007

Drawing (7) from THE BASIS OF MAKE-UP

"Three giraffes watching TV in a motel, the module of an infinite picture for wallpaper of an Italian children’s room. As opposed to television, that started at one point and to which we connect and disconnect throughout our life, film – as a traditional cultural form with a beginning, middle and end – still leads to differing opinions. Films are finite products. Cinematographic representation proudly states: this is how I once was and this is what I am like now. As a medium, television stands for an entirely different perception of reality. It is the image of a flow that cannot be defined and thus the constant assertion of an opposite. In formal terms, it is the hitherto most successful parody of life. Everything we contribute to it has nothing to do with us. We appear on TV and for this reason mean nothing anymore. No chance for criticism and its selective methods of objection. A true euthanasia medium." (From: arsenal, february 09).

(1976) 

Lynne Tillman later wrote about this drawing: "It was in a hotel room in Los Angeles, a very seedy room where we had gone to seed. The TV was attached to the ceiling, the management fighting theft. We wouldn't have take it...

... It would have been too much trouble. No ladder, no hope, no desire. The only joke of the night was imagining a giraffe who could easily bite through the chain and carry the TV away, the chain and the TV like a necklace and a bauble around its long, irrevelant neck." 

David Marc reproduced this drawing 1995 in his Buch Bonfire of the Humanities auf Seite 108 with the caption: "Totalitarian Stalinism and mass culture television were typically depicted ... as evil twin doubles ..." und eröffnete damit das Kapitel Sechs des Buches: "Eight Meditations on Couch Potato Stasis, Social Mobility and the Itsy-Bitsy Attention Span Thing".

The "design for a wallpaper for an Italian children's room" is now the endpaper of the catalogues "Museum für Gegenwart Nr. 11 – Heinz Emigholz" und " Die Basis des Make-Up (1974–2007)".

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