Insight into the life of artist Lisa Stybor

Sensitive as she is, she needs her own reclusive reference point more often to be found not merely in a studio but at home, in the kitchen and in what is her immediate surounding.

Lisa Stybor in her kitchen in Berlin

She knows no reluctance to use as communication tool to make her works be known a webpage. While willing to go public, she needs also to withdraw in order to understand all that what is having an impact upon her. Often she would say before withdrawing, 'das wird mir jetzt zuviel' - that is becoming too much for me!

Her withdrawal is not permanent. She is a person fully engaged in society and therefore responsive to the needs of others. As far as she has the capacity to respond, she will do so and this in an often surprising way. She will come up suddenly with an idea which might alleviate the person from the specific problem even though before that eruption of idea no one could have noticed that this question was preoccupying her.

As a person who has lived for ten years in Dessau and then decided to return to Berlin in order to live there she commutes now during the week to Dessau (by train it takes two hours). Given her background and experience she is prone to understand German re-unification and what problems that has created for people of former East Germany. These problems are fundamental. Her key insight is that once people have lost their basic orientation, they cannot be helped any longer. That may explain the deep down despair of those living in the East and why former East Germany is experiencing shrinking cities. In the case of Dessau a huge budgetary deficit has given momentum to the prospect of having to close down the theatre. It is one of its very few cultural venues (besides the Bauhaus building where the university is located). Germany faces in 2010 a crisis which affects many people and institutions in various ways at first more hidden but are becoming more pronounced as harsh measures need to be taken to align state, regional and municipal budgets all right now deep in the red. Simply said nothing has retained any self evident dimension and this cultural crisis affects Lisa Stybor very profoundly. She engages herself to save the cultural life in Dessau. It would be disasterous if the theatre in Dessau would be closed.

Altogether the life and work of Lisa reflects the difficulties to combine artistic and teaching experiences nowadays. As professor for the arts she has witnessed how university reform has transformed the landscape of higher education and not everything is positive in her opinion. Above all there is a lack of responsiveness in the system to both the new needs of students but also what they need to learn if they are to become really good artists or architects. Substantial knowledge is never self understand and requires time and effort, in short some crucial investments which means the professor has to be willing to go out of his or her way to communicate that special discipline. It goes without saying in few of the tradition of the Bauhaus that this teaching much convey ideas in a most innovative and far reaching way. Once that becomes a capacity, artistic abilities can let ideas about doing things converge and bring about a new cultural synthesis. For that education needs to be an open field for further going experiences.

An interesting escape from too much misery and only frustrating experiences is for Lisa Stybor to seek the silence of monasteries in Italy, preferable on Sicily. Thus it would be very interesting to know her maps and where she found a way to live with local people as she would be curious enough to stop and ask questions. She would pick up small pieces of evidence and take it home with her. They end up on the kitchen wall to remind of not necessarily secretive places but of locations where a small item in the sense of Bachelard would reveal such a poetic space with many light years inside so as to show to the mind as inquisitive as that of Lisa's a hyperbolic construction of a beautiful world existing but not perceived in a life marked by haste and futile engagement in things which do not matter in the end. As a matter of fact she would denote how much money is spend on futile things when it could be spend on much more worthwhile things. She sighs at this point for she knows the potentiality of art to do great things and experiences herself as artist and professor of art how little of that is realized in a world structured towards the media and newest technology but without having any footing in human experiences.

Any artist reveals secrets when showing as well where materials are gathered. In the case of Picasso it was all sorts of objects including bicycle handle bars. Once he picked them up, he transformed that into a bull's horn. In the case of Lisa Stybor she turns her attention to what Bachelard calls the poetic spaces revealed by sea shells and all kinds of fossils.

Fossil collection of Lisa Stybor

While involved in this search for ideas, she knows as artist there is the much wider responsibility in a society which is made up of people who are filled with fear due to being forgotten by others. Artists should give orientation, perspectives and hope that things can be altered. To do that it is her belief that people need to gain strength. They can do so out of learning but that is only possible by assuming self-responsibility. Only then the situation can be changed. As artist she wishes to convey through all her art works such strength and conviction in the human capacity to learn and to express strong, equally good ideas.

Hatto Fischer 24.5.2010

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Insight into the life of artist Lisa Stybor