To be one and to become one: Narciss’s Error

It was a Saturday morning in the museum. I was alone there. Sunlight flooded through the galerie-rooms, apart from me there were only the wardens.

I was standing in front of a Potato- the latest work by Frida Forelle (Frida Trout), an impressive object! It carried the title “waxy” – I couldn’t understand that, I would have done it differently. Even less I understood the indifference of the visitors. The potato – a fruit from the earth. Light fare? Hardly! It was small and cloddy. The artist, so it seemed, had washed it carefully. A whiff of wax gave it a golden shimmer. It wasn’t as bright as a polished egg, but undoubtedly it remained an important piece of German postwar culture. It was lying on a pedestal. I was feeling it cleary. This piece of work was concerned me. I thought, someone has to understand what the artist had intended. The potato was of a haunting and idiosyncratic beauty.

I have a strong feeling for conceptual art, for the presumably absurd. I love Art, which takes away the pathos of museums and shows/recognizes the special in everyday life. Installations, which leave the impression of the Nothing, the emptiness or the absence and banish everything superfluous. Artists, who manage, to quietly disquiet us.

Frida Forelle (Frida Trout) belongs to those.

Her charms, her vibrancy and her charisma are praised: Frida Forelle is an internationally acknowledged conceptual artist. I met her first at a preview. I came, like to almost every opening, ostentatiously artistlike dressed in black and had my hair loose. The art market can be compared to a nursery, a playground of desires. Competition marks the laws of transaction by every trick in the book. Every event is a networking opportunity, the principal thing is to be seen. So you go there to see yourself. You expose yourself to the self-imposed agony of watching others, who see each other, but deliberately ignore you. I am also always there : in this shifty-eyed search for contacts, this obsessive addiction to insider appreciation. The art scene is my working zone.

On that particular Friday night I got to know Frida Forelle. She was wearing her hair very very short. She appeared cool, but irritated. Some called her a feminist, others believed her to be asexual. I did it nonetheless: I addressed her. And Frida Forelle told me the usual story.

To work with me, my dear, is difficult, dodgy, stress! Because you know, for me the next step is never defined beforehand. For me there is no order, no reliability. Are you ready for my way of thinking? Do you want to get into this? Then she pointed out her principles. She loved, or so it seemed, meaty words: “decide and then follow your decision”, “save”, “hold your tongue”. There followed statements like “Art doesn’t lie”. The art scene she described as frivolous, herself as a master of asceticism. She sounded like a cynical manager of herself.

This started to make me feel uneasy. Simply unfriendly, I thought. Art, there was no doubt, had a cast shadow – where you – especially in the world of art might have expected precious people with a sense for the good and the beauty of things. What I met instead, almost without exception, was envy and rivalry. The desire of one person, so it seemed, incited the desire of the next person. To be pretentious and to be important – that is the iron law of the art scene. Egotism seemed to be the social pre-condition. In his fascinating “ Encyclopedia of Platitudes”, Gustave Flaubert remarked as

early as in the 19th Century, competition is good for business. Thus art is a business???? I had understood: the whole thing was through and through violent.

As if you were hit by blindness, there is a hard and bitter fight going on. Such Darwinist play of power will seldom lead to a healthy self-confidence, rather into a shadow world. Does art mirror economy? Dirk Boeckers once said, art is “ the attempt to slow down the learning processes forced by society”. Was he correct?

The story of Narcissus who fell in love with himself is still as relevant as ever even though Ovid told it 2000 years ago. It is the story of a tragic, death inducing self-mirroring. ‘Tired from his hunt the young man lay down drawn to this special place at the fountain, when to his thirst another thirst emerging…’ The mythical Narcissus looks at the water, sees himself but does not recognize himself. Full of desire and loneliness he finds himself growingly estranged from himself, unable to hear his own voice, his own words. Nowhere is what he is looking for. In love with himself but unknowingly Narcissus dies from his own gaze – he perishes in tears even though all he was longing for was to be embraced. Rimbaud summarized it: Myself is someone else.

Narcissus was lost, speaking of himself only in the third person. Another image (the image of someone else) would have presumably made him feel better. Wolf Helzle is a media artist who is inspired by philosophy. What one sees is what one is: the viewer is the viewed. But only when you recognize the other – the different – you recognize yourself. The flood of images our world experiences constantly asks for decoding, for an ongoing dialogue. The self and the other are like a torn pair of twins.

That is why modes of looking and images have to be changed around. These images need time, to find anchors in one’s own world of images, to undo their randomness. One cannot resist tracing the images of the others and by doing trying to find the space of others which is removed from one’s own space.

Helzle’s net-art project ‘I am we’ responds with great clarity and globally interwined images to our tendency to narcissistically cocoon ourselves. In a delightfully choreographed symbioses collective and individual, gained and not borrowed time become visible. Online succeeds in capturing the moment. It is a work in progress, a mosaic, a calaidoscope which gives the past and the present a shared face. The growing project is search for deeper meaning which it creates itself. I am we turns everybody into a work of art. It is a work of art composed of people. Reaching beyond our traditional understanding of art Helzle’s project shows through exposing our images what we feel, desire and fear. Switching between closeness and distance the act of logging in – following Pirandello – allows to slide from one place to the other. Online allows to create an intimacy with seemingly unknown people whose diaries resonate with one’s own feelings and projections. The process of log in resembles falling in love – one enjoys the freedom to little by little dissolve the sense of strangeness of the other. And on asks the question, how would my life have been if I was somebody else. Surely there remains that little uncertainly that will never be fulfilled. But that is part of it. Ludwig Wittgenstein succinctly concluded: The world of the happy man is different to the world of the sad one. And he added: everything we see could be different.

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