Markus Vater

Markus Vater, Snowman, 2004; acrylic on canvas. Courtesy artagents gallery.

Markus Vater is a German artist who lives in London and works in various media.

The Archive

Trees are not people and people are not flowers and flowers are not straw hats and straw hats are not the smell of freshly picked sorrel and the smell of freshly picked sorrel is not nonoperational lighters. Nonoperational lighters are not belly-revealing pants. Belly-revealing pants are not cigarettes inserted in the mouth back to front. Cigarettes inserted in the mouth back to front are not Japanese people. Japanese people are not motorbikes. Motorbikes are not declarations of love. Declarations of love are not radio broadcasts. Radio broadcasts are not fear. Fear is not heating. Heating is not a neighbor. A neighbor is not a riddle.

If you just fly far enough away and look down on it all, it merges into one. But you have to fly a long way away. Further than you can. To another galaxy. The further away you fly, the bigger you become. In a bar at the end of the galaxy, the really big people meet. They soar several kilometers into the air like broadcast towers while they lean on the bar as if on the wall of a dam and order thousands of liters of beer or Campari and soda. The water in the reservoir glitters like shards of glass. A yellow and blue rubber boat drifts across the expanse of water. You can hear a chain saw in the distance.    

An old man is lying on the bank in recovering position wearing a dusty suit. He is suntanned and there is a book beside him. On the book is a small white flower, like a rose, only much smaller. The man is completely on his own. He is dreaming. His dreams are very orderly. They have a start, a middle, and an end. They often begin in the foyer of the SoHo Grand Hotel in Manhattan, where a young woman is sitting at a low table eating peanuts. The young woman is his mother. She has alert, bright blue eyes and a dark complexion. Looking at her face is like sitting in a dungeon that has just two small windows through which you can see the blue sky of a summer day outside. The young woman is a realist and she does not like being in a dream. She moves back and forth restlessly. She throws peanuts at the lens of the dream camera.   

The dream cameraman is extremely annoyed at having to film such a silly lead. He is tall and has curly hair. He wears a light-meter around his neck on a silver chain. He would much prefer to be at a motorway exit north of the Ruhr, making a melancholic film about the inhabitants of a motorway island. Behind the heavily wooded island, a coal-fired power station blows steam into the evening twilight. Instead the cameraman is miles from home in a hotel lobby having peanuts thrown at him by an admittedly pretty but impossible young woman. The older man lying on the bank of the reservoir wakes up briefly and turns over. “Peanuts.” He sighs and blows a tiny piece of pollen from his nose. The pollen is then carried away by the wind nestling on the surface of the reservoir. No one knows where it flies to. In theory it would be possible to obtain such information. But the information is filed away in the category “unimportant.” Right at the back in the last row of the archive. The archive grows by the day. Soon it will be bigger than the world that it archives. It will displace the world. Of course, the displacement will decelerate as the archive will have less and less to archive. This graph will approach but never reach zero. At some stage the world will then be no more than a gap the width of a hand. It is advisable to prepare for the move into the archive. Anyone who does not adapt is doomed. The old man sleeps restlessly. A beetle crawls over the corner of his mouth. The beetle comes from a family of 31,000,000 eggs of which only 1,000 survive as beetles. He is two weeks old and a cheerful fellow. He has six legs and his build is reminiscent of a shaky silent film diva painted black. The old man rubs the beetle off his cheek and crushes it. That was foreseeable. Death is foreseeable. Dying has the same event strength as writing down this word. Is dying actually an activity? “The man in the red turtleneck pullover is great at dying. He is really good at it. He has been dying for twenty years.” The young woman leans back with satisfaction after making her remark about the man in red. She said it very quietly, with the result that the soundman in the dream turns a few knobs in irritation and shakes his head at the cameraman. “You’ll have to say that again!” The young woman ignores the cameraman’s request. She cannot understand the psychology of the scene anyway. When she has eaten all the peanuts on the small low table in front of her, she starts to pick her nose. The salt on her fingers stings her nose. It really stings. A tear forms on her eyelashes and runs down her cheek. The cameraman is pleased. Tears are always good.