brief. 1998-2008

Work-in-progress 1998-2008

Art and life are not seperable in brief. They converge in a narration which syntax exclusively recurs on the written or painted sign. On yet another level these signs are accompanied by the fixed signs of hotel logos, the defined postal signs of the envelope showing time and date the the letter has been dispatched. These signs inform about the time of the writing and meeting. And so about the place were the artists has traveled himself. The visualization of the dates are differently according to the country in which the artist was staying and thus correspond to the places in which the letters as works originate. The date itself denotes the present, calls to mind the past and also implies the future and the history that is bound up with it.

Brief. is a nonlinear diary, an administrative box that blurs document and moment, introducing knots of the sudden into the autobiographical flow. Through the iterability of letterhead, letter and the day are equated, and thus represent the materialization of time. What unfolds here, is a material field of desire, embedded in urban contextualities. The letter becomes sign of the presence and directness in the threefold momentum of seeing, meeting and parting. The interaction that makes the letter possible turns into a narrative potential that outlines the space between the autonomous and the controlled intersubjectivity.

In aiming at special places in the context of the city, the letters also point to today and to the real everyday life of the viewer, to his own temporality in relation to the indicated site. The dates of the letters, in correspondence with the city, signify indexical markers in a series of ‘here and now’ that were then.