It always depends where one sees something. Those who encounter Ottjörg’s project Deskxistence unprepared in an exhibition cannot at rst glance envisage the complexity of the story behind it. The large prints that shimmer in different colours appear to be etch- ings whose cuts and scratch marks and bizarre surface shapes belong to the tradition of Art Informel. However, on closer examination such a premature stylistic categoriza- tion is not sustainable. Such large etching plates are quite unusual. In addition, a closer look reveals that the various abstract or even slightly gurative lines and indentations are in fact very distinct. The artist does not seem particularly interested in trying to create his own unique handwriting. Sometimes only words or single letters are visible, although different languages and forms of writing have also been used. One can suppose with good reason that we are dealing here with the handwriting of several artists. And we do indeed have the results of a collective production here, in which Ottjörg did not participate himself – the marks that pupils have left behind intentionally or unintentionally on the school desks they were seated at during class. One can nd such scribbles all over the world and Ottjörg has “collected” them over a period of several years. He undertakes journeys to China, to me- tropolises such as São Paulo or New York, visits schools along the more extensive travel routes, or visits the places of his own school education. Marks of existence Scribbles and scratches are a means of expression that have accom- panied the history of mankind since early times. We can trace them as far back as the Stone Age caves and the catacombs of the Roman era and we can also nd them on important buildings today, on which tourists have immortalized themselves with their initials. Walls of buildings and above all public toilets are tattooed so to speak with small drawings, secret messages and obscenities. Ottjörg has been interested for some time in such marks made with pens, knives, scissors or other tools and he also searches for them in places where they are frequently overlooked. Ten years ago he caused quite a sensation with his project Existentmale in which he took the scratched metro windows from fourteen metropolises around the world and used them as printing plates. The gravure printing process that he also used for the school desks in Deskxistence adds visibility to the imprint of that which the metro passengers scarcely notice. They tend to look through the windows or at what is re ected in them rather than consciously looking at their surfaces. The term “existence”, which appears in the title of several of Ottjörg’s projects, is a reference to the fact that the secret codes, love notes and other scratched symbols and messages are also marks with which people manifest an existence that is often scarcely taken notice of. A mark that has engraved itself physically into a surface and cannot be easily removed, which often still exists after a long period of time and tells something about the author even when they are no longer re- membered by anyone. Ironically, Ottjörgs processing of other people’s marks began in a place where these were not intended for posterity. During his studies he shed etching plates discarded by fellow students out of the rubbish and reworked them. Mobile printing plates Ottjörg’s occupation with what already exists is based on the experi- ence he has gained in the sculptural processing of different materials. How does one use an object to make something very different out of it? This is expressed in an exemplary manner by the following observa- tion: “And then you are sitting in the metro and suddenly see all the printing plates driving along.” Using the windows as printing plates provides an opportunity for a different form of visibility, the transformation into another material state. The “driving” printing plates also indicate transportability, travel, without which Ottjörg’s art would be unthinkable, and also the fact that not only bodies but also pictures travel. Since the invention of printing techniques, texts and images have been circulating more and more quickly than human bodies. Today they travel along the digital airways around the world in a fraction of a second, have freed themselves from all their supports, have left every kind of material weightiness behind them. The printed images, when they were printed onto easily transportable materials such as paper, initially left the weight of the plates into which they had been engraved behind them, as well as the plates that mostly consisted of wood and were used as priming for painting at the beginning of modern times. The school desks that have been converted into printing plates are reminiscent of such wooden plates. And the rst prints were woodcuts. The weight of the wooden plate is a material resistance still tangible in the imprinted school desks. The pictures that Ottjörg allows to circulate have not freed themselves from all forms of gravity. They are based on a direct physical contact of the form that is becoming less and less frequent in the age of globalisation. The transformation into another material is also a translation: not into another language but into another mode of perception. Art, documentation, translation The way in which the art historian and exhibition curator Nicolas Bourriaud makes the term translation applicable to today’s ne art, can also be read as a description of Ottjörg’s approach: A translation “transports the object that gives it its power and then convenes with the other in order to present something unfamiliar in a familiar form. I will bring to you what was said to be yours in another language... 1 In today’s globalized era, artists and the art world are increasingly given the task of translating between the cultures. The dictate is initially to overcome the “eurocentralism.” This means recognizing the uniqueness of all cultures and their historical produce. However the problem is deciding which standards one should apply when one does not know the cultural context or understand the codes. A provisional solution applied for example by Okwui Enwezor in 2002 for the documenta 11 that can meanwhile be seen at the Istanbul Bien- nale 2009 or the Berlin Biennale 2010, and which seems to have rmly established itself, is the increased use of documentary formats in photography and above all in video. In this way one avoids a “stylis- tic” judgement that hegemonically universalises the criteria of the western tradition and at the same time corresponds to the need to gain “information” about countries and cultures about which we know very little. We expect that artists from Africa and India reveal to us something about their culture and living conditions rather than their art. The seemingly neutral nature of the documentary however becomes a disguise for a new form of exoticism. The artist as a traditional repre- sentative of the “other” in our society becomes a representative of “another” culture. Nicolas Bourriaud describes the increase in the presence of the documentary format in the international art scene as follows: “The Hollywood lm no longer shows how people live... lms used to provide us with information about the world around us: it seems as if today this programme has essentially been transferred to contemporary art.“ 2 The mixing-up of art and information is accompanied by a strange lack of re ection with regard to the technical parameters. Because the formats with which things are “documented” are by no means neutral but are just as much a product of the “west” as Impressionism or Conceptual Art. One could however criticize “neutrality” from another angle, which can be seen in connection with Ottjörg’s art. Information and narrative In his essay Der Erzähler. Bemerkungen zum Werk Nikolai Lesskows (The Narrator. Notes on the work of Nikolai Lesskow, 1936/37), Walter Benjamin compares “information” with the “narrative”. The tradition of the narrative is based on lived experience that is passed on through word of mouth, embodied in “farmers who have settled to till the elds” and in “trading sailors”: Each of these brings the “client from far a eld”, the person “from the past”. Both forms of narrative were com- bined in the handicraft trade of the Middle Ages because “every master of the trade was a young travelling tradesman before settling in his home town or in another town.“ 3 However “the experience has dropped in value” 4 and with it the narra- tion as a “form of communication conveyed quasi through craft.” 5 It is increasingly being displaced by a new form of communication: by the “information” that “lays claim to swift veri ability” and therefore appears more or less comprehensible.” While the client mentioned here “liked to borrow from wonders, it is of vital importance that the information is plausible.“ 6 What Benjamin describes as “information“ could also be called “news”, as it is dispersed via television or internet. One form of art that can currently be seen in big international exhibitions and biennales seems rather to take on the task of news agencies or re ect media reporting. The use of a video camera for pure documentation is a contrast to the critical approach of the prefabricated nature of the medially commu- nicated experience. However the attempt to report “differently” about the world can be seen again and again; to give a voice to other “stories” about words and images other than those dominant in the media. Ottjörg’s art, which does not deliver any decisive “information” but is based on craft processes, on a physical contact with objects and materials as well as a transfer of direct experiences, can also be placed in this context. While the verbal narrative communicates the “experience” by translating it into the spoken or written word, in Ot- tjörg’s case this occurs through the translation of the experience of the material and object. Benjamin describes the haptic element of the narrative as follows: “Thus the mark of the narrator lingers on the narrative like the imprint of a potter’s hand on the clay bowl. It is the inclination of the narrator to begin their story with a portrayal of the circumstances under which they themselves have experienced what is to follow...“ 7 Ottjörg does not forgo this portrayal of the circumstances because he always wants to communicate the process, which ends with one or more school desks. He also provides “information” here: about the routes of travel, the social milieu of the schools that he visits, the production of the prints. However Ottjörg does not “decode” what pupils have left behind on tables in Jerusalem or Beirut, in São Paulo or New York. His “transla- tion” consists of using the tables, of which he does not change any- thing in terms of the design, as if they were readymades, transforming them into another material state, recoining them, making paper mon- ey out of a coin 8, so to speak. In addition to the basic decision to print the school desks in the form of gravure printing, the artistic “freedom” lies above all in the choice of colour. Ottjörg sometimes uses the same table for several sheets, printing them in different colours, and in this way creates very different moods. Scribbled Art The medium of art is quasi the framework that literally provides a cultural production that otherwise remains largely unnoticed or even invisible – with clear parameters and in doing so allows it to step into the public limelight. What the pupils have scribbled intentionally on the tables or have left behind through the abrasion of their arms, contains the format of print graphics that give the table surfaces, as mentioned at the beginning of this essay, a similarity to Informal Art products. Some artists, who can to a greater or lesser extent be categorized as Informel have clearly been inspired by everyday scribbles, for exam- ple Cy Twombly or Jean Dubuffet. Photographers such as Brassai are interested in the legacies left on the walls of houses and other loca- tions, which one discovers when wandering through the town. Such photographs already belonged to the tradition of the “picturesque” that had emerged about a hundred years previously as its own genre from this new medium that was still in its very early stages of devel- opment. Back then the artists already had an eye for things that were removed from society, or usually overlooked on weathered “pain- terly” walls characterised by signs of aging, although these were not yet de ned by manual marks and scribbles. However the gaze was already consciously directed at a lower level – also in a social sense, which an academic form of art characterised by classicism would not have turned its attention to. An awareness for the material of the medium itself was inherent in this photographic interest in damaged surfaces, as an analogy can be drawn to the sensitive layer in the exposure process or to the coated surface of a print. Direct interven- tions in the photographic layer are also made however they are not as extensive as in lm. Here there is a marginal but continuous tradition of a direct approach to the carrier material. Such “ lms without a camera” were presented extensively in 2010 in the exhibition Zelluloid (celluloid) in the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt. However the focus is more on the experiment than on the connota- tions connected to the process of scribbling and scratching. Jean Dubuffet intentionally incorporates these into his paintings that are characterized by an almost object-like approach to colour. Dubuffet offensively uses the term “anti-cultural” in his writings, originally as an expression of a preference and a means of portrayal that initially appears archaic, one that is marginalized by the standards of aca- demic education in western culture. On the path of alphabetisation One of the most signi cant standards embodied by a cultural world is alphabetisation. The clarity and distinctiveness of letters as compo- nents of enlightened Modernism that are held in high esteem nd their expression for example in the typography of Bauhaus. Despite the frequently playful approach to the individual letters, above all in the combination of picture and text, one can scarcely imagine a greater difference than that found between the iconic clarity of a Bauhaus poster and the frequently superimposed and interlocking lines and indentations of everyday creative scribbles that merge with the background rather than setting themselves apart from it. The scribbles on the school desks are also a sign of the pupils not con- centrating entirely on the lesson – the unclean impression so to speak of what an image of pupils seated at desks diligently writing in their school books “of cially” communicates: we live in a civilized culture. The level of school education and the alphabetization quota of a nation or culture can be generally perceived to indicate the degree of devel- opment. However can one apply a long tradition of written culture to today’s situation? The rst journey in the context of Deskxistence led Ottjörg to the “Alphabet Road”, following what is among the oldest evidence of writ- ing and book-based religions known. He followed the route backwards in a historical sense, via Vienna, Sarajevo, Skopje, Istanbul, Beirut, Jerusa- lem, Ramallah and Haifa through to Cairo. The fact that “Alphabet Road” is today characterized by numerous warlike con icts does not speak in favour of the fact that great progress has been made in terms of civilisation during the past decades. 1 Nicolas Bourriaud, Radikant. Berlin 2009, p. 55. 2 Ibid., p. 29. 3 Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. II, 2, Frankfurt a. M. 1977, all quotes p. 440. 4 Ibid., p. 439. 5 Ibid., p. 447. 6 Ibid., p. 444. 7 Ibid., p. 447. 8 Please also refer to the text by Gregor Jansen for a comparison with the process of embossing.