Unfortunately, the recording of a conversation between the New York exhibition curator (?) and S. is incomplete. It was no longer possible to determine the time.

?: Hello, Ms. S.! Everything okay?

S.: Pardon?

?: I mean your exhibition. You are a painter. How do you feel?

S.: I am an artist. Painting is my profession.

?: Okay! With this subtle distinction, you are alluding to the convincing sentence of one of your world-famous German colleagues: “Everyone is an artist?”

S.: No, not at all. On the one hand, this sentence originally came from the German Protestant theologian, philosopher and educator Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768 - 1834), and in his words, “All people are artists.”

He is primarily a successor to Immanuel Kant and F. W. Joseph Schelling. This is worth mentioning because it places him in the tradition of Romantic philosophy, which assumed that the creation of the world was a “poetic act”. This was understood to mean a self-creative power in man: An artistic power, halfway between his power of faith (religion) and his power of knowledge (science). In this order, Schleiermacher literally says: “Everything that mankind appropriates as an extension must be formed in an artistic way.” This means nothing other than that mankind's works receive their fully valid form from his artistic power. This applies to all the forms human beings create. We place our self-made forms in juxtaposition to the forms that have developed in nature, and so create our own world: the world that human beings have made for themselves. But this is still far from being the world of works of art. It is about forms of life that enable us to live with other human beings and nature in freedom and peace. From this, what we generally call objective culture is formed, for example, our language. If we want to take the step to art, we have to wrest something from our objective culture, that is, the culture of all people, so that an objectified form can develop out of the objective and show a higher form in an objectified reality. To understand this better, I would like to point out that we can create an objectified form out of our language by creating a poem. The poem is the art form. The art form is free of all utilitarian thinking and serves only the realization of the beautiful. That is the form, the art. This requires a special will to art, an idea, talent and craftsmanship.

My famous colleague just poured old wine into new skins.

Incidentally, I would like to remind you of our agreement to talk about art today and not about artists. Then you have the work in front of you and not the artist.

?: Okay. I see paintings and drawings around me that were created in an old-fashioned way: canvas, oil paints, charcoal, chalk, water colour! Have you somewhat overslept the developments of the last few decades?

S.: Developments? What developments? How should one be able to tell?

?: For example, by the way in which artists open themselves up to the spirit of the age and take up the issues and problems of society. Many artists show great commitment here. In their works, they point to inhumanity, to wars, famines, social misery. They want to shock the audience with their means in order to provocatively shake people up. None of that takes place in your work. You show the beautiful, ideal world of colours and shapes. But there is nothing ideal about this world at all!

S.: Of course not. However, I would like to draw your attention to the fact that shocking experiences disturb the free relationship between the work and the viewer. This must not happen, because this relationship is not available for any purpose. In this sense, shock experiences are to be seen as coercion. Coercion, however, has no place in the freedom of art. The meaning of the work must always arise from the free form in the viewer and only through her. The most stupid question in this context comes from school lessons, when the art teacher asks on the occasion of a picture interpretation:

“What does the artist want to tell us with this picture?“

The answer should be: ‘Nothing!’ Because she didn't know us at all!” Because a work of art always refers only to itself, never to anything else. It is, as already said, simply unavailable for any purpose. Incidentally, this applies equally to works of art and children (education). Apparently this is impossible for people to comprehend.

I would like to know what this provocative art, which has been going on for several decades now, has brought in the way of enlightenment? On the contrary! These works quickly seem banal. It is always just a question of time. When one abomination is replaced by another, the work that dealt with the past abomination is then an abomination. The relationship between art and reality is extremely sensitive. You can't just go at it with a hammer! And the question of how to recognize developments at all has, as far as I know, still not been answered

Art in its freedom did not and does not develop in a linear fashion. Quite the opposite: it loves leaps! Sometimes it takes something from a previous epoch, shows it anew in its time, or behaves in a good sense of intellectual anarchism, in which it completely destroys past forms and is able to show everything new, a totally new world: this The arts also play this game among themselves: at one time religious art (e.g. the temple!) as architecture is decisive for an era; or perhaps music determines the entire artistic scene, or poetry, etc.

Xenocrates (396 BC to 314 BC) was a philosopher and student of Plato who took over the “Philosophical Academy” in Athens from his teacher and ran it for 25 years. Xenocrates believed that a change in form in art must always be preceded by a change in consciousness in people.

I would like to explain to you how difficult it is to understand this doctrine and, above all, to make it clear in what great temporal spaces overarching thought must be applied here. This can perhaps be exemplified by the most important architectural structures, which are usually at the centre of all cultures: That is the building of temples! A clear change of form, preceded by a profound change of consciousness, can be recognized in the transformation of the Egyptian temple into the Greek temple.

If we look at Egyptian culture, we see that it is very much composed of architectural monuments, massive structures that rise up before us. The Egyptians built huge temples with expansive and tall walls, some of which were decorated with large figures on the front sides. In the middle of these huge walls, and in fact exactly in the middle, the Egyptian builders placed a small opening in relation to the wall surface. Now one can ask oneself, 'What is the purpose of this narrow-looking opening in the wall?' and 'What does the relationship of this small hole to the monumentality of the wall structures say?

Temple of Hathor Source: insightvacations.com

Anyone who has ever stood in front of such a temple wall with its immense dimensions experiences this opening as a gate. The gate appears extremely still and at the same time relentlessly strict to the observer, and this impression is intensified by the huge figures, which appear threatening and whose faces are characterized by deep seriousness and inner composure. One could almost say that the entire massive front of the temple was built for the sake of this gate, which seems to want to force the viewer or the person walking towards it into itself. It demands that the person pass through this gate. This is the experience that the Egyptian temple wall offers the approaching person: hitting an enormous wall, going through it, stepping over a threshold and crossing a boundary to enter an interior that is completely hidden from her and possibly contains great dangers. As one approaches, this wall pushes itself more and more towards the onlooker and seems to finally penetrate her. Its gesture literally draws her into her own body. This is the primal experience of the Egyptian person in front of the described gate, which becomes her loophole into eternity:

Coming from the outside, she is drawn into the temple, she is educated. Her education is the drawing into her own body, even if it is caused by fear.

The closed nature and dark interior point to a culture whose true life is not anchored in this world, but in the hereafter, in the afterlife.

The Greek temple is quite different: it is completely connected to the earth. It has a selected place in a moving landscape, in the lines of tension, at a very specific point. The temple is set into the earth. It is open on all sides, allowing sunlight into its interior. All darkness is gone. While the Egyptian temple was completely turned inward, the Greek temple is turned outward with the same determination and stands on the earth like a being. Its columns were modelled on the example of human dimensions: no two columns are the same, each has its own being. Its own self! The temple wants to be looked at from the outside. It wants the human gaze to sweep freely around it, to grasp it! And this desire to grasp the world through concepts was the new shift in consciousness in Greek culture.

Temple of Hera II, so-called Temple of Poseidon, mid-5th century BC, Paestum.
Source: Kunstgeschichte Europas, edited by Martin Rabe & Georg Friedrich Schulz, Schuler Verlagsgesellschaft mbH, Munich

Xenocrates' theory was so good, though, that it lasted until the 18th century, when Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717–1768), founder of scientific archaeology and art history in the German-speaking world, classified developments into three stages: youth, maturity, age. His concept has actually remained valid until today, if such a differentiated approach is still used at all. But it doesn't capture all artistic expressions either. So it is that we have no yardstick with which to say, in all seriousness, that this or that artist works according to outdated concepts.

? : Your explanations are not enough for me. They seem to be divorced from artistic practice and reality. Just look at how many new materials have been adopted in art, which have allowed completely new, previously unimaginable effects to be achieved, effects that arise entirely from the artist's treatment of the material.

S.: That's right. The artistic expressions are tied to the material and always take on a very specific character from it. But they do not arise from the material. They arise from insights. These are driven by the artist, as it were, to the material and transform it. A block of marble is a natural stone. When the artist's idea encounters it, its natural form is transformed into a new one, an art form. Now it stands before us as an idea in marble. Incidentally, the process is not appropriate to the material, because the artist wants to overcome the material, the substance, in order to give it a new existence. She works against the nature of the material, which does not easily bow to the idea, to the spirit!

The great influence of material, which you mentioned and which began during the industrial revolution, does indeed represent a significant caesura in the creation of art. It provided influence for the pursuit of invention in art and increasingly replaced the search for knowledge. One could be forgiven for thinking that invention has taken the place of knowledge.

? : If the reality of contemporary life means so little to you, then I would like to know what drives you to create art?

S.: I did not mean to imply that the present means nothing to me. On the contrary! I take everything from it, just differently than you think and above all in a different way and by means of other methods of representation.

First of all, I believe that, in very general terms, works of art are created because people want to see and recognize in external form that which they can only grasp from the given through ideas and concepts.

In this way, ideas and concepts that fit the given become tangible reality. Both idea and concept are to be released from the form of pure contemplation and woven into the active world. Only then can people find themselves in it and thus develop an awareness of themselves, that is, self-awareness.

With this thesis, I am pointing to an almost essential requirement, namely to show people a way back to themselves in a world that is becoming increasingly virtual. I would like to emphasize this particularly, because art is able to unfold great effects here.

And now imagine the following: there were no works of art in our world! What feeling does that convey? Perhaps you can better understand my question with the help of an example: Imagine if nature were to lose all its colours. What would that mean? I think it would seem soulless, dead, and this mood would certainly be transmitted to people. In the colours, we are confronted, as it were, with the spiritual element of nature. From this I conclude that without art the world would lose its spiritual element. It would be like dead, but I think it's possible that no one would notice.

? : Again, an old-fashioned thought! Much too idealistic!

S.: You have no idea! Speaking of colours, I would like to explain my artistic approach to you: Painting only comes from colour. I think we agree on that. The colour contains a spiritual element, namely to form itself figuratively during the painting process. It is immanent to form! It always brings a form with it from which the pictorial composition arises through the ordering hand of the artist.

Now the most important question: What quality do I give the colours? This is crucial! And this is where I try to get away from the way colours shine in my pictures, to increase it, so to speak, to a “glow”.

The colour no longer appears in the light, but it shines from within. Each colour surface hides its own inner light source within itself, an inner light, so to speak! I follow this light, because for me it comes from a new dimension, a new space that has not yet existed in painting. In this endeavour to develop a light painting, in a completely different understanding than the Impressionists had, I stand in a centuries-old painting tradition. And if I don't find this light in me first, I can't paint it. Does that make me a backward-looking artist?

For centuries, artists have always taken what was good and showed it in a new way. Originality in art has only been known since the beginning of the 20th century.

? : Nevertheless, somehow I can't shake the feeling that you don't fit into today's art scene. It's all too beautiful. Your pictures and everything you say about art.

S.: You should have told me at the beginning of our conversation you apparently have something like a fear of water when it comes to beauty. I would have spoken to you in a completely different way, in the usual vernissage code. You know what I mean, about the creativity of the artist, the authenticity of her work, or how you consciously no longer want to make art and consciously renounce any statement... which, by the way, is a statement!

Nevertheless, I think it's good that you have a sense of beauty. That proves that it is still in you, otherwise you wouldn't be able to feel it.

In fact, it's all about beauty! Because that's the only thing we humans have organs for perceiving. However, we don't seem to suspect it, since we are mainly concerned with the opposite of beauty, the “finitely dead”. You understand that the opposite of beauty is not ugliness, but lifelessness. Mankind cannot relate to the inanimate, because we ourselves have nothing to of it in us. We are not equipped for it. That is why we do not recognize it.

At the beginning, you said that as an artist I should deal with the great catastrophes in an enlightened way. I ask you again: what should come of it? After the last two world wars, people in Europe were sure that these atrocities would never happen again, because they now knew what kind of beginnings something like this arises from. They even did peace research! What happened? Wars returned with the same intensity.

If we are to turn to the apocalyptic, then we have to do it right, that is, show the essence of the apocalyptic, which lies in the transformation to a new beginning.

The apocalyptic always contains the seed of the future, which is not present in the finitely dead.

We have to turn to beauty and place it upright in the world like large mirrors so that its opposite is reflected and exposes itself. People cannot expose it. We also have to look after the cleaning materials for these mirrors and ensure this aesthetic dimension is kept shiny and clean. That is education in art, which unfortunately is increasingly neglected.

?: So again, it all sounds too idealized to me. You can't do that anymore. I also have a question that starts at the other end: What if today's artists refused to create any more artworks?

S.: I recall what I said earlier about a world without art. I don't know what would really happen then either. There was a moment like that during the First World War. Disappointed by the materialistically oriented intellectual culture, many artists refused to continue creating works of art. They consciously created anti-art.

But what happened then? The art market ignored this fact because it needed the goods. The artists' abstinence was commercially unacceptable, and so clever writers and art dealers simply declared as art that which, according to the artists' will, was not art. Such a thing is absurd, and this absurdity has been preserved to this day: Art is whatever is declared to be art. That is the motto. I have to tell you that I have nothing to do with this, and I see no reason to attribute such events to artistic creation.

? : How do you think it should continue then? From what you say, one could think that nothing essential has been produced in art since the so-called classical modern period.

S.: I don't want it to be understood that absolutely. In my opinion, there are two positions at stake: On the one hand, those who care about art have to abandon the misconception that art's meaning is self-evident. It never is! As Kandinsky once put it, art speaks “in secret of the secret.” Any crudeness is out of place here. That is why appreciating art has to be practiced just as you have to practice anything you want to be able to do.

And now the more difficult part: Whether we are looking at outer space, the interior of the earth or matter, at present-day social conditions or back to distant times, we come up against limits where our imagination ends because it relates to the external, tangible world accessible to the senses. Limits beyond which the thoughts developed from sensory experience no longer lead to further perceptions. Everything seems as if we can no longer find answers to the questions of the present because we cannot move forward. At the beginning of the century, the artists of the group “Blaue Reiter” were at a comparable point. They had the question of how to get light into a creative process whose root could no longer arise from the obvious, that is, from the representational. This question is applicable to all levels today and one answer could be: We have to develop useful, that is, practical visualizing methods that go beyond the obvious and factual knowledge. Only in this way can we move forward and recognize what there is to recognize beyond the previously mentioned limits. We are hardly prepared for this extraordinary departure, which must begin with a reorganization of the relationship between mankind and reality. It would be a major change. It is uncomfortable. This is why people continue to act as if the matter is clear, and it is precisely this deception that is the cause of the art crisis, which people like to talk about so much and so cleverly.

But now I would like to ask you a question in this context. Please don't close your ears, because I'm starting again with the old days: we know that the imagery of the Middle Ages was derived from the texts of the Bible and the events of salvation. The Bible was the great revealer and inspirer for these artists.

With the beginning of the modern era, nature took over this role, or rather the study of nature. Nature was the motivator. It inspired artists and this relationship lasted at least until the end of Impressionism.

And now my question: What could it be that could be as important as the Bible and nature as an inspiration for the arts today? What or who can take over this position? I have never received an answer to this question, have you?

? : Of course not, because I have never thought about it that way.

S.: A change of consciousness leads to a change of form, not only in art. I have tried to make clear to you in what great dimensions.

My question: What shapes our consciousness today? I already gave the answer to this in one of my other essays. Today's thinking is determined solely by the economic sphere. It determines everything and its great goal is called “competitiveness”, no matter in which field. This fetish of competitiveness has even found its way into schools and universities. I explained all this in detail. We will suffer from this, because competitiveness has nothing to do with culture, whatever culture, and nothing at all to do with peace and freedom. We are running ever faster after competitiveness.

So if the economy is the arbiter of our consciousness, then art, however contrary this may sound, must develop out of economic thinking. But now out of new economic thinking. Or to put it more precisely: the false economic thinking that has lasted for centuries must be dropped.

To do this, we need to approach the essence of our work with a new awareness. The labour process consists of the fact that no one can work alone. Everyone works not for themselves, but for someone else. Everyone depends on someone else to do their work, which is useful for either continuing to work on it or consuming what has been produced. Other people are always needed in the labour process.

However, if I use my energy to outdo others in the form of strong competitiveness, the whole thing logically ends in war. And that is exactly what we have today and it determines our consciousness.

My question: How can art, which is completely selfless in its essence, arise from such selfish thinking? Only from new thinking, which starts from thinking for the needs of the other!

We must not fall into the error of thinking that we can create a change for the better with the same thinking that we used to bring about the catastrophe. No! Because it was precisely “this thinking” that brought about the catastrophe. We cannot believe that we will get help by managing everything better now. We need a new way of thinking. And this thinking must come from art. Only art guarantees the defence against all forms of egoism. And only that can save us.

© Martin Rabe & Sibylle Laubscher