Unveiling of the tryptich "DAIMmonomania III" at CSMC'This Work Can and Should Serve as a Permanent Impetus'

30 May 2022

A triptych by Hamburg graffiti artist Mirko Reisser alias DAIM has recently been put up in the foyer of the CSMC building at Warburgstraße 28. In his speech given on the occasion of the unveiling of this work, art historian Bruno Reudenbach explores a simple question: why here?

Lesen Sie hier die deutsche Version dieses Artikels

At the beginning of the summer semester, the triptych ‘DAIMmonomania III’ by Mirko Reisser alias DAIM was unveiled in the foyer of Warburgstraße 28. This is the occasion for a small two-part series on the artist and his work. In this first part, art historian Bruno Reudenbach explores the question of what points of contact exist between graffiti and CSMC (this is the manuscript of the speech he gave right after the unveiling). The second part takes 'DAIMmonomania III' as an opportunity to look at the development of Mirko Reisser's work, but also of the graffiti scene itself during the last 30 years.

Karsten Helmholz

What I’m about to say to you now upon the unveiling of Mirko Reisser’s ‘DAIMmonomania III’ artwork is not going to be an in-depth classification of the piece in terms of art history. In fact, I would like to use this short speech to try and answer a simple question instead: ‘What does this picture have to do with us and our academic research work here in this building?’ We’re not a museum or an art gallery, after all, but nonetheless this picture is now going to decorate the foyer of the new premises used by our Cluster of Excellence. After a considerable delay due to the pandemic, we are now in a position to make up for lost time and do what was originally meant to happen at the official inauguration of the building a while ago. This backdrop and the almost ‘programmatic’ location for the painting in the Cluster’s foyer suggest that something more is intended for its visitors than just the attractive decoration of an austere office building and the enjoyment of art – in this case, that there are also points of contact with the Cluster’s work here since we try to understand written artefacts of all kinds.

In the graffiti scene, Mirko Reisser is one of those people known as ‘writers’ – people who write things and whose subjects are words rather than figurative images. In fact, the only thing he actually ‘writes’ as such is his four-letter pseudonym: DAIM. An artist’s name written on their picture is primarily known as a signature in classical art and has been used for authentication purposes for many centuries now. It’s an artist’s way of identifying themselves with their own work, occasionally in the form of a monogram – just think of the famous letters ‘AD’ that Albrecht Dürer added to his pieces. Our picture is also signed in this sense, namely on the back. At the same time, the artist’s name is not just an attribute of the painting in this case, often placed rather marginally in one of the bottom corners or on the back of it, as it is here. Rather, Mirko Reisser’s pseudonym, DAIM, is actually the subject of the large picture – an important finding concerning the interest taken in authentication concepts in Written Artefacts, which is being pursued in Research Field C: Creating Originals.

This space is not completely visible to the eye, so it partly remains an enigma.

This also applies to a second authenticating element, namely visual realisation, meaning the individual, unmistakable style in which writing appears. Mirko Reisser’s fame is based on the invention of his ‘3-D style’. This authentic style of his is characterised by the three-dimensionality of the letters appearing in the picture, which is coupled with the shaping and decoration of a pictorial space through writing.

In our painting, the writing seems to be pushing forward from the indefinable depths of this space. The letters break through the thin layer of the front of the picture just like in an explosion, causing it to disintegrate into a host of crystalline pieces. These, in turn, combine with fragments of the letters and other shapes to form a large-scale arrangement covering the whole surface. Despite its precise 3-D geometry, this space is not completely visible to the eye (or even clearly visible to it) in terms of the relations between its constituent parts, so it partly remains an enigma. Nor can we be absolutely sure we are actually dealing with the four letters in ‘DAIM’ here; immediate, unambiguous legibility is impossible in this dynamic image of writing exploding, so the writing partly remains a mystery, just like certain areas of the space used for it. Its semantic dimension takes a step back behind the dominance of the visual elements.