Die Basis des Make-Up

Drawing (371) from THE BASIS OF MAKE-UP

"Feet kept on the ground by weights, the lines on their soles can be read just like the ones that appear on the hands. A combinatorial arrangement of squares that fails due to its own complexity. What is the task of the arts in the 21^st century, asks the Akademie der Künste. Art stems from the necessity to expand languages and concepts, to carry out research on them in experimental fashion, and provide a record of this process. It cannot expect understanding or sympathy here, to say nothing of taking them for granted or even begging for them. Art should not regard itself as social work and thus discredit the professions of the social worker or designer. The German word Aufgabe (giving up) might imply that art would be abandoned were it to raise its head high in independence. Yet art has no tasks, nor should it be allocated any by critics and curators in political fashion to monitor their enforcement. If artists chose to set themselves tasks or accept them, that’s their own business. The concept of the 21^st century is an untenable disposition." (Ferom: arsenal, february 18).

(1977) 

Drawing (370) from THE BASIS OF MAKE-UP

"Icons among themselves: Jaqueline Kennedy and Aristotle Onassis sitting on opposite sides of the very back seat of a stretch limousine. A woman as a trophy refusing any handshake or as compliant prey, representing her exchange value not just in terms of sex. This horror, which has the effrontery to play family, is covered by the black silhouette of a section of Giovanni Fattori’s 1904 canvas The Explosion of the Munition Truck, which stems from a time when painting started thinking scientifically. This is accompanied by the start of a simple combination of black and white squares whose end could be predicted, or at least in art (there’s more to come). New scene: in relation to the doctrine of art in the era of technical visual media and thus also experimental film (which is owed to the industrial revolution), it can be said without any restriction that 'The experiment which precedes efficiency as a condition makes an assumption of wasteful fallacy' (Pierre Klossowski)." (From: arsenal, january 18).

(1977) 

Drawing (456) from THE BASIS OF MAKE-UP

"The swinging legs of the Rockettes at the Radio City Music Hall in NYC during a Christmas show, their military alignment reminiscent of the swarm intelligence of animals. They appear to want to trample everything underfoot as if on some revenge campaign, yet they’re actually just trying to be funny and mock the military; whoever believes them is a saint. Behind them,  healing hands, which rest on top of the skulls of two executed pirates. Their severed heads were nailed to two wooden poles on the Grasbrook in Hamburg harbor to act as a deterrent and to rot. “HeHe”: Hermann and Heinrich. Heinrich liked Hermann, Hermann was indifferent, and so together they gave themselves over to robbing and killing, first in the employ of the Hanseatic League and later, and fatalistically, against them. It doesn’t hurt at all is what Heinrich’s severed head wanted to say to Hermann from the basket, but he, as mentioned, was indifferent to everything anyway. His single wish: not to have to be resurrected as a red coated dancing girl at the Cologne carnival." (From: arsenal, december 17).

(1983)

The drawing was published 1995 in David Marc's book Bonfire of the Humanities on page 46 with this legend: "With mental automation as with physical automation there is an inevitable transcendence of mere improvements in speed and efficiency". It was the opener of Chapter Three of his book: "Mass Memory – The Past in the Age of Television".

Drawing (438) 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 20^th 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 (353) from DIE BASIS DES MAKE-UP

"Following heavy bombing in 1944, the ruins of Monte Cassino now form a huge spaceship that floats over the Lilly Ponds in Forest Park, Springfield, Massachusetts in 1909. They are captured from a part of the ornamentation on a Persian garden rug dating from the 18th century, which symbolizes a system of ditches and resembles the legs of an insect. As a final resort, the ability to conceive of historical simultaneities felt somewhat uncanny, before it ceased to be terrifying. Most cosmologies are developed between four and five in the morning while looking at a clear view of the Milky Way from a terrace, when the cold freezes the animals and insects in their tracks. Then we are no longer at home and addicted to the depths of space, still loving, but already lifeless. Brains are the black holes they are in search of. It is from them that consciousness emerges, as if belched out of an alternative universe. And it is within them that everything is pulled back together again. Knowledge and memories breathe. Everything flashes forth only to disappear again." (From: arsenal, october 17)

Drawing (354) from THE BASIS OF MAKE-UP

"Following heavy bombing in 1944, the ruins of Monte Cassino now form a huge spaceship that floats over the Lilly Ponds in Forest Park, Springfield, Massachusetts in 1909. They are captured from a part of the ornamentation on a Persian garden rug dating from the 18th century, which symbolizes a system of ditches and resembles the legs of an insect. As a final resort, the ability to conceive of historical simultaneities felt somewhat uncanny, before it ceased to be terrifying. Most cosmologies are developed between four and five in the morning while looking at a clear view of the Milky Way from a terrace, when the cold freezes the animals and insects in their tracks. Then we are no longer at home and addicted to the depths of space, still loving, but already lifeless. Brains are the black holes they are in search of. It is from them that consciousness emerges, as if belched out of an alternative universe. And it is within them that everything is pulled back together again. Knowledge and memories breathe. Everything flashes forth only to disappear again." (From: arsenal, october 17)

(2007) 

Drawing (435) from THE BASIS OF MAKE-UP

"Language breathes, it contracts and then bursts apart again. We made it all the way to twenty-six letters in infinite different combinations of words and phrases and even to representing letters in a binary code which promises a higher rate of transmission. Now people look at themselves from the outside and fall silent. They no longer dare to trust themselves and leave their memories to the machines. Once sent off, these signs of life can no longer be retrieved. A large bell whose clapper recalls the oblong stone of a date. The silhouettes of aloe plants on Laguna Beach, California, shortly before it burnt down and I packed my bags to move to Berlin. In the sky, a pile of knocked-over chairs and T-girder cross sections in regular permutations. A blindfolded woman has been hanged from a construction crane in Iran; in case anyone should ask what will happen to us when surrounded by the nonsense of a state religion." (From: arsenal, september 17)

(2007)

Drawing (452) from THE BASIS OF MAKE-UP

"Language breathes, it contracts and then bursts apart again. We made it all the way to twenty-six letters in infinite different combinations of words and phrases and even to representing letters in a binary code which promises a higher rate of transmission. Now people look at themselves from the outside and fall silent. They no longer dare to trust themselves and leave their memories to the machines. Once sent off, these signs of life can no longer be retrieved. A large bell whose clapper recalls the oblong stone of a date. The silhouettes of aloe plants on Laguna Beach, California, shortly before it burnt down and I packed my bags to move to Berlin. In the sky, a pile of knocked-over chairs and T-girder cross sections in regular permutations. A blindfolded woman has been hanged from a construction crane in Iran; in case anyone should ask what will happen to us when surrounded by the nonsense of a state religion." (From: arsenal, september 17)

(2007) 

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) 

Drawing (198) from THE BASIS OF MAKE-UP

"The large-scale construction site for a particle acceleration facility deep below the earth of the North American desert, with the traces left behind by photons on an imaging medium in the background. Research is to be conducted here on fusion processes for elementary particles and proof of the existence of anti-matter to be found, the result being an infinite series of unread data. A cavity of heterosexuality with its clearly delineated sexual symbolism. At the edge of the image to the left, two rowers can be seen in an eight-man German World Championship scull. On the end of an oar shaped like a magnifying glass, the x-ray plate carrying the proton traces has turned negative. To the bottom right, a massive wooden penis from a Shinto temple in Kyoto, Japan, its glans currently being polished by an employee. An academic world that is mentally overwhelmed demands that the political correctness of traditional forms of art be urgently reviewed. But we already know that we live in the Middle Ages. It would be better to bury time capsules that pass on the kindest of regards to those born later." (From: arsenal, november 16)

(1994)