She knows nothing about clouds
What is viewed easily? We see too much, but not necessarily well, or clearly. Or I don't. Perspectives are lacking for too many. Where do you go and how? Where she was going.
It is good to move. To feel one's feet on the ground. However, reality can be an awkward host, dress up as mud, serve as a discursive (play)ground, occur as several sticky places at once, or worse etc. I don't know what it is that I keep bumping into. Lately I have bruises on my legs that I cannot account for. Though, I know I get them easily, I must bump into things, something real in reality, or my body does, my legs do. As if reality wanted to confront me somehow. What is it that I don't perceive/see? What do I hit/forget? I seem to not remember/see reality. Not to know how to navigate things. Reality doesn't seem to be my friend, isn't on my side, not really. My bruises confirm that I am here, was somewhere, where reality is or was, or something real. How narrative is this? What needs to be removed? What is it that I negate? What kind of desire makes me bump? What do you do with this body? Head in clouds. How did I end up here? She doesn't know. She missed taking her place, failed to institute herself. Of course, she did. Now, too often, I seem to be in a place where I can't be, where something/someone else already is. While advancing (where to?), she walks away twice. I'm not very good at dodging. I like redundancy too much. I used to be better at finding my ways. Better at reality. Or an idea of it. More charming? Less incomplete/partial. Less cloudy. Better at placing myself. Knowing/Owning my position. Really? I want less reality, more ground. What or who gets real? And how do they do it? Do I fail to see because nobody watches?
Am I too caught up in the imaginary? Aloof? Who is not good enough? And for what or whom? I am clumsy, dull like a pedestrian. Don't know how to be in touch, move. I am where you can't be, but are. You are where I can't be, but am. Is the desire to “run into” something (what?) so big? Is this why the colours spill? She understands she needs to compromise somehow. Her body. What is/would be her proper place? I want to come back to you, and I always only come back to me. The problem is that I cannot place myself, and that you can't either. And that I know that now. What would be this place? Or is this an/the essential oddity when you really move, change? Do I? Am I on my way to something or someone? Or am I just impaired? My position might be of quite fragile nature, improvised still. Me, not supple enough. Not yet. What kind of threshold do I need to pass? What do I hold on to? She slowly walks backwards (again). What becomes of her? She imagined herself as an absence. She's loose. She's hesitant. She is too loud. How do you get ahead? She didn't wear glasses. She didn't listen. She listened. I want to catch what it is to listen between clouds. Not fall on a sentence. Or in a puddle. I learn that swim means someone that isn't me.
What did I expect?
Sometimes I'm surprised how many people know how to cross the street.
To bear the healthy tension between the imaginary and the symbolic is a hysterical problem, that she is not too comfortable to hold. Always missing the point, she's already there. There's no secret, obviously. It is, all is, more banal really, more banal than she wanted to know.
Recently, I started to take pictures of my feet/shoes touching the ground/floor. Wan action shots while walking. They remind me where I begin, and that my hands don't fan around in the air alone. As confirmation? To portray reason? In English like in German the word ground Grund has two meanings, it means ground and also reason, which is quite nice, quite calming somehow. It is good to have reasons, or think you do. To come down to something concrete. They save/hold you for a bit. Beneath/beside the worlds (or streets) of/for others.
In some scene in some series, I watch, someone says: When you pray for rain you gotta deal with the mud too.
I'm afraid of stagnation and immobility in others, and in me. Afraid of unpleasurable passivity. A certain ease or lifestyles in which all big questions seem to have been answered already, one's place been found or rather accepted, and one's own powerlessness more or less been taken on, make me gasp for air.
The smoke detectors would go off needing attention, needing someone to climb on a table tiptoeing to reach the now reddened button repeatedly because someone else forgot to switch off the fog machine again. We are smoking outside. I'm happy, spending New Year's Eve at this last minute self-organised party of friends in some foggy Salsa joint in Charlottenburg. There's enough space to dance and be seen while dancing as soon as the fog settles again. We dance. I'm wearing the wrong shoes, they stick a bit on this mirroring floor. I'm wearing Isa Genzken‘s lung x-ray t-shirt. J. who had already bought it before me said that it looks/works like a tie, and it does look/work like a tie. Still I don't work this room, ignore reality, again. It always seemed wrong to me to work at parties. Did I learn anything?
Her shoes are very green. Does she move forward? Does she feel her feet? How? What is forward? At Kottbusser Tor I take pictures of the shoes of a woman walking in front of me. I like them. Some grass green rubber ankle boots. Later, I find them online. They are and quite fittingly named Grass, describing the colour and their proper ground and called Puddle Boots. They are by Bottega Veneta. You could buy them for 620.- euros. You wouldn't slip. Though it doesn't rain. Not now, not at Kottbusser Tor. And there is no grass nor lawn anywhere near. To what am I near?
I show some of the pictures that came into being, while I was thinking about sublimation, and my last exhibition, the sadness in the figure of the hysteric, my problems with the symbolic, and reading and reality, and cereal again (to help with the real or at least with reality (food always invokes the body)) at 20 20 in Vienna. I put some of what I'm about to lose/gain (content?) in this text, the pictures don't have to carry that, though some of it I believe they do reflect in their very own (picture) way.
Muddy grass green Puddle Boots for 620.- euros at Kottbusser Tor.
What is a picture? What constitutes a picture? What does a picture know? And what when it's raining? And (now) it is. Listen.
I am interested in what quite literally or really comes out of a picture (or text). The pictures at 20 20 are porous, untenable. They bleed. I again “finger-painted” in Photoshop. As if they were wet still. They patiently leak colour in almost the same colour as in the pictures, become dank abstractions or partly or party?. The colours are withdrawn except in their attempt to leave the pictures. The pictures seem to eventually become monochromes, reductively monochrome, disappear into/onto themselves. Anyway, the bleeding colours assist to underline and subvert the pictures' flatness (and besides their agency).
Monochromes calm. How abstract am I? Or can you become? Colour follows me like language, when I step away from the pictures, dangling, gets caught as water colour at the window. Comes towards one. Comes down. I like redundancy and non-performances. Performances that are mundane, mere gestures, or very boring. Perhaps they too are trying to find their boundaries. Or are trying to reach (out), seduce. For a moment she thinks these lines might suggest something like tape or ribbon, a tape or a ribbon which is not yet attached to anything else. A wish to connect. Or they just fail, or refuse to hold what they're supposed to hold, or (I) think they do. Me?
I should have bought this sweatshirt with FUTURE written on it on sale (-70%) back in early 2020. A sentence I used already four years ago and one that becomes more and more suitable by the year or the older it gets.
Convergences (Annäherungen). Water colours of (my) closed ears that are shaped like ears only with some fantasy, especially the green one. Clouds that are standing upright (and might imply/be confused with potatoes as well, as J. points out and smiles). Monochromes that are not quite there, but close, and may be bleeding colour as well. Clouds appear in the introduction of Jamieson Webster's book Conversion Disorder, when she writes about knowledge. How knowing clouds the listening of the analyst. How expectations always get in the way. That Lacan with a nod to Aristophanes' play The Clouds said psychoanalysis takes place by listening between clouds. She knew nothing about clouds. When I'm tired, I still sometimes think people are just about to floss their teeth in the U-Bahn when they are getting out their wireless ear plucks. I'm not sure, I was that good at listening, even less between clouds. Often I didn't get what was suspended in them, too often, at least, not in time. Can you hide expectations in/behind clouds? Do you hear the rain then?
You can hear happiness in the calmness of a voice. Or glimpse it in someone's eyes following a butterfly. Begin here.
A landscape in portrait format, formally indicating downwards, like others before it. A picture of a butterfly wing, if you will. This one's almost monochrome, dull, drowns in itself, is drunk by itself. I am pretty taken with the elegant woman in this restaurant in Venice who has a butterfly as a pet. The butterfly wouldn't leave her sight. Circles her delicately, and frail. Pauses on her silky sleeves. Then circles her again, tenderly. Never flies away, never departs for more than half an arm's length (later I remember how you, in between everything, touched my face briefly or shy, almost flying by it, in the most tender way, that first night). Something does change in reality, becomes unknown, which makes her more silent, makes her soft. This butterfly really is on the side of reality, real. You see?
She knows nothing about clouds, 2024
Text accompanying the exhibition She knows nothing about clouds at 20 20, Vienna, 2024.