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.
 

© Katharina Klara Jung, 2006