Artist Statement - Peter Feiler
As early as 1918, Oswald Spengler recommended in his book “The Decline
of the West” that artists lay down their brushes and rather become engineers
instead. Even then, in his opinion, the merits of our
high-culture-frozen-into-civilisation were not to be found in the field of
visual arts. The speechlessness of art in the face of industrialisation’s
“achievements” reminds me of Adorno’s demand to cease writing poetry after
Auschwitz.
Today, we face a functional cultural industry whose substance is widely
corrupted by greed of gain. The immense budgets film and music productions
and their interconnection with merchandising (e.g. computer games, coffee
cups) and media presence can hardly be opposed by the freelance artist
working on their own.
I suggest that the advertising industry creates aesthetic and cultural
realities (ideas of man) far more effectively than any artistic action
might. In the future, I see the culture industry become even more
fundamentally superior to the museum relics–through creative reinvention of
man itself for the sake of excess value via e.g. genetic engineering or the
coupling of neuronal networks with virtual reality. It could be argued that,
in contrast to profane products, art was free of function. Yet this I call
idealistic window-dressing: you can save taxes with art, gain prestige,
prove good taste or succumb to the fetish of possession that is collecting.
Buying things free of function might even be interpreted as the vain
appearance of cynical decadence. The museum visit is at times equal to a
purchased memory of better, or optionally worse, times.
But do we want the absolute market? Do we want it, if necessary more radical
and unconditional that we may even begin to imagine?
What drives me is horror, fear and helplessness.
In socialism, there were state-owned enterprises; today it seems to me as
though there were more and more states-as-enterprises in which politicians
function as democratic alibis and that attack themselves to wage wars for
energy or have lives patented to gain power over biologic resources with the
genetic blueprint. Terror is used as an excuse to undermine democracy and to
install repressive instruments of control and surveillance. From the context
of trade unions I see new superpowers forming, entirely undemocratic and
oblivious to the voice of the people. Laws are written by lobbies or
chambers that represent corporate interest. The race for globalisation is
lead by neoliberalism. But capitalism does not require democracy.
To what magic moments of morality modern art can arise in our brave new
world was laid out for me by a certain Boris Groys’ art theoretical bouquet
of crap. The author seriously compares the excesses of Abu Ghraib to an art
performance. He takes the west’s freedom-fought postheroic lack of dignity
displayed there as a potent means in the symbolic trade off with the
terrorists’ martyrdom.
The “easy-going” postheroic dealing with crisis is a smug stylisation to me,
and a declaration of bankruptcy of an allegedly complex world where common
sense faces deprivation of its natural right to make up its own mind. On,
for example, the fact that the system of interest resembles slavery, or that
three giant steel structures cannot be dismantled expertly by two planes.
The self-humiliation and debasement in modern art as Groys so positively
describes, much rather appear to me–not excluding myself–like psychological
compensation for our own powerlessness. On one of the next images, a torture
rack shall be reserved for him.
Peter Feiler – The Dark Side
Laconic and motionless, a beer can in his hand, an open book on his
knees, a man sits on the bench of a train that passes industrial buildings
spitting out flesh coloured smoke. In his open shirt, his intestines lie
idle; his head and face are merely bones and tendons, with mat, staring
eyes, as if the skin, protection against the outer world, had been ripped
off only to reveal that no mystery lies behind the outer shell, no spark, no
passion, just dull loneliness resolving into the void beyond recognition of
his surroundings: a second, female figure, naked to less than mere skin,
seems to disintegrate in agony, arms and legs distorted in pain while naked
children dance like gnomes through the scenery…
A scene directly looking into the every-day-monotony, the joyless banalities
of the forever same anybodies in inventory surroundings, literally turning
their insides out: A view into the protagonists’ devastated emotional world
lying somewhere in the vast range from complete resignation, the quest for
meaning and an almost existentialist world-weariness (Tramway scene, 2002).
The inclination to experiment and the many-layeredness revealed in the works
of Peter Feiler (*1981, Halle an der Saale, Germany) open his works to many
interpretations. Yet the plethora of miscellaneous subjects ranging from the
orgiastic over whole world systems on to a casual criticism of today’s
highly intellectualized egomania (the Paradox of an individualized society,
2001) which he raises like a whirlwind in his pictures all centre around the
main theme of the abysses in human existence.
With the unusual medium of coloured pencil’s pastellish tan, Peter Feiler
qualifies his grotesqueries and covers the precarious subjects of “what men
can do to one another “ (Peter Feiler) with a childishly innocent patina
standing in harsh contrast to his protagonists’ salacious, almost
pornographic poses:
In the “Final Examination” (2002), a latent aggressiveness in mimics and
gestures hides beneath the sweet shades of green and blue and the fragile
execution of the poisonous Dieffenbacchia’s overlarge leaves. Under the
spell of those rich details, the spectator is lulled into a false sense of
security only to then be hit by the full extent of the brutality of a human
soul’s very darkest side: Abuse, rape, torture, adultery, merely alluded at
times, at times pointed out in blatant explicitness. “I am not a
missionary”, Feiler says about himself, “I don’t want to change people. But
maybe I can make them discover something good with their repulsion of my
provocations.”
„Sex is very ambivalently connotated”, says Feiler, and accordingly his
orgiastic ink drawings mainly focus on the negative, the manic aspects of
sexual intercourse reduced to an industrial product, teeming of naked bodies
and open wounds, of repelling and yet fascinating details, of greed,
lasciviousness, self infliction and the psychotic lust in pain and
destruction – a portrait of the soul’s shadows (Feast, 2003) the
consequences of which he proposes in the drawing “The last man” (2002): with
gleaming black eyes, a spider waylays an old, defeated man behind whom a
human carcass – his Alter Ego? Hybris itself? - rears up against the
colossal architecture in the background.
The epic dimension of Peter Feiler’s open narration spun from isolated
fragments and allusions to form dazzling and chaotic patterns gives birth to
a painting monumental not as much in size but in content; in the throng of
people, men fight gargantuan insects, beer-bellied horsemen dash over the
roofs of an unlikely, an impossible city while, moonlike, an alternative
world rises headfirst above the scenery as the borderline between the
terrific and the terrifying vanishes into a blur. Short scenes like ripped
from their context by momentary spotlights mingle, are sent spinning in a
maelstrom of antagonistic associations: Peter Feiler plays off the visible
against the perceivable (Hüpf Hopf, 2003). He does not offer a strand,
refuses to provide a thread through his works and forces the spectators to
involve in the complexities, the entanglements and humorous details in a
self referential system to eventually mould from it a story of their own.
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