subject: frühmorgensgoldenstund from: rudolf steiner <rudolf.steiner@hausamgern.ch> date: fri, 10 may 2002 06:39:09 +0200 to: barbara meyer cesta <bmc@hausamgern.ch> what I wanted to tell you: the thakis, the original wild horses, travelled across the western plains of the uni ted states a long time ago when a heavy winter came along and they all froze to death, except some who emigrated to mongolia where the evil man dschinghis khan conquered the whole world from their backs and forgot a few in spain, from where they went over to mexico by boat with the evil man cortes to convert the heathens, but you know all that about juan diego and the virgin mary who appeared to him as an aztec goddess, but by that time the little horses had long crossed the desert border to the united states as migrant workers, where one or two indians rode them while killing the evil settlers before these invented the colt rifle (a colt is a male baby horse) and barbed wire, which the Indians and their przewalski’s horses, named after their polish discoverer who found them in the wilds of mongolia and decided that all wild and domesticated horses in the world had descended from them; this was in the year 1879 I believe, so at the same time as edward muybridge proved to the world that galloping horses at certain moments lift all four hooves off the ground – this research was a commission by leyland stanford, then one of the richest men in the world, constructor of the railway that led right across america, horse breeder, founder of a university and a wine grower who aimed to overshadow the wines of the old world, but although he had the biggest vineyard in the world the weather didn’t play along, it got too warm so the harvest was ruined and turned into brandy, an excellent brandy, if contemporary sources may be trusted; but we were talking about the wild horses of the american plains who cut up their legs on the new barbed wire that partitioned off parcels of land into cow paddocks and – because the bison had already been hunted to near-extinction – were shot as dog and cat food, sometimes sold as table meat to the europeans because americans rarely ate horse meat at the time, after all the ole’ cowboys would have been more likely to eat their best friend than their horse, but that didn’t stop them capturing some of the animals and sending masses of them to south africa, where from 1899 the english waged a senselessly brutal war against the boers and the boers conducted a senselessly brutal guerilla war against the english (the indigenous population is barely mentioned in the sources, but they did nothing but suffer anyway), so in any case the English put up a monument to the formerly wild horses who were slaughtered heroically in battle, in port elisabeth – in this same war, a photograph was taken of three australian nurses, who looked after the women and children of the fighting boers as they were dying from various diseases in the concentration camps (another glorious invention of the time); also on the picture is a dog, with an isabelline coat (although the photo only shows him in black and white of course) with two noticeable whorls of hair running counter to the rest of the fur, the first picture of a rhodesian ridgeback, a cross between the dogs of the hottentots and the dogs that the boers (settlers from the netherlands) had brought to the continent in the 16th century to enjoy the pleasures of the hunt in their new home; a breed therefore that was able to put up with the extreme climate, protected farms from unwanted intruders and could even hunt lions in a pack – by the way it’s also very family friendly dog, but has unfortunately been listed as an attack dog in germany and england; in the czech republic I met one of these charming dogs, it belonged to an old punk and dropout who lives in one of the many nearly deserted villages on the austrian-czeck border in a shack with the dog and a horse (whose coat is also isabelline) and whom everyone calls the indian because of his Mohawk, when I met him he was lying drunk in his garden, and the dog’s name is atta because it was born on 9/11 – but that’s a different story; I really wanted to tell you how the wild horses that remained after the boers war were transported to europe in their thousands because of the first world war, where barbed wire was again in use as well as machine guns, and because the war was so boring in the trenches, a few talented soldiers began making horse carcasses from papier-
mâché, which they then used as sniper cover on the battlefield; the snipers would shoot his enemies through a hole in the horse’s midriff – truly a contemporary version of the trojan horse, quite suited to modernity. by the way: muybridge shot his wife’s lover with a smith & wesson nr. 2, not with a colt, and leyland stanford lost his only son to an accident in italy. in the night before his death, this son appeared to his father and asked him to do good in the world, so the father founded stanford university. he quarreled with muybridge however, or rather muybridge quarreled with stanford, because stanford collaborated with a certain stillman to publish the book “the horse in motion” in which muybridge was only peripherally mentioned. stillman by the way was present at the exhumation of a certain phineas gage, whose forebrain had once been grazed with an iron bar, leading to changes in his personality, including irritability, risk taking, uncontrollable mood swings: all traits which the defense also attributed to muybridge (in his case as a result of a carriage accident) and which was meant to save him from the gallows, but finally the jury agreed that they could not condemn a man for a deed which the members of the jury said they too may have committed considering the circumstances. In retrospect we are very grateful to this jury, for had muybridge been hanged we would still not know that horses can keep all four hooves up in the air simultaneously. in south africa by the way there is a winery called scher penheuvel (like our pilgrimage site in belgium) and on an american cemetery the image of the virgin mary was first discovered in the trunk of a redwood tree, and a few days later on a branch cut from a tree at the other end of the cemetery. ever since, people have been going there to pray and make videos and take pictures. in poland the image of the virgin mary was discovered in the window of a tenement building. a young woman named julia butterfly sat in the top branches of a huge old redwood tree for two years, more than 50 metres above the ground. every two days a support team came to bring her food and batteries for her cell phone and notebook as well as taking away her rubbish. she only came back down when a conservation order was placed on the tree. a while ago the trunk was heavily wounded after it was attacked with a chain saw. the police are so far searching for the perpetrators to no avail. in his first film sans soleil, chris marker mentions hitchcock’s vertigo and the spiral of time in kim novak’s hair and the scene in the park with the redwood giants with the giant cutaways of the trunks with their growth rings … a) the two oldest stuffed horses are to be found in the armory of the royal museum in Brussels. the mare apparently carried isabelle on her ceremonial entry to the city on 5th september 1599, the stallion was dear albert’s – but there is some doubt about this, because the white stallion is also said to have saved albert’s life during the siege of ostende 1601–1604, by taking a lethal bullet to the throat, an injury from which it died a year later – this, however, it impossible because (according to the most recent x-rays) the aorta had been severed, meaning the stallion would have bled to death on the battle field – unless the story actually took place at the battle of nieuport in 1600, no one is quite sure. in any case the oldest stuffed stallion in the world has a hole in the neck and his hind leg is at such a strange angle that if one wanted to get a live horse into this position the sinews would need to be severed. it is astonishing how impossibly most equestrian statues are posed, even most paintings of horses impute impossible movements to their subjects: the so-called dummy position was particularly popular, the front legs stretched forwards, the hind legs backwards. It isn’t clear why isabelle’s mare and albert’s stallion were preserved in the first place, perhaps only because it was possible? b) if we start with the growing suspicion that ingestion (to eat a large number of foods with the greatest of pleasures) is our artistic strategy, that is, everything ingests: the place ingests the pictures and the viewers, the pictures the viewers and the place; and if we also assume that the viewers are to be fed (usually indicative of a special effort and a particular reason), with long-term consequences: that they stop trusting their digestive system and keep coming back for the next hundred years or so until they can’t differentiate between their optic rays and their intestines, so that they may even end up ingesting themselves in the sodium vapors of the street
lantern by which we meet after the exhibition – if we assume all that we’ve advanced a little way through the stained glass windows with the tags we stole, looking out towards the criminally disfigured wall where they came from, the wall that excludes us with its secretive demeanor (there is no need to exclude us) and therefore takes us back to the horse which we might embody as it ingests us. for if we were threatened we could protect ourselves in this horse’s belly, with the help of its body we deceived the enemy, although the fissures in the baby’s skin on the wall behind us might reveal how porous and idiosyncratic our own skin is, our skin that surrounds us, protects and nourishes us, but would also separate from us if the suffering became too much. so the mild gaze of the virgin soothes, it rests on the fox and we look at it too, because we are ingesting, insinuating ourselves so that we may look at the exhibition from our vantage point in the optic ray emanating from the virgin’s eye, showing our inverted image to the viewers who wonder about the clever fox who has encased his snout in gold and in whose belly an organ may play. should the door be a trap door that leads in and out of virtual space without being locked, but which is flat like a perspectival line drawing of a mousetrap that will be displayed among other plans when one approaches the fox, still almost clueless as one grasps the handrail?… c) I am thinking of a mousetrap as a grid when foreshortened and as an inversion of perspective. I am thinking of the virgin of guadalupe and of the direction in which to cleave human skin and the bunch of roses and the fox with the gilded snout and the camouflage horse into which I can crawl – falada, falada, the little rocking horse is the horse of troy is a sniper horse; many hounds catch the fox the bloody fox, blood red roses in winter and little lord jesus asleep in the hay with the crown of thorns; the handrail as a playpen as a barrier tape as measuring bar as signpost; the gate is the trap is dürers perspectival machine is eternity is the matrix is the model of a grill which is the cross hatch on mary’s face is the direction of cleavability of human skin; the lamp is the sun is the eye of god, of the king, of the security state and enemy of graffiti tags and the opposite of privacy and intimacy; tagger’s are hidden from the eyes the public, because they do not belong to the king and they fear the lamp, which winks however, it winks with one eye, is half blind like the eye of our lady mary who watches us and we watch her who carries the proof of her existence in the apple of her eye, the eye of god of the king of the public state; that’s why the artists are showing a video that shows them in weapon training: where do we look when taking aim, do we face inwards like the walls of the kunsthalle? the heraldic stained glass as a farewell on the occasion of the anniversary are the marks of social duties fulfilled, they are the tags of the bourgeoisie of the family clan, the scorch marks of the herd: je suis au roi is more precise than the color; the signs, who before they become signs already carry signs within them, the burn marks, the tattoos in living skin stay visible on the skin of the dead, the wrinkles, the fissures, the matrix, finally the color of isabelle’s shirt that took on the color of skin, during war, during a siege, and it is also the color of the horses best suited to war … d) where is there honey in the rock and where is the shirt of isabelle? To start with I would suggest erecting a lattice grill (with a door in it) which as a perspectival drawing foreshadows everything one encounters later with regard to duchamp, dürrer and the monastery of st. urban, whereby the concept of perspective as a two dimensional representation would shift to a perspective of the mind, gathering together the thoughts of the landscape to correspond with the gaze of the fox, in the sodium vapor of the street lantern by which we meet after the exhibition and in a window that looks straight out into the crown of a tree, in the second room, we might have a glass window installed according to our instructions. robert could make it in warsaw, it’s pieces would be cut and transported as fragments, before being assembled on site, a window that leads outside as an inversion of the gate, the initial perspective portal, as one descends the staircase. one approach might be to organize the space in just such a way that it might exist for – let’s say – one hundred years.