Just Quist opened the presentation for his new work by playing the cymbals in front of the closed door of his studio. After this, he left, leaving the guests alone with the work. This first operation marked the event: presence through absence, meaning through retreat.



This is the poem I keep returning to. X (1933) is old and has seen the promises of Fukuyama come and go. X writes somewhere that the Europe of Goethe and Schiller has made way for the Europe of 3.1, 3.2 and the monstrous 3.3. The thing that keeps drawing me back to this poem is something which Harold Bloom has described as the anxiety of influence: how can we shape ourselves through a language that we have not invented ourselves. 

This question also surfaced in a recent exchange of letters between me and a friend in which I return to Nietzsche. In the birth of Tragedy he poses, in essence, the following:



There is something in the physical experience which fundamentally precedes words and imagery. Language can never represent this completely; at most it can circumscribe it. What we express through language always remains on the surface of what the physical and affective has already touched upon. 



This thought marks a departure with Plato and Descartes. With them Truth is something mental, accessible only through thinking and language, whilst the physical domain is marked by illusion. Nietzsche inverts this: the reality is bodily, and language and intellect do not form roads to a deeper truth, rather distracting from it. Where Plato and Descartes saw a way out through language, Nietzsche removes this comforting notion from us.



From this inversion I position myself. In lieu of Rorty I do not understand myself as something stable, but as something which comes into being as a result of the interplay between the body and language. The way one describes themselves – as an artist, as a man, as a progressive – has real consequences. One can never become one with such a description, but by constantly reformulating, one can change the circumstances of one’s life. I am an artist and therefore I make art. Because of that I meet certain people, I read certain books, I learn to recognize certain symbols. These experiences in turn produce new self-descriptions. This is how movement comes into being. 



That movement however, also knows its limits. During the reading of Derrida’s Psyche: The invention of the Other I once again ran into the question whether we can ever truly reach other. Derrida suggests – oversimplified – that every attempt to understand the other can not reach beyond ourselves. 



Even when we direct ourselves towards the other, we are always speaking with ourselves. In Mourning and memory we meet the other as they live within us. Reaching the other outside of ourselves, remains impossible.



This raises the question whether recognition of the other is possible at all. Not through language I suspect. And that’s where the paradox which Nietzsche, Heidegger and Derrida share floats to the surface: how to express in language that the language can not express such a statement?



Perhaps there is a possible opening when we bring these lines of thought together: the bodily nature of the experience and the impossibility of capturing the other in language. We have to keep speaking of the other, again and again, just like we should allow the other to speak of us again and again. We can not fall into eachother, but perhaps we can experience something within the attempt at doing so. Of this I would rather be silent.



The author of the exhibition wrote to me.



I had to think of a moment at the bakers, where there was cake on display named  “indulgence”: butter, almond paste, comfort in concentrated form. My response to this was: what does that actually mean? Should I lay down on the floor so someone can stroke my belly? 



That almost infantile position exemplifies modern man to me. One is offered everything, it all has to be comfortable. That is especially why setting things on hold is important to me: the delayed gratification. As long as something is still moving, everything remains possible. In between chaos and promise, in the pause, in the spot, perhaps that is where the light hides. Real liberation does not exist; there is merely the promise.



Keeping that in mind I return to the creator of the exhibition. When the author answers all the questions, neutralizes the risk, the interpretation loses its dangerous quality. I can partake in the format, play along, conform. On a large scale we’re witnessing an avoidance of danger and a desire for security. The coloring page in the pictures of X – you merely have to stay within the lines – says plenty. A good painter is overwhelmed by their own painting.

It’s especially when the artist is absent as a mediator to their work, that the viewer is confronted with the work itself. The viewer is faced with the unknown with no way out. Then the choice remains: to avoid the work, or to take up a position.

Ebbe Tim Ottens

The Balustrade is a non-profit artist initiative relocated after its start in 2019. It aims to offer a diverse program of exhibitions, meetings, and lectures that critically engage within a rapidly deteriorating art climate. A platform where we have to keep speaking of the other, again and again, just like we should allow the other to speak of us again and again.