Artist Feature

Every week an artist is featured whose single image was published by Der Greif. The Feature shows the image in the original context of the series.

The work »Rattenkönig« (Rat King) was made 2012-2014. It includes 38 black & white, 6x6 photographs. I will show you 12 selected photographs of that work. Ratking is a work about the people themselves. I want to show the people how he rubs on his life, his work, his environment. To show that I was looking for clear shaped visual dynamic pictures that meet the theme. The pictures are made on many travels trough Germany and Poland. Ludwig Rauch, a german photographer and lecturer for photography has written about this work: I see the »Rat King« as a study of the absurdity and contradiction of life and about the beauty of imperfection on the grace of anger, as a single large »Nevertheless«. Rat king is no conceptual work and all photographs are found.The work is self published as a book with a text written by Lars Dreiucker.   I recommend the text from my book written by Lars Dreiucker. Translated from German by David Heywood & Jones: The insipid feeling of never losing the ability to smell carrion. The sticky desire to live. The cell does not divide, it does not require space, but dies anyway. An invisible, not visible (sic!) hand or strings is required to hold the sinews to allow the as of yet undivided component parts to pull themselves together and to breath. Five fingers on one hand are as strong as a threaded structure. Taxis are just as flat as Texas. Its flatness is its contradiction. Always. Nobody is just horny. Each contradiction, just like the coughing cell stuck to the rat's nest, needs its space. There is far more space between Warsaw and Moscow than Berlin and Paris. a. A handful of self-reassurance. It freezes. But it has just reached out. Beyond, behind the mountain, the revolution. b. Humidity, much. Without revolution the humid will become an absent-minded asshole through a-historical but traditional self-overestimation. With its desire to move outwards, the humid, without pain and guilt, go to Bayreuth. c. Get away from there. Sparkling whilst celebrating leads to a reduction in social complexity. In our circles, this is termed marriage or gelding. d. Schmoozing, stroking, building others a pit, from clay, from tree. The rabbit serves the wolf with fear, the wolf serves no one. He eats the rabbit anyway. The idea can only deliver the bearing of children. e. My lungs full of tar My belly on the keyboard My love in the notes My fingers on the keys No aspiration between My socks wet with sweat My lips velvet dry Rhythm can't be heard My kisses were visible to all My love is abrasive from the start You cry for traces in the blood I am bleeding. f. Fassbinder to Moreau Just be great. g. Whatever. It's not clear if you or she want anything more. Certainly nothing more in the next half an hour. What you definitely could have done better was postmodern. h. Mirko! Come out to play? No, why not? Donít want to. But Iím in my grannyís next week. Have fun. I. Drive on what lies in front of you, loudly and forcefully, so that twitching and fright will not be its first movements, rather, the volume must be so intensive that the ground upon which the water rests awakes. In that sense humanity is not the worst thing that could happen to the human earth. j. The distance between intimacy and emotional dependence is the differentiation in the question whether you love her. So spoke the young man at the beginning of the day. k. I am at war because I am not the son of a wealthy white man. I am a son of a whore, who must fly for a land which assumes neither responsibility nor a future nor hope for me. I hate the land in which I was born. l. Sing my Saxon, sing. m. All words appear, no they are embarrassing. They confirm this incomprehensibly beautiful world. The darkness shines and it shines, not the brightness. It spreads itself out. Where that is, is where the words are set. Because they are so small, they embarrass. n. You are all gone, you left before I could love you. The most beautiful sentence in the world cannot change that. Marie Farrar is still dead. You asshole. Forbid yourself from thinking. That the digital world lets you dream and that you suffer. Is. Your fault. A4 The surface is that what we see. True surface. Hate and hiccups. Must unite. In order that the powers that be understand their lack of humour, for they do not love what they improve. If the day in Prague was still to come, all would be happy. o. »I saw the flames myself. Soon after that I had to leave Germany and first saw it again wearing an American uniform. A survivor. Years later I returned to the eastern part of the country. [Ö] To be sure the majority of people affected by the constraining burden of Stalinism and post-Stalinism have been freed. But the crisis to which I referred, a crisis which now involves the whole industrial world, has become even more apparent. How long will this planet, the only one we have, suffer the manner in which humanity produces and consumes its multifarious commodities? And how long will humanity suffer the manner in which these commodities are shared?« – Stefan Heym 10.11.1994 p. Dog Dayís Afterrnoon. Parsifal was proud but not aware of his wounds. He lacked the appropriate vocabulary. Promises of salvation lie in the wound. Affliction, which allows life to rumble on, is also part of the wound. When the small, fat Kafka drags you by your calves, even the Chancellor/ King of the farmers understands that he will lose. Wounds are not just funny if you know enough doctors. Or you forget the urgency. Like the unbroken bourgeoisie in West Germany after the French Revolution. Calmly reflect, how our future is to be, said Marx to Heine, that is what the king said. Both then said: Where is Paris? Today it lies below the Falkland Islands. At the time it was the polyphonic place. In Germany, trouble makers were expatriated, always. That is why pure capital is having a bad time. Parsifal was not German. q. Danube so blue, So bright and blue, Through vale and field You flow so calm, Our Vienna greets you, Your silver stream Bids lands together, And joyful hearts beat On your beautiful shore. Franz von Gernerth Danke Kamil.