Selig sind die Zeiten, für die der Sternenhimmel
die Landkarte der gangbaren und zu gehenden Wege ist
1
I have long awaited and then keenly followed the current uncovering of an early wall painting by GR
in the Hygienemuseum in Dresden. Due to the painting being in a figurative style following socialist
realist doctrine, GR has disavowed the work and it had remained overpainted for decades, even after
the so-called re-unification. Unearthing someones early work like some kind of archaeological
wonder while they are still alive and also against their expressed wishes is some wild shit, and I
personally am here for it, and when I say here, I mean that in the sense of the seminal comic book
Here by Richard McGuire, who is btw also the bass player for Liquid Liquid.
The wall painting turned out to be quite disappointing.
I’m trying to structure this text in my head while my father and me re-arrange the soil and
flowers on the family plot (wherein my mother now rests and which, by coincidence, is
also the title of Hitchcocks last movie) into a temporary order, just enough to
keep up appearances, to not be judged by the rest of the village for neglecting our duties.
Back in high school I wrote a text debating if either GR or my then-idol Neo Rauch was
better suited to design a church window, and in what at the time felt to me like subjecting
myself to some kind of masochist/maoist self-critique, I had to conclude that GR
window slapped more, that it banged more then Rauchs stupid window.
My current position is that both of those windows do the job.
There are just black holes
Where the stars would be watching
2
Tobias getting turned down by Städelschule made me think of my friend AT who had wanted to
attend the same film school once attended by Tarkovsky (VGIK) but had to settle for the Rodchenko
Art School.
While we were walking together along the Moskva near Zurab Tsereteli’s infamous statue of
Peter the Great (originally designed as a monument for Columbus but repurposed by the artist after it
was turned down by various american cities), my friend AT told me that Kabakhov (RIP), while
much more famous, was actually less interesting than Bulatov (or was it the other way around, I
can’t remember), in the same way that Polke (RIP) was less famous but actually better than GR
(according to AT).
The debunked Kulturbegriff of 19th century bourgeoisie with its conceptions about painters schools
and what an Art Academy is preserved like the dauphins small,
withered and shrunken heart in the crystal jar of stalinist cultural politics and post-soviet societies;
modernism sentenced to the same fate as those fancy commodities on the shelves of Parisian
department stores that brought Rodchenko to tears, as if those objects were his friends imprisoned.
Speaking of crystal jars: I still care about glass stuff, I still care about my collection of Stalin-era
гранёный стакан, but more in the way Robert de Montesquiou cared about the glassware of Émile
Gallé, if you fellers catch my drift.
Just black holes
Where the stars should have been
In the Kaufbeuren market square there are stones in the pavement commemorating various famous
people connected to the town in some way, and for Hans Magnus Enzensberger (who was also still alive at the time I noticed this) they had a stone that read „Hans Magnus Enzensberger, born 1929“,
followed by the usual dash and then a neat, blank space.
I saw the stone when I went to see an exhibit of drawings by Wesley Willis and Henry Darger at the
local museum with my mother, who was then alive and is now dead, and who has been born and died
within the lifespan of Gerhard Richter, as if GR was that redwood tree from Vertigo and my mother
was famous actress Kim Novack, or rather, the whole history of humanity, spawning, climaxing and
disappearing within the life span of some big-ass tree who absolutely refuses to take notice.
Deshalb haben die seligen Zeiten keine Philosophie