The Constitution of Liberty 

 

 

The Project „The Constitution of Liberty“ consists of a web-video and prints, which document an installation in Detroit that the artist built in spring 2011 on the spot.

 

The title is taken from a book of the Austrian economist and social philosopher Friedrich A. von Hayek, which he wrote in 1960 about the economic liberalism in general and more specifically about the relation between society and economy.

 

The book is allegorized with the view of the abandoned, empty Central Station in Detroit/US. Against the background of the collapse of the car industry, the building has become an icon and a symbol for the city’s deterioration. 

 

Referencing Duchamp, who in 1918 attached a book on geometry to his balcony, and according to the current situation, the artist rises the question, how the book „The Constitution of Liberty“ and its theories relate to the conditions in Detroit or rather how they prove to be true.

 

"It was a geometry book, which she had to hang by strings on the balcony of her  apartment in the rue Condamine; the wind had to go through the book, choose its own problems, turn and tear out the pages. Suzanne did a small painting of it, 'Marcel's Unhappy Readymade.' That's all that's left, since the wind tore it up. It amused me to bring the idea of happy and unhappy into readymades, and then the rain, the wind, the pages flying, it was an amusing idea…" (M. Duchamp)

 

The HD video shows 24 days, each shows 24 hours and every hour is shown in a sequence of 15 seconds. The video shows the exact same time of the day on each of the 24 days.

 

 

 

 

Painting Blocks

since 2000

 

 

A series of Painting Blocks/ Stripes and Dripes, produced in 2000, is adjusted to a 12m wall. Half digital, half analogue, the artist creates abstract areas of color, which take rhythmic codes out of paintings and describe a time sequence, which shows the same pattern as sound structures, similar to frequencies and wave illustrations in the electronic music or rather music software and physics.

Paintings using automatic processes with samples, structures and rhytmic to isolate them again by analogue and manuel processes out of their mechanical and post-mechanical context. Their radical reduction, condensed at the same time, abstract and puristic, is formulated for an audience after the 20th century and is again to be debated.