Being There, Exhibition in Public Space, Linz 1996 Excerpt from the Catalog
A person, an individual, does not consist of a single closed unit, but rather of 103 individuals who complement each other when speaking, thinking, communicating, joking together, and interrupting one another.
I am reminded of Canetti's autobiography, in which he talks about his view of the Narrenturm and the characters he recognizes in that perspective and communicates with. For him, this outward projection was delineated in the number of 7 different individuals, but in reality, there are 103. Education, the adaptation to the dominant conception of reality, the morality of society, leads us to discard some of these possibilities and to excessively force other parts of our personality.
Then, one day, you wake up and notice that your path has come to an end because you have settled on a single personality, entrusted leadership to one person, and not listened to the advice of others.
Many people manage with relatively few characters; it doesn’t take many to carry out daily work and routines, to lift a woman, and to care for children. As an artist, as a person endowed and gifted by God with talents, I have the task of expanding and expressing my horizon as much as possible. When a friend told me yesterday, "Stay grounded!", I forbade myself any further remarks of this kind.
A person, the spirit of a person, is born to fly, and anyone who denies this is a damned liar! Back to the artist’s task: they must stretch the edge of the world, the edge of the disc, as far as possible to pave the way for others to live; to show that life is not as limited as we are often led to believe (for reasons of governance and manipulation). We have a task, so let us take it up, let’s get to work; we don’t have much time left!
So please: let us not get lost in formal playfulness and questions of good taste; let us forget about that part of the Viennese school that all too eagerly exhausts itself in sweet superficial allure. Let us dare to leap out of our ivory tower (we can fly, after all), expose yourself.
Our talents are gifts, and they are meant to be shared and grow when we give them away. Artists: keep going! Yes, and of course: let’s not forget humor: it spices up our often miserable existence as a flake on the hair of the world.
Burp.
Magic Summer of ’90. Love, Hermann