TWIGS
Twigs, Goethe Institute, London, England
/ 2001
These black and
white photos of twigs, branches, a tree house, a path leading into the forest
and a small bush in the snow were printed as offset posters for the show Twigs
at the Goethe Institute London in 2001. The show room of the Goethe Institute
where I had previously shown my photo collages in 1998 (Schöne
Welt),
had by then been converted into a café with only one wall left to show
something on, so I decided to make some café art. The idea was to give
the students that would drop by after German class or visitors from the nearby
Natural History Museum some nice art to look at and some posters to take home
for the student - friendly price of 10 pounds.
Since twigs are closely related to children's and hermit's forest-dwelling huts, you might want to look at the third part of L´Invitation au Voyage: Ghosts, or at the hut that a bum built himself near the motorway (Einer zu viel), or read my excurse on hermit's huts in Chinoiserien.
To learn more about my relationship to twigs, please read Alexa Hennig von Lange: Interior Worlds.
Some of the images on the posters are the same as in:
My very gestures… enchanted
Brown, The Approach, London, England
/ 2001
This series of black and white photos (which I had
developed myself on warm tone baryte paper) was done for the show Brown
in The Approach, curated by Gary Webb. The images are framed in mirror frames
and should be hung in a rectangle.
In these photos, we meet with real and living statues, reflections that look like sculptures, and visionary moments. The Living Statue, Sarah Mucaria, whose photo I had taken on the street in Milan, later performed for the show Video. Featuring Sarah Mucaria and Krylon Superstar.
The title is taken from the Frankie goes to Hollywood song Welcome to the Pleasuredome [1], in which the poet says: "I have forgotten how to walk and speak. I am on the way toward flying in the air, dancing. My very gestures express enchantment." ( Paul Morley is paraphrasing Friedrich Nietzsche, Die Geburt der Tragödie [2] ). This maybe summarizes more than anything else what I would like to get at.
This group show was so convincing to me, made so much sense, that for the first time I thought about curating myself. Normally curators have a written concept and they are keen on making the artists fit that concept. Gary, who had written a wonderfully incongruous text about materials for Saturday, an art fanzine in which Ingo and I had published a little text called The Diamond, put together personalities rather than artworks. When he invited me to participate in Help (Els Hanappe Underground, Athens 2003), the next show he was curating, he kept calling me at three in the morning to tell me that I had to do something absolutely new. I developed a mental block and finally doodled a geometric drawing on my computer, which I enlarged onto the wall in the gallery space. When I came back from Athens with a bloody toe I had to go straight to Cologne, where I curated the show Splendor Geometrik, with some truly geometric art, to which I had in turn invited Gary Webb. The following year we did Atomkrieg; which was based on the concept I had learned from Gary.
I again reused some of the images in:
My very gestures… enchanted
Sven Lager and Elke Naters, The
Buch, Cologne / 2001
The main difference
was that I included more photos of myself, in which I slap my head very softly,
as if to say: go away, visions… - no, no, stay!
In: Sven Lager and Elke Naters ( Ed.), The Buch, Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Köln 2001, p.283-291
My very gestures... enchanted
El Niño, Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach
/ 1998
I had used the same title before, for a multimedia-show in the old
sense-slides and sound, that I had done together with Ingo Niermann for the
show El Niño in Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach (1998).
My very gestures…enchanted, 1998
/ 81 slides, 20 min, slide show and CD
The slide show consists of about
80 photos that I had taken while watching TV. Most of them show some kind
of transition. Sahara Nomads in their tents, set up with some twigs and sticks
and very colorful cloth, a Chinese woman on the way to her hometown, an American
police series, in which the main actor discovers she is a lesbian, a romantic
kiss between teenagers, a pregnant woman in search of the father of her child
in a Cuban film... they all are glued together by the strangely symphonic
music composed of samples by Ingo Niermann.
We both believe that television is essentially a great way to learn more about the world. I later used TV-images for two of my series of paintings: The Police discovers the self-built Hut of a Tramp in the Wood near the Motorway (1998-99) and The Prisoners (2000). All of these little twigs cross each other and form a thicket, and they all go back to Hütte (1993).
[1] When I wrote my first and only novel,
about some poor kids that arrive at a future megapolis, where they find work
in an amusement park inside a glass dome inspired by E.L. Boullée
or Buckminster Fuller, I called it The Pleasuredome. They start
having wild parties, things get out of hand, and they form a kind of anarchist
state that eventually develops rules of his own. Some try to become peaceful
spliff-smoking ecologists, while others establish a fascist government complete
with police and secret service. Finally they run out of supplies and have
to go outside, where they find that the world had forgotten them because
a war is going on. (The novel was never published).
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[2] "In song and dance man expresses himself as a member
of a higher community; he has forgotten how to walk and speak and is on the
way toward flying into the air, dancing. His very gestures express enchantment.
Just as the animals now talk, and the earth yields milk and honey, supernatural
sounds emanate from him, too: he feels himself a god, he himself now walks
about enchanted, in ecstasy, like the gods he saw walking in his dreams.
He is no longer an artist, he has become a work of art (…)" Friedrich
Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, 1872
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