I
Fernando Castro Flórez
“L´art regarde, il nous regarde, il regarde notre regard”
II
Schön kommt von schauen
Leo Zogmayer in conversation with Tayfun Belgin
III
Do not linger on, thou art so fair!
Leo Zogmayer in conversation with Carl Aigner
IIII
Franz Xaver Baier
Leo
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ I
Fernando Castro Flórez
“L´art regarde, il nous regarde, il regarde notre regard”
1. We can consider minimalism as, rather than a rupture, the fulfilment of the development of modern sculpture, which would coincide with the development of two schools of thought, phenomenology and structural linguistics, in which it is understood that the meaning depends on the way in which any form of being contains the latent experience of its opposite, the simultaneousness which an implicit experience of sequence always brings (1). Objectuality would replace a transcendentality of the work of art, but at the same time it would reduce the meaning to a subjective drift. It is clear that in the contemporary crossroads it is not enough, as Serra intends, to affirm that this is all there is, given that the critical content of that putting everything in its place can slip discreetly into cynicism. Hybridisation brings something more than an intertwining of languages, above all it is a crossbreeding of intentions and feelings, a will which is (anti)communicative rather than expressive. Leo Zogmayer is not an orthodox minimalist (2) nevertheless his objectual modulations, the geometry that he is obsessed by and the renouncing of expressionist gesturism allow him to connect with this aesthetics. It is true that this Austrian artist is not as trusting as the Americans of the ideal givenness or of the presence of materials but he considers that a sophisticated compositive task is necessary.
2. Some theorists like Freud have aroused discussion about the fear that art succumbs to the threat of theatricality, entertainment, kitsch or mass culture. Although serious problems may also be detected when aesthetics loses itself or is dedicated to expurgating all impurities. Rhetoric would appear to provide little when its fundamental preoccupation is to legitimise itself, when not wallowing in a collection of stories, the more pathetic the fewer positions that are worthy of defence. What Leo Zogmayer wants is to uncover the beauty of the present (3). We should talk about an art of suspension, in which a desire for lightness (4) materialises.
3. In Sentences on Conceptual Art Sol Lewitt suggested that conceptual artists are more mystics than rationalists. They are on the limits of logic, in that place with a sub aespecie aeternitatis view. Lewitt considered his aphorisms as comments on art but not as artistic sentences. Kosuth, however, thinks that artistic indignation is the language of art itself: a work of art is a type of proposition presented within the context of art as an artistic comment. Works of art are analytical propositions, in the sense of Alfred Ayer, in other words, tautologies, definitions of art. The artistic condition of art is that it should be a conceptual state, even when it sometimes approximates to “private languages”. Kosuth writes in opposition to Kant when he states that art cannot be a synthetic proposition, actually when he talks of artistic art he is dictating the Lessons of aesthetics which refute the ideas of Hegel. Works are not “present” as they are seen, on the contrary, the entire structure of the deception that artists like Reinhardt deploy is only to put visibility into question. There is a demand to consider art in its entirety in a Wittgensteinian philosophical i.e. therapeutic key: “This is where I propose the visibility of art should reside. In an age in which traditional philosophy is unreal due to its presuppositions, the ability of art to exist will depend on it not fulfilling a service –as a distraction, as a visual experience (or another kind), or as decoration- which is something that may not be easily assumed by the kitsch culture and technology, but also on its capacity to remain viable not assuming the philosophical position; the unique character of art lies in its capacity to remain above philosophical judgements. It is in this context that the act has certain similarities to logic, mathematics and also science. But while these other companies are useful, art is not. Evidently art is only for art’s sake.
In this period of humanity, art can be, after philosophy and religion, one of the companies that satisfies what in other times was called “the spiritual needs of man”. Or to put it another way, it could be that art analogically deals with the state of “metaphysical” things which philosophy had to deal with through affirmations. And the strength of art is precisely that even the previous sentence is an affirmation that cannot be verified by art. The only objective of art is art. Art is the definition of art” (5). The primary structures in Leo Zogmayer do not lead us towards the meta-artistic, but rather the work and the study of this creator, determined in a repetitive geometry (6), avoid the rhetoricalised search for the “definition”.
4. It is often considered that conceptual art emerges from minimalism, the last of the avant-garde which is sustained in formalism, but with a new twist, that of introducing things such as certain types of meanings in the world. But there is a number of specific differences. The movements that develop based on minimalism radicalise the materials before producing some alternative meanings, whilst conceptual art aims to reveal the uses of the meaning: “the substantial importance of the work, as I understand it, can be found in the radical re-evaluation of how a work of art works, thus it tells us something about how culture itself works: how the meanings can change without the materials changing” (7). Conceptual art generates intense activity (work) on the context and, at the same time, signifies a critique of the culture of spectacle, precisely in times when there was also a desire for the specific and poetic transmutation. Given all of this, it is obvious that behaviour closely linked to conceptual art could not escape, as they ideologically intended, from fetishism (8), or from the drift towards simulacrum. In 1990, Kosuth suggested a monument for Walter Benjamin in Frankfurt. What interests this artist about the author of “The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction”, is that it offers an outlet for the impasse of painting in the sixties. The function of art was inverted because instead of the ritual it found that the political praxis was the basis of art. “The ritualised celebration of the “authentic” with its auratic art, has now becomes the baptism of the inauthentic” (9) . The grammatical context is now a form of prosody which “works” in the sense of a cultural critique: “without the social grammar that culture offered, punctuation begins with art” (10). Auratic art, recalls Kosuth, originated in the ritual and in magical-religious behaviour: painting claimed this space throughout centuries, that “distance that came closer and became far away at the same time”. But painting caused itself to collapse, with monochromes, the empty canvas of Ryman, Marden, Martin or Mangold (11), the fortune of lucidity and blindness at the same time. What interests Zogmayer is to modify the perception of the world, take us to a point in which the contemplative element invents spaces (12). He does not aim to be either an “eager anthropologist” or suffer the “anguish of influences” because of preceding reductionism. One is given the impression that his imagery is tremendously fertile and that it is an intense pleasure for him (nothing close to nihilism) to succumb to his formal variations.
5. To have, as Jeff Wall remarked, the “authority of the crypt” is not particularly recommendable (13). It is for sad people to take refuge in tautology (14). Leo Zogmayer avoids getting bogged down in logicism; what interests him is the act of looking and above all the effort of doing it without being trapped by prejudices. That extensive experience is not, by any means, overcome. We should remember that Hegel thought that beauty is not an abstraction of understanding but the absolute concept in itself specific or, to be more precise, the absolute Idea in its appearance conforming to itself. To a certain extent, what Zogmayer does is make concepts specific again and so he uses words (“Feind Bild”, “Dich”, “Text”, etc.) not categories.
6. Far from anti-form (15) or the way in which Carl Andre takes possession of space, Sol Lewitt affirmed that the work of art can be understood as a theme with a direct connection between the mind of the artist and the mind of the spectator, “but it is possible that it does not reach the spectator or it does not leave the mind of the artist”. LeWitt worries more about paradoxes than concepts: “Everything that LeWitt thinks, writes or does –remarks Robert Smithson- is inconsequential and contradictory. The “original idea” of his art is lost in a confusion of drawings, configurations and other ideas. Nothing is where it appears to be. His concepts are prisons devoid of reason” (16). That nonsensical, truly routine nominalism seemed to be devoid of intensity (17). An era of “delibate boredom” and of the fascination for the organised (18), has given way to an aesthetics of morbid beauty. Reticles and obsessive geometry take possession of the wall, imposing a certainly elegant chromatism. An artist like Zogmayer deploys his energy in a territory where everything accidental has been underestimated: “Without echos of footsteps in empty rooms, without the cries of birds through open skies, without torrents of water in the distance –the grid has collapsed the spatiality of nature on the limited surface of a purely cultural object. The result of this proscription of nature, after that of talking, is an even greater silence. Many artists thought that in this recuperated stillness they could hear the beginnings, the origins of Art” (19). Following the fiction of the original statute of the pictorial surface, in an end which is, strictly speaking, a time of definition of new endings, the need to locally establish the poetic without resorting to a general program is imposed. Zogmayer believes that beauty can be found in everything and, in this way, it forms part of art (20), his vision broadens the dogmatic reticulation, it offers us the elemental which is precisely the unexpected.
7. Let us remember that Greenberg thought that modernism had demonstrated that there were increasingly more painting conventions that proved to be dispensable, i.e. not essential. “But now, it seems that the idea has been established that the inescapable essence of pictorial art consists of just two conventions or constituted norms: flatness and its delimitation; the mere fulfilment of these two norms is enough to create an object which can be experienced as a painting: thus, a canvas extended or fastened with tacks exists as a painting – although not necessarily a successful one” (21). Michael Fried established some reservations to these previous considerations: “To start with, it is not enough to say that a naked canvas hanging on the wall is not “necessarily” a successful painting; I believe it would be less exaggerated to say that it is not conceivable as such. The fact that, in the future, circumstances may permit that it is a successful painting could be discussed; but I would sustain that for this to happen the art of painting would have to change so drastically that only the name would remain (It would need a more major change than that which occurred from Manet to Noland, Olitski and Stella!)” (22). Both theorists simultaneously display their scarce capacity to anticipate what was going to happen, but above all their blindness in not being able to see that which they already had before their very eyes. They cannot deny that they are “contemporaries” of an extension of the limits of painting, of a drift towards the impurity that was not only that which was already sketched in the post-pictorial abstraction but had been radicalised in the radicalisation of minimalism. Clement Greenberg spent years announcing the limit of painting because he believed that it would never be crossed, converting the surface (the flatness) into something resembling a myth, but he also began to suspect that catastrophe (ruin in impurity) was near (23). The works of Leo Zogmayer which are between painting and sculpture, or rather, which lead the spectator to perceive this territory as somewhat crossbred(24) are characteristically post-modern.
8. It seems as if painting has convinced itself that it has reached the limit of its possibilities, reaching the point of renouncing itself, refusing to continue being an illusion than reality: “today it is very difficult to talk about painting as it is very difficult to see it. In general, painting does not exactly wish to be looked at, but absorbed visually, and circulate without leaving a trace. In a certain sense, it would be the simplified aesthetic form of the possible exchange. However, the rhetoric that would best define it would be a rhetoric in which there would be nothing to see. The equivalent of an object which is not one”(25). Paradoxical logic, which is what defines the contemporary prostheses of vision, although it is also found disseminated in the fractured tradition of painting, will impose the oblique and coded rhetoric, the estrangement that simultaneously means the acceptance of the veil’s function. Paradox makes use of the element that does not add up in a common group, presenting the impossible difference of levelling or cancelling in the direction of good sense. In his essay “The End of Painting” Douglas Crimp finds in the work of Daniel Buren a series of questions posed which are an institutional critique of art, particularly from the moment when the idea of the “painting” as something obvious in itself is destabilised, beyond any type of epistemological condition or outside of enunciation strategies and visibility devices(26). If modernism attempts to expulse everything that is improper from the dominion of art, postmodernism would be the deconstructive intensification of that modern logic which points to where both binary extremes are included and involved: “we are tempted to affirm that painting has reached its truth, it has adapted to its terrain or problems, except that these problems consist of precisely the essential impropriety of painting, its essential possibility – and great difficulty – in losing itself”(27). We ought to remember, pursuing Rosalind Krauss, that if the dominion of pleasure of modernism is the self-referential space, this is transformed into the semiological possibility of the pictorial symbol as something non-representational and not transparent, the meaning thus becomes a redundant condition of something treated as an object (28). In the wake of the monochrome tradition, with that radical evocation of the vacuum (29), Leo Zogmayer understands to uniformly pigmented surface as that which intensifies the look (30), the cuttings of a piece of reality in which there are no anecdotes or figurative references but in which something certainly happens. His pieces are centres of gravity which invigorate empty spaces. This artist who, with great lucidity, states that beauty is, in fact, the visible same(31), knows that the poetic is not something that is trapped like a bird in a net; on the contrary, the wonderful thing about art is the dispossessing, the decision to not possess anything, i.e. the moment at which one prefers vision to knowledge (32). Zogmayer is perfectly right to suggest that beauty is a condition for our being, it is the way in which life is presented and therefore the work of art is a “liberation of our narrow way of looking at things”(33).
9. Zogmayer is, without doubt, a master of the art of framing. But it is important to observe that his “frames” neither limit nor exclude but provide spaces for events. There is, as Derrida remarked, a “language of framing”: the passe-partout generates subjectivity or, rather, the parergon leads to the work (34). Thanks to the frame, which in the work of Zogmayer, is an object which takes on all of the importance (35) we can, I insist, look at the world in another way. In the schön catalogue of this artist I find, following a series of reproductions of his beautiful works, a series of photographs that confirm that reality is framed/marked by the aesthetic experience: a device for advertisements on the roof of a building, a crane around which birds are fluttering, some railway containers, two pianos shining in the semi-darkness, an empty concert hall, aquatic plants or a spotlight in the darkness. It would attempt to show the exceptional beyond that barren place of the banal (36). On black glass, Zogmayer leaves words which make his obsessions “transparent”: beauty, possibility of change, now, text, celebration that is conditioned, the reason why of China, the invisible or the forgotten.
10. The brilliant and hypnotic works of Zogmayer are inhabited by shade, by that spatial serenity that nostalgically reminds us of Tanizaki (37). “We like that tenuous clarity, made with exterior light and with an uncertain appearance, trapped on the surface of the walls of crepuscular colour and which scarcely maintain the last remains of life. For us, that clarity on the wall, or rather that darkness, is worth all the adornments in the world and his vision never tires us” (38).
11. Mária Orisková remarks that the works of Zogmayer, with his convincing and, at the same time, subtle physical presence, are “models of thought” which escape any categorisation (39). There is no doubt that to enjoy presence is the mystic expression par excellence (40). As the works of this tremendously rigorous creator demonstrate, it is enough to construct almost nothing in order to produce a transformation in a regrettably almost fossilised reality. I think of neither by Zogmayer which evokes an opera of the musician Morton Feldman whose libretto of just sixteen lines was written by Samuel Beckett: “self self shadow shadow sound sound” (41). This master of the Nichtbilder (non-paintings) devotes himself to the deconstruction of a text which is, in itself, an experience of that which one can say in spite of it all.
12. Amid all the speculations, we should know what to do with mirrors, i.e. if we want to reflect the world of make it opaque (42). Art concerns our look, the raising of something which in its lightness affects us and which, with all of its gravitational inertia, ends up interrogating us or, rather, it summons us. A vision which is portrayed (43). “Is your Journey really necessary” writes Zogmayer on the cylindrical metal surface. After facing the elegant and poetic surfaces of this artist, we can only answer affirmatively: the journey to his “visibility” is, in every sense, essential.
1/ Cfr. Hal Foster: “The Crux of Minimalism” in Minimal Art, Ed. Koldo Mitxelena, San Sebastián, 1996, pp. 99-121.
2/ “It would be equally wrong to call the artist a radical reductionist or minimalist constructivist as it would be claim him as a representative of mystically meditative inspirational art or a mysticism garbed in archetypes” (Rainer Fuchs: “Connected separations. On Leo Zogmayer´s Recent Works” en Leo Zogmayer, Ritter Klagenfurt, Viena, 1996, p. 15). Mária Orisková points out that the works of Zogmayer are “literal objects like all minimalist works” (Mária Orisková: “On the Work of Leo Zogmayer: the work of art as an instrument, the artist as a theorist, the viewer as a creator” en Leo Zogmayer, Galéria Medium and Museum moderner Kunst Passau, 2000, p. 24).
3/ “If we always cover the visible with subjective prejudices, we occasionally need strong eruptions that break the lids. After this Apocalypse (from the Greek: revelation) beauty is once again possible” (Leo Zogmayer interviewed by Tayfun Belgin, 2006).
4/ “Suspension –such is the word of this painting. It suspends the heaviness of the representations both with regard to the spaces represented and to the meaning that he wished to produce in it. It does not suspend it by means of any retaining device, nor by any artifice supporting it in the air. It holds the body in suspension, surprising its heaviness instead of its truth. It is the place of a wish. All bodies are heavy due to a heaviness which is not entirely due to laws of physics. These are not, in the final analysis, anything more that the consequences of the desire that makes bodies so heavy: anxious to unite themselves with them” (Jean-Luc Nancy: The Weight of Thought, Ed. Ellago, Castellón, 2007, p. 11).
5/ Joseph Kosuth: “Arte after Philosophy” included in Simón Marchán Fiz: From Conceptual Art to Concept Art, Ed. Akal, Madrid, 1982, p. 419.
6/ “For at first sight the items in his studio do not differ one from the other: rectangular objects on the walls or distributed over the ground, cubes and rectangular solids on plinths which are also themselves cubes or parallepipeds, frames or parts of frames on walls, on cubes and on the floor, rectangular crates for transporting works, rectangular heating appliances, hung from the rafters of the studio… from the perceptual point of view, all the elements are equal” (Mária Orisková: “On the Work of Leo Zogmayer: the work of art as instrument, the artist as theorist, the viewer as creator” en Leo Zogmayer, Galéria Medium and Museum moderner Kunst Passau, 2000, p. 23).
7/ Joseph Kosuth: “No exit” in Art after Philosophy and After. Collected Writings, 1966-1990, The MIT Press, Massachusetts, 1991, p. 229.
8/ “The conceptualist critique of fetishism is usually fetishist in its own right: on the one hand, the “dematerialisation” of the artistic object tends to participate in a modern fetishism of “ideas” and “essences”; on the other, it does not always escape the bourgeois format of exhibition or merchandise. However, conceptual art develops the theme of fetishism of merchandise in art until it is given a definition” (Hal Foster: “The future of an illusion or the contemporary artist as cargo cultist” in Anna María Guasch (ed.): The manifestos of post-modern art. Textos de exposiciones, 1980-1995, Ed. Akal, Madrid, 2000, p. 98).
9/ Joseph Kosuth: “Statement for Ex libris, Frankfurt (For W.B.)” en Art after Philosophy and After. Collected Writings, 1966-1990, The MIT Press, Massachusetts, 1991, p. 251.
10/ Joseph Kosuth: “Statement for Ex libris, Frankfurt (For W.B.)” en Art after Philosophy and After. Collected Writings, 1966-1990, The MIT Press, Massachusetts, 1991, p. 252.
11/ Cfr. Joseph Kosuth: “1979” en Art after Philosophy and After. Collected Writings, 1960-1990, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1991, p. 185.
12/ “For this reason “aesthetic and functional appropriation needs no patronizing choreographic staging of an urban stage but the provision of space and a very reduced inventory” (Leo Zogmayer). In Zogmayer´s own words the objects in the public space projected by the artist are something “between an autonomous art with contemplative elements and art as a service. In terms of form they tend to occur below the threshold of perception as art” (Franz Xaver Baier: “Leo…” in Leo Zogmayer, Galéria Medium Bratislava and Museum moderner Kunst Passau, 2000, pp. 15-16).
13/ “In the opinion of Jeff Wall, isolation in his redoubt was the cause of the omnipresent melancholy in the initial conceptualism: of the “dull language characterised by the work of Lawrence Weiner or On Kawara” and “of the mausoleum aspect” of the grey texts, anonymous notebooks, the files and metal cupboards of Joseph Kosuth and Art & Language. “Social subjects”, he observes, “are presented as enigmatic hieroglyphics and they have the authority of the crypt”, with the omnipresent opacity being a confession of the tribulation of art, an impotent mortification in the face of the overwhelming political and economic machinery that separates information from truth. The last weakness, of this entire phase of art is due, in his opinion, to his failure in his attempt to provoke subjects free of irony” (Thomas Crow: “Unwritten histories of conceptual art: against visual culture” in Modern Art in everyday culture, Ed. Akal, Madrid, 2002, p. 221).
14/ Buchloh takes advantage of a quotation of Barthes on tautology to criticise certain obsessively linguistic developments of conceptual art: “one takes refuge in tautology as with fear, rage or sadness, when one is without an explanation… Within tautology is a double crime: you kill language because you betray it… however, any rejection of language signifies a death. Tautology creates a death, an immobile world” (Roland Barthes: Mythologies, París, 1957, pp. 240-241 quoted in Benjamin H.D. Buchloh: “From the aesthetics of Administration to the Critique of Institutions” in Arte Conceptual. Una perspectiva, Fundación Caja de Pensiones, Madrid, 1990, p. 19).
15/ “In December 1968, two months after the New York gallery of John Gibson presented the exhibition Antiform, Robert Morris brought together a group of American antiform artists and European Povera artists in a spacious warehouse belonging to gallery owner Leo Castelli, the majority of whom had not become known for individual exhibitions. Some months before, the same R. Morris had published the article “Antiform” in the magazine Artforum in which he had suggested that sculpture should abandon the constructive aspects, the preconceived unitary volumes still subject to European tradition of cubist origin and rigid materials. The new sculpture, regardless of preconception should vindicate chance, the indeterminate, the inaccurate and the unpredictable” (Anna María Guasch: El arte del siglo XX en sus exposiciones. 1945-1995, Ed. Serbal, Barcelona, 1997, p. 171).
16/ Robert Smithson. “A Museum of Language in the Vicinity of Art” in Art International, March 1968, p. 21.
17) “The serial work of Sol LeWitt occupies a particularly flat position, devoid of intensity. Their complex structures, with multiple parts, are the consequence of a rigid system of logic which excludes to the maximum individual factors of personality. As a system, it serves to reinforce the limits of his work, as if they were “things within the world” which are separated from both the doer and the observer” (Mel Bochner: “Serial art, systems, solipsisms” in Minimal Art, Koldo Mitxelena, San Sebastián, 1996, p. 87).
18/ “There was a fascination for big numbers (the pseudo-mathematics series of Fibonacci of Mario Merz, the work One Billion Dots of Barry in 1966, that of Kawara in 1968, One Million Years) and for dictionaries, thesaurus, libraries, mechanical aspects of language, permutations (LeWitt and Darboven), the regular and the accurate (e.g. Twenty Waves In A Row, by Ian Murria in 1971). The list of words was also very popular, e.g. the work of Barry in 1969 which included its own “purification” when it progressed –at least in 1971- and began: “It is complete, determined, sufficient, individual, well-known, entire, revealed, accessible, manifest, activated, effective, directed, subordinate” (Lucy Lippard: Six years: the dematerialisation of the artistic object from 1966 to 1972, Ed. Akal, Madrid, 2004, p. 19).
19/ Rosalind E. Krauss: “The originality of the avant-garde: a post-modern repetition” in Art after Modernism. Rethinking representation, Ed. Akal, 2001, p. 19.
20/ “Beauty is found in everything, in anything, in any movement. Art aids and augments the visual element. The arts are the cult of the beautiful. They involve strategies to attract us, they convince us to observe and affirm the world… often in complicated diversions…” (Leo Zogmayer interviewed by Tayfun Belgin, 2006).
21/ Clement Greenberg: “After Abstract Expressionism” in Art International, Vol. VI, n° 8, October 1962, p. 30.
22/ Michael Fried: “Art and objectuality” in Minimal Art, Koldo Mitxelena, San Sebastián, 1996, p. 65.
23/ “Like the horizon for a castaway- and it was that-, always present but never reached, painting could maintain itself, with the pure plane of the fabric, at a perhaps infinitesimal but constant distance. In this, in continuing there – in his raft- like painting resided in his heroism following heroism. Or perhaps, simply, his survival instinct, deployed in an effort to keep this almost imperceptible plate occupied to which the dimension of the myth was now reduced” (Juan José Lahuerta: “The space of painting” in Frank Stella, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, 1995, p. 52).
24/ “No longer mere paintings or sculptures but artful bodies speaking to us about the pictorial and the sculptural, about possibilities of combining the two and ways of presenting them, these works also triggered a discourse about the spectator´s role and position” (Rainer Fuchs: “Connected separations. On Leo Zogmayer´s Recent Works” en Leo Zogmayer, Ritter Klagenfurt, Viena, 1996, p. 15).
25/ Jean Baudrillard: “Aesthetic Illusion and Disillusion” in Letra internacional, n° 39, Madrid, 1995, p. 17.
26/ “What makes it possible to see a painting? What makes it possible to see a painting as a painting? And, under such conditions of its presentation, to what end painting?” (Douglas Crimp: “The End of Painting” in On the Museum´s Ruins, The MIT Press, Massachusetts, 1993, p. 87).
27/ Stephen Melville: Philosophy Besides Itself: On deconstruction and Modernism, Manchester University Press, 1986, p. 87.
28/ “The non-representational symbol of modern painting always represents something, even although it is only the desire of non-representation. It can be to do with a 20th century version of decimononic picturesquism, pure abstract is always, to a certain point, an image or copy of the ideal of non-referentialism. Thus it is to do with a symbol which is related with other symbols in relations of reduplication and repetition” (Steven Connor: Postmodern Culture, Ed. Akal, Madrid, 1996, p. 72).
29/ “The monochrome square has density of meaning: its vacuum is more of a metaphor than a formal truth –the emptiness left by the flood, the emptiness of the blank page” (Arthur C. Danto: After the end of art. Contemporary art and the pale of history, Ed. Paidós, Barcelona, 1999, p. 166).
30/ “It is not about images that cover the real world with a beautiful appearance, here it is about much more than beauty, what is produced in each thing and at each time, it is about the simple act of “looking”. Everything which is reflected in the surfaces of the monochrome glass, which are displayed in a frame, are valued as beautiful” (Leo Zogmayer interviewed by Tayfun Belgin, 2006).
31/ “Beautiful (German: schön) comes from to look (German: schauen), and means visible, look without judging; everything visible is beautiful” (Leo Zogmayer interviewed by Tayfun Belgin, 2006).
32/ “Western culture does not look, it wants to know. And knowledge is a kind of camouflaged game of possessing, of wanting to have. Poetry and beauty are shown when the fiction of being able to possess is recognised and abandoned” (Leo Zogmayer interviewed by Tayfun Belgin, 2006).
33/ Franz Xaver Baier: “Leo...” in Leo Zogmayer, Galéria Médium, Bratislava and Museum moderner Kunst, Passau, 2000, p. 15.
34/ “The first time, occupied in yielding to the major philosophical question of tradition (“What is art?”, “Beauty?”, “Representation?”, “The origin of the work of art?”, etc.) to the insistent atopics of the parergon, neither work (ergon), nor outside work, neither inside nor outside, neither up nor down, the parergon disconcerts any opposition but does not remain indeterminate and leads to the work” (Jacques Derrida: The Truth in Painting, Ed. Paidós, Buenos Aires, 2001, p. 23).
35/ “The frame not only as something which delimits the painting and separates the image from the surroundings, but the frame as an object which in a minimalist repetition becomes a diptych or triptych of the kind familiar from art history” (María Orisková: “On the Work of Leo Zogmayer: the work of art as instrument, the artist as theorist, the viewer as creator” en Leo Zogmayer, Galéria Medium y Museum moderner Kunst Passau, 2000, p. 25).
36/ “The banal is a place of abandonment. We abandon ourselves to impressions, the hourglass of impressions. It is always singular, it is increasingly more singular as it is an exception and the exception is the rule, and the rule is a very regular effect: existence is exceptional” (Jean-Luc Nancy: The weight of thought, Ed. Ellago, Castellón, 2007, p. 100).
37/ Franz Xaver Baier refers precisely to Tanizaki in his essay on Zogmayer: “In classical Japanese aesthetics the concept of beauty defines an aesthetics of asceticism, simplicity and hidden harmony in contrast to garish, colorful or superficial appearances. This aesthetics is rather “quiet, delicate and lingering”, revealing not only the material works but also their non-material context. This leads to a “state without possession” where everything is not centred upon one subject. This is liberating” (Franz Xaver Baier: “Leo…” in Leo Zogmayer, Galéria Medium and Museum moderner Kunst Passau, 2000, p. 17).
38/ Tanizaki: In Praise of Shadows, Ed. Siruela, Madrid, 1994, p. 46.
39/ Cfr. Mária Orisková: “On the Work of Leo Zogmayer: the work of art as instrument, the artist as theorist, the viewer as creator” in Leo Zogmayer, Galéria Medium and Museum moderner Kunst Passau, 2000, p. 25.
40/ Cfr. Jean-Luc Nancy: The weight of thought, Ed. Ellago, Castellón, 2007, p. 133.
41/ Beckett fragment reproduced in Schön. Leo Zogmayer, Kunshalle Krems, 2006, p. 89
42/ Nicolas Bourriaud, as a conclusion to his essay on neo-minimalism, inserts a Chinese legend transmitted in the 17th century by the Jesuits: “in the age in which the world of mirrors and the world of man was not separated, the animals of the mirrors lived freely, in the open air, completely indifferent to man wit5h his forms and colours and they returned to their territory when night fell. One night, the beings of the mirrors invaded the Earth, and a war followed which was won by the Yellow Emperor. The latter confined the defeated men inside the mirrors and ordered them to repeat without respite the acts of the men who became their reflections. But one day they will be liberated, they will cease to imitate them and they will come out of the mirror. Artistic creation is similar to this mirror luck; as much as pop-art prefers to look at it and minimalist art wants to make it opaque ” (Nicolas Bouriaud: “The inheritance of indifference” in Minimal Art, Koldo Mitxelena, San Sebastián, 1996, p. 129).
43/ “Art looks, it looks at us, it looks at our look. It is not reflexivity, art does not portray us, it is its own portrait, not a self-portrait but the graceful raising of a figure” (Jean Luc Nancy: The Weight of Thought, Ed. Ellago, Castellón, p. 69).
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"Schön kommt von schauen"
Leo Zogmayer in conversation with Tayfun Belgin
Tayfun Belgin: To what extent is it possible to create an exhibition on the theme of "beauty"?
L.Z.: Perhaps the exhibition can be thought of in terms of a course in seeing, a freestyle exercise as opposed to a prescribed one. Not unlike an informal wine-tasting...
The following text is from the exhibition:
"schön" (beautiful) comes from "schauen" (to see), and indicates seeing without assessing: everything visible is beautiful.
T.B.: What does it mean to "see without assessing"? What purpose can it serve?
L.Z.: While looking, we are conditioned to equate the seen with what we already know, and thus to immediately assess what we see. More often than not, we distance ourselves immediately from seeing (which is an act that can only occur in the present). We choose to stay with images from the past, plans and fantasies of the future, and "to see" becomes a secondary action. The act of seeing is subject to the permanent stranglehold that our prejudices, patterns and preconceptions have on us. As a result of these self-imposed restrictions during the act of seeing, we tend to think more than we see. It need not be like this. This is what the exhibition is about.
T.B.: To what extent does "beauty" lend itself to becoming an object?
L.Z.: Beauty is available in all things, in every movement. Art assists and heightens visibility. Ensnares us and coaxes us to look at and accept the world - often through somewhat unknown detours... Artists produce very specific objects, which help us to see, but most of the time they are reduced to objects to be looked at, and are thus misunderstood and misused.
T.B.: How does this work in your exhibition?
L.Z.: For every single visitor, the transcending richness of the visible expressed in the word "beautiful" may open itself in another object. However, no piece in the exhibition seeks to be tied down to this heightened sense of attention. An exhibition that takes this theme seriously, automatically takes a stance against idolatry.
Here, it is not about pictures that cover up the real world with a pleasing appearance.
Instead, it is about the archetypal, the beautiful - that functions in each thing and moment. It is about the act of looking itself. Everything reflected in the monochromatic glass surfaces, that shows itself through a frame, is beautiful (the photographs in the exhibition are a showcase of extracts from endless processes of reception). Beauty appears everywhere, "on every street corner" as a poet said.
T.B.: Is there an inner dimension of "beautiful" How can one conceive of it, is it at all possible to conceive of it? Can one speak at all of the "beautiful"?
L.Z.: "Beautiful" articulates affirmation. Agreement with what is. We condense beauty into works of art, being careful not to smother it in the process of compacting it... but it is not a case of cognitive comprehension. "Beauty" is more likely to slip away from us than be communicated. It almost seems more appropriate to say that it itself speaks , without any intervention on our part.
T.B.: Is the "beautiful" just an idea? Does "beauty" have a claim to truth?
L.Z.: It is about nothing other than the transcending richness of the visible that can be experienced. And I encourage the viewer to see what happens, when he does not impose his valuations upon the act of looking.
T.B.: What is the relationship between "beauty" and time?
L.Z.: Anyone who, in seeing another human, simultaneously compares him with previous encounters, or thinks of him in terms of certain planned purposes, is not truly seeing or hearing him. In an extreme scenario, this could be a reason to kill the other, because an imagined concept of the enemy may be created, which is more powerful than the recognition of one's own self in the other.
T.B.: If "beauty" comes from looking, can there be an unsightly way of "seeing"?
L.Z.: This is a helpful formulation. I would describe an unsightly way of seeing as a perceptive mindset where valuation, weighting and judging take precedent over the act of seeing. A kind of trained blindness, connected to the fact that the people of the occident (with few exceptions, the current global culture) have abandoned and unlearnt how to see and be amazed in favour of a possessive grasp on the world. The western person does not see - he wishes to know. And knowledge is a poorly disguised form of ownership, of wanting to possess. It is only when the fictions of ownership and possession are made transparent and given up, that poetry and beauty show themselves.
T.B.: If everything visible is beautiful, why do we sense unsightliness in architecture, in
aesthetic configurations etc.?
L.Z.: One rarely says unsightly, and is far more likely to use ugly (or even hateful, which springs from hate). Here, it is not just beauty and unsightliness that are differentiated between, an element of quite perceptible aggression is brought into play.
T.B.: Does this mean that you, as an artist, do not wish to allow any importance to the difference between beauty - as aesthetic adequacy - and ugliness - as aesthetic inadequacy? In this case, how are you able to express yourself at all?
L.Z.: This is not what I mean. It is more a case of accepting the manifest order: first, to see, nothing more. And only then, when the situation demands it, to differentiate, arrange, negotiate. Our culture teaches and practices the meaningless opposite of this: we perceive the present only fleetingly, but ceaselessly rummage about in the attic of our memories. The present is ignored, the past and future are celebrated.
T.B.: Why is this so harmful?
L.Z.: Because in this way, we are not truly living. We simulate life on imaginary settings, remembering and regretting what has gone by, and are scared of the future that we have described for ourselves. The real potential, the pure life in the now, lies fallow. If we continue to cover up the visible with subjective judgements, from time to time we evidently need violent eruptions that blast away these coverings. It is only after such an apocalypse that beauty is again possible.
T.B.: How do we come out of these apocalypses?
L.Z.: If we do not envelope the world with our disfiguring valuations, there is no need for a painful uncovering. Apocalyptic de-valuations are no longer necessary, and thus, do not take place.
T.B.: Is beauty only a category for philosophers, merely something subjective, or is objectification also possible?
L.Z.: I do not think that we have to, or even can, accomplish this objectification. Beauty is not a theme reserved for philosophers, nor is it something entirely subjective. Unless, of course, we are still speaking of beauty as an egotistical and culturally transmitted valuation. Beauty is always here, though we rarely see it, because we choose to be wrapped up in fictions, instead of in visible reality.
T.B.: Is "beauty" a precondition for being?
L.Z.: If anything, it is unconditional. Like life itself. The beginningless beginning.
T.B.: Is beauty an ontological category?
L.Z.: Ontologists flounder on the line that they themselves lay out. The ancient Chinese saw the danger in this. There, ontology and discussion on being were recognised as leading to an impasse, and were not nurtured any further. The chinese language did not even create a word for "being". For a person of the west, it is hard to comprehend that in ancient China poetry fulfilled what western ontology struggled with: beauty in stead of being.
Tayfun Belgin, Leo Zogmayer Juni 2006
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Do not linger on, thou art so fair! *
Leo Zogmayer in conversation with Carl Aigner
Carl Aigner: You once said that works of art should not block our view on reality, but rather liberate the gaze itself. What role is played here by photography—a medium you have continuously used since 1980s, along with painting, drawing, prints, sculpture, and public art?
L. Z.: My photography in a sense parallels my work on the frames, monochromes, text, and so on, where at issue is the opening up and dismantling of fixed visual formats. Photography has actually accompanied my work in the media you mention ever since my time at the academy, exemplifying for me objective, refracted looking, which is what I consider the subject of art.
CA: Vilém Flusser in particular always insisted that photography is an apparative extension and expansion of our vision. The terms "viewing" and "viewpoint" become neuralgic moments in your oeuvre; is the photographic image not a strongly conditioned form of vision, therefore something contrary to the look?
LZ: Photography still tends to be measured against a conventional image rather than in terms of the medium's fluid qualities and features. The "pictorial" photographers, the current kings of the booming photography market, owe their success to this conservative attitude towards vision. Flusser once called a photograph a flyer-like picture. I would rather speak of picture-like flyers...
CA: It is repeatedly said that vision comes from knowledge. How would you characterize the relationship between vision and knowledge?
LZ: Knowledge is a camouflaged claim of possession. And that tends to blind us, rather than open our eyes. In our culture, pretty much everything is subjected to the fiction of possession. Absurdly enough, even the acting of looking. In terms of the history of language, it can be proven that looking doesn’t come from knowing, but that knowledge, that is, awareness, originally referred to vision.
CA: There's a childhood saying, "I see something you don’t see, and you're lost in it." Is seeing, perceiving too closely linked to a restrictive notion of the subject?
LZ: John Cage once suggested in a poetic statement: "Take the world from your shoulders. You'll see: it holds." We might ask ourselves what would happen to vision if we followed that advice. If the visible was no longer so strictly separated from the person looking. What am I then? A player in the game of vision? Am I the game?
CA: For many years you have been engaged with the phenomenon of the frame from a painting and sculptural perspective. Is this also relevant for your photographic work?
LZ: Indeed, it's quite relevant, but what's important to me is not framing the world, but unframing and leaving open.
CA: Is not the gaze the mobilization of the look, determined by socio-historic and sociocultural phenomena, a kind of instrument with which vision is guided, ideologized? Which also fundamentally enables vision?
LZ: Vision is indeed both engendered and distorted by the moment of guidance and ideologization, or, as you put it, subjectivation. Before that, looking is real. The act of looking is therefore a priori free. It simply happens, in the suddenness of looking, the incredible tiny burst of light along the winding thread of the visible and invisible. Incidentally, I don’t know a more illuminating formulation for the endeavor of modernity than the poem by René Char where he says we should "inhabit a stroke of lightning." This koan-like turn of phrase makes clear that looking is poetry.
CA: But is the image not also something like a visual hold, a visual pause?
LZ: Pictures are thus hesitating—or fluid, even superfluous, like our faculty of vision. There is no image that will not sooner or later give way we push it.
CA: To move briefly to the aspect of temporality—picture and the notion of time are closely connected in a visual society. Is the attempt to achieve an aniconicity not also an attempt to undermine the dominant notion of time, to suspend it? What role does time play in your artistic work? And is photography not a very special time-image?
LZ: As an intermediate step in open acts of reception photography tends towards achronicity, to free time, not subjected to "having time." The all too powerful paradigm of chronological time, usually experienced negatively as psychological time, stress, etc., is so persistent because it is not perceived as an artificial idol, but rather seen as a naturally given. In intentionless, mere looking, free of all time pressure, in looking without regret, the invented, built world collapses, revealing the uninterrupted flow of the real. Do not linger on, thou art so fair! *
* This is an alteration of a famous passage in Goethe’s Faust.
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Franz Xaver Baier
LEO…
On the state of the art in the arts. The discourse of the concepts of modernism / postmodernism has also included
a careful analysis of art. Modernism is supposed to have been a „gigantic decomposition of the old holistic
character of art and a brilliant treatment and pure representation of the elements of the field fractionated in this way
… What had earlier merged into the wholeness of a picture is now being isolated and presented in its partiality and
specificity. This ranges from construction (Mondrian) to colour (Rothko) and nuances (Girke), from white (Zero) to
blue (Klein) and black (Reinhardt), from the everyday (Schwitters) to the cultic (Beuys), from the unique (Opalka) to
the serial (Warhol), from the irritating (Albers) to the sublime (Newman), and back again to the trivial (Spoerri) by
way of the invisible (Duchamp) and paradoxical (Magritte), and then the whole thing once more from the concept
(Kosuth) and medium (Paik) to the frame (Viallat) and from the artist (Lüthi) to the viewer (Pistoletto) and collector
of works of art (Haacke). Modern art addresses all these partialities which emerge when the whole is dissolved,
dealing with them subtly and specifically and exploring their facets to the most minute possibilities. It is a consistent
development of the field of possibilities inherent in art and it has turned its variety into a veritable plurality. It is
strikingly polymorphous." (Wolfgang Welsch, Unsere postmoderne Moderne, Weinheim 1988, 193)
Anyone who has seen Dokumenta 1997 will in future have to include not only our domestic pig, its family and
habitat as part of the art scene but also cooking, the entertaining of guests and the psychological and medical
attention by physicians and nurses. It is to be expected that additional disciplines and areas of social life will
likewise be appropriated by the art scene in future. This will be the case because it is becoming more and more
obvious that all things are interlinked and everything exists in the context of everything else and as part of a
dynamic process. This explains the current interest in works of art that instead of being something isolated can be
interlinked into larger networks and nets of works and into complexes that correspond to the complexity of „life".
This is why surrounding conditions, contexts and concrete situations are of interest. And it is for this reason that the
younger star curators such as Nancy Spector, Klaus Biesenbach and Hans-Ulrich Obrist no longer work alone as
individual stars but are closely networked and consider e-mail something they no longer want to do without. An
ongoing dialogue and a number of changing teams testify to the renewed interest in establishing „connections
between things", „overcoming the boundaries between different genres" and a „dissolution of traditional roles". (Den
Künstler schütteln, Die Zeit, 16.04.1998)
We live in an era in which structural thinking, chaos theory and semiotics have made the traditional categories of material and form, carrier and meaning, something and nothing, presence and absence, value and worthlessness, irrelevant. For this reason chipboard is today no longer just a cheap material for lining the backs of sofas and easy chairs of all kinds. Instead this chipboard has already become a symbol of our way of dealing with nature in general. As the painter Reimers Jochims once said: „By using an element like the chipboard I have made a decision of social significance. Chipboard is not a noble material, but it belongs to our time as perhaps no other material does and it contains the catastrophic dimension already in the material. It is not just produced in the factory, but the way in which trees are planted and cultivated today, i.e. our so-called forests, are already potential chipboard." (Frankfurter Rundschau, 20.02.1988)
Today artworks are parts of communication structures rather than objects by themselves. They are interlinked
observations, instructions, possibilities: „It is the function of art to offer the world the possibility of observing itself
from the viewpoint of the excluded possibilities." (Baraldi et al., GLU, Glossar zu Niklas Luhmanns Theorie sozialer
Systeme, Frankfurt 1997). Art can call to mind that which has been constantly overlooked and ignored. It can point
up nuances in cases where distinctions are too crude. It can anticipate states that cannot or have not yet been
realised. It can create critical distances and a sphere of possibilities within our world where the self-actualization of
the individual becomes more likely. We can call this „global art" in contrast to „object art".
Since this is more a matter of states of the world than of individual objects, things become interesting that are open,
unfinished and, like healthy margarine, „unsaturated". These are things that stimulate the metabolism because they
have gaps, rough edges and free bonds. In terms of objects these are the semi-finished goods that develop their
proper form only through a communicative process. For this reason communicative objects belong to a different
class of reality. They are not related to each other in a simple relationship but refer to a process through which
reality seems „one step more real". (Sloterdijk, Medien-Zeit, Stuttgart 1993)
However, the fact that mere referentiality does not result in communication has been shown in detail by e.g. Luhmann (Niklas Luhmann, Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft, Frankfurt 1997). Communication can work only if the participants „become dependent on a system of higher order under whose conditions they can choose contacts with each other". The higher order has the character of an event as well as of a cyclical process by which free and linked elements manifest themselves as both medium and form. It is this virulence of communication that allows space, form, perception etc. to open up.
The artist thus starts from a complexity that is akin to the way life operates. In accordance with this he perceives places as situations and e.g. a housing estate as an „urban fibre" that can be analysed in terms of a „new intertwining structure" (Leo Zogmayer, description of the Kagran-West project). Viewed in this way, the creation, production and exhibiting of art is tantamount to generating and operating in an emerging and highly energised medium.
The incorporation of the artistic elements addresses the higher-order system, bringing the existing objects into a momentary communications context. In this way a temporary unity of equal partners – living beings, materials, things and relationships – is brought about. Communication frees that which exists from the degrading states of the merely material and merely useful, linking it with the human sphere. Thus the immediate surroundings take on an eloquent appearance manifesting itself. The object character becomes a media context and the art object in the narrow sense of the word takes on a communicative function.
Such successful communication, however, presupposes a different kind of objectness. Akin to the painted pixels in
Cézanne's works, the individual works are building blocks that evoke a larger work of art. For this reason a
photograph of the exhibition is in this context not a depiction but an extension of the generative process. The works
are conceived in such a way that they incorporate floors, walls, doors and everything else within the field of
attention, according them equal importance. This is a liberation from the usual narrow way of looking at things. Art
is here seen as the activation of an entire situation, presenting it in its entirety and balance. It means not limiting
one's glance to the object, as is usual, but instead keeping it open and incorporating, clarifying and developing a
pure presence.
The easel paintings and grids give an extensive appearance. Rather than focusing the space and the surroundings
as is the case in traditional object art they unfold and relax the usual contractions and limitations of the objects.
One learns how to let go again of any kind of relationship, discovering that condition is the origin of all relationships.
As open elements the individual works can enter into relationships without excluding everything else. The frames
neither limit nor exclude. Instead they generate actual surfaces on site. For this reason the works have a backstage
character. They provide space for something else. They remain in the background and do not demand centre
stage. They do not create reified events, but provide stepping stones and platforms for them. Just as a shirt by the
fashion designer Helmut Lang reveals the skin as that which is more alive, real and valuable. For this reason
„aesthetic and functional appropriation needs no patronising choreographic staging of an urban stage but the
provision of space and a very reduced inventory" (Leo Zogmayer). In Zogmayer's own words the objects in the
public space projected by the artist are something „between an autonomous art with contemplative elements and
art as a service. In terms of form they tend to occur below the threshold of perception as art." The artist does not
want to depict events, but instead provide something that can make events happen. For this reason the works
appear as pure essence – a main tenet of Eastern wisdom. The works do not fire our imagination, do not create
any fiction or utopias. What matters most is not the expressive character of a subjective emotional state but rather
the clear and serene presence of the materials, colours, the light etc.
As is well known, the artists of Minimal Art sought for a way out of the ever more varied mixture of styles and the avant-garde approaches of the 50s and 60s. „They constructed simple, undecorated geometric objects that were characterised by symmetry, an absence of the traditional compositional scheme and a sparing use of colour. These „simple objects" were at the time seen as a challenge for the modern easel painting: Positioned somewhere between painting and sculpture, Minimal Art aimed at confronting the viewer with his own perceptual conditions, cultural expectations and artistic values. In addition the Minimal artists made industrially produced and often serially used elements acceptable in art once and for all. (…) One might say that in themselves Minimal Art objects do not express anything, refer to little beyond themselves and suggest little. Industrially produced objects may be said to be mute and inexplicable. At least in terms of its original intention Minimal Art was based on the presence of the viewer. The latter, however, was seen as an abstract, neutral personification, as a dialogue partner necessary to complete the work".
Another important achievement of the avant-garde attitude was the critical concern with the museum as an institution, which was specifically addressed by artists such as Daniel Buren and Hans Haacke. The museum was presented as a domineering force that „subjugates everything that is shown there" (Brandon Taylor, Kunst heute, Cologne 1995). For this reason artists and curators today usually incorporate the institution in their works. This is also true of Leo Zogmayer's work, although he radicalizes by referring to more comprehensive situations to begin with.
In classical Japanese aesthetics the concept of beauty defines an aesthetics of asceticism, simplicity and hidden
harmony in contrast to garish, colourful or superficial appearances. This aesthetics is rather „quiet, delicate and
lingering", revealing not only the material works but also their non-material context. This leads to a „state without
possession" where everything is not centred upon one subject. This is liberating.
The concept of wabi, which plays an important role in the tea ceremony and has become internationally known
through the works of such contemporary architects as Tadao Ando (Tadao Ando, GA Architect 8, Tokyo 1990),
indicates an existential area that is „to be located somewhere between the perceptible and the pre-perceptible or
the articulated and the non-articulated whole" (T. Izutsu, Die Theorie des Schönen in Japan, Cologne 1988). For
this reason the works are characterized by a strangely ambivalent state of „negative and positive, dampening and
encouraging, anti-expressive and expressive, darkly matte and radiantly alive etc." Their referential structure is
therefore less a causal-linear sequence than a network of interrelationships that allows the coexistence of an
infinite variety of things and events to appear.
While walking through the snow-covered park of Schönbrunn Palace in Vienna with Leo Zogmayer as dusk was
falling and inducing another view of the world, the artist told me about his proposal for a desired expansion of an
urban lighting concept. Instead of increasing the lights in the city by additional objects he suggested turning off the
lights during the full moon, allowing the moonlight to illuminate the city. Triggering the ancient fear of darkness, the
proposal confused the authorities.
Art needs to produce like any enterprise. Leaving something off disturbs our progressive thinking and our culture's beautiful journey towards the light. As Tanizaki Jun'ichiro has shown in his famous design of an aesthetics of the shadow and darkness this is a typical Western figure, where people prefer to be dazzled and reflected instead of expanding their view through the quiet power of the mellow light. Moonlight, too, would be very bright. However, to perceive its effect would require a short adjustment phase, comparable to the hunter's lying in wait to whom the forest also reveals itself only after a period of patient and sensitive waiting.
