Josef Strau / The Cologne-In-Review-Lamp

C.

For sure this place was the best place to be
It was
Non-production, Refusal, Habitus
Soziales Leben, the field, the influence, negativity

scary lack of work,

it was the place
providind suffering artist with lovingly honours and affections

C.

Your old broken black suitcase was stuffed
With subjective voice of fear, the narcistic cultivation of insignifiance and meaninglessness
and most of all with anti-visual heresies.


“I have given you all and now I am nothing
When will you take off your clothes,
when will you look at yourself through the grave,
Cologne, two euros and twenty something,
I'm sick of your insane demands.“

Didn't you become for me a kind of metaphor for a certain kind of art attitude, which I sometimes miss here but sometimes I am quite glad it lost its reality and influence and turned into a mode of sometimes almost bizarre memory.
With your “typical“ obsession of critique and judgement of others, which I only observe when being with you.


But maybe the motives of this could have been simple fear of representation, whatever,

Evasion


Living, screaming,
Real,
theory of telepathy curating

evasion of common production curating

For sure you were the best place to be,
Instead of pressuring the non-productive artist it inundated his or her suffering with loving honors and affection.

C.

You are you are the errand boy, errand boy of the melancholy,

You are the breakable planet








we could play with kind of non-productive statements, with the use of fragments of work, but concentrating on our oral statements, pretending most of the time that we show models for the space and not certain work within the space. I don't think at any other time or another place we could have been able to create such public attention with this kind od “empty“ space.
Sometimes I think that the theoretical considerations to shift the main perception of art away from its work or product to its social conditions were


For sure Cologne was the best place to be, if some considerations were granted-





















- it was maybe a kind of transformed fetichism attitude to live the social life of an artist, but actually not producing any art, or at least not to present any art. The motives of doing so could have been just fear of representation on one side or on the very other side the desire to practice in a radical consequence what many theories suggested by the death and destruction of an author/producer subjectivity.

Certainly this pose of an anti-production position in the period of the late eighties, which for sure was already inspiring the nineties art fashions, was a self-transforming attitude.
Although the strong background of theoretical and radicalist conceptual art considerations were criticised by some as a bourgeois attitude of well-fed men. The substitution of the self-representation of the artist as art producer by the sheer behavior as artist bohemian in the social art field was a reaction to the work values of the eighties and necessitated a very dense social field in order to act out its partly theatrical impulse. Otherwise it would be no fun to insist in every opportunity to just not do anything and to somehow threaten the professional environment with this kind of lack of interest in production or to threaten others with some promise of a future real production.
It is very difficult to explain the strenght of this attitude, so obsolete and boring it may seem to me today.

- In short, the popularity of anti-productive attitudes in Cologne was maybe a result of some iconoclastic tendency, the sympathy for an attitude which substitute image qualities with narrative impulse. In its best years the non-productive artist got great recognition, if he substituted his worw with personnal narrative qualities. It was at its best moment a kind of island in the main art world and secured a continuity in the tradition of anti-visual heresies. In that sense the anti-productive attitude was a kind of iconoclast-discipline.

- But the destructive effects of time were particularly strong on this frail and quite exciting attitude, creating later some darker effects in the art communities. As usual, a liberating movement turned into a repressive force, exemplifying the mechanism in which forms stray from their aims and develop a system of values and result in a political behavior, which instead appears in its form ugly and ridiculous, destroying the qualities of embarassment and subjectivity and so on and replacing them with demands for legitimation, individuals forced to permanently impose judgments on the others in order to create a position.











Maybe it was because so many psychological tendencies behind this semi-glamorous attitude, which I enjoyed so much, remained latent and hidden. Or as I said it was fear of real expression and fears of all kinds which I could never express in an act of collective self-censorship.