B E I J I N G Today Art Museum 04 11 2 0 0 5
"This
is a map made by an exiled pianist, as a directive to the
members of his band. He could not foresee that his musical
and topographical instruction should be used backwards. As
a cartographer, he was not appreciated in his own country."
- A Walk Through H
P
E T E R* G R E E N A W A Y*
M A S T E R C L A S s* i n *B
E I J I N G 2 0 0 6
Luper
believes that the gold has been
stolen from the victims of the Third Reich, smelted
down from their gold possessions. He provides a story
and a case history for each bar, all the time tracing
Harpsch’s car ride - creating his exact journey from
maps discovered in the Bolzano restaurant.The cafe owner
is a renegade and a malcontent fomenting Fascist trouble,
trying illicitly to offload the gold for his own profit.
Luper as he writes a story for each gold bar moves it
from one pile to another on the floor of his attic prison.
One of the cafe customers is Primo Levi returning from
his concentration camp ordeal. He had met him before
in Turin and they discuss the significances of the atomic
table - most pertinently with theelement 92 of uranium.
With the miller betrayed over an infidelity escapade
involving his wife and his daughter, and US military
police about to recover the gold and with the 92 stories
finished, Luper, to his very great surprise - for his
reconstruction of Harpsch and his life and journey is
entirely fictitious - discovers Harpsch’s daughter Fidelia
in the cafe - happy and healthy and well-looked after
by a devoted Italian childless couple. With both her
parents dead, Luper reveals nothing of her background,
fact or fiction, and presents her with her father’s
mended watch as a gift. With his business in prophetic
fiction completed, Luper makes his escape on his whitehorse
back into the pine forests and into the mountains. |
LupersResume
There are three layers to the project, like transparent skins
of an onion, lying one on top of the other, each one showing
through the other.1. Luper’s story.The background and incidents
and events of Luper’s imprisonment in the Bolzano cafe for
eleven weeks, from May to August 1945, where he writes the
Gold Bar stories, and invents a fictitious life for Harpsch.
The day by day events of this Luper imprisonment can be related
to an exact calendar of dates, days, weather reports -and
maybe a day-by-day textual and visual account of the events
of the post-war world.2. Harpsch’s story
The story of Harpsch’s life, invented by Luper, most pertinently
an account of Harpsch’s robbery of thegoldbars and subsequent
journey to Bolzano.
3. The 92 Gold Stories.
The 92 stories (plus 9 others) that tell of gold appropriated
by supporters of European Fascism from the ThirdReich’s victims,
mainly jews.
“SETS”There
are many “sets” or ambience/location backgrounds to the narrative,
related, again as above, to the three layers of plotting.
And these can be manufactured by multiple still images manipulated
in verysophisticated ways by Photo-shop techniques, often
simulating movement.
Onto these we will insert pieces of moving film activity,
either to be shot or from the copious materialalready filmed
for the Tulse Luper films.
TM
& COPYRIGHT 2005 BY ISTVAN HORKAY +TOM CHAMBERS. INTUITPICTURES
