Seeing and Walking
1990

In 1988 I was accepted into the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. During this time I changed from painting and drawing to concepts. I no longer painted – I thought about painting. That was also the name of the first catalogue, “Painting”, and it documented objects and installations that dealt with the phenomenon of making pictures and painting. I bought old pictures and made sculptural objects out of them. I dealt with iconoclasm, the political or religious urge to destroy pictures. In “The Golden Ratio” I investigated the act of a mentally ill assassin who tore up Rembrandt’s Night Watch with a kitchen knife in the Van Rijn Museum in Amsterdam. I dealt with the evolution of the sensory organs, the physiology of perception and the theory of knowledge, read Wittgenstein, Benjamin and Roland Barth and asked myself: Why do I paint? Why do people want to have pictures hanging in their homes? Why are they hungry for pictures? What is kitsch? Do our eyes reflect reality? What are optical illusions other than lies? Our sensory organs distort perception and our brain optimizes our thoughts and feelings for survival, hunger, prey and hunting, fear and hope. What can we know then? Are we blind? I exhibited an installation with white canes and pictures with the E symbols of the vision test. A series of works was based on newspaper photos in which the eyes were covered by an eye bar, for example in crime or in sex ads. The eye bars protect the person being viewed but also the viewer. For the X-ray work, I used old X-ray pictures and placed them in small shaving mirrors in an old bookcase. The image of the bones of a deceased person obstructed the view of my face. In the exhibition “In my eyes” I had an ophthalmologist friend take photos of my retina, which I then had printed and stuck to the floor of the Kunsthalle Wil. The visitors had to move “in my eyes”.