Klaus Merkel: hornbook

What is the "hornbook"?

The special feature of Klaus Merkel's volume "Hornbook" in the Kienbaum Artists' Books for 2014 is the order of the 165 pictures in this volume, which is in keeping with his working method and exhibition practice. The artist always forms rows, clusters or rhythms to identify the signs in his pictures as signals of form and colour without messages. He himself has said that "you only see what comes across via the subjective mood. The pictures have no 'narrative' and are not for processing 'abstractions'. You can either perceive them physically or you can reject them." This can also describe figurative signs, except that the image is no longer a narrative space, i.e. it has no mimetic function whatsoever. The artist uses a palette of a few colours, namely green, red, yellow, black and sometimes blue. Hans-Joachim Müller writes in his entry in the Kritisches Lexikon der Gegenwartskunst: "What is narrated, if there can be such a thing, is a non-linear, undirected 'narrative', narrated by the continuum of images that knows no direction, that stretches and extends in all directions, that reaches deep into the history and origin of the images and equally deep into the broad space of their possibilities and horizons." The fact that chance is also mobilised here as a source of images is perhaps illustrated by the artist's choice of title for this book. Klaus Merkel has installed a dictionary on his computer that spits out a word at random every day. The hornbooks were alphabet tablets carved in horn, which were once used in England and the USA to teach children to read.