Christo

After half an hour wandering around in the streets, I arrive at the corner of Bismarckstraße, where I feel attracted by two charming things - a small Italian cafe, pressed against a cosy picture shop. While sitting on the table with my cappuccino, I catch a glimpse of the shop window. Frames, digital works and digital copies of fashionable authors and ... ooh!? ... Lithographs of Christo! Can you imagine! Not at all expensive – what are 2-3000 euros for such work? In a corner shop for pictures!?

That’s how it began. I had to rearrange not only the perceptions of how things work, but also the scheme for reality evaluation.

In her letter to a friend of mine Jeanne-Claude writes that upon arriving in New York from Paris, they were welcomed by problems from a scale, they have not even suspected .... and goes on 11 pages further - Christo does not work with sponsors and galleries. He finances his projects by himself.

Did you get the idea? Christo is a brand! Like Gucci. D&G. Mercedes. In this coffee at Bismarckstraße I got the first clear insight and I understood. I learn from a master!

There was this guy interviewing Christo Yavashev.

- Why – he asked – you never come to Bulgaria?

- I have 10,000 clients worldwide, some of them are friends, but no single customer in Bulgaria. Whom should I come to and why?

The answer apparently was not satisfying and the guy insisted.

- You see - Christo told him - I make 18 thousand dollars per day. I have dedicated two hours to you.

Do not go to Berlin and avoid cafes and pictures shops. The danger to be confronted with reality is significant! Stay in your studio, search for inspiration, read art magazines, you can even become Master of Art! Expect with longing the gallerist, the curator and the critic who will understand you. And will sell you!!! And then ... oh, then, no doubt the uncle from America will come. And one day you will be in the top 10 of sales like Damien Hirst. However, you will not be a brand. You will not be a free master. You will be someone’s product. And the story about love of art will be over.

Gift

This song is a gift. A gift for a former enemy, who later became a true friend, honest and sincere, whom you can trust unconditionally, and then a friend until a threshold. If you have not realized that you have crossed the threshold ...

Not that you or he have done something reproachable. No. Just a different setting. Only two very different paths ensue from this. And there is no return.

Each border situation can be considered as a risk and chance. I am an artist, I only register chance, believing that a new idea has the potential to take you out of any situation ... And so speaking, the risk is negligible and does not count. Unreasonable ... but who expects common sense from the artist?

Common sense, according to Einstein, is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.

When descending into the depths of Jean Bernard, 1358 meters below the surface, my man went down first. He's big for а caver and hе noted somewhere in the abyss while threading like worms that as a leader of the group, if stuck, would prevent the girls from making the record. He waited the next widening and let them go ahead.

- And if he got stuck following them, how would they come out? And how would people know they have made a record?

- Haven’t thought about that.

That is the right answer. When you feel comfortable in your special field, you do not even think of the risk.

Jonah, whom we have forgotten

The raw hidden strength of time seeps into the light penetrating through the huge oberlicht encompassing in its simple squares the entire ceiling. The halls bring a sense of final order in  knowledge and sensitivity. There three ancient cultures are neatly arranged and their once eternal power and grace have shrivelled like mummies in crates.

I am smoking on the balcony overlooking the old park of the hotel. A cold morning. The grey having wrapped the trees is not fog - rather the sea moisture coming over in waves. For several days, while smoking, something slowly brightens in me and roams the Pergamon Museum in Berlin.

I am standing next to a simple stone sarcophagus from Mesopotamia, I would have passed by, but the living sense of the paintings stopped me. The academic work of the artist in the expedition. Document-photography is still black and white, art is still fine, artist is still a profession, not a passion. In the rough brushstrokes on the canvas, desert breathes, the air is permeated by the specific light of these distant for a German lands and his admiration for a simple, eternal and natural world is not an official duty. What a contrast between the feeling of an exhibit in the hall and the direct experience in his own world!

Ishtar Gate had been amazing and frightening with its glazed in sky-blue bricks. Lions painted on them resembled heavenly creatures. The monstrous scale of the city had been standing upright like a weird dream in front of you if you were arriving riding a domesticated donkey after a long journey. Your world, sprouted into an oasis under the canvas of the tent had shrunk somewhere in your soul. Such was the suggestion of Ishtar Gate the time and the purpose it was created for. Beauty and Power.

And this museum is only power. And functions. There our old cultures (and they are not old because they germinate each day, with each outright feeling and reflection) are like Jonah in the belly of the whale.

I will remind you the story of Jonah the prophet so that you can feel him like a man.

After all adventures, thrown ashore and once willy-nilly  betrayed the king‘s warning to repent in sackcloth and ashes - climbed a hill to watch how God will punish the city. He lived in a simple tent, and over time a pumpkin grew over one of the poles. One day Jonah saw it withered. Deeply grieved, he turned to God:

-        You sent me – he said -  to tell the King to repent, something which should not be said to a King, and I hid and ran away ... Drowned me with a boat ... Threw me in the mouth of a fish, threw me ashore and now what!?You should have demolished the city, and what did You do!? I had only one pumpkin and You withered it!

-        If you – God replied – grieve so much for a pumpkin how am I to sacrifice a whole city!

You see – they discuss and communicate as friends. And we do not. Maybe we're like Jonah the Prophet in the belly of his own Museum. Museum of Functions, Knowledge and Perceptions.

Louis XIV

hardly endured the constant murmur of the king courtiers (for he was a king, not a Tsar) for his favouring of artists. I can - explained the King - turn twelve artists into twelve ministers, however, from twelve ministers I cannot get even one artist.

For quite some time I have been thinking about the next, definitive step for the development of the ARTESTATE project. It seems easier to present it in art circles in the US, and I have already provided support on an art level, which is not even to be mentioned…Really.

I did everything, then I waited painfully the realistic concurrence of circumstances.

The project consists of two equal compounds: Art and Property. I had to become in the property world what I am in art. Brutal economy dominates there, not that in art of the same level it doesn’t. Anyway.

Luxury recommended it to me as a partner and I could not help but catch the strike. Well, there was ... Yesterday I crossed the line. At the moment, I enjoy platinum status in the professional world network. The ceiling. ARTESTATE lives in real commercial situation. A good start for this year!

So, we sailed off!

The horizon behind the trees

The bay can be seen through the branches of the trees in the park. Ships are more like silhouettes. The horizon is blurred in cold grey. Some old trees were beginning to bud these days, flocks of cormorants flew north, and I thought that spring comes following them, but it turned cold.

The park of my studio is also old, surrounded by a hundred high linden trees. The trees are almost unchanged - from the old times, but I do not have pines. Pines and birches were planted along on the Black Sea coast in the 50s of the last century to evoke the landscapes of forests and meadows at the edge of Siberia. Therefore, everywhere the trees are the same size. Those areas in our country possess the intrinsic deciduous vegetation ... as well as all kinds of fruit trees, wild and grafted.

Our culture is also grafted. Something grew and then various shoots from other cultures, covering us in their area, have been joined. Layer upon layer, natural juices had to descend into a variety of new fruits. And if there isn’t constant care, and care means pressure over nature, the wild returns. The real wild this time - only deaf resistance remained because memory about what is natural and normal in the life-giving juices is obliterated for us. And is languishing - and degenerates slowly but consistently.

I heard that some courses at the Academy have been closed, and in sculpture speciality things are also insecure. There were no applicants. It’s normal. Theatre, painting, literature have been systematically joined in the past 150 years. This way of expression is not typical for us and if you ask someone from Varna about thirty priorities, sculpture would not fall among them.

So, I apply pressure in a way ... I would like to create a Sculpture Park in a location with no public, not to mention professional and impartial academic criticism. Ten years ago the literate audience – which grew up for several generations with concerts, galleries and opera, escaped – the closer possible to Sofia. Now if you make a sculpture exhibition in the park there will be no resistance. There will be no reaction, either. I just have to pay. Market society.

Teacher and friend Lubo Prahov made money. Take for your pocket a small plastic published in large print. Look at it meaningfully. A round nickel alloy difficult for an amateur play. On one side there is the number 1. From the other side comes the magically built plastic portrait of St. Ivan Rilski. Low relief from the highest probe. This knowledge is already lost, there is only one other sculptor in our country that still brings forth this millennial knowledge. The relief contains and outlines a horizon of values in whose area the figure one has value and can be freely exchanged. I'll repeat it to you: within the global framework as well as on the basis of established and shared Culture standards there can be exchange. Exchange, means economy. Economic relations are a specific segment in Culture.

But don’t be afraid. whoever's been rich will end up rich. Pain is just a natural process which clears awareness, and truth comes with it. Truth, creativity, love, understanding…such things.

Now I would like to share an audio and a dream with the right person ... Maybe that is how spring comes. I don’t know.  

In the Museum’s Labyrinth

- Mariney, what is TV?

Marin is my lawyer, he is also the lawyer of Register BG and I regularly test through him the no man's land between 19th century terminology, rules from the middle of last century and contemporary legal practices and schemes. Register BG is the kind of monopoly, which would be nice to become one of the pillars in information society. What is right for him, to me looks like a field of undefined the way we do it and obscure cultural and cognitive standards. So it goes.

He sees me looking at him craftily and he remains silent.

- I will simplify the question with a specific issue. How a Television can be frozen by a private bailiff? This might help us define what is Television.

- What do you mean?

- Well –  few thugs come in, led by private bailiff and guarded by police during а TV programme, begin to disconnect and take out the computers. During this time, operators transmit live news in real time. Brutal show!

We had a great laugh.

- Now we know! Television is a computer! Movable property. Right in rem. Later on the bailiff sells those five computers and pays back seven-million-debt. What is the problem with This Right - corruption or conceptual and cognitive inadequacy? They live in the 19th century, Marin.

We serve ourselves another drink.

- I have written some time ago some books or rather texts and I used to store them on a CD. Are those books, because a book means paper. And they are on a CD.

- Books on an electronic rather than paper medium.

- I got your idea. So sculpture is usually and traditionally on bronze or marble medium.

We burst into laugh again and we pour ourselves one more. So, when it’s written in my biographies "Vesso lives in a village," which means that for years I've not been involved in the normal gallery life, should be taken as: I have created art on a mental medium.

That’s how things stand in the Museum.  If "Misal" (Thought) circle had accomplished its mission, things wouldn’t be like that. 

Maybe!? Now let’s look at the better side of this sensitivity.

Exhibit

- Good morning. Coffeе, please.

- Short or long?

- A strong one.

In Amsterdam, if you order a “strong” coffee you are offered some other stuff. I admire more other civilization benefits. For example, "Pliska". "The Wonderful World of Pliska cognac" – as my teacher and friend Lubo Prahov used to say. This was an allusion to Dragan Tenev’s book " The wonderful world of Art". There is no Pliska in the Netherlands and roaming in the morning ice fog I have to carry a small bottle of whiskey to warm myself up.

- Ah! - I see on the shelf behind the girl a small, flat, pocket size bottle of Pliska.

- Could you pass me that Pliska, please.

A puzzled look - it’s only 8 o'clock in the morning

- Who was the poet who said that his best lived time was when he was walking with a volume of Shakespeare in one pocket of his raincoat and a bottle of whiskey in the other? – the girl raises her glance.

The coffee is ready and she puts it on the counter. It is not the same as with Byron. Byron used to walk with two guns – one in a pocket. A poet and a knight, I understand him.

It is cold outside, it is February. The planks of the bench in front of the shop are frozen, I sit down and pour myself some brandy in the coffee. Some exhibits pass by. They do not look at me at all – they are heading to their place at the exhibition.

Long long time, so long ago you hardly believe that it existed, due to my cognitive passion and conceptual frustration, I came across a text of Lenin. Dated 1917. It was just the beginning. The edition was from 1923. Old. Yellowed pages. Authentic. You should only drink water from the source ... So there, the Chief of the Revolution indicates the enemy. "The real enemy, he says, does not wear military boots and a rifle. He is a grey man in a suit, shirt and tie and passes by on the street the same time every day. He goes to a desk in an office. And there, with everything he writes, says and does, he revives exactly that past the revolution must demolish. " A great king! Conceptually he is perfect! It gives you shivers, doesn‘t it?

So…I will tell you some other time about the Museum. It is still morning. I pour myself some more Pliska in the coffee.