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The daimler-drawings
though in our case function as bridge
between the inventor and the artist. They do not perceive sketches of
Daimler as
technical drawings and information, but rather as esthetical sign and
let themselves be inspired to a productive act in their own creative
work by the difference between sign and signed, by the double meaning
of the esthetical pattern.
The mythological figure of Prometheus, at the borderline of gods and humans, did not only bring fire to humans but, the enabled by the goddess Athene, he also is regarded as the original father of artists, who knows to do all arts and technics. In his figure collecting, researching and modelling. In a kind of prometheusic practice, to which Horst Bredekamp (Berlin) in his work "Antikensehnsucht und Maschinenglauben" ("longing for antics and faith in machines") appeals, the DaimlerKreis (DaimlerCircle) has changed the EINSTELLUNGSRAUM in an impuls giving art - and miracle chamber. Here the lost unity of art and technic, the theoretical reflektion is asked for and presented with the work with the material and the analysis between science and art in a kind of workroom- and laboratory situation. In the basement Elke Suhr has modelled a kind of un- derground cave of laboratory with her installation. The rooms is parted in two: in the front area one gets into an archive or rather into a museum-like space for memory. It is dedicated to the prometheusic inventors and the element fire, which they tame in the motor and put in the service for humans. A large board shoes Nikolaus Otto with his invention, the atmospherical flight piston motor. The artist confronts this with the alchemistical cosmos- scheme and the scheme of purification of Thomas Norton of 1477 and discovers striking analogies. With the otto-motor the wheel of flywheel sits on a piston-like trimmed cylinder construction. In this vertically directed construction the piston is hurled upwards and speed back down by the explosion in the "Arbeitsspiel" (play of work). The artist recognizes old neoplatonical thinking patterns, |
which have materialized
themselves in
the motor, like the eternal "stirb und werde" ("die and become") or the
purification from the
material to the spiritual, the aiming for the light. The piston
in the cylinder of the machine is doing this path of vertikal movement
from down to up and back forever, in the same rythm - a path the human
needs a whole life for.
On a second board one can see Gottlieb Daimler with his invention and further development of the motor, "der Standuhr" ("grandfather clock"). The picture has changed. The flywheel has slipped down and is smaller, through which the mobility has become possible. A sign in the note books of Daimler has be- come decisive for Elke Suhr interpretation in this context. It shows a short upwards aiming arrow with the note "1/4 a.m." (1/4 athmospherical motor"), hence a diminuation and reduction of the motor. Those changes she interprets as a departure from the cosmic principle, from up to down, a move towards a mechanical, earth bound principle. Daimler was indeed stimulated by such a move when constructing the 'Standuhr' (grandfatherclock) as is proofen by the name. In the second part of the room which is dedicated to the element of light, she steers the view from the archive to the laboratory. Some kind of workroom and working situation is pretended. On the walls of the cellars the terms Saughub (sucking stroke) and Arbeitsspiel (working game (combustion - hurling down of the piston - movement of connecting rod and wheels)) are affixed in suetterlin-writing (old german kind of writing), which stand here for the efforts of the human for another level. From above out of a light shaft bright light is shining in onto "ladder of pictures". This intallation is composed of three parts in differnent art technics - photographs, hand drawing and computer generated pictures. Over three levels the lift is happening - the 'Standuhr' (grandfatherclock) from the materiell, from the earth, to the spirituel. In those the classical model of the "Stufen der Erkenntnis" (steps of enlightenment) are symbolised in a three-step. |
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