Prophit #3
Vanity of Existence
Existence: One big pile of rubbish? This year Prophit Art Zine, devoted entirely to collage art, takes its theme from The Great Pessimist: Arthur Schopenhauer. This edition’s title is Vanity of Existence.
Like the previous editions, devoted to Punk and Dada, this edition also offers a cut-through slice of contemporary collage art. It has contributions by some twenty artists from all over the world. A small selection: American Adam Stoves, operating from Barcelona Uruguayan Juan Fielitz, Tinca Veerman of the Netherlands, Lydia Moizis from Berlin, Germany, and K Young from England. A collage literally tears our concept of reality to pieces. Being an all transformative art, collage is the perfect way to express feelings or convey messages.
By special request chief editor Lula Valletta asked Jah Wobble, former bass player of PiL, to cross swords with Schopenhauer on the question of how useless life actually is. Jah Wobble, the infamous member of the Sex Pistols entourage, recruited by Johnny Rotten himself as the bass player of post-Pistols post-punk band Public Image Limited (PiL) is not a newbie to anarchism and nihilism. He can go along quite a while with Schopenhauer. But from a Buddhist perspective, this arch-pessimist is overlooking something. We do not need to put our weary heads to rest with so much emptiness in our existence. Besides all that, there is also an escape out of all the suffering.
Is there a way to give some use to uselessness? This is exactly what each of the twenty collage artists is showing in this year's edition of Prophit Art Zine, all in their own way. Like the Dadaists hit the world with total disenchantment and the way punks had fun, even though proclaiming boredom, similarly, the collages in this edition give truth to Jah Wobble’s rebuttal of Schopenhauer.
Depicting emptiness is also the way out of this emptiness. Seemingly easily but striking nonetheless D.M. Nagu does this by integrating old-fashioned picture postcards into portrait photos. Similarly, Isabel Reitmeier and her cuddly animal pictures, Nicky Symptome with his masks, and Lula Valletta herself with her living-dead landscape architecture.
Prophit Art Zine is a yearly magazine on collage art. Initiator and chief editor Lula Valletta has moved the headquarters from Berlin to The Hague.
Participants in this edition are: Jorge Chamorro, Isabel Reitemeyer, Adam Stoves, Niels Kalk, Lula Valletta, Holger Becker, Juan Fielitz, Leonor Faber-Jonker, Max-o-matic, Miriam Temme, Ben Stolk, Tinca Veerman, Bill Noir, K Young, Nicky Symptome, Lydia Mojzis, Jakob Müller, Musta Fior, D.M. Nagu, Pascal Verzijl.
