I had been shortsighted for a long time until, at the age of fourteen, my poor eyesight was diagnosed at last.
In school, I was considered an oddball because I did not copy into my notebook what the teacher was writing onto the blackboard - in fact, I could not see it. Whenever I realized that everybody else was writing, I wrote down whatever came to my mind or drew patterns in my notebook. In other words, I did not copy what was to be copied, but copied those copying.
At soccer, I was considered a maverick because whenever I had the ball I did not pass it on: I could not see my teammates in the clear. Whenever I realized that players around me started to run, I instantly started to run in the same direction. In other words, I did not play the game, but played a player.
What I did see were basically patterns, grids, ornaments, arrays of colors: chalk-white on the blackboard or the cluster-forming colors of the shirts on the soccer field. Then I was prescribed glasses. The number of diopters I needed caused a shaking of heads. Why hadn't I said anything, why hadn't I indicated how weak my sight was? How could I? For me, what I saw, and how I saw it, was my reality, and I had never known any other. I had learnt to take a close look with a weak eyesight and to move around in what I could make out. With the glasses, my reality moved into focus - and the astonishing thing about it was that reality seemed to disintegrate at first. Now I could see a bald spot on the back of the teacher's head, while he was writing on the blackboard; or I saw a blemish on his neck, which deprived me of the feeling of harmony that had hitherto been found in the whole, and this shattered the impression of the purposefulness of every dot and every spot, in brief: every single particle, for the order of the whole. Or I saw dust dance in the shafts of light that sometimes fell through the windows - this was no longer light that created an enlightening stripe-by-stripe orientation for the eyes in this classroom with its dark furniture and that smell of sweat and Lysol, but rather a diversion. The most insignificant particles were cast in full light.
Strangely enough, when I learnt to see through my glasses, the array of light and shadow, of colors and surfaces did not seem more distinct, but, on the contrary, less clear and somewhat blurred in its structure. Not only did I have to learn to see things anew, but rather - in order to see anything at all, now that I could see at last - to see them with a sort of double vison: the diversity and, somewhere in it, the familiar reduction and abstraction. Thus I did not only learn to see the dust particles in the light, but, more importantly, to see the light again through the dust.
I think that this is what Claus Prokop does: to see things anew, distrusting his "own glasses" - questioning visual habits through a new view and taking his bearings of them in the unfamiliar. He has a double vision which he also directs our gaze: he sees patterns and grids where there is life and he sees an image of life in what we perceive in terms of structures. Art as a reflection of reality is always a reflection of reflections - reality is not to be had otherwise: it already is a reflection as soon as we start to reflect it. The reflection of a reflection, however, is its neutralization at the same time; not an image, but the image of images, not an idea, but the idea of ideas, in other words: a grid, a pattern, a structure. But any grid has holes in it; and however powerful visual habits may be, they work like a sieve, and anything they cannot hold will run through and arrange in new patterns.
Claus Prokop is as much of an oddball and a maverick as I was before I learnt to see. However, he is it in a clairvoyant way. I can see that.
Robert Menasse
Preface to the catalogue „Claus Prokop“ 1998
In school, I was considered an oddball because I did not copy into my notebook what the teacher was writing onto the blackboard - in fact, I could not see it. Whenever I realized that everybody else was writing, I wrote down whatever came to my mind or drew patterns in my notebook. In other words, I did not copy what was to be copied, but copied those copying.
At soccer, I was considered a maverick because whenever I had the ball I did not pass it on: I could not see my teammates in the clear. Whenever I realized that players around me started to run, I instantly started to run in the same direction. In other words, I did not play the game, but played a player.
What I did see were basically patterns, grids, ornaments, arrays of colors: chalk-white on the blackboard or the cluster-forming colors of the shirts on the soccer field. Then I was prescribed glasses. The number of diopters I needed caused a shaking of heads. Why hadn't I said anything, why hadn't I indicated how weak my sight was? How could I? For me, what I saw, and how I saw it, was my reality, and I had never known any other. I had learnt to take a close look with a weak eyesight and to move around in what I could make out. With the glasses, my reality moved into focus - and the astonishing thing about it was that reality seemed to disintegrate at first. Now I could see a bald spot on the back of the teacher's head, while he was writing on the blackboard; or I saw a blemish on his neck, which deprived me of the feeling of harmony that had hitherto been found in the whole, and this shattered the impression of the purposefulness of every dot and every spot, in brief: every single particle, for the order of the whole. Or I saw dust dance in the shafts of light that sometimes fell through the windows - this was no longer light that created an enlightening stripe-by-stripe orientation for the eyes in this classroom with its dark furniture and that smell of sweat and Lysol, but rather a diversion. The most insignificant particles were cast in full light.
Strangely enough, when I learnt to see through my glasses, the array of light and shadow, of colors and surfaces did not seem more distinct, but, on the contrary, less clear and somewhat blurred in its structure. Not only did I have to learn to see things anew, but rather - in order to see anything at all, now that I could see at last - to see them with a sort of double vison: the diversity and, somewhere in it, the familiar reduction and abstraction. Thus I did not only learn to see the dust particles in the light, but, more importantly, to see the light again through the dust.
I think that this is what Claus Prokop does: to see things anew, distrusting his "own glasses" - questioning visual habits through a new view and taking his bearings of them in the unfamiliar. He has a double vision which he also directs our gaze: he sees patterns and grids where there is life and he sees an image of life in what we perceive in terms of structures. Art as a reflection of reality is always a reflection of reflections - reality is not to be had otherwise: it already is a reflection as soon as we start to reflect it. The reflection of a reflection, however, is its neutralization at the same time; not an image, but the image of images, not an idea, but the idea of ideas, in other words: a grid, a pattern, a structure. But any grid has holes in it; and however powerful visual habits may be, they work like a sieve, and anything they cannot hold will run through and arrange in new patterns.
Claus Prokop is as much of an oddball and a maverick as I was before I learnt to see. However, he is it in a clairvoyant way. I can see that.
Robert Menasse
Preface to the catalogue „Claus Prokop“ 1998