Reality devours art
The basic task of art is not limited to focusing on processes and conditions of reality (not only of everyday life); less ambiguous (because postulated to be at least partlyuncoded) instruments and methods of scientific communication are available for this purpose.
To us, art consists in creating (not only aesthetic) new realities from scratch, which can neither be circumscribed nor conceptualized, and henceforth cannot be realized by means of common verbal-theoretical techniques.
Even philosophy onlyapproaches Wittgenstein‘s „Ineffability“ by paraphrasing, without ever achieving it (unless philosophy itself crosses the boundary to the art of language).
Art itself is the only medium capable of consequently undermining our worldview, which generallyis considered to represent reality, to turn it upside down in every possible way – it is this unique quality that needs to be taken advantage of first and foremost.
Compared to the varied opulence of the universal pool (of artwork), which can at best be sensed rudimentarily in particularly exceptional moments, what this generally agreed upon so-called reality has to offer remains anyway pathetic.
and artists devour themselves
Yet even after dismissing reality as an uninspiring and creativity-destructing source of any professional resourcefulness there still remains a repressive element: it is ourselves, caught in our everyday narrow-mindedness that inhibits us from exploring the true diversity of the cosmos.
it.wasn-t.us …
Therefore it is the very opposite of the analytic or emotional descent into thealmost always disappointingly infantile-apish-banal depths of one’s own personality as a method of brainstorming and resolution that has long and increasingly appealed to us: the active scattering of one’s own identity.
To this purpose – and to our surprise this can be consistently achieved rather easily – it is necessary to approach creative decisions from something like an experimental temporarily imagined extra-personal platform beyond our socialised range of trivialities, that is to come to conceptual and creative decisions a priori as consistently changing, virtual creatures, which we could possibly be, even ifor especially when they don’t have any resemblance with humanoid beasts, ourselves above all. (In many other yes-no questions this scheme has been to us at the very least a mind-broadening experimental hypothesis: How would I decide if I was an alien – and why don’t I?)
… but.then.again.it.was
It is therefore disturbing and comforting at the same time that all of our works have common recognizable features, which are rather discovered by others following our output than by ourselves; it is in any case exciting enough and answers the purpose of a working hypothesis for an intermediate résumé for our total oeuvre.
Because this conflict between an always defended absolute freedom of creativity in conception and implementation of our artwork and the usually too-limited boundaries of our individual capacities is maybe the crucial theme of our work, and represents possibly the only intrinsic connection between us as individuals and creations, though it is constantly under attack.
GRAF+ZYX [translated by Simone von der Geest]
