Edgar Honetschläger, E la nave va, Melk Abbey, Austria, 2023 Photos: ©Edgar Honetshläger
January 1st 2024, a day of happiness ?
by Rosanna Albertini
“Happiness is a force in movement. Not a gratuitous movement, it is openness to the world.” As well as reason, “Reason is an energy we can only understand in its development, in its growth.” JEAN STAROBINSKI, Montesquieu par lui-meme, 1967
In three lines, this is the quintessence of one of the most influential eighteenth century philosophers. Let’s put the name aside for a moment. He provided the foundations for the American constitution.
In a strange manner, artist Edgar Honetschläger is navigating the same kind of ideas and installing them as an art piece in two rooms of one of the most admired baroque European religious buildings: the Melk Abbey in Austria, a Benedictine monastery.
If Edgar were an egg, I would say his shell is encrusted with Viennese, Japanese and Etruscan civilizations. Mental habits integrated with each other to the point where they affected his sensitivity, they made him a stranger to the rest of the world, although capable of engaging hands and the whole body in creating the biggest, most delicious strudel one can imagine in my Los Angeles kitchen. The dough was as large as the table and thin, almost like a sheet. He is a very refined crafts person. His art is gentle, and he would like to fill it with a generosity that passes through it and leaks out, for other members of the strangers tribe.
Painted on a huge white egg he brought the bugs into the abbey, giving them precise figures with a spirit that is not the one of scientific illustrations: they look alive, ants walking on the egg repeating the same choreography they create when they invade our kitchen. Organized dancers. Bigger bugs are majestic, proud to be where they are, underneath the power of a painted king radiating sunlight from the ceiling.
Beware their elegance: they are messengers of a real crusade the artist started in 2018 to give the bugs places on earth in which they are not threatened by pesticides, pollution, or other deadly agents. No bugs = no pollination = no food for humans.
The artist had reached a tipping point of exasperation. Too much talking about ecological disasters, rare practical interventions, what to do as an artist? He started GOBUGSGO : a non-profit organization including biologists, entomologists, notaries, lawyers, rangers working pro bono for GBG. They acquire land where bugs can thrive with no attacks : THE NON – HUMAN ZONES.
Back to the art, I’m tempted to write, but GBG is an art piece as was the ceramic urinal for Marcel Duchamp. The installation at Melk Abbey is a double limb of the GBG body.
A white paper boat holding a vertical dry Ferula picked up in an Etruscan archeological site (where archeology protects plants from receiving pesticides) floats on a cloud of feathers, real geese feathers.
The contrast between Edgar’s art piece and the images covering the rooms from floor to ceiling, painted by Johann Wenzel Bergl in 1760, is striking. The contemporary piece is a scream of despair spreading from three symbols pared to the bones; FRAGILITY, DRYNESS, HOPE. Yet, the ferula almost tickles the palm leaves and the clouds on the walls, and the paper boat echoes in b-flat minor the galleon triumphant between the ocean waves. The whole thing is wonderfully absurd as are most of the eighteenth century images covering the whole interior building.
They shape imaginary dreams, joyful paradises in far away continents discovered by travellers sent by European conquerors. They give form to an imaginary state of nature that is dried up after only 3 centuries. “Efficiency….efficiency” laments Joseph Conrad in Heart of Darkness. Cruelty, and for what? For an idea. Maybe they believed in it. Redemption is a wish drowned in the waves. Disasters followed as a chain that makes us all prisoners of so called ‘rational’ decisions. For those who believe in absolute values and crash reality under their soles, with inevitable lack of soul, this art piece by Honetschläger is a beautiful reminder. Reality. It’s simple. Not easy. Art never is. !!!Gobugsgo!!!
These are THE NON-HUMAN ZONES acquired during the last five years:
Weitra Austria, 2500 m2 2019
Kallendorf Austria, 52.000 m2 2021
Breitenbrunn Austria, 4000 m2 2021
Capodimonte Italy, 2000 m2 2022
Langenlois Austria, 32.000 m2 2023 Photos: ©Danilo Donzelli
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