The aim of this one-time experiment called „Hypostasicisms“ was to emerge into the so called Neoplatonic metaphysics, to very practically concentrate on the possible applications of their most idealistic discourses as on the understanding of the forces of the universes with their distinct spheres, in between spiritual movements, gravitations and attractions, the separations of times and the different worlds in general and in the particulars on observing the sphere of the here and now during the moments of creation in the production of the works exhibited. Zooming down these Neoplatonic inspirations and models, down to the everyday practice of the artists temporal studio situation in the extensive dimensions of the Viennese Ringstraßen areas building. Possibly or actually finding a new philosophical Sachlichkeit in the most metaphysical methods.

The production was also an attempt to re-appropriate earlier production procedures and repeat their exercises, by hopefully rectifying them. Like the performing space of the lamps, building a temple model, the postertext for the angel, mimicking and retouching childhood art historical objects, such as Doré's Jacob's encounter with the Angel, the internal and the sea monster, or the unexplainable attraction to useless poster folding. Drawings of the yellow light, burning soft metal, and coating it on found trash like bonbon chocolate box trays. The dark power of magnetism, gazing at the Porphyrian tree of life, collecting stones without knowing their names, confusing the canvases with a ballpoint pen, mimicking writing, obsessive paper folding, etc. But now, all these exercises, often kept unexhibited before, connect and suddenly make sense by observing Plotinus and his paradoxical drifts of thoughts. Like the phenomenon of feeling to be observed during moments of Hypostasis while connecting the separated materials.

Creating a limited time of exercise, often very basic and exclusively chemical. For instance, mostly in the burning and extinguishing of fire of metals like tin or lead, or the sulfuring connecting them to the canvases or the found objects from trash just through fire exclusively without glue, or by magnetizing the objects and connecting them only with particular stones. But always in dedication to the advice of Plotinus. The phenomenon, for instance, that while elaborating the most simple material experiments, in the very present moments, the vast thoughts might descend into them through inspiration, as if performing the universe's central force of Hypostasis, as Plotinus teaches to experience the descent of the inspirations into the sphere of simple material movements into the Hypostasis container.

Plotinus' pleasure surely lies in the attraction to the not-so-clear, the attraction of not really understanding, as he praises regarding another philosopher, "but he seems to teach by metaphor, not concerning himself about making a doctrine clear to us, probably with the idea that it is for us to seek within ourselves as he sought for himself and found."

It is better to choose something that cannot clearly be understood, and that "it is weariness to keep toiling at the same things and always beginning again," invoking the great spirit of not understanding, at least during the time while approaching or even entering some new field.

The attraction of the things and the thoughts that are not so easy to discover, as we find inconsistencies, but still those works appear to be more attractive than the very consistent ones, getting much more light from them. Maybe such pleasures and attraction derive from a deep sense of the pleasures of the liberation from the intellectual imprisonments, for instance, of the consistent and the clarified.

In permanent respect to the advice of Plotinian philosophy (Plotinos, c. 204 - 270 CE), although reappropriating them in very freewheeling modes of interpretation and pseudo-Plotinic text, that in order to emanate a thought into the material sphere, one might better use materials not only without such thought but by actually negating it. Bringing oneself into a situation of self-refusal to become an instrument of such thought and having faith that such thought will emanate by its own power.

Saying how to become hypostatic as a cultural producer who is willing to withdraw from all prefigured assumptions, not out of nihilistic desire (although including it at times) but to emanate thought in general, or in metaphysical ways even, and by the way revealing the reason why sometimes using stupid things can be higher and intellectually more demanding than any translating production attitudes.

Interestingly, the greatest or, as many say, the most influential philosopher, Plotinus himself, did not care to be understood.

Text by Josef Strau

Download Text

Institutional Exhibitions

Josef Strau
Tears and New Tears

Introduction

Like before all the exhibitions one day I get to the kitchen desk that recently in fact turned into a black marble kitchen island and assumed I could explain with hard felt simple words why I would do what I do, why I did such and such and even what went through me while working on it. Usually it means getting lost pretty fast. I must have been deluded by a mean spirit very early in my artist life, that production should be self-reflective, that it should include documentation of some production related self-observing recording and even should put a critical eye on the artists biographical events or on the existential usually pretty bad conditions, coming along with the unavoidable self-sacrifices, the sufferings so to say, the idiosyncrasies of erratic confusions, that lead to the only good works. Not even the knowledge of such procedure’s eternally repeated failure or the influence of well-meaning people can exorcise the miseries of such early implanted possessive acts.

So I certainly wished I could zoom away from myself as if looking from far away at that entity and would join others considering what they obviously make of it. That would not be too kind to myself in fact. Remembering the moments of origin of such artistic deviation catching the first times of intrusion, would mean to a healthy mind removing them. Wouldn’t such procedure of self embetterment mean learning that even good influence such as having seen great movies and books read while the brain still developed years before artistic possessions of my own mounted uncontrolled, would maybe in my case have been of no good influence at all. So what is it that some like me as they look back on their own duration only look back on negative transformations of good influence events that after devoured into our all consuming subjectivity only turned through unproductive fragmentation into obscure misunderstandings and even complete deterioration?

Thinking of JJ Rousseau’s second autobiography, or second confessions he wrote, a great confusing and violent book on himself. He wrote it with the intention to produce more evidence to who he believed were his prosecutors and accusers. He somehow ceased being autobiographical, stopped laying out his life like in his first confessions how he remembered it well meaning and rational but turned it into mapping it with all his knowledge to give a picture of his roots of evil and wrongdoings, turning in a somehow cinematographic shift his protagonist I into his own antagonist I. He felt the self-imposed prosecutors and judges of his 18th century Paris social environment would accuse him but never really tell what was the accusation, what his wrongdoings. So he sat down to help them and elaborated on an endless long and quite unreadable self-accusation. After being written he wanted to submit it like a prosecutor’s supporting evidence and deposited the first final copy right at the place he believed was the center the origin place of all accusations the center of cultural power of his time. He believed it must be the altar and center of Notre Dame cathedral. And he achieved the difficult act and squeezed himself through the metal fence barriers before the Sunday mass and put the collected self-accusation next to the mass book to be read the very first time by the highest cardinal himself to the congregating audience of highest and most powerful influencers. I cannot verify it but I believe nothing happened and it was just entirely ignored.

I myself today would not even know what the altar of cultural power would be, it would be a bit frivolous to say it here at the kitchen island beginning this hopefully finally sincerely executed writing act, but at least in our fragmented situation with my own interior even much more fragmented intentionality, I for sure will do it very differently from the to me greatest genius of great and adored 18th century France and probably end up not so completely ignored rather very frivolously received in the 8th floor gallery space, which I say not at all with humorous intention but with great gratitude and a feeling of unending unworthiness, feeling like a straying so foreign entity that found some compassionate context and grateful for a place to be fed and to sleep finally in the brightest peoples great and almost sacred city of refuge. Because you seem to always tolerate it when I am giving something away and deposit what can only appear most silly and almost ignorant in the intense struggles we are all facing in the contemporary condition, written in such tedious simple and always even mistaken language of ignorant un-contemporaneity. It is not the result as you will believe of a blasé-ish unproductive artist’s attitude but of his unfiltered disabilities.

Josef Strau
The New World, Application For Turtle Island, 2014

I wish I could say that my whole project is dedicated to the Americas, but I for sure don’t know what I am talking about, so I better not. I wish my whole project could be dedicated to the Holy Mother of Guadalupe. But I might have become too shabby a soul to proclaim my name and my word so very next to her, and as well, in connection to the, at least to me, such unbelievably intense and rich history of the Americas. She is the Holy Mother of all Americas and one can feel particularly today her possible influence everywhere. And maybe it is her influence, with maybe the influence of other good spirits as well, which has made my every day in the Americas almost miraculously wonderful, in which case I may then for sure at least say that my whole project is dedicated to these daily experiences in the countries of the Americas, experiences which stand in such opposition to those in Europe all the years before. It is dedicated to the compassion, the understanding, the intelligence of communication, and so remarkably, to the everyday good will of trying to make things for one another as good and easy as possible.

For many months I tried to work on these obviously simple expressions of the happiness in everyday life that I first finally found in my life in these countries on the great continent of the Americas. No big thing, I thought. I just had to explain it, what I was seeing and perceiving, by taking photos, by drawing and by writing things down in the low key diary form. I would say to myself privately, in regards my efforts, “For this project, I will try to formulate through art and writing, simple expressions of gratitude to all these people in the States and in Mexico.” In order to keep for myself the freedom of expression and preserve even the privilege and risk of being naïve, I first tried to avoid staring at other cultural products that express similar ideas. But then long months followed of sometimes ailing unproductive reflection, but at the same time filled with the huge pleasures of reading the most amazing books and seeing movies about the early encounters of Europeans with Americans, let’s call them the first Americans, although I believe no one is first. Anyways, I got really obsessed with transferring in my imagination my own experience to these fantastic narratives of first encounters, of Europeans arriving broken and sick and poor from the long journey and finding the amazing helpfulness of the Americans who took care of them and showed them a world much better than their own. I looked at these long ago adventure stories as if my own contemporary experience was reflected in them, as if they were a mirror of my present. Days and nights slipped by. Weeks became months. Memories of normal life dimmed.

THE NEW WORLD

This project is about experience and the attempt to work completely without judgment, either good or bad. Please, promise, to remember that. It is instead about trying to be observant.

One reason for wanting to work this way, apart from so many other more important reasons, which would be inexplicable here, might have been the desire to adduct new grounds of freedom. For instance the freedom to incorporate clichés, well established ones, including the most known facts and time-worn expressions. Of course there is a higher valued freedom in the field of art expression, which is to gain unknown ground, but sometimes the engagement for freedom has to go the other way too. And freedom is somehow part of the overall theme of this project, or should be, as it deals with such clichéd problems as encountering the Americas as a European and includes or delivers historically conveyed facts and information of other such encounters as well. At least in my belief, the experience of vast individual freedom is still strongly at work in the dealings of everyday life, wherever you go, in the place that once might have been called Turtle Island.

Like many others I was always extremely seduced by books about the early encounters of Europeans with Native Americans, from Columbus all through to the period of the civil war. There are too many of them though that are really very hard to read, for all the atrocities, the destruction, the genocide. It is unbearable knowing that the particular violent event you are reading about, was not a unique instance, that happened just that one time, but one that happened innumerable times during this period. But there are as well books, texts and reports, letters, etc. that are the most exciting literature and often describe the sweetest and most human events imaginable on this earth. For instance when European explorers, Jesuits, traders and others found themselves completely lost in the immense country, or when they arrived from the long crossing of the Atlantic Ocean completely exhausted, broken and half dead, from the travel, but much more so from the long hard years in Europe, and suddenly out of nowhere some of the Americans would immediately turn up and find these sick, broken individuals lying on the ground just awaiting death, and even if they’d already had some bad enemy experience with other Europeans, even then, they would care for them, feed them and give them their famous great medical care, all for free, until some weeks later the Europeans were fully recovered. The first encounter literature is so full of these reports. This, for Europeans, most strange compassion and sweet care of the Americans always touched me intensely and now as I for many months obsessively dove into this kind of literature I wondered what kind of subconscious pattern exists in my personality that I am so attracted by these texts. Suddenly I realized that, believe it or not, it is simply because almost exactly the same thing happened to me in my own life. I arrived once completely broken, sick and exhausted in America and had the unexpected merciful luck of meeting people who most compassionately and most unselfishly started taking care of me and achieving real miracles with me.

Surely for all these reasons the whole project will appear to a few as, hopefully, most sublime, to others as a most laughable, bad mixture of a visual arts adaptation of an adventure fantasy novel, or maybe, in the best case, as a most effable gesture of gratitude. And it really is an adaptation of some moments taken from adventure accounts, true ones, that somehow mirrored my own contemporary experiences of encounters in the, or definitely my personally, “New World”.

Anyways, the better question to ask myself before going public, is why does it mean so much to me to capture this outside or alien perspective, while at the same time there is nothing I desire more than morphing myself into a true Turtle Island citizen (American of many American nations) myself? Probably it is because I was always a bit of an alien too, wherever I was, wherever I will go, and therefore it would be best that I live there myself. Therefore one part of this project “The New World,” is one of the two publications, subtitled “The Application,” which is a kind of visa or citizenship application for turtle islands and hopefully for its native nations, a kind of story I would prefer sending when I do such an application in comparison to the real visa application.

And probably there should be an undercurrent running through this project, that it is all a kind of collection resulting from a life without much stability, with the hope of one day getting somewhere and finding a home. Therefore I ask for the understanding and the acceptance of the people who see these works and who already might have found and still find each expression of nomadism unpleasant.

Altogether after the long period of obsessive studies I believed I should write a kind of treasure island adventure novel for this project. A story including all my descriptions of entering the imaginative spheres of earthly paradises, the promised society of good people.

Whenever one makes the fundamental experience of entering a very wonderful and very greatly esteemed country, one can observe automatically in oneself the appearance of feelings of gratitude. That is one thing. But coming to such a country and then even experiencing the interest and the support, help and compassion of the people living there, this kind feeling should somehow be defined and expressed in this first personal, American institutional, one-person exhibition.