Travelogue

               

The following happened on a summer day lost in September 1957.  We drive in the direction of the border, which must be somewhere behind the mountains.

There is a lot missing from this trip. Like a road map, a packet of cigarettes, says my friend.

We didn't discuss this trip, we got into the car, I started the engine, we left. That this trip would ever take place, we knew for several years. Like accepting a hangover after a nightly slamming party.

We drive fast and recklessly, “ as if we are fugitives from the law, who for a few days  raided a paymaster”.

We do not exchange words. In the rear-view mirror we see what we leave behind.

Perhaps the feeling of emptiness that has permanently settled in us,  is responsible for this enterprise.

Restless like a chameleon. That is how I described my mental state in a letter to a lady friend. Since the beginning of the summer I slept badly. I often woke up at night. I masturbated to calm myself down. My friend, his hands confidently hold the wheel, stared through his binoculars all the time in those days. Or for the umpteenth time he reread his favourite eighteenth century travel story.

One day, the day before yesterday?, he discovered a way out between the buildings

‘What an invention’, he says smilingly. ‘What do you mean? ‘  ‘The  steering wheel, all that's needed is a steering wheel.’

I wonder if the lifetime of a human is sufficient to pass all the roads, streets and paths that exist in the world.

'Can you say that you have seen the world?'

'Have you ever felt the pain of loneliness so deep, you had to hide away from people. And being alone was the only cure.?'

A Brief History of Drag in the Art World

Drag has a rich cultural history, spanning cross-dressing performances and deliberate parodies of fixed roles of gender and sexuality. Men have been performing on stage as women since the Ancient Greek tragedies, Shakespeare famously cast men as women, and Baroque operas featured early examples of drag.The term “drag queen” was first used to describe men appearing in women’s clothing in Polari—a type of British slang that was popularized among gay men and the theater community in the late 19th and 20th centuries. And while drag has long maintained a powerful presence in popular culture, more recently, it has developed a strong foothold in the art world as well.Today, in the wake of the popular television program RuPaul’s Drag Race, drag queen Conchita Wurst winning the Eurovision Song Contest, and new drag-themed club nights popping up across London, New York, and L.A., one could say that drag is in the midst of having a mainstream moment. Riding this wave of popularity are art galleries and museums. Recently, drag has been identified as an influence among major art exhibitions, like the Whitney Biennial in New York, and performance programs, like “Contemporary Drag” at NADA New York this past March. It also serves as one of the themes in the new show “Queer British Art” at Tate Britain.

Artists have historically created work that might not be considered or intended to be “drag,” but nonetheless similarly challenge and deconstruct rigid social and sexual archetypes. Take, for example, Marcel Duchamp’s female alter ego Rrose Sélavy, who first appeared in 1920. The character’s name was a pun on “Eros, c’est la vie” (meaning “eros, it is life”) and she appeared in several portraits taken by photographer Man Ray. Sélavy was an expression of Duchamp’s love for subversion and enigma. Similarly, the artist Claude Cahun was the male alter ego of the Surrealist Lucie Schwob, who took self-portraits dressed in male garments.Cahun was a forerunner to contemporary feminist artists like Lynn Hershman Leeson, Ana Mendieta, Cindy Sherman, and Gillian Wearing, among many others, who have played with elements of drag, often to critique the expectations placed on their gender. Hershman Leeson created a fictional character named Roberta Breitmore between 1973 and 1978, who even had her own therapist; Mendieta photographed herself with male facial hair to challenge gender signifiers; Sherman’s conceptual portraits have seen her disguise herself as fictionalized characters; and Wearing has manipulated her self image with masks.Elsewhere in history, major artists have famously documented the practice of drag. Andy Warhol filmed drag queens like Candy Darling and Mario Montez. The video artist Charles Atlas filmed famous London nightlife star Leigh Bowery; photographer Nan Goldin captured drag queens in her hometown of Boston as a teenager, and New York’s drag communities in the 1980s and early ’90s; and later, Mario Montez collaborated with the photographer Conrad Ventur.

Atlas continues to work with drag, evidenced by his recent video, Here She Is…v1 (2015), which was included in MoMA PS1’s “Greater New York” exhibition in 2015. He featured the famous New York drag queen Lady Bunny lip syncing to camera. One could also argue that the colorful characters depicted in Ryan Trecartin’s works of the 2000s had a proto-Drag Race aesthetic about them.Trecartin’s work was included in last year’s Berlin Biennale curated by the team behind DIS Magazine. The Biennale was titled “The Present in Drag,” and the DIS curators intended it to be a space for artists to reflect contemporary culture onto itself, rather than expose it. Also featured was the work of Amalia Ulman whose self-portraiture sees her enact a fake character she has cultivated via social media.

The recent drag programming at NADA New York was focused on more traditional ideas of drag, influenced, in part, by the recent explosion of a new generation of drag queens in Brooklyn. “[We brought them] out of the bars and into the streets—or rather into the art fair,” says Sam Gordon, who co-curated the performance program with Jacob Robichaux (together they run Gordon Robichaux, a curatorial agency seeking to surface under-recognized artists).That same Brooklyn drag scene was given gallery air-time at the end of last year in the show “Coney Island Babies: Visual Artists from the Brooklyn Drag Scene” at Bureau of General Service — Queer Division on West 13th Street in Manhattan. Curated by Director of the Fire Island Artist Residency Program, Chris Bogia, and drag performer and visual artist Montgomery Perry Smith, the show took stock of the vibrant community of contemporary visual artists in New York’s drag scene today. Prominent among the scene are the performance groups Chez Deep and Bushwig.

Meanwhile, across Europe, a renewed interest in drag has seen a slew of young artists incorporating it into their performance work. In the U.K., for example, Victoria Sin uses her drag persona to critique the expectation of feminine labor; and Samuel Douek, a drag performer, filmmaker, and artist who recently graduated from the Royal College of Art, has presented his work in both cabaret venues and galleries, as part of his work around queer spaces.In Berlin, events on the city’s underground scene have recently been hosted by artists like Parker Tilghman, who enacts a drag persona as part of his work.

When asked why drag was a relevant subject choice for the NADA lineup this year, Gordon explained that within the current political climate, drag could address an urgent need. “Everyone really needed some drag right when we served it up,” Gordon told me, describing the events as joyous, defiant, and inspirational.  

While emphasizing the contemporary moment, Gordon and Robichaux also acknowledged the evolving conversation around drag over time. Through a multigenerational group of drag artists—from the famous Lady Bunny and Tabboo! to younger performers like Sasha Velour, who has been hosting Nightgowns (a drag cabaret) in Bushwick for the last few years—they highlighted the deep history of drag’s presence in gallery spaces. 

The main difference when you put drag performance in a gallery, Penney explained, is the crowd. “To be in a gallery setting where nobody is talking and they don’t even know if they should clap because they don’t want to interrupt things, it can be really intense,” he said. And in that sense, drag gets taken seriously by the art world, but Penney believes it’s still somewhat marginalized. “I think a lot of performance art still gets de-legitimized because its drag,” he said.

At this year’s Whitney Biennale though, drag—in some interpretation—has been given credence. Work relating to the practice is present across the show wrote co-curator Christopher Lew in the exhibition catalogue’s introductory essay. Collective Puppies Puppies, for example, presents Liberty (Liberté) (2016), what they’ve described as “a drag performance and sculpture,” where a performer dons a Statue of Liberty costume and stands in public. Lew pointed to works by Porpentine Charity Heartscape and Cauleen Smith, as well as Tommy Hartung’s video The Lesser Key of Solomon (2015), as all dealing with identity and emancipation, and in that sense speaking to the practice of drag. He cited these works as examples of how “in these recent times of escalating strife and partisanship, artists have taken it upon themselves to bridge divides.”

If one thinks about drag as the practice of performing gender, sexuality, or other fixed societal roles, then in a way, we’re all doing drag, all of the time. So long as it deconstructs identity categories, it’s still drag. And according to curators like Lew and Gordon, today, amid an oppressive political climate, it’s a more relevant means of expression and creativity than ever.For example, artist Alexis Blair Penney was inspired to start the drag collective Chez Deep following a performance at MoMA PS1 in 2011 with Cody Critcheloe, Colin Self and Mykki Blanco. “If this is what a drag super-group looks like, I might just have to start one,” he thought. Penney noted that Chez Deep’s performance has run the full gamut of venues, from bars to white cube spaces. In 2014, the artist Spencer Sweeney flew them out to Glasgow to perform at The Modern Institute’s gallery space. Gordon emphasizes that the current moment is just the latest iteration of drag. “Drag moves in cycles,” he says, “but it’s interesting to see how quickly the mainstream is finding the alternative.” If anything, he believes taking drag out of its traditional contexts and into the art world is helping it continue to evolve.

If one thinks about drag as the practice of performing gender, sexuality, or other fixed societal roles, then in a way, we’re all doing drag, all of the time. So long as it deconstructs identity categories, it’s still drag. And according to curators like Lew and Gordon, today, amid an oppressive political climate, it’s a more relevant means of expression and creativity than ever.

Artsy, By Amelia Abraham, April 14, 2017

Sasha Velour won season nine of "RuPaul's Drag Race" on VH1 and Logo, and she's unique: Velour, the stage name of Sasha Steinberg, was a Fulbright scholar and has a master's degree, and takes an intellectual approach to drag.

On her intellectual approach to drag performance

"The truth is I do take drag really seriously, and I think that there's kind of a place for that — to see it as this political and historical art form, and to want to continue pushing it in new directions. And also honor the old directions as well. So I'm sort of like a drag intellectual/drag queen.""I went to Vassar College for undergraduate and studied literature and queer theory, and all of the above. And then I took a Fulbright scholarship in Russia. And that's really where my direction shifted a little bit, because I became really interested in what kind of work actually helps to change things for queer people. And I became really fascinated with drag because it's such an accessible and joyful art form. I wanted to create beautiful images in drag that would not just inspire queer people who need to see some beauty and need to experience some joy, but also would engage people politically."

On the role of drag in LGBTQ advocacy

"We need to talk about representation for queer people in the media and also in law. And there's a long history of drag queens leading those discussions in marches on the street and even in bars going back to the time of Stonewall and before. Gay bars have always been spaces of getting angry about politics and about legal situations, and we need that now more than ever.""Drag is so much more than gay men dressing up as women. It's about creating space and creating validity for people who want to express gender differently and by their own rules. And drag queens, drag kings, need to be at the forefront of pushing for rights and protections and safe spaces for the entire spectrum of gender non-conforming and trans people."

On how young people can get their start in drag"It's the simplest thing. You just go and you find whatever you can find. If it's a simple pair of heels or if you have to strap some cans of food to the back of your shoes so you have that little lift, if you want to go and get some mascara or if you want to use a little Sharpie on your eye, you can make drag out of absolutely anything. And if that is what inspires you, I say everyone should go out and do it." 

Sasha Velour On Why Drag Is A 'Political And Historical Art Form'.  wbur, July 24, 2017

It’s Time To Change The Definition Of “Drag”  By Eric Shorey, Nylon,  April 4, 2017.

“You're born naked and the rest is drag,” RuPaul has famously quipped for decades. But the phrase has been so oft-repeated, it's hard to say it aloud without the nearest drag queen rolling her eyes. Despite the whimsy of the quote, many people's definition of drag has remained rather stagnant: It's when a man dresses up as a woman–or something–right?

But as the very concept of gender explodes, perhaps we should reconsider the accepted definitions of the word “drag.” The term originated in Shakespearean times as shorthand for “dressed as a girl,” or so the story goes because back then women were not permitted to be actors. Whether or not that tale has any validity now is beside the point; drag slowly morphed into its own art form over the past few hundred years, and only recently have we begun to rethink the word so completely.

If the post-Tumblr generation of millennials has taught us anything, it's that gender is a social construction; there are never-ending possibilities of gender expression and identity. The idea that "drag" could be defined as “clothing typical of one sex worn by a person of the opposite sex,” which is actually how it's defined in Merriam-Webster, now seems almost laughable to those who spend their lives in gay bars. Isn't the idea of an “opposite sex” itself obsolete? As we reconsider the vast complexities of gender, it's about time we threw out the idea of gender as a spectrum (with male on one end and female of the other) and start doing better with our explanatory metaphors. Gender is closer to (if you can forgive the hippie turn of phrase) a mandala than a spectrum, with maleness and femaleness knotting eternally in interlaced spirals. But gender is more than any 2-D image—gender has a smell, a feel, a taste; it exists in time and space.

If drag has nothing to do with the now-defunct concept of “opposite sex,” then what the hell is it? A semiotics professor of mine once quipped that after Marcel Duchamp, “anything can be art, but not everything is art.” Could the same be said of drag? Has the word become as nebulous and confusing as “art” itself? Post-modern theory aside, a simple visit to a Brooklyn, New York, nightclub would immediately relieve one of their assumptions about drag as an art form of illusion based on binaristic ideas of anatomical difference. Bearded queens have become common, as are fashionable, alien-esque club kids in the tradition of great artists like Leigh Bowery. Plenty of trans women do (and probably always have) performed as queens, with many realizing they were trans as they played with their own expression through art. We reached out to a handful of trans and non-binary drag performers to get their takes on the subject: "For me, [drag] was the beginning of learning to navigate spaces as someone who isn't read as 'boy,'" says Daphne Sumtimez, a Brooklyn-based transgender drag performer. "It’s taught me how much agency we all have in forging our identities."

"I’d say that the number of definitions is increasing," Sumtimez adds. "I’m sure drag still means the same thing it always has to a lot of people, but there are as many definitions of drag as there are people thinking about drag, and that number is certainly on the rise… Drag is just dressing up as someone or something other than what you are currently dressed up as." 

Drag is one of the world’s greatest forms of escapism because of its capabilities in transcending identity beyond reality – in this realm, artists can become whoever they desire to be. With the use of excessive visual markers, performers break free from the social constructs that oppress them.

Tracing how this freedom has existed as an art form across history is London’s Hayward Gallery with their upcoming show, Drag: Self Portraits and Body Politics that will run from August 22–October 14. Through a lens of artist self-portraits from the early 1920s–today, the show explores how drag is an act of rebellion that goes far beyond its perception as an act of gender performativity. While drag is an essential act for driving the future of gender forward, its capabilities go far beyond this.

Through the works of Ana Mendieta, Robert Mapplethorpe, Victoria Sin, Cindy Sherman, Samuel Fosso, and more, the Hayward’s Drag show reveals that drag resists all social constructs – race, class and sexuality included. “Drag is an act of resistance that emerged from systems of oppression,” explains the Hayward Gallery’s senior curator Vincent Honoré. “Drag performances, as seen in visual arts, resist binary systems and norms, challenge oppressive structures, and echo social changes: in the exhibition, drag and the way it is used reflects on societal debates including feminism, civil rights, gay rights, Aids crisis, anti-consumerism, and post-colonialism.”

Eight artists who use drag as a political tool of rebellion.   By Lexi Manatakis, Dazed , August 14, 2018.

Drag, by definition, is ephemeral, transitional and transformative. It’s the act of temporarily inhabiting a character to break through the gender binary, challenge the status quo, and perhaps even live out a political truth. In 2018, drag seems to be going through a kind of global renaissance — not only in the mainstream, with shows like RuPaul’s Drag Race and Dragula, but in bars, galleries, cabarets and venues around the world. The misconception of drag as a Las Vegas stereotype has all but dissipated, and vibrant performers of all ages, genders and backgrounds are creating a new artistic community.But how would you represent this community? How could you do all these artists — who are cultural warriors in their own right — justice within a traditional art institution? These are the questions that Drag: Self-Portraits and Body Politics, opening at London’s Hayward Gallery today, tries to answer, with works from over 30 artists exploring drag through their respective lenses. When we spoke with Drag’s curator, Vincent Honoré, a week before the show’s unveiling, his vision for the exhibition was clear. “The concept of the exhibition is to address drag and how drag has been used as an art form, via the work of visual artists from the ’60s onwards,” he explained. “We are including emerging artists as well as historical ones, and looking at how all these artists use drag to address cultural shifts, from many different angles — from feminism to post-colonialism to civil and gay rights.” Taking inspiration from their own bodies, alter-egos, identities and environments, the artists showcased in the display range from heavy-hitters like Leigh Bowery, Robert Mapplethorpe and David Wojnarowicz, to newer, but just as important, drag practitioners like Victoria Sin and Samuel Fosso.

“While researching the exhibition I spoke to a lot of drag performers, sociologists, and people from different backgrounds,” says Honoré, speaking to the wide range to experiences represented in the show. “I realised that it was absolutely crucial to offer a diversity of expressions. Actually, I believe about 50% of the artists we have are drag kings, with a lot of feminist artists included, for example Eleanor Antin or VALIE EXPORT. I think it was very important to speak from different cultural perspectives, so looking at Asia, African and South America. South America had so much political drag art in the ’70s, especially in Chile, where it was forbidden to have any personal expressions other than the binary one. Doing drag, or being a crossdresser, was illegal. So there’s this fantastic artist in the exhibition called Francesco Copello who is dancing in drag with a Chilean flag. That was extraordinary for people at the time.”

To preserve an authentic outlook on drag culture, the exhibition purposefully shines a light on more underground and subversive drag scenes. “We are only addressing self-portraiture, therefore I excluded everything that has to do with documentation,” states Honoré. “I really wanted to present something that has to do with self-performativity and the own voice of the artist. We are not showing mainstream culture, apart from a video by Leigh Bowery of a performance from 1988, and a painting by David Hoyle — he usually does these when he does drag cabaret, and they’re rarely exhibited. In terms of the breadth of all the different kinds of drag, we are including drag queens, drag kings, and biodrags, and we are including very different narratives of drag. Drag originated and is mainly rooted in mainstream culture. It’s really coming from that culture, and that’s why it’s so critical because it embraces it — it embraces cabaret, music, fashion, balls, everything.”

10 Radical Self-portraits serving Ultimate Drag Realness. By Cameron Cook. Sleek Magazine,  August 22, 2018. 

Also of interest :

Drag is an art form. By Emilia Slupecka. Artefact , March 1, 2018 

Who Says Drag Can't Be Fine Art? By Emily Colucci.  Vice, October 14 2016

An Exhibition Recreating the Isolated Huts That Philosophers Worked In

It was a family trip to Jamaica that brought into focus the real world implications of philosopher Dieter Roelstraete’s life’s work. “The one thing I was looking forward to most was switching off my phone. I didn’t want screens or computers. I didn’t bring a laptop,” he explains, sitting under the extravagantly frescoed Baroque ceiling of Fondazione Prada’s Ca’ Corner location in Venice, where he’s just opened his latest exhibition, Machines à penser. “But when I arrived there was WiFi,” he continues. “Even in paradise, we were unable to escape the prison of connectivity.”

The desire to disconnect is a longtime academic curiosity of Roelstraete’s, who was trained as a philosopher at the University of Ghent and currently works as a curator. With this exhibition, his curatorial mission was to explore ideas of exile, escape and retreat in relation to creativity, choosing to do so through a somewhat unconventional entry point: the philosopher’s hut, something philosophers Ludwig Wittgenstein, Martin Heidegger and Theodor Adorno have been connected to in their respective careers. In the exhibition, Roelstraete explores the hut as both an essential bricks-and-mortar shelter for cultural production and a metaphor for the seclusion required to fulfill intellectual potential. A ‘room of one’s own’ for male continental philosophers, if you will.

        “The triangulation of Heidegger, Wittgenstein and Adorno together with their huts is what really sparked the curatorial argument to make an exhibition,” explains Roelstraete. “I wanted to look at these structures as a way of talking about the relationship between thinking and place, between creativity and isolation, between reflection and solitude.” Visitors to the exhibition are invited to step inside mock-ups of both Wittgenstein’s and Heidegger’s huts, while Adorno’s life in Los Angeles as an exile during the war is recreated through detailed maps and photography by Patrick Lakey. Together, they provide a doorway into the three philosophers’ isolated physical realities during their most prolific stretches of time.

                                                                    

In addition to the huts, the exhibition considers a broad range of work by artists and intellectuals who have dealt with the idea of retreat and escape within their own practices. Gerhard Richter’s paintings of the remote Engadine landscape sit alongside a historical study of the hermit Saint Jerome, who spent his life alone in the Syrian desert translating the Bible into Latin. New work was commissioned for the exhibition, too: Goshka Macuga created a series of vases that take the form of the philosophers’ heads, as well as plans she made, unfortunately unrealised, to turn Fondazione Prada’s palazzo into a mossy, hut-topped fjord overlooking the grand canal. The Scottish poet Alec Finlay responded to brief with an epic poem tacked to cherry red lattice work enveloping a richly decorated Renaissance era studiolo, and Portuguese designer Leonor Atunes created a series of chandeliers inspired by the house Wittgenstein built for his sister in Vienna. We spoke to Roelstraete about his inspiration behind the show, his thoughts on exile, and why escapism should be seen as a virtue.

 “The title of the show is Machines à penser, an allusion to the famous quip by Le Corbusier, who called a house a ‘Machine à Habiter’ – a machine for living. It looks at philosophers who have been associated with huts in various degrees. The two most important ones are Ludwig Wittgenstein and Martin Heidegger who both had historical huts built for them. Heidegger’s hut still exists today in the Black Forest village of Todtnauberg, while Wittgenstein’s hut used to stand on the edge of a fjord in the Norwegian village of Skjolden. Thirdly, there’s the figure of Theodor Adorno, who never lived in a hut or built himself a hut, but strangely enough had this sculpture named after him by Ian Hamilton Findlay, who is British sculptor and poet who made this installation in 1987 named Adorno’s Hut. My discovery of the existence of the Adorno’s hut many years ago is what triggered the thought process that eventually culminated in the exhibition.”

“One thing that I was interested in doing was to stage escapism as a virtue, not a vice. If you’re called an escapist, it’s derogatory, right? Escapism is something that’s bad, right? Entertainment is escapist. It’s meant as a slur. I was interested in painting a picture of escapism as a completely legitimate attitude and productive for a variety of things: thinking, art making, but also perhaps social interaction.”

“If part of the exhibition is the relationship between thinking and space in the relative comfort of the space of one’s own choosing, we also show the connection between thinking and space if you are forced into that space. If all you have left of your home is your language. On display is a map that shows where Adorno and Horkheimer, who were immigrants from Germany, used to frequent when living in LA in the 1930s and 1940s during the war. It’s where the cream of the crop of German Weimar intellectual culture in LA used to live in that period. Thomas Mann, Bertolt Brecht, all of these people. Hanns Eisler, [whose music is played in the gallery] is somebody who fled to the US, was initially welcomed with opened arms, and then in 1949 when the Cold War was gathering pace, was forced to leave again because of his Communist sympathies and return to his native Germany. He’s somebody who has hounded his whole life, on the run his whole life, and still managed to create.”

“You can make the same show about islands, or you could make the same show about the desert. In both cases, they’re spaces that are the recipients of our desire to escape. To flee and break free from connectivity, from the attention economy, from all these things. And so, that’s I think why this exhibition is relevant. This is something that we all dream of, that we all want. If you live in a big city, you probably dream about the mountains.”

      Another Magazine, June 20, 2018

                                                                         

“Machines à penser” focuses on three major philosophers of the 20th century: Theodor W. Adorno (1903-1969), Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) and Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951). The latter two shared a life-long need for intellectual isolation: Heidegger spent long periods of his life in a secluded hut in the village of Todtnauberg in the Black Forest in Germany, whilst Wittgenstein retreated on several occasions to a small mountain cabin situated in a fjord in Skjolden, Norway. Adorno, on the other hand, was forced into exile from his native Germany during by the Nazi regime, first to Oxford and then to Los Angeles, where he wrote Minima Moralia, a collection of aphorisms that also reflects on the fate of forced emigration. These reflections inspired the installation conceived by the Scottish artist and poet Ian Hamilton Finlay in 1987 titled Adorno’s Hut, a centerpiece of the exhibition alongside architectural reconstructions of the actual huts of Heidegger and Wittgenstein.

As Dieter Roelstraete explains: “these were the places where our protagonists hatched out their deepest thoughts. Isolation, whether chosen or imposed, appears to have inspired them decisively—and over the years their huts have proven to be an inexhaustible source of inspiration in turn for generations of artists, attracted to the fantasy of withdrawal as articulated in its most elemental architectural form.”

The exhibition takes place on the ground floor and on the first floor of the 18th century palazzo, creating an immersive journey that deepens our understanding of these three philosophers and the relationship between philosophy, art and architecture.

Adorno is the protagonist of the first part of the exhibit, in which his American exile is recalled through a large-scale reproduction of a photograph by Patrick Lakey showcasing the interior of Villa Aurora in Los Angeles. The fate of forced retreat is explored through the work of artists such as Susan Philipsz; Ewan Telford; Patrick Lakey; Anselm Kiefer; and Alexander Kluge, who conceived a new video for the exhibition.

On the first floor of Ca’ Corner della Regina Martin Heidegger’s Black Forest cabin is evoked through a remake that contains, among other works, a series of personal photographs by the photo-journalist Digne Meller-Marcovicz and a set of ceramic pieces by Jan Bontjes van Beek. Contemporary work by artists such as Giulio Paolini, Sophie Nys, Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle and Paolo Chiasera chart the long shadow cast by Heidegger’s thought across philosophies of building, dwelling and belonging.

Inside the reconstruction of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s small house in Skjolden, Norway, the viewer encounters Head of a Girl (1925-1928), the only artwork known to have been made by the Austro-British philosopher, shown here alongside his personal belongings. Wittgenstein’s self-imposed exile and lifelong quest for philosophical peace of mind form the subject of artworks created by a Norwegian artist collective comprised of Sebastian Makonnen Kjølaas, Marianne Bredesen and Siri Hjorth; Jeremy Millar; and Guy Moreton. A newly commissioned work by Leonor Antunes and a sculpture by Mark Manders are also featured in the exhibition.

Goshka Macuga designed three sculptures for the exhibition depicting the heads of the three philosophers, Mark Riley presents three dioramas and Gerhard Richter exhibits overpainted photographs of Engadin mountainscapes and sculpture Kugel III, evoking Friedrich Nietzsche’s thinking quarters in Sils-Maria where Thus Spoke Zarathustra was conceived.

The exhibition also includes a historical section focusing on Church father Saint Jerome (347-419), famous for leading the life of an anchorite in the Syrian desert while translating the Bible into Latin. Renaissance paintings and prints dedicated to the iconography of the saint are exhibited alongside a Renaissance studiolo containing, among other items, first editions of Heidegger and Wittgenstein’s writings, its outer walls clad in a site-specific installation by the Scottish artist-poet Alec Finlay titled Hutopia (2018).

     Fondazione Prada

     A review of the exhibition. Domus

     More photos of  the show here : TL Magazine  , Designboom 


  Additional :

 Much has been written about the writer’s cabin. Among the most notable recent books on the topic are “Heidegger’s Hut” by Adam Sharr and “A Place of My Own: The Architecture of Daydreams,” Michael Pollan’s account of  imagining and then actually constructing his own writing space. A standard Internet search can quickly yield images of the writing rooms (cabins, huts, sheds) of legendary scriveners: Dylan Thomas, Virginia Woolf, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Roald Dahl, Carl Jung, Henry Thoreau and — a writer of a markedly different sort —Ted Kaczynski, to name a few. And Jill Krementz’s 1999 collection of photographs “The Writer’s Desk” gives us tantalizing glimpses of writers sitting at their desks. But why the interest? Have these places somehow become secular sites of the sacred?

The Lure of the Writer’s Cabin by David Wood, December 9, 2012, New York Times

 

                                                                       

  On Heidegger’s hut and Wittgenstein House by Edwin Heathcote,  Financial Times, September       2013,

‘I can’t imagine that I could have worked anywhere as I do here. It’s the quiet and, perhaps, the wonderful scenery; I mean its quiet seriousness.’ Ludwig Wittgenstein, 1936.

Ludwig Wittgenstein’s exile in Skjolden,  Einarlunga Wordpress

This short film takes through the beautiful countryside of Norway, in search of the hut where Ludwig Wittgenstein exiled himself from society from time to time, first starting in 1913.  Open Culture

A review of the book by  Adam Sharr, Heidegger's Hut. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006.

Hermitary

Our visit to the Heidegger cabin (Heidegger's hut). After x nature

                                                                  

Girl on scooter

I am sixty years old. “In the middle of the road of my life I awoke in the dark wood where the true way was wholly lost”, to quote the poet. Health prevailing.

I must admit this last year I’ve experienced something I’ve not known before. No, no one could forget  such an experience. I’ve known melancholy, sadness for loss. But this sadness is a totally new experience. The sense of not knowing what to live for. What’s ahead.

It happened a week ago. Tears came to me. Whilst I was riding my bike, on my way home. It was a hot day in June. One girl on a scooter passed me, then another.  Two girls on a scooter, later on.

These are images dear to my heart.

Independent, graceful, canty.  All qualities I lack. They know where they are going.  Look at their stature, absorbed in thought, how they sit, backs straight, their knees almost touching, their hair blowing in the wind.

[Four stages of a Dream : Behold Appropriate Transform Escape]

Houdini

                                                                       

He remembers Harry Houdini.

When I was a boy, twelve years old, I witnessed one of his daring escapes.

His assistants tied him with iron cuffs  and chains and threw him in the river.  Everyone was waiting, impatiently,  on the quayside. It was a day in winter, they had to clear the ice, in that part of the harbour.  I had to push my way through the crowd.

I kept my hand above my eyes and searched the water.  First I see a head floating on the water. Then he raises his arm. His hand waves at us.

The crowd cheers. I look at a man standing beside me. We both admire the trust we have in Harry. People laugh. The men throw their hats and caps in the air.

I think this event confirmed my childish belief in heaven. Later I realized that if you can free your hands you can redeem yourself.

                                                                          

You Tube