CULTURE ET LOISIR (Freizeitgestaltung)

German artist Franz Burkhardt lives and works in Belgium. He is primarily a draughtsman and « borrows » his images from erotic, medical, scientific and technical magazines of olden times. The vast majority of his drawings are accompanied by texts. These textual additions act both on the form and the content, as a comment of the image, as both discrete and dominant details.

Klaus Littmann, (Littman Kulturprojekte, Basel), with whom Franz Burkhardt often collaborates, had already noticed the great importance of the writing in his work. That’s why they published in 2005 artist book Störungen haben vorrang (or Disturbances are priority) in which we only find writings, and this, in all possible and unimaginable forms : balloons, scribbles, memos, unreadable or edited writings and printed fragments…

These textual fragments were gathered by Franz Burkhardt from Duchamp, Goethe, Adorno and Wittgenstein, but he also uses popular expressions, distress words and swearwords, often in German, but also in English, French and even Spanish.

In his installation Culture et loisir, Franz Burkhardt uses sentences and formulations again. And as he collects old materials to rework them and convert them into new works, he reuses here sayings and common sentences, insults and philosophical quotes to transform them better.

The title of this work responds to the dichotomy between high and low culture, always present in Franz Burkhardt’s universe : oscillation between sublime and serious, mentioned by the word culture and the laid back commitmentless nature of the word loisir.