Retrogradist is an unusual job title. Adi Hoesle patented it. The term describes exactly what the artist, a border crosser between art and science, is about. “I’ve always been interested in whether you can trace a work of art back into your head,” he says. A work is created in the mind before it is translated with a brush, pencil, hammer or chisel. But does art need the classic form of materialization at all? Or can you make something present even though it is absent? Questions like these have been driving Hoesle to new projects for almost 30 years.
He summed up his questions in 2004 in “Subductive Measures”. He took the 50th anniversary of the Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in Armed Conflicts as an opportunity to ask 50 contemporary artists, including Andreas Gursky, Jörg Immendorff, Jonathan Mese, Karin Sander and Christoph Schlingensief, to donate a work.
These works were sealed in metal containers under notarial supervision and, after an exhibition in the Bonn Kunsthalle – “only the sealed stainless steel vessels were shown” – stored in the Barbara tunnel, the central “recovery site” of the Federal Republic for cultural assets, near Freiburg. Nobody has ever seen the work, says Hoesle. But because they were housed in the tunnel, they were identified as important German cultural assets. “Does the question arise whether what happens in the mind of the viewer is already the work of art?”
A special exhibition in the Oberschönenfeld Museum in Gessertshausen, which is well worth seeing, offers an insight into Hoesle’s world of ideas. “I paint, therefore I am” is the title of the show. But you don’t discover paintings or drawings at first. They exist, but initially the large-format photos fascinate, showing an impressively beautiful, incredibly present woman. She is sitting in a roller chair. Due to a disorder of the motor nervous system, known as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), Angela Jansen has only been able to communicate with her eyes for years. She controls her voice computer by moving her pupils, the rest of her body is paralyzed and she has been on artificial respiration since 1998.
Adi Hoesle sees himself as a border crosser between art and science.
(Photo: Christine Hofmann, Museum Oberschönenfeld)
Hoesle has been working with the Berliner for many years. And in 2018 she immediately felt like taking part in the photo session that led to the series “I’ma Model”. “We rented a studio, hired a fashion photographer and a make-up artist,” reports Hoesle. Jansen decided how she wanted to be dressed and made up, with or without a hat, with loose hair or an elaborate updo. Only those who look closely will discover the staging and see that the head needs to be supported, the elegantly spread fingers need to be stabilized.
The creation of the photos was one big performance, says the artist. Before he studied art in Munich and at the Free Art Academy in Nürtingen, he was an anesthetist in a neurosurgical ward, so he was always pretty close to the human brain. During his search for the origin of a work of art and the transition from idea to materialization, he worked with many scientists and technicians, particularly intensively with Andrea Kübler from the Institute of Psychology at the University of Würzburg, who has been studying the brain-computer interface for more than 20 years researched that allows the paralyzed to write and speak.
With fashion photographer and make-up artist: The photos with Angela Jansen are elaborately staged.
(Photo: Adi Hoesle / Martin Jepp, VG Bildkunst Bonn 2023)
Hoesle used the brain-computer interface to invent “brainpainting,” painting through the power of concentration alone. A conversation with Jörg Immendorff, who also had ALS, in 2004 motivated him to do this, says Hoesle. “I wanted to develop a painting option for him.” But when the program worked, it was too late for the painter, he died in 2007.
A sculpture in the exhibition commemorates him: his brain waves milled out of wood, which were recorded by an electroencephalogram (EEG) while he was painting. Angela Jansen also reacts creatively to her surroundings with brain painting. In the meantime, Hoesle has had her standard sentences – mostly requests to the nurses to do this or that – translated into sign language by a deaf woman and filmed her doing it. It seems as if the movement of the hands is the origin of all drawing.
The multimedia installation “Styx” runs on the upper floor: It tells of Sebastian, who contracted ALS at the age of eleven and died at the age of 18. Hoesle met the boy in 2006, already in locked-in status. The father, who cared for the son day and night, asked him to make a film about his child. “He called umpteen times, but I felt like I couldn’t do it, I was emotionally too involved.” He asked the father to attach a camera to Sebastian’s head, a kind of extended eye. When the boy died, his father gave him 8,000 photos and 72 films. “An unbelievable contingent,” the artist recalls.
The video installation “Styx” is a collage of four films.
(Photo: Adi Hoesle, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2023)
He withdrew to a mountain hut in Switzerland, viewed and sorted the material. The result is a 15-minute video installation named after the river that marks the border between the living and the realm of the dead in Greek mythology. “After all, it was never clear to us whether Sebastian was still in this world or more in the afterlife,” says Hoesle. The collage of four films shows the world from the boy’s point of view: siblings and other visitors, once a baby who looks at him curiously. Again and again the end of the bed, the walls of the room, but also trips in the father’s car.
In recent years, Hoesle has dealt intensively with the Braille alphabet. “We see the writing but cannot read it. The blind cannot see it but can read it.” In the video “The Blind Reader”, recorded from the point of view of a blind woman, the viewer follows a woman’s hands scanning a Braille text; she reads three verses from Else Lasker-Schüler’s first volume of poetry “Styx”. At some point, the dots, nothing but small plastic brains, begin to dance under their hands, the text thickens through constant overlapping. The video was made right next door in the Folklore Museum, where Hoesle’s large-format Braille work hangs in the “Über Grenzen” exhibition.
When the 64-year-old Hoesle has doubts about his own artistic work, he retreats to his studio in Babenhausen (Unterallgäu) and paints and draws. Since he ventures so far into science, he sometimes has to question himself whether he is still making art or more science, he says. Then watercolored “walking brain” or finely nuanced EEG caps are created. In any case, he never really lets go of his subject.
Adi Hoesle: I paint, therefore I am. Until April 23rd, special exhibition Schwäbische Galerie im Oberschoenenfeld MuseumOberschoenenfeld 4, 86459 Gessertshausen.