MICROSTORY OF ART

MICROSTORY OF ART
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Dedicated to Permaculture

(Picture: PermaKulturgut.de)

Permaculture (Interviews with Bruegel IX)

(17.12.2023)

– Mr. Bruegel, do you understand the concept of a table?
– A table? What is that?
– One uses to sit around a table, a wooden plate, one places plates on a table, to eat from such plates…
– To eat from plates? Does one place such plates on place mats?
– This is exactly what I am getting at: I have seen place mats, solid wooden place mats that used reproductions of your paintings. So one might say that people eat from reproductions of your paintings. For example if they do not eat from plates, but cut the bread, for example, on one of your paintings.
– I like that! Cutting the bread on reproductions of my paintings. I would not like it though on my real paintings.
– Which painting you would like to see people cutting their bread on?
– Well, all of them. The more merchandising the better.
– Are you serious with that? Do you like the concept of merchandising, even if you, personally, do not benefit from this kind of merchandising?
– But I do benefit. My family does. Don’t you know that I had, well have a large family. My grandsons and granddaughters all know how to deal with the modern media, and we have channels on all of the major…
– Do you even have an own channel on, let’s say X (formerly known as Twitter)?
– No, I have several channels on other networks. But not under my real name.
– Well, back to cutting bread. People have always asked themselves if Pieter Bruegel, your real name used here, was, in fact, a peasant himself, or knew the culture of peasants well. Do peasants use to cut their bread on reproductions of your paintings?
– No, in truth, they do not. But they should.
– So what is your relation to peasants in general, and more specifically: as to your own biography.
– Well, as I have said. My family is large, and some of my grandchildren…
– Please answer the question, Mr. Bruegel: are you a peasant?
– No, presently I’m not. But some of my grandchildren think urban farming to be a good idea. Or even permaculture, or whatever it is called. You have to see the bigger picture. Even if I was not a peasant myself in my own day, I could have had grandchildren that had been rooted in the agrarian world (more than, in fact, myself, was). And even, or especially if you think yourself to belong to the more urban (or suburban) culture, you need to know the not-urban, less-urban, brief: the agrarian world. Don’t you think? Don’t you have permaculture in your own neighborhood?
– Indeed we have. So what you are trying to say is: one has to study how every kind of people does cut their own bread, well not their own, but bread produced by, well, permaculture…
– Exactly, this is it. It is not about identity, but about being interested in identities, and about asking where you belong to, at a particular moment, or in most moments. And the moment you are cutting your bread (on reproductions of my paintings) is perhaps a good, no, the best moment to ask you that. To ask you that once more.

MICROSTORY OF ART
ONLINE JOURNAL FOR ART, CONNOISSEURSHIP AND CULTURAL JOURNALISM
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