ALIENATION

Demonstrate by dismantling! According to Bertolt Brecht, we’ve never known a time in which the world hasn’t gotten out of joint. Yet, art offers a structure suited to patching together the world’s disorder. Worringer’s universe of images displays this: threads hang everywhere, are tied together, are made up of painted masking tape and recesses of real adhesive strips. A web of compositional lines and barrier tape holds together a world drifting into pieces. Fragments everywhere, flapping tatters that challenge the viewer to come closer, stretch up, squat down, in order to understand Worringer’s paintings. The pictures’ discontinuity is limited by their own edges. Worringer takes on the resulting alienation himself. Not to confuse by piling up incomprehensibilities, but to encourage understanding.

Worringer understands the process of actively seeing in the arts as a “ritual,” as Victor Turner calls it in his “social drama.” According to Turner, the artist is supposed to be active, yet stand outside of society. His task is to kill uncertainty and instability, symbolically, in order to overcome social crises.