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november 11 2002, monday
All the smaller paintings will be hung in circles of light from a slide projection of an exploding disco ball. Made two flyers and a pretty well received press text about the "industrialization of club culture" & club art. It goes a bit like this: The idea is that after having become an institution, saturated or obsolete, a phenomenon never is discontinued but kept alive and alive. For instance, as long as you still can sell the most ludicrous product just by attaching some reference to clublife, it just won't go away, however dead it might be.
So, as so many jobs are involved, and with young people inventing
nothing
new, it'll all go on for a while, getting as boring as rock was in the
end. A solution would be to just let robots do the clubbing for you.
Let
them get the hangovers, get addicted to drugs, go to Betty Ford Clinic,
get blown up by jihadists, or have drugged up unsafe sex and die for
you. You could follow it vicariously if you'd care, but you wouldn't.
After the mechanization of workspace
it would be the mechanization of playspace. Artists were for quite some time jealous of DJ's, but now DJ's seem
to grow jealous of artists. Especially DJ's that are getting on seem to
value the potential of growing old gracefully that being an artist offers...
october 18 2002, wednesday
Painted her in dark purple, pale salmon and in yellow up till now, but my favourite one might be still in the making; it's going to look like those horrible Klaus Schulze or Yes record sleeves. We're thinking of showing slides of the portraits at her House of Shame night (at Ostgut) some night in November. We're also arranging to present slides and kinetic stage paintings at the marke bevent
at the Berlin Volksbühne on December the 13th. It's a big yearly
festival presenting the many Berlin electronica record label, curated
by Gudrun Gut (of Malaria and Oceanclub fame), the talented Thomas
Fehlmann and dj Daniel Meteo, and featuring concerts by the likes of Peaches, Schneider TM, Gonzales, Modeselektor, & Thomas Morr. We'll be presenting our art in the so called "Roter
Salon", a nice Art Deco ballroom with lots of wood.
If this is the serious, upmarket art circles we should be counting on instead of clubwork, i'm not so sure. "Artist as entrepeneur" is still my best bet. Also in the mail was a copy of Sicco Carlier's and Tillmans' butt. Butt magazine that is.. Have to admit to liking their butt. Looking very like my teenage porn, it's so unlike any other gay magazine because it's not about shopping. Instead it has long, "indeep" interviews like the 70s Gay Sunshine ones. Painted a small portrait of James Baldwin today. It's to possibly get a commission from a jewish patron to paint an african american, or an african african, as long as it's a "famous personality". Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King were mentioned as examples.. As a compromise besides Baldwin, I thought of Billie Holliday, but I
somehow suspect a queer and a junky aren't the role models that are wanted
here.
October 2 2002, wednesday . The party
part was in a huge, brightly lighted hall in a very minimal, very chic,
very unrentable new office building in the city center. Only a handful
of collectors had come, and the rest was all artists. We came a bit later
on; everybody was dressed up fine, but drunk in the most unbelievable way, probably out of frustration at the lack of bidding.
When musicians Rob Rutman & Nico Nippolis started their fine gig some
of the artists started to actually roll on the floor or do horrible spidery
hippie dances, actually shouting "far out!" occasionally, the many security men placed symmetrically on the balconies
and other strategic points looking on in disbelieve. Made me feel as if we were
in art-prison. Some guards were cute though. Then a Alan Ginsberg lookalike behind us started to groan ecstatically
as the music developed and we just had to leave. september 20 2002, saturday
Burqa art is popping up everywhere by the way; it's in the "Inside Out"
art show in the Bunker,
and a czech artist (I think it is Cerny)
is doing performances in Rotterdam wearing burqas that are made out of
flags too! That's a problem with conceptual art, an idea can be stolen
or appropriated much easier than a craft. It also demonstrates what a slow
kind of fashion art is: in haute couture there were burqa "statements"
already a year ago. september 17 2002, tuesday
It does explain why artists often talk such crap though: first it's conditioning by failed artists that are forced to teach at art schools. Later after you left art school and are now a failed artist yourself you perfect your academic lingo a bit further by applying for these grants and prizes. Trying to impress critics and wealthy people does the rest. To imagine you're helping artists by putting them in some faraway castle "to develop their work without outside interference" is just so neo-feudal. It's the court life that matters anyway, not the castle, and today's court is to be found in the city. So if they want to help, they should be giving you spending money for the "Paris Bar". Anyway: who says you get better art by just giving artists some
money
to do whatever they like at home. Doesn't it in reverse mean you don't
want art to interfere either? It didn't hurt Andy's or Rembrandt's or
Michelangelo's
art to be told what to do. A patron cares a lot about the results at
least.
An art civil servants or a jury that tells you to go develop yourself
doesn't. Without a social component art is pretty meaningless.
september 8 2002, sunday
august 27 2002, tuesday
We're busy preparing stuff for our presentation at a deserted Jugendstil toy factory as part of the event. You can also follow the event as livestream (www.jukufa.de) on the evening of the 31th. Other news: Check the Berliner
Zeitung newspaper this week for a colourful full page feature on Tulip by
journalist Katja Winckler.
august 17 2002, sunday
Seems our circus will travel to the Hague in december to do a large
presentation for the Integrate
event! Turns out the futuristic college building (Haagse Hogeschool) where it takes place has
hip ceramic art all over the place made by another great MaMA
artist, so it'll be mamafication allover.
august 1 2002, thursday
july 13 2002, saturday
We sadly could not show the huge backdrop painting we'd been preparing
for weeks for the Star Sounds Orchestra, the band project of Steve Schroyder
formerly of Tangerine Dream. In their live
Most such reunions don't bring interesting new work, but D.A.F. still sound contemporary, nicely in tune with the renewed interest in song structure in electronica today. As a concert though, it sounded almost too exactly like the records as is often the problem with electronic acts. They should have thought of some kind of Senior Coconut hack to make it less predictable. Like a version of "Tanz den Mussolini" for electronic piano, or a senior citizen big band version of "Sex unter Wasser" headed by Gabi in a gold lamé suit. Oh well, it's easy to think for others.. july 13 2002, saturday
What we hadn't realized is how much techno purist are still steeped in new wave aesthetics, they don't want to cross over one little inch. They weren't amused much by our bright imagery and, again confusing it with a goa thing. We'll be painting black on black for them next time... (Very many famous dj's passed by our stand i'm told, but then so what. So many of them remind me of the rock heroes of my youth, plain blokes put on a pedestal. Motte would be Bob Geldoff or maybe John Lennon. Westbam would be Phil Collins. But who would be Freddie Mercury? What's also the same is none of them ever wants to retire, we'll need a electronic punk movement soon to make it all exciting again.) Still fairs are a nice thing, i think art fairs are the best exhibitions, and any kind of other fair is good fun to infiltrate & educate with something arty. 
For "art professionals" it's the context that makes something "fine art". For them art must be documentary nowadays, but, ironically, art that functions socially is deemed naive... Understandable as such art does after all take away their job of explaining. I just read somewhere that the origin of the art exhibition is from people hanging their paintings from their balconies for the pope to see once a year, so there was a time when art could be high-class and literally "street" at the same time... Maybe what we've been doing in our art is regressing in history towards
the beginning of painting. A journey away from prestige object orientation
towards a shared social event, from exclusive to inclusive: We started
out in galleries with canvasses, then came murals, then lowering the prestige
more by doing disco paintings, now our paintings are dangling from cars...
Next thing we'll be cave-painting.
Also, we started to paint the frieze for Paul van Dyk's loveparade van,
it's 34 meters long all around, and might also be shown at their party
in the evening.
 The Praxxiz event slides we designed after Paulus' pattern paintings
will have the audience looking like tatoed tribal figures. If it works
out, otherwise they could just as well turn out to resemble russian prisoners.
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een
very busy with painting and publicizing the "Robodisko" exhibition (at
the Berlin Libido Lounge on sunday december the 1st). 
he
tulip-o-rama paintings at the The Hague show (on the 7th of december) will
be on view until christmas, with lights and all. They'll be hung theatre
style as a giant backdrop, about 14 meters wide and 6 meters high, and
incorporate two video screens. It'll help develop this idea i've been having
for a while, to use these kinetic paintings to make art backdrops for theatre
productions of some kind, as a well paid and all of a sudden well respected
artist' job, context changing all.
ade
a couple of small glam portraits of Chantal, a local drag queen who has inspired many artists already. it is based on a 
nother
rejection today of some paperworx that we'd sent in to be in an exhibition
/ competition organized by an art society in Mainz. We're ruining
ourselves financially (and morally) with these applications, each costing
us time and money. Artists had to send in originals and ours came back
crumpled... I can just imagine the jury gathered in their quarters: the
local school director, the mayor's and the banker's wife deciding well,
this is so graphic it can't be painting now can it. And then accidentally
sitting on it.
ot
back the paintings from the art auction, think only very little sold. The
organizers must be having a hard time... Actually glad to have them back;
they turned out very well and can now be used for a proper exhibiton.
.I.P.
preview benefit party for Saturday's art auction "Künstler helfen
Kindern" proved only hippie artists have a social conscience. 
ad
a supper at the atelier so artists 
oined
a benefit art auction "Künstler helfen Kinder" (artist helping children)
with six rather too nice paintings. It's for the 
orked
for days on a proposal for an open-air art piece for a festival/workshop
in an "english style" park at a castle near Dresden next year. It's four
curved lighted walls (somewhat like the "Sliding Wall", with colour vinyl
shapes glued on) that make a kind of pavilion space.
aulus
finished his father's gravestone project at last, because of regulations
he had to change the concrete sculpture lots of times.
performances they apply an (endless) jamming attitude,
involving giant gongs and lots of fine african percussion, to ambient,
goa-style electronica. There was no proper stage and no
stage light at all so they had to play in the dark... Also they'd been
scheduled to play at the same time as the long awaited D.A.F. reunion
gig, so most of the time it was playing
in the dark for no audience for them.
