INTERIM REPORT
or: Glittering secretly
Recently, I was thinking. Not to figure something out or mull things over, but in the way other people go for walks, and the way I so often mean to myself, only to forget because I accidentally carry on thinking instead. It’s rare for me to think about just one thing at a time and see it through to the end. But lately, in all my thinking, I’ve been missing something specific, and after a while I figured it out: an obsession. A sudden crush, one that’s built on unknowing and thrives on daydreaming. An infatuation that I myself could only describe as »folly«, because it is in folly that I suspect infinite freedom.
Perhaps I kept my possible infatuations so well hidden that even I forgot about them in the end. Or perhaps I simply overlooked them because I was sad. In any case, I missed the feeling of waiting for something or someone, that light thrill, the pleasant loss of control – to have something to always come back to: a castle in the air that promises to stay airy and elusive.
Being in love is a tremendously interesting state, interesting enough to warrant at least one further thought – though it need not come from me, since others have known it too, perhaps even explored it more deeply.
So now I will ask them, these others: friends, wanderers through fictional spaces and everyone I believe may have tried their hand at falling in love or at life itself (or both) better than I have, or at least differently. I’m sure they have new ideas and exciting crushes.
There is so much to share: a personal paradise (sometimes lost, but always found again), a time machine (favourite songs from the past or a childhood sweet), battlefields and squabbles, new neuroses – and then there’s all the food, which is why I reckon I’d rather base good conversations in future on a yoghurt with a decent fat content than on art, as was originally intended here (I’ll get back to that in a moment). Or on personal recipe books, which are really nothing more than in & out lists anyway.
Therefore, I will take the same advice I was given long ago when I started painting (»copy, copy, copy«) and, besides acquiring all the food that will hopefully be discussed here, I’ll be racking my brains over the things that are already piling up in this head of mine and are desperate to get out (for example, whether a glitter piece and glitter body oil are too much and why nowhere smells quite like SCHLECKER did back then).
Meanwhile, it will be mostly others doing the writing or sharing what they’ve found.
There is so much one can fleetingly fall in love with: a thought, a smell, a song or the singer that sings it, a path, a snack, a time of day or night or, best of all, an in-between-time … the list is probably endlessly long. In any case, I have not yet found an end to it, and what I call »falling in love« here is my favourite hobby. So to end this list would mean, at the very least, an end to my favourite pastime, and probably also the end to all artistic work for me, so I’m not going to risk it.
Crush-chains have the longest endurance, they prolong the intensity and lifespan of enthusiasm from HubbaBubba to Wrigley’s – and that can be crucial for the (non-)transformation of an obsession into an artwork – or at least into a temporary identity or phase that means fun. For example:
A specific house with a glass roof – blue hour – tea with milk
or
Herring with dill – cinnamon & tears – smoking (secretly) out the window at 10pm
or
White oleander – vanilla tea with pepper & chilli – calissons
or
Every song by Sofie Royer – office core – pistachios & sugar free cherry lemonade
or
1 new person (shelf life: as long as new) – very spicy soup – white socks
or
Rain day – A-HA – fanta cigarettes
tbc.
So, from now on, I will ask others for their thoughts and crush-chains on the things I love and still don’t know anywhere near enough about:
(falling in) love – painting – snacking – dressing – working – playing – dancing
Some of these topics will probably overlap, while others may be forgotten. But one thing I hope for from the collective wisdom of everyone here is: tricks!
I love tricks.
And I’ll probably need at least one trick right now.
Because I believe you cannot fall in love properly if you are still lovesick. This may sound a bit dramatic, but I am currently working through a loss that I can’t quite define yet. I haven’t lost anything specific – but rather a particular approach, or a sense of ease, or a certain way of seeing something: seeing art, seeing art as work, as an occupation, a game, a world of its own, as my profession. Either it’s just a temporary loss or I’m going to have to find a completely new approach.
Generally speaking, I don’t want to go back. I don’t believe in a better past, nor do I know of one. But hopefully, in every past there are little moments and niches where things were good, where something precious resides – and that is what I am looking for right now. Just as you might mentally retrace your steps when you have lost something, in the hope of finding out – in time! – where it could be. In my daily newspaper (Pinterest), I recently found some advice for young artists by Vivienne Westwood:
1 read
2 go to art galleries
3 learn the names of plants
and it reminded me of how it felt when art was still new to me: the summers spent in the Pinakotheken in Munich, when we used to go there religiously almost every day on our student tickets rather than to the pool or the lake. The time we spent drawing: in the museum, on the train there and back, on Mondays at home on the patio, drinking fizzy pop. The time I spent during my voluntary social year working on art school applications – at night, after work, on weekends. Time that somehow felt sacred – and stolen, as if taken between two jobs, even though it was »mine«. Maybe it’s easier to hold on to something when you feel you must defend or justify it. And when it’s still totally new. When it feels as though you are discovering it entirely for yourself – but with the knowledge of having allies.
Over the course of many years, during which I rarely stopped to consider what »art« is and mostly regarded it to be something I spend my stolen time doing, something I try to play and solve like a riddle as soon as I wake up or wait or listen to music or swim or run (except when I’m actually heartbroken) – over the course of those years, it was many things: a language without words (a relief), a way of life, possibly the least harmful religion in the world, the emperor’s new clothes, materialised thoughts, material for thought, research that has gotten out of hand, taking a walk in a dream.
But from the very beginning – before I even knew or heard of the word »art«, that it can be a career path and that you can study it – it was a place I could always go to.
Recently, someone told me that their own artistic work has always been a secret refuge from someone: the only place no one could follow them. And that they no longer need this place, now that the other person is no longer there. I thought about this for a very long time. I understood it, and yet, in a way, I didn’t.
One thing I have truly come to understand is that I have to protect this place, which is its own world to me. That protecting it is part of my profession and that I seem to have missed that. Maybe I let myself get distracted too much, maybe the path there has changed a bit, or even a lot, maybe I took something away or let something in that doesn’t belong there. I think it is a bit of everything, especially the last part.
Now I’m not really sure what to do, but then again, I am doing life for the first time. For now, I’ve jotted down a numbered list, since this calms me down and gives me the feeling that I know how life works:
1. copy, copy, copy
2. read what others write, hear what they say, see what they do
3. in the meantime, don’t do much else other than eat yoghurt in bed (this was recommended to me)
And as long as I don’t come up with anything that I can’t see or feel the point of, I don’t have to do anything either.
I can just sit here in bed and eat, wait, read, write, draw, and it’s just one of my days that I don’t have to steal in order to make mine. And at some point something will happen, or it won’t, but it probably will, and no one but me will know about it.
Which doesn’t make it any less true.
Elvos’s comfort scents are frankincense, animal fur, tomato plants in the rain.
Elvo Axt (b. 1993, Karaganda, Kazakhstan) is an artist based in Berlin. They studied under Rita McBride, Christopher Williams, and Gregor Schneider at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. Their practice works conceptually across image, text, and sculpture, exploring themes of hauntology, surveillance, and gender.
Works by Elvo Axt
Text & Concept by Thea Mantwill
Translation into English by Rebecca Grundmann
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