see my catalog from the Magazine. The complete text is there.
(eventually reasons why the work has not been realised)
Political
Previous Publications (?)
Catalog from where art Magazine 1996
Exisiting Documents:
to be requested from Nordhorn
Other Remarks:
I feel it is one of the best works I've concieved and was a great disappointment to have it cancelled.
Great Idea for a book!
Allen Rupperssberg
What It Is:
Art and Ourselves is the title I have given to a three-part, at times, complex, absurd and darkly humorous work to be explained in this proposal. It is a work about boundaries and is addressed to both the public and private lives of the people of Nordhorn. The three interrelated parts of the work are: 745 small engraved metal plaques measuring about 2 x 3 inches each; a large statue of stone or bronze; a collection of photographs to be published as a limited edition book. Although these three separate components form one work, they can be considered as individual proposals.
Art and Ourselves is a proposal for a rather improbable form of cultural exchange to take place within the city of Nordhorn. This exchange occurs between the cemetery and the theater, and is meant to blend and fuse the oppositions found there. In this exchange between the natural and the artificial, fact and imagination, I propose to memorialize selected aspects of Nordhorn's collective memory. The synthesis of the cemetery and the theater is like an epitaph, it dissolves the distinction between the living and the lifeless. In some cultures, a theatrical performance is used to heighten the magnificence of a funeral ceremony. For example, there was a custom in Lower Brittany that had a rhymer, a poet and improviser, adapt ancient prayers in verse to the character and position of the departed. The parallel of the voice from the grave and the speaker from the stage both addressing a passing audience, is only one of many in this work.
How It Works:
A common event in the recent history of small towns and villages has been the removal of histoncal statues and monuments from their traditional locations where they have functioned for decades as touchstones of local history A common destination has been the cemetery. The cultural history and stories of a village are being displaced by a newer culture which doesn't recognize them as either art or history.
What words are left?
What images are left?
Who was their author?
What is the text of a memorial?
This work tries to answer these questions by bringing back from the cemetery the stones of the statues and placing them in the theater, and in turn, taking an image from the theater to replace the story in the cemetery. The frozen image from the theater is paradoxical also renewed by its representation in stone.
Step One: The Plaques
The last or best seat in the house?
Theoretically the theater seating diagram which I have reproduced on acetate film can be laid over the cemetery blueprint. Numbers are able to be matched up between the seats and the plots. The names of those buried in these graves can now be given a seat in the theater. After this is completed, a small plaque is placed on the back of each seat engraved with exactly the same information found on the corresponding headstone (see illustration). Since I do not know at this time all the details of how the cemetery is designed some of the points covered in this explanation are not exact. If the proposal is accepted the finer details will be researched and completed.
The language of the cemetery, the poetry of names and dates, birth, marriage and death is given to the theater to become a part of the text between seat and stage. Real people live and capture our sympathy. Ordinary people are made unique by the lives they are forced to lead. These aspects of the real world are brought into the theater, a world where nothing else is supposed to matter. The audience member will read the names and dates of the plaques and see characters on stage all in one motion. The characters become more individual and the individuals become more of characters in these newly invented roles. They are all nearer to the audience, combined in memory, images and present thoughts.
Step Two: The Statues
A play is chosen from the list of works which have been produced on the stage in Nordhorn, 522 in all, I believe. An image or character is then taken from the play to be rendered in stone or bronze and placed in the cemetery. The question that occurs in the choosing of character or image is the same one that would traditionally be used to determine which person or event was to be immortalized: Did this person, character, image or event have an effect on the life of his or her time? In this way, a statue of a character chosen for the effect he has had on the lives of those buried around him, can then "live" in a similar manner as they do in this "Theater of Stone". This character also lives in the player who has played him, even as the actor himself is forgotten by the audience. Could it be possible to choose a character that was played by an individual buried in this cemetery and place this representation in stone by his side? Ideally this would be a figurative work done in the historical style of the period in which the play was written.
Step Three: The Book
The book is conceived as a collection of found photographs. The publicity stills and random photographs that are usually taken from the production of local plays are paired with documentary photographs taken from the life of the city itself. The artificial is paired with the real as it appears in the collected photographic history of Nordhorn. The sources of the anonymous photos can be found in libraries, town halls and newspaper and police department archives. If the theater doesn't have an archive of its own with images of local actors and productions, the inventories of local photographers in the Nordhorn area can be used. Other stills could be found of these same productions, but they cease to be primary material in quite the same way and would have to be used accordingly. I have included images from my own collection as example. I see this book in one of two forms, both limited editions. One possibly a luxurious hand-bound edition with an essay or text by a critic or historian; the other a simple magazine type format, laid out more casually and possibly including ads from village stores etc., designed to appear as something to be given away in a supermarket.
The Book, The Statue and The Plaques
Can be separated from each other and thought of as single proposals. They are now interrelated but with a different emphasis in each case could become independent ideas
What It Means and How It Began
The assembly and juxtaposition of images with no seeming connection, natural or moral, but which are yoked together by means of coincidence is my preferred method of working and the origin of this proposal. On my initial visit to Nordhorn, after touring the country and city locations with the assembled group we met at the gallery/theater building for some further discussions. The building itself held no interest for me either architecturally or in its location but I needed a break and always like to see theaters so I entered and took a seat in the dark. My feelings of comfort and familiarity in this meeting place common to all towns and cities began to focus my attention on its own particular history. This is, of course, the traditional one of art and culture from the urban center entering into and influencing the local culture around it. In the theater lobby, I happened to find the seating diagram and since I had just returned from a look at the cemetery, also a favorite place to visit, I noticed that this plan bore a striking resemblance to the Map at the cemetery showing the numbers and locations for the Identifications of the dead and buried. The idea and the image eventually merged and I began to wonder what would occur if the one were laid over the other.
- Plot numbers and seat numbers
- Local history and world history
- Facts and fictions, fictions and facts
- The backs of the seats look like headstones
- Headstones look like statues
- William Faulkner's goal for literature was "to make men stand on their hind legs and cast a shadow."
- Both headstones and statues cast shadows and tell stories
- An alphabetical listing of the 522 plays presented in the theater gives every story a number
- Numbers are counted, time passes, and narratives are created
- This is the language of the theater and the poetry of names and dates
- A concern with fate and a chance to escape it
- Art and the grave are both storehouses of memory
Images to Consider:
Rows and rows of seats looking like rows and rows of headstones, but with a different -audience- in them.
A circle of oppositions and equivalents.
Sitting in the cemetery one large statue of one image from one play taken from the local theater.
The recreations of life and death on stage reinforced by the plaques on the seats which hold the audience who is seeing them both "A play is written with more than one pair of hands."
There are two identifications for the audience in this work. One is real, an act of intense attention towards someone dead, the other is fictive, a staged event. This certainty of names and dates mixed with the uncertainty of art creates the kind of bridge between the mystical/artificial and the realistic that I seek in this work. Presently, I am not concerned with the singular memorial of heroic feelings connected to war and destruction and experienced by an object left behind somewhere in time. My concern lies with the culture of monuments themselves and how they should be experienced in a more contemporary sense The emotion and feeling which connects art and memory to common histories and is used as a source of identification for all and concerning all is more to the point.
A reconciliation of outer and inner. the Individual and the representative a general sympathy combined with particular thoughts and images
A community of the living and the dead unified by the imagination. the currency of art and the theater.
Plays. characters. names. dates. individuals, anecdotes memories a citizen of Nordhorn recognizes; the audience will recognize another person someone of the stuff of which we ourselves are made.
see my catalog from the Magazine. The complete text is there.
(eventually reasons why the work has not been realised)
Political
Previous Publications (?)
Catalog from where art Magazine 1996
Exisiting Documents:
to be requested from Nordhorn
Other Remarks:
I feel it is one of the best works I've concieved and was a great disappointment to have it cancelled.
Great Idea for a book!
Allen Rupperssberg
What It Is:
Art and Ourselves is the title I have given to a three-part, at times, complex, absurd and darkly humorous work to be explained in this proposal. It is a work about boundaries and is addressed to both the public and private lives of the people of Nordhorn. The three interrelated parts of the work are: 745 small engraved metal plaques measuring about 2 x 3 inches each; a large statue of stone or bronze; a collection of photographs to be published as a limited edition book. Although these three separate components form one work, they can be considered as individual proposals.
Art and Ourselves is a proposal for a rather improbable form of cultural exchange to take place within the city of Nordhorn. This exchange occurs between the cemetery and the theater, and is meant to blend and fuse the oppositions found there. In this exchange between the natural and the artificial, fact and imagination, I propose to memorialize selected aspects of Nordhorn's collective memory. The synthesis of the cemetery and the theater is like an epitaph, it dissolves the distinction between the living and the lifeless. In some cultures, a theatrical performance is used to heighten the magnificence of a funeral ceremony. For example, there was a custom in Lower Brittany that had a rhymer, a poet and improviser, adapt ancient prayers in verse to the character and position of the departed. The parallel of the voice from the grave and the speaker from the stage both addressing a passing audience, is only one of many in this work.
How It Works:
A common event in the recent history of small towns and villages has been the removal of histoncal statues and monuments from their traditional locations where they have functioned for decades as touchstones of local history A common destination has been the cemetery. The cultural history and stories of a village are being displaced by a newer culture which doesn't recognize them as either art or history.
What words are left?
What images are left?
Who was their author?
What is the text of a memorial?
This work tries to answer these questions by bringing back from the cemetery the stones of the statues and placing them in the theater, and in turn, taking an image from the theater to replace the story in the cemetery. The frozen image from the theater is paradoxical also renewed by its representation in stone.
Step One: The Plaques
The last or best seat in the house?
Theoretically the theater seating diagram which I have reproduced on acetate film can be laid over the cemetery blueprint. Numbers are able to be matched up between the seats and the plots. The names of those buried in these graves can now be given a seat in the theater. After this is completed, a small plaque is placed on the back of each seat engraved with exactly the same information found on the corresponding headstone (see illustration). Since I do not know at this time all the details of how the cemetery is designed some of the points covered in this explanation are not exact. If the proposal is accepted the finer details will be researched and completed.
The language of the cemetery, the poetry of names and dates, birth, marriage and death is given to the theater to become a part of the text between seat and stage. Real people live and capture our sympathy. Ordinary people are made unique by the lives they are forced to lead. These aspects of the real world are brought into the theater, a world where nothing else is supposed to matter. The audience member will read the names and dates of the plaques and see characters on stage all in one motion. The characters become more individual and the individuals become more of characters in these newly invented roles. They are all nearer to the audience, combined in memory, images and present thoughts.
Step Two: The Statues
A play is chosen from the list of works which have been produced on the stage in Nordhorn, 522 in all, I believe. An image or character is then taken from the play to be rendered in stone or bronze and placed in the cemetery. The question that occurs in the choosing of character or image is the same one that would traditionally be used to determine which person or event was to be immortalized: Did this person, character, image or event have an effect on the life of his or her time? In this way, a statue of a character chosen for the effect he has had on the lives of those buried around him, can then "live" in a similar manner as they do in this "Theater of Stone". This character also lives in the player who has played him, even as the actor himself is forgotten by the audience. Could it be possible to choose a character that was played by an individual buried in this cemetery and place this representation in stone by his side? Ideally this would be a figurative work done in the historical style of the period in which the play was written.
Step Three: The Book
The book is conceived as a collection of found photographs. The publicity stills and random photographs that are usually taken from the production of local plays are paired with documentary photographs taken from the life of the city itself. The artificial is paired with the real as it appears in the collected photographic history of Nordhorn. The sources of the anonymous photos can be found in libraries, town halls and newspaper and police department archives. If the theater doesn't have an archive of its own with images of local actors and productions, the inventories of local photographers in the Nordhorn area can be used. Other stills could be found of these same productions, but they cease to be primary material in quite the same way and would have to be used accordingly. I have included images from my own collection as example. I see this book in one of two forms, both limited editions. One possibly a luxurious hand-bound edition with an essay or text by a critic or historian; the other a simple magazine type format, laid out more casually and possibly including ads from village stores etc., designed to appear as something to be given away in a supermarket.
The Book, The Statue and The Plaques
Can be separated from each other and thought of as single proposals. They are now interrelated but with a different emphasis in each case could become independent ideas
What It Means and How It Began
The assembly and juxtaposition of images with no seeming connection, natural or moral, but which are yoked together by means of coincidence is my preferred method of working and the origin of this proposal. On my initial visit to Nordhorn, after touring the country and city locations with the assembled group we met at the gallery/theater building for some further discussions. The building itself held no interest for me either architecturally or in its location but I needed a break and always like to see theaters so I entered and took a seat in the dark. My feelings of comfort and familiarity in this meeting place common to all towns and cities began to focus my attention on its own particular history. This is, of course, the traditional one of art and culture from the urban center entering into and influencing the local culture around it. In the theater lobby, I happened to find the seating diagram and since I had just returned from a look at the cemetery, also a favorite place to visit, I noticed that this plan bore a striking resemblance to the Map at the cemetery showing the numbers and locations for the Identifications of the dead and buried. The idea and the image eventually merged and I began to wonder what would occur if the one were laid over the other.
- Plot numbers and seat numbers
- Local history and world history
- Facts and fictions, fictions and facts
- The backs of the seats look like headstones
- Headstones look like statues
- William Faulkner's goal for literature was "to make men stand on their hind legs and cast a shadow."
- Both headstones and statues cast shadows and tell stories
- An alphabetical listing of the 522 plays presented in the theater gives every story a number
- Numbers are counted, time passes, and narratives are created
- This is the language of the theater and the poetry of names and dates
- A concern with fate and a chance to escape it
- Art and the grave are both storehouses of memory
Images to Consider:
Rows and rows of seats looking like rows and rows of headstones, but with a different -audience- in them.
A circle of oppositions and equivalents.
Sitting in the cemetery one large statue of one image from one play taken from the local theater.
The recreations of life and death on stage reinforced by the plaques on the seats which hold the audience who is seeing them both "A play is written with more than one pair of hands."
There are two identifications for the audience in this work. One is real, an act of intense attention towards someone dead, the other is fictive, a staged event. This certainty of names and dates mixed with the uncertainty of art creates the kind of bridge between the mystical/artificial and the realistic that I seek in this work. Presently, I am not concerned with the singular memorial of heroic feelings connected to war and destruction and experienced by an object left behind somewhere in time. My concern lies with the culture of monuments themselves and how they should be experienced in a more contemporary sense The emotion and feeling which connects art and memory to common histories and is used as a source of identification for all and concerning all is more to the point.
A reconciliation of outer and inner. the Individual and the representative a general sympathy combined with particular thoughts and images
A community of the living and the dead unified by the imagination. the currency of art and the theater.
Plays. characters. names. dates. individuals, anecdotes memories a citizen of Nordhorn recognizes; the audience will recognize another person someone of the stuff of which we ourselves are made.