DISTANT SUFFERING XXI | i.d. of a shared bullet
I would never had imagined that so little water would mean so much to me.
A visitor of Supermarket Independent Art Fair Stockholm after the melting of the ice bullet . . .
IN MEMORY OF ULAY [ FRANK UWE LYCOPENE ] 30/11/1943 – 02/03/2020
Click here for the time-laps video
presented in / on:
Luxfer Open Space | Czech Republic | June 11 – August 30, 2021
Juxtapose Art Fair | Aarhus | Denmark | August 20 - 22, 2021 ruimteCAESUUR | Middelburg | December 22, 2021 – January 06, 2022
Studio44 | Stockholm | December 22, 2021 – January 19, 2022
DiEM 25 - DiEM Gallery | web | from January 2022 on Cinema U 2 - Peace Letter to Ukraine 2 | web | curated by Wilfried Agricola de Cologne and Yarina Butkowska for the Alphabet Art Centre, part of the The New Museum of Networked Art for the project Peace Letters to Ukraine March 6 – May 31, 2022
AiR Biekorf - Misfigure | Brugges | Belgium | April 21 – May 29 2022
Supermarket Art Fair | Stockholm | Sweden | May 26 - 29, 2022
Slipvillan | on Långholmen in Stockholm | Sweden | June 4 - 18, 2022
financially supported by Vleeshal
Luxfer Open Space | Česká
Skalice | Czech Republic
‘i.d. of a shared bullet’ was for the first time presented at Luxfer Open Space in Česká Skalice in the Czech Republic on June 11, 2021. Roman Rejhold and Kate Štroblová invited me there for a residency an an exhibition. During the opening artist talk we handed out the ice bullet . . .
Aarhus | Denmark
‘i.d. of a shared bullet’ for the second time was presented at the Juxtapose Art Fair in Aarhus, Denmark, from August 20 – 22, 2021.
presentations in Studio44 | Sockholm | Sweden
ruimteCAESUUR | Middelburg | the Neterlands
the time laps-video of ‘i.d. of a shared bullet’, was presented in Stockholm, Sweden and in Middelburg, the Netherlands from December 6, 2021 till January 7, 2022.
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Långholmen | Stockholm | Sweden
Photo courtesy of
© Masoud Shahsavari
A walk home from Slipvallen on Långholmen
Photos courtesy of 2022 ©Thierry Mortier
Under contemporary conditions, the assertion of aesthetic autonomy is, in itself, a political claim.
Nicholas
Brown1
DISTANT SUFFERING XXI i.d. of a shared bullet
Reflecting on the conversations during the slow melting of i.d. of a shared bullet, Adorno comes to mind. He too taught me to look at art in a layered, but above all, political way. At the roles of the art producer, the art consumer, and all entities that move in between, the ideological angles in art history, etc. All this of course within the economic paradigm of the ruling class. Adorno set me on the content of my artistic path with “Art is not a matter of pointing up alternatives but rather resisting, solely through artistic form, the course of the world, which contitouted as "Hot Bullet Shape Mode."
course of the world, which continues to hold a pistol to the heads of human beings.”2
I also felt almost personally supported by him: Theodor Adorno perhaps came the closest to making the ultimate defence of l'art pour l'art by claiming that “art becomes social by its opposition to society, and it occupies this position only as autonomous art. It criticizes society by merely existing.”3
Back to the beautiful conversations during the melting. My art work i.d. of a shared bullet consists of a frozen ice bullet in a small bottle provided with a cork and a label carrying the title. The bullet is from an AK-47 Kalashnikov. of
bullet resembles that of automatic assault rifle. Made with the help of a cartridge, developed to brighten up your scotch. The image of this rifle - the AK47 Kalashnikov - is portrayed in so many images and documentations of war. The bullet, one rarely sees. The results on the other hand . . .
Immediately after the little bottle with the frozen bullet leaves the freezer, the ‘decay’ starts: the bullet starts to melt. It melts from a metaphor of a lifethreatening object – a bullet - into a life-creating element: water. I presented i.d. of a shared bullet for the first time in June 2021 in Luxfer
the first time in June 2021 in Luxfer Open Space in Česká Skalice, the Czech Republic. As an opening session. During the Juxtapose Art Fair in Aarhus, Denmark, for the first time my wife Willy and I handed people the art work one on one. We let the melting decide about the time frame: it guided the conversation almost like an hourglass. The people who thawed the bottle in their hands all became emotional after a very short time. First of all they considered the work as beautiful and than –sometimes at a deep personal level –meaningful. Some wanted to stop the process by putting the bottle back into the freezer, others photographed the the freezer, others
ongoing process during our conversation, some tried to minimize skin contact to slow down the melting process. Many lamented that the work confronted them with their own vulnerability in a way almost how Adorno was quoted by Byung-Chul Han in his 'Saving beauty': “We should return to the kind of beauty that makes us (…) in Theodor Adorno’s terms, realizing our own finitude.”4
self – is actually the only one who has seen the art work in an "original" state. The rest of the planet has to trust that the "story" is based in reality, even in truth, that this water was once an ice bullet. So the only “realistic” image is anchored in the owners memory as long as she / he / x remembers that.
In many cases, the conversation half way down focused on the preliminary result: a small glass bottle with a label and a cork with a little water in it. The owner – apart from the artist himself – is actually the only one who has
“Indeed, this escape from reality led to an experience which could (and did) become a powerful force invalidating the actual prevailing bourgeois values, namely by shifting the locus of the individual’s realization from the domain of the performance principle and the inner resources of the human being: pas-
sion, imagination, conscience.”5
On a personal level, the specific work also shows the physical dynamics of my physical present; me being 70 years old and survived cancer, be it with a lot of negative side effects. The vulnerability and transience of myself and others around me are quite realistic facts in my life. So part of the work of course is shaping my own finitude. An experience I share with all those wonderful people I had the privilege to meet while melting the ice bullet under the watchful eye of Adorno . . .
One of the melted bullets accompanied Azumi Okabe to Niigata City, Japan . . .
Courtesy photo 2022 ©Azumi Okabe
1 Nicholas Brown, The Work of Art in the Age of Its Real Subsumption under Capital, nonsite.org., March 13, 2012
2
Theodor W. Adorno, “Commitment,” in Notes to Literature, Volume Two, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia UP, 1974) 80.
3
Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, eds. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: U Minnesota P, 1997) 225 - 226.
4 Byung-Chul Han, Saving Beauty, trans. Daniel Steuer, (Polity, 2018) 22 - 24.
5 Herbert Marcuse, The Aesthetic Dimension: Toward a Critique of Marxist Aesthetics (Boston: Beacon, 1978) 4 - 5.
