Father Klaudius Winz, OSB
Dear Ladies and Gentlemen,
When the first railways began operations in the mid-19th century, the press was full of warnings against using this new mode of transport, suggesting that the enormous speed of about 40 kilometers per hour would rob travelers of their sanity and lead them to madness.
Since then, our perceptions of what drives one to madness have fundamentally changed. The acceleration of the world has become the hallmark of progress, extending not only to mobility but also to economic processes and general communication. Selective perception has turned into a survival strategy, as texts and images flood in, casting their nets over our eyes and ears.
Humans lag behind their capabilities because they have been accustomed to standing on two legs since the Stone Age, which can only support them to a limited extent. The eye roams and registers more than the brain can store, overwhelming the intellect. Advertising profits from this phenomenon, as split-second commercials are injected into evening television films, just long enough to be lodged in the subconscious. Ethical commissions cry out, and humanity devours itself.
One might misunderstand this discourse as a lament in an overly dark time, forcing us to learn whether we like it or not, but Sigmund Freud was likely right in stating that all learning begins on the blank chalkboard of a cave wall, ever since humanity fell out of nature.
The discomfort with culture is structural because it drives the human species from boundary to boundary and grants it little opportunity to catch its breath unless it permits itself to do so. Regression whispers the pessimist, niche culture says the cynic. However, the coexistence of different speeds may give meaning to acceleration, argues the optimist, who does not elevate the intoxication of acceleration to a Bacchanalian religion, to idolatry of the faith in progress.
Hermann Staudinger has taken the effort to savor different speeds. Stays in New York, Morocco, or Nepal have sharpened his view of rhythms, tempos, and subtle crescendos. The native of Schwanenstadt trained as a graphic artist in Vienna at the University of Applied Arts and has, as he puts it, clarified his own position. The titles of his exhibitions repeatedly reflect this search for position; “Journey to the Sources,” “I Am,” “We Are,” “Healing,” or “Fulfilled” mirror the wonder of a position. These are pendulum swings of breathing that bind themselves not merely to the atomized self, but place humanity within its social conditions, in the calm of being part of a whole.
This happens with Staudinger partly through the locus iste of his presentation, marking locations in the working world contrasted with the distinct tempos of sleeping dogs, for example, as shown today. What occurs in a hectic office when people, for whom stress seems to have become normal, encounter a street dog that doesn’t even know how to spell the word stress? A being that can simply sleep amidst the heat and dust of a southeastern metropolis becomes a metaphor for a counter-design, a question mark to the dogma of stress. Whose time is fulfilled—the dog's or the stressed person’s, or are they together representatives and incarnations of a single existence?
Such questions stand for a slowed-down view of life and its perception. Here, seemingly contradictory snapshots become spellable. This also happens in the deception of the materiality of his drawings: his cloud images from the 90s replicate hastily taken photos composed of a series of differently dense circles. The grain as a product of a phototechnical process is not only made visible but is inverted in manual reproduction into a meditative stroll through what seems to be meaningless detail, which only becomes conscious through methodical shifts in perspective.
The interchangeability of reproduced speed and painstakingly tracing slowness becomes nowhere more shimmering and chameleonic than in the application of this technique as grattage, where tracing the points manifests as an injury.
These are newspaper images that testify to the speed of everyday media operations, quickly shot, quickly selected by the editorial team, and quickly skimmed by readers to become nothing more than yesterday's news and end up in the trash can.
Do such images only violate the golden aura of the divine, or are they, in fact, a bold thesis, part of that divine that holds and carries all existence, even and especially in its apparent banality or its sensational drama of daily importance?
For Staudinger, the exploration of the effect of gold as a material has been a topic for more than seven years, guiding him in various directions. His forums, empty, gilded frames, shine and illuminate the surroundings, forming a courtyard with the background or wall space that becomes occupied. The shape of the stadium seating of an interchangeable arena is illuminated and reflected by the glow of the spectator stands in the literal sense of the word. Communication and its media are staged here, shimmering like the material itself. Elevation and importance, inversion of perception, and shifts in perspective form a tangible symbiosis that invites the viewer to reflect themselves in this staging as a question mark.
No definite concept is proclaimed as truth here; instead, the grounding of traversing, the manual slowness in reversing production processes serves as a control mechanism, one could also say as an imposed exercise in humility for the all-too-quick spirit, the dangers of which we all know too well yet have not learned to cope with in such a way that we are not dominated by them.
The art of survival may lie in learning enough humility that we occasionally slow down our steps, as well as our eyes and words. We would then have the chance to truly understand words like acceleration and perceive their claims relativized, with the maturity of that distance from which reality does not simply consume us, but makes us more adaptable. The reactions to the tsunami in the Indian Ocean have frighteningly demonstrated how little the Western-shaped person has learned so far. The more important he takes himself, the more ridiculous he becomes.
This exhibition may contribute to learning a little more about this.