The following are extracts from my forthcoming self help manual that as
yet remains untitled.
1. Hide and Seek
Franz Kafka’s short story A Fasting Showman in the quartet
of A Hunger Artist turns the artist’s studio into a cage
without its main attraction. By the end of Kafka’s story the ‘showman’
has become so thin that he is indistinguishable from the dirty straw lining
the cage in which he performs his act of fasting, and in using himself
up, has nothing left to show except one final exhibition of fallibility.
Kafka’s story is a parable about the idea of self-display as a masterful
form of self-denial, and as an unnatural and shocking lack of taste. By
the end of the story the fasting showman is dying and seeks forgiveness
by saying he was compelled to fast because of the fact that he could not
find any food he liked and that; “If I had found any, believe me,
I should have made no bones about it and stuffed myself like you or anyone
else.” His disingenuous confession expresses a desire for compassion
and creates a lapse in taste that starves his work of meaning. This confession
oversteps the boundary of his art and presents an autobiographical note
which transgresses his art as a fasting showman, and while it is regrettable
that he needed to come out of hiding he might be forgiven because of his
wit in referring to ‘the bones he made’ of himself. Contrary
to not finding any food he liked, the showman’s discipline enabled
him to metaphorically gorge himself to death on the ascetic ideal of a
gravy train.
2. Nobody likes going to the dentist, but…
If the pleasure of exhaustively returning to the self-portrait is located
within the maddening search for a verification of one’s existence,
then it is like a tongue that cannot stop probing the hole in a rotten
tooth, and the repetition and neurotic waiting involved in the act of
delaying the prospect of remedying this situation becomes a worrying habit.
3. You’ve only got yourself to blame
We moved into the new studio, and since we are artists, we could not bear
the sight of the
dark coloured carpet tiles that covered the floor. We enthusiastically
pulled up the carpet tiles and now we walk around on beige linoleum tiles
covered in sticky glue. We prefer the light coloured floor but we keep
getting stuck like insects. We have been on our hands and knees scraping
for days. The glue is slowing us down, we can’t move as fast as
we used to and the rent is overdue.
Peter Grziwotz
March 2009
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