Adelheid Mers - Retreat

[Retreat] Throughout my teen years in Düsseldorf, I was eternally hanging out at the Art Academy, going to Fluxus performances in the auditorium, hearing and seeing music with the craziest forms of notation, even performed for one long night in one of Cage's MusiCircus events nearby in Bonn, before finishing high school and enrolling as a proper college student. It was all highly visceral, throbbing with adrenaline and other good stuff, super intellectual and entirely normal at the same time.

[Status Quo] Once I was admitted to the Academy, the magic collapsed rather quickly. Heidegger's very aged editor taught the philosophy courses. Fortunately, there were no disciplinary boundaries enforced within the arts, but everything else became segregated. I read and wrote at the university, where I was also signed up to study German Literature and Linguistics. I made art at the studios, cycling through what I quite a bit later recognized as formal, diagrammatic elements in drawing, painting, sculpture and film, and regularly danced with Punks and Teds at the Ratinger Hof.

[Retreat] I made friends with foreign students, whose delightful uses of language were proof of contingency, a concept I was beginning to appreciate. MFA in hand, I decided to become a foreigner myself. Richard Deacon had accepted me as a post-grad in London, but the University of Chicago catalog advertised that it was ok to be an artist and a reader as part of the same practice, so that's where I went, for one glorious, fully-paid-for year as a DAAD fellow.

[Status Quo] I learned: In monocultures, one is supposed to know the rules, which means they are not so transparent, but can be kept negotiable. In federal cultures, on the other hand, deputies are assigned to explain and uphold rules. That creates very different types of governmentality, and also different ways to be above or below its thresholds. Clearly, neither exists in a pure state. Both conditions are simultaneously useful and absolutely maddening.

[Retreat] While I learned this and more (I was reading everything about space and by John Dewey) I made light installations, in a way showing that I was looking, but also shaping defined continuums that were no longer stuff, but grounds for something else. I eventually invited others in, asking them to do things. "Please exhibit in my one person show." "Feel free to modify art objects others have placed here." "You need to bring a gift to enter this exhibition." Finally, on the occasion of a residency at Columbia College, I declared my last light installation a studio space and diagrams to be my new art form.

[Status Quo] Still based in Chicago today, I seek out specific, rule bound/producing circumstances (essays, talks, conversations, art practices, organizations and their networks) and note my readings in diagrams, presenting them with variously prepared drawn and printed materials and in performance lectures. Specifically, qualitative diagrams interest me because of their potential to function as thinking aides and I enjoy their wild, performance-inducing nature. If themes become very complex, which they increasingly do, I seek out others to work with me, which can take the form of teaching a class, organizing a conference panel, or curating an exhibition. People have also begun to come to me to invite me as a consultant. Currently I am waiting to hear if a firm who wants to use my services will be hired to conduct the next Cultural Plan of Chicago.

[About Retreat] A couple of weeks ago I returned to a diagram I made in 2003, of Vilém Flusser's short essay, 'Celebrating,' written in 1985. The occasion was Tricia Van Eck's invitation to contribute to her "Happiness Project", a series of events and exhibitions currently taking place in Chicago. In his essay, Flusser coins the term "other program." This is how he arrives at it: Judaic tradition revolves around time out of time, the Sabbath. Platonic tradition has carved a space out of space, the Academy. The Sabbath is connected to auditory concepts, it represents a calling. The Academy is a visual device; it leads to theory (theoros = the spectator.) Together, they have shaped the contemporary, secular Judeo-Christian leisure and knowledge economies, culminating in the Telematic society. The Telematic society is expected to evolve into a dialogic condition in which 'own programs' that are proprietary have been abandoned in favor of 'other programs' that are shared (similar to Open-Source.) Once the ratio of work and leisure tips  - through increasing automation - humanity will spend its time "in purposeless play with others for others," having reached a state of celebratory existence.

I never exhibited that diagram, since, clearly, the idea is flawed. After all, the universal orgasmic state of celebratory existence didn't happen. What has happened is that 'time out of time' and 'space out of space' have spawned a massive, highly proprietary gaming industry that is intricately intertwined with what is now the military entertainment complex. I am now curious if a third root tradition, namely Buddhist thought, can be inserted here to provide a complementary thread, from meditative "mind out of mind" through a secular, "pragmatic state" that introduces empathy into what could become "compassionate play with others for others." What is intriguing in this picture is that temporary, spatial and mental states of exception in conjunction with each other - retreats - can potentially be leveraged for amelioration.

My last visit in Banff, in 2008, happened just after I got a tenure track job as a Cultural Management Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. It sparked a new thread of practice, and an exhibition that will open in April 2012. Now I am tenured, getting ready to move into my first sabbatical - time out of time. If invited to participate in this retreat, I would wish it to be more collaborative than the residency, much more about comparing notes. I have loads of materials, many of them acquired since 2008, that I could contribute.

Chicago, November 27, 2011