Words that changed the world and influenced the weather.
Franz Ehmann at SpiroGraceArtRoom, Brisbane, Australia
There where you are not.
The weather was not recorded while making, recording, living and presenting the artworks. A dead weather zone is aligned with the zone of history, with the zone of memory, with the zone of forgetting, with the zone of sound and noise and with the zone of words.
I begin as I always do with discontinuities and with a sense of ending. I’ve been meaning to tell you something about lost causes and what to smuggle away from it. Have not really pinpointed why this starts up again and again. There is nothing specific to it. Some noise, a few words and an enormous amount of visual material that gets filed somewhere and becomes useful sometime later. I will tell you what these things are not. Do not confound them with the things they’re not. As this all takes time, time takes everything. Everything is really everything and words always mean a little more.
On the noise, i wish i was the road to peace, a map of human kindness that still discovers its own ways, … i wish i was the things that have to be said, talks of peace at any time to remind the tyrants of compassion and words of healing, stop – fragile as this appears the peace plan is blown and the news has no end of violence, stop, another attempt at securing the next peace mission is on its way,…across many countries the diplomats talk of peace and sanctions, of cease fires and medical evacuations, condemnations in many forms and retributions and trade embargos, every act begets the next, peace needs rescuing from the seamless abuse of the regimes, stop in the name of terror, – stop -, this must go on, cannot go on, will go on,… i wish i was and so it continues with my discontinuities.1
I will stick with I can’t get it right and I cannot be good. Add to the noise and add to everything a bit more noise. Something so helpful, something so hopeless and even more lost to the moment of an incident on the way home from work. It is just noise, dirty, marred, spoiled and flawed. It is a pure knock’em downs in a few words. Have I just rehearsed this, this flow of traffic towards these artworks? I start to talk to make noise. From afar the incident I see is a few levels up on a building I usually see but never think of. I spare you the ‘baroqueifications’ of endless adjectives to describe a certain event. No windows and a dirty black cavity I go with. A shapeless smoky cloud has invaded a building. That is my kind of Zero Painting.
1. This is from my ongoing text Wishlist that I started in the late 1990’s. Franz Ehmann