continued from yesterday

d. Short-cut of The Art-ist is (a) Present
e. A-dresses being eaten by the moths of the media

Developing my work, I was playing very consciously with the traditional ideas of the muse and of the artist. In Cyberspace it doesn't matter what you wear, it matters what kind of image you create of yourself, you're home-page or ad-dress rather than what Gottfried Keller once said "clothes make the man." Paul Cézanne said in the beginning of this century "We have to hurry if we want to still be able to see something. Everything disappears." So maybe fashion would be just a fashion to be present or to appear?

With these thoughts in mind, I started to use the "artist is present" "Die KünstlerIn ist anwesend" as a title for all my work in 1989. Presence is always referring to absence. When I am there you think when is she leaving and when I am gone, you might think, when was she here or when does she return. Presence also refers to mental presence and/or absence and is, in a philosophical sense, a question of self-reflection and recognition, a definition of yourself in your environment. Presence, according to Heidegger, is synonymous with being and is a function of temporality. So can we still discuss "To be or not to be" or has the question ultimately shifted to "To be present or not to be present." Is virtual presence a form of being? And in this context "what is "being" in relation to fashion versus art." How much is the way you're presenting yourself you're way of "Being present."

To me, by now, the idea of being present has become an existence in my dresses. My dresses have much more become my home than anything else I own. The dress is a custom-made snail shell, a second skin to protect me from being completely perforated by the moths of the modern media.

Fortsetzung folgt...to be continued tomorrow