30/11/2018–31/01/2019
"Chicago Volume 2"
MARIE REICHEL
TOM STREIT
Eröffnung: Donnerstag, 29.11.2018, 19 Uhr
First as a tragedy than as a farce. Decoration. Fiction, Truth, Reality.
It depends on the perspective. Somebody fought for it. A group of
people. An association. There had been different views.
Many different views. Nowadays they come for the frieze. Beethoven.
But I prefer Wagner. The connection is not only physically, it is what
happens before and after, it is what happens in your head, too. It is hard
to explain.
A carpet. Taken from another time, another land. Stored in our museum.
Our museum? A place to remember the achievements of culture. Our
culture? Only traces are visible. I leave the place with a vague feeling.
One can sit on one or lie on one or stand on one or one can be in one,
too. It’s the thing one is looking at or, sitting on, or lying on or standing
on or one is wearing, too. It’s the thing one can be thinking of.
Do not think! At a place. At a given time. A present. A gift. Something
to remember. A feeling. Wishful thinking and illusion. Verdrängung and
neurosis. Hidden from the world. A secret. Curiosity. A white box. With
arms and legs like lingering plants.
Sometimes one wants it to be somewhere but it doesn’t want to be
there — then it’s not there. Sometimes it is the other way around.
And sometimes like mostly the both of them agree then there’s the
connection. Sometimes it looks like a table, sometimes it looks like a
bed. Sometimes it’s both, sometimes it’s neither nor. Two people shake hands.
A deal is sealed? A ritual? The public is involved. Anderson called it
Imagined. Imagined communities. The invisible hand persists. A poetic
fixed form. Contingency, hegemony, universality. A Performance.
I still like the quote of an American writer: There seemed to be three
choices. To give up trying to love anyone, to stop being selfish, or to learn
to love a person while continuing to be selfish. For me, it fits in anytime in
any situation.
Chicago. Vienna. Wien darf nicht Chicago werden. The resistible rise of
Arturo Ui. A school drama. We had been forced to read it. Now I stand at
the opposite. The lake is so vast it seems like an ocean.
The city is not visible anymore. There are no steel plants left, no coal is
fired. The trees are gone as well. Only caravan parks and hideouts. It’s
not shrimps.
Of course not. It’s what was left behind. The remaining, the rest is
remained lying and what remains is fragments which lie (gracefully) on
the shelf. Two catch fresh air, outside. Break. Vis-á-vis, towards, at once.
Apart, a rendezvous-sans-table. Touch me, you. But not offensively.
