Is Art real? A short lecture on reality by Gijs Frieling. One of the things that I think have to do with reality is that, for things to be real they have to be connected to all other things. So when I heard that Wouter was handing out leaflets, I decided that I wouldn’t show any slides and also wanted to hand something out. Then two weeks ago I was in the garden of W139 and there was a huge fig tree as high as this room, and I thought this was so beautiful, so I have brought some of the leaves to hand out here. They also smell wonderful (Gijs hands out numerous fig leaves).  The second thing I want to connect to is casted wax like Maria Verstappen has shown us. Eight-een years ago, on my foundation year before art school, we went to Monchengladbach where I saw a large work of Joseph Beuys’ in the museum. It was this huge cast made from paraffin origi-naly made for Skulptur projekte Munster, a cast of the space between a balcony and the slope be-low upon which the building was built. This was a huge space, 2.5m long and 2m wide, tapering to a point. This form was casted in paraffin and I think they did lots of calculations to see how long this paraffin would take to solidify, and so started casting it about three months before it was origi-nally supposed to be shown - over ten years before I came to see it. At that time, when the sculp-ture was supposed to be moved to its exhibition space, only about 10cm of the outside was solid and the entire inside was still warm and fluid. So they couldn’t actually move it, it had to stay there. Yet Beuys, with the quick mind he had, decided to respond with a statement saying, ‘Joseph Beuys has made a sculpture that will never become cold, (which when it came down to it was really his main ambition with the social sculpture). So ten years later when I actually saw the work in the museum, these huge white/yellowish blocks on these wooden pallets. There was also a ther-mometer sticking into the side of the thing, which read 29 degrees or something, which was cer-tainly not the temperature of the gallery. Since I already new a bit about the story behind this work, I was really enthusiastic about the fact that it was still not cold, that was really wonderful for me at that time. I went up to my teacher then, someone I really looked up to, and said, “Have you seen Joseph Beuys’ sculpture, he’s made this sculpture called ‘Joseph Beuys has made a sculpture that will never become cold or solid’ and it still isn’t cold after ten years! It’s fantastic!” He came with me and looked at it and then said, “I think that when this thermometer is real, its not art at all. I’m not interested whether that is the real temperature inside it or not.” – So that really changed my life because from that moment on I decided that it is really important that art is not real, it is extremely important in fact that it is never real. So we go from the paraffin to the flame. Now you have a candle... Try to imagine that the most individual part you have is the flame and that this flame floats into a completely endless dark spa-ce. You are the flame and there is nothing around you. Dark emptiness. Imagine the first object that would appear in this space, like a falling fig leaf, a piece of paper or so on. This would be the first thing seen by the light, and by you. The thing you would probably feel is that you have seen something real, this would be reality and would also in a way, ‘wake you up’. When you would be only radiating light in this eternal space, it would make no difference if you were awake or asleep because you would just be there. Then this piece of paper would appear -or something catching the light- which wakes you, changing and drifting away as you watch it. You would tend to think that the object you see is the real thing. In a certain way we tend to think that reality has something to do with density. So the more dense things are, the more solid they are and the more real they seem. Which is true. Yet I would say that it is a naïve mind that thinks that this density of reality is at a one to one connection with the density of matter; that the more dense the matter is, the more real it is. People may say that a rock is more real than the colour green, because the colour green can shift into lots of different colours whereas the rock can stay put. To a large extent we are all quite naïve, and it all works out quite well in the world because we all tend to believe this feeling. However, the density of reality is pro-bably more related to the flame -to yourself and your perception of reality- than to the density of the rock. I want to give a small example, something about my eldest son when he was six -I prefer not to bother my kids too much with the idea of Darwinism– so we raised them with the idea that they were created by God. This idea of course promotes debate in the school classroom with those who learn that they come from the monkeys. I had this conversation with my son about this girl in his class and he said, “In her family they don’t believe in God, they also don’t believe in the mon-keys – she has learnt from her mother to believe in herself”. So I said to my son, “Well, that seems like a good idea huh?” But he wasn’t very enthusiastic and so I said, “But don’t you believe in yourself?” and he said, “Well, I think I probably believe more in God, because he can make a hu-man being, and I can’t!” and then after some seconds he said, “I would like to see this small box of meet from which God makes humans”. Reality and density are one thing, and then reality and attention are another important thing. For example as Wouter said, “For artists art is real and for truckers trucks are real”. So when we are a bit flexible we can have our attention devoted and directed to trucks, although we are artists, which then makes the trucks become more real for us too. So if we direct our attention to certain things, it is this attention that makes things become more real. That has to do with the fact that at first we perceive things and perceive them intensely, they inform us and so we get some knowledge about them. These two things make the things we are looking at real. You see them, you perceive them, you smell them and you get some knowledge about them and then they become real. Another thing I won’t get into now is how this relates to whom you choose to be your teachers. Instead I’ll only give two small tales told to me by someone I chose to be one of my teachers. The first, he told me a couple of years ago about a family of farmers who looked after my grand-mother’s house in Switzerland. The parents of this farmer would often walk across the fields in the Alps, and when they happened to come across a lot of chamomile growing there, the woman would bow and the men would take off their hats.  The other was about a man who was with his family in a museum looking at some El Grecos. This man said, “I don’t like El Greco so much, especially those strange cold metallic colours…I was doing my best but couldn’t connect with those paintings”. But then this man was standing next to a woman looking at the paintings when he noticed she was singing, very softly, and he asked her, “What are you doing?” and she replied, “Yes, to see these colours of El Greco, you have to sing a bit for them. Then they show themselves to you”. Another thing that is important in accordance to reality is knowledge. When you say something is real, the one question of course is, ‘How do you know?’ This is a very important question be-cause we don’t know that much, and we tend to think these days that there is a lot of knowledge in the world - but I would say, knowledge that is not really within you is not really worth very much- I’d say that things that are said about reality that are ‘proven’ where for example, ‘research has shown that…’, are always things that are used as an argument in favor of a certain reality and of certain kinds of things that have too much value in our times anyway. Since, what is it worth to attribute a reality to something when you do not have the knowledge yourself? You should have the knowl-edge yourself or else treat these things freely as beliefs.  This is what brings me to the leaves and then back to art. For instance Adam and eve were in paradise and were not supposed to eat from the tree of knowledge. Knowledge was restricted to them and when they did eat from it they were suddenly ‘unveiled’ to each other. They saw each other naked both physically and metaphorically. This was really a shock to them and they were ashamed. So the idea of nakedness and then knowledge certainly have something to do with each other and also, I think, have to do with art. Since in a certain way I can have the feeling that our love for the world is tested because the world is made so naked for us. And so, I would like to say that art should be like a fig leaf to reality, covering the overly naked world. That is what I wanted to say today.