Fouad Asfour
Some things you lose, some things you give away, schlebrügge.editor, Vienna 2007.
Beauty lies in the eye of another’s dreams
It is like being in a flowing, continually changing space, in which I sometimes can see
myself from outside, sometimes from within. The direction of a narrative can be
changed, like with painting. There is no direction given except the direction in which I
am going. And wherever I go, space and the surroundings emerge, then turning around
I find something completely different.
The structures of language function according to an inherent logic, but the preconditions
for a lived reality and the endless levels of its perception make an entirely adequate use
of language impossible. Language cannot be scientifically measured, and any
interpretation of statements in language, depending on the framework in which they
arise, is an intimate affair.
Enter the countless directions of perception which are always accompanied by a feeling.
Like the film score of the world, feelings bind time and space to what takes place during
cognitive processes. Language connects these two realms, making a procedural
exploration of the world practicable. At the same time, language produces the
opposition between the inside and outside, in language Joseph Conrad’s reverie
becomes our “heart of darkness,” an image which by itself comes into being when
encountering the Other. What are the effective agents when differentiation is at stake,
when it is a question of the inside and the outside? To say, “I know, or I don’t know”
involves an augmentation of pleasure. In Sigmund Freud’s Jokes and their Relation to
the Unconscious we read: “It seems to be generally agreed that the rediscovery of what
is familiar, ‘recognition’, is pleasurable. Groos (Die Spiele der Menschen, 1899, pg. 153)
writes: ‘Recognition is always, unless it is too much mechanized (as, for instance, in
putting on one’s clothes…), linked with feelings of pleasure. (…) If the act of recognition
thus gives rise to pleasure, we might expect that mankind would start to exercise this
capacity for its own sake – that is, would experiment with it in play. And in fact Aristotle
regarded joy in recognition as the basis of the enjoyment of art, and it cannot be
disputed that this principle should not be overlooked, even if it does not possess such
far-reaching significance as Aristotle attributes to it.’ Groos goes on to discuss games
whose characteristic lies in the fact that they intensify the joy in recognition by putting
obstacles in its way – that is to say, by creating a ‘psychical damming-up’, which is
destroyed in the act of recognition. His attempt at an explanation, however, abandons
the hypothesis that recognition is pleasurable in itself, since, by referring to these
games, he is tracing back the enjoyment of recognition to a joy of power, a joy in the
overcoming of a difficulty. I regard the latter factor as secondary, and I see no reason to
depart from the simpler view that recognition is pleasurable in itself – i.e., through
relieving psychical expenditure – and that the games founded on this pleasure make use
of the mechanisms of damming-up only in order to increase the amount of such
pleasure.”1
Read to me your pictures, let me see what you are writing, what are you thinking
anyway – should I try to think for you? This is not going to be a text which will offer a
neat explanation of Katrin’s paintings. Wouldn’t it perhaps be better to conceive of
traditional, academic art history as a kind of European ethnography? When I look at
pictures, I can either empathize with them or perhaps read them, but everybody is able
to make this choice for themselves. Which texts should be read in reference to art, is, of
course, determined by the respective academic discipline and its traditional discourse.
Reality is not allowed to get too close to the feeling, and I have never seen it work the
other way around either. For those who actually get caught up in reading historical
reflections on art theory, this usually ends in distant contemplation. At the same time,
feelings can consume you when standing in front of artworks, and this happens so fast
that there is no way to introduce any kind of deliberate or detailed contemplation into
the process. Are emotions organs of perception, like the sense of sight, hearing, smell or
touch? Or are they closer to commentary? How is it anyway: do you hear something
when you read, or feel something when you smell? What does it taste like to look at
pictures? Does perception cross-modally unfold through experience, is it possible to be
turned on and off like the volume or bass dial on an amplifier? When, for example, one
thinks about how pictures come to being in dreams, then it appears as though there is
more to it than the film version of a “library of what has already been seen.” It is much
more the case that something new comes into being through the fact that feelings
become the images that we see, and feelings explicated through stories no doubt also
function as captions for these images. Stories provide the context and evoke the next
image. Every text can stimulate an abundance of images in me. And in Katrin’s paintings
precisely this occurs, they are not pictures of something, but rather pictures that lead to
something. While I allege to construct a reality through my vision, her painting directs
me back to myself. In this movement, the image comes into being for itself. Katrin’s
work remains precisely between this movement and that which is produced by vision.
She does not work with paints but rather with the feeling that leads to the point where
an image is created. In much the same way that stories, encounters or situations
emerge when one recognizes something without knowing precisely what it is. In my
parents’ house there is a picture by Matisse hanging on the wall that shows a table with
a goldfish bowl on top of it. My mother copied it from a postcard and I have known the
picture for as long as I can remember. It was never completely finished and the white of
the canvas pops out from behind the form of the goldfish.
“… I agree with you that no culture, no closed form of living appears to me to be
enviable. The more porous forms of living are, the more possible it is for the true
conditions to shine through. In the end I am an anarchist, albeit skeptical enough to
regard actual anarchism as a distortion of what it is supposed to mean. What today is
understood and sought after with the notion of “community” is pure mythology, which
reckons that it is possible to come to a consensus with the inclusion of nature, idolizing
its form. The notion of the community is constructed based on the contrary notion of
“society,” which, although it does dissolve man’s natural attachments, it does not bring
about the real human, but rather the reified one. The dream, the most extreme
determination of true anarchism is an ‘association of free men,’ as Marx said. If one
challenges these words as much as they deserve to be challenged, then one arrives at a
norm through them, from which the notions of the community and society can be
subjected to critique. Neither the cultural, historically developed entity, nor societal
organization can be tolerated from the point of view of this norm. The more holes and
gaps, the more undisguised is the perspective. The question is only as to if and how the
movement towards the kind of reality propagated by anarchism might be possible. Here,
because I am believer, I sense a great disbelief not unlike Kafka’s, and it seems to me
as though the truth in reality will always lie precisely at the point, where we just
disagreed with each other.” (Siegfried Kracauer in a letter to Ernst Bloch, June 1926)
When I look in the direction of Besucher aus dem Hier, I first have the vague feeling
that I am not welcome in front of this canvas. The gazes look out at me without
interest, uninvolved, neither defensive nor hostile, more neutral, watching and waiting.
“Look there. What brought you here, how did these people fall into this picture? Did
anybody notice?” I move a little bit to one side, “What are you looking at, what boat
dropped you off here anyway?” Regarding this picture feels more like being discovered,
but precisely as if one’s own presence, stance and way of thinking were being called into
question. “Why so anxious, why so insecure?” It is also an inquiry into what is the
appropriate way of thinking, into what constitutes the here and now that is in the air. It
directs one’s attention to one’s actions in front of the picture evoking the question “What
am I doing here?”, and this does not come from any kind of preconceived consideration.
Directly following this, the question: “And why would you say that now, is that
important, don’t you know where you belong, where the space is in which you can act,
in which you are effective, where your ideas can be realized?”
Here the raw canvas, the holes which emerge through the movement of the paintbrush
on the canvas leaving out some places, making a void before one’s perception visible.
The monstera plant comes to mind, which, by the way, I find to be an excellent
metaphor for modernity. Regarding the form of the leaves, one might think about how
they could reflect an aspect of western modernity. There is always an exotic element in
photographs of modernistic rooms: the African mask, the cactus or some other kind of
orpine family shrubbery. I truly believe that our perception of such spaces has been
influenced by these elements. Empty places everywhere you look, blank spots on the
map. Why is the world war called a world war? Wasn’t it for the most part the western,
imperialistic industrial nations that were doing everything they could to make each
other’s cities uninhabitable, after they had divided up the world into markets? A largescale
endeavor towards modernization, which now is finally surpassed by the
deterritorialized war that takes place mostly in our heads. And wasn’t it during this
period of disenchantment of the world that orientalism as something mysterious and
beautiful was called on in order to come to terms with the traumatic experience of
modernization, the horror of industrialization? Meanwhile the rest of the world watched
on as the world war developed before their eyes. This can be seen in Satyajit Ray’s films
in which one sees that the world was still a village in which nothing had changed before
the postwar period which burst into their lives with the effects of world war finally
wreaking their destructive powers in the “heart of darkness.”
Maybe it is time to learn to think of the world differently, as one critically looking back
into history in a kind of reverse orientalism. Today, reconsidering postcolonial thinking
would imply further continuing the ideology of the European early modern, a projected,
heaped together history of culture. When people started trying to conceive of the Other
as a separate being independent from the Self, and with this, without spelling out one’s
own identity, creating an imaginary Other. In structuralist linguistics there is the notion
of the private opposition which describes the situation where between two people, one
withdraws, and does not say who or what he/she is, while the other is forced to define
and explain him-/herself, whereas with the equipollent opposition both sides show all of
their cards.
Beauty lies in the eye of the dreams of the other – like the Other in one’s own thought?
Agnès Varda illustrates this beautifully in her movie Cléo de 5 à 7 when the singer Cléo,
played by Corinne Marchand, having to wait two hours for the results of her cancer test,
anxiously meanders through the city, which proves to be an uninhabitable place full of
unfeeling inhabitants, until a soldier, portrayed by Antoine Bourseiller, approaches her in
a park, asking why she is so unhappy. That evening, he is scheduled to ship off to fight
in the Algerian war, and on the way, he accompanies her to the hospital. I do not know
of any other dialogue as beautiful as this one between two people who find themselves
cut loose from whatever it was that had held their lives together before. For me, this is
where art begins. It displaces me from continuity, detaching me from the familiar,
showing me a new kind of seeing and feeling, opening my eyes to the manifold
possibilities of existence. The world can be conceived simultaneously as a whole or in its
subjective perception. Katrin’s art presents me with images, makes it possible to carry
on my life and to dream because it allows freedom and leaves blank spaces, like vents
punched in a cardboard box making it possible to breath.
1 Freud, Sigmund, Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious, (trans.) James Strachey, (ed.) Angela Richards,
Penguin: London 1976, pg. 170