A horse has been hanging from the spire of the Roman Catholic church of St. Michael in Wabern near Bern since the end of Ap ril. The poor animal is tied helplessly to the cross 30 meters above the church square, waving it’s hooves in the air. Hubert Köss ler, the leader of the local church community, in con versation about art, faith, lies and clueless joggers. “Pfarrblatt” : Hubert Kössler, a horse on the church spire – an irritating sight, isn’t it?
straight at its halter and continued on his way. So much for the Baron’s tale. Second ly, the installation is part of the artistic trail “artpicnic“ that leads from the Eichholz all the way up to the Gurten and which will be accessible throughout Euro 08. 1 Thanks to the horse, our church is a station on this artistic pil grimage.
The clueless jogger
As leader of the church community, do you want to support a monument to lies?
Interview + photography: Jürg Meienberg Pfarrblatt, weekly journal of the Roman Catholic communities of the Canton of Bern, 17.5.2008
Hubert Kössler: Recently a jogger rang the bell at the vicarage and asked in confusion whether I knew what was hanging up on our church spire. I told him Munchhausen’s story. He laughed and said he would show his wife and kids the next day. But what on earth do the fibs of Baron of Munchhausen have to do with the church?
Firstly, the context is one of his most fa mous adventures. If you remember, Munch hausen was riding across a snow-covered field, he then tied his horse to a pole stick ing out of the snow and went to sleep. Next morning, once the snow had melted, he discovered his horse only after a long search: it was hanging from the church spire. As a good shot, he freed the horse by aiming
When the American Pre sident tells untruths to go to war in Iraq, he is lying. Munchhausen’s stories, by contrast, work because everyone who hears them knows that they never qui te happened that way. Before the Baron even told his stories, people mutually ag reed on this setting for the tales. They are therefore not really lies, but stories about the imagination’s capacity to transcend reality. Imagination aims to entertain, to lift the spirit, to break down boundaries. As the writer Bruno Schulz once put it con cisely: “The original function of the spirit is fabulation”. The Bible, too, is familiar with this tradition. The Bible? Sometimes the essential is not the imme diately obvious. Take the story of the seer Ballam in the Book of Numbers. He does