WHERE OUR LANGUAGE MAKES US GUESSING SOMEBODY SITTING ON A BENCH IN THE RAIN, AND WHERE THERE IS NO SITTING ON A BENCH IN THE RAIN, THERE,WE WANT TO SAY, BE A GHOST / 2008 / wood, plaster, iron, fabric, string, newspaper, sound, light box, glas, marble, foam, photography, salt, cement board / Show: Am Sprung / 14.11. ­ 18.01.2009 / OK Zentrum, Linz

Nothing less than a retrospective, an interim review of the previous work. A kind of conclusion was assumed: art had been practiced as an exercise in an old­fashioned understanding of work as self­generation ­if not self­ improvement (choreography of a (ostensibly engaged / ruined) reality). Retrospective is useful only as a renewed attempt to invent this language (the content! = The how), which understands the process of correction of itself (the victim?) As a gesture of optimism and encouragement (likelihood of confusion with usual Geschichtsbeschönigung); despite all those doubts that arise from the claim to embody a promise like a functioning (a name like a work). (Reliability only guarantees the art of abolishing time -­ this was advised as an urgent and unflinching gesture against the petty speculation that is currently being exposed.). Perhaps the innovation of chance is exhausted, the spirit weak (thanks to the spiritualization) and calculability of risks no longer the basis of social contracts (what give a no longer wanting society?). For the future: I write on the properties of every thing that was created (against me). Starting with the remains * collected in the archive, it is about questioning one’s own way of working, the pitfalls of the art business, simply what is of relevance.

For another „local scene of the generation“ review, it seemed appropriate to create a kind of retrospective of recent work. Countless hard­to­communicate experiences remained as a collection of fragments of formerly extensive installations (as in this portfolio too). It was time to drop ballast: so much has been disposed of, not without first paying attention to each piece. Formally decisive and memorable details of larger objects were poured into plaster, whereby a partially ruinous­ seeming result was considered appropriate. The result was real reminiscences, a tour of the work, a collection of attractive shards merely, an intense archive for the artist. A collection of memories of events that once provided living experience (relics that still maintain the possibility of living encounter). These were accompanied in the installation of similar remnants of the steel industry in Linz, as soon found similar talking and attractive remnants. The presentation tried to establish unity and autonomy, which was only partially successful: it is still going on, with the Geisterseherei.