What’s up there? “Space, infinite expanses…”—we know.

I’ll start at the very bottom. Although, as Markus Döhne said yesterday,
it can be better to work your way down from the top rather than the other way around. While it contradicts the models that usually preoccupy us, the movement from top to bottom perhaps corresponds to a more subtle conclusion that life experience forces upon us, whether we like it or not.

Let’s start downstairs, where we are in a kind of uncomfortable reception hall, anyway, with a corporate advertising sign promising a mission to be achieved, thus offering the church a nonchalant handshake. The golden urn displayed in a glass case, with which our remains can be shot all the way up, is also a promise of the end. For those for whom all the beginnings here on earth weren’t enough...

Let’s start at the bottom. I remember a scene in Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey where a visitor on board the shuttle on the way to an orbital station is intently studying the very detailed instructions for using a zero-gravity toilet. The problems of the bottom are persistent, even on the way to the moon. That’s only humiliating if you believe you are clearly making progress on the way into space and to the moon. "I’d love to shoot you to the moon!" isn’t spoken to elevate someone, but is a message for someone who is at their lowest point.

Speaking of being through. When NASA, at the height of manned space travel, was aiming for flights to distant planets and galaxies, it was considered that, since such long journeys would never carry enough provisions, the astronauts’ excretions could be repeatedly converted into food during the flight. This is interesting in that it provides one of the most telling analogies to the problem of originality in art. But that’s just an aside.

Back further up.
Talking about art usually mimics the movement of space travel, insofar as this is a metaphor for the conquest of higher spheres in the scientific age. Talking about art usually comes from above and, as such, is often totally out of line. Anyone who has attended more than two exhibition openings knows this. Because this above has usually been reached with spaceships built by others. Therefore, I would like to draw your attention here, at some point, to pedestrian behavior in an exhibition.

The red monkey (no nostalgic Cold War pun intended) in Room One, for example, has giant arms that already reach into the space above him. At the same time, we know that he first has to descend from his height toEarth in a very lengthy process before he can ascend. But the stars are already there as grid points. And in the image in complementary green, he’s already sitting in the space capsule, which is just about to blast off one of its lower stages amidst the stars and let it fall downwards.

The other red monkey, Nikita, holds a globe in the display case over his self-satisfied, grinning glowing head. A result of initiative and enthusiasm, sure... (and of blue seduction). A model of Sputnik, the first unmanned satellite, a globe that the Russians, to the castrating horror of the Americans, were the first to send into orbit, from where it repeatedly flew over the USA. “When the Russians come”, they said.–The answer was, as you know, those giant erectiles with which theAmericans triumphantly shot themselves to the moon. – You look up, and what you see is always the very bottom...

As you can hear, I also try to stay down, while always wondering upwards when I discuss art.

Look at the rocket images in Room Two. The iconic phallic element is so moving because it’s now Cold War folklore. Scientific space exploration is everywhere today, both internally and externally. The days of its naive, especially sexual, metaphors are long gone; we no longer see them because they are omnipresent, just as we all are Freudians, whether we like it or not. They are icons, by the way, technically, a classic icon painting on wood with applied, apparent gold grounds.

[…]

And the display case in that room: do you know what kind of device was encased there which resembles a drill bit? I didn’t know. The artists explained it to me. It’s a syringe used to apply grease to the so-called grease nipples of a machine! I say that to point out how difficult it can be to try and hide in language once one reaches a certain level of seriousness. How difficult to remain unsullied when one wants to get to the bottom of things unsuspectingly. Space travel, if one allows oneself to get involved in it, is a strange thing. Art is also a counter-concept to the astronautical and technical understanding of space travel, as Res Ingold very rightly explained to me. A different kind of space travel.

A rocket you are sitting in has only one destination, an exhibition does not! The back and forth between you as a pedestrian and the entire space of the exhibition is your own ergonomic interaction and participation, how for example, you speed up your pace on the stairs so you can reach the top or get back down faster, how you hesitate, how stubbornly you march higher, how you exert yourself or are curious or bored when you start conversations, when these die down in relation to the works present or when they are stimulated by them. Don’t neglect the time on the stairs between the works and floors. And the time afterwards... – And also in front of the works themselves: What does the relationship between image and display case actually trigger in you? Between motif and raster points? Where do you dream of going? In what rhythms do you hesitate, look, falter...? And where does all this lead you? Forgive this somewhat didactic lapse...

Go one step higher and one step lower at the same time. Room Three is a basement with three defendants and a small proxy ball as the corpus delicti. If the moon, as a Catalan saying on the stairwell says, if the moon is the conscience of the earth, then here you see the three criminals who were the first to set foot on the conscience of the earth. A giant leap for mankind. They look burdened and accused. The autobiography of Buzz Aldrin, the second man to walk on the moon, is not called return to forever but return to earth. Evidently the great task of his life afterwards. Incidentally, he supposedly became an alcoholic, but came back from there too.

But the final word on the descent and ruin hasn’t been said yet. Way up above, in the red-light district, moles dig, earth augers drill, subways run, and boots run through subterranean water. Right at the top, at the end of the space journey, is a catacomb containing a film album from the artist’s life as a burrowing animal. Beautifully placed at an angle in the space and best of all, difficult to read in many details. Not having to understand everything anymore and being able to observe in peace is a wonderful arrival. Even if you realize that it can be exhausting to hold your head high for any length of time.

It’s difficult, you’ve probably noticed. The problem with speaking to art rather than about it is that you have to do two things at once. I’m speaking from the ground station, Earth, with all the instruments I find and the prefabricated knowledge they produce–and I want to perceive and speak simultaneously, like an alien paying an astonished visit to completely unknown territory. Always above and below at the same time. No matter how high it goes.

So what is upstairs?

When I first viewed the installed exhibition last night, strolling through the rooms of the Rocket Tower with its various levels, Res Ingold hadn’t yet set up his projection in the tower’s catacombs. I met the curator Mr Vogel in one of the lower rooms and after a brief conversation said to him: “I’m going back upstairs” – Mr Vogel looked at me and casually uttered the sentence that, better than I might have said, expressed a continually shocking central truth about the issues addressed here and about the most important intersection of religion, church, art and science.

He said, “You know there’s nothing up there…?”