A palm tree extends its full length, from the root ball to the tips of its fronds, diagonally across an appropriately sized exhibition space. Anselm Kiefer has called this impressive installation “Palm Sunday”.
Since Plato at the latest, we have been asking ourselves what we actually see when we look at things that are of this world. Which of the things that make up our image of the world exist independently of what we actively perceive; that is when we are awake? And what happens when we are sleeping?
Hardly anything else determines our lives and also our attitudes towards life as much as this thing we call time. It is therefore all the more difficult to imagine that there was once a time when there was not even a name for what we refer to as time today.
What does a human being feel when looking at a piece of art? What thoughts, associations, and emotions does it stir up? These are the questions the MINDKISS Project have been researching in different ways for ten years now. An entirely new path has opened up for the project’s Art of Resonance Show, which recently premiered in Leipzig.
After a five year break, the MINDKISS Project is now moving on to the next stage. From 28 October to 8 November OUBEYs Art in the Digital Resonance Space will be premiered in Germany. In September this year the presentation already wowed visitors to the Science&Fiction/Science&Art festival in Moscow. So just more trendy surfing on the zeitgeist wave? Far from it.
In a conversation on 25 November 1991 OUBEY was asked what piece of music he would be, if he was a piece of music at all. He promptly answered: “Take A Pebble – By Emerson, Lake and Palmer, 1970.”
Over the past ten years since it’s been active in the public eye, the MINDKISS Project has constantly sought out untrodden paths and unexplored territory in its efforts to bring OUBEYs art to the attention of people everywhere in the world. And now in the tenth year of the project – which is actually its fifteenth – all the signs point to its embarking on a highly promising next stage.
When the astronomer Dr. Cecilia Scorza of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg first encountered OUBEYs painting Einstein’s Tears, what she saw in it was an image of the very early stages of our universe over 13 billion years ago when matter began to form, the first galaxies began to take shape and light was created. When she had shown all this and explained it by reference to the painting, she added “That’s a daring take, a very daring take.” What did she mean by this? What did she find so daring about this painting?
The question of the spirit that inhabits and animates us humans is one that has been asked since the dawn of time. And on the Whitsunday of such a momentous year as this – and we haven’t even seen the half of it – it’s one that is being aired with a particular urgency – not just by those who know and understand the meaning of this day.
Times of uncertainty like those we’ve been going through in the past weeks and months and that are set to last for a very long time across the whole world call for all our skills and abilities, all our strengths and all our senses. A state of extreme emergency such as the world has long not seen. Dynamic complexity in full flight. And what’s at stake here is nothing less than what we have always held to be most dear in our lives – life itself.
Even today I can still well remember the excitement and enthusiasm with which OUBEY, back in the summer of 1985, talked about the presentation of a revolutionary new computer with – for that time – unheard of multimedia capability in the ritzy setting of New York’s Lincoln Center. The computer was the Commodore Amiga 1000, and it was presented by no other than Andy Warhol together with Blondie lead singer Debbie Harry. How dearly OUBEY would have loved to own his own Amiga back then.
Can you remember something you’ve never seen? And if you can, how can that be possible? These are questions I asked myself for the first time when a young girl once came out with the astonishing statement that some of OUBEYs pictures reminded her of things she’d never seen. After I’d pondered her words and the phenomenon they describe for quite a while I came to the conclusion that yes, indeed you can – provided that you get away from the usual everyday meaning of the two concepts of remembrance and seeing.
Why does someone want to be an artist? What drives him or her to look inside themselves and want to or indeed have to create something called art? And how do they cope with such a form of life, because that’s what it is, a separate form of life? What distinguishes artists – apart from their special gifts – from all the other people who might love art but live in a completely different world to those who actually create it?
A wafer-thin membrane envelops our globe. We call it the Earth’s atmosphere. It protects us from the lethal rays of the Universe whilst letting through the life-giving beams of the central star in our solar system. It’s a unique composition of incalculable value created by the very agency that hasn’t exactly shown itself to be terribly friendly to human beings – the Universe. It’s a gift.
Over 500 years ago a number of courageous men of science put forward the momentous world-changing assertion that “And yet it does move”. By this they meant the earth. Such a view filled the potentates of the church of that time with horror and dismay. They believed that the Erth and mankind were the crowning glory in the divine scheme of things and thus must stand at the very centre of the universe. And they would bitterly persecute anyone who dared contradict them.
It took millions of years of evolutionary development before, some 35,000 years ago, our ancestors began to paint the walls of caves at Chauvet, Lascaux, Altamira and a great many other places in Europe and North Africa, caves where they sought protection from enemies at night and shelter from bad weather during the day. With only the most elementary means they created their wall paintings to eternalise what moved them, what they seen and lived through and what seemed so important to them that they had to commemorate it in images.
Imagine a spaceship one kilometer long and 20 tons in weight just starting on its journey to a planet similar to our Earth in a solar system four and a half light years or 40 trillion kilometers away from our home planet, 700,000 times further from our Earth than the planet Mars. Planned duration of the journey: 50 years. Object and purpose: to find out if there really is extra-terrestrial life on this Earth-like planet. Is this just some crazy fantasy? Pure science-fiction? No, quite the reverse.
There are moments when chance and destiny touch for the fraction of a second. These are the moments of universal creation, change, decay and death for all things. Moments of perfect being-at-one with everything. Moments in which chance and destiny become a single whole.
“Being an artist means not reckoning and counting, but ripening like the tree which does not force its sap and stands confident in the storms of spring, without the fear that after that will come no summer. It does come. But it comes only to the patient who are there as though eternity laid for them. So unconcernedly, still and wide. I learn it daily, learn it with pain for which I am grateful. Patience is everything.”
In the last one hundred years, our knowledge of the cosmos, our world, and what happens in it, and our understanding of ourselves as part of life in this world and this universe, has expanded enormously. And in the last thirty years the rate at which we acquire new knowledge has grown at a breath-taking speed. All this has changed our view of the world and ourselves. Yet, even so, our consciousness still finds it difficult to grapple with the implications of what this newly acquired knowledge means and to adequately assimilate them.
Ever since our species first became sedentary, the creation and construction of stone monuments and purpose-built buildings has formed part of every culture. Many testimonials to human prowess in architecture from antiquity are still standing today and remind us of the astonishing achievements of our ancestors across the whole world – from the pyramids of Egypt and the temples of the Babylonians, Greeks and Romans to the gigantic statues on Easter Island and the ring of standing stones at Stonehenge.
When excavations in prehistoric caves unearthed a flute which palaeontologists dated as some 30,000 years old, it was apparent that not just fascinating cave paintings but the productions of sounds from such instruments as flutes was already part of the repertoire of cultural techniques possessed by our ancestors.
Humans trust in their senses. We tend to believe what we see and to hold what we don’t see for non-existent. We tend to hear what is loud and overhear what is quiet. We tend to assume that what is big or appears big is important, powerful and even threatening – as the case may be. We tend to take whatever is small as insignificant and harmless.
No one can see the wind. Wind is an invisible but extremely potent force. It shows its power in the far reaches of the universe just as on our planet by moving and transforming.
The mariners of former centuries steered huge sailing ships across the oceans of this world. They were experts in the wind and knew how to set their sails to extract maximum effect from its power.
