I have a confession to make:I am not an artist, I am a collector. Or better yet: I craftily create collections of self made artworks and artifacts that look old, in the hope that future people will find and collect them as well.
And if some of these works manage to survive the coming collapse caused by global warming, I hope that one day they will be discovered to tell their tale. I hope that one day a wanderer finds my artworks by accident and gets intrigued by them, wondering where it came from. I dub this adventurer Jerome Goldnose, man from the future. He most likely will become a famous Archaeologist, who is also Art Dealer, Adventurer, collector of Artifacts and an Asocialite. This person is part Indiana Jones, part Junge Werther – could he maybe also be a bit like me? This website and all my art is dedicated to you, future friend.
I am but a loner, but I have various plans to bring this about.
It is my plan to hide my artworks in watertight containers, in concrete bunkers, mine shafts in the mountains or in forgotten basements to secure them against the coming climate change and everything that it will bring about. And they will be accompanied by fake documents written by non-existent experts about their age and the artists that created them.
Or maybe I will give away my art pieces and tell people they are actually hundreds of years old heirlooms, not kept in the family but given away as presents to friends, who then gave them to other friends. And I will tell them a fake story of how they came to be, and what traditions they were part of.
When they are rediscovered, the world will be a different place where people are wondering what happened and why there are these large buildings in enormous cities that are now abandoned. And they wonder if those myths about flying machines and mechanical men and thinking machines were real after all. And the children will play in those abandoned places, and later will have parties there when they come of age.
The items that I collect can have whatever form, can be solid, electronic, photographic, the leftover pieces after an unknown object was destroyed. But it does not end there, because the collection can contain ideas, memories, symbols, icons, stories about moments in history or dreams, or a body of possible stories. Using these items I create new items, in clay, wood, paper pulp with glue, and very often painted, or it is created in a computer and then printed, or cut out, used as stencils, or folded and then painted. This is then connected, glued, welded, screwed, put together in a form that I present as art.
This art is, it is not not art in itself, it can not be, it is a falsification based on my memory of art – what I create is merely something that looks like art, it should remind people of art, make them think that this is art.
My art I present as an objet trouvé , a fake found object, pasted together from many sources, a construct created to represent what art is in my mind.
But maybe this actually is art in itself, because I have no idea how else art can be created. It beats me, it is just something that I hear or see while walking somewhere. It is like a feeling not connected to a place or time, a memory that seems to come from another person. Or is it a story that I have heard a thousand times as a child?
And it is with this knowledge that I work constantly to create that which one could call art – that which I have called falsifications of artworks that have never existed.
And I think that only in such a way we can make art, by watching the artworks from the past, talking to them, mimicking them, answering them, negating them, transforming them in something else, writing them love letter or hate letters, in short: by creating a tradition and coming to terms with the fact that this tradition of creating art that way is as old as the oldest cave paintings..
And that tradition is what I want to give my future humans, because if we can not hold on to that, what is there to live for?
Dedicated to Jerome Goldnose