Dead End

“Corner a dog in a dead-end street and it will turn and bite”

A Country Doctor

Then I am stripped of my clothes and, with my fingers in my beard and my head tilted to one side, I look at the people quietly. I am completely calm and clear about everything and stay that way, too, although it is not helping me at all, for they are now taking me by the head and feet and dragging me into the bed. 

They lay me against the wall on the side of wound. Then they all go out of the room. 

The door is shut. 

The singing stops.

 Clouds move in front of the moon. 

The bedclothes lie warmly around me. 

In the open space of the windows the horses’ heads sway like shadows. 

“Do you know,” 

I hear someone saying in my ear, 

“my confidence in you is very small. You were only shaken out from somewhere. You don’t come on your own feet. Instead of helping, you give me less room on my deathbed. The best thing would be if I scratch your eyes out.” 

“Right,” I say, 

“it’s a disgrace. But now I’m a doctor. What am I supposed to do? Believe me, things are not easy for me either.” 

“Should I be satisfied with this excuse? Alas, I’ll probably have to be. I always have to make do. I came into the world with a beautiful wound; that was all I was furnished with.”

 “Young friend,” I say, “your mistake is that you have no perspective. I’ve already been in all the sick rooms, far and wide, and I tell you your wound is not so bad. Made in a tight corner with two blows from an axe. Many people offer their side and hardly hear the axe in the forest, to say nothing of the fact that it’s coming closer to them.” 

“Is that really so, or are you deceiving me in my fever?”

“It is truly so. Take the word of honour of a medical doctor.” 

He took my word and grew still. But now it was time to think about my escape. The horses were still standing loyally in their place. Clothes, fur coat, and bag were quickly gathered up. I didn’t want to delay by getting dressed; if the horses rushed as they had on the journey out, I should, in fact, be springing out of that bed into my own, as it were. One horse obediently pulled back from the window. I threw the bundle into the carriage. The fur coat flew too far and was caught on a hook by only one arm. Good enough. I swung myself up onto the horse. The reins dragging loosely, one horse barely harnessed to the other, the carriage swaying behind, last of all the fur coat in the snow. 

“Giddy up,” I said, but there was no giddying up about it. We dragged slowly through the snowy desert like old men; for a long time the fresh but inaccurate singing of the children resounded behind us:

“Enjoy yourselves, you patients.

The doctor’s laid in bed with you.”

Franz Kafka

Hans Aichinger

Hans Aichinger

»Truth or Dare«

 at maerzgalerie@Berlin

Oil on canvas works in varnish technique, formulated in AICHINGER’S characteristic perfection and built from the darkness of the space by the use of illumination in depth.

So far, AICHINGER had orchestrated these scenarios as some kind of chamber play stage; now it is the laboratory in which the observer gets much closer to the core.

The works of the exhibition are still lives, dedicated to young people being engaged in a gesture, as a playful redirection activity for something hidden. The unnaturally meticulous manner of painting does not want to be beautiful but is rather dismissively cool and creates distance – a gap it needs to undermine the aesthetic of overwhelming and to dive for the nature of the seen.   [ + more ]

Electric Sky

I.

Electric Sky

II.

III.

IV.

V.

VI.

VII.

Markings on the Walls - 3

I.

Markings on the Walls

-part 3-

II.

III.

IV.

V.

VI.

VII.

Odd Nature

I.

Odd Nature

II.

III.

IV.

V.

Cat-o-logy

"No matter how much cats fight, there always seem to be plenty of kittens."

Abraham Lincoln

"Time spent with cats is never wasted."

Sigmund Freud

"A happy arrangement: many people prefer cats to other people, and many cats prefer people to other cats."

Mason Cooley

"Those who'll play with cats must expect to be scratched."

Miguel de Cervantes

"In ancient times cats were worshipped as gods; they have not forgotten this."

Terry Pratchett

Reflections

Reflections

"Men seek for vocabularies that are reflections of reality. To this end, they must develop vocabularies that are selections of reality. And any selection of reality must, in certain circumstances, function as a deflection of reality."  --Kenneth Burke

Joseph Beuys at Hamburger Banhof Museum

Joseph Beuys (German pronunciation: [ˈjoːzɛf ˈbɔʏs]; May 12, 1921 – January 23, 1986) was a German Fluxus, Happening and performance artist as well as a sculptor, installation artist,graphic artist, art theorist and pedagogue of art.

His extensive work is grounded in concepts of humanism, social philosophy and anthroposophy; it culminates in his "extended definition of art" and the idea of social sculpture as agesamtkunstwerk, for which he claimed a creative, participatory role in shaping society and politics. His career was characterized by passionate, even acrimonious public debate, but he is now regarded as one of the most influential artists of the second half of the 20th century.

The concept of "Social Sculpture"

It was during the 1960s that Beuys formulated his central theoretical concepts concerning the social, cultural and political function and potential of art. Indebted to Romantic writers such as Novalis and Schiller, Beuys was motivated by a belief in the power of universal human creativity and was confident in the potential for art to bring about revolutionary change. 

These ideas were founded in the body of social ideas of Rudolf Steiner known as Social Threefolding, of which he was a vigorous and original proponent. This translated into Beuys’s formulation of the concept of social sculpture, in which society as a whole was to be regarded as one great work of art (the Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk) to which each person can contribute creatively (perhaps Beuys’s most famous phrase, borrowed from Novalis, is ‘Everyone is an artist’). 

In the video "Willoughby SHARP, Joseph Beuys, Public Dialogues (1974/120 min)", a record of Beuy's first major public discussion in the U.S., Beuys elaborates three principles: Freedom, Democracy, and Socialism, saying that each of them depends on the other two in order to be meaningful. In 1973, Beuys wrote:

“Only on condition of a radical widening of definitions will it be possible for art and activities related to art [to] provide evidence that art is now the only evolutionary-revolutionary power. Only art is capable of dismantling the repressive effects of a senile social system that continues to totter along the deathline: to dismantle in order to build ‘A SOCIAL ORGANISM AS A WORK OF ART’… EVERY HUMAN BEING IS AN ARTIST who – from his state of freedom – the position of freedom that he experiences at first-hand – learns to determine the other positions of the TOTAL ART WORK OF THE FUTURE SOCIAL ORDER.”

In 1982 he was invited to create a work for Documenta 7. He delivered a large pile of basalt stones. From above one could see that the pile of stones was a large arrow pointing to a single oak tree that he had planted. He announced that the stones should not be moved unless an oak tree was planted in the new location of the stone. 7,000 oak trees were then planted in Kassel, Germany. This project exemplified the idea that a social sculpture was defined as interdisciplinary and participatory. Beuys's wanted to effect environmental and social change through this project. The Dia Art Foundation continues his project still and has planted more trees and paired them with basalt stones too.

Beuys said that:

"My point with these seven thousand trees was that each would be a monument, consisting of a living part, the live tree, changing all the time, and a crystalline mass, maintaining its shape, size, and weight. This stone can be transformed only by taking from it, when a piece splinters off, say, never by growing. By placing these two objects side by side, the proportionality of the monument's two parts will never be the same."

[ source ]

You can find more about Joseph Beuys' work at Artsy's Joseph Beuys page