lamp

HAUTLAMPE
GIANT TRAVEL LAMP

GIANTTRAVELLAMP 1999 coproduktion: HIKE

backround text about the giant travel lamp and the holocaust monument from 1999 :

My first sight is a surreal Object, just a much to big table lamp...

But it has a background in reality and history. And it has a connection to the present discussion about the future holocaust monument wich is a very hot theme right now in Berlin. Since years the polititions get paid for talking and talking, and can´t find a solution what kind of monument they should build. For me the discussion is a farce, as long as victims don´t get reasonable indemnity, and the real "monuments" Auschwitz/Birkenau and all the other concentration camps itself pulverize! The discussion smells like hypocrisy.

The lamp can be seen tastelessness, but it´s a symbol of tastelessness in political way of acting!
The Lamp is a symbol of warning ,thinking, what cruelty humans are able to do.

In the latest period of my artwork, I was busy on the item "Trophies". Man kills to have a souvenir to show off with. Safari, hunting sport, war- to improove with strengh and power - a male dominated thing. I tried to understand, what gives people a reason to act like this. Then I found the story about a woman and she is said to have given order to kill humans to make trophies (shades, bookcovers...) out of their tatoowed skin. So I started the attempt to look behind the subject of a woman`slamp ill perversion under the covering help of a fashist regime.

Her name was Ilse Koch, she lived in the time1937-44 in the KZ Buchenwald as the wife of the commandant.
The trophies were given as corruption gifts to high ss-chiefs to hide enrichment on the property of the prisoners in the KZ.
The woman Ilse Koch was a house-wife and mother of three children. In my phantasies I saw a woman repairing the socks of her husband or with an embroidery work., warm and cosy light came from one of the corps-lampshades. It´s kind of like reading the bible under a hill of corps!
For me this is a non-understandable contrast. It´s what provoked me and i wanted to put this piece of art in the public room of discussion.
The work of a housewife: keeping, cleaning, doing things that are not to be seen the next day....frustration...everything has to be white, clean and innocent. With the might she had in her position in the KZ, she was able to rub out the marks of the prisoners, people who gave the lifelong statement with their tatoos : "I do not belong to the society, I don´t want to be white and clean, nobody is innocent." (btw: probably it was sailors and outlaws, whose tatoos were taken, because jews are not allowed by religious law to mark their bodys)
About the tatoo drawings on the lampshade:
The pot: The german name Koch means "Cook" in english
Hands coming out of nowhere. (no one wants to have known about the neighbourhood getting transported away)
Do they open or close the pot? Once Pandorra`s box was opened, the evil of the world was set free to destruct.
Lot´s of today people try to keep the cover down, they don´t want to know about their own perverted inclination. (and the ones of their ancestors) They live under pressure, so the perversion seeks for an uncontrolled outlet.

Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it
LIGHT INTO THE DARK!