vivos voco/mortuos plango/fulgura frango (chaworo)

With regards to the freedom of speech and thought, since the Middle Ages, there has been a mutual interrelationship between the jester and power. This enforces the idea of a correlation between authenticity and truth, attributes that artists like to claim for themselves and their art. The prerequisite for this, however, appears to be that they are also ascribed the jester’s role – jesters who are allowed to say anything to the powerful without fear of retribution. This even includes truths that ought to be suppressed. Lamentable in this constellation is less the clichéd role of the jester and more an increasingly clear repressive tolerance coupled with the insignificance of everything maintained by the jester’s art – and everything that claims to be art.

As the customer is boss in the cultures which have shaped what the contemporary notion of art is, it hardly appears surprising that the forces that now have to be fended off using artistic means are cash and an addiction to intellectual pleasures. In the Middle Ages the carnivalesque topsy-turvy world of the jester was just supposed to show a travesty of this best of all possible worlds so wisely organised by God. We have swapped sides in the present day so that today the world appears to be part of the large game of pleasure and pastime, a carnival open all year round. The artist-jesters are now ascribed a different role in this back-to-front world, they have to be SERIOUS, if possible even showing that we are actually living in the worst of all possible worlds because if it were just a fraction worse – and this danger always looms – it could soon cease to exist altogether. As could everything that has been conceived and made for perpetuity in numerous studios in the midst of tempests of inspiration and thinking, lit by flashing thoughts and the lightning bolt of pending fame.

To ensure that eternity does not arrive too soon, and the refinements of the reshaping of the energy from flashes of thought not only noisily powers revolving centrifuges undermining meaning, but also so that the potential cultural heritage of all humanity can condense, the telephone is ringing.

What?
The telephone?
Which telephone?!

Well, that telephone whose ring tone amplifier is a jester’s stick. Moussa Kone conceived it as a lightning conductor for flashes of thought. “A motor inside the pedestal moves the jester’s stick rapidly in jerky movements from left to right for a number of seconds when it’s dialled-up and controlled remotely from my mobile phone. It makes a sweet melody chime from bronze bells that swirl in the exhibition space. They announce those moments when I am developing a new artistic idea. The title of the work is a medieval saying frequently engraved onto church bells, it is supposed to protect against being struck by lightning during storms. Here it makes the jester’s stick into a lightning conductor for inspiration.” (Moussa Kone in a conversation with the author, 2010)

Incidentally, I should like to mention that these bells do have a sweet melodic chime. Not a siren’s howl nor a brazen alarm sound from speakers with the company’s logo etched into them, as are familiar from various Hollywood films where we readily accept that dauntless heroes and heroines almost single-handedly save the world. It comes as no surprise when artists also play the fool to stall the advent of eternity for us. And the best of them use a form of irony to do this that allows the very things to be sneered at which they themselves have to take all too seriously on their mission: megalomaniac artistic dreams and the compulsion to be creative. These are the complementary attributes of the carnival world, where we compensate for powerlessness with hedonism and where a lack of thought is celebrated vociferously.

Text by Kurt Kladler, Vienna, 2011 (translated from German)