Thomas FeuersteinTrickster

TRICKSTER “has little to do with a classical concept of sculpture.” When Thomas Feuerstein (b. 1968) is asked about his exuberant oeuvre, which deals with biology, literature, art history, philosophy, medicine, cybernetics, religion, sex, economics and the mass media as well as with the effects of biopolitics on the individual and the dream of eternal youth, he likes to reply in writing with a literary statement. And the audacious enumeration of the constituents of his work then resembles all the more a complex literary theory of real life, because he responds with an adventurous narrative of his own, such as his story “Plus ultra. Das Herkulesprojekt.” Here Thomas Feuerstein describes the boxer, magazine publisher, Dadaist and dandy Arthur Cravan, thus turning his attention to a figure of the 1920s who in more recent times, some sixty years later, has haunted the telling of pop history as an idol and, as it were, feeds the myth of the anarchic anti-hero. This literary image, however, stands only as a parable for Feuerstein’s model of machines and bioreactors with which art is produced in an entirely classical sense: with, for instance, an automatism of writing borrowed from the famous „Écriture automatique“ of the Surrealists, though in his case it is based on the notation of price fluctuations. Alongside this, organic matter, enzymes and catalysts, molecular sculptures and hence a processuality are depicted that lead to manifestos of a kind known only from the history of art. His concept of form, the artist says, “has little to do with a classical concept of sculpture. The material, together with its molecular structures and the processes and transformations bound up with them, plays a specific role. I do not see form as the opposite of matter, but as a structure that can assume different shapes and figurations.”

Exhibition:
Kunsthalle Krems, 18/11/2012 – 10/2/2013