Die Basis des Make-Up

Drawing (587) from THE BASIS OF MAKE-UP

"Lavertezzo, September 14, 1994. Horrible constellations, a primal forest of denial and betrayal that seems to be killing me piece by piece. It is not just bungee jumpers that throw themselves from the Diga Valle Verzasca dam in Tessin, where a Bond film was once shot. The wall of water unleashed by the burst concrete wall would drown all the towns on the far shore of Lake Lugano. LAC – lake; RIM – rhyme, fissure, crack; LACRIMA – tears. Artificial Tears like drops of amber. At the top right-hand corner, one of these black drops hangs from a finger before the horizontally distorted facade of Chicago’s Claridge Hotel, while in the bottom left-hand corner, it is being tugged at with fingertips. Ueli Etter’s Babosa Gigante, a type of slug upon whose back the active ingredient of the consciousness-reducing drug Agony is secreted, climbs up the side of the vertically distorted hotel. In the mountains, above the clouds, you can hear the miserable cries of cattle and hippies who despair at their agricultural efforts." (From: arsenal, september 15)

(1999)

Drawing (85) 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)

Drawing (278) 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 (60) 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 (192) from THE BASIS OF MAKE-UP

"A self-portrait that shows me with long hair in Naples in 1971. A desert without adverbs of either time or place, a severe depression corroding the Tuscan landscape. Lighting strikes one of San Gimignano’s medieval defense towers, while a stone in the form of the octahedron from Albrecht Dürer’s Melencolia I dislodges itself from the roof parapet and falls on my head. Dürer too must have known this feeling. The sun leaves us as vegetables. That’s what’s useful about the course of time. One is reminded of the hot air balloon flight over the Egyptian pyramids that Michael Jackson invited his goddesses Jackie Onassis, Diana Ross, and Elizabeth Taylor to join him on so that they could crown the creation of the Western character. Who has seen every place in the world must rely on the landscape of his dreams, in order to later despair at the fact that dreams cannot be dreamed on seamlessly as one desires. They follow a different logic, they allow the synapses to be recombined again and again. The only thing that can help now is Milk, milky-white Propofol, perfect for escaping nightmares." (From: arsenal, january 16).

(2007)

Drawing (245) 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 (515) from THE BASIS OF MAKE-UP

"The fish monster from the Gardens of Bomarzo with a carpet pattern and its negative inversion within its open mouth. The matching carpet used to hang in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, where I would go and see it as often as possible. Six salmon spring from a roaring river on their way to the spawning ground upstream, osmoregulation to manage the shift from seawater to freshwater. A shed wall with a three-part window whose blinds are half-drawn forms the current door to hell, there’s no suppressing it. A troop of Islamic Black Widows practice their target in no man’s land. Killing people is like shooting birds, which applies to all involved. The voracity of nature, people turned to stone, visions in the belly of monsters. Within the eye of the beast, the reflection of a passing cloud can be made out, with the sun’s rays shining behind it. It’s still early in the morning and the atoms are only slowly assembling to decide to get up early once again in order to pass through the door." (From: arsenal, march 16).

(1996)

Drawing (4) from THE BASIS OF MAKE-UP

Drawing (266) from THE BASIS OF MAKE-UP

"The fish monster from the Gardens of Bomarzo with a carpet pattern and its negative inversion within its open mouth. The matching carpet used to hang in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, where I would go and see it as often as possible. Six salmon spring from a roaring river on their way to the spawning ground upstream, osmoregulation to manage the shift from seawater to freshwater. A shed wall with a three-part window whose blinds are half-drawn forms the current door to hell, there’s no suppressing it. A troop of Islamic Black Widows practice their target in no man’s land. Killing people is like shooting birds, which applies to all involved. The voracity of nature, people turned to stone, visions in the belly of monsters. Within the eye of the beast, the reflection of a passing cloud can be made out, with the sun’s rays shining behind it. It’s still early in the morning and the atoms are only slowly assembling to decide to get up early once again in order to pass through the door." (From: arsenal, march 16).

(1996) 

Drawing (327) from THE BASIS OF MAKE-UP

"A self-portrait that shows me with long hair in Naples in 1971. A desert without adverbs of either time or place, a severe depression corroding the Tuscan landscape. Lighting strikes one of San Gimignano’s medieval defense towers, while a stone in the form of the octahedron from Albrecht Dürer’s Melencolia I dislodges itself from the roof parapet and falls on my head. Dürer too must have known this feeling. The sun leaves us as vegetables. That’s what’s useful about the course of time. One is reminded of the hot air balloon flight over the Egyptian pyramids that Michael Jackson invited his goddesses Jackie Onassis, Diana Ross, and Elizabeth Taylor to join him on so that they could crown the creation of the Western character. Who has seen every place in the world must rely on the landscape of his dreams, in order to later despair at the fact that dreams cannot be dreamed on seamlessly as one desires. They follow a different logic, they allow the synapses to be recombined again and again. The only thing that can help now is Milk, milky-white Propofol, perfect for escaping nightmares." (From: arsenal, january 16).

(2007)