Point of origin. I was born in 1964.
In this year my uncle was working on NASA’s Mariner IV, the first spacecraft to encounter the planet Mars and to transmit grainy images showing random constellations of craters.
My uncle died in 2010. I discovered in his garden hundres of self-made concrete tiles incrusted with random constellations of bottle caps. common point.
In 1965 In his essay ‚specific objects’, defining new art that is neither painting nor sculpture, Donald Judd writes: „three dimensions is real space...Obviously, anything in three dimensions can be any shape, regular or irregular, and can have any relation to the wall, floor, ceiling, room, rooms or exterior or none at all. Any material can be used, as is or painted.”
That year the first ever spacewalk was performed by the russian Alexei Leonov.
The american Ranger spacecrafts were designed scout out future landing sites on the moon.
Between 1964 and 1965 three probes flew straight down towards the Moon and send images back until the moment they crashed on the surface.
Michael Fried declared in 1967 in ‚Art and Objecthood’ that minimal sculpture is the anti-thesis of modernist art. Denouncing that it was based on an engagement with the spectator, physically and in duration.
In 1969 I was five years old and watched the first men walking on the moon on a grainy black and white television set in my grandmother's apartment. They were leaving traces of their steps in between the random craters.
The table I was sitting on was punctured by thousands of tiny holes, criss -rossing it surface in abstract drawings. Traces of my grandmother cutting out paper patterns to make clothes.
It was bought in the early 1930s in the lower silesian town of Olszyna. When in 1943 allied bombs hit their Berlin apartment, my grandfather pulled it to safety out into the street.
Air raid exercises were still regularly organized in the 1970s by my grade school. Teaching us what to do if nuclear missiles would strike Germany. Hide under a table. Life expectancy: 3 minutes.
Point Zero.
The The table consists of two half round forms that can be pulled apart to seat up to twelve people. Between 2005 and 2009 it stood in the kitchen of H29 in Brussels, a space for sitespecific nonobjective art that I ran together with fellow german artist Tilman. There it has seated visiting artists from many countries around the globe. When I moved Into my new space it was used in a performance with red wine. I did not leave the random traces.
Today only one half is in use.
Painted blue.