|
Installation shot
© Courtesy of the artist
|
During my time in New Cross, London, I lived on a mattress in the kitchen of a flat share. This living situation simultaneously limited my private sphere and enabled me to have a controlling function over the kitchen inhabitants, as it was the focal point of the flat share.
In the installation the 'Nest' I intended to translate and test out the experience of this double function; I wanted someone to live in my work, so that real space and pictorial space could link or operate in parallel. And especially, I wanted to experience how an installation can affect an inhabitant. What will happen to me, will it be painful for me, if someone really uses my work and therewith inevitable changes and destroys it?
It seemed to me that Sven Schuch, a curator and dance theoretician, was suitable for this experiment. I had already worked with him and he was familiar with my work. [solo exhibition, 'Vertigo' 2008 at FIELDs, Berlin]
Sven inhabited for three weeks the Installation (2 September to 23 September 2008). He was allowed to do whatever he wanted with and in the installation, he had full liberty.
It was important to me that he would write a diary and that he would document the changes, as I didn't want to be present during his stay.
For his three-week stay I left two books, which I thought would be important to him: Martin Heidegger: 'Die Kunst und der Raum / L'art et l'espace [ art and space]1; and Siri Hustvedt's 'What I loved'2.
 |
1Heidegger, Martin, Die Kunst und der Raum / L'art et l'espace (Frankfurt am Main, Klostermann, 2007)
2Hustvedt, Siri, What I Loved: A Novel ( New York, Henry Holt, 2008)
|
02-09-08
Arrived?! Actually, a good question. Obviously, my body is here in London; I heard this car alarm umpteen times, the street makes itself noticeable. Nevertheless, the room is not only geographically perceptible; does the mind take more time than the body? However, also the body needs time for the adjustment; climate wise it does not make any difference - just that it is damper.
The remains of the initial stress: the body is still rebelling, it feels exploited. The mind thinks, why are you now going to London, what are you actually looking for over there?
Plane: I slowly adapt to the situation, I think about how it might be? Will I be able to adapt myself really to new mental spaces through Christl's installation and the location shift? What did Christl do + will I be able to take pleasure in it, i.e. add something to it?
Insertion: yes sure, a question of physical presence, as well as of individual enrollment, not only through the changes, which I do, + and will do: also smell, + the squatting of the room as mine, authorized by Christl's artistic creative design: however also in the sense of legitimization.
London, Arrival: nearing embarrassing anxiety not to do something wrong, i.e. not to stand out as a non-londoner; it is deemed to fail, it is also a pretension that it is not possible to hold and also why should it; this signals the difference to other cities, the awkwardness, the 'otherness' as a paradigm, as a basic condition!!! Am I not here for this, for the gap, mind the gap, it is also possible to stumble forward and one even sees more of what is on the ground.
Irritation through the portraits: the truly narrative, the text in the space, be it verbal or pictorial, i.e. european connotated. For this the book from Foucault, which Christl gave me, might be enlightening.
A short attempt to categories:
a) Portraits of murders, with and without explanatory text.
b) color scale/ patterns; brushes, basic painting material
c) newspaper articles of different orientations, boulevard, estate etc
The article of Mladic is already read, scary. Reminding meof an SZ [Suedeutsche Zeitung] article from a islamic translator in Srebrencia, which describes how the UN failed, + how parents + brothers were taught in genocide.
me/my body reacts, startup emotionally; jumps future. I introduce the article in the conversation with my new flat-mates; we speak about repression + the responsibility for collective deeds...interesting that responsibility seems to be proportionally related to the environment/user i.e. distance. We are emotionally involved if it affects our national/cultural context, i.e. our inner familiar circle.
d) word riddels [crosswords]- shall I do them? If I should become bored why not? Somehow this is too obvious, too inviting. Maybe, to much interactively intended. Or do I resist against the already given. This, which is getting discovered does not need questions; where is then the relevance? Sven, relax, this is a game. An invitation, which is not yet limited in its duration. Does Christl somehow not always invite to engage with that, what one is anyway already engaging with intuitively, to which I would also count listing.
e) Quickly read the diary of Christl; in there she writes about Copenhagen and her doubts + how she leaves them behind; Theme: Janine Bean. Beuys, Bense etc appear also in it..coincidence that I have also the book of Jessie with me...
f) empty pages: are they for me? is this a direct motivation to literally write...and the spirals are not continuos, they reveal things i.e. circle around things; they guide a focus; therefore, other things are only vaguely decodable.
Insertion: Mladic; physically exhaustive to read, as stuck to the ceiling; my necks hurts, but I wanted to finish reading the text.
A spiral has at its centre a 3, it reminds me of my school time.
Murders + articles everywhere; they look at me.
g) letters with illustrations - rabbit -You - x-ray - flower
please don't try to generate now meaning, don't
last night I also installed myself in the room..., then I experimented a bit with light and photos. Did I already disturb the integrity of the artwork? is this possible to do in these kind of spaces? Will I be able to discover something more about it through a conventual understanding of art? Is there a conceptual listing present? and ephemerality + perishability?
|
Installation shot
© Courtesy of the artist |
11-09-08:
I don’t perceive the murders, which are hanging on the walls as a threat. Today, for the first time I was gravitated towards research, googleing the biography of Mata Hari and Al Capone.
Fundamentally, they are victims, with no traces of the beast; with Mata Hari it is even questionable, in how far she is guilty of the crimes, for which she was shot in 1917.
No question, that Capone was a murderer; however one still recognizes the human in him, the loyal father, a man with certain moral concepts.
I realize, that I am through and through a man of the 20th century.
The shift to 'what is the reason, that makes men to become murderers?', instead of solely asking 'is there a crime and who can we accuse of it?', -which happened between the 18th and 19th century-, this no longer occurs to me. I think directly of psychology; consider the psyche and the biography of the perpetrator; their motives; their pattern; their accountability.
I don’t recoil from them per se; distance them from myself and reject any proximity between me and them; in contrary, I seek to understand them; to understand and conceive them as humans, which is according to my reflection far more uncomfortable, than to execute bestially the beast.
I find Foucault's premise pulsating, that each execution is a spectacle and that the only possibility to eliminate this characteristic from judiciary, is to eliminate the death sentence.1
Then, ultimately one would have drowned the human drift for vengeance and nemesis in bureaucracy.
Lets wait and see, if one comes back to the 'impairing punishment'; even though, as Foucault also always underlines, the complete abolishment of corporal punishment is derelict, as each type of reprimand affectively constricts the body.
Moreover, torture has never vanished, we speak here from western societies, and also here it is gratifying itself with increasing popularity, see Abu Graib.
16-09-2008
My private room: while I've just read through the first pages of the journal, I noticed, that many states have already entered a routine; the gaps are getting smaller and smaller.
Already, yesterday the thought appeared, how familiar the room has become to me, and the extended space, London, already became.I no longer feel overstrained, if I go somewhere; I am relaxed, as I am aware, I will find my way home; and there my private room awaits me, with all its characteristics.
By and by I have developed a ritual:
1) the window gets sealed with a paper drape; first the cardboard part, which was thought as a kind of curtain from the beginning, then the two sheets of papers, which I have established as an additional sealing against light + noise. The practical usefulness stops short on doing zero; one could call this blemish Nr 1.
The first thing in the morning, which I do, is generally, to open the curtain, that is to put the paper drapes, cleanly, in the middle folded onto the bed; then to flap the curtain, so that it falls behind mirror and wardrobe.
For this one needs to yank a bit, whereas the curtain already suffered terribly. However, it still needs works.
2) hood on (the head) to sleep, a reminiscence to the initial ear infection; a relict from past days, or blemish Nr. 2.
3) Earplugs in; no doubt certainly functional, as the street objectively has not become softer. Subjectively, I perceive it as less disturbing; however, I did not get used to it. It still wakes me up + does not bestow me with calm sleep. All these concerns are constituted in a corporal need and indebted to a functional-pragmatic motive. There cannot be any talk about a profoundly intellectual approach...
|
Installation shot
© Courtesy of the artist |
|
