Llaura I. SŸnner PROTECTION INSTALLATION EINSTELLUNGSRAUM, Hamburg   
Thursday, 5th of March, 2009

Querschlegeln* as pataphysical attempt for protection of human, material, pin and traffic.
Introductory speech by Gunnar F. Gerlach

"My philosophy is or rather is developing more and more in this direction that we are doing it all wrong, that we escape a status of general misery which let us become a warning example for other intelligent creatures. I view our achievements in engineering and our industriousness as pure actions of craziness. And you believe that everyting is in order."**
John Ruskin: Letters from Venice, 1850

"What since the villages of the New Stone Age was interfused in the places of spontaneous social traffic was relegated individual and separated in space and time. The result of this was and is that the connecting links between these separated elements  (in-so-far as they exist, what would be a value in itself: means of communication, paths and roads, signals and codes, exchange and trade agents) gain exceeding importance: the copulative becomes more important than the connected parts.... streets and road namely become important  but with the onslaught of the steady and recurring traffic at the same time become dessert. Selling becomes more important than production, in-between trade becomes more important than the producers, the means more important than the ends."**
Henri Lefebvre: Introduction to Modernity, pg.145f. 1962

The seemingly unstoppable progress of the so-called modern ti-
mes since the mid 19th century is not only conceptually subjected to all kinds of dialectics also negative dialectics but also prejudiced in interactive, back and forth swinging exclusivities and antagonisms: alone the Latin 'progressio' means originally 'already development towards virtue'. The incentive for economical deve- lopment to absoluteness of the purely technoid-like instrumen- talized capitalism however lives solely on the deadly sins 'envy' and 'greed's as preconditions for desire so that 'war is the father of all things' (Heraklit) may remain true.

Before the flight, the inner emigration and the wrapping in a protective cocoon remains still as strategical action of resistance - which is rooted in the nous of philosophy and art - beating and 'Schlegeln' * against the normatively decreed rules and directions of the social absurdity:

Associativ Querschlegeln* as pataphysical attempt for protection of human, material, pin and traffic in consideration of the installation by Llaura I. SŸnner.

To swing and to sound

Nichts ist so klar und deutlich wie die deutsche Sprache und Grammatik. (Nothing is as clear and articulate as the German language and the grammar) did the analytical master of the great critics during the Enlightenment, Immanuel Kant, already state. Added should be: even more logic, clear, definite and regulative than the German language could be are the German traffic regulations - possibly apart from its traffic sign jungle as a perma- nent-installation performance. And even this controlling order which is supposed to protect all traffic - thus exchange, com- munication and transportation participants - leads to accidents on a day-to-day basis and "Lernprozessen mit toedlichem Ausgang" *** (processes of learning with deadly outcome) [A.Kluge].
*the verb is an invention of the speaker, it is a combination of terms closely and not so closely associated with the present exhibition:  "quer" for 'to cross' and "schlegeln" an actually non-existent word derived from 'schlagen' for 'to beat' and 'Hegel', the highly-regarded philosopher by Gerlach.

**for lack of the original English text  by Ruskin we are offering here the retranslation of the German and kindly ask for your own research regarding the original text if interested.
***Alexander Kluge: Lernprozesse mit tšdlichem Ausgang, 1999,
Verlag Suhrkamp (A. Kluge: Processes of learning with deadly outcome, 1999, publisher Suhrkamp)
back
next