Anna-Sophie Berger & Reinhard Voigt at GROTTO

One can always claim this: the transition from dreaming to waking does not bring us the sensations that were already present in the dream; and after waking, illusions continue to persist (for example, one embroiders the mechanisms of awakening instead of embroidering a phantom). (Simone Weil)

Text as image and vice versa, the crumbling universality of the grid, a division that blurs flip-flops, tiled in.

I think of Adorno’s much-maligned essay on jazz and think: differences in quality everyone, over the course of their own work, occasionally makes a real blunder. I think about how familiarity with this Adorno quote has almost entered pop-cultural consciousness. I think: what a time to be alive.

When I am asked to write a text for the exhibition, I am in the process of clearing out the apartment of my recently deceased grandmother. I am stunned by the piles of cross-stitched tablecloths stacked in folds. Countless hours of craftsmanship, a trousseau, the woman’s entire pride. Cross-stitch and grid, I think:

logic of standardisation.

I, who despite better judgment usually order my own shoes one size too small, read online: With the same model from the brand Florsheim Shoes, the US president has recently begun gifting his White House staff unprompted. I read that they are almost always too large. Whether this is because Trump, who enjoys guessing shoe sizes, misjudges them, or because of a male anxiety based on his claim that one can tell a lot about a man from his shoe size, remains unclear.

I think that the division into applied and fine arts has long since become obsolete to us; I think: a distribution of the sensible (Rancière) in lifestyle part-time, always doing two things at once, I think:

that the dissolution of aesthetic regimes threatens to be reversed in the authoritarian turn of politics, I think: logic of standardisation.

I think: what a time to be alive.

Text by Sophia Eisenhut