Art Bagua. Philosophy

In the beginning of this project there was the question about what art really is. Is there art on the internet, or is it only complicated technology with several aspects like in advertisement? Artwork shown on the internet is certainly the "object" of an "arts sale", but is this gallery art by itself? The great philosophers could not help me either answering these questions properly. After reading parts of the history of "western" and "eastern" philosophies (from Plato across Patanjali and Confucius up to Kant etc., etc.) I came to the conclusion that it is possible by no means to determine the notion "art" in a timeless and general way. However, I never had the view that every person is an artist - here I oppose Beuys. To me, a plastic artist is a person that manipulates things in a way that makes art out of them by doing which it is required to bring things into a context, to rethink and to explain them. In this manner, it is not enough to paint simply a picture or to build an abstract sculpture. The explanation of the creation and the created as well as the context just makes a statement possible about the world which we live in. To me, this matters - in another form - for a performing artist, too. I have made up my mind for plastic arts because I did not want to become an object as a person by myself. This website is the only clever alternative to a gallery for me, particularly because I cannot even afford a studio. Therefore it shows a little performance and presentation of my creative work in a running process of growing. As life develops, this website will develop.

Symbolic surrealism

The painting, photos, objects and texts shown on this website have a reference both to the real material world and to the dream world. What started in 1998 as intuitive painting, "ends" up now with the search for an art history reference, which I´m continuing with the Surrealists and abstract art at the time. However, projecting the experienced of (day-) dream and vision to a sheet of paper, to materials like wood, stone, metal or linen is not my aim. In the example of the painting "Doorways/Eyes ear" you see an entrance for two symbolically descripted areas of perception, and yet you can see many things in this picture, slightly similar to a Rorschach-test, including your own psychic constitution. The photos play with perception, too. View, sharpness, distortion: we do not see as sharp as you can take a photo, but our perception is more comprehensive. We are at the beginning of the 21st century like the first Surrealists were at the beginning of the 20th century. At that time new technologies and theories conquered the world and accelerated the way of human living. Nowadays this is not a different thing. And in these days it changes our "dream world", too, even if some things on principle remained the same, like playing the Didgeridoo or arranging linen. Even though language has changed, human mankind does not forget the roots - and that´s one of the reasons why I develop an editor for one of the oldest languages of the world - Sanskrit - including the design of an analysis-program for grammatical forms. However, like everything on this website it is only to perceive in an artistic context. The program is not implicitly intended to fulfil special rules or ideal conceptions but just to make or manipulate Sanskrit - texts and analyze their components. Therefore the context is procreation of both multiple levels and multiple meanings through shortness and simplicity. In accordance with this context are besides Sanskrit also some devices, programming languages and user interfaces. A "Bagua" was indeed ideal to show these correlations because it can practically explain our world to a certain extent, not only as a block of numbers on the telephone. Here you can realize that something old not really has to be "stale" or solitary.

Art, history and future

Truly reconciling the obviously irreconcilable probably hasn´t been a success for anybody yet. There may be utopistic novels that are about time travels but officially no human has been doing that until today. The past and the future stay separate, a human probably couldn´t cope with space without time. Our “time travels” are limited to the linear life until our death. Even if humans fly into space or bend space, they are subject to space and time, definitely. Not just because of this interstellar space travel has been staying an adventure of the genre science fiction officially. However, the facts of science could not put a stop to fantasy and art of human kind until today. Therefore, it is of special interest for me to get close to the omnipresent natural sciences with arts connected to history. I could express some of my conclusions from the history of the architects of the pyramids in Egypt with modern tools relating to trade artistic, too. I have transformed the inspiration by Gene Rodenberry´s “Star Trek” in a direct context with Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A space odyssey” and several different visions of the future of civilizations into a prototype for water research. The prototype is both an artistic sculpture and a scientific apparatus. Strangely enough, the procedure that is not really scientific results in astonishing synergy effects. The Fibonacci numbers and the golden cut are as immanent in all used products for the assembling as the theories of Einstein and Heisenberg. What professional scientists might affect disconcertingly, I dare to start as synthesis of art and science. Art and science have one very important common ground: They ask questions. It are the questions of art and science that drive millions of artists and scientists on the planet earth to continue their work. Even I as an autodidact can present images of my works with little money and no classic gallery or classic art business to any interested party in the world having Internet access and a pc with the Internet as a medium. I enjoy leaving the question if the human civilization has really reached the better future it has been striving for – inspired and thrilled by Stanislaw Lem – as an open discussion topic.

Abstraction and Postmodernism

The linguistic definition of art as a process and product of creation designed by humans escorts me to abstraction, that is defined itself at times as inductive thought process of leaving out separate parts and transference to something more general or simple. At this fictive place of thoughts I find postmodernism, that wants to be the future in a certain way of desperation as a creative product, that wants to overcome the believed despotism of modernism. It takes effect as relativism in the alternative to the totalitarian principle of modernism. To me, this is necessary to abstract now. As a result of postmodernism, a relativist state at all times, that changes its spin like an elementary particle, but never oscillates between two states. Postmodernism as the future in the present, the immanence of forms and events in forms and events, fluctuates like a state of knowledge. But yet, it can be considered impassively as a sequence of events, even as sequence of 9 192 631 770 events every second by the natural philosopher. The oscillations of atoms can clarify a term of abstraction and subjectivism. In my painting, science can be found in the pigments of copper and iron, whose traces and interactions can only be shown with special imaging methods. This is where the invisibility of an abstraction originates that can only become visible as a potential by explaining words.

Correlation and Causation

A spark of an electrostatic discharge unfolded itself to me in the view of a metal installation. The correlation between the charge of my clothes and the discharge on the metal did not just reveal the causes of the discharge, but the properties of two bodies in an inertial system. Yet, as short as the existence of electric fields revealed for humans, their effect in the correlation is permanent. The spark sticks in memory in the frequent view of the clear starry sky, too. If stars still exist that are visible to the unaided eye of humans, remains an uncertainty, the view into the starry sky remains a view into the past. The cause of the light phenomenon, it could have been disappeared a long time ago, though the light phenomenon could reach near places longer than the life cycle of the solar system. The crackle of the electrostatic discharge finds its way into auditory canals and causes many microscopic electrochemical processes in human cells, while the individual does not even know scarcely the dimension of interactions with the elementary particle at the spot of the discharge. That is how the sculpture enters a specialized electric correlation with the bodies and the inertial system. The cause of the correlation keeps as fluctuating as the correlation itself. The point when appearance happens is not just a question of agitation and attention of persons, but a paradigmatic event for the unimaginable amount of potentials in the universe. Was it just the so-called potential “curiosity” in me and the consciousness about static electricity that caused the view into the clear starry sky? The determination of freedom can be understood by eternity and infinity from a view to the atomic definition of a second, two poetic but helpless concepts that elucidate the superhuman. The question if the art object “Water Research Prototype Nr. 2” causes a causation beyond any local correlation in the dielectric could neither be answered with physics nor with the fantasy of the artist yet. What remains is amazement and humility for the size of the universe and its forces.