Die Basis des Make-Up

Drawing (352) from THE BASIS OF MAKE-UP

"A seagull on the head of a bronze statue of Winston S. Churchill. Behind it, the wreckage of the bells in the Marienkirche in Lübeck that were smashed in the bombing of the night of March 28^th, 1942 following a direct hit. Three Jacob’s Ladders are at the top of the image, none of which touch the ground. The falling octahedron from Albrecht Dürer’s Melencolia I has shattered the brick flooring, leaving a gaping white void beneath. As children, we were unaware that we were the first generation to grow up while entire cities were being rebuilt. It now sends a shiver down my spine that we found it entirely normal to grow up among ruins, just like tens of thousands of children around the world do today. There were also people living there they warned us against, although they never did anything to us. We ourselves were Displaced Persons. The childhood ignorance and the matter-of-factness with which we turned fields of ruins into our playgrounds give me hope. Aside from the fact that the inexorable traumas just started later on." (From: arsenal, february 16).

(2007) 

Drawing (478) from THE BASIS OF MAKE-UP

"A cannoneer with just a stub of bone for a right arm presents the opening of a gun barrel, a 12 incher, on a postcard. It was sent from the battleship USS Delaware in July 1900 and has  'Where the marks are is where the gun opens' written on the back. (Edward T.) FUSCO (Incorporated) writing paper, found in 100 Hudson Street, 1974. A hand runs its fingernails along a whitewashed wall. A lamp that emits darkness to a limited extent is placed next to the window as a science fiction object. During the day, the window is shrouded by an overlong curtain whose fabric also covers the hole in the floor, where is where I lay down in Brooklyn. I remember so well the body that no longer exists. We are the survivors, those who consume, those who were exchanged. The cheating forgetful, the listless combiners. If the story were already over, more than few names would occur to me in relation to it. As it is, it hardly makes you curious for the end." (From: arsenal, april 16)

(1997) 

Drawing (129) from THE BASIS OF MAKE-UP

"An idyllic breakfast scene, a transparent hatchet chopped into pieces and made of meat, dark muscle fibers visible on its blade. A dog pelts down a wooden staircase to where it’s usually fed, the kitchen of an American suburban home sometime during the 1950s. In the glistening light of an advertising set, a woman pours herself a cup of coffee in spirited fashion. In the centre, the Pym Films logo, the retina extracted from a rabbit’s eye, oddly threatening, as if revenge for Willy Kühne’s animal testing were about to be taken by a canine berserker. Or is its snarling just brought on by the sound of the feeding bowl and the smell of the dry food mix, like in one of Ivan Pavlov’s laboratories? The boy with his hair cut short, the woman in the pleated skirt, the staff’s conditioning is quite blatant, the light in which they appear globe-spanning, inexorable, reaching every pore. The 'human experiment' of which Vlado Kristl spoke launches into one final regression." (From: arsenal, april 15).

(1977)

Lynne Tillman: "Everything was going wrong. Suddenly I thought I didn't really love her. She poured the coffee in a determined way. She never read my thoughts but this time she laughed and said, 'All you can really love is the dog.' I poured too much dog food into the bowl and the dog appeared, larger than life." 

Drawing (130) from THE BASIS OF MAKE-UP

"An established series of animals, abbreviated to TPMS: toad, fish, dog, reptile – Tetrapoda (T), Piscis (P), Mammalia (M), Sauropsida (S). The Pym logo reflected in the pupil of the Eye of Horus, the Eye of Ra. Maltese fishing boats carry Eyes of Horus on their prows. At the bottom left, a stenographer draws the positive of the logo in her notebook. Next to her, to the right, the muscle extracted from an eyelid, pierced by a pencil, preventing any sort of external vision. People languidly play Blind Man’s Buff and record their movements in the process, making use of their fingers and sticks as their gazes materialize along linear paths. The engineers’ drafts are guided by their inner eyes and must be sketched on demand. The boss sits in the middle, blindfolded, and is permitted to point at either empty spaces or people. This is how the universal prayer of Visual Communication became both abbreviated to death and a record of the last things people see. I saw something, but neither did I come, nor am I a victor." (From: arsenal, may 15).

(1983) 

Drawing (172) from THE BASIS OF MAKE-UP

"Details from a Roman fresco painting from the 5^th century before Christ in the burial chamber of a diver in Paestum that shows the naked diver’s silhouette. Next to these, an inside look at a rubber glove factory from the 20^th century after Christ, with a hand clothed in light-colored gloves pulling a black glove off one of the many molds. We are islands of perception, singularities, bodies which supplant other bodies and spirits, gliding grimly through a time we can no longer grasp as a continuum. Over here, one gaze has failed, while over there, it has been captured anew in the photographic valley of tears, praising the constellations of the real. Or rather it has been brought about by a mosaic of tiny stones that brings a movement gliding past to a halt and hammers it into our consciousness. Like a theory that nails together isolated gazes into a semantic shack as if there were nothing it hadn’t seen. All this screams: I will have lived, but I didn’t know it. It has come upon me." (From: arsenal, june 15)

(1993) 

Drawing (180) 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 dark 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)

Lynne Tillman: "The woman, who was naked, looked like a figure from a seventeenth century Japanese drawing. That she was naked made me think she might be from the north of Germany or further, perhaps Sweden. She stopped looking naked after I thought that. A thought something like 'Nudity is permissible in northern countries.' I didn't wonder why but turned instead to look at a man I thought of as the tourist. He was so well-prepared for travel that, even though he too was naked, he wore a cap. He might play golf, I imagined. My friend was looking angrily at the tourist who, in his effort to capture the ocean, which is how I figured he might put it to the folks back home, was taking his picture too. He always said what everyone who doesn't like having their picture taken says - primitive people think their images being stolen - implying that he too felt like that. He was not like that - primitive - about anything but photography, although the only movies he liked were Westerns, which he said were Wittgenstein's favorites, an odd position for a primitive, I told him."

(1976) 

 Drawing (526) from THE BASIS OF MAKE-UP

Drawing (538) 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) 

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 (291) from THE BASIS OF MAKE-UP

"King Tetris in action. Rectangular formations falling in all possible combinations from a head that is helpless and numb from compulsive gambling. King Tetris in on autopilot and reacts trance-like to every movement at the edge of his gaze. Yet two arms still stick out from his insides in the direction of a possible rescuer. But it is only a fork gradually losing its prongs that actually approaches his face. Behind it is a microbe that causes diarrhea, appearing like a bomb over a small town hospital that is preparing itself for the outbreak of an epidemic. Pure playing time set against the forced progression of a disease. The departure from real time that occurs when in the grip of pathological gambling is addictive. The forced entrance into real time which marks the analogue progression of a disease is devastating. In both cases, darkness spreads, threatening to consume everything. The crown of creation rids itself of all obligations, its head retreating from view between the teeth of a zip." (Aus: arsenal, october 15).

 (1994)