EARLY INFLUENCES, LATE CONSEQUENCES
OR: WHY MACHI NES DID IT FOR ME
Cornelia Sollfrank |
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Fragments of a biographical reconstruction as text generation
with particular consideration to the question:
Are artists automatically ingenious or are automats ingenious artists?
The fact of my birth would otherwise be
completely insignificant for my further
work had I not seen the light of day
for the first time in
Feilershammer. Ingeniousness
announces itself on occasion under app
r o - priate auspices—and so this constellation
was foreshadowed long in advance. As if to
the manner born, I was very automatically given
file and hammer, two instruments that would
take on great significance in my later work.
Even today, one of my most painful memories
is how sports cars belonging to day-trippers
lined up to the left and right of the country
road, around which the circle of siblings elatedly
closed ranks. There, where my brothers’
fingers pointed accompanied by ecstatic calls, I
only saw the locks on the door, steering wheel
and ignition that separated me for the time being
from automotive mobility. The keys were
in the possession of others who even uncomprehendingly
snarled at me before driving away
saying that I should keep my fingers to myself.
Anyway, women and technology, I am somewhat
mixed-up in this regard. That was difficult
for the little girl that I was, but she learned. She
learned that the correct key is required to make
things run. And with time she came up to par in
matter concerning automotive mobility. From
then on it was my most ardent wish to show
how things work.
But my childhood also knew joy, and speaking
of them means reporting on a further influence.
My mother loved to be surrounded by flowers.
Not only by flowers in the garden or flowers in
vases. Colorful floral prints adorned the tiling
and the kitchen towels, the pots and pitchers,
dresses and aprons. Here, in these sculptures,
my world view was most deeply influenced—
and my other pictures are unimaginable without
them.
I particularly owe much to the floral
prints; on the one hand they inspired
the iconographical studies that would
play an increasingly significant role
in my later work (of which we will
speak more of later), but it was especially
one blossom in particular, on the other
hand, that my mother had a special love for and
which she therefore surrounded herself and
us with more than any other; one that would
deeply ingrain itself into the minds of the impressionable
adolescents: the hibiscus blossom.
The hibiscus blossom—its visualized form—it
seemed to me to unite something, was a symbol
for—I do not know what. Only much later was
the deep secret that lay in the fateful encounter
with the blossom revealed to me. I would encounter
it again in a standard work on modern
art. In triplicate, in quadruplicate, soon even by
the dozens, by the hundreds, by the thousands.
Printed on canvas, printed on paper, reproduced,
multiplied, digitalized on the Web. An ideal
trademark—quite automatically ingenious!
Everything in me called out to it. But alas, I was
as yet unable to program the allurement. Not
yet. Because I had learned long ago: Woman and
technology? Not a contradiction, but programmatic
instead! In order to learn more about how
to generate such way-out, automatically very
ingenious pictures, I attended an art academy—
which, however, did not prove very useful. One
learned to paint there and one also spoke about
ingeniousness. There was also the one or other
computer there. But there was mainly the Old
Boys Network there that told me I should keep
my fingers to myself. Anyway, women and art, I
am somewhat going for the wrong thing.
My crucial experience
with the key entered into
play here. It became immediately
clear that I didn’t have to
paint the flower picture or any other
picture myself because they already existed
in abundance. Secondly, the lessons of automation:
The smart artist makes the machine do the
work. As my work proves, I have been repeatedly
successful in this. Hammer and file have,
to put it rather floridly, shown themselves to be
extremely reliable instruments.
And at this point it can be said that, thanks to
my tireless research efforts, to which my work
elegantly testifies, daylight has again penetrated
this metacausal relationship between the images
in which the real meaning and the true
order of the pictures can first be found—free
of any and all causalities or consecutions, in
which nothing else is proven other than the
deep ornamental desires of otherwise disoriented
writers on art.
Although I would gladly provide further examples
documenting my research—the individual
investigations and their subjects (emale Extension,
Women Hackers, Warhol Flowers, Museumshop, This is
not by me) this would of necessity be
so delicate that an adequate representation
would go beyond
the scope of this text.
In conclusion, I would briefly
like to address their methodological
foundations. This seems
very necessary to me because
the general assessment of my work
is exceedingly unimaginative and lacking in
original ideas (“That is not by her at all—everything
comes out of the computer!”), revealing
a complete blindness for methodological problems
totally unsuited to its strict but also subtle
methods. Because this is precisely what it is all
about: That which does not
look like I made it is by
me. That which I didn’t
make is by me. And
everything that I made
is not by me. This strict
law of complementary
functions between authorship
and reproduction
that mutually produces each
other as well as negating it, forms
the foundation of automatic ingeniousness in
addition to, as a methodological problem that
is simultaneously its own solution, the foundation
of all my works, raising them above all the
odd pseudologies of the writers on art who still
operate with such antiquated terms as fantasy,
originality, and creativity etc.
I herewith wish to end my comments on my
life and work; not all questions could be dealt
with—particularly those concerning the authorship
of this text.
But I hope that my comments serve to stir
some of the old iconodulism in our times
that have been prejudiced by narrow-minded
iconoclasts.
The autobiographical material used above was
made with the assistance of a reprographer (1) and
a text generator,(2) the programming of which I
am very grateful to Prof. Dr. Kuni.
Translation: Michael Wolfson
(1) A device used to produce photocopies.
(2) A program to destupidify instincts and their vicissitudes
of one-handed reading material about art marketed
for example under the trademark of “authorship”
and “originality”.
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