Drawing (593) from THE BASIS OF MAKE-UP

"Summer in the City: wearing a white baseball cap and showing off his naked belly button, the Harlem drug commissioner meets a stout women at the Prinzenbad open-air pool in Berlin, her hair blowing in the breeze. The Lovin’ Spoonful used to advertise heroin, the Steve Miller Band cocaine, and The Mamas & The Papas were then the ones who sold the stuff. Divers’ legs horizontal in mid-flight, positive and negative, shown as is or in reverse. A dancer and a long-jumper landing in a sandpit, both bald, in front of twelve cigarettes drawn in distorted fashion, taken from packets whose images of terror are supposed to warn of death. “Give me the one with the black lung on it”, asks the customer at the kiosk and the smoking salesperson replies, “They don’t warn you about sugar with pictures of ulcus cruris”. The dancer is encircled by the total amount of newly grown hair one person produces each day, converted into the length of a single strand. The imaginary hair runs from bald head to bald head as proof of an imperceptibly tender communication." (From: arsenal, july/august 17).

(1996) 

Zeichnung (594) aus DIE BASIS DES MAKE-UP

"Drei hohe Mauern bilden das Ende einer Sackgasse, eine 'Exekutionsstätte' in Barcelona 1936, nach einer Fotografie von Hans Namuth und Georg Reisner. Hinter der abschließenden Mauer die riesigen Äste des Last of Birnam Wood. Eine Luftröhre mit einer strahlenden Schilddrüse hängt mit den beiden Flügeln einer entzündeten Lunge von der Mitte des oberen Bildrandes herab. Sie sind an zwei, am unteren Bildecken sichtbar werdenden Eiern angeschlossen. Als Delinquenten zwei an einem Startblock festgebundene, grob skizzierte, nackte Schwimmer, von denen sich einer rückwärts springend vom Block zu lösen versucht. Der in die Mauernische fallende Schatten ist mit Ornamenten aus Teppichmustern verziert. Links der Einzugstisch eines Computer-Tomographen, darauf ein auf dem Bauch liegender Mann, ausgehfertig angezogen. DEF (Definition) - INIT (Initiation) - IVO (der mit dem Bogen aus Eibenholz zu kämpfen weiß) = definitivo, endgültig.  Das Schicksal im Frieden - das, was ein Krieg nicht sichtbar werden läßt, weil er den Tod vorwegnimmt." (Aus: The End, Disko 22, 2011).

(1997) 

Drawing (595) from THE BASIS OF MAKE-UP

"An African whose cheeks are pierced by two sharpened wooden poles has his head inside a plastic model of an oversize ribcage. Before him is a half-naked worker in Baku, in the USSR of the 1930s, who is wearing a scarf over his head as he shovels oily sludge. Both of them have reached a dead end, but the accentuation of the former via medieval semantic perspective speaks for itself. A white man in black skin and a black man in white skin, things become people. To the Wretched of the Earth, internationalism passed automatically, if it hadn’t already been cast out of them beforehand. The fight for liberation and the victim became the rule, from fire to fire. The uniformity within the skeleton in which our hearts beat is a given and cannot be overlooked. Desperate attempts to purge, compulsive cleaning as the last vestige of genocide. What shines through is the Sisyphean organization of society’s work, which expels the biographies of its members as waste, in all regimes." (Aus: arsenal, november 15).

(1999) 

Drawing (596) from THE BASIS OF MAKE-UP

"A U-2 espionage aircraft from the US in the 1950s over Sebaldsbrück ("I'll soon see the bridge") near Bremen: As a child sitting in a train, I thought it was a mechanical principle and not an optical illusion when the arches of the bridge rose and sank shortly behind the ceiling of the station as the train travelled through. The inscription G(CH)IAMULERA, the name of an ice-cream parlour in our small town, is in the field of vision of two eyes. One's gazes may be also jerkily shifted to create the impression of a filmic sequence. The eyelids as the wings of a Maltese cross. On the bottom right, eight flames devouring a human. Opposite, to the left, the depiction of a naked man on the communication circuit board of the Voyagerspace capsule-with wing feathers on the lower left arm. The story of an easy come, easy go black space. And no one there to tell or to read, and all hearts too small to pump the blood required for a flight." (From: Black Blocks, Cinema Scope #46, 2011).

(1984)

Drawing (597) from THE BASIS OF MAKE-UP

"SUDDENLY: a city. Language as premonition. An exploding cushion over the roof top of a high-rise with the silhouette of a person murdered by the Manson gang in front of its façade. Above it in the sky, lying on its back, an oil-smeared bird and the function of time describing chance. Two transparent T-squares and a bracket, tools of the almighty drawing studio. Adolf Hitler's sketch of a soldier from WWI-the root of evil-with an added umbrella and a left arm stump as a wing. The lasting delivery of insensitivity, the occupation of dreams by very real dead persons, no play of instable combinations of atoms. A circularly spread-out condom from HB (Hanseatic City of Bremen) as an anonymous means of communication: "Love is a burning ring of fire." The game is over, a time that has ended too soon. A clear line that no one thinks about anymore. I know you, but you didn't know me. It slowly dawns on me what's going on with the others." (From: Black Blocks, Cinema Scope #46, 2011).

(1984)

Drawing (598) from THE BASIS OF MAKE-UP

"In the segment of the circle at the lower edge of the picture a crowd on August 1, 1914, the day after the mobilization to the First World War, at the Odeonsplatz in Munich-after a photograph by Heinrich Hoffmann, who later became Adolf Hitler's personal photographer. At the top right corner, the enlargement of a detail from the picture on which Hoffmann in 1931 discovered cheering Adolf Hitler, whom he had not yet known in 1914. From bottom left to top right a dislocated human joint. From bottom right to top right tracks of human steps. They are from a unit of the French Foreign Legion mixed with those of Gary Cooper and Marlene Dietrich - on a "wandering dune in the Sahara" in the Paramount Studios in Hollywood, 1930, during the shooting of Morocco by Josef von Sternberg. In the middle of a stadium, crouching on the ground, a defeated soccer player who has pulled his shirt over his head and, with this gesture, congenially gives shape to melancholy as the peak of male sexuality." (From: arsenal, december 11).

(1994)

"Tel Aviv, 21. Februar 1999. Post Leonardos Tränen, für Leonardo Nascimento de Araujo in Second Nature – Die zweite Natur. Im Sommer 1998 weinte sich der Barasilianer Leonardo nach dem verlorenen WM-Finale in unsere Herzen. Ein besiegter Spieler, der sich das Hemd über den Kopf zieht und mit dieser Geste Melancholie als Höchstform männlicher Sexualität kongenial umsetzt. Dazu Spuren in der Wüste...

Zeichnung (599) aus DIE BASIS DES MAKE-UP

"Mein nackter, weißer Unterarm mit der Aufschrift 'bed' in der Handschrift von David Larcher. Ein Ausschnitt aus seiner Widmung Something to read in bed in dem xeroxkopierten Exemplar einer chinesischen Zeichenschule, die er mir 1973 in Hamburg in die Eppendorfer Landstraße zuschickte. Vier wundersame Formen von Lichtspiegelungen, die Anfang der 90er Jahre auf Umwegen über einen düsteren Hinterhof in Moabit in das Berliner Zimmer meiner Wohnung reflektiert wurden. An ihren Rändern Prismafarben, ein paar Minuten lang vom Bett aus zu sehen an einem herbstlichen Spätnachmittag. Dahinter die in drei Teile zerrissene Schwarzweißpostkarte mit den gepolsterten Hockern Arlew und Wilson und der großen Prunkvase Dover, die schon immer ein Anlaß zum Lachen gewesen war. Die zu versteigernden Objekte sahen aus wie zu Möbeln erstarrte Kalauer.  Im Hintergrund grafisch umgesetzte elektrische Impulse aus der Gehirnmasse Lenins. Ergrautes Eiweiß, ein Brei, in dem die Nachfolgenden hilflos herumgestochert hatten, und für jede Interpretation zugänglich." (Aus: The End, Disko 22, 2011).


(1997) 

Zeichnung (600) aus DIE BASIS DES MAKE-UP

"... YX, der angebetete Sekundentod: ein Startsprung in den regulierten Styx, den Höllenfluß in seinem Betonbett. Die Menschen als zu Lebzeiten abgestoßene Leichenteile einer sich auf ewig teilenden Gesellschaft. Ich habe meinen Freunden Geldmünzen unter die Zunge gelegt, aber sie nicht getröstet. Schon Tausende sind diesen Weg gegangen, auf dem es keinerlei Trost gibt. Im Hintergrund Säureregen auf ein Kaninchenauge, in dessen Glaskörper sich Trichter eingefressen haben. Davor A LAMP – eine Fadenlampe mit Reflektoren vor einem skizzierten Tapetenhintergrund, die Funzel der Aufklärung. Unten links Elektroden und Meßgeräte an offen gelegten Gehirnregionen eines Schimpansen in der Echtzeit-Forschung. Oben rechts die Betäubung eines Kalbes mit einem Schlagbolzen auf der Tötungsstrecke eines Schlachthofes. Der letzte Blick des entsetzten Tieres gilt dem großen Messer, das seine Kehle durchschneiden wird. Das Primat der Gemütlichkeit: Herr, laß das Verdrängte an uns vorüberziehen und das Unvermeidliche möglichst angenehm vonstatten gehen." (Aus: The End, Disko 22, 2011).

(1996) 

Drawing (601) from THE BASIS OF MAKE-UP

"The World: a trouser fly. Transparent: the closed fly of a pair of non-iron suit trousers. Love as work: a model of a ship held out in front of a couple conducting sexual intercourse in the missionary position who had neither the time nor the desire to remove their clothes beforehand. The areas of black were leftover pieces of paper on a Polaroid negative of the scenery. RO ID = the unvarnished ID, the arrangement and agreement to be allowed to resemble an animal. Harvey Weinstein should convert to Christianity, then all would be forgiven. His infringements were long since known to each and every person working in film, ante delictum too. The journalistic fuss now suddenly being woven around his despicable role contains all the ingredients for a new McCarthyism. A foretaste of this could already be experienced at the Think:Film-Congress in 2012, when Traité de bave et d’éternité (1951) by Isidore Isou suddenly fell out of favor with Andrea Dworkin aficionados." (From: arsenal, june 18).

(1988) 

Drawing (602) from THE BASIS OF MAKE-UP

"Anyone wanting to cross a river in a straight line will be carried downstream if he doesn’t row against the current. In his novel Victory, Joseph Conrad wrote in a plain and succinct way: 'An island is but the top of a mountain', and this sentence alone is enough to make what he produced stand out against the pompous scene journalism and racism of his contemporary Gabriele d’Annunzio. A woman lying on the floor asks herself what has become of his 'lifestyle' and in 1978 lifts one square of a wall-to-wall carpet. The 'downfall of the white race', as Louis-Ferdinand Céline thought he had to declare only after the surrender of the 6th German Army in Stalingrad, took care of itself – along the lines Conrad had repeatedly described. Above all this hovers the skeleton of a concentration camp prisoner found in the planned Kraft-durch-Freude-spa Prora on the island of Rügen. That’s how the word became action, irrevocably bloody." (From: arsenal, september 09).

(1978)

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