1

Although I used to write for many years some catalogue essays for very different artists, I was never really able to do what I was supposed to do and somehow to reach the final and common goal to write about their works, meaning discussing the qualities of the conceptual or material objects, naming and comparing them etc. becoming quite sensitive and super self reflective about this permanent condition of non achievement, still I believed it was still only a matter of self occupation but eventually I even had to learn that writing about an artist and not about his or her works would be in professional metaphorism interpreted as gesture that means the work would not be interesting enough. It would be an intense case of a very public offence. I even heard this from real good friends with mostly very complex abilities of text interpretation. But it was too late for such an insight, the text were already published. All of them were and I did not produce any exception. And too late I was left with the hope one day I might be able to redeem the destructive failure of my writing attempts. Somehow I am hoping this might be as well read by those artist as one first evidence of the changes I went through which lead to intense desire for redemption. Although my reasons and excuses were purely good-willed at the time, I still learned my earlier text methodology was in fact still a misperception of my intention and redemption would definitely be necessary. What I did was that I misused the examples of their production. I believed that I have to condense their life into an almost abstract model of artisthood, I should say. I wanted to turn them into an example of what I believed was a good model of how to be and how to live as an artist in contemporary time and survive it in a sometimes hard way but still everything feels like the suffering was done to leave the traces of an exemplary life. Still publishing such writing could be fine, but somehow I hoped with the description of these model lives I would in a second step somehow throw this model into the face of the powers that often unfortunately determine the lives of these artist, but even worse so the conceptions and assumptions about artistic life by these participators of these powers were completely false and inhuman. Altogether my determination for good ended in using them and using someone is always followed by misusing. There was no hope for redemption from such mistakes I felt and kind of stopped or in reality only avoided writing more of these until now Stefan asked me to make another attempt for the e-book publication connected to the record he did with a few other friends whom I don't really know enough to apply such an individualist or even existentialist modes of description and of survey and hope that this empiricist trajectory on one person could be projected on everyone.

Still seduced by the invitation to contribute this text and by thinking I would have understood the issues involved in the production of a text that emphasizes the biographical artists model as medium for compassionate propaganda against everything systemic I should chronologically and most empirical at least start a long text about everything concerning Stefan and the model he and his many different works represent to me, because I consider him as being the greatest model in doing so. -But then I feel that part of this model would also be to even leave this systemic writing by the side and rather tell a story, maybe just about one sound or for me even maybe about americas?

So here is a very little beginning of his huge biography... but let's start chronologically...

It feels like trying to catch too many and even too difficult to explain things so quickly and so complex, as I approach my subject here, artist Stefan Tcherepnin. We met at a party far away in Europe the first time, it was a party after performances, party without clear space permanently moving and once very late arriving in the tiniest hotel room I have ever seen. The room had almost only a light wood bed and no pictures on the wall. The place we talked first was the tinier room, as usual connected to the small room but without door. I was shocked about the big amount of biographical information this unknown man put into me in shortest time and I could only think of America as reason and provenience of such speech excess without formality but high amount of information. But that was then when I had made attempts to live there myself and it was time when many things I just could see were determined by the great endless fascinating continent. I swallowed all these informations with incomparably intense attention. In best case asking myself something like what kind of americaness, american experience is this person displaying here to me, what is the name for exactly this one certain human for such party display. I was being very stupid then obviously, but it was very important to be so too.

The sound of talking in the tiny room reflected, resonated the general outside sound I often projected into the sounds that feel so old arch-american maybe in the stories I read even?

2

Like many others I was always extremely seduced by books about early encounters of Europeans with native Americans from Columbus all through to the period of the civil war. There are too many of them that are really very hard to read, to read all the atrocities the destruction the genocide. It is unbearable to read these examples and having to know that the particular violent event you just read did not happen alone and once but happened innumerable times during this period. But there are as well books texts and reports, letters, relations etc that are most exciting literature and often describing the sweetest and most human events imaginable on this earth. For instance when European explorers, jesuits, traders and others would have found themselves completely lost in the immense country, or when they arrived from the long crossing of the atlantic most exhausted, broken half dead and suddenly out of nothing some of the americans would come and see these sick broken individuals lying on the ground just expecting death and even if they had already bad enemy experience with other europeans, even then the americans would take care of them and would feed them and give them their famous great medical care all for free until some weaks later they were fully recovered. The first encounter literature is so full of these reports, whatever, this for europeans so most strange compassion and sweet care of the americans always touched me intensely and now as I for many months obsessively dived into this kind of literature I wondered what kind of subconscious pattern is there in my personality why am I so attracted by these texts. Suddenly I found out and believe it or not it is simply because almost exactly the same thing happened to me in my own life. Arriving once there most broken, sick and exhausted in America but having the unexpected merciful luck of meeting people who most compassionately and most unselfishly started taking care of me and achieving real miracles with me.

One wise Lakota Sioux was writing that living with all these useless self reflexive and self torturous identity issues are result of living far off from the spirit of mother earth

Once in Liverpool in the hotel we did a poster together, recombining the words of from "The New World" movie by Terrence Malick.

Come Spirit!

Help us!

Mother!

Help us to see and to sing the history of our Country

You are the Mother, we are the maizefield.

And from you! we raise up

Mother

Where are you living

In the fields, the clouds, in the water

Show us your face and give a sign

We raise and we raise

But I am fearing myself

What else is life

You suspect anything?

I will be faithful

Truthful

2 not more, 1, 1, I am I am

Or Another Pocahontas Prayer:

While they get hungry they start digging for gold

The real life changing into a false one

Forgive me mother

I cannot come over seeing you die, I am too incapable of bearing it

We speak the last time to each other, we are not any more your child

I ask myself why I obsess seeing the tragedies,

Why again and again

Why does it all appear as phantasy in evil, this martyrdom of phantasy

Mother, you are my power and I do not have any

You showed me your world, now I have seen

And I wanted to find happiness in all what I see

Next exercise: while living quite happy facing the unbelievable dark mercilessness of history and same time keep praising.