Marianne Eigenheer

Art should explain the world, perhaps a too big duty, on the other hand, with art, the artworks still existing from cultures long disappeared , we have something to look at which is not moving away, which seems to be static and so we can move around with our thoughts and sometimes also physically. But today to make a change in the way we look or how we watch things ,into SEEING things as they are and as they relate to all other things in the world, is always has been, difficult.

TO SEE is –as it always was – difficult. But the globalized world has brought also into the discussion new instruments, new understandings, and (what will be one of the key issues for ICE) it has brought in also a better understanding not only of distinctions, but also of the need to cross the borders, in sciences, in art, in politics etc. It is not the place now to go deep into all this discussion, to the changes in recent years of the understanding of the individual, not only in our home culture, the culture of the Western European world( still the basis for many of us),but I just like to touch some points they will form the basis of the hopefully soon ongoing discussion we will have here.

On old world maps mapmakers wrote “there be dragons!” describing so the unknown as often frightening. But when then explorers penetrated every area of the world, the monster-marked patches disappeared .But there are still lots of dragon-infested areas in our mental map of how the different parts of the world work together, how all the immense range of cultural expressions for example fit together. From the universe under a microscope, the universe locked into a cell to the new world of the Internet. And we as actors and viewers in between but also part of it with no more clear defined borders to know where the networks end and where we are. It was much easier in past times to know were we were and where were the dragons, but now?

The good news is that recently scientists have been learning to map our interconnectivity in many different fields. Their maps are shedding new light on our weblike universe. Many surprises and challenges are found simultaneous challenges and insights we wouldn’t have dreamed of 10 years ago. Maps of companies connected by trade or ownership have traced the trail of power and money in Silicon Valley. Maps of interactions between species in ecosystems have demonstrated humanity’s destructive impact on the environment, maps of genes working together in a cell have provided insights into how cancer works. So we will try to draw new and different maps of cultural manifestations and art expressions too, because the real surprise of the recent years has come from placing maps side by side. Just as diverse humans have skeletons you can’t distinguish, all these newly discovered maps follow a common blueprint. A string of recent breathtaking discoveries has forced as to acknowledge that amazingly simple natural laws govern the structure and evolution of all the complex networks that surround us, or also, in the cultural and social contexts, CREATE us.

These “new” views that scientists and artists are now working with are naturally not at all “new”, but today we have to deal now with the immense complexities of levels and layers of a globalized world , together with the microcosmos of the private destiny. But what today is increasingly recognized also in the personal private world of an artist making his own work ,is that nothing happens in isolation. Everything and everybody is interacting with a huge number of others, of other pieces of a complete universal jigsaw puzzle. Intellectually we have been aware of this since a long time, but it is now more and more also for many people like an attack against their individual expression, their lives as individuals. All these processes are now clearly be seen through the differences ,sometimes the CONFLICT between the ideal of the individual art work as a masterpiece and the art work that comes out of experiences of the everyday and which is often disregarded as not real art at all.

Networks, not only intellectual and mental networks are present everywhere. All we need is an eye for them, because also the older static explanations for the world are no longer adequate.(With black and white, good and bad, we can’t create an image of the world anymore. What happens, if we split the world into God and Evil, is that we have fear everyday). So all these insights from different sciences involved in global processes, in natural sciences, oeconomies, politics etc. we can now try to use for our field of research also. We can leave behind the logic of things going from A to B as the only tool to work with. We can start to move around in a net knowing that for every second of our life we are part of it on a micro and macro basis. Because being part of a moving and living net of energy flows we do not have to fear getting lost. (So also the idea of heaven and hell is not existing anymore, as naturally many wise people in the past, William Blake for example, or Meister Eckhart always knew, it is all integrated together).

These ideas to connect different levels of culture, of the society, to get a more precise idea about new insights, to have a better platform to get more knowledge, has always been a discussion also in the institutions we are all working in, also in the museums and their collections, a theme we will open up more at the September Conference. And it is interesting how these ideas appear and disappear, for example the ideas a great German curator and academic Alexander Dorner, who was driven out by the Nazis to find exile in the States, because he had this new understanding of the interactivity between exhibited objects and the space in which they are shown, and, naturally, the interactions between the public, the artist and the curator. In the seventies his work became again very important also in Germany and elsewhere and his ideas are affecting still today the work and thoughts of a new generation of writers and curators.

His understanding of the flowing moving world of mental and spiritual energy being also inside of objects is absolutely contemporary. So perhaps real glimpses of understanding are always CONTEMPORARY as long as they are on the move and not static, not describing something but creating it again and again. So we could perhaps see an artwork also as a dense connection and coming together of millions of energy streams, and which appears in front of us as a static object, not moving, quiet, appearing as an empty screen for us to put our own meaning or understanding on it. Just looking at an object can be in a way very boring, but if we see the work in the space of a civilisation, and a surrounding culture, connected perhaps to a biography (which is also like a static object ,leaving out the most important parts, the movements and changes) then it becomes exciting.

To be today an artist, creating ideas, artworks, situations, and to be a curator, looking at objects but also at situations from where the objects are coming , to be a writer to put into a verbal language all these moving changing visual phenomena, we get all the time without knowing it, to use the cultural base of the humanity to work with, is an incredibly chance. It is the new place of the between, not the void and a frightening place were the dragons come to attack you but it is a place where you can find your way, through moving, choosing things, loosing things and ideas, changing places.

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