Die Basis des Make-Up

Drawing (150) from THE BASIS OF MAKE-UP

"Dial NERVOUS for the time, using sharpened pencils to operate the rotary dial on a black telephone, even though the heavy receiver is still on the hook. A view from the front room of our railroad apartment onto President Street, Brooklyn by night in winter 1975. The Northern Lights stick out into the image from the bottom left, shielding the telephone. The landlord had let us use his refrigerator, which was the height of a man, in order that the kitchen facilities were sufficient. While being transported, the fridge was dropped on the floor just before our front door while being transported, its door opening wide in the process and a horde of cockroaches streaming out from inside. Visible from afar, they scuttled over the snow and disappeared into various nooks and crannies. It wasn’t just for that reason that our Puerto Rican and Italian neighbors detested us. We lived directly on the dividing line that separated them and an additional ethnicity was not welcome. An anonymous letter that appeared in our postbox shortly afterwards began as follows: 'Dear Sirs ...'”. (From: arsenal, january 17).

(1984) 

Drawing (21) from THE BASIS OF MAKE-UP

"Where have you come from, where are you going? The River Weser at Horstedt in Lower Saxony, with porcelain tableware floating on it, gliding on its way to the North Sea. My granduncle’s house lies in the swamp behind the dyke on the other side of the river. In the front a place for mooring with a bell to call the ferryman, who then rowed over and picked us up. During the crossing, we had to scoop out the water that was entering through the gaps in the hull. None of us were able to swim. I can still hear our “Hellos” from back then reverberate within me, like those from Dreyer’s Vampyr. That was also the place from where I wanted to launch my handmade wooden crate so I could travel downstream, drifting around Europe and then along the African coast in the Atlantic all the way to Cameroon. From there, I would proceed on foot to the Sahara. Cameroon was also the name of the huge sand dunes close to our house that were carted away in the 50s for the reconstruction of Bremen. An epithet that was just another expression of the same Wilhelmine insanity that pervaded everything." (From: arsenal, october 16).

(1984) 

Drawing (299) 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) 

Drawing (391) from THE BASIS OF MAKE-UP

"

The Chinese Landscape, 1971, a domestic scene seen through a fish-eye lens. Water pipes painted red and blue in memory of the fashion to “emphasize their functionality”. A shack for the whole world, mass choirs following the call of the drum: modernity. Banana-shaped dildos grow out of the cracks and openings of a perfect kitchen – or are they sickle moons? A woman cleans, cooks, and washes them up, a child holds one out in front of him in his left hand, puzzled, staring at nothing, as the kitchen roll waits to be used. On the floorboards, indigenous peoples draw on anal stretching to torture their own. All the violent acts of the past centuries appear to have been thought of anew. A promise is a promise: eschatological paradises lurk behind the black holes of the universe. People should only walk around veiled like Wahhabites to avoid frightening aliens with our bodily form. The assumed balance of the universe is merely a snapshot." (From: arsenal, december 16)

(1977) 

Titlepage of "The Chinese Landscape", Raw MailBook Nr. 8, NYC 1979. 

Drawing (405) from THE BASIS OF MAKE-UP

Drawing (395) 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 white 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 (95) from THE BASIS OF MAKE-UP

Drawing (73) from THE BASIS OF MAKE-UP

Drawing (284) from THE BASIS OF MAKE-UP

"A unit of Russian engineers in Cuba marching towards the construction site for a rocket launching facility, shortly before the Cuban missile crisis in October 1962. They are framed to the left and right by the two halves of an x-ray of a human body, which is being shredded by falling Tetris formations. A torn-off umbilical cord hangs from the sky and holds up the raft of a blind passenger marooned before the coast of Somalia. A recollection of the victims of the Argentinean military dictatorships of the 70s and 80s, who carried their opponents in airplanes and cast them out over the sea from great heights while still alive. It is the power emerging from the periphery that frames this sketch, whose centre is empty. This power trusts in its own implosive radiance, no longer represents anything more and attempts to gain recognition as a deliberate much ado about nothing. Argentinean General Menendez mentioned the numbers in advance: 'We will have to kill 50,000 people: 25,000 subversives, 20,000 sympathizers, and 5,000 as the mistakes we will make.''" (From: arsenal, november 14)

(1994) 

Drawing (557) from THE BASIS OF MAKE-UP

"A motorized serving hand transports a glass before a milled stainless steel razor blade. A giraffe with its neck in bandages looks up from a letter written in 1975, a historically documented stutter: “This was run ... and that was ... seen so ... Together they form ... and no room for ... by.” I can’t claim I was interested in processes and dialogues back then, but rather in states and statements. This disinterest, which Frieda Grafe may have termed “perversion”, continued for a long time out of sheer necessity. My films remained focused on points from which the space was grasped by different lines of sight. The movement is supposed to take place in the mind but is not to be represented. All the talk of a “moving camera” doesn’t give things any time. Their own individual time must however be insisted upon if you want to remain committed to reality or what you regard as such, to say nothing of stories and processes that have no beginning and no end and thus cannot be narrated." (From: arsenal, may 16).

(1993)