Nschotschi Haslinger
Nschotschi Haslinger Nschotschi Haslinger
I think that Nschotschi’s work touches upon an intrinsic limit of reality. The distortions she allows us to see are those of our world. Despite the abundance of her visual worlds, cracks and holes can be seen everywhere. You get the impression that the wind blows through them. Around the figures and depicted elements, but also through them. There is something fluttery about these drawings, they recall fairy-tale creatures, exhibit their superior knowledge, which makes them uncanny figures that belong entirely to the immanence of our world. But they do not belong to it without resistance. Their grins, their grotesque laughing prove them to be derisive dwellers in reality, who refuse to shove off, to any elsewhere. They are witchy beings who get by without fairy tales. Also—and this is crucial—without the fairy tale of reality! They draw their strength from their refusal to not be here. This lends them their persistent monstrosity at the margins of identity.
Even if it might seem otherwise: Nschotschi’s work is free of symbols and metaphors. This is the immanent character of her sculptures, objects, and drawings: They evade self-enigmatization, precisely because they are enigmas! Enigmas are not enigmatic, they do not imply any hidden truth. All they represent is a refusal to accept the dictates of evidence that constitute our realm of reality. Gilles Deleuze has identified the witchlike with the connotation of a movement that causes the subject to follow a line into the unknown. Witches ride their brooms into nowhere. This is not an escape to a better place, into a metaphysical world behind the world. On the contrary: The line of the witch rips holes into the pre-existent to demonstrate its inherent spookiness. All knowledge is populated, guided and controlled by phantasms. There are “images sneaking around in us.” The offensive, rather than negative, way of dealing with them decides it all. You have to be able to live with ghosts. They are already here and will not let science, which is always also ghost-science, scare them away.
Nschotschi’s work is open to ghosts, as long as we understand ghosts as playful figures of inconsistency. There’s always something grotesque about them. The grotesque is confusing in that it marks an inherent exterior. Grotesque is what remains unfamiliar about the familiar. When the normal warps into a grimace, it becomes grotesque. It is a warping that proves the warped to have already been warped beforehand. Grotesque is the funny, laughable moment of our reality. It is often laughter that turns into panic. The experience of the grotesque is tantamount to confusion. Dominant categories falter. The subject loses its footing. It loses its grasp on the realm of established evidence. Not because this ceases to exist, but because its inconsistency has become manifest, its maskedness.
Ever since Nietzsche we have known that the mask does not refer to anything stable behind it, a substantial truth, but rather to the non-existence thereof. There is nothing but masks on top of masks. Wherein does reality lie? Undoubtedly neither in metaphysical substantialism nor in its attenuation through the masquerade of postmodernism. The grotesque refers to the complex dialectic of pretense and truth, consistency and inconsistency. It’s about the mask, trembling. In ancient Greek there is a word that means both face and mask: πρόσωπον. The Latin term persona is derived from it. It’s about the human being, the subject. It’s a mask of a mask. Its face expresses no truth. Or: It expresses nothing but the ontological inconsistency of the substance called truth, which functions as the cardinal referent of our constructions of reality.
Perhaps Nschotschi’s work points to the abyss of maskedness that is our reality. Maybe we can learn from her to identify ourselves as a mask with masks. Not somewhere and sometime, but here and now.
(Marcus Steinweg – YOU HAVE TO BE ABLE TO LIVE WITH GHOSTS.)
1 Roland Barthes, How to Live Together: Novelistic Simulations of Some Everyday Spaces (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), S.42