24 Hours
by Dirk Krecker
In 1997 I used for the first time an old mechanical typewriter as a drawing tool for a series of drawings about the large purchase by the German government of 180 Eurofighter warplanes. I guess a Royal 200. I discovered the typewriter as a drawing-tool by searching for a new way of working, because doing art with pencils and brushes and colors was not working any longer for me. Computers entered the room and the heads of our university and life. The sound of techno from Detroit, Frankfurt, and Berlin was everywhere. In the new aesthetic coming from the work with the computer was something like a promise. But the computer rooms were occupied by the students of graphic design. That was not a good atmosphere to work on art projects. And I had no money to buy my own Macintosh. But searching for a new way to realize the Eurofighter series I was trying to find a way to add anonymization and computersmell into it. And I found the typewriter opened the possibility of creating cooled-downed images that had enough similarity to the look of works done by the computer. And at the same time it was an open source system and ideal to explore. In my work I was concentrating on airplanes, urban cityscapes and architecture. I avoided for a long time working with human figures. I don’t know why, but every time I tried, I did not like the image. I was becoming able to use figures when I found a photo of two people standing in a suburban park with a lot of nothing around. That worked for me, it was the missing link: the moment human figures and the surrounding space interpose themselves on the same level of significance and flicker in the level of relevance. It’s funny because I realized later that I used the same parameters for the airplane and warplane drawings. But for the human figure it seems I had to develop it again. As an artist I am interested in narratives about relations. The images in my work are negotiations about artwork, space, and society. After 9/11 in 2001 nothing was the same. Going on with work was not the same. And typing airplanes and cityscapes did not feel good for a long time. So much sorrow.
Dirk Krecker was born 1972 in Frankfurt, Germany. He studied art at the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Offenbach and at the Staedelschule in the class of Thomas Bayrle. During university he started searching for a way to create a narration with images that are able to handle the dislocations of our highly speeded up urban space and society and not lose track of creating cool and good images at the same time. Working with the typewriter for the first time, he used patterns and forms only. Since his first big typewriter drawings in 2008, he has extended his manner of narration and entered the area of the complex relationship between image and word.
Originally appeared in the online supplement to the Beyond Category issue 43.2-44.1