Axel Malik: Bibliothek der unlesbaren Zeichen / Library of Unreadable Signs [Text nach Verlagskatalog / text acc. to publisher’s list:] “Der Berliner Künstler Axel Malik schreibt Zeichen, komplexe, körperhafte Setzungen. Diese Zeichen sind Schrift, aber nicht lesbar. Sie sind Ausdruck der Konzentration auf die reine Schreibbewegung, sie werden zu Text, zu Büchern. Sie sind geschrieben auf Glas, auf Leinwand, auf Wände oder flüchtig mit Licht in den Raum. Inspiriert von Bibliotheken führt Axel Maliks künstlerischer Weg konsequent in diese einzigartigen Wissensräume und zu raumgreifenden Installationen zurück, wie 2015 in Norman Fosters Philologischer Bibliothek “The Berlin Brain” an der Freien Universität Berlin. Dieser Band dokumentiert auch Maliks Arbeiten an der Bauhaus-Universität und im Goethe- und Schiller-Archiv Weimar 2017. Wissenschaftliche Beiträge nähern sich den ästhetischen Paradoxien seiner gestischen Zeichentexte aus philosophischer, literatur- und zeichentheoretischer Sicht.”
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[Auszug / excerpt:] “Although recent approaches in philosophy and literary studies do indeed strive to emancipate writing from the reign of language and to restore it to its own sovereign aisthetic rights, their efforts so far have failed to alter our society’s prevalent common-sense notions in that respect. Too readily is the decipherability of writing taken for granted, too strong are the detrimental effects that matters taken for granted tend to have on the development of further insights. But fortunately, there is art, and art has always reacted allergically to matters of course – especially where its very own media of expression are concerned. Notably in such cases art has often masterfully succeeded in perturbing the order of what seemed evident, tersely and thoroughly shaking the foundations of the supposedly given by virtue of its practice alone until the resulting cracks again laid bare the medium’s autonomy and idiosyncrasy underneath. With his “scriptal method”, Axel Malik releases the epistemological potential inherent to an art form bent on tackling its own mediality in a most conspicuous manner, and thus adds new momentum to the long scholarly and artistic tradition of exploring script as a cultural technique. For more than three decades now, Malik has been inscribing variously-sized surfaces made of paper, fabric, metal, or stone with sequences of graphematic figures whose individual shape is determined by no factors external to the unique act of their respective realisation, and which completely defy any attempt to decode them in terms of attributing to them any kind of linguistic content. The result consists in a vast panoply of scriptal shapes that systematically frustrate all their viewers’ efforts to interpret them linguistically and thus tie their observers down to what is accessible to sensory perception alone. In this way, the focus is shifted to exactly those elements of writing that in our quotidian employment of script are normally bracketed out, letting them assume an independent existence.” [Text: A. Polaschegg; transl.: sinntagma.com]
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