How is your carpet?

Accompanying text to the exhibition in the project space Streitfeld

An object has a complex essence. In perception, it does not prove to be an independent, autonomous form of existence. It cannot be separated from other sensory areas or from the entire embodiment of the human being. Since people live, i.e. act in situations, it is obvious that objects cannot be separated from their social relation to action. In language we can assign them a concrete form, a texture, and this ordering speech is based on a common reading, a common sense. Objects always provoke whole situations and the corresponding intentions. We see external things from the perspective of the human activities that can be carried out in, with or on them.

Now the external world of formed matter is also a big book of images. Images are applied to external things as forms. Or they are taken up by things.

The place of all images, however, is within us. The brain processes visual information and creates inner images that can be modified, but overall have their origin in seeing, in the image on the retina of the eye.

A painting creates a world entirely of its own. Even abstract paintings contain numerous forms that are similar to the real world. It is the whole picture, its movement. The painting itself is a process: a painting is always a draft of being.

Paul Cezanne says: You see a picture immediately, or you never see it. The explanations serve nothing. Now there are only colours and in them clarity, the “being”.

However, pictures remain indissolubly entangled in the overall physical and social reality of people. That is why they are always as much “speaking” themselves as they are open to interpretation. The meaning of an image, however it may be actualised individually as a feeling, through associations and memories, has a social dimension. There is no separate being of an image that is identical with itself. Whether an image means something is decided in the life-world context.
And what the image means to us always remains embedded in numerous bodily functions: Sense of touch, feeling, even smell.

Images as well as objects always move in this way, potentially activating all sensory areas. One cannot separate the eye from the brain, the brain from the body, the body from its actions and finally its embedding in social processes.
processes.
We associate experiences with things. Experiences become memories, memories become images.

But we humans are creatively acting in the world. The definition of a thing is constantly being created anew in our actions, in our communication, in our dealings with each other. It arises from our being-in-the-world, as Heidegger put it, which is much more than just a causal connection of biological processes. It is the possibility of linking image and thing in external action to a common language in a narrative.

This project was supported within the framework of the scholarship programme of the Free State of Bavaria. Young Art and New Ways.