For Man Cannot Be a Dog Novelle montage No 1

For Man Cannot Be a Dog
Novelle montage No 1
Maria Peters

In the exhibition For Man Cannot Be a Dog Novelle montage No 1 Maria Peters mounted paintings, drawings, printed graphic works, objects and text and video works together with texts on the walls to create a spatial installation that functioned as a physically accessible narrative and, supplemented by a reading area and the book For Man Cannot Be a Dog Novelle montage No 1, expressed the artist’s complex and simultaneously highly sen­sual methods of working and thinking.

Maria Peters has developed a way of working with image-text narrative that is entirely her own, enabling her to translate spatial collages into the medium of the book and, vice versa, to transfer content from the book back into the space. She has cultivated the practice of sampling experiences gathered while traveling, in discussions, or while reading. Operating in a similar way to thought processes, which rarely progress in a linear fashion, this practice invites the recipient to skim read, or stimulates him/her to create his/her own personal Novelle montage – to use a term that Maria Peters has invented for this working method.

Hand-written below a painting entitled Balto Dreams of the Polar Sea hanging in the entrance area, we read the following: “This story begins in the Ottoneum, a small museum of natural history in Kassel, which still retains the charm of a curiosity cabinet with its creaking floorboards and labyrinthine rooms.” A sledge dog gazes down from the edge of the harbor onto the rippling waves below. The image is almost a seascape in the spirit of Romanticism, including a foundering ship; we see only its rigging still projecting from the water, at least, if there were not also visible the silhouette of a modern city…

“Wishes creep up on us like wild cats. They seldom appear directly, but make themselves noticed quite gradually. They are expressed in symbols, changing our actions, drawing us as if led by a ghostly hand into situations or places, whose meaning often only emerges much later. And then – quite suddenly – they leap on us from behind.” This pointer to a symbolic level is repeated on the book’s back cover and thus can be seen as a description of Maria Peters’ approach. On the tour, one dis­covered several things about the living conditions of the sledge dogs in Greenland, encountered curiosities from folklore and learnt how the relationship between man and dogs had changed across the centuries. “Can St. Barnabas also heal the illiterate?” stands beside the painted image Dog in the Grave of St. Barnabas in Northern Cyprus. The Saint healed the sick by laying on not his hands but a copy of the Gospel According to St. Matthew. Is the lazy-mindedness of folk religion being mocked here? The video shown on an adjacent miniature screen, which shows a mechanical figure of a dog intended for a nativity scene wagging its tail, appears to support that idea. The paint­ing Coyote by the North Sea cites the video work I Like America and America Likes Me by Joseph Beuys. Beuys had himself locked into a cage with a coyote for a week. Maria Peters saw that video work on her travels through Germany and in the book she describes how touched she was by the vehemence with which the coyote had courted the favor of the strange creature wrapped in felt blankets.

In the room at the back further work dealt with the themes of longing and loyalty. A painting of St. Christopher cited iconic representations and referred to his representation in the southern Slavic region as a human being with a dog’s head, a cynocephalus. In mythology, this being stood for converted wild creatures, i.e. the tamed heathen. The artist combined this motif with the Platonic myth of the once complete, spherical man, who was divided into two halves by the gods. The root of man’s feeling that he is missing his other half is said to derive, therefore, from Plato. In Maria Peters’ work spherical man has been divided into man and dog. The two halves seek each other, and the bond between man and dog becomes a meta­phor of searching for true synthesis between the animal and the cultural.

The oil painting Dog in a Ruined New Building and the text on the wall beside it make clear that the dog, if given a choice between the society of men and life in the wilds, will show a preference for civilization. Here, man’s flirtation with the wil­derness and the natural is taken (also self-) ironically to the point of absurdity.

In the key moment of the story in the exhibition, the sledge dog Balto reappeared. Viewed again from the back – this time set in a sculptural work – he is looking at the central statement: “For man cannot be a dog.” Knowledge gained and the desire for culture ultimately outweigh a longing for the wild – at least in the artist’s imagination of paradise. The Undead Ances­tors stand guard over paradise, which – as a state of continual happiness – does not seem to Maria Peters altogether worth striving for: “We could no longer taste of the Tree of Life. The serpent was clever enough to have its fun with us: seducing us to knowledge but not to eternal life. But so be it. Knowledge of our death makes us productive.” So productive that she even enters into a pact with the Grim Reaper for the painting Death and the Young Girl.

A globe object stood in the small studio area beside the office. Working with Gunter Bakay, the artist carefully erased all the writing on the globe on New Year’s Eve 2013-14. The globe, cleaned and now apparently still unexplored, stood as an object in front of walls papered with intarsia linoprints. These printed graphic works are a kind of analog “copy and paste” – a technique which allows her to embed components such as pomegranates or images of the Virgin Mary into a dystopic, primeval landscape.

Research on a universally comprehensible language leads – at least in our cultural sphere – to Genesis and the building of the Tower of Babel (Babel means confusion). When people began to build the tower, there was global union: “The people are one and they all have one language”. It was probably because these people presumed to build the tower until it reached heaven that God sent the confusion of languages upon them. Maria Peters, who dreams of a peaceful world union, made a second attempt: her Tower of Babel was a rather unstable one – in colors refer-encing Bruegel’s work, she assembled modernist elements in scenes reminiscent not simply by chance of Ground Zero and the trauma of 9/11. By some means or another, the Kon-Tiki – a simple raft that was used in an experiment during the 1940s to prove that the settlement of Polynesia starting out from South America was conceivable – wormed its way into the picture.

Motifs such as these occur often in Maria Peters’s work: some-one sets out to explore something, wants to paint a Polar Sea, to find paradise or Atlantis. That longing to improve the world makes people inventive and creative. Following this train of thought, to a lesser or greater extent we all carry a notion of

paradise inside us – even if it is one in which we reject perma-nent rejoicing and exultation and prefer to take our turn push­ing Sisyphus’s boulder. “The urge to create art is one of the positive side effects of the Fall of Man – for in a heavenly paradise there would be nothing to do.”

Maria Peters *1966 in Tyrol, lives and works in Innsbruck. She studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna from 1997 to 2002. She then worked abroad in various countries such as Nepal, Tibet and Greenland. www.maria-peters.at/

Opening and book presentation: 29.01.2015, 19.00
Introduction: Christoph Hinterhuber, member of the board, Tiroler Künstlerschaft
Publication: Denn der Mensch kann nicht Hund sein, Novelle montage No 1, Maria Peters.