To stand on a plinth promises integrity. »Je suis médusé« strictly speaking means »I have turned into stone«. It does not make sense, to lift down a statue without pointing to the ground and saying: »Please, here!«. But if you run aground, you can build a raft to move along. The horse in its horizontal position might break adrift, as if on wavy sea, and although it is laced to a package, the ropes are loose.
Condottiere Bartolomeo Colleoni went to Venice in 1431, under orders of Gattamelata, and fought seven years against Milan. Then he chose the sides, different times (because he was able to), and thus increased his fame. The annals say without betrayal or plundering. Before he died, he appointed the Serenissima as heiress but set up a dodgy condition. His property would go over if a statue was to come in front of the basilica San Marco. A statue is unnatural by nature and needs at least a name and a place. The Venetians did not like this egocentricity in the townscape. Sanctimoniously an unobtrusive placing in front of the Scuola di San Marco was decided. Both, the knight and the artist, no more experienced the cast in 1488 and the mounting.
The artist, Andrea Dell Verrocchio, was the master of the school that let blossom Leonardo, Botticelli, Ghirlandaio and Perugino. The Bode museum owns his bronze »Sleeping Youth«. Art has always been shifting between cult and defense tower, property and testamentary interpretation of law. The more we get lost in time, and if witnesses are missing, the more the concepts of ›original‹ and ›copy‹ become imponderable. One might cast anew then. »Close and open a space simultaneously«, says Franziska Cordes. The will of a dead person is his last no. The expertise to the community of heirs of Erich Cordes says: It must be spoken of a loose connection and an immediate taking down from the base is recommendable. Please arrange all further steps.
At the beginning or the end: »Well done, badly done, not done.« (Robert Filiou). Freewill remains the utopia of art, all its obstacles included. Consider that to renounce to your rights of action is to give them away without letting someone else have a share. A self-authorized change of an authorship is not only a changing of clothes, it may also be a fertile changeover. And: mechanics are factual. Hands that pull ropes encourage.
The chameleon in its existence is purely context bound. In a spotless manner it mimics the present, 360° beyond understanding, while responding to light, shade and temperature. The chameleon has no reality and no fictional opponent. However, modern subjectivity holds will and illusion. The Self is a perspective appearance, a canalising door with a dimension that rejects completion.
The film installation »Mirage (Club Silencio)« (2007) of Franziska Cordes reduced all elements of perception to the sound of breathing of the artist and translated it precisely timed into the light and darkness of a spotlight directed to the wall. The light was an empty space for illusion and a reduced but potent interface between the artist and the viewers.
Emptiness, deception in consumption. You can conceal the insubstantiality of a food with sugar. You eat but you eat nothing. In baroque era sugar was precious and society devoured hole birds and plants of blown sugar. These sugar objects were consumed as dessert during the deserving, broken open and fragmented. Meat and bread was served in the banquet hall while the sweet nothing was eaten in the secluded, private atmosphere of an adjoining room called the ‘Void‘.
The film »All is full of love« (2007) combined pictures of divers during her sports training with scientific images from the ›Fallturm‹ of the Centre for Applied Space Technology in Bremen, an evacuated drop tube which simulates zero gravity. Franziska Cordes studied one year of astrophysics at the Leibniz Kolleg before turning to art. Her works and exhibitions show a preference for mutual force actions in systems, coordination, statics/dynamics, cause/effect, and an interest in thresholds (in the sense of criticality). They put an emphasis on the relativity in human endeavours, and on resonances and analogies in the context. It is not the mountain that is beautiful, but our distance to it, the air in between.
We may regard the present state of the universe as the effect of what it was at the previous moment. A demonic intelligence which at a certain moment would be able to submit all relations between all elements to analysis would embrace in a single formula the movements, places, and relations between these parts for all time in past and future.
But then there’s secret, self-reflection (the intelligence would have to calculate itself in), interference, and deterministic accuracy dwindles. In physics absolute chaotic behaviour proves to be a white noise whereas in a deterministic system you receive a discrete spectrum. Somewhere in between lies the critical state. Upwards sublimation, downwards splatter and trauma. In horizontal level everything is possible. »Indecency« - no decency embraces also the abyss. In consequence people began fighting wars, and cultivating and aiming landscapes.
Sandra Bürgel