Thomas Kratz, Wie ich dem toten Hasen die Bilder erklaere, 2006

Thomas Kratz, Wie ich dem toten Hasen die Bilder erklaere, Vera Cort^es, Lisbon, 2006
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Looking back at performances of the 1960s they seem to have been made in order to end in a black and white picture. One of these photographs has entered the collective memory of the art world like hardly any other: Joseph Beuys, his face covered with honey, gold dust and gold leafs, carrying a dead hare in his harms. On November 26 1965, Beuys walked trough the Düsseldorf Gallery Schmela with a hare on his arm from art object to art object, whispering in its ears. The performance was entitled „How to explain pictures to a dead hare".

With „How I explain pictures to a dead hare" Thomas Kratz will re-enact this key performance of the 1960s. He transforms the photographic traces and eye-witnesses' description into a bodily-spatial ritual, which yet meets now a changed local and temporal context. He thereby examines Beuys' test arrangement for its present-day effects, which it may have on himself as well on the audience. The Beuys-Performance, which has influenced the art world's imaginary so much, is used as a camouflage. By producing a familiar impression at first sight, Kratz infiltrates a new refined lyrical metapherology between tragic and humour, addressing the big anthropological questions about life, death and reincarnation. Kratz positions himself and the public in a conflicting area generated by the pictures from memory and the actual happening in the presence. In his choice of means the artist follows reflections by Jorge Luis Borges: „I use the most hackneyed metaphors. After all this is what is eternal: the stars look like eyes, f. e., or death is like the sleep." The familiar is the door to the new, the work of another artist the door to one's own oeuvre. The meta-individual culture is the condition of the particular experience, the archive the condition of contemporary art.
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(Text by Margret Rosen)

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People & Blogs

Tags:

• Thomas Kratz
• after Joseph Beuys
• duration 3 h
• Vera Cort^es
• Lisbon
• 2006

[aaronthhedude]

WEAK!!!!

[eisee8sch]

Ha, genau wie Joseph Beuys! Tolles Cover!