Georg wartet auf Ludwig von Ficker am Bahnhof Brenner.

Georg wartet auf Ludwig von Ficker am Bahnhof Brenner.

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Georg is waiting for Ludwig von Ficker at the railway-station Brenner.

Performance, Galerie im Traklhaus, 2014

In the year 1928, Georg, an Austrian poet, is waiting at the railwaystation Brenner, for Ludwig von Ficker, an important Austrian editor for poetry and literature. Ludwig is not coming. Georg is getting more and more upset, being so upset he’s reciting manic monologues until he is passing out……….

Georg is lying on the floor, at the station, clouds are covering the sky, a thunderstorm rises. There’s roof above the platform, so Georg awakes by the first heavy rain-drops, plopping onto his face.

He feels cold, his arm, his hand lies in a deep puddle, just his finger sticks out of the water. Due to the coldness, he can’t feel his hand, his finger anymore.

Suddently, this very finger starts talking to Georg,  the finger claims its own personality it’s own subjectivity, the finger, he, declares, that from this moment on, he is an independent entity, an independent „acteur“.

Further on, the finger starts to calming down the confused and nervy Georg, and then the finger mentions, that he doesn’t want to assist Georg’s hand with writing words anymor, he wants to point at things, not to write and work anymore – he wants to point to things  in the world and especially FORMS – visual FORMS  – so he tries to convince Georg not to  produce handwritten poems anymore – he convinces him to take the letters of his former handwritings – to extract single strokes and syllables and disrupt them from the visual context of the word – to cut them out of plywood in order to produce abstract forms – VISUAL ART!
Georg is going to follow the finger’s instructions, and transfers all his poems of the past to abstract visual arts – and he becomes famous with this strategy. In the future he will influence artists like Friedrich Kiesler, Matisse, Marcel Broothaers and Franz West, Cy Twombly and last but not least – the architects of the Post-modern „blob“-movement.

At the very end of the Performance, Ludwig von Ficker arrives at the station. Georg tells him about his epiphany and that he will stop writing in order to produce abstract gesture-based visual art.
Ludwig leavs the station immediately, he’s fed up of Georgs crazyness. But ist this really Crazy how Georg behaves? Even observed from our present point of view in 2015, we don’t know.
But that’s not the crucial point. The crucial point is, to write a story about the generative process in Georg’s head – how and through which outer incidences a idea in his mind gets triggered, pops up, an how it developes into the outside world.