" THE  PARADISE  "

'Where nothing lies in its rightful place lies order' B.Brecht

The form of the unformulatable question.

Text, the first photo and text, a performance, where the allotropy of all things begins.

Begin at the smallest and stay at the smallest. Madness as guest.

But how if the Rabbi has overlooked the most difficult of smallest things? Could it not be that the Messiah is also a little mad to free him from the terrible weight of waiting for deliverance and healing?

To know how to write, you have to consider the others, the untouchables.

The moment science losses sight of its technological components, the shiver of poisoning commences, not to mention the blackening of the first sparks of the fire.

The autonomy of art has as its origins the cover of work.

The autonomy of alchemy has as its origins 'bonding'.

Construction as the unconscious. Dream as dialectical drought, then the awakening. The rare flower, 'Light' is put in oil.

Not an awakening, rather to be transported into an otherly dream, for the death is the awakening (Mark).

The breast covered with a frayed rag, the flight into the wilderness, over the sand-pit games of tactical manoevourings..........

The subject is incapable because the thing is trying to attain the usefulness, then commodity, then other things.

A concept is company, is team, a concept should be written down: there is too much authority in all, particularly when named and from which a quotation is derived.

The archives are complete.

The archives are complete when they are hot.

What has happened to the cold archives?

Nothing bores the ordinary person more than the cosmos, both above and below.

The elements of an installation, of a performance are imparted realities that are analogous to the spiritual, unrelated, the performation danced out.

Virtual spaces are analogous to architectural spaces. Non identify against searches in the imagery for truth. These concepts are also old bugbears.

The homeland closes up, we cut the umbilical cord. Variants of dependency inside the structure: the way to the toilet is desired.

What nature should the distanciation from the subject take so we have a different quality of action?

'Den Nichtsehenden'- the people who see nothing - are the trouble making blind.

The developments lie at the breaks.

The tree of knowiedge stands not because of the breakdown of Good and Evil which should have been possible in the Garden of Evil, but because it is a symbol of the judgement of the questioner.

This monstrous irony is the characteristic of the mythical origins of Right............. Because people had sullied the name, they only needed to turn away from the way things look, the language of which the knowledgeable man investigates.

To perform means to rob blind the whole basis of man's shaking spirit of speech.

Symbols must get confused, where things get confused. Here commences the other silences the nobility of the name declines.

All knowledge that turns into theory is the systematic division of madness. The respect of power ratios above all permits no moral naivety.

One of the most passionate affectations, shame, is our way of putting. Right in order, a verdictless execution of mercy and laughter.

'lt is agreed that in changing times a whole town full of unjust and reckless people can probably continue to exist' but that'not three just people can live under the same roof without eventually tearing their hair out and quarreiling.'

In these pictures the scene is cleared, like and apartment that still has no new tenant, an idea without atmosphere. Like this scene, reflection clears. lt leaves the (political) view open, intimates aiding the clarification of details.

Each thought has its own cell and each cell appears in a flash, in a flash a chamber, a place of Right.

There are people who achieve the oath never do stay in closed spaces, the idea of open doors.

Hypersensitivity as highest critical organ, idiosyncrasy as instrumentation, 'The dream of individuality is enticed by the world's fabric, like a tooth with a cavity.

Because I see and hear that it is good and therefore not yet become................

To draw out the real object of the form, because it is more present than any work. Leave no doubt about work, doubt about a reality howsoever expressed.

I have a picture. if a person looks at me and makes a picture of me, then I will do something so he looks away and if he then looks at me again, sees a totally new person, never seen before. The nano seconds of being there and yet being somewhere else completely.

A possibility of Alchemy today

Boris Nieslony

If the False is like this already, how then will be the True. J.W.Ritter(1776-1810)

ROUNDTRIP  TO  PARADISE

translated by Adelheid Mersat the request of Rachel Selekman Winter 91/92

One work of Boris Nieslony’s, which since 1980 serves him as a basic model for his aesthetic ideas, is titled ‘ The Paradise ‘.

The title arouses attention. It means promise. It reminds one of the origin and the destination of human existence, of the possibilities of our self-realization and completion, of lost origins and regainable harmonies. Paradise refers to change and passager to victory over finality, which at all times concerned people. In the Middle Ages the churches vestibule was called ‘Paradise’. From there one entered the sacred place, where in shimmering riches the leadlike shine of the everyday was absorbed by the golden glow of eternity. „ The copper never rests until it turns into gold", said Meister Ekkehart, referring to the soul, longing for the perfections of its origin.

Paradise reminds of the myth of creation,through which the cosmos came into being from the chaos of unanimated matter, the world developed from the intertwined play and interplay of the elements.

This image of the functioning of the cosmos reflects the work of Boris Nieslony’s. It is a small world, moving in itself. On the worktable there is a confusing variety of a number of things, which function, among each other and become entangled in strange stories, endlessly variable. The world on the table is in constant motion. Some objects are cleared away, others happen to be added, arriving in new constellations, displaying their effects in ever changing versions. The table develops into a kind of ‘ Story of the History/Story with the objects ‘, giving space to the unpredictable. So the artist does not use his objects as material of description for certain courses of action. Also he does not choose them principally as suited building blocks for a prepondered plan. He leaves room for chance, uses found objects, also objects given to him by friends or artists, brings objects together that „want to come together", and gives way to their qualities of experience, which arises from their meetings, their touches. „Contacts/Touches", Nieslony writes, „ are occurences of definable or undefinable predictability". From them arise "tensions, which lead to realisations between the touching parties. Touch is a movement out of desire, out of preference, which is a message.

The objects on the table communicate themselves - i.e.,they are freed from their self-referentiality and begin a correspondence through which they fertilize each other, and are heightened in their qualities of meaning. They relate to each other like mirrors, facing each other, with images mutually attracted through constant exchange in uncountable reflections, carried on and heightened into infinity. Here one is reminded of a word by the Natural Philosopher and Physicist Johann Wilhelm Ritter, formulating his basic reflection in a question:

"Is the process of life continuous Galvanism of uncountable interconnected chains?"

Ritter, who is the founder of modern electro-chemistry, sah in the 'Galvanic Action' the expression of a unified, "universal" electricity. In another place he describes this more clearly: "Such systems (chains) now become links in higher chains, these become links in even higher ones, and so forth to the largest, which by the way encompasses everything. So the parts run into the whole and the whole runs back into the parts."

In his question about the reasons for creativity, Nieslony playfully takes up the role of the Natural Scientist. So Ritter’s "theory of the electrical systems of bodies" is verified on a sensory basis through the Paradise-table.I.e., all objects on the table are bodies endowed with energy, which upon their meeting they mutually emit and absorb. During this exchange energies are strengthened and freed, growing to ever larger contexts - up to the highest chain. Symbolically they evoke the glassballs, in which the objects of the world can be found as ‘complete world’. Nieslony himself says about this: "Geometry, the topological system, is formed analogous to the galvanic systems (chains).Temperature, tension and heat arise from closeness and distance, from mixing and combining the elements, which are the paradise." During their physical cormunication these elements create a certain climate, which defines the character of the table-landscape which they connect themselves to, and whose agitated life affects them.

The table can be seen as a battery which stores energies and emits them transformed. It receives ‘food’ through the ‘radiation’ of the objects. But also the artist and the observer can activate energies. The intensity of the battery’s energy field is dependent on the forces active in it, which intensify each other, but can also extinguish or repulse each other. This is exemplified through magnets and iron particles.The iron particles are sorted, so to speak, by the tension poles of the magnets, which transport them to the complementary pole according to the alignment of the respective forcefield. The magnet arranges the relation of the forces in a well-balanced equilibrium. " the true magnet of all world-bodies must be a heart ", Ritter wrote," and in the human body the heart is the magnet. In the earth pulsates the magnet, in the human being the heart."

Next to an iron buddha, contemplating himself, a small giraffe is placed, which curiously stretches its neck. In front of a shiny soldier stands a clown, round as a ball, smiled at by a butterfly. The somersault of a wind-up plastic mouse turns into a prayer in front of an image of the Madonna. A pierced sheet of metal projects a blinking sky of stars in the light of a lamp. "Give the usual a mysterious air, the known the dignity of the unknown, the finite the impression of the infinitell, Novalis says, so one can rediscover the original meaning. "Reversed is the operation for the higher, unknown, mystical, infinite - it takes on an easy expression ... alternation of exaltation and degradation." For Nieslony a magnet is the heart of the table.

Poetry dissolves strange being into one’s own being.

This sentence by Novalis can be followed by a sentence from Ritter." Only when bodies meit", can be found in his fragments,"they achieve reason. Only now they can grasp each other. So it is with us. The ‘warmer’ we are, the more we can understand, grasp, we ‘thaw’." The table reveals itself as a battery for metamorphosis through forces of the soul. In this process the small can, as in a fairy tale, develop unexpected dimensions; the mysterious can become usual - and ‘helping hands ‘, (magnifying glasses as opticians use them) can appear as vivacious sorcerers apprentices. Like living beings the magnifying glasses on the table handle objects with their plier-hands, to enlarge them for their ‘eye’, into gigantic measurements, to change them into microcosmic landscapes, in which the gaze happens on a fantastic journey of exploration. The predictable measurability of objects seems to be annulled by qualities affecting the observer’s imagination. In a countermove the imagination bestows the objects with changing meanings and arranges them in new constellations. "Poetry is misappropriation" Nieslony writes in one of his texts, "Essayistic of the Materials", "Fascination with the Occupations of Meaning",Connection of the Cognizant with the Cognized".

Glittering mountains are towering on stacked sheets of glass. Their bizarre shapes were created by cold and heat, with which the artist treated the glass. Everywhere on the table stand sheets of glass, for the objects to ‘view’ each other through. In a mountain of glass swims a penguin, diving up again in uncountable facets. Glass is transparent, yet mirror-smooth.It is transparent, yet firm, hard and breakable. It opens the view towards „everything else „ and returns, stored in it, its own mirror image. For the artist glass is a poetic symbol for love.

Musing "is nothing but a qualitative magnification" Novalis writes, and "Poetry is representation of the mind - the inner world in its totality."

Like an early Romantic Nieslony searches out " really the actual world-soul of nature ... all outside processes should be understandable as last results of inner processes." This sentence was written by Novalis about his friend Ritter. It is reminiscent of the of hermetic wisdom of epochs past, when the Cosmos, the macro-cosmos and the human being, the micro-cosmos, matched each other. What was contained in one had to be contained in one shape or another in the other one; one had to be rceivable through the other. So every act of cognition included self-cognition.

Like the Romantics, Nieslony rebels against the forced rationalism of a scientific age, against the division of imagination and reason, against the atomistic view of Empiricists, in whose eyes the world primarily consists of measurable and countable entities. The "reasonable mind, Caught in many finalities", is countered by the question for the „totality of life", with the quest for the tie, that connects one and all. To be able to approach complex subjects, the romantics posted, rigidly, an absolute as model of reflection. Ritter, e.g., proceeds from a theory of "universal electricity". The romantic poets used the term poetry. Under the impression of Ritter's theories, in which being is defined as an organic process, the brothers Schlegel developed the idea of a "progressive universal poetry". In one of his treatises August Wilhelm Schlegel wrote: "Regeneration is the mediating term between the transitoriness of the individual and the immortality of the general." Part of the installation ‘ The Paradise’ is the ‘Anthropognostic Dishes’ (a moving sculpture as shrine). It is the ‘head’ of the piece (the paradise is the heart). It consists of a bookshelf, carrying books by philosophers and poets of all cultures and epochs and also works and text collections by the artist and his friends.The bookshelf is complimented by a photocopy machine, a Videorecorder and a tape recorder. These elements of the work transport the table into a „life-situation": It is possible to take books from the Anthropognostic Dishes, read them, make photocopies, talk with the artist about the texts. Conversations between artist and audience can be taped on video- or audio tapes and can be stored in thies sculptur.

"Continuance ... here is not identical with completion", Jürgen Raap, a friend of Nieslony’s, writes. "After all, the inventory does not consist of mummified, mortal shells, whose conser-vatory intercepted material decay feeds the misguided belief in values of eternity, but it consists of intermediary results of permanent movability, and that means : Aliveness, process, self-exposure." (He wrote this in sense of the „ Black Kit", a parallel sculpture looks like the Anthropognostic Dishes.) "For this reason I would like to say, the shape itself should not possess shape, but should only be the certain ending of a thought, emanating from one point evenly to all sides."

This innermost idea of the romantic art-conception, which Clemens Brentano makes his charakter Godmi speak, is expressed in a third part of the Paradise piece: in the photographs. In an expanding number of pictures they document the ongoing story and history of the table, each part being part of an infinity in time. There the objects of the table embody the unlimited number of possible connections. With the ‘viewfinder’ of his camera Nieslony filters balanced structures from the existing object-constellations - snapshots from a pre-existing harmony, where the experience of an original unity flashes from deeprooted memory.

Nieslony with his works asks for the meaning of art. He is not concerned with "constructive uniqueness" (1), but with the possibilities of art as medium, which can trigger activities of the soul, aiming at metamorphosis, development and rebirth. Religious mysticism describes this attempt at inner harmony as regaining of an earthly paradise. Nieslony formulates very similarly:"Atlantis, advances towards a central event: Experiments", he notes in connection with a different method of his work.

Nieslony does not deduct the principle of creativity from the ability of having free access to an existing material. He rather understands it as a constant polarity between active and receptive behavior, as an ongoing process of enriching experience. He imagines to installing his Paradise table in a Cathedral, in places "which through cults of transformation create time in an atmospheric way

„Andata e Ritorno! Si, si, al Paradiso"

In his asthetic thoughts Boris Nieslony uses Johann Wilhelm Ritter’s physical theory as a model of reflection. At a time when the sciences began to specialize extensively, becoming more abstract and less personal, Ritter speculated with the concept of totality. He wanted to "move the spirit to stay, that was vanishing from the natural sciences" Ritter’s plan was to let physics become an ‘art’ . "Scientia vitae, theoria vitae (Science of life and theory of life) would have to be the title of the future, completed physics. The former would be implied in the latter. My future book will have to deal with life." In an analogy from reversed perspektive, Nieslony is providing art with the right to a scientific way of viewing it. The romantic theory with its universal claim is very current.

There is a strip of paper on the table, with the laconic sentence, "Roundtrip! yes, yes, to paradise" (1). The strip is arranged into a Möbius-strip, an endless loop, on which the motion of the gaze runs back into itself, moves from one side to the other without having to cross a threshold. On an endless way paradise is easily reached. Subtly this arises in a poem by Ezra Pound;

"I attempted to write a Paradiso

Don't stir
let the wind talk
so it is the paradise
Lot the gods have mercy with

what I created
Let the ones whom I love have
mercy with what I created

Vgl.--Compare Aus=from Zit-von=quoted from

1 B.N.;complete quote:"As founder,ones duty is to expose ones work not only on one level (the equation work+work=Museum),but on many levels. Avoiding Worlddesigns, to create movement does not mean to encode ones own works on many layers or to create constructive uniqueness; it is attempted to mount this work of obsession in a complex field of relations" and: "Einstein's remark, that he was always disturbed about the impossibility of multiplying a horse with an apple, achieves an obvious point of view."

2 the möbius strip, lettered in italian, is a present to the artist from Viola Kiefner.