For decades, Stockholm has been the turf of photocopy artist Renate Bauer. She paints too, but her main mode of expression is hand-written prose-poetic screeds covering every square centimeter of the paper. These she photocopies and fixes with sticky tape to notice boards, bus stops and other convenient surfaces all around the Swedish capital, as a kind of analog local blog. I pocketed an entry dated Friday near the NW corner of the Humlegården park yesterday. Here are two excerpts, translated by yours truly.
"26/9 '08. You can really tell that the Minister of Culture in Sweden is a talent-challenged untalented person, a Narnia witch incompetent blind in the head genetically congenital unschooled insensitive. Yes, you know she ran around in galleries with her old man Ulf Adelssohn has run around like that been in like that places and probably also abroad at museums and certainly at the Munch museum in Oslo the bitch the freak judging from senses gene-doubled talented over-talented well-made in the head DNA unit of measurement measuring-rod viewed.""I hate the ill-defined not getting things into order and be grumpy puzzled about what the fuck that was. About myself and irritated that I said artist for real. About if somebody who isn't really an artist but just a fence painter theatre-scenery painter for real. I got into order clarity what I had done and why and how. When Ingvar V.M. talks to me. At the place of a mutual acquaintance a hair dresser Marie L.A. in a hair salon my sister and I. Ingvar was the DNA I had seen and his name is Ingvar V.M. and not Jan H. Then I realised all of what I had seen and done. How and why I always say to mention artists by name for real and the pigs, so that others in their turn can go and check it out and see the DNA and make it out puzzle pieces biology machinery machine to make out nuances a bit like in a car computer hi-tech so and avoid getting fooled by the freaks witches trolls Jew Judas and avoid fooling themselves."
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Yup, she's one of the things I miss about Stockholm :-)
Where are the sesquipedalian diatribes about "illiterate sick in the head hypocrites" we've come to know and love?
That's fantastic! Do you think she'd come to Texas and do some of these on our local "wildlife"? The current presidential campaign could really use this kind of commentary!
Is that her "Art"?
Kent
http://www.kentroberts.com
It's a definition issue, really. Marcel Duchamp and the others taught us a century ago that anything can be viewed as art. Renate Bauer's photocopied writings can be seen as art, as amateur journalism (a paper blog), as poetry or simply as a symptom of mental illness.
Anyway, Kent, I really like your stuff! Hope you don't suffer from poor mental health. (-;