paper, water colours, inks, stamping inks, wax, graphite, gouache | sizes: variable  approx. 260 sheets 


I want to Dance

 The drawings on hand-written scores represent another level of my examination of sign languages. I am interested here in the aspects of coding, the process of sending messages with the changes in transmission, the irregularity of sending and receiving them just as the fact that, with the increasing degree of coding, the person decoding it leaves his or her mark on decoding to an even greater degree in terms of their own world view and the assumed content of the communication.

 

The intended message is no longer a direct sensory impression. It gets there indirectly via the beauty of symbols, the composition of the symbol bearer, the reasonableness or understanding of the reader. For the means of communication are not in possession of the meaning. The meaning is assigned to them. The symbol, the character as cognitive construct always has an emotional element. The current life situation is the context in which the symbol finds itself. Recipients (re)construe the information according to their capabilities and possibilities. Reading and at the same time construing things.

 

Such information needs to manage for the most part without things being balanced out in conversation, without the negotiation process between those talking about the content of the communication. It’s something found as well as something lost or a piece of rubbish that only attains importance or function again if someone picks it up and lends it a – perhaps different – meaning. Something found, like the hand-written notes that were discarded in the wastepaper.

 

With the drawings on the sheets of music, I am reacting to the varied messages from these sheets: to the suspected tone, to the arduous work of handwriting, to the mathematical reference to music, to the visibility of corrections of written memos that have already vanished into oblivion, to the imagined pitch when playing the music, to the transported themes, to the age of the worn sheet, to the likely conviviality when playing a musical instrument, to the pride of the copyist revealed in the signature, to the industriousness of evening musicians, to the brittleness of the pen-stroke and much more. A process that has triggered a dance of interpretation, reaction and imagination in me when working on it.

 

See speech at the opening by Dieter Kleinpeter.