirs a wooden fork in the hole of the fuselage. In early 1974, I'm sitting on a long bench in front of the skeleton of a whale in the Senckenberg Museum in Frankfurt, with my head supported by my left hand. Silke Grossmann took the picture. In the exhibition, the contours of the whale were set in relation to the skeleton, to make it easier for the viewers to grasp. Death halved by the picture edge pours a jug of water over my head. The torture of history that releases the individual into nothingness. A military religiosity. A nagging knowledge. A stroked chord, a teased-out something. The time span of sending and receiving has been too minimal until now. The richness of interpretations eaten away by bacteria, lost in time windows that couldn't be kept open." (From: Schwarze Blöcke, SchwarzHandPresse 2010).

(1997)

Drawing (144) from THE BASIS OF MAKE-UP

"A mosaic from Pompeii, Death as cupbearer, a water carrier filling up a grave. As a wall drawing spanning several metres, he marked the start of my exhibition The Exhaustion in the Kunsthalle Bremerhaven in 1989. Assembled in four rows, my first 38 notebooks since 1974. My own forehead with unkempt hair in front of a tiled wall on the invitation card to the show Since I am blonde, I dye my hair at the XPO Gallery, Hamburg 1989. The outlines that describe the bottom of the grave filled with water as a human silhouette point to the head of the boy who leans out of the window naked and gives the skeleton the finger. Photographed in Bremerhaven and sent to me anonymously by a fan. It was a hot and dusty day. After viewing the bronze sculpture Monument to the Emigrants by Frank Varga, which had sunk into the sand behind the dike, we trotted along to the Aladin movie theatre on Rickmers Street to preview the movie The Holy Bunch, on account of which my company then went bankrupt." (From: Schwarze Blöcke, SchwarzHandPresse 2010).

(1997)

Drawing (145) from THE BASIS OF MAKE-UP

"Undetected nails in the heads, the spiral-shaped abandonment of a Western understanding of life. At the end of Paul Bowles' novel Let It Come Down, the American Nelson Dyar - after escaping from Tangiers' International Zone and high on majoun - rams a nail through the auditory canal of his local guide Thami Beidaouis and into his brains. Only a trickle of blood is visible from the outside - inconspicuous but eloquent. The murderer as an acrobat, a wrestler and a referee, in the different regions of the brain. You grew up perfectly my friend, but your life is so pointless in the Western world. Murder as the last resort, to come into contact with the police officer's world. At the time, the universe of German television, in which night after night social democratic police inspector duos explain how the world works, was still unknown. Quality of Life was still not part of any party platform. I am ill, therefore I am, is how a loquacious fellow of cultural studies sums it up. In other words: The eyes are contemporaries of the teeth." (From: arsenal, december 12).

(1994)

Drawing (146) from THE BASIS OF MAKE-UP

"Lifestyle nonsense: the blurred boundaries between lifestyle and artistic product, generally celebrated as 'life' that, as we know from Adorno, 'doesn’t live', have become legendary since D’Annunzio’s doings at the very latest. The fact that he was able to indulge his sense of kitsch and drug addiction as a pampered rich man doesn’t mean his endeavors are above comparison with those of, say, Jack Smith, who carefully concealed his lucrative connections. The latter was aware of the normative power of street credibility, the other of the binding force of envy; in both cases, one might talk of arrested development. Many artists live in poverty, but since when has poverty been an art form? Art isn’t ennobled via poverty either. The struggle for recognition all too often pitched before the front doors of the bourgeoisie and their politicians like a beggar on parade is an act of authoritarian fixing. Analyzing poverty and the reasons for it is far from art per se, but rather an academic undertaking first and foremost. Depicting poverty can indeed be an art form, however." (From: arsenal, december 20).

(1993) 

Uncle Fishhead. 

 

Zeichnung (147) aus DIE BASIS DES MAKE-UP

"Ein Brainstorm auf einer Holzterrasse am Atlantik in Stone Harbour, New Jersey, 1975. Der Ursprung - A WELL - meiner Miscellanea-Filme ist die Zeichnung La Pelouse von Georges Seurat. Deren Kohlepartikel kommentieren die jeweiligen Aktualisierungen der Welt durch Rasterpunkte und Codes: vom Konkreten zum Abstrakten und wieder zurück, eine komplette Virtualisierung. Ausgehend von einem arabischen Hammam die Beschreibung einer imaginären Wanderung, im Uhrzeigersinn: der von Touristenbooten ausgeleuchtete Cruisingpark am Quai d'Austerlitz in Paris, Gabriele d'Annunzios Vittoriale am Gardasee, eine Lockheed T-33 an einem Swimming Pool in Del Rio, Texas, das Gemälde Die Beerdigung des Grafen Orgaz von El Greco in Toledo, die endlichen Variationen zweidimensionaler Unendlichkeitsmuster auf den Kacheln der Alhambra in Granada, Auguste Rodins Porte de l'enfer in Zürich, die Ruinen von St. Pere de Rodes in den Pyrenäen, die Fahrten des US-Flugzeugträgers Ticonderoga im II. Weltkrieg und der architektonische Brutalismus im saudi-arabischen Rhiad." (Aus: Zeichnung oder Film, 2013).

(1994) 

Drawing (148) from THE BASIS OF MAKE-UP

"An interplay of acting and directing in front of the steel construction of the Weser Bridge near Uesen in Lower Saxony. Two stocky women from a painting by Pablo Picasso from his neo-classicist period are walking under the bridge. The bridge was a location of the film How I Won the War by Richard Lester, with John Lennon. In the film, an extra playing a retreating German soldier carries a huge Cubist painting by Picasso over the river. How funny, these Englishmen, and how correctly conceived. I was impressed by Cubism from childhood. At the bottom left, a man disappears head first in oily liquid. Recapitulation: The directing rays (DIR) hit the convex hand mirror of acting (ACT). The mirror could also be a seat cushion embroidered with an ace of spades. But on the surface of the mirror, the rays of directing also hit the viewing rays of the spectators that are aligned in a parallel way and focussed in the director's viewpoint. A correlation to be grasped from all ends." (From: arsenal, march 10).

(1993)

Beim Zappen durch das Video-Programm im Flugzeug von Paris nach Los Angeles auf das Gesicht des Schauspielers gestoßen, mit dem ich die Hauptrolle von Second Nature besetzen wollte. Er spielte eine größere Nebenrolle im Arthouse-Movie eines Blockbuster-Regisseurs – ein Film vollgestopft mit einer Vorstellung von Kunst, die einen aufstöhnen ließ: State of the Art der Kitschgestaltung...

Zeichnung (149) aus DIE BASIS DES MAKE-UP

"1975. Wir waren durch die Toll Booths des New Jersey Turnpikes gefahren, ohne zu bezahlen. Drei Polizeiautos verfolgten und stoppten uns, keiner von uns hatte einen Führerschein dabei. Ich weiß nicht, welche Geschichte Sheila McLaughlin den Polizisten erzählt hat, aber sie ließen uns weiterfahren bis nach Stone Harbour südlich von Atlantic City, in ein Holzhaus am Atlantischen Ozean, das inzwischen von einem Biest von Wirbelsturm ins Meer gerissen worden ist. Tim Kennedy sitzt auf der Kühlerhaube unseres Wagens, Silke Grossmann und Gary Woods stehen daneben und Sheila kommt mit der Schale eines Horseshoe Krebses vom Strand zurück. Ich kann mich an nichts erinnern, und doch ist alles gegenwärtig, eine Relation zwischen Wolken und Tischen mit halbgelesenen Büchern darauf. Wir rauchten Gras und mein Gehör reagierte auf das kleinste Geräusch mit Schmerzen. Zwei Doppelbetten und ein einzelnes Bett wurden aufgeschlagen. Eine halbleere Flasche stand auf dem Tisch. Der Ton einer Unterhaltung an einem Tisch schwebte im Raum, unerträglich laut." (Aus: Zeichnung oder Film, 2013).

(1977) 

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