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squeezing art: pissing dreams
on commission
Dreaming is as good, necessary, relieving and annoying as "pissing"
- yes, comparable to a necessary bodily function (urinating). Sick dreams
or healthy ones, they all are a pain in the a... sorry. In that lower
body zone, things often stick and stink, they dissolve stuff, though don't
resolve them.
Asked to harvest dreams that are producing artworks, I came up with the
following products over the last couple of weeks without rolling out any
dream fishing gear, i.e. a bloc and a pencil near my pillows.
Mid November 2006, New York
The art in this dream consisted of a performance: I was free style
pissing in public without using my hands and considered it a
"performance." Four friends and I decided to piss somewhere
like Central Park, New
York. After we have been drinking, I saw an accumulation of stones and
invited everybody to piss, though I was afraid of being caught by the
police. I felt really good at this art of pissing. To avoid detection,
I tried to hide and kneel "underneath" a stone, like a woman
urinating on grass, or a Russian step dancer, or a
Brazilian one under the robe of a samba dancer. While my friends pissed
customarily, the police drove by, stopped and arrested them all. I escaped,
by walking away and pissing underneath the stones so that I couldn't be
seen (not something very logical outside of dreams and computer
animation). I walked to the other side of the park and got away without
being
questioned by the officers though I was still afraid somebody would denounce
me.
In the dream, I was very conscious that I was executing my art and
that I was considered an artist while doing the “perfect samba
pissing.” I was, so to say, a "piss artist" and seemed
to have gotten away
with it...
Context: I had several appointments with NYC's court system for
"urinating in public" - I have basically stopped this European
practice now.
But recently, in an emergency, I did piss alone in the middle of the
night in the middle of Central Park - hiding in the bushes at a cross
road near 69th street. The fact that I was pissing without using my hands
reminds me of bicycling without holding the steering wheel,
something I am currently engaged with as an artist. “Bicycling”
and “pissing” not only sound similar when said aloud, they
are
somehow similar as bodily acts - they both get you on in daily life, both
affect with a sense of urgency.
November 21. 2006, Stuttgart
The beauty of this object is of dubious nature since I don't bother
with my recollection of it. The dreamed object was an object of my own
surprise, somehow obscene, somehow perverse and abject, as if made of
crystallized piss.
The object in question - the dreamed art work - had a tendency to perform
or turn me into a performance but I can't recall more details. The
dream object or more precisely, the dream abject was turning and spinning
at
the height of my head having an intrinsic relationship with me, as
if extracted from me, my feces, my piss, my blood or I don't know
what. I looked at it in an unpleasant way and admired it with some
jealousy, wishing to domesticate it, to save it as an art work. Yet, it
somehow
felt too "normal," so I didn't bother to write it down, to fixate
it,
to transcribe it, to pull it into presence, into preservation. This was
the revenge of the piss-art work, or the revenge of some unconscious
me, in order to make the object disappear. Now it is gone and nothing
but a vacuum, a feeling of loss remains. Now, I accuse myself of
intellectual laziness, of mnemonic laissez-faire, of bull-pissing myself.
I woke up unpleasantly, would much have preferred to sleep but I had
the urgent need to release myself and did so immediately without
hesitation or concern for my dream. Moving after a dream is never a good
idea
if one wants to remember one. At the toilet, I kept - half sleeping -
turning this floating device of crystallized piss into an artwork to be
done, to be imitated.
Context: This piss-dream art work (holy piss) might have
a relationship
with the polystyrene objects I presented yesterday in class in
Stuttgart. In Stuttgart I have to sleep on the table of the class room,
a huge
studio for sculpture.
Later in November, 2006, New York
Eventually the dream came through. I was standing in line at a bar with
a large group
of people, mostly students. Also present was a Stuttgart art academy
employee, a Werkstattleiter. I introduced myself to him and he was nice.
Yet I was afraid of him, for he looked like a bull dog. Suddenly the
class started leaning over me and we all fell over in a line, one body
pushing the next body. I was embarrassed and apologized to this man that
I fell on him. Eventually, we started talking and he was very nice to
me. He told me that he remembered an artwork of mine he saw in Der
Standard, the major Austrian newspaper. He described my piece: a grave,
a
rather flat bronze tomb, with two flowers on it. Very traditional.
While the Werkstattleiter described my artwork he had seen reproduced
in
the newspaper, I not only recalled this piece but also got an additional
idea for yet another artwork to make. I considered creating more work
on this tomb as it seemed to relate to my photographs of war
heroes (a series I started doing but didn’t' really get too far
with).
Eventually, I felt very grateful to this man’s recollection of my
artwork (which in reality doesn't exist) and I became exhilarated in the
dream. But right at this crucial moment of excitement, his dog, a German
shepherd, started to
attack me, finally seriously biting my wrist. I become very angry when
his fucking dog bites me and drags me onto the floor. I thought in the
dream that this man’s usually nasty attitude towards me was now
replaced by his vicious dog. The dog kept biting me, biting me. I
eventually woke up...
Context: Here no pissing, but somebody was pissed at me. The
Werkstattleiter
exists and is responsible for the bronze
department at the Stuttgart academy where I just got a teaching job. I
don't get along with him so far, but I need to work with him for my own
projects. When we met, he mistook me for a student and chased me out of
a room before he realized that I was actually another professor.
He pissed me off, so to say.
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