On Marina Moevs
MAY-JUNE 2019
by Dr. Dirk Lanzerath
Thank you very much for this invitation. I feel very honored to be part of the opening of Pluto and the opening of your exhibition, Marina.
For me as a philosopher it is always a bit ambivalent to talk about art, since the medium of philosophers is language. In contrast, art can be considered as a way for the expression of our inner self, beyond ordinary language capabilities and how it assists our process of embodiment. So, what can a philosopher do?
Dr. Dirk Lanzerath introducing Marina Moevs’ work at the Summer 2019 galerie PLUTO Vernissage.
When we philosophers address non-verbal talks, we consider them as non-propositional expressions, as qualia. This is to take up Ludwig Wittgenstein’s famous last sentence of his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent." This does not mean to stop talking, but to start with a different kind of language, like the language of art: The language of art is talking about the unspeakable and visualizing the invisible—using our multiple repertoire of senses.
With these senses we get in contact with our environment, with the world we live in and what we share with other beings, humans, animals, plants, landscapes, artifacts.
The senses are our emotional existence that make us hungry, make us share our food, make us into sexual beings, make us love, make us into listening beings, make us sing, make us into beings that are full of passions. Our passions are the motor of our life, of a life of beings that are not satisfied with the now. We consider the future by reflecting our past.Therefore, we recognize our environment as an existing past, a perceptible now and a thinkable future: this is our natural and artificial environment. In this existing past, perceptible now and thinkable future there are: boats, trees, cars, rivers, cottages, living beings and many more entities...all of them are subjects/themes/topics of Marina’s paintings.
The way we look at the world around us, how we perceive all of these things in our world is not intuitively natural, although our senses are the senses of a natural being. Rather, we have to learn to educate this relationship between senses, mind and body. It is a daily, never ending training program and process. We philosophers call this “embodiment” a part of our educational process that is not just rational, it is also a learning process of our affective sphere. John McDowell, the Pittsburgh philosopher, calls this process of embodiment “Bildung,” he uses this German expression, “Bildung” (formation).
Art is one of our important means to support this "embodiment" and "Bildung.”
Marina takes us by the hand to help to embody our self. Art is an important source of our self, to use this expression of Charles Taylor. Marina’s art helps us to learn to see the visible of the now, the invisible of the past and the uncertainty of the future.
Her paintings are full of what is valuable for us, but what disappears step by step because of our exploitative behavior. Obviously, any scientific article or political speech is not strong enough; we need the language of art like a protest song. Between a realism like Edward Hopper’s paintings and abstract art, like the white monochromes of Robert Ryman, Marina’s pencil drawings are visual protest songs. Marina helps us to talk about what we cannot talk about, she is a translator of the unspeakable. This is to break the Wittgenstein’s “silence.” "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent."
I hope that we now are going to spend a lot of time feeling the expressions of Marina’s work and talking about the unspeakable in our crazy and more and more incomprehensible world.