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Uwe Bressem |
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An Essay by Bob Merkin In December 2001 (a dreadful season when the world screamed: Stay home! Hide in your basement! Cringe and cower!) I summoned up a tiny bit of courage and had the great luck and privilege to fly across an ocean and travel to Berlin and finally meet Uwe Bressem. There was much to do and see and little time to do it. But for one half hour, I was admitted to a very remarkable Raum: Uwe's incredibly tiny mail art studio in a room off the kitchen of his apartment. I do not think any artist anywhere on Earth has ever created so much remarkable work in so small a room. Not that hectares more would make better art. A studio the size of a football field would still be Uwe's studio, and the same wonderful dreams and feasts for the eye would come from it. I felt very much like a thief or an imposter to be admitted to this amazing room. My world is chiefly a world of Words, and only in the past few years was I somewhat accidentally seduced and abducted into the community of visual artists, an odd group of people who use words chiefly only when they must, say, to say to a grocer: "Here is money, give me that cabbage now." It is clear that at some very early age, baby artists and baby writers part company at a fork in the mind's road. From that moment, The World is either a thing of image and picture and colors, or a thing of abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz. I suppose what Uwe and I have in common is a need to Grasp the World, to make some Sense out of it as it drags both of us through it on our one fast ride from entrance to exit. Uwe paints its picture. I try to tell its story. (And then there are musicians who sing its song.) Uwe also feeds the World as it races forward. While it drinks its coffee and argues about the issues of the day, it must send down bread and sweets and meats and creams to keep body and soul alive, while the neighborhood works and its politicians and bureaucrats scheme, everybody must eat. If you think that is an unimportant or unartistic thing, then stop eating for a few months. Uwe is a remarkable chef and restaurateur, and indeed, my visit to Berlin was a panicked, emergency visit. Uwe had announced suddenly that he was closing his restaurant in the Wedding neighborhood of Berlin, and I had long been dreaming of tasting this special museum of art for the tongue and the stomach. I dropped everything and flew across an ocean to Berlin and conquered the Riddle of the U-Bahn to eat at the Kantine in the Wedding Rathaus in its final Uwe days. All civilized people are taught to distrust their instincts; I had never had a better instinct, an instinct had never led me to more beauty or pleasure or wonderful fellowship. Every piece of personal mail, every postcard, every letter, is the heart and the hand's way of overcoming distance and separation. Many years later, during spring cleaning, we discover a piece of old mail, and we hold it in our hands, and gaze on it again, and feel things in our heart, we feel a horrible sadness of a past happiness. A friend travelled to India and wrote us. A lover sent us a card from South America; she did not say so, but she knew and I knew we would never be lovers again. Now, years later, you read the card again; the piece of mail has frozen a moment of your heart for as long as you don't ever throw it away. You are reminded of every grace, of every regret, of every failure, of everything that blossomed, of everything that should have blossomed but failed to. And there, hitchhiking along, is a magnificent cathedral. A lovely floral park. The Bridge of Flowers. The Glacial Potholes. Bridges over the grand river winding through the ancient city. The summit of Mount Washington hidden in mist. Uwe wants to find the Meaning of the World in these pieces of mail and in their elements: the envelopes, the cards, the messages, the handwritings, and the stamps, the stamps, their wonderful images. And while my lover and I send mail to one another, Governments officially bang their own messages on our love letters: postage currency numbers, cancellation postmarks, dates, permissions, instructions, approvals. FOR 31 ZORVI THE REPUBLIC OF BORISMUS ALLOWS THESE LOVERS TO SEND THIS MESSAGE THIS TIME. Uwe uses all these elements as he uses vegetables and spices in the Kantine. He does not make a Different or a New World. He receives Our World, locks it in that tiny studio with him for a week or a month, and underneath the bright light and the magnifying lens squeezes the World and shrinks it and imposes new ratios and colors and textures and patterns on it, and when it leaves the tiny studio again -- this time headed for the post office, to travel to scores of mailboxes all over the world -- he has imposed a Different Meaning on the World, a clearer and more blunt and beautiful meaning -- sometimes, often, a more puzzling meaning. He has defeated Greed, he has defeated Stupidity, he has executed Ugliness, most of all he has banished Predictability. Days later his friends around the world go to the mailbox and find his visual thrills waiting for them, and their day is tattooed by a guy in Berlin who worked hard and obsessively to add beauty and meaning to the world. And freeze it, like the postcard from South America. I live in terror that I am not as organized as Uwe's tiny studio, that I might accidentally lose a single one of his magical stamps or pieces of mail. Sometimes Uwe drops mail from airplanes onto the Earth below using parachutes, and sometimes Uwe sends mail into the sky in zeppelins and in rockets. There is meaning in how the world sent my lover's postcard to me. It left her touch, and went through the hands of many strangers. It went on trains and boats, on busses, on airplanes, and yes, by balloons and rockets, yes, why not? Uwe explores and re-creates and even invents these paths very carefully. And then my hand reaches into the mailbox and touches a corner of my lover's postcard from South America and my heart aches. She has moved on without me and sent me the card that I can never throw away.
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