Pubblicato: 11.10.2020
I found a piece of culture hidden in the most beautiful autumn colors in Engadine. In the garden Il Parkin with artworks by Not Vital, the elves are still dancing among the yellow larch trees and the fierce gnomes are wallowing under the dark green Swiss stone pines. Not Vital is the Engadine artist who flew from the Grisons Valley into the wide world as Randolin to unleash his imagination with Andy Warhol. His soul feels at home next to the African Agadiz in many places on this earth. With Not Vital, I feel that he is mocking people with a smug smile and giving them a kick in the ass to finally use their own intuition. He had cow dung cast in bronze and those with money bought it. They fought the most for the biggest dung piles, because the biggest shit is known to sell best.
Il Parkin extends over a terraced slope, at the foot of which is a small shady valley with a foaming creek. At this mystical place, the visitor does not expect a ferryman who translates him into the realm of shadows for a coin, but the water house. The large triangular window is oriented towards the bubbling stream, whose wild power makes the pane and one's own body tremble. I felt intoxicated by the trembling power of the stream in the truest sense of the word, and the water drops scattered in all directions fascinated me. And then the man with the Deuter backpack and the On shoes destroyed the whole magic of this moment. His only thought was about the worry of how much of a hassle it would be to keep this window clean with its impractical shape. Not would have certainly laughed loudly and silently given him one of his famous donkey heads as consolation. He would have slapped the original model of his cow dung sculpture into my hollow hand because I allowed this man to destroy this moment with his stupid babbling.
Only when we allow ourselves to find, do we activate our intuition. Not shows us through his art what dreaming means. As children, we do things from the bottom of our hearts, and later as adults we clean up all the truly spontaneous things, like the water stains on the window.
Even when Not's works were admired in the Museum of Modern Arts in New York for a long time and Not Vital was considered one of the greatest artists of contemporary art, the mountain people laughed secretly like teenagers about this eccentric. And it is precisely this insecure laughter that shows that Not is addressing a human need that we have been suppressing for far too long - if you have to do something, just do it, no matter what others think. Go your own way and leave all the junk you don't need on the rubbish heap.
The cleanliness enthusiast with the Deuter backpack stepped out of the water house in front of me, and I followed him to the daylight with an annoyed face. The malicious laughter of a Eurasian jay brought my stray thoughts back to the present at this wonderful place. Maybe it wasn't just the birds that laughed at me as a Bünzli, but also the artist with the black hat hidden somewhere under a pile of leaves.