Drawing (523) from THE BASIS OF MAKE-UP

"A Roman floor mosaic from the year 500 AD in present-day Istanbul: a lion fighting with an elephant. That's how one would prefer nature and its participants, having them eliminate themselves. Ah, and with what outstanding intelligence man hunts animals and keeps them captive. Five men dream of it on hot marble slabs in the Cemberlitas Hammam of 1584. Their association engines are running at full speed and producing chimeras of naked Chinese recruits whose legs they can pull: from a low-wage country to imported luxury limousines. An old saying already knew that dreams are piles of shit that tell stories. That's their nature; they stem from the digestive tract. You have to wake up so that they won't kill you, and fall asleep again when the scum of the real can no longer be endured. In between, the happiness of a second, the little death and volatile forgetfulness. The first comment of extraterrestrials in face of our uninhabited planet: 'That must have been love.'" (From: Black Blocks, Cinema Scope #46, 2011).

(1999)

Drawing (524) from THE BASIS OF MAKE-UP

"Engedi, February 24th, 1999. In the evening sun, four Israeli soldiers appear out of a wadi next to the Dead Sea, who we take with us to the Dead Sea Laboratories at Mineral, which is currently 400 meters below sea level. Their body odor after three days of extreme hiking in full army equipment through the Judean Wilderness fills the car like a heavy perfume. Their cell phones start working again, so they return their mothers’ calls. In the evening, in a concrete hut on the mountain, I sketch the telegraph poles in the valley by the now silvery grey and blue sea, connect the sketches of two pillars of salt with the torso of a charred jet pilot, add a Roman floor mosaic with a wave pattern and sketch a photo of the preparations for the burning of a mountain of corpses in Auschwitz. It shows a man in boots teetering around on the bodies of those gassed. In 1954, I still thought all children were about to be gassed in the showers of our school gymnasium. ENGELER means 'to freeze to death'." (From: arsenal, march 15).

(1999)

Drawing (525) from THE BASIS OF MAKE-UP

"Chicago, April 2nd, 1998. A self-portrait as an old man in the bathroom of The Claridge Hotel on the last stop on this year’s tour of the USA. My naked father looking back at me in the mirror. The slides for the show burnt up in the Art Institute’s projector the night before – like the first shot of the film Normalsatz at its premiere at the Delphi Filmpalast in Berlin on February 16, 1982. I collapsed from exhaustion beneath the Louis H. Sullivan arches that have been put up again on Monroe Drive – the last remains of his 1984 Chicago Stock Exchange Building that was torn down in 1972. In May 2002, we filmed these ruins from a dolly for Miscellanea III. Above and below, the positive and negative of the symbol of a ladder copied by hand in slightly distorted fashion from the wall of a storage shed in Hamburg harbor in 1975. In the middle, a piece of original border fence that is to be put up again in an East German nostalgia park, somewhere in 'complete' Germany. A changing of the guards is very much the order of the day." (From: arsenal, february 15).

(1999)

 Drawing (526) from THE BASIS OF MAKE-UP

"Lavertezzo, September 14, 1994. Horrible constellations, a primal forest of denial and betrayal that seems to be killing me piece by piece. It is not just bungee jumpers that throw themselves from the Diga Valle Verzasca dam in Tessin, where a Bond film was once shot. The wall of water unleashed by the burst concrete wall would drown all the towns on the far shore of Lake Lugano. LAC – lake; RIM – rhyme, fissure, crack; LACRIMA – tears. Artificial Tears like drops of amber. At the top right-hand corner, one of these black drops hangs from a finger before the horizontally distorted facade of Chicago’s Claridge Hotel, while in the bottom left-hand corner, it is being tugged at with fingertips. Ueli Etter’s Babosa Gigante, a type of slug upon whose back the active ingredient of the consciousness-reducing drug Agony is secreted, climbs up the side of the vertically distorted hotel. In the mountains, above the clouds, you can hear the miserable cries of cattle and hippies who despair at their agricultural efforts." (From: arsenal, september 15)

(1999) 

 

Zeichnung (527) aus DIE BASIS DES MAKE-UP

"Text under construction"

B = Beginning, (...), E = End. Grasbedeckte Silhouette von Israel, darunter die von Massada. Adressfeld auf einem Notizheft aus Los Angeles. Zwei Schalen mit Miso–Suppe. Beerdigung eines israelischen Soldaten in Tel Aviv. Blutiger Zahn von vier Fingern gehalten.   

(1999) 

Zeichnung (528) aus DIE BASIS DES MAKE-UP

"Text under construction"

Kamikaze. 

(1988) 

Drawing (529) from THE BASIS OF MAKE-UP

"Some facts and constellations of things from the world before it became interconnected: a piece of the wreckage of the Boeing 747 Maid of the Seas near Lockerbie hanging from a crane in front of the bloated body of a dead pig, a knot in the gearstick of a car in front of half a skinned cow with the caressing hand of its butcher,  an industrial ruin with two chimneys and Kasimir Malevich's tomb destroyed by German troops marching on Moscow. Under the rubric Chats about Capitalism - Social Conservatives Discover the Tendential Fall of Profit Rate capitalism has been criticized recently for exercising its power through machines that buy and sell automatically. What stays forgotten is that we all have long been part of that critized machinery, and this fact, too, tells us more about language than about reality. 'To describe the way things really are is to be a shit and we know what happens to shits: they are flushed away.' (Gore Vidal)." (From: arsenal, september 13).

(1996)

Zeichnung (530) aus DIE BASIS DES MAKE-UP

"Die Ballade vom weitergereichten Leben, hier eine Ansammlung verpasster Möglichkeiten aus der Endlosschnulze 'Geh' zu Chancen!' Ein Porno-Bauhaus am Santa Monica Boulevard mit einem stählernen Wasserspeier und das ovale Larry-Flint-Hochhaus am Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles, 1998. 'Ell-Äeh' klingt wie 'Elch' - diese Abkürzung benutzt aber kein geborener Los Angelito für seine Stadt. Ideal gebaute Torsi von Eva und Adam bei der Apfelübergabe sind mit Klebeband in den oberen Bildecken befestigt worden. Wie sich die Schönheit unter den Menschen vererbt hat, ist mir immer schleierhaft geblieben. Von Natur aus müssten sie immer hässlicher werden, aber alles nur Ansichtssache. Zwei hohe Palmen in Silverlake, positiv und negativ, lebendig weiß und abgestorben schwarz. Links unten ein Selbstportrait in der Pose eines Hamamelis inhalierenden Mitglieds der Bhagwan-Sekte mit orangenem Frotté-Handtuch im Zippelhaus in Hamburg, 1976. Dieses Bild enthält keinen einzigen Fehler, seine Kombinatorik stimmt, aber alles darin ist auf seine Weise falsch." (Aus: Zeichnung oder Film, 2013).

(1996) 

Drawing (531) from THE BASIS OF MAKE-UP

"Syracuse, June 11, 1999. The end of the negotiations with Syracuse University on the duplication of their Oral History of TV archive. It is to be feared that in the coming years German television in all its programs will act so arrogantly absent-mindedly and at the same time so provincially-narcissistically self-reverentially that our project could fail. To apply the auteur theory to German television producers is indeed hardly conceivable. Instead zapping: A hooded man on a pilgrimage with a wooden cross on his shoulder and a hole in his ornamented, tailor-made shoe, the Clintons at an election campaign event on the end of a red carpet, a roll of fitted carpeting unrolling from the sky, the X-ray image of a truck with hidden Kosovars inside at the customs office of Calais. Never-ending police inspector duos at the top of our fully subsidized actors’ despotisms: the state brought to the point with its broken down people."(From: arsenal, october 2009)

(1999)

Zeichnung (532) aus DIE BASIS DES MAKE-UP

"Orvieto, 13. September 1990. Himmel und Hölle, Wiederauferstehung. Auf der Suche nach einem von Pier Luigi Nervi erbauten Flugzeughangar aus den 30er Jahren. Wahrscheinlich existiert das Gebäude nicht mehr. Hier die Tragkonstruktion des Daches mit der Toraufhängung. Rechts schlägt ein Skispringer in korrekter Körperhaltung kopfüber in den Boden. Links assistiert ein Geburtshelferengel der schwarz eingefärbten Seele des Grafen Orgaz aus El Grecos Gemälde Die Beerdigung des Grafen Orgaz dabei, in den Himmel zu schlüpfen. Auf Gegenkurs dazu die brennenden Reste eines einmotorigen Sportflugzeuges. Das Wort Ordet ist in seiner Typographie aus der Titelsequenz des Films Ordet (Das Wort) von Carl Theodor Dreyer übernommen. Im Film erscheint es negativ in eine jütländische Landschaft mit Strohdachhaus einkopiert. Die Schrift bildet dort ein Gegengewicht zu den hellen Wolken am düsteren Himmel. Auch im Filmtitel steht nach dem Wort ein Punkt. Das Scheitern und dann eine Erleuchtung, wie eine Behauptung, als Ereignis." (Aus: flypaper #5, 2010).

(1999) 

Pages