Birgit Jürgenssen
The place of images
In: Ausst. Kat. Birgit Jürgenssen (Wien: Galerie Hubert Winter, 1988), S. 10 -14.

The place of images is in the living body that is inseparable from thought.
He closed the door of the living room behind himself and crossed the foyer. The quiet of the house made ghosts in his brain. For the first time he perceived the presence of that thing he didn`t understand and towards which, slowly, heavily, he began to walk. Memory is to one what history is to the other. He tried to concentrate like a child on a poorly memorized poem. Playing with the signs of his memory, he finally pinned them down and decorated them like insects. He donned a look of toughness and modesty and trimmed this already difficult expression with a smile. He ran his fingers through his freshly washed hair and thought of her: Nothing was ever more soundless than the way she moved. 1
He opened the entrance door and for a few seconds the doorknob felt cool and smooth in his palm, and it came into his consciousness that he was holding a handful of pearls in his right hand. Her pearls. He stepped out into the night. "Your solitude frightens me." He thought about the moon. He stood there, his figure casting a long shadow through the night. Animals like turtles or snails never can leave their home and they can only move slowly with it. Nor does he want to stay still becoming more like a piece of architecture or a tree or a mountain or a still life. There is more advantage to separate home and body.
The headlights of an onrushing car touched him, like two celestial eyes. Then the lights and noise disappeared in darkness again. There was stillness now around; he could hear with his eyes and there was a lot of room in his ears. Stillness and darkness are similar in that they both neutralize the perceptual world and so shift us from the sensational to the celebral, the insubstancial place.
He felt a certain mourning which can be a very narcissistic thing, a melancholic mourning from which one can get a sort of pleasure. A swirl of shadowed melody came into his head. a slow waltz. "I want to be a wandering place", he said to himself, and he was like sleepwalking, following some traces of paradox. He felt so weak that somebody could bend him with an eye-dropper. 2 It was that abyss above his head with this endless blue that trivialized his little motions. The scale of things encrouched him, making him small. He was chosen to give up privileges, but he can do nothing about the privilege that has allowed him to choose. "Taste - Waste - Etwas", strange words he murmured. The time went, wherever time goes. He looked up to the sky with this sea of stars. His image needed to be refreshed and in a way he was trained always to sense something lurking. By reflex he blinked with his eye. "I don`t think hypnosis is possible from a great distance." And he goes on with his monologue: "Being vertical on Earth is a way of being centered. But I need my equilibrium, my balance. Maybe I could give myself nine guesses and twelve of them would be right. 3 Right as rain!" Raindrops were falling down on him, on the street, in a slow rhytm. He wished to play on his key board now.
Released from the weight of history, time and space disappeared in a pinpoint. Rhythm was the new parameter for analysis. Rhythm creates the form to connect various levels by throwing bridges between these reservoirs of information. Is everything through the ear more believable than visual experiences? He rubbed the lobe of his ear. He found that fear walks on its hind legs as violence puts its wild mouth over legends which defy designation in the circuitry of possible transmissions.
Suddenly he felt strong like a big mountain and he walked down to a valley, which was a lake like a sea of silk. "He flipped her pearls out into the water one by one, at the floating seagulls. They made little splashes and the seagulls rose off the water and swooped the splashes." 4 Then he stopped and kept three pearls back in his hand. He looked at them on his palm, glimmering in the dim light in the colours of "LIGHT, EARTH and BLUE", 5 with halos of invisible matter around.
He remembered the intensity of the blue of her eyes, wich were wide set and there was a thinking room between them. 6 And he was seized by a terrible homesicknes for a universe that at once beat like a heart.
 
An artificial reason is as good as any other reason if you believe it.


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