Thoughts & Insights

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.

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?