Die Basis des Make-Up

Die Basis des Make-Up

Image: 

Drawing (590) from THE BASIS OF MAKE-UP

"Gaschurn, September 9th, 1995, the world premiere of the film Schlafes Bruder is being held in the schoolyard. All the actors have been once again brought together for the biggest open-air live performance of all time in full Dolby stereo. It’s raining. A Gala reporter claims primly and adamantly that we know each other from studying German literature together – What do you mean, when and where was that? At the hotel, an actor colleague shows me a “chute”, a joint you smoke by putting the lit side in your mouth and keeping it closed. We fall about laughing when looking at my telephone doodle, a sketch of the creator to accompany Michael Jackson’s poem The Dance from the album sleeve of his Dangerous CD: “This world we live in is the dance of the creator ... I keep on dancing ... and dancing ... and dancing, until there is only ... The Dance.” It sounds like Art In Ruins, 1993. In the background, the Fahlun mines and their transport baskets can be seen, against a landscape that shows people sitting on a bench. I thought I’d soon have stored all landscapes in my head and would no longer need to move. Time did as it usually does." (From: arsenal, september 16).

(1999) 

Image: 

Drawing (590) from THE BASIS OF MAKE-UP

Gaschurn, September 9th, 1995, the world premiere of the film Schlafes Bruder is being held in the schoolyard. All the actors have been once again brought together for the biggest open-air live performance of all time in full Dolby stereo. It’s raining. A Gala reporter claims primly and adamantly that we know each other from studying German literature together – What do you mean, when and where was that? At the hotel, an actor colleague shows me a “chute”, a joint you smoke by putting the lit side in your mouth and keeping it closed. We fall about laughing when looking at my telephone doodle, a sketch of the creator to accompany Michael Jackson’s poem The Dance from the album sleeve of his Dangerous CD: “This world we live in is the dance of the creator ... I keep on dancing ... and dancing ... and dancing, until there is only ... The Dance.” It sounds like Art In Ruins, 1993. In the background, the Fahlun mines and their transport baskets can be seen, against a landscape that shows people sitting on a bench. I thought I’d soon have stored all landscapes in my head and would no longer need to move. Time did as it usually does." (From: arsenal, september 16).

(1999) 

Image: 

Drawing (448) 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) 

Image: 

Drawing (443) from THE BASIS OF MAKE-UP

"A sand path in Morocco in the midday heat. A veiled woman pauses at a city wall made of clay. A statue hung with big Christmas tree baubles struts past, casting a small shadow. To the top right, an astronaut clad in white is carrying out a space walk in the sky, a divine appearance. All this is a surreal sketch on a page ripped out of a spiral bound notebook, above which a perfume bottle floats and sends out alarm signals. A memory from Meshes of the Afternoon by Maya Deren, in which a veiled woman glides down a flight of steps in the Hollywood Hills. There is a mirror bordered by black veil before her face, within which the viewer is allegedly supposed to be reflected. But in the film itself, you can only see the reflection of the white sky of back then. All our attempts to reflect or be reflected in a film are in vain. It remains a crude container of a past era, whose contemporariness only sometimes becomes an argument. The viewer is in the picture even without the mirror." (From: arsenal, june 16).

(2007) 

Image: 

Drawing (443) from THE BASIS OF MAKE-UP

"A sand path in Morocco in the midday heat. A veiled woman pauses at a city wall made of clay. A statue hung with big Christmas tree baubles struts past, casting a small shadow. To the top right, an astronaut clad in white is carrying out a space walk in the sky, a divine appearance. All this is a surreal sketch on a page ripped out of a spiral bound notebook, above which a perfume bottle floats and sends out alarm signals. A memory from Meshes of the Afternoon by Maya Deren, in which a veiled woman glides down a flight of steps in the Hollywood Hills. There is a mirror bordered by black veil before her face, within which the viewer is allegedly supposed to be reflected. But in the film itself, you can only see the reflection of the white sky of back then. All our attempts to reflect or be reflected in a film are in vain. It remains a crude container of a past era, whose contemporariness only sometimes becomes an argument. The viewer is in the picture even without the mirror." (From: arsenal, june 16).

(2007) 

Image: 

Drawing (381) from THE BASIS OF MAKE-UP

"NYC, August 1975. The similarity between a taxi driver and Josef von Sternberg drives a wedge into my experience of time, making the city collapse before my eyes. He took me to a building at the entrance of the Holland Tunnel on the corner of Hudson Street and Canal Street. Overcome by flashbacks, I finally had a full nervous breakdown while on the ferry in the harbor. I packed my things and drove west, from Manhattan to the Nevada desert, which I reached in two days. There, I lost myself in gambling. What do we learn from this? Failure is due to a lack of curiosity! All the protagonists of my dreams who I might have questioned were still alive. But instead of asking questions, I only knew answers back then. My body was more exhausted from this than I’ve ever experienced again. The miracle of faces that allow everything to collapse and be revived again. But the question remains: who once looked into your cradle in such a way? Z, S, and E are the first letters in the names of people who I’ve forgotten." (From: arsenal, july/august 16).

(1977) 

Image: 

Drawing (132) 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)

Image: 

Drawing (135) 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)

Image: 

Drawing (358) from THE BASIS OF MAKE-UP

"Details from a Roman fresco painting from the 5th 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 20th 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)

 

Image: 

Drawing (52) 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 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)

Pages

Subscribe to RSS - Die Basis des Make-Up