http://www.alflohr.org/

dear alfred: that’s a bit embarrassing for me. but i do think it describes your work relatively well. i’ve never been very ‘camera ready.’ next time, give me a blackboard, so i can sketch out what i’m thinking!  in the same time as i try to think…

Stockhausen on Time

I think that the most important innovations in musical form come about from building on the relationships of three time regions: form, which is everything that happens between, say, eight seconds and half an hour; rhythm and metre, which is everything that happens between one-sixteenth of a second and eight seconds; and melody, which is everything that is organized between one-sixteenth and one-fourthousandth of a second, between 16 and 4000 cycles per second.

Stockhausen: Lectures & Interviews, compiled by Robin Maconie

Stockhausen gives me another way and language to think about your paintings. it’s clear that your paintings have no melody….  unless you paint faster than a speeding bullet! “Oh, Superman…” [laurie anderson] 🙂 [see supaman below]

okay, now i have to complete the Stockhausen quote above:

It is almost technically possible to stretch a single sound lasting one second, to a length of half an hour, so that you have an overall form which has the characteristic structure of the original sound. On the other hand, if you are able to compress an entire Beethoven symphony into half a second, then you have a new sound, and its inner microstructure has been composed by Beethoven. Naturally it has a very particular quality compared to the sound resulting from the compression of another Beethoven symphony. Not to mention a Schoenberg symphony, because there are many more aperiodicities in Schoenberg: that would be more of a noise, whereas the Beethoven would be a vowel, because it is more periodic in its structure…

so, alf, to continue about your work. this brings up a very strange thought – if it were possible to compress middle life in the way Stockhausen imagines, would it yield a periodic, Beethovian single sound, or an aperiodic Shoenbergian, single noise? Perhaps that would depend on the listener… A listener with a comic view of life would hear the Beethovian sound; while a listener with a tragic view of life, would hear a Schoebergian noise?

ah, dear alf, if you were to paint either that compressed sound or compressed noise, or both, what would they look like?

Excerpt from, The Auctioneer

[mdb, semptember 2016]

Epigraph

The Undecidable

The story of how I became an auctioneer features accident more than glory or infamy. The difference, in my case, is undecidable. In fact, one must indulge in fantasy considerably to call it a story at all. For how could a story arise from a series of random events? Even my role is unsettled. It is more truthful, or at least more accurate, to call myself a trafficker. But this distinction too remains undecidable. It is true that I presided over selling both singular and indiscriminate lots of memories to the highest bidders. But it is false that I did so neutrally. If I had, I wouldn’t now be recording these thoughts. Some think that I had a secret advantage, some special power that allowed me to trade in memory with impunity. It is this accusation that has forced me to make this record, to dispel it, if I can, to save myself.

Ro’moth, Recordia-Ath, Bio-01, 2171

hi mark,

I tell myself that I have learned to be more patient in the last two month lying down. [since i fell off a ladder and broke my pelvis].

When a third of my entire art work burned down two days ago in Germany ( not insured of course) I said to myself that I have one storage problem less to worry about.

I could hear Frank Zappa write a song about that.

Amazing how the ruin looks like a Caspar David Friedrich painting just because this building is in Greifswald at the Baltic sea where he was born, lived and painted.