Martin Disler. Art Random Series (Book 78)

Martin Disler

In may 1984, Martin Disler sent me a postcard from Japan, where he felt rather upset about the highly aestheticized form of daily life. The picture showed a scene of hell: desperate people in a sea of fire. Next to it some calligraphic lines - Jigoku Zoshi (Scrollof Hells), Kamakuraperiod, 12th century. Disler wrote in addition: "going through martial arts".
The sword makes real that small space between the cult of alienation and death: there, Disler might first have noticed in Japanese culture, a reference to himself: he, the European, this "possessed one without vulgarity" (as his artist-friend Helmut Federle called him), he, one of those ever excessive artists who simultaneously work with tenderness and a sharply critical consciousness. Their desire is to "let myself paint", as Rimbaud said, Arthur Rimbaud who was Disler's favorite author during his early years when he mainly wanted to become a poet, but also was painting and drawing and much else besides. Rimbaud said of his own writing: "It thinks me. It is someone else; pity the wood that finds itself to be a violin". On in Disler's words: "The main issue is always: will it be dead or alive when it leaves my hands? For a short while during the process it's me that appears on the sheet of paper or on the canvas, and then I slip back into myself....I'm always involved in this process of overcoming; you might say I have given up myself. The images take on their being and later, when I took at it, I need time to see, to understand where it is all about. It's then that I'invent' life".
"I disconnect myself". For Disler, this is the necessary condition to diving into that 'letting-myself-paint' consciousness, which is not at all a passive state. The condition is double: on one hand, giving up all certainties; on the other, being prepared for a (non-martial) battle. It is more of an erotic condition, a "stepping into the motion of creation", like an imaginary union of Venus and Mars.
"I begin to blush, then it starts to come, hello hello, and then I let go". This has little to do with the elevated forms of meditation and selfcontrol that may lie at the base of Asian art forms (even when Zen, and in factevery kind of lyric -- like the work of Richard Tuttle-- served as examples for the early works of Disler, that were already then both tender and excessive).
Disler's creative activities usually begin with an eruption of drawings. "Drawing is my weapon against drying up, against getting too complicated or conscious of small similarities... There is a tremendous and terrible itch, it's mythic... and then it is released". This rush of drawings however is not the immediate preparation for painting and sculpting.
The number of these always grows and forms a large group of works that are alternately worked on in an unbelievable tempo, in a sort of choreographic process, until they are shaped in a dense, final form. This great number of drawings, watercolors, paintings, etchings, woodcuts, sculptures, and sometimes written works accompany and at the same time embody this 'stream', while the other works form the islands'. The important thing is that they cohere, they correspond to an increasing commitment to the whole, to life and death, to suffering and fulfilment, to constant striving and 'fighting'. In them are to be found "the moments I feel myself a living entity. It is almost areligious feeling; and, of course, it is the experience of love".
Disler's oeuvre can be understood, according to its content, as the field of tension between 'Umgebung der Liebe' ('Environment of Love' the title of a large 1981 panoramic painting, executed for a certain challenging site), and 'Oeffnung des Massengrabes' ('Opening of the Mass Graves', the title of a 1982 work, included in this catalog).
In one of Disler's poems, Jackson Pollock says: "I'm dripping lights and sipping death". Roman Hollenstein has said: "Like a hungry jackal, death hovers around Disler's paintings". These paintings and sculptures, moving and rebellious at the same time, aren't created in a mood of naive energy or in a state of a strong consciousness of death only. They ultimately raise the question what people want in their lives in which the will to destruction becomes ever more strident--and the question of what life and spirit can bring about in general.

Dieter Koepplin



Art Random Series (Book 78)
First published in Japan 1990 by KYOTO SHOIN INTERNATIONAL Co., Ltd.
Editorial director : Kyoichi Tsuzuki
Art director : Ichiro Miyagawa
Designer : Masashi Kitazato
All reproductions by courtesy of Elizabeth Kaufmann, Basel
Translation : Mariko Ohtomo, Stefan Hogenelst