Leipzig exhibition June 1999

OSMOSE / OSMOSIS

Photo exhibition

in Moritzbastei, Leipzig

18.6.1999

Programme

1. Participants of the EU CIED conference arrive at the Moritizbastei

1. Opening with Reading by Radjo Monk, Leipzig

Heinz J. Kuzdas, Jeannine Govaers, Britta Heinrich, Iris Reuther

Artists present:

Mark Durden, England

Jeannine Govaers, Amsterdam

Astrid Kokka, Berlin / Athens

Heinz J. Kuzdas, Berlin

Hartmut Schulz, Berlin

Edith Tar, Leipzig

and

Li Jiwei, Beijing

Texts:

Oracle of Delphi by Radjo Monk

(This is exerpt from an essay about their project „Europe's roots/ the Gral“ by

Edith Tar and Radjo Monik who have working on this since 1992.)

Edith Tar - a short biography

„The famished road“ by Ben Okri

„Balkan Image War“ by Mark Duren

Curator: Hatto Fischer

(English version below)

Orakel von Delphi

In der Taverne Omfalos sitzen die Männer, am Ofen wird

die Propangasflasche gewechselt. Fernsehbilder flackern &

rücken das Nächste in jene Ferne, der sie das Geheimnis rauben.

Vergiß alles, was du über Delphi weißt, sonst wirst du dich

nie erinnern an Delphi & den pythischen Odem ersticken

unter der Branddecke deiner Vorstellungen, dachte ich & schaute

in die Gesichter der Männer, die in die Gesichter schauten,

die der Fernseher abstrahlte.

Vielleicht wäre Delphi besser aufgehoben unter dem Mutterboden

von Kastri als im Licht des Gottes, dem es geweiht war. Vielleicht

wären die Bauernsöhne, die hinter Glastüren auf Gäste lauern,

glücklicher in ihren Häusern unter den Phädriaden, zufrieden

mit dem täglichen Ausblick auf das verbotene Land von Krisa,

behütet vom Berg Kirphi, wo noch immer Gäas erste Priesterin

wohnt, die den Nebel in jede Tiergestalt verwandeln kann.

Hat in Delphi jemals ein Mensch gewohnt? War es nicht immer

Apollons Wohnung & die Bewohner Delphis nur die Schatten

seiner Hände? War es nicht sein Pfeil, der morgens in der Haustür

steckte, ein Punkt hinter dem Namen – als wären sie seine Feinde,

all die in seine Hand gegebenen, die ihm ein Haus bauten aus Lorbeer

& Bienenwachs & es bewachten & offen hielten auch im Winter,

wenn er nach Norden zog & die Mänaden des Dionysos vom Parnaß

heulten, wilde Hündinnen des Herbstes.

Die Männer in der Taverne Omfalos verfolgen den Fernsehfilm,

als erwarteten sie jeden Augenblick den Auftritt der Pythia. Alles

was sie in der Hand haben, ist das Komboloi, jener Rosenkranz,

der sich auch eignet als Kette für den Autoschlüssel.

Radjo Monk

Oracle of Delphi

In the tavern Omfalos men are sitting around, at the stove

the gas bulb is being changed. Images of the television light up &

move the close by into that distance which robs it of its secrets.

Forget everything that you know about Delphi, otherwise you will

never remember Delphi and suffocate due to a pythonic odour

underneath the fire blanket of your imagination. I thought so & and looked

into the faces of the men who looked into the faces

projected on the television screen.

Perhaps Delphi would be better protected under mother's earth

from Castri than in the light of the Gods, to which it was devoted. Perhaps

the farmer's sons, who wait in prey for guests behind glass doors,

happier in their houses underneath the Phaedriades, happy

with the daily look-out upon the forbidden land of Krisa,

protected by the mountain Kirphi, where still resides Gaia, the first priestess

capable of transforming fog into every kind of animal shape.

Did ever dwell a human being in Delphi? Was it not always

Apollo's home & the inhabitants of Delphi a mere shadow

of his hands? Was it not his arrow, which hit early in the morning

the house door, a dot behind the name – as if they were his enemies,

all those things put in his hands, who had erected for him a house made out of laurel

& a bee wax & guarded it & and kept it open as well in the winter,

when he travelled North & the mynades of Dionysus from Parnassos howled

like the wild female dogs of the autumn.

The men in the tavern Omfalos follow the television movie

as if they expect at any moment the appearance of Pythia. The

only thing they hold in their hand is the comboloi, those worry beats

which can also be used as a chain for the car key.

Radjo Monk

Translated by Hatto Fischer

(English text follows below)

Auszug aus einem Essay über das Projekt „Wurzeln Europas / Der Gral“, an dem Edith Tar und Radjo Monk seit 1992 arbeiten

Als wir uns auf die Entdeckung Europas einließen, spürten wir bald, daß diese Entdeckung einen langen Abschied von Europa gleichkommt. Bislang haben wir Irland, England, Polen, Ungarn, Tschechen, Israel, Griechenland, Südfrankreich bereist, um Material zu sammeln – und natürlich auch immer wieder Deutschland. Diese Reisen wurden für uns zu einem geistigen Weitwinkelobjektiv, das unseren Blick auf Europa prägt.

Die derzeit um den Europabegriff kreisenden Fragen werden gern in Pro und Contra zerlegt. Uns geht es hier nicht um ein Für und Wider, sondern um die Wurzeln Europas. Wir halten alle Fragen für berechtigt, denn jede Frage hilft, eine Antwort zu finden.

Und wenn jede Antwort neue Fragen aufwirft, muß das nicht zu Nervosität oder Ratlosigkeit führen, sondern kann zum Ausdruck für ein gereiftes Bewußtsein werden, das europäische Entwicklung als etwas Lebendiges begreift, das sich von Fragen ernährt.

In Eschenbachs „Prazival“ ist das Fragenkönnen ein zentrales Motiv, von dem das gesamte Handlungsgefüge abhängt. Parzivals Abenteuer beginnen erst richtig in dem Moment als er die entscheidende Frage nicht stellt. Was er danach erlebt und erleidet, erscheint als ein Reifeprozess, durch den er fähig wird, die richtige Frage im richtigen Augenblick zu stellen.

Es handelt sich um eine schlichte, rein menschliche Frage, die Parzival stellen muss: „Was fehlt Dir?“, fragt er am Ende den kranken Gralskönig, und erst durch diese mitfühlende Frage kommt die Geschichte an ein gutes Ende.

Hätte Parzival nach dem Architekten der Gralsburg gefragt, es hätte niemandem genutzt. In diesem Sinne fragen wir in unserer Arbeit nicht nach der Funktion, sondern nach dem Bezug. Es ist eine künstlerische Arbeit, die eingebunden bleibt in die Gegenwart.

Die Europadiskussion wird beherrscht von Fragen, die auf Wirtschaft und Politik zielen und für den Einzelnen oft in Abstraktionen versanden. Wie wird Europa sein, wenn die Grenzen zwischen den Ländern nur noch nominale sind, wenn wirtschaftliche Anpassung regionale Identität übertüncht, wenn Kulturbegriffe zur Massenware werden? Wird Europa ein Großkonzern, der die abendländische Kultur als Bonus benutzt,um seine Produkte auf dem Weltmarkt besser verkaufen zu können?

Es kann nützlich sein, die Fragen mit Gegenfragen zu kontern, um einen gedanklichen Rahmen zu schaffen. Die Frage: was kommt, wenn „Europa kommt“? Klingt ganz anders, wenn gleichzeitig gefragt wird: woher kommt denn Europa?

Für uns sind die Orte die Gralsepen Suchpunkte, die poetische Energie freisetzen. Wichtiger als die Orte sind uns die Menschen, die uns während der „Suche“ begegnen: sie sind das eigentliche Ziel, sie sind die lebendigen Träger der europäischen Wurzeln.

@ Radjo Monk & Edith Tar

Excerpt from an essay about the project “Roots of Europe / the Grail”, on which Edith Tar and Radjo Monk have been working since 1992

Once we were committed to discover Europe, we soon sensed that this discovery would be very similar to an elongated way of saying good-bye to Europe. Until now we have visited Ireland, England, Poland, Hungary, Tschech Republic, Israel, Greece, Southern France, in order to collect materials – and naturally also over and again Germany. These trips became our spiritual wide objective angle which has determined our view of Europe.

At the moment questions concerning Europe are preferably partitioned into pro and con. However this for or against is not our concern, rather we wish to know the roots of Europe. We consider all questions to be legitimate, since every question helps to find an answer.

And if every new answer provokes new questions, then this must not lead to nervous tensions or dis-orientation, but rather can become an expression of a consciousness undergoing maturation and which conceives the European development as something very much alive, something nourishing itself from questions.

In Eschenbach's “Prazival” is the ability to pose questions a key motif upon which the entire sequence of actions depends. Parzival's adventure begins only then really when he does not pose the decisive question at that moment. What he experiences thereafter and suffers under, appears to be a part of this maturation process which enables him to pose the right question at the right moment.

It is a matter of a simple, purely human question, which Parzival must pose: “What are you missing?”, he asks finally the sick Grail king, and only because of this question out of empathy the story has a happy end.

If Parzival would have asked about the architect of the Grail castle, it would have been of no use to anyone. Likewise we do not ask in our work about the function, but about relationships. It is an artistic work which retains its affinity to the present.

The European debate is determined by questions which aim at economy and politics and which for the individual usually lose themselves in abstractions. How shall Europe be, once borders between the various countries are but nominally ones, when will economic adaptation blend out regional identits, when will cultural concepts be transformed into mass products? Will Europe become one big corporation which uses European culture as extra value in order to be able to market its products much better?

It can be beneficial, to counter the questions with contra questions, in order to create a framework for thoughts. Die question: what comes, when “Europe comes”? It sounds quite differently when there is asked at the same time: from where does Europe come from?

For us locations are the searching points for the Grail, in order to free poetic energy. More important than the locations are for us the people, who we encounter during our 'search': they are our main goal, for they are the living carriers of European roots.

@ Radjo Monk & Edith Tar

Translated by Hatto Fischer

Kurzbiographie: Edith Tar

Short biography: Edith Tar

1944 in Biela (heute Tschechische Republik) geboren, im thüringischen Lucka aufgewachsen;

nach dem Abitur mit Berufsausbildung Studium der Fotografie an der Hochschule für Graphik und Buchkunst Leipzig von 1970-1975.

Ab 1976 freiberuflich in Leipzig tätig, seitdem kontinuierlich Einzelausstellungen (zuletzt im National Museum of Fine Arts, Valletta, Malta „Roots of Europe – the Grail“, Mai – Juni '99).

Längere Auslandsaufenthalte und Studienreise, intermediale Zusammenarbeit.

Ab 1990 verschiedene Buchpublikationen; Hinwendung zu künstlerischen Ausdrucksformen außerdem der Fotografie (Installationen, Land-Art, Performances)

1944 born in Biele (today Czech Republic); grew up in Thuringia Lucka; after finishing high school study of photography at the occupational university for Graphic and Book art in Leipzig 1970-75.

Since 1976 active as free professional in Leipzig, since then continuously individual exhibitions (last one at National Museum of Fine Arts, in Valletta, Malta: “Roots of Europe – the Grail, May – June '99).

Studies abroad and study travels, inter-media cooperation.

Since 1990 various publications, turn towards artistic expressions aside from photography (installations, land art, performances)

The Famished Road by Ben Okri

The spirit child is an unwilling adventurer into chaos and sunlight,

into the dreams of the living and the dead. Things that are not ready

not willing to be born or to become, things for which adequate

preparations have not been made to sustain their momentous births,

things that are not resolved,things bound up with failure and

with fear of being, they all deep recurring, keep coming back and in

themselves partake the spirit child's condition. They keep coming

and going till their time is right. History itself fully demonstrates

how things of the world partake of t he condition of the spirit child.

There are many who are of this condition and do not know it.

There are many nations, civilisations, ideas, half discoveries,

revolutions, loves, art forms, experiments and historical events

that are of this condition and do not know it.

They are many people too.

They do not all have the marks of their recurrence. Often they seem

normal. Often they are perceived of as new. Often they are

serene with the familiarity of death's embrace.

They all carry strange gifts in their souls.

They are all part time dwellers in their own secret moonlight.

They all year to make themselves a beautiful sacrifice,

to bring transformation

and to die shedding light within this life,

setting the matter ready for

their true beginnings to cry into being,

scorched by the strange ecstasy

of the will ascending to say yes to destiny and illumination.

The Balkan Image War

What is so striking and disturbing about recent British press coverage of NATO's war with Yugoslavia, is the way in which the faces of innocent children are used as a sentimentalising media focus to encourage support for the continued bombardment of Serbia by the most powerful countries in the world, militarily, politically and economically.

There is nothing new in the use of pathos and sentiment in representations of war. John Taylor has written about the way the family album was drawn into the news when 'ordinary family mementos were changed into the relics of sacrifice.' He draws attention to the publication, in the Daily Sketch on 13 September 1915, of family snapshots picked up from the battlefield during the First World War, photos of loved ones, of women, children and babies. Using such private mementos as poignant public memorials, enabled the press to address the losses of war without graphic representations of death. Such snapshots fashioned 'a new precept of normality: the family used to patriotic purpose.'

Similarly, Don McCullin drew upon the pathos of a snashot photo portrait in his well-known war photograph of a dead North Vietnamese soldier from 1968. Potentially transgressive sympathies were elicited from such a photograph as a result. There the detail of a snapshot portrait of a woman's face, among the dead soldier's personal effects, served to humanise and individualise the enemy.

The anti-war rhetoric of McCullin's photo is in market contrast with the pro-war sentiment so abundant in current newspaper coverage of the Balkan war. Images of families are now used to confirm and bolster NATO's continued bombardment of military and civilian targets in Yugoslavia. Typical of this is The Sun's use, on 3 April, of a full cover page to a portrait of wide-eyed refugee children, together with a plea, in Serbo-Croat, to Slobodan Milosevic: 'Don't let them die'. Such sentimentalising child imagery continues with coverage of the arrival of the first few hundred Kosovan-Albanians in England: another cover image by The Sun on Monday, 26 April, showing a little refugee girl smiling and waving as she arrived in Britain the previous day.

The faces of Kosovan-Albanian children offer a very different media image of war to the much-discussed image-sequences of the Gulf War which were transmitted from the noses of 'smart bombs' descending on their targets. Coverage of this war partially attempted to erase memories of Vietnam, stressing US superiority through high-tech weaponry. If such an abstract media representation of war anaesthetised us to the full horrors of the massacres of Iraqi conscripts in Kuwait and innocent civilians in Iraq, media coverage of the war in Europe is much more emotively charged. Only the emotionalism and pathos elicited by all the close-up portraits of refugees fleeing Kosovo, is caught up in the Government's pronouncedly hawkish and pro-war rhetoric.

Many in the media have made analogies between the present conflict and the Second World War. For all the confusions and uncertainties which mark its media coverage – as Barbie Zelizer has pointed out, captions would even describe military personnel as Serbs, despite the fact the insignia on their uniforms identified them as Croats – the Holocaust has become the constant reference point for the representations of atrocities in the Balkans.

As NATO continues its ferocious military bombardment of Yugoslavia, Slobodan Milosevic is demonised as Hitler (as Saddam Hussein was during the Gulf War) and his 'ethnic cleansing' of Kosovan-Albanians is compared with the Nazi's extermination of the Jews. A front page of The Mirror on 1 April not only evoked the war against Hitler, but drew upon Steven Spielberg's film, Schindler's List, to drive home its point even further. Echoing the film, the front page coloured a section of a black-and-white picture to make a little girl stand out, alludes to Spielberg's use of colour to single out, from the black-and-white surroundings, a little girl in a red coat. Colour comes at a particularly significant moment in the film. Schindler is watching the destruction of a ghetto from a hillside and comes to realise the horror of the scene in which he has so far participated. As Mieke Bal has pointed out, the director uses the little girl in red to show us the point of view of Schindler – to show us what he is seeing. The little girl alerts us to the fact that Schindler now sees those in the ghetto as 'individuals instead of the devastating, de-humanising bureaucracy of numbers.'

Succeeding pages in The Mirror went on to use archival photos from 1942 to 'show' the parallels between the past and present, between the brutality of the Nazis and that of the Serbs, the plight of the Jews and that of the Albanian refugees. Invoking the war against Hitler through the use of historical photos and borrowings from Hollywood, further confuses and distracts from the full complexity of this conflict. References to the Holocaust, genocide and ethnic cleansing are used to justify, morally, the present military action. But such use of the past is problematic, both diminishing the resonance of the representations of atrocities of the Second World War, and confusing the historical reality underlying the events of the present with the past.

While the media representation of the Gulf War was notable for the absence of bodies, bodiees proliferate in the present war coverage. However, media focus on the plight of Albanian refugees fails to give the full story. As in the Gulf War, the horrors of a Western military devastation of another nation have been under-represented.

In more recent coverage, NATO's atrocities are no longer hidden behind the poignant faces of Kosovan refugees. On Thursday, 15 April most newspapers ran graphic colour images showing the carnage which followed the accidental bombing, by NATO, of an Albanian refugee convoy. And where the body horror was not shown, in an interesting reversal of the earlier use of sentimental portraits in the British press, it was the very faces of Kosovan children which stood to trouble the conscience of those supporting the war: the bloodied and bandaged faces of two sisters orphaned by NATO bombs which ran on the cover of The Express on Friday, 16 April. As visual testimony to NATO's brutalities accumulates, Vietnam (where atrocities and blunders were committed by US troops) becomes a more appropriate historical reference point than the Second World War.

Today, as I write, Sunday, 2 May, The Independent on Sunday runs a shockingly explicit colour photograph on its front-page showing the bloody rag of a human body, one of 40 civilians allegedly killed when a NATO missile hit a bus in Kosovo. To say such images play into the hands of pro-Serb propaganda misses the point. It is only through necessary exposure to these images that we begin to get a fuller representation of the brutalities being committed by both sides – in the present war in Europe.

Mark Durden

published in Creative Camera, June/July 1999, pp. 36 - 39

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Leipzig exhibition June 1999