Christoph Türcke The Hare and the Girl

Plotpoints 2002

“Not only do we have the computer as a new defining metaphor, brother robot now offers us the opportunity of a radical realignment. We must understand again (again!) that the human being has more in common with gods and machines than with animals.” These were the words of Norbert Bolz, harbinger of new media, half a decade ago. How much identification with – and how much obliviousness of – the superiority of microelectronics is embodied in such words. Under the spell of the screen, it is easy for us to forget that humans are, in the first instance, animals – a particular type of animal admittedly, which has taught itself, with untold tenacity and patience, to manufacture tools, to configure language, to create images and therefore has opened a special chapter in natural history – but nevertheless animals and not machines. Humans who disregard the animal in the human, who disregard metabolism and digestion, without which no human could exist, without which, as it were, they could not have a program, could not even exchange their own physiology using a program – that is something they haven’t considered. Children sense it immediately. They treat animals as their equals, speak to them without any inhibitions, project their own desires and fears on to them without any ado and forget their closeness to animals only to the extent that they are taught to do so by the standards of their culture..."

...However, the sinister accounts for just one dimension in these pictures. The association of the child and the hare does not desist from revealing a symbol of pacified nature. In FRANEK’s work, this symbol is sometimes obfuscated to the point of unrecognizability but never completely obliterated. It extends like an extremely fine, utopian layer of varnish over the sinister underlying surface. After all, Trauschauwem (Watch Who you Trust) also means: I would ultimately like to be able to trust someone without having to watch my back. And where would the longing for this be better suppressed than in the concept of the child and the animal casually playing with one another?"

Christoph Türcke: The Hare and the Girl. In: Plotpoints

W Tanzt Mit Hasen
W Trauschauwem 18
W Trauschauwem 2