Water does not mind

"These are all political paintings," is the first thought I have when I enter Margit Preis's exhibition. Those who know her art may be surprised by this reaction. But in fact, I see in almost all the paintings an artistic response to a world that has been in multiple crises long before the pandemic. A world that poses painful and difficult questions: "How to live in a world marked by so many disasters, war and violence?" "Who is the human being in such a world?" For me, the exhibition and the performance are Margit's answers to these questions – admittedly not directly political answers, but answers refracted through aesthetic reflection, in which Margit Preis expresses her image, interpretations and ideas about the relationship between the human being and the world. In a certain sense, they are spiritual answers that show themselves in the artworks – and they suggest a long-standing struggle for an answer to these questions that has been achieved in freedom. This interpretation is probably due to my "déformation professionelle": I am a Catholic theologian, and I am reminded tonight of the biblical story of creation in the Book of Genesis. It is also a response of people who, in the midst of political repression and countless crises in exile, ask themselves the same questions. Their answer is: The world is God's creation – and it is fundamentally good. The human being is God's creature and good, but he or she finds himself or herself expelled from paradise as a result of his or her desire and is therefore free and obliged to distinguish between good and evil. And the human being becomes truly human only in relation to the other, to the you. The answer of the Bible is therefore theological and ethical. The anthropology and doctrine of creation that is evident in Margit's paintings and performance is in some ways very similar, in some ways significantly different. The response is aesthetic. The art I am privileged to experience tonight is for me a mirror of the situation of people in late modernity. Aesthetics is the response to the expulsion of (Western) people from the (supposed) paradise of eternal progress and a way of life that threatens to destroy the planet and the world. This late-modern human is at the same time aware of his responsibility for the crises of the world. Surrounded by images that aesthetically reflect these experiences of a world in crisis, the performance begins with an act of creation: Out of the roar of the sea rises a creature – reduced in its physical appearance to the essential, contoured, delicate and fragile. The human being comes from the water. This is also proven by the theory of evolution – I remember the textbooks of my youth, in which I was fascinated by the pictures of those coelacanths and other creatures that emerge from the sea and are our ancestors. Life originates in water, biology teaches. In the Bible, too, water plays a key role: the primeval flood before creation, over which the Spirit of God hovers; the waters that are separated from the land and thus contribute to order in chaos; the flood that washes away all evil; the Red Sea, through which the people of Israel find their way to freedom; the baptismal waters in the New Testament, in which people awaken to a new, spiritual life. From what waters is the creature Margit represents born? With which waters is it washed? Unlike plants and animals, Margit's creature that has arisen from the waters can dance. The artist takes us into this movement, so unique for humans, which has no use, no purpose, no goal, but is practiced for its own sake and is simply beautiful. Of course, a dance like the one we have seen here needs to be practiced and learned. So Margit's creature probably does not come from the primeval flood, but from the waters of purification, cleansing and clarification. Moreover, the beauty of this dance is neither idyllic nor harmonious, but full of life in all its fullness. So the audience sees an ambivalent creature – between strength and weakness, uprightness and stooped posture, vulnerability and invulnerability, joy and seriousness, strength and tenderness, permeability and impenetrability. This is how the creature dances through the world, surrounded by paintings, each with a deliberately chosen, well-considered place, accompanied by the sound of the sea, as unrelated and indifferent as it is rhythmic and reassuring. An image of nature indifferent to human activity – or of a divine energy that surrounds us? How long can a person dance alone, circling around him or herself? At some point, the dance reminds me of the Sufis, the mystical dervishes of Islam, who – even in groups – dance for hours alone, always circling around themselves in spiritual immersion, without contact to the others. I have always felt uncomfortable with such solos. Will it be also too much for the artist, our late-modern human being? The creature that has emerged from the water begins to make contact with the audience, which looks at the dancer earnestly and transfixed. She looks the audience directly and clearly in the eyes, smiles, flirts, even loses her ring, which is taken by a spectator. The dance becomes dialogic. But how much contact and relationship characterizes the performance, right from the beginning, only becomes clear to me in the course of time and in subsequent conversations about the role and meaning of the music – admittedly invisible to those who do not know that this is not a rehearsed, but a spontaneous and unrehearsed jam. We hear and see three instruments: an unconventional combination of percussion, recorder and the artist's body, listening and responding to each other. This invisible listening, the constant dialog, is constitutive for the life dance of the creature. I myself do not perceive who is calling the tune here – my guess is: no one. Everyone looks, listens and reacts to each other. And this with a perfection that gives me the impression of months of rehearsal. When I realize this, I am fascinated. In the anthropology of the artist, relationship plays a key role – but it is through listening and listening to each other. This is apparently how late modern humans can live and survive. And this kind of listening, like painting, is an art to be learned and practiced, and can only be accomplished in freedom. The theologian in me remembers that listening is also central in the Bible: Faith comes from listening. Here I find this listening represented by this performance. On this evening, I was given an understanding of a concept of existence that is very foreign to me, but which taught me that I "must" pay attention above all to the invisible in order to discover behind the dances and images a view of becoming and life that is characterized by a deep sensitivity to the world and a processing of it in the mode of art.

Regina Polak, Vienna 2023 Translation by Dennis Johnson