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nothing

nothing

some people say depression is night, but night it is not as it is nothing. some say it is darkness but darkness is smooth and depression cuts with a blunt knife.

some assert depression is descent but it has no direction. some people say” i have it” but really but it can’t be had, it can only have you. some people say they came out of it but you can’t come out of it for it is rooted deep inside you.

some claim that it is an enemy but an enemy it is not, it is you yourself in a cunning disguise and with your own voice reverberating through the hollows of your brain that whoever you are, whatever you do will amount to – nothing.

so. why.even.try.

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Monsters everwhere

Monsters everwhere

While taking walks I usually pay attention to the marginal ways people express themselves in public. “Marginal” in the sense that one cannot identify a specific purpose to an expression nor the reason somebody had to feel compelled to make such a public, albeit anonymous statement. This picture was taken in a wooded area near to Hamburg. The original sign reads “nature preserve” (Landschafts-Schutzgebiet) and the symbol chosen to communicate the idea is a stylized black owl. I have noticed that these signs seem to be attracting alterations wherever they are displayed. It’s funny, considered that they are only found pretty much out of the sight of urban traffic.

It’s a bit mysterious to me. What is it that the sign communicates (despite the sober, original administrative message)? What triggers the desire to change it? Is it the way the owl stares at the viewer with yellow (paper-cut like) eyes?

The changes mostly interpret or exaggerate the original monster like quality of the cut out owl. Here someone actually spray painted a monster on top of the owl, completely obscuring the original symbol. It seems not too far fetched to state that the simple anthropomorphic quality of the monster points back to the very origin of art, the moment when humans started to express themselves with symbols.

As Mircea Eliade has observed in his work “The Sacred and the Profane”, even in the modern world we pay witness to a deeply ingrained “mythical” comprehension of the world by reacting to triggers. The world through human eyes is “fraught” with religious value, or at least with “meaning” in the sense of an offer of communication not necessarily only between people but also between people and nature, people and the inanimate world, people and the perceived reality of an order of their world that they must adhere to to give their own lives value and meaning.

Could it be that the character of this sign inadvertently triggers such a response? And that the response is rendered in just the same language? Artist’s musings, for sure …

I have often been asked why monsters are a recurring theme in my work. Obviously there is not one answer to that question. Sometimes it’s their naivety and friendly, childlike celebration of the world that attracts me. But I have done other more serious monsters. And I feel that one underlying theme might be a response not unlike these anonymous signs. Though I do not paint on traffic signs …

Just to round this up: I have also seen the signs and the little owl creature changed through weather and sunlight, resulting in faded or partially peeling paint. And in the midst of these beautiful alterations the little owl changes character, always peeking out at the world and talking about time and change … Seems that nature itself takes pleasure in participating in this game …

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Monstrous Spelling Mechanism / Zen practice of giving thanks to a teacher

Monstrous Spelling Mechanism / Zen practice of giving thanks to a teacher

Art is time travel, no question. I didn’t know I still carried this monster around – but here it is. I learned how to read pretty early, before school, scanning my grandfather’s newspaper and imitating the strange throat clearing sounds he produced every now and then while reading. It was quite literally his newspaper, he was a co-publisher of some small town daily newspaper, back in the days when they were still independent.

Anyhow, reading and drawing quickly grew into something alike to breathing and running around for me. Imagine my bewilderment when in first grade I discovered that someone had torn all the words apart and stuck them into a strange primer expecting me to study each one of them separately. I decided not wanting to have anything to do with it and skipped to the end of the book where most letters founds themselves tidily arranged back to sensible words and stories.

I was quickly found out though by our teacher who then consulted with my mother, complaining about my absolute messy reading habits (being able to read but not to practice sound exercises with random letter-combinations). The following week she caught me with a book under the table again – and I still refused to fill out the worksheet according to the primer. We were at war. She took away my book and I kept busy studying the colophon in the reading primer.

Before you give me credit for my precocious rebellious behavior I have to admit that I plain did not understand what was expected of me, and for some reason the teacher had such a vague personality that I found it incredibly hard to focus my attention on that pale, almost transparent if upset presence who did not stop elaborating on how I was not supposed to read what I hadn’t been taught to read. It seemed to me that I could see the squiggles on the chalkboard behind her – through her. I could literally look right through her. It was a mess.

At home my mother followed up on my homework assignments and had me fill the lines of my notebook with squiggles and squabs. It was monstrous, it really was. I had absolutely no clue what I was doing and why. My mother meticulously instructed me how to fill a page with doodles, then she left me to it. When she left the room I took out a book and read instead. There were tears that night.

I don’t know what would have happened had we not moved to a new suburb. I got a new teacher who very nice about my keeping a book under the table and even encouraged me to put it on the table instead. While in the first school my teacher had insisted on my using the phonetic approach which was still brand new back then to acquire a skill I already possessed, in my new school I was allowed to spell with the whole word sight system which happened to be the way my reading comprehension just happened to work anyways.

Later I did learn to take the words apart, by the way. Today I am the master of the monstrous spelling mechanism. I wonder if the second elementary school teacher ever knew that she was a life saver. Thank you, Frau Bock.