Talk
February 20, 2012 – Neighbour
We had Martin Eberle for dinner. He is our neighbour. Of all people on Earth he is the person living closest to us, just across the landing. Martin is a photographer who makes superb portraits of empty clubs and tired performers. This evening he told us about another project he's been working on for a long time, centered around the golden records carried by the two Voyager space probes, which took off from Earth on August 20 and September 5, 1977. These records contain pictures and sounds of life on this planet. Martin's project revolve around the content and context of this message to those out there. No man made objects have travelled further than those two Voyager probes. Incredibly, they are still sending some information back. Their current positions in space is constantly updated by NASA. Right now Voyager 1 is 17,916,000,000 km from Earth. It is no longer transmitting photographs.
Voyager 1's last photograph of Earth was shot on February 14, 1990. No other photograph of Earth has been made from a greater distance.
At the time of shooting the probe had travelled for 12 years and 5 months and 15 days and was in the vicinity of Neptun. It has since continued on its way for a further 22 years and 6 days.
On February 14, 1990, the image of Earth was no more than a pixel wide.
February 16, 2012 – Subculture
A couple of weeks ago I read Just Kids, Patti Smith's book about her relationship, love and friendship with Robert Mapplethorpe. It's a deeply moving book, romantic and important in many different ways. Her version of the Rimbaud/Verlaine story, even when the details don't fit. I keep thinking about it – and it made me buy, for the very first time, some of her records as well as a Mapplethorpe biography.
Today I finished Sarah Thornton's first book Club Cultures – Music, Media and Subcultural Capital. It was published in 1995 and is based one her PhD dissertation. One year ago I read another doctoral thesis, it's subject very different, but I did indeed find some parallells... – we either live on islands or try to build them. Thornton's book is a thorough study of the development of the acid house and rave movement in Great Britain in the late 80's and early 90's. The core discussion relate to the creation of what she calls "subcultural capital". This type of cultural capital cannot be directly translated to what is relevant in the art world. But there are interesting similarities and very clearly this study paved the way for Thornton's present career as a very clear-eyed writer on visual art. With her background in Media Studies she's not concerned with applying opaque art theoretical concepts to what she sees, instead she registers and relates how things actually function. With art having converged with the entertainment industrial complex, a background in study of clubs and DJs turns out to be a very useful point of departure for professional art observation. I ordered Club Cultures after having reread Seven Days in the Art World at the end of last year. A brilliant book, which – to my surprise – has made me deeply fascinated with Takashi Murakami.
February 10, 2012 – Marlboro
In the last couple of weeks I have grown increasingly fascinated with an outdoor advertising campaign from the cigarette maker Marlboro. It started in a pure typographic manner with variations on the message "NO MORE MAYBE" or just "MAYBE" in capital letters, with the "MAY" part crossed out, the word followed by the image of a Marlboro cigarette pack. Message translated: "Don't waver, be Marlboro". It is not that unusual in Berlin to see advertising using only English language, but this campaign features a double coded message which I imagine would be tricky also in a native English speaking area.
In the last week or so, the typographic messages have given way to new billboards featuring hip and somewhat dishevelled looking twentysomethings; a boy with a guitar, a girl reparing a motorcycle, etc. No cigarettes in picture space. Messages: "Maybe will never write a song", "Maybe will never be her own boss"...
These cool looking young people could have appeared in a number of other lifestyle consumer campaigns, for other cigarette brands or beer or whatever. But this campaign is striking in an unusual way. It has to do with the ambiguity of the message, I think. It has been turned around so many times. What is actually being said here? And who is the target audience?
I don't imagine teenagers walking around pondering "should I start smoking or not? Maybe I should...?". Starting to smoke is seldom a considered decision, I don't think. But on the other side of the argument, society is full of messages, overt and implicit, that tell those who already smoke to stop. So, if I am a smoker (and indeed I am not) I will find myself thinking every so often "Maybe I should stop...". The Marlboro campaign thus turns out to be defensive action, rear-guard battle telling its diehard followers: "don't give up, stay with us. We're cool, not losers."
February 7, 2012 – Waiblingen
I just received an invitation informing me that the exhibition "Neue Realitäten. FotoGrafik von Warhol bis Havekost", which was at the Kupferstichkabinett in Berlin last summer, now opens at Galerie Stihl Waiblingen, which is near Stuttgart. I didn't know the place before. A quick Google search shows it is more impressive than the name let's on. In the exhibition itself will be my three woodcuts again. They will be in good, if not exactly gender neutral company. In the email is a list of all the artists in the exhibition:
John Baldessari, Mirosław Bałka, Christiane Baumgartner, Lothar Baumgarten, Bernd & Hilla Becher, Falko Behrendt, Jan Berdyszak, Christian Boltanski, Martin Borowski,
KP Brehmer, Marcel Broodthaers, Nils Burwitz, Chuck Close, Tacita Dean, Olafur Eliasson,
Hans-Peter Feldmann, Franz Gertsch, Richard Hamilton, Eberhard Havekost, Carsten Höller,
Jasper Johns, Thomas Kilpper, Ronald B. Kitaj, Roy Lichtenstein, Michael Morgner,
Eduardo Paolozzi, Sigmar Polke, Mel Ramos, Robert Rauschenberg, Gerhard Richter,
Dieter Roth, Kai Schiemenz, Peter Sorge, Klaus Staeck, Simon Starling, Jan Svenungsson,
Al Taylor, Rosemarie Trockel, Wolf Vostell und Andy Warhol.
I'm just about to start work on a new, highly complex woodcut intended for my show at Galerie Werner Klein in June. Though it will not feature any dots...
February 7, 2012 – Suicide
Mike Kelley committed suicide last Tuesday.
January 31, 2012 – Birdhouse
I finally received my copy of Intellectual Birdhouse, an anthology of new texts on "Artistic Practice as Research" edited by Florian Dombois, Ute Meta Bauer, Claudia Mareis and Michael Schwab. As can be gathered from the fourfold editorship it's quite a heavy publication. Sarat Maharaj is contributing, as is Hito Steyerl, Tom Holert, Henk Schlager, Renée Green and many others. The book has been in production for a long time. I wrote my contribution in the summer of 2010. It's called "Spying on Sparrows" and is one more example of me mining for meaning in Hebdomeros. I use two long quotes from De Chirico's novel and construct around them an argument on the nature of "precision in a text".
I am certainly pleased to note that my text has been chosen to come first of the book's 19 contributions.
January 26, 2012 – Seaside
Last night at nine, in the dark, I set out on a run in Vienna, along the Donau Canal towards the river itself. It's quite a particular urban situation; for a while I run on a footpath along the canal with an elevated motorway above me, blocking the sky. On wide concrete supports a changing exhibition of ambitious graffitti paintings. There are not many lights, no people, no other runners, just the canal, the implied presence of the road, the concrete.
Then I reach the river. As dark as it is, the other side (actually a very long island in the middle) can hardly be made out. To me, it feels like the edge of the sea, and there's an indistinkt smell of... something... which helps the impression of having reached a destination of some sort. I continue to run up the river, listening to a podcast from American public radio discussing the current race for the Republican nomination, while wondering dreamingly: where am I? How did I happen here? On my left side now, there are train tracks and on the other side a little mountain with vineyards. I can see an illuminated tower and a church floating in the dark sky. Now there's a little village on the left. I use a tunnel under the tracks to make a detour in small streets, with country houses. I imagine being far away, in the country side. Then I turn around and head back towards the city. In my headphones a report from the meeting in Davos going on right now. The worsening situation for Europe and the Euro.
The way back is easy, my body feels light. I could go on for much longer tonight. In my small apartment in Pramergasse I connect my GPS watch to the computer and check where I have been. Kahlenbergerdorf.
January 21, 2012 – Looking at things
I apologize, I can't help myself: there is a website called Kim Jong-Un Looking at Things and it's too beautiful not to mention. Apparently it is a knock-off of another site called Kim Jong-Il Looking at Things – which I didn't know existed until now, but where many of the photos are known to me.
In Berlin I live down the street from the North Korean embassy. Outside of its gate is a glassed box display. It features a constant photo exhibition of the Great Leader (Il-Sung) and the Dear Leader (Jong-Il). What they're doing? Well, looking at things, mainly. (I even integrated this display in a little project once.)
In the embassy display the Great Successor (Jong-Un) has not yet shown up looking at things, so it's a great advantage to be able to keep up to date through this new site.
January 15, 2012 – Kids
This Sunday morning I began reading Patti Smith's memoir "Just Kids". She describes her very first exposure to art, on a family trip to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, when she's about 12 years old:
... it was the work in a hall devoted to Picasso, from his harlequins to Cubism, that pierced me the most. His brutal confidence took ny breath away.
Brutal confidence.
January 14, 2012 – Kodak
A long article in the Economist about the death throes of Kodak, the company that personified the technology of photography for 120 years. Then two things happened: digital photography killed chemical photography among consumers (= everyone) and telephones became the dominant tool for its capture.
One of many ironies in this story of destructive development is that the very first digital camera was built at Kodak by Steven Sasson in 1975. Another is that when digital cameras became commercially available fifteen years later, Kodak was there first again.
But they didn't get their strategy right. And now, Kodak is facing bankruptcy.
It's both fascinating and very sad to read about this development from a business perspective. Seen from the vantage point of an art historical perspective, photography is a young imaging technology. Yet, there is simply no comparison for how this technique of capturing reality's shadow has been driving cultural development and political change over the course of its existence (170 years).
Over the past ten years virtually all photography based on securing the capture of reality's shadow using a chemical reaction (= a physical process) has been replaced by capture secured in code.
Code is abstraction, code is language.
January 7, 2012 – New Year
It's a new year. I have made no resolutions, except to continue. Continue to work hard and trying to achieve... something... in all the different areas where I am active and where I have a passion. One big problem is how to organize my time so as to be able to concentrate on one thing at a time. I'm not exactly alone in having this problem. The whole of society seems hell-bent on convincing everyone multitasking is the greatest talent one can have. It is indeed a necessary talent. Nevertheless, a more important one in the wider scheme of things – and especially for any kind of artist – is to be able to switch the multitasking faculty in oneself off and be with one task long enough to make it pay...
I'm not very good at this. Should get better.