Sometimes I am confronted with the question: How do you describe your art? Well, it is plain and simple: my art is what remains when I die and I am no longer here to have the ideas in my brain that made me create the works that I did.
A more practical way to describe my art is to say that I make handmade digital art with self made photographs and that I try to find ways to print it by hand as well. Some people only want to hear about the way I create my works, you can never tell in advance – until you see their eyes shift sideways or they start looking confused.
Everything I do makes me look like an artist. But I can assure you that looks are deceptive. It only seems like I am an artist, since I am not, I am a collector. Or better formulated: I craftily work on creating a collection of artworks and artifacts that look old, and I present those works as if it is my art collection.
This collection of artworks and artifacts is in turn also created with items I have collected: discarded plastic shapes, rusty metal parts, remnants of broken machines, old wood, ideas, myths, historical facts, lies and photographs. Lots of photographs, over 200 thousand and counting, all categorized and with keywords.
I use all this to create new items by putting them together in my computer, using various printing processes and on my workbench. My work is finished as soon as I have high hopes that the result will be recognized as art.
But if you were to ask me if my creations really are art, my honest answer would be that they are not and they can not be. They are falsifications of artworks that have never existed, that’s what I can tell you, they are disguised as Objet Trouvé, hidden in the basement of that strange uncle who also collects those broken appliances that nobody recognizes.
Maybe one could also say that the artworks that I make, that they should have existed in another timeline – but who am I to judge. What I create is merely something that looks like art, it is shaped with the aid of my memory of art and therefore it might even resemble art.
Or is this actually the essence of art? 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 that makes me think of art. It is kind of like 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 I never realized what the meaning was until now?
Based on my experience this process seems to work just fine, because I notice time and again that I really am capable of fooling my audience into believing that I create art. So why should I stop there?
Art is something that connects us humans from one time to the next, it is as if we planted a bunch of flags in time, one after the other, to tell people how we do things and what we like and what is important to us.
I am really fascinated by archeology, especially those places where people have lived many thousands of years ago – and sometimes they find artworks from that long, long ago and you realize that the art they made is not that different from things we know from not that long ago. But since I live in this totally different world where everything is automated and we have things that are called computers and printers, we have almost no connection with these old artworks. We have a totally different way of thinking about art.
A 100 thousand years ago humans came together with their families in caves and they made stripes on the walls with their fingers, young and old and children and everybody – we have dubbed this ‘Finger Fluting‘. Many thousands of years later we started making ornamental stuff and statues and paintings of landscapes. And today there are people who say that art is only ideas. I am afraid they will not leave that much behind and therefore they will be forgotten, just like those people who only make digital art.
So to understand the time I live in it is important to know that everything is different – even the ways we make art. Some people still use stone and wood and oil paint and make great things with polychrome wood and what not – but not that many. But the most important thing with the current tradition in art making is that we kinda stay away from all things traditional in art, we kinda lost the connection with previous eras. We also think all art has to be original and never made before – even though in earlier times everybody knew that a good story gets better if it is retold again and again by other people.
In short: There is almost nothing that connects our art – our fine art – with what was previously made. Apart from commercials and films and other forms of entertainment, they very often are inspired by old art because everybody knows and recognizes that and it makes them feel warm and fuzzy. And sales people like it when that happens.
So the tradition is somehow alive in our subconscious, in our memory of what art should look like – but the artists seem to work very hard to break that tradition. It is like the fairy tales we still tell our children: some components of the stories change, but the basic patterns remain the same.
So I decided to make an alternative to our art history where everything is a bit different. And not just because of that, but also because some art tells terrible stories and because some things should have been told with art.
If some of my 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 an Art Dealer, Adventurer, collector of Artifacts and an Asocialite. Maybe he is also a bit of an artist himself. 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 artworks 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 so on. 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. And they will dance like in a hypnotic Trance.
Dedicated to Jerome Goldnose – the art collector i am impersonating