In the following text I intend to philosophically grasp the thoughts and the motives behind the idea of EXIT, capturing them in language. The focal point or the core of this project is a word, which is targeted by the artist as a visual unity of both image and word. Although the actual artwork's final subject is photography itself, its object of interest is only the word “EXIT.” Hence, there is an overlap of two levels, namely of language and image, which Florian Reinhardt expresses fragmentally in square photographs. Subsequently he creates video installations with Filipo Laizzini by composing a larger moving fragment to which a further means of expression is added, which is music.
The conditions and possibilities for this kind of artistic expression are tied to our highly technological present. Within it, the artist, as here, can realize a holistic vision by means of a sole device. The unimaginable extent of the EXIT image library, which has grown photograph by photograph over the past years, reveals two phenomena: on the one hand, the artist's obsession with this word and, on the other, the role of motion picture and photography predicted by Walter Benjamin in his essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility", first published in Paris in 1935:
“The most important social function of film is to establish equilibrium between human beings and the apparatus.”
Last century's technological progress liberalized classical art from its elitist ideas, which had simply been essential for thousands of years. Consequently, the concepts of art expanded and changed. Experimental spaces arose in which new art movements such as Cubism, Surrealism, Dadaism, or the Bauhaus could be conceived by groups of artists. Painters, photographers, sculptors, composers, and writers merged developing ideas and manifestos, from which collaborative artworks originated that continue to serve as an example to the world today, as well as here. Each of the following texts is expected to visualize the photographic fragments of EXIT by fragmentary experimental thoughts and lyrical language, which is presented to the lover in the form of this art book.
EXIT is the withdrawal from external determinism, it is the contemplation before devastation, it is the moment of absolute quietude. It is the second in which you suddenly start seeing and perceiving yourself in life, which is unscrupulous and generous, intoxicating and shattering, light and weighty, tender, and aching–it is fading slowly and yet is always there. Life lets fly to burn–letting burn, to hope. It carries you on a leash of hope, compelling you to grow. Rage, excess, imagery, and escapism lead you to intoxicated dreams in a dream intoxication while you are striving for release from the constraints of life’s rationalism. Life is a labyrinth–an infinite, entangled and interwoven path of billions of lives, a unique closed system, order in chaos and chaos in order; it is formed layer by layer and then dissolves again in the same way–layer by layer. Life attains its form through the one who is living and therefore being at the same time. So, it is nothing other than being now.
What if there was a parallel world, or even a parallel Earth, on which exactly the same things happened, involving exactly the same people who committed exactly the same deeds or mistakes; a new dimension which, by its very existence, permitted the possibility of canceling out mistakes that had been made, thus overriding space and time as factors? It would be the salvation that had become true, it would be the concept of simply erasing events of life and rewriting them; it would be an act of escaping guilt, of relativizing the uniqueness of the moment and the moral consciousness, of completely escaping the consequences of life's doctrine; it would be the perfect EXIT from the self.
Man often tries to flee from his own life. However, this can never succeed fully, as there is no escape from the world inside and hence from our own reality. He constantly turns circles around his own axis, just like the Earth, which follows a physical order in comparison. The imagination of a parallel existing second Earth, somewhere in the universe, might be striking only at first sight. The truth is, this mirrored world would be dreadful. It would expand the illusion of social inconsistency by one more Earth, supporting the misleading idea of inexhaustible possibilities of action and its immediate effect uncritically. There is no escape from your own self, not even a way of mirroring you on another Earth. Escape motivated by the idea of avoiding yourself must fail bitterly. The only question is how deeply your own consciousness acknowledges this fact.
Regarding man, the EXIT strategy does not lie in the possibility of throwing life away like an old, tattered garment and reaching for a new one. The garment that you are trying to shed is your own skin. You are torturing yourself slowly to death by peeling it off. The path of salvation leads all the way through the unsparing, raw, unvarnished confrontation with your thoughts, feelings, yearnings, pain, dreams, expectations, abilities, beliefs, skin, and God. Your God. Only.
Metamorphosis through transformation of thinking is the cognitive process that man will experience to become what he is and not what he shall be. It is the extraction of intrinsic strength that enables him to defy the normative ideas of society. It is death and rebirth.
Human existence is defined by dynamic and static traits. It is dynamic through its ability to acquire, adjust and move through new cultural and psychological landscapes. Static traits are given by nature in the form of biological characteristics to which the human body and mind are inseparably bound. Through them the enormous power of nature is manifested, which will pull man from life in no time and return him back to life. Man is dominated both by nature acting within and outside of him. The contrast between nature and man reveals the fragility and the nothingness of existence conceived in categories of time.
The mind-body-spirit complex is the trinity of opposing principles of the dualistic unity of man: Does he control the body by his mind or the mind by his body? Can he control the pain or does the pain control him? Is pain reality or is reality pure pain? Does man exist as man because he thinks or because he feels? Man is man because he thinks and feels. Overcoming the dualism existing between body and mind or body and soul means the supreme transcendence of human beings.
Life’s principles are derived by means of combinatorics based on the number of previously, currently, and possibly existing men multiplied by the sum of all characteristics of any given human being. Consider life as a self-contained system, i.e. as a mathematical unit in the form of a circle. Thus, it must be possible to deduce a constant analogous to π from life itself. That constant can only be the capacity of creating beauty for eternity in man.
Deus ex machina via deus ex homine: God created man in his own image. For this reason, he tends to be presumptuous and bottomlessly overestimates himself, which condemns him to fall at any time. In what respect does man resemble God? Man is the creation in Creation that creates. He creates worlds of stone and marble, brush and canvas, thousands upon thousands of filmed units, images and of words, in which people can get lost. The creative power of man leads to beatitude and to art, which paves the way to timelessness.
“Brave New World”–a modern slave in the hamster wheel is a man. He is weighed down by the distorted idea of freedom: Man runs, runs, runs, rolls over and falls, continues spinning the wheel, in circles. While doing so, he increases his power of action to the point of self-destruction and total self-exploitation. This is it, the misunderstood freedom: you must not be weak and vulnerable, you must not fail, but keep silent and run until you collapse to death from exhaustion. Hold your tongue. Hold your breath. Be happy.
Man is a playful creature always trying to move boundaries and mountains. This quality is his greatest fortune and his greatest misfortune. Not everything in life is a game. Not all games can man win in life. Let go, this one game is not your game. No games, no games. Playfulness. Playfoolness. Life.
The bestial order of power: when the machinery of evil, in which oppressors, rulers, oligarchs, technocrats and exploiters, human traitors and murderers find themselves, is set in motion, it must inevitably be stopped. In the period between the beginning and the end of the formation of evil, something takes place which we define as history. Art stops evil by detecting and reflecting symptoms of disease throughout the existence of humankind.
Sometimes it is said there is only a small step between love and hate. But how many steps lie between life and death, between the right and the wrong decision–not being able to decide, being torn back and forth, being broken, fighting for life. Man attains wisdom through knowledge. He comes to knowledge through experience. Man is the synthesis of all his experiences. They, however, mean hell. The way to wisdom leads through your own hell.
The human mind is comparable to coal on its way to becoming a diamond under pressure of time. Through enticement and experience, suffering and self-knowledge, life grinds human existence until ennobling or destroying it solely.
