Textkreisel Nichtstun, sculptural idleness, performative literature, 2014. The self-contained “Textkreisel Nichtstun” (Text Gyroscope Idleness) evolved as an autonomous work alongside the project StadtkomplizInnen realised with theaternyx at Kunstmuseum Lentos. In its intended indefinedness this non-economical text debates idiosyncratic structures, anti-ideology, theory beyond common modes of application of texts and a playful gestus of the poem: The extended territory of text reaches from Menschengedichte to variations of the haiku to a quasi-theoretical concealment in a weekly structure and word cascades. The text has not been edited and therefore swings between form and function, between theory and poetry.
Textkreisel Nichtstun, TanjaB
Textkreisel Nichtstun, TanjaB
Nichtstun_Week 2_Lentos Kunstmuseum
Preperatory Poem
Idleness
Aesthetics
Performance
The feeling: I think I´m spinning the wheel
Super-activism
Playing in an institution
Suddenly a zone of idleness
Idea for mise-en-scène
Isle for Writing
(with a view at the Danube)
As a connection to the harbour
As a river course and stream
Traffic stream
The view outside
Panorama window
Proposal for distraction
Essential question
Can we also meet
In order to do nothing
An honest idleness
Says Claudia
C … and what it takes to be honest
Contrary to anything else
To busyness
To meditation
To ideology
Day 1, Friday / Lentos, Week 2 /
/ Menschengedicht
Verena Henetmayr
Gerlinde Roidinger
Susanne Maier
Birgit Schwamberger
Marion Klimmer
Luis Wohlmuther
That´s us!
/ Tracking
The house chitters, heavy eyes, exhale noisily
Whistling in the ear
Am I the one that whistles or is it the house
Who´s got the tinnitus
Due to stress
Now the house is humming
I gain weight
Can you also do nothing while standing
Or only when you have the feet up
?
Sleeping at the Lentos
Good
Art becalms
Usually it keeps you busy
I rest in an unsupervised corner
in idleness
And notice
THAT THE HOUSE IS WORKING
I meet my sister´s ex
Occasionally he works over here, helps with the buildup
I have to laugh, that coincidence
As I realise
That my own ex uses to work here as well
on a permanent basis
EXES WORK, TOO
Not only houses
I look down, through the cracks
Clean house, but down there it isn´t
House clean, ex sober
I take notes, so that I can discharge them, from my brain
Just like at home, where I raise from the couch, to take notes, that it does not exercise a burden on me and on the couch. Luis is asleep. Four-days-of-writing-on-the-book before. Exhaustion. Sleeping camp. Gerlinde has moved and now sits somewhere else. Bring newspapers with me tomorrow? At half past noon some action starts. Heavy eyes. Exhale. Not forget to insert the dots: Else it says: Eyes exhale. Cross out, gonna do that at home, destroy the notes.
A silent movie, that´s what it´s like. Write with the left hand. Memory about primary school. Yesterday. And about Grandma, who only attended primary school, before her escape. (This part has been written with the left hand)
When we hang around it looks all so beautiful
From above
House is working
Looking outside the house
Casually left again.
A raindrop geometry on the panorama window.
A curtain of drops. Dry spots beneath the tables.
Le pleurre? (How do you write it?) blare. It blares. My Grandpa. Rings. Signs. Cross it out. Look into it. Texts. Suddenly being an object or so. No idea whether it is us or them who observe. In any case, I write it. Down.
It is difficult to rise
A black sky
Behind the church tower
We look
On behalf of the others
Suddenly the un-social visages
Looking around everywhere
Like observing.
Though we are the ones observed
By humans and by a camera.
But the funny thing is: Even the video tapes
Descend into the void after three weeks.
/ Reflex
Let´s start into idleness, into actively doing nothing
Let´s do nothing – Come on!
Start into levelling down, debating about it later
Pleasant experience, sharpen the perception, but no imperative
Calm and conformist – that´s what there is also, not only excitement
Conversation about shoes at the elevator as intermezzo, Birgit, casual epistemology:
Ruminating about whether form is a necessity, or nothingness is sufficient, at least for something
Collective idleness is a necessity
Apart from that: The houses are still there, as noticed by Markus, I mean, the yearning is huge.
Day 2, Saturday / Lentos, Week 2
/ Menschengedicht
Susanne Maier
Dorit Ehlers
Reinhard Winkler
Gabi Hiti
Ursula Witzany
Elfi Ruprecht Porod
Karin Hofer
That´s us
/ Tracking
I rested well at first, then again tired behind the eyes. Heavy, so heavy. And There Is A Space Behind Your Eyes. There Is The Sound. Again those heavy eyes, and hungry. Conversation with Pichler, as I leave the room. Getting nervous. In the basement I see a poster with the Last Days of Mankind, an installation with rats, I read about it. That rat stuff annoys me, no wonder. Remember, how it works with attracting attention. A classic, animals, sadism – voila. Art. The contrary to what I am able to do and what I want to do. I am in the last room today. I notice the sculptural element of the idleness group (strength). A couple of people join us, visitors of the museum. They stay for twenty minutes, they become a part, a part of the sculpture. A pink interconnection, strong: little dots on the floor, two sweaters, Manner bag. Things to take from yesterday: Wired to Timing, „stress“ at the beginning. The question is like observing. But the big thing of today is: Again, the sculputural element. No words. Sometimes, when looking at single persons: It is like going by train without going by train. Is but a short glimpse – since: The group is the thing. Larger. The group carries. I think of myself inside this whole, as a quasi-object that thinks in all directions: What a messdance out of things we did and we did not do, that we imagined and did not imagine, what a relationship to the others, what a quasi-art object.
/ Reflex
Sculptural day – my so-called QuasiKunstobjekt. Eclectic between activity and idleness. Literarian interjections. Looking at each other. Or outside the window. Then, silence again. Then, some words again. I think about this construction as a quasi-art object, as a collective made of things and objects, from references, ideas. I think about this construction as a collective made of persons and thoughts, rats, the rat populations in my head, a spider in its net outside the window. I think about this collective of things, but also take projects and things undone into it. Also those things undone, or not present, or not visible affects the hybridity of people and objects, is maybe even its primary expression. The formation of hybridity in this room, of people, things, things done and undone, ideas and intellectual constructs means hidden complicity with idleness. With an open solution.
Day 3, Sunday / Lentos, Week 2 /
/ Menschengedicht
Miriam Bajtala
Christoph Wiesmayr
Susanne Blaimschein
Sabine Funk
Ines Häufler
That´s us
/ Tracking
Morphogenetic Fields. An experiment about rat behaviour. As soon as a single rat knows something, all rats in the world do. What do rats know about art? If there is something as communication of unarticulated experience (Objection: The private face is serious, or: the social face is jovial, smiling? The rat face is like? Who knows? … they probably hate humans, and I would understand it, how does it actually work, in the human realm again, that this accumulated criminal mess, that has been accumulated by man, does not have more severe consequences), then complicity in idleness means: That it is about a hidden relationship work. It is nothing. It is anti-ideological. It is peaceful. Complicity without end and purpose. Not even representation of interests or lobbying, in a classical sense. Idleness vs. Lobbying. A different kind of lobbying. Refusal. At least temporarily. To do something is always ideological. We don´t do ideology, that´s the point. We deny the ideology of activity and that other stuff, the ideology of relaxation as well – of the permanent half-activism alongside the flows of work/life balance. We do not want to proclaim something, no salvation of any kind, we aren´t the project board that wanders like talking clouds. As for the practical part: Great disquiet in idleness at the beginning. Only a few visitors. I sense that individuals may be wrestled down into idleness – or wrestle themselves down. And, apart from any thoughts: I´m feeling really bored today. I suddenly understand that idleness exists – even if I announce a thousand times that I breathe nevertheless or that my heart goes on. Of course, nothing else is dead. But there is idleness, I have learned it today, regardless of being active or doing work: It works – to do nothing. There is something painful to it, an insecurity. Waiting. For something. Insight: Idleness is not being on a mission, no matter whether it is a mission set up by other or by oneself. I even refuse my own mission? And in the end it is the fallow that nevertheless has to be tilled. That´s ok. And in between I think: avoid the mistake of going into inner emigration too soon.
What does the room carry
Audience
Panorama
To act with it
Participation
It becomes an installation
Occasionally
Mutual observation
And surveillance
Low-Threshold
That it is low-threshold
Is a fact
And a parody upon a fact
If low-threshold is doing nothing
Then low-threshold ceases to mean anything
Super demanding it is on the other hand
And even more than that
/ Reflex
Inhabitating Animals
Running
Resting
Finished
Sleeping
Chatterboxes
Bears Monkeys
Feelings of happiness
Seeing spiders
Not being afraid
But laughing
Inhabitating Animals
Fallow
Idleness is not being on a mission
In the fallow land of activity
The question that haunts us
becomes marginal
not even becomes an issue
becomes buried at best
maybe it sprouts somewhere in time
Break
Smoking as taking a break
Forget about the break
when not smoking
Hence smoking excessively
Day 4, Tuesday / Lentos, Week 2 /
/ Menschengedicht
Günter Mayer
Peter Hanusch
Boris Schuldt
Martha Kniewasser
Claudia Dworschak
Viktoria Schlögl
Marion Hackl (?)
Claudia Mader (?)
Times up
Foamies
That´s us
/ Tracking
In the morning being overrun by a car (nearly)
Then two more troubles with cars
Think about the trilogy of quasi-art objects
And the thing with memory with idleness
That I can´t remember it right now
The stress, that all needs to be at hand
Instead of cultivating a come and go inside the mind
This haiku-thing, now I got it
Three times multi-layered haikus
Cluttered haikus
Like repainted by Rainer
For instance an overworked Jesus
Perfidious job-enrichment
Against monotony at the assembly line in former times
Now a part self-exploitation
Only for the best of all, for all
By golly!
17 prime number, level 8, multiplied with factor 3
Now I know where the haikus derive from gazing into the void. /
Art and (the) art of production need to remain foreign to us!
That supports me in (inner) distance and demanding the basic income./
I´m fed up with
Done with
Idleness-Breathing. Exit.
A low-threshold extreme experience
how eternal, fantastic, uplifting.
Idleness: Anti-ideological
Collective idleness: Extreme experience, isn´t it?
Idleness is like walking on tracks or going by train without a train.
I understand the slow ganzing into the void. It is it is it.
The long gaze isn´t ideological. It is a paradox.
It is about an object of art, that feeds off many things.
That simultaneously says yes and no
(and in my head it whispers: Don´t be afraid of a new manifesto)
An art object, that
Simultaneously says yes and no
An object, that
Simultaneously says yed and no
A narration, that
Simultaneously says yes and no
A performance, that
Simultaneously says yes and no
Something like self-experience, that
Simultaneously says yes and no
A production, that
Simultaneously says yes and no
Distinct protest, that
Simultaneously says yes and no
Resistance, that
Simultaneously says yes and no
A psychological state, that
Simultaneously says yes and no
Complexity, that
Simultaneously says yes and no
An art object, that
Piles up the binominal principle of our yes-no combinatorics of decision into 0 and 1
Multilayered decisions of yes and no, of 0 and 1, that´s how we live
Towers
Plains
Traps
Fallows
Then the project of idleness emerges
That says no to ideology (that says yes and no to it)
or:
An art object, that
Simultaneously says yes and no
An art object, that says yes to art and no
That says yes and no to narration
That says yes and no to performance
Not a haiku 1
Double fields
Woven accomplices
Inarticulated
In between us a web
Of interwoven nothingness
The spider´s in there as an observer
(like the ocular of a camera)
It also
Hidden relationship work
Prison. Muscle exercises after it. Waiting for the outside. Go!
I look outside the window and there are two people painting / the boat. Nearly need to cry. How moving their meaningful intention.
Not a haiku 2
Suffering is enormous
Like out from that that is
Duration is important
two hours good
And what is all that
A deployment
Positioning
Is it sufficient that the individual is carried by the group
Or the question:
Can we meet, in order to do nothing?
/ Reflex
Hardly any motion
Not even moving
First place last place
Almost
Concentration
Contemplation
Diversion
Sleep (an escape)
A happy ending
Two intensive phases
In the meantime for instance
Memorations of a long journey
Many guests
Intense density
Been very productive myself
Great understanding of myself
Hardly any post-ist
Nothing needs to be said
how fine and how parallel
to the art of Tino Segal
Magnus is finished
Not without purpose gazing at animals
Markus would prefer trees
Somehing I understand
They´re hanging trunks over there
Idleness
Quasi-object
Haikus
Panorama
On the final day
Like going to work
Yet a talking cloud
I am my material
Widely ramified
Passage
Something has risen
And any other theory of creativity
And the art context
A o of deconstruction
Can be hooked in there
We do not perform
Distance and design
Oh my god, ist nothing!
World distance and world design
Longing for oh my!
Inbetween nothing
I is irrelevant
In secession
Speaks:
I am in my third person
In dissolution of self I have already been
Afterpoem to anti-ideology:
The entrepreneurial selfs
With their immanent double narrative
from total self-actualisation
and a narrative of suffering
systematic
hyperreal
sit at the bargaining table – in silence
It is about breaking through a style of communication
That consists of a deep entanglement of economy and emotion
Oh my God – ist nothing!
More about Quasikunst on this Intro-Page and in Stadtwerkstatt-Context