ARCHIVE
The survey (extract), 2015
self-conducted survey in the painting department of the Weissensee Kunsthochschule Berlin, in collaboration with Julie Legouez
The solution, ink and pencil on paper, DINA4, 2016
Non boring neutral space
Goerge Perec
Extract of The Infra-Ordinary
What speaks to us, seemingly, is always the big event, the untoward, the extra-ordinary: the front-page splash, the banner headlines. Railway trains only begin to exist when they are derailed, and the more passengers that are killed, the more the trains exist. Aeroplanes achieve existence only when they are hijacked. The one and only destiny of motor-cars is to drive into plane trees. Fifty-two weekends a year, fifty-two casualty lists: so many dead and all the better for the news media if the figures keep going up! Behind the event there is a scandal, a fissure, a danger, as if life reveals itself only by way of the spectacular, as if what speaks, what is significant, is always abnormal: natural cataclysms or social upheavals, social unrest, political scandals.
In our haste to measure the historic, significant and revelatory, let’s not leave aside the essential: the truly intolerable, the truly inadmissible. What is scandalous isn’t the pit explosion, it’s working in coalmines. ‘Social problems’ aren’t ‘a matter of concern’ when there’s a strike, they are intolerable twenty-four hours out of twenty-four, three hundred and sixty-five days a year.
Tidal waves, volcanic eruptions, tower blocks that collapse, forest fires, tunnels that cave in, the Drugstore de Champs-Elysées burns down. Awful! Terrible! Monstrous! Scandalous! But where’s the scandal? The true scandal? Has the newspaper told us everything except: not to worry, as you can see life exists, with its ups and downs, things happen, as you can see.
The daily newspapers talk of everything except the daily. The papers annoy me , they teach me nothing. What they recount doesn’t concern me, doesn’t ask me questions and doesn’t answer the questions I ask or would like to ask.
What’s really going on, what we’re experiencing, the rest, all the rest, where is it? How should we take account of, question, describe what happens every day and recurs everyday: the banal, the quotidian, the obvious, the common, the ordinary, the infra-ordinary, the background noise, the habitual?
To question the habitual. But that’s just it, we’re habituated to it. We don’t question it, it doesn’t question us, it doesn’t seem to pose a problem, we live it without thinking, as if it carried within it neither question nor answers, as if it weren’t the bearer of any information. This is not longer even conditioning, it’s anaesthesia. We sleep through our lives in a dreamless sleep. But where is our life? Where is our body? Where is our space?
How are we to speak of these ‘common things’, how to track them down rather, how to flush them out, wrest them from the dross in which they remain mired, how to give them a meaning, a tongue, to let them, finally, speak of what is, of what we are.
To be average, ink and pencil on paper, 40x40cm, 2016
Normalement, intervention at the Kunstmuseum Ahrenshoop, 08/15
Everybody wants the big picture. Capture the world. Visitors are willing for a clear overview, a guiding system. Museums work on bringing whole time periods in one place. Why not pushing the idea of summarizing even further. It should make everybody happy.
I pursued the idea of summing up a time using a simple mathematical principle. The average. The normative sense of a museum, looking for objectivity, categories and simplification reminds me of the normative character of average calculation. This secret expectation of average, this inherent norm never become a picture. Unless you ask a programmer, Florent Siccardi, to make an algorithm out of it.
Each of the 3 main time periods of the Kunstmuseum Ahrenshoop (artist colony, classical modernism and post-war years) has been condensed in a single oil painting ( out of silkscreen). The museum labels were also condensed in one new average artist, title and year.
ARCHIVE
The survey (extract), 2015
self-conducted survey in the painting department of the Weissensee Kunsthochschule Berlin, in collaboration with Julie Legouez
The solution, ink and pencil on paper, DINA4, 2016
Non boring neutral space
Goerge Perec
Extract of The Infra-Ordinary
What speaks to us, seemingly, is always the big event, the untoward, the extra-ordinary: the front-page splash, the banner headlines. Railway trains only begin to exist when they are derailed, and the more passengers that are killed, the more the trains exist. Aeroplanes achieve existence only when they are hijacked. The one and only destiny of motor-cars is to drive into plane trees. Fifty-two weekends a year, fifty-two casualty lists: so many dead and all the better for the news media if the figures keep going up! Behind the event there is a scandal, a fissure, a danger, as if life reveals itself only by way of the spectacular, as if what speaks, what is significant, is always abnormal: natural cataclysms or social upheavals, social unrest, political scandals.
In our haste to measure the historic, significant and revelatory, let’s not leave aside the essential: the truly intolerable, the truly inadmissible. What is scandalous isn’t the pit explosion, it’s working in coalmines. ‘Social problems’ aren’t ‘a matter of concern’ when there’s a strike, they are intolerable twenty-four hours out of twenty-four, three hundred and sixty-five days a year.
Tidal waves, volcanic eruptions, tower blocks that collapse, forest fires, tunnels that cave in, the Drugstore de Champs-Elysées burns down. Awful! Terrible! Monstrous! Scandalous! But where’s the scandal? The true scandal? Has the newspaper told us everything except: not to worry, as you can see life exists, with its ups and downs, things happen, as you can see.
The daily newspapers talk of everything except the daily. The papers annoy me , they teach me nothing. What they recount doesn’t concern me, doesn’t ask me questions and doesn’t answer the questions I ask or would like to ask.
What’s really going on, what we’re experiencing, the rest, all the rest, where is it? How should we take account of, question, describe what happens every day and recurs everyday: the banal, the quotidian, the obvious, the common, the ordinary, the infra-ordinary, the background noise, the habitual?
To question the habitual. But that’s just it, we’re habituated to it. We don’t question it, it doesn’t question us, it doesn’t seem to pose a problem, we live it without thinking, as if it carried within it neither question nor answers, as if it weren’t the bearer of any information. This is not longer even conditioning, it’s anaesthesia. We sleep through our lives in a dreamless sleep. But where is our life? Where is our body? Where is our space?
How are we to speak of these ‘common things’, how to track them down rather, how to flush them out, wrest them from the dross in which they remain mired, how to give them a meaning, a tongue, to let them, finally, speak of what is, of what we are.
To be average, ink and pencil on paper, 40x40cm, 2016
Normalement, intervention at the Kunstmuseum Ahrenshoop, 08/15
Everybody wants the big picture. Capture the world. Visitors are willing for a clear overview, a guiding system. Museums work on bringing whole time periods in one place. Why not pushing the idea of summarizing even further. It should make everybody happy.
I pursued the idea of summing up a time using a simple mathematical principle. The average. The normative sense of a museum, looking for objectivity, categories and simplification reminds me of the normative character of average calculation. This secret expectation of average, this inherent norm never become a picture. Unless you ask a programmer, Florent Siccardi, to make an algorithm out of it.
Each of the 3 main time periods of the Kunstmuseum Ahrenshoop (artist colony, classical modernism and post-war years) has been condensed in a single oil painting ( out of silkscreen). The museum labels were also condensed in one new average artist, title and year.