W. Hornung - OUT OF MIND

…just to let everybody know that you can leave comments, even it doesn’t show immediately -
I have to edit them first…

…cold but sunny this morning, great weather to have a walk in the city.
Dogs too had their walk and left memories of eaten food on the boardwalk.

Now there was a nice hill of dogshit and on top of it like some vanilla fudge cream ,someone that I consider not far from sick, had stuck a piece of 50 cents. Daring everyone who would be tented to take it up to think it over if 50 cents are worth to go through all the trouble…

Once the possibility of money-shiting dogs excluded, there’s only one way to consider this: Scary Minds are “living” among us…

(Sorry, no photo available I had forgotten my camera.)

When Warhol promised to everybody 5 minutes of GLORY in one’s lifetime I think it was kind of stingy.
5 minutes per day would be the dose we need today to satisfy the love for ourselves -

…and if you don’t get any of this, there’s still IRONY left, the glory of slaves.

Sometimes I wonder if one’s life would have changed a lot if you knew at 3 what you know at 46 - or is it just that you went from black/white to color…

and I forgot to mention, that in many cases the older you get it’s becoming black/white again.

MELANCOLY, such a nice word with a lot of music in it and still such a bad reputation as most of the time it comes together with genius and madness in our occidental world.
This word followed me for quite a while and to get rid of it I made a painting called “HOMEMADE MELANCOLY.”
This is a very small detail out of this painting:
A couple of months ago I didn’t even know that there existed such things as “Melancoly Objects” even if I used some of them in my paintings.
Melancoly, like some kind of smoke that covers all of your thoughts and sadness invites itself into your home.
Aristote and Hippocrate were first in describing Melancoly and its symptoms.” State of mind” and “body” are chasing after each other, you can’t get hold of it. Unreal and real at the same time Melancoly has been associated with many terms, psychology, anatomy, philosophy etc. and may be one of the reasons to have Melancoly objects made lies just in it’s nature that you cannot get hold of it’s spirit.
There’s even a museum of melancoly. Well, and as they have to put something into this museum some objects got their melancolyc bi-names.
From Arbrecht Dürer to Edvard Munch, from Domenico Fetti to Giorgio de Chirico you will find many examples of this kind of art, not forgetting the “Penseur” by Rodin with it’s typicall melancolyc gesture: hold one’s head in your hands pretending you’re thinking quite deeply about something. May be that’s why you find not very often melancolyc politicians.

Personally I like a lot what H.F. Amiel (1821-1881) the swiss philosopher, poet and critic wrote about this subject:
“Melancoly is at the bottom of everything, just as at the end of all rivers is the sea.
Can it be otherwise in a world where nothing lasts, where all that we have loved or shall love must die?
Is death, then, the secret of life? The gloom of an eternal morning enwraps, more or less closely, every serious and thoughtful soul, as night enwraps the universe.”
Well, he couldn’t hide his talent for poetry and in todays world we say “thanks for sharing.”

When I started writing this blog I made a promise to myself: make at least 1 entry a day.
Promises, may be the only way to make yourself belief that it’s possible ordering the future…and I heard other people say that they made promises just for the pleasure of breaking them. Well, I don’t see any intersting point in this.

I almost forgot to show you one of my favorite spots:
And if you wonder what’s written upside down on the page, don’t hurt your neck I will tell you anyway:
It’s a new slogan for poor people: “NO MORE REALITIES, WE WANT PROMISES.”

It happened while I was sitting in a Montparnasse/Parisian Café when a guy sitting opposite to me took his cardboard out of his pocket like some kind of gun and started drawing something on it. The way he looked at me from time to time was suspicious enough to make me think of just another gay person looking for contact.
Well, after about 3 minutes he had finished what he was doing and he turned the sheet of paper towards me with some kind of triumphant blinking in his eyes.
That’s what he showed to me:
Leaving the café he gave me the drawing and thanked for having been his model.
I don’t remember if I blushed but one thing is for sure, Mark Twain was right when he said: “Man is the only animal that blushes. Or needs to.”

Lately I found myself engaged into some discussion wether an artist should have his own style or as my partner put it “style is just a kind of logo” and of no use to the artist as he will find himself imprisoned and get bored while doing the same all the time…
Being an artist myself and working on surreal digital images,
I think it’s quite important to be recognizable with your own style and it doesn’t mean that you’re stuck doing the same all the time and running in circle.
As the human condition is shared by us all, if you try to communicate something through your art and you do it in your own typical style it will also speak to a wider audience .
The communication and appeal of the art can be either intellectual and/or emotional. But as most things in life, finding your way is a lifelong quest of refinement and evolution.
Or to put it differently, if you’re trapped in a room that is locked, another way of looking at it could be: the world is locked and you’re free.

A friend wrote the following:
“At least from my perspective, the discussion wasn’t about “trying” to not have a style, but about simply not having a single style, as opposed to striving for a uniform “signature” consciously. I certainly have nothing against such obvious “branded” artists as Tanguy and Magritte. For myself, it was simply a matter of either preferring attempts at new approaches, or - more likely - desperately searching for anything that works, considering my limited technical abilities. For the most part it was never a matter of technique at all, but more just a poetic exploration which sometimes revealed itself via similar things (as in a series), and sometimes led me down dark little alleys. ”

“So although there are obvious examples of what you speak of: the consciously “not having a style” because you don’t have a clue, I think there is also a “stylesness” based upon the fasct that the creator simply doesn’t put much effort into certain surface qualities, or is simply not exploring “great statements” but rather digging about in a smaller garden, and trying to make the most of it.”

” Because what we usually call style is built from two components:
1 - what you are (if that may be identified which I do not think is possible or if it is possible then it is a mutilation).
2 - what you are dealing with - the problem, question, idea, obsession.

The result is usually that when you change the problem, question, idea, obsession you are dealing with, then your “style” tends to change accordingly. That’s not always true, that’s just often true. ”

…could it be that to overcome the feeling of getting bored/stuck in life/art is the challenge that makes what you’re doing something special?
Digging deeper on the same spot/style until you’re not bored any longer instead of going to another place. Having a full menu and not leaving after the starters…

This one is called “CURRENT STATE OF MIND”
and one of 2005 new paintings.

“The situation got complicated by some aspects of the Romantic spirit -
and yet Romantism was certainly not a bad thing at all - and both
questions of “boredom” as a reason for action and “doing something
special” as a reason for action belong to a perspective that was set-up
by the Romantic movement.
(Actually they are only parts of the complete romantic perspective.)

When discussing on “style”, the idea was more to redirect the focus on
the non individualitic aspects of Art which tend to be the ones that
posterity “filters”. And for good reasons, since they are the ones that
serve the future of mankind once an artist is dead.
Work is boring. Even Art work may be at some moments, even if freely
chosen and at the cost of high risks, as is most often the case even
today. But boredom is a weak reason for making choices. I would even
tend to say that it is of no value at all.
The alternative, I think, is more between horizontal exploration
(exploring multiple paths) and vertical exploration (exploring one path
as deeply as “of interest”).
An actual exploration strategy - and most probably an effective one - is
a balance between the horizontal and vertical approaches.
The “right” strategy is the one which fits with the
question-problem-sensation, whatever the artist is dealing with.
Most of the time, an artist does not know what he is actually dealing
with and to some extent “must not” know what he is dealing with (Duchamp).
In Art like in any other field of human activity, the point is usually
not to answer questions but rather to ask valuable questions, that is,
questions that help the human adventure getting further and deeper.
Questions that are “of some consequences”, in other terms, within the
scope of an artist’s life of course, but also to the extent possible,
beyond.”

My answer to this :
As a great believer in life before death I really can’t get a kick out of hoping at some Posterity-Melitta filter that some guys after me put over my work to squeeze something useful for humanity out of it.
The artist/prisoner who wants to escape from his emotions by digging a way out, if he’s digging somewhere between vertical/horizontal, most of the time comes out directly at the superintendents office and get jailed again.

But this is all theory and all those questions never come into the mind of someone creating something. This might be an individualistic point of view but how could it be otherwise? May be I should say duovidualistic point of view as I’m sitting next to myself looking at this guy playing with a mouse…