lukas hofmann / saliva

Sospiri

National Gallery, Prague

Performance: Dec 15, 2018

lukas hofmann / saliva

An Infinite Gravity
Lukas Hofmann
By Pablo José Ramírez

A long time ago, in the western highlands of southern Mexico, an old friend, community activist, and shaman told me in a grave voice that everything that matters is liquid. I said I didn’t quite follow, but he didn’t respond. Instead, he showed me his back and bent to run his fingers through the damp dirt. At the time, I was traveling throughout the Meso-American region, doing research on non-Western art practices and their relation to mysticism. We existed together in silence until he turned to me and said: “Everything related to life is in a liquid state: water, blood, semen, chlorophyll…”

He was commonly known in the community as Don Carlitos. An eccentric man, he was always wearing white Nike sneakers — maybe because of his daily excursions up and down the steep mountains — a small, red bag made of colorful Mayan fabrics (with who knows what inside) draped over his left shoulder, and a black cap. He was a smart talker and a skillful, eager jokester.

Later that evening, at a Mayan ceremony, he was feeding the fire in the middle of a circle where a group of around twenty people had gathered. He was repeating a mantra while feeding the bonfire with copal, its marvelous smell filling the air. One could not help but relax amidst the comfort and quietness. Half of the group were trendy tourists donning Nat-Geo garments and looking for a new-age experience, and Don Carlitos knew it. At one point — perhaps when I was making my best effort to get into the ritualistic mood that such an event demanded — he took a break from stoking the fire, nodded towards the tourists, and whispered ironically in my ear: “They love this part of the ceremony.” He was referring to the visual spectacle created by the growth of the bonfire.

It seems that a sense of irony was as important to Don Carlitos as the liquids that he said give life. He took the ceremony quite seriously while at the same time maintaining a healthy distance from any kind of sacralization or empty mysticism. Liquidity, then, is about a state of matter, but it could also be about a certain state of truths, about the mind itself.

Liquids are the keepers of time. They act as a planetary archive, preserving the coding of the future safe from human knowledge. In this way, liquids guard the DNA of time, as they are never present but always ahead.

Hofmann’s work is difficult to define, but not because it encrypts a meaning that feels too late or too soon to access. Instead, his work becomes more of a zeitgeist, which must be read through the medium of contemporary art itself. Everything is exactly as it appears, and that itself is suspicious. However intimate it feels, its alienability pushes the public to different levels of abstraction.

Saliva is Hofmann’s moniker, and now I feel like theorizing about it. I want to think about its biological use and its cultural predicament. When we kiss somebody, for example, billions of microbes and bacteria are exchanged. We kiss someone, of course, because we desire to, and in doing so, the microbiological exchange becomes more of a collateral effect. Saliva is the entanglement between a conscious mind and a sensitive body.

When we chew, larger amounts of saliva are excreted, disintegrating food molecules into smaller particles so the remaining biological processes become easier. It is an organic collaboration for the single purpose of extending life. In Q’anjob’al Mayan communities, for example, it is a common cultural practice while making tortillas for loved ones to chew the cooked corn to form the masa. Saliva, in this way, can be read as a bio-ethnical code — again, mind and a (racialized) body.

lukas hofmann / saliva

A group of performers moves randomly through a gallery space carefully staged by Hofmann, singing well-known pop songs. They interact with some of the exhibited pieces while never touching them, creating a sort of auratic tension. With their tongues forming an arch with the upper lip, they carefully touch the red strings with moss inlays hanging throughout the space. They pull each other’s bodies while trying to carry a dead weight. Later, they hold their partners’ noses and mouths to hold their breath. At some points, the bodies seem exhausted, as if confronted with an existential void. At other times, they appear to simply be playing.

The notion of a broken body, coined by Friedrich Nietzsche, might be helpful here. He thought of the German army and its inability to experience freedom and movement as the opposite of dance. To dance is to move with no agenda and no discipline. A broken body is sensual and unpredictable. It knows no rules — its fate is infinite gravity and collision.

If we look into contemporary dance, we might find some clues as to what I’m talking about. What we witness is liquidity in the movements, which tend to take a ferocious distance from the discipline of fixed bodies. To dance is to move like the unstable predicaments of deep ocean waters; these movements are the antithesis of our automatic daily routines. They are playful and mischievous.

lukas hofmann / saliva
lukas hofmann / saliva
lukas hofmann / saliva
lukas hofmann / saliva

Vulnerability arises in Hofmann’s performances as a way of interaction, a sort of common ground, which gives a chance for collective subjectivities and a broken collective body to take place. Its paradox seems to lie between individual subjectivity and the collective entanglement. Bodies interact in a way that is conflictive and anxious, yet tremendously empathetic — a kind of Romantic Irony embedded in a vertiginous libidinal economy.

Silence is the counterface of text, a post-discursive enunciation. There is something that doesn’t need to be said in order to actually express something, which would be like saying that meaning is entangled somewhere between words and silence. A text is an ecology saturated by loneliness. Following this logic, meaning is not allocated in the single action of a single body’s enunciation, but in the entanglement of bodies and absence.

Hofmann’s performances and installations are most often bridged by a liquid entity: water, bodily fluids, steam, breathing — which seem to work as passages; modes of interaction with the Other. This collective practice produces its meaning based on its very alienation. The alien body is an emissary from archaic times; there is nothing to be discovered behind those bodies, no truth beneath them, but their immanent palpitant singularity.

lukas hofmann / saliva
lukas hofmann / saliva

I mean, this is not a humanist project. It is not about holding hands while singing together, but more of an ontological experiment. When I think about the artist, the image of a sort of millennial post-communist-shaman-kid comes to mind. This image is actually able to take place in my brain just because it is ironic and senseless, which I particularly enjoy.

Bodies are a sort of post-industrial motif, while auratic states of matter (vapor, liquidity, fire) and pop songs work as a collective mantra where memory and time are rendered until there is no meaning to be discovered. Let us remember that secrets are meant to be uncovered; enigmas are meant to be lived in their vertiginous presence through a mirror, an oracle, a grimoire, a piece of moss, or some mushroom music.

At the ceremony where Don Carlitos built a fire to the point that I was afraid the surrounding woods would catch, the fire pit felt like the center of the universe. I must admit that despite the small interruption from Don Carlitos and his joke about the tourists, I was falling into a meditative state. I realized that the fire pit worked as an enigma at the center of the group of people, that their attention was centered on a sort of non-human entity that spoke to us all amidst that infinite silence. It is not by chance that many non-Western cultures have learned how to read fire. To read an enigma is a plurilingual act of translation, an alchemy — fire is not a state of matter, but a reaction to it.

lukas hofmann / saliva
lukas hofmann / saliva

The famous quote by the media theorist Marshall McLuhan, “The medium is the message,” seems to resemble Hofmann’s artistic imprint. A fashion show made of stolen pieces of clothing from a Swedish furniture multinational offers a hint of what I’m talking about.

Performers enact a fashion show wearing stolen Ikea clothes. They walk around the circle that the group drew in the gallery space beneath Hofmann, who is hanging from the ceiling, moored with ties over a board. At the beginning of the action, the group of performers gives some “security guidelines,” evoking the safety instructions of commercial airplanes. The action is more of a b-side of post-Fordist capitalism, its miserable hyper-consumption metaphor.

Hofmann’s attitude towards fashion, at least in the space of contemporary art, somehow tries to get rid of a sense of innovation and style — its prosaic nature adds a layer that could make anyone suspicious about his very intentions: how serious is he about this?

lukas hofmann / saliva
lukas hofmann / saliva

A post-fashionable attitude towards the body and its garments seems to detonate the most eccentric motifs emerging from the vestiges of industrial modernity: an apocalyptic song of decay and creation. The bodies are ethnically diverse. Their attitude is prosaic. Their garments are colorful, broken, troubled, ragged. One cannot ignore that beneath those clothes (or armors, as fashion designer Yamamoto refers to his clothes), there are different bodies claiming different ethnic backgrounds and different skin colors.

Now I think of Don Carlitos’s ceremony, of the bodies, fire, and entities that took part in it — I think of the biotechnological operations emerging from those ephemeral communities and materials, where time behaves differently and something takes place in that relation between One and the Other. I am thinking of it as ontological experiments at a laboratory of weirdness and amusement.

Steam, boiling water, a blackened room with a steaming pool that feels like a dark ecology where people are fatter. The environments seem carefully curated: fabrics hanging around the space. The event is happening; Hofmann is joined by others as they sing a corny pop song in the middle of a wet space filled with organic material: sadness and a palpitant nostalgia. The fact that nobody is alone as one views this performance may reduce the weight of anxiety. Somehow, the acceleration of the outside world decreases, and I find myself in a cosmic bubble extracted from a Carpenter movie.

Special thanks to my English editor, Sam Simon, without whom this text would not be the same.

lukas hofmann / saliva
lukas hofmann / saliva
lukas hofmann / saliva

Sospiri

National Gallery, Prague

Performance: Dec 15, 2018

lukas hofmann / saliva

An Infinite Gravity
Lukas Hofmann
By Pablo José Ramírez

A long time ago, in the western highlands of southern Mexico, an old friend, community activist, and shaman told me in a grave voice that everything that matters is liquid. I said I didn’t quite follow, but he didn’t respond. Instead, he showed me his back and bent to run his fingers through the damp dirt. At the time, I was traveling throughout the Meso-American region, doing research on non-Western art practices and their relation to mysticism. We existed together in silence until he turned to me and said: “Everything related to life is in a liquid state: water, blood, semen, chlorophyll…”

He was commonly known in the community as Don Carlitos. An eccentric man, he was always wearing white Nike sneakers — maybe because of his daily excursions up and down the steep mountains — a small, red bag made of colorful Mayan fabrics (with who knows what inside) draped over his left shoulder, and a black cap. He was a smart talker and a skillful, eager jokester.

Later that evening, at a Mayan ceremony, he was feeding the fire in the middle of a circle where a group of around twenty people had gathered. He was repeating a mantra while feeding the bonfire with copal, its marvelous smell filling the air. One could not help but relax amidst the comfort and quietness. Half of the group were trendy tourists donning Nat-Geo garments and looking for a new-age experience, and Don Carlitos knew it. At one point — perhaps when I was making my best effort to get into the ritualistic mood that such an event demanded — he took a break from stoking the fire, nodded towards the tourists, and whispered ironically in my ear: “They love this part of the ceremony.” He was referring to the visual spectacle created by the growth of the bonfire.

lukas hofmann / saliva

It seems that a sense of irony was as important to Don Carlitos as the liquids that he said give life. He took the ceremony quite seriously while at the same time maintaining a healthy distance from any kind of sacralization or empty mysticism. Liquidity, then, is about a state of matter, but it could also be about a certain state of truths, about the mind itself.

Liquids are the keepers of time. They act as a planetary archive, preserving the coding of the future safe from human knowledge. In this way, liquids guard the DNA of time, as they are never present but always ahead.

Hofmann’s work is difficult to define, but not because it encrypts a meaning that feels too late or too soon to access. Instead, his work becomes more of a zeitgeist, which must be read through the medium of contemporary art itself. Everything is exactly as it appears, and that itself is suspicious. However intimate it feels, its alienability pushes the public to different levels of abstraction.

Saliva is Hofmann’s moniker, and now I feel like theorizing about it. I want to think about its biological use and its cultural predicament. When we kiss somebody, for example, billions of microbes and bacteria are exchanged. We kiss someone, of course, because we desire to, and in doing so, the microbiological exchange becomes more of a collateral effect. Saliva is the entanglement between a conscious mind and a sensitive body.

When we chew, larger amounts of saliva are excreted, disintegrating food molecules into smaller particles so the remaining biological processes become easier. It is an organic collaboration for the single purpose of extending life. In Q’anjob’al Mayan communities, for example, it is a common cultural practice while making tortillas for loved ones to chew the cooked corn to form the masa. Saliva, in this way, can be read as a bio-ethnical code — again, mind and a (racialized) body.

lukas hofmann / saliva

A group of performers moves randomly through a gallery space carefully staged by Hofmann, singing well-known pop songs. They interact with some of the exhibited pieces while never touching them, creating a sort of auratic tension. With their tongues forming an arch with the upper lip, they carefully touch the red strings with moss inlays hanging throughout the space. They pull each other’s bodies while trying to carry a dead weight. Later, they hold their partners’ noses and mouths to hold their breath. At some points, the bodies seem exhausted, as if confronted with an existential void. At other times, they appear to simply be playing.

The notion of a broken body, coined by Friedrich Nietzsche, might be helpful here. He thought of the German army and its inability to experience freedom and movement as the opposite of dance. To dance is to move with no agenda and no discipline. A broken body is sensual and unpredictable. It knows no rules — its fate is infinite gravity and collision.

If we look into contemporary dance, we might find some clues as to what I’m talking about. What we witness is liquidity in the movements, which tend to take a ferocious distance from the discipline of fixed bodies. To dance is to move like the unstable predicaments of deep ocean waters; these movements are the antithesis of our automatic daily routines. They are playful and mischievous.

lukas hofmann / saliva
lukas hofmann / saliva
lukas hofmann / saliva

Vulnerability arises in Hofmann’s performances as a way of interaction, a sort of common ground, which gives a chance for collective subjectivities and a broken collective body to take place. Its paradox seems to lie between individual subjectivity and the collective entanglement. Bodies interact in a way that is conflictive and anxious, yet tremendously empathetic — a kind of Romantic Irony embedded in a vertiginous libidinal economy.

Silence is the counterface of text, a post-discursive enunciation. There is something that doesn’t need to be said in order to actually express something, which would be like saying that meaning is entangled somewhere between words and silence. A text is an ecology saturated by loneliness. Following this logic, meaning is not allocated in the single action of a single body’s enunciation, but in the entanglement of bodies and absence.

Hofmann’s performances and installations are most often bridged by a liquid entity: water, bodily fluids, steam, breathing — which seem to work as passages; modes of interaction with the Other. This collective practice produces its meaning based on its very alienation. The alien body is an emissary from archaic times; there is nothing to be discovered behind those bodies, no truth beneath them, but their immanent palpitant singularity.

lukas hofmann / saliva
lukas hofmann / saliva

I mean, this is not a humanist project. It is not about holding hands while singing together, but more of an ontological experiment. When I think about the artist, the image of a sort of millennial post-communist-shaman-kid comes to mind. This image is actually able to take place in my brain just because it is ironic and senseless, which I particularly enjoy.

Bodies are a sort of post-industrial motif, while auratic states of matter (vapor, liquidity, fire) and pop songs work as a collective mantra where memory and time are rendered until there is no meaning to be discovered. Let us remember that secrets are meant to be uncovered; enigmas are meant to be lived in their vertiginous presence through a mirror, an oracle, a grimoire, a piece of moss, or some mushroom music.

At the ceremony where Don Carlitos built a fire to the point that I was afraid the surrounding woods would catch, the fire pit felt like the center of the universe. I must admit that despite the small interruption from Don Carlitos and his joke about the tourists, I was falling into a meditative state. I realized that the fire pit worked as an enigma at the center of the group of people, that their attention was centered on a sort of non-human entity that spoke to us all amidst that infinite silence. It is not by chance that many non-Western cultures have learned how to read fire. To read an enigma is a plurilingual act of translation, an alchemy — fire is not a state of matter, but a reaction to it.

lukas hofmann / saliva
lukas hofmann / saliva

The famous quote by the media theorist Marshall McLuhan, “The medium is the message,” seems to resemble Hofmann’s artistic imprint. A fashion show made of stolen pieces of clothing from a Swedish furniture multinational offers a hint of what I’m talking about.

Performers enact a fashion show wearing stolen Ikea clothes. They walk around the circle that the group drew in the gallery space beneath Hofmann, who is hanging from the ceiling, moored with ties over a board. At the beginning of the action, the group of performers gives some “security guidelines,” evoking the safety instructions of commercial airplanes. The action is more of a b-side of post-Fordist capitalism, its miserable hyper-consumption metaphor.

Hofmann’s attitude towards fashion, at least in the space of contemporary art, somehow tries to get rid of a sense of innovation and style — its prosaic nature adds a layer that could make anyone suspicious about his very intentions: how serious is he about this?

lukas hofmann / saliva
lukas hofmann / saliva

A post-fashionable attitude towards the body and its garments seems to detonate the most eccentric motifs emerging from the vestiges of industrial modernity: an apocalyptic song of decay and creation. The bodies are ethnically diverse. Their attitude is prosaic. Their garments are colorful, broken, troubled, ragged. One cannot ignore that beneath those clothes (or armors, as fashion designer Yamamoto refers to his clothes), there are different bodies claiming different ethnic backgrounds and different skin colors.

Now I think of Don Carlitos’s ceremony, of the bodies, fire, and entities that took part in it — I think of the biotechnological operations emerging from those ephemeral communities and materials, where time behaves differently and something takes place in that relation between One and the Other. I am thinking of it as ontological experiments at a laboratory of weirdness and amusement.

Steam, boiling water, a blackened room with a steaming pool that feels like a dark ecology where people are fatter. The environments seem carefully curated: fabrics hanging around the space. The event is happening; Hofmann is joined by others as they sing a corny pop song in the middle of a wet space filled with organic material: sadness and a palpitant nostalgia. The fact that nobody is alone as one views this performance may reduce the weight of anxiety. Somehow, the acceleration of the outside world decreases, and I find myself in a cosmic bubble extracted from a Carpenter movie.

Special thanks to my English editor, Sam Simon, without whom this text would not be the same.

lukas hofmann / saliva
lukas hofmann / saliva