©Photo Nils Strothoff
ART & DESIGN
My dance of united discrepancy
"What I like best is to remember the future." - Salvador Dalí
With this quote from Salvador Dalí, I would like to speak directly to the connection between the two (terms that are actually difficult for me to reconcile). The paradox of remembering the future is what is reflected in my working method of free artistic creation as well as in function-oriented design. In relation to art, for which my heart fundamentally beats, I am motivated to create utopias, to proclaim my imagination as reality and to leave the viewer groping in the dark of (self-)reflection.
The aesthetics of the performative is, according to Erika Fischer-Lichte, a current attempt to make the immediate effect of objects and actions not dependent on meanings that can be attached to them, but rather this happens quite independently of them, in part still before, but in that case beyond any attempt to settle meanings.
Artists and spectators are given the opportunity to experience transformations - to transform themselves, to transform the respective opposites, the other - the social, the political, the ethical - in a quite wonderful, not to say magical way. For it is precisely the collapse of these opposites, their merging, that can be understood as a reflection on the autonomy of art carried out by the performances, which at the same time radically questions this autonomy. (Erika Fischer-Lichte, Aesthetics of the Performative, 2004, p. 29f.)
For me, art means the resonance product of our present time, in which screens become the leading medium of almost all world relations. "Art touches and moves modern man as a recipient in the innermost part of his soul like nothing else - and it commands him as a producer, that is, as an artist or creator of art, by being able to assert its own lawfulness against all instrumental, political, or economic reason." (Hartmut Rosa, Resonance, A Sociology of World Relations, 2019, p. 473)
My craft creation liberates me from the tedium of reality, which design tries to optimize in this sphere. Design means for me, in clear contrast to art, reality. Its basis is nothing "supernatural", but quite primitive: the replacement of one function by another. (cf. Peter Smolarski) Good design has a cultural and sociological meaning. In other words, a constant reminder of the "better" future. Dieter Rahms even goes so far as to classify good design as a fundamental right. Design is made for people, to make their lives easier. This aspect also contributes to the resonance experience. Well-designed things do not escape me cold, hard and rigid, they unfold the pleasure of liveliness.
We, as physical beings guided by the senses, have the ability to discover the meaning in design. We design our lives - our world
As a designer - as part of a constructed, symbolic system, I am able to positively influence the world relationship of my fellow human beings, their experiences of resonance.
As an artist, I consciously live in a self-created illusion that invites everyone else in, but is not created for anyone.