Drawing (552) from THE BASIS OF MAKE-UP
"The Principle of Hope – hermaphroditism in the lower animal kingdom: The sweet water polyp Hydra with testes, ovaries, and a young bud struts skillfully as a supermodel on an iron bar. Two times M, F, m, f = male/female. On the horizon, a defective pipeline near Grosseto in Italy, meant to pass on the hot steam rising from crevices in the earth. In 1971, I balanced on it unaware. Embedded in it, the plaster cast of a cavity that a human killed by the eruption of the Vesuvius in 79 AD left in solidified ashes-photographed by Giorgio Sommer in Pompeii in 1873. The poisonous plasma cloud had overwhelmed and suffocated the sleeping man. An American soldier on his knees during the first Gulf War tries to pat a cat about to jump at the bi-sexual Hydra on the catwalk. In the background, the irrationally long line in front of the last helicopter on the roof of the US Embassy in Saigon at the end of April 1975. That's what hope looks like when it's over." (From: Schwarze Blöcke, SchwarzHandPresse 2010).
(1997)