ABSTRACT
219As in Gary Hill’s work Remarks on Colour from 1994, where he makes his 12-year-old daughter Anastasia read from Ludwig Wittgenstein’s 1950 book Remarks on Colour at an age where she cannot understand what she reads, my son and the children in Bristol also struggle with a text that is far too transcendental and abstract for them to understand at that age. The difference between Gary Hill’s daughter Anastasia and my son David, Gracie, Jayden and William from Bristol is that Anastasia within her father’s staging is talking about her own presence while my son and the children from Bristol are talking about the future they will inherit. In both cases these works talk about how strange it is to address and plan your future before you know what you want and desire.
The better organised the means of the individual, and thus the possibilities of resistance, the more obliged are public affairs, as a societal rule, and for self-preservatory reasons, to integrate whatever the individual is, in order to prevent its neurotisation of public affairs, and thus to prevent accidents or catastrophes. The claim for totality must sustain the individual even if it does not reveal it, or, from its standpoint, is unable to reveal itself to it. The contents of the collective rest with the individuals. If it is not conscious of the tensions of the extreme, as a correlation, it is simply padding without an engine, an emasculated patriarchal-collective ego in the veiled twilight of an infantilised alienating animal. Its cultural effigies are the symbols of the death-chambers of waiting in one-dimensional mass-communication. It would strengthen the collective ego’s power to anticipate itself in concrete utopias and in its images, and send packing the eternal animal’s revelations, which seeks the end of the world with consternation, ascension and panic.
trans. from Gmelin 1969