From Cotton via Velvet to Tragedy

 When my wonderful seven years in Düsseldorf (1983-1990) drew to a close in the winter of 89/90, in the shadow of the fall of the wall, I made a vow not to leave the city before I had put my new video equipment into use. Actually it was not so new any longer since I had purchased it three years before, but it had remained unpacked and untouched. It was meant to be the tool to record eventual rehearsals for an ambitious 16 mm film consisting of minutely choreographed dialogues in interesting settings, composed as if they were the movements of a symphony. These dialogues, or more often group conversations, or even verbal battles inbetween a multitude of actors were arrangements of quotes from the books we were reading. The ‘we’ refers to a sisterhood coalition of Susanne Troesser and me (I mentioned her before in the text on the Heinrich Heine Allee). This for a while deeply inspiring and prolific coalition ended after she accused me of misogynistic tendencies because of material I had contributed to our scenario (written by Colette) and because - that being the last straw - I had given a blowjob to an artist who not only asked for it but after the pleasurable act turned out to be her boyfriend and felt the need to confess his sinful transgression which probably was the reason why he wanted it in the first place. Ah, those Germans !       

 Anyhow, after it became clear that the film project had been put on ice and as time slowly but inexorably proceeded towards my departure for Berlin, I realized I had to bite the dust, get to work, unpack the camera (Sony), overcome my technophobia, and come up with something I could do on my own - … undeterred by such offenses and completely alone, since after that final and telling incident I had bid an inner goodbye to the city and cut the ties. In this sense ‘From Cotton via Velvet to Tragedy’ was done in a transitory no-man's land which might have contributed to its experimental qualities. Interesting settings were no problem at all, since I had outfitted my home, in anticipation of the moviemaking, in the most painterly fashion and its location in an exciting flatiron-shaped building next to the trainstation was sure to help the cause. I dont know to how many art students this building gave affordable shelter in the past, but now it was inhabited mostly by Moroccan immigrants whose indomitable children turned the stairwell into their playground from morning to bed time. But in the wee hours coming back from my shift in the restaurant and my clubbing, another kind of creatures came jumping down in acrobatic arches : the rats, huge and fatted by the refuse of the butcher (Moroccan) and the lunch joint “Ingrid’s” (German) in the building’s basement. Far from shocking, the ubiquity of rats in Düsseldorf was a daily recknoning for anyone working in the gastronomical sector. A hold-out very much unlike the rest of the city, such an adress had now become, in the swinging-to-the-right eighties, a stain on the art students career, if she respected the newly set pattern of pristine, uncluttered spaces befitting the perfection of surfaces and shapes, the new rage in the Academy. Sure you could steer your frigate of gayness along these forbidding cliffs but only if you were old enough to have acquired the cutzpah to show them that there were other ways in the world as well ; which, when succesful, required to be ever present, on constant alert and best not to infringe on the territory of their respective diciplines (the essential reason for our movie project) ; drink harder, dance better then they, and know more about movies, sex and fashions then they ever could ; and, maybe most important of all, to have a job at the pulsing heart of money and the ingestive pleasures it could provide - not to mention the exuberant elegance of the Iranians and their preference to discard the Chateau Lafittes in favour of Johnnie Walker Black Label to go along with their Filets Café de Paris ; the flawless elegance of the Indians and their equally flawless tastebuds, and the astounding uniformity of the Japanese, a symphony in grey in the complete absence of womankind. In short, to be a respected waiter in the town’s finest restaurant, and to be proud instead of ashamed of it. Well , that’s not how I see it any longer ; today I would agree with A.E Coppard : “How can the poor be contented as long as there’s the rich to serve ? The rich we have always with us, that’s our responsiblity, we are the grass under their feet. Why should be proud of that ?”    

 In any case, back then it gave you the enormous advantage to be able to pay for your own drinks instead of having them dished out to you benevolently by the potent partriarchs of the Institution and, when they turned up in the restaurant for some family reunion or even a date, to impress them with the smooth expertise of your double life …  -  oh, the sweet satisfaction you experienced at their surprise and embarrassment to have been caught in commitments they tried to keep so scrupulously hidden while creating and chiselling their artistic personas (family and love being equally prohibited) but more so maybe in their ineptitude to choose from a menu or to feel comfortable amongst people belonging to the class which constituted their future patrons and promoters.    

 This outsider status created an amiable atmosphere of détente around me because it meant that I wasn’t a competitor and could be entertaining. And I had just returned, at the age of 30, from Rome, where I had spent 4 equally wonderful years under the noble reign of Renato Nicolini, coming into my own, as they say, in a city which had been transformed by this remarkable man into Europe’s culturally most propulsive place of the time (1979-1985) , a place where the possibility of  “una cittadinanza pubblica felice”  appeared to be a possibility. Who in the world, then, could have impressed me in the land of my origin?  When, after all, the germanophile Nicolini had, amongst many other things, organized the first ever complete retrospective of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, you had to confront that revolting placidity and fake humbleness ?                                         

 But  to come back to “From Cotton via Velvet to Tragedy” … as I mentioned before, the video was to be done with no one else involved, but how ? Maybe we can say that a technophobe will always be more likely to come up with some radical solution because she a) cannot handle the stuff and must eliminate any pretensions to be able to do so and b) she has no interest in stuff which others do better anyhow and, regardless of her respect for expertise makes no sense for her to emulate because for what she has on her mind and how she wants to say it, it might not even be appropriate. Why, of course I put myself grudgingly to the task of reading the instructions because there was no other way to begin with. The camera was the easiest part : it had to be fixed, any movement out of the question, except when I wasn’t in the frame and could move it ; the editing of the frames was done without any subsequent alterations directly in it. This rejection of improvements or repeats was to result in charming, unplanned mistakes or improvisations, call it the Smith League. It was the soundtrack that asked for more difficult solutions because I had decided upon some sort of dialogue, actually an interview, which meant that I, as the only actor, could speak live but any other voice had to be recorded on tape, the speaker out of view, unless I wanted to use a dummy. That led me to the conclusion to create tapes on my double deck getto blaster, with the questions of the interviewer or some music recorded, according to the script, alternating with empty stretches of tape which left me enough time to answer ; it had to be rehearsed but in the end you could put the recorder and the camera on at the same time and slip yourself somehow into the frame and start to answer to the ghostly voice of the taped interlocutor. If I come to think of it, it was very much an adaptation of hiphop, and hiphop indeed I used at several occasions throughout, being just in the air everywhere, except in the Academy.  

 The text was based on excerpts from a book of interviews conducted by Barbaralee Diamondstein with American fashion designers, an extremely shallow and depressing publication I had picked up from a table of unwanted books at a bargain in the hope to add a foreign element to the highly polished and intricate literary language of our former scenario, something more mundane connected with the world of production or marketing ; it turned out to be the highfalutin mixture of self importance and cluelessness, even despair, so familiar from public ‘talks’, including so-called artist’s talks or panels where an audience is unexplainably ready to listen, unlike paid claqueurs, to utterances which gain their significance mostly from the asymmetry between speech and the absence of it.  

 These ingenious systems of ineptitude and limitation were then put into action. It meant, after all that to a vast degree nothing could be spontaneous ; that everything had paradoxicaly to be prepared as if on a ‘professional’ set . As I had to put on my own make up, dress or undress as required without assistance, to organise all the sustaining provisions like food, cigarette and drink, and above all to keep a distached directors eye on what I was doing in that chosen solitude, I became something most comparable to a sea cucumber, an organism rooted to the ground whose only self-defence consists in the amazing capability to spit out her entire intestins so to cloud the vision of her predator. Oh yeah, there you have it, autonomy ! The closest friend I still had, when called to my rescue because I had run out of cigarette, which in full maquillage and costume I did not find the courage to procure on my own, delighted sadistically in his power to delay the delivery. As far as I can remember this seclusion of me, in this case the lonely transvestite, lasted for two weeks ; and lest I forget   - never having been interested in ‘stories’, as opposed to mise-en-scène :   it’s all about an aging fashion designer out of fashion, enwrapped in depression and fantasies of revenge. After it was done and submitted to the jury of a gay film festival in Amsterdam by Madeleine Bernstorff who liked it enough to take the blame of rejection, I entrusted it to the care of Gallery Buchholz who digitalised it, and from whose vaults it has rarely emerged. It remains under the radar of any reception and has thence been prevented of becoming a member of my body of work. I should add that the soundtrack of the film, though professionally wanting, plays an overwhelming role in its appeal, not only because of the devices I mentioned above, but for the diegetic sound of the children roaming the staircase, the birds and maybe even some trains or the trainstation which I don’t remember because I never had the occasion to watch it in its entirety since it was done, not even in Artist’s Space where it was on view combined with ‘Le Mani Sulla Città’ ; there, I was prevented from doing so by the usuall, all-consuming toil of installing the show and then make it through the opening. This combination brings me, however, to conclude with the reasoning behind it. Since “Le Mani Sulla Città” represents the public domain in its most relentless and violent manifestations, it offered the opportunity of a rupture with and a constrast to the petulant, melancholic and imperial privacy of the self-enamored fashion designer, shattering the illusory borders inbetween public and private and taking down any notion of identity politics with it. Comparably, in “A Little Cantata” , another product resulting from the abandoned Düsseldorf scenario, the soundtrack created by Julian Goethe fulfilled the same function.

 And, after all, who had the last laugh back then in Düsseldorf ? The end of “From Cotton via Velvet to Tragedy” was scripted, and we packed up and loaded a hired truck with our dismountable cariolas and stacks of freshly ironed bed linens to head overnight to a squatted flat in Berlin. Who constituted the ‘we’ this time ? A new sister called Gabriele, once rejected by the Academy and about to become Mother Superior of Electronic Music, calling herself henceforth Dj Mo ; Uwe, the first waiter to have made it after the wall from the despised GDR to the arrogant temple of cloistered gourmandise called the “Lindenhof”, who had volunteered to drive us. And while Düsseldorf descended into bankruptcy, the Academy lost its clout, the restaurant had for the first time opened its doors to a Kurdish waiter called Ali and to Mr.Kügow, the first fat, loquacious, irresistable beerhouse waiter with his own unassailable ways, all after I had unwittingly become the watershed (being the first untrained waiter) of a new approach to how things could be done in a way formerly unimaginable in terms of representation, acceptability and physical and communicative presence of waiters who had been excluded from a status quo by now defunct. The bosses, Doris and Robert divorced as well and whether that world exists as I knew it, including the Academy, I have no idea. Bless you ! 

Lukas Duwenhögger 31.08.2022                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  

Around 2004, the year of my retrospective in Hamburg called “Prinzenbad”, I wrote the following text as a possible introduction for the book that until now, sadly, didn’t materialize,to be called “Prinzenbad” as well. At this point it seems to me not inappropriate to tell you, dear follower of these pages, that this website was meant from the beginning, amongst other things, to build the foundation for that book to be. As I am looking for a publisher and everything else you need to produce it, I would welcome and be grateful for any serious suggestions concerning that project.

Chandeliers feel especially at home in palaces. Here, they can unfold : They love to look at their magnificence in mirrors, and the receptiveness of any shining surface to their fickle flashes makes them dizzy with appreciation. To dissect and refract light, to emit that tinkle in a breeze or when camions rattle by, to resemble a fountain trapped in amber or an arctic merry-go-round, to be up and above... it’s all so delightful that they stop to realize their dependency on the labour to keep their icy candy unclouded and shining.

But when they are taken apart for the big cleaning every once in a while and spread on the heavy carpets from Hereke, innumerable prisms from Böhmen become painstakingly numbered.

This is when visitors are rushed through in order to keep them from looting …

Like dead silvery fish washed upon a shore by poisonous waters, those prisms are taken out of their element - the air - and their dead bodies become the objects of professional scrutiny : the music is gone.

Isolated from their glittering swarm, their mechanism revealed, they offer a sight of utter helplessness and exposure. But when the reassembling is completed, the transitory humiliation over, the abject jelly translucent and solidified, they soar up to their 360 degree habitats again, where not even the most able feet - Fred Astaire’s for instance - can dream to waltz.

The sun-kissed Serkan emerging from the waters, sweet or salty, in an explosion of diamonds comes to my mind. Then, suddenly, this ascension is brutally stopped, an arrest instituted, the trip to the moon cancelled ; the joys of the lift replaced by the strain of weight and suspension. There, eternal thaw is setting in. In the stale and stagnant climes which gather under any ceiling, cuppolas included, thickened by the exhaust of the building and the activities within, the upward swirl of icy sparks now hangs and melts. Now, glistening drips and drops are forming a confluence which swells the single, heaviest, lowest-pending crystal ball to a ripeness where the glassy skin at any moment might not endure the tension any longer and tear open, like a tomato.

At this very moment invariably the Palace-Administration pushes an ornate circular table underneath, with an empty vase in the middle.

Perhaps this is a heathen belief that indeed at any moment that pregnant bubble might pop and the heavenly liquids contained within must be saved at all costs ; or it is an old fashioned love for symmetry, stemming from heraldic signs, gardens and embroideries ; or an attempt to organize the by now purposeless grandeur of those rooms around a central, vertical power-line that in the dusty twilight is connecting something : the feet with the eyes, the ground with the skies, the past with the present. But as this line is composed of two seperate bodies which are brought into an almost

unbearable vicinity - one culminating in the erect orifice of the vase, the other one gravitating towards that dangling envoy of glass - you realize that not only an extraordinary event with unforseeable repercussions could bring about their electric unification, like a scream or an earthquake, but that a mere whisper would suffice.

These anxious and concentric decorative efforts seem to be as unaware of their gluttonous arrangements as the fantastic creatures of the deep seas, in the complete absence of light. Or are they? They make you wonder if the other visitors with their shadowy, minky eyelashes - in case you had joined the Turkish group - would have similar perceptions and, to avoid exposure in public, carry them silently home.

“And here again imitation-pillars!” exclaims the guide imperiously, and on we move towards the alabaster baths.

P.S : The title of this essay was taken from Diane Arbus' Diaries