Artist: Magnus Andersen
Exhibition title: Spazzacamini
Venue: Neue Alte Brücke, Frankfurt, Germany
Date: March 26 – April 26, 2015
Photography: images courtesy of the artist and Neue Alte Brücke
The necessities of circumstance we turn to virtue. We have done so for as long as we can remember and thus will continue. Circumstantial necessities are realisations of His will and we will dutifully comply. A test of discipline and strength of character, it allows us to live up to the ideals of upbringing, bring your children up as highly as you can, before they wander down to their test. The distractions of their respective age must be confronted. The attachment of the smallest with weaning, the play instinct and magical sentiment in the age of tales equilibrated with work, the striving of pleasure, defiance, disobedience and self-puffing of the chit-chat child with the worlds hardships, and in the phase of pubescence, fraught with perils, youths turbulence can only be contained by shame. There must not be mingling of Eros and Sexus without the presence of the Lord.
So choose the chaperone wisely. He shall be a man of great rigour, well respected, a loose hand for loose minds. He shall be your sons and daughters keeper. Else the wreckage of moral havoc will engulf our mountain.
The winter comes and they must go like the storks, in search of nourishment they see lands and towns. You mothers who weep and scream like drowning cats when you part from your child, these are not the screams of birth pains, these are screams of furies! You want to strangle them with your umbilical cords? These bonds must be used as a longe. Only dressage makes a good horse. From their last confession off they go on a journey, purifying and enriching, the present guidance coming from afar and coming from the past. Where there is virtue, piety, obedience and cleanliness, there will be mercy.
Off daddy you go now, hike up to the meadow, the spade in your fist is clenched tight. Then dig up a marmot, in fall when my times up, and Mama starts crafting my flutes. Please dig me a grey one, the red stay away from, it hisses and pisses and snaps. And then I will tame it, give sugar and cane it, until it can whistle and dance. High rocks I descend from, dark valleys, I stride on, no echo exists where I go. Where patrons are burning, the coal in the chimney and all that is warm needs a scrub. I crawl in the chimney, scrape coal there, must breath air, so burning and bitter the snot. Hop hop little marmot, now begging we must walk, to venues of mundane métiers. Im blowing the flute and Im covered in soot, such is music amusement for folks. The ladies are stroking my marmot invoking, the dance of the marmot in tact. So ladies and gents, put your hands in your banks, and then shell out some bills for my thrills. See these chasms I dote, no yawning I vote, oh marmot take note never back to my goat.
– Lorenz
