Cooperation with Bertram Schrecklich.
We had the idea of making art with iron-on beads together with our daughter Gloria almost two years ago, but other art projects, professional and family commitments initially prevented us from implementing it. The crafting medium, which is popular with children, had a special appeal to us on the one hand due to associative, but also optical and nostalgic factors. On the other hand, the practical implementation turned out to be a greater challenge than we had previously assumed. In addition to a steady hand and a tactile feel, a good feeling for colors was mainly necessary. Iron-on beads have not played a significant role in art so far, which is why the medium can be understood as unbiased in this context. A key reason for this is probably the enormous restrictions that characterize working with this bulky medium. The shape of the pegboards, the arrangement of the pegs on them, as well as the size and color of the iron-on beads are standardized and limited, which is why detailed representations are not possible at all or only to a limited extent. Our aim for the iron-on bead pictures was therefore to get closer to the templates in terms of color and composition.
Because of the connotation of iron-on beads with children's toys, it was particularly important to us to first uncover and then question the tension between the lives of children and adults. To do this, we decided to depict a total of ten motifs that are emotionally received and discussed either because of their controversial, polarizing and also vulgar effect or referential symbolic power (portraits of well-known political representatives, religious dignitaries, historical figures, as well as depictions of historical events, scandalous works of art, life-despising weapons of mass destruction systems, or crude pornography). Some of the content we depicted and even some of the images themselves were, or are, banned at different times in different geographical locations, or were or are subject to a certain age restriction. Despite, or perhaps because of, this repressive and/or authoritarian approach to such violations, these contents have the appeal of the forbidden, whereby the imaginations have become so deeply ingrained in the collective memory that a few visual indicators are sufficient to identify the respective motif.Our iron-on bead images, which are pixelated due to the material used, illustrate this fact impressively. The more familiar the respective motif is to the recipient, the clearer it becomes despite the alienation measures. We contrast this content, which is intended to symbolically illustrate the world of adults and the responsibility that comes with it, with a single morally and ideologically unobjectionable depiction that is intended to reflect the innocence, naivety, insecurity and need for protection of children. After careful consideration, we came to the conclusion that no motif conveys these infantile characteristics more clearly than a manga → "Kako Kurai panics" is the name of the work. The facial expressions of the characters in particular are used as a preferred narrative tool to give the recipients non-verbally information about the emotional and/or mental state of the character. Close-ups of faces should therefore always be given special attention. It is also advisable to pay a little more attention to the facial expression of our manga illustration, because it illustrates, despite the alienation effect caused by the material, the increasing dependence of children on reliable, benevolent and loving adult caregivers in a rapidly becoming more complex world.
The specific nature of the medium forced us to make extensive representational simplifications of the sometimes complex motifs, and the optical effect achieved as a result can probably best be described as pixelation of the image content. By using motifs that are not necessarily considered suitable for children, we managed to use the supposed disadvantages of the medium to good effect. We were thus able to "censor" vulgar or, for example, violent depictions, although the image content can certainly be recognized with a little imagination. So we made a virtue out of necessity. In addition, through the alienated representations of the motifs, we were able to achieve a certain mystification, or a liberation, or abstraction from objectivity. On the other hand, we integrated a participatory moment, since it is up to the recipients to discover the actual image content. In order to give viewers the opportunity to independently check their interpretations of the alienated images, we resorted to QR code technology. Scanning the QR codes makes it possible to link the analog iron-on bead images with the original (unpixelated) images.
Winter 2019/2020