2.
There's no need to do away with memory just because one wants to stop making it compulsory."
from "Die Verbesserung von Mitteleuropa", Oswald Wiener)

He carried along on his journey a sheet of paper covered with hand-written notes, one of those - as he was only too willing to admit - "cheat sheets", upon which he sketched out his speeches for exhibition openings; something to jog his memory. But the more time that passed since it had been written, the more it recalled, even to him, something akin to hieroglyphics rather than letters of the alphabet. This text on his friend's work was to act as a kind of reference for the observations he was to
formulate after looking at the copies of his friend's new work, which he still expected to receive. In the course of reading (which is to say deciphering) this document his eye fell upon a fragment of text, which he adapted and affixed to a postcard addressed to his friend: "Here it has become especially evident that photography, in particular, has made a major contribution to the question of the non-congruence of perception, reality, and truth. If the purpose of advertising is the idealization or ideologization of the body, then pornography is dedicated to its instrumentalization. The work is like a paraphrase of these sentences, an expression of a strategy of clarification on a meta-level. In the center of it all, and above all - this must repeatedly be emphasized - stands his body all by itself."
While everyone else was making preparations to heave himself headlong into a bubbling, raving, electric, scintillating New Year's Eve, he returned to his hotel and added, on a further postcard: "In spite of it all, his vision is not exhibitionistic. On the contrary, he peels away his body or parts of his body as though they were stick-on transfers, with a kind of violence. Isolated from their whole, monochromatically-altered, set in a pose, enriched with commentary, or carried ad absurdum and stuffed into a picture frame, they become things to look at, artefacts of (his) life. Work in which, through the staging of reality, so-called reality itself is revealed as staging."

3.
"What a wicked, merry thing it is! All of that down there."
from "Die Stunde des Teufels in:...", Fernando Pesoa)

Of the latest work, which had been supposed to be the substance of his discussion and for which he had waited in vain during the course of his journey (which was now slowly winding down) his friend provided him, shortly before his departure - at the last minute, so to speak - proofs of two images for the catalogue, a kind of "hors-d'œuvre" that awakened in him great curiosity about the work which was still to be sent to him. In one of these pieces his friend - or, to be more precise, the image his friend had made of himself by striking what amounted to a military pose clad only in a slight leather g-string and fixing his eyes with a steady, almost hypnotic gaze onto his own flexed biceps - demanded of the viewer of the image, via a sign attached to a steel contraption, nothing less than: "You must love me."
When he recalled this piece later, in the lobby of one of the hotels he was staying in, he made the following assertion on yet another postcard to his friend: "Once again one feels that one has been transported into a world whose basic law is the fragmentation of existence, in which identity exfoliates into a variety of roles and poses, in which the parts endure alongside each other but cannot be reunited into a whole, in which irreconcilable opposites are all lined up right next to one another, in which a gap opens between image and commentary. A world which confirms one's doubts as to whether the ego can, through its likeness, which is to say through artistic self-reflection, again cohere as a single unity and identity. So it is that the images - even if they seem first and foremost to be an ironically-distanced commentary or a lusty, manneristic masquerade - resemble a photographic vivisection; they are deeply personal and cause pain, too."

4.
"If I speak of myself differently, then it is because I regard myself differently. All contradictions are to be found there, according to point of view and circumstances."
from: "Essays", Michel de Montaigne)

On another postcard he continued his exposition by stating that one thing that particularly fascinated him about his friend's work was how he mined the potential of his personality and person to the extreme and how, in regard to his role, he was able to congeal the ambivalence of personality, the artist, and the star together with their public image.
After having sent this postcard he departed, or, to put it more correctly, continued on his journey. He still had not received the package with his friend's work; gradually doubt began to grow within him as to whether he had ever actually forwarded his latest pictures at all. But then he thought back to how dependable his friend had always proven himself to be, in fact, if he were called upon to give an example for dependability it would be his friend's name and no other that would occur to him - a dependability that found its equal in the precision of his work. Certainly the pictures had been sent long ago. The possibility of a long-distance inquiry made of his friend seemed to cancel itself out of its own accord as a fully superfluous sign of distrust. Thus he was absolutely persuaded that the pictures his friend had forwarded to him were still travelling along somewhere on his trail. He mentioned this to his friend in a postcard and added a quotation from the Cuban photographer Salas, a quotation that he had considered using for his text on his friend's most recent work: "A camera is an instrument used by someone to convey something; to deny it would be as though the author of a story would maintain that not he, but his typewriter, had said something."

5.
"When I think of a person, I change him; it almost seems to me that he is not as he is, but that he had only been that way when I began to think of him."
(from: "Geschichten von Herrn Keuner", Bertolt Brecht)

Now his journey was reaching its unavoidable conclusion and still the pictures from his friend had not reached him. He therefore let his friend know, on a postcard, that he had now given up all hope of still receiving the pictures in time to compose the desired text for the catalogue, which had already gone into production. Contemplation as to whether this had been an act of God or whether it simply owed to certain shortcomings on the part of the postal service of the country he'd been visiting seemed to him, at this point, immaterial. There remained nothing other than to send him excerpts of this story: a story of pictres which were sent and never reached their destination. This time he closed his comments - divided between a number of simultaneously-mailed postcards - with the following sentences, with which he had intended, in any event, to open his essay for the catalogue after the timely reception and careful study of his friend's pictures: "The individual in complete solitude feels no shame, neither for its nakedness, nor for its bodily functions, nor for any other of its actions; in its isolated state these would not become a source for the feelings of repugnance we call ashamedness. In order for shame to arise, a public is required, or at least memories stemming from earlier experiences with such a thing." Having done this, his instinctive inclination was to think of that second image from his friend's recent work, which he had seen shortly before his departure; that self-portrait of his friend, dipped in a hellish red light, upon which his body had appeared to him as a very nearly perfect sculpture, and upon which the laconic sentence could be read: "I'm your problem."

Gerald Matt, 1999

Published in Textpieces 1996-1998