Everyone is the Blacksmith of Their Own Fortune (God). 2023

The present is defined by excess.
Bigger, faster, better, higher than before.
Combined with the claim to absolute being.

“What I do is right.”

Everything else is excluded.
This is the rule – from high politics to group identity, down to the smallest interpersonal detail.
Contradictory thinking and action are perfectly united in the name of progress.

In grand plans – history has taught us – not only is the wheat separated from the chaff,
but the hollow shell is also declared to be the fruit.
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This year, 2023, I have declared the year of the “rescue blankets.”

Everything must be protected so that nothing goes to the dogs.
The golden side of the rescue blanket is turned outward – for attention.
The silver side faces inward – toward inner values, so they do not get lost to the outer world.

At the beginning of March this year, my exhibition Poetry of the Moment opened at Kunstraum St. Georgen in Wismar. My art project on the necessity of poetry in a time of fear.
One chapter I dedicated “to those who not only count the days, but the seconds.”

In this exhibition, LUPINALE 2023: TIME:SIGNS, the focus is on recycling, on waste, and on the question:
How does art emerge from refuse?
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“One of the defining characteristics of a work of art is that it serves no practical, material purpose –
it is an end in itself.

It fulfills no other function than contemplation.
The pleasure of this contemplation can be so intense, so deeply personal, that one experiences it as a self-sufficient, self-justifying primacy – as an independent being – and often resists any demand for analysis.
Such a demand is an attack on human identity, on the deepest essential self of a person.

No feeling is without cause. And such intense feeling cannot exist without origin, without connection to the source of values and emotions – to the needs of survival of a living entity.
Art has a purpose and fulfills a human need.

But it is not a material need – it is a need of consciousness.
Art is inextricably entangled with human survival –
not with physical survival, but with that upon which physical survival depends:
the preservation and continuation of consciousness.

Art is not morality’s housemaid.”