The Abecedarium of the Artist’s Death
Guidebook
Macabre-beautiful corpses
"The early bird catches the worm", the English teacher liked to preach. But if you're too early, you'll also catch nothing. Like Bianca on the circus trapeze. A classic artist's fate: some ideas are only understood too late. Not all fates end so disastrously, sometimes only the career is as dead as a doornail. With bittersweet sarcasm, artist Moussa Kone pays tribute to some of his failed colleagues: those slain by their own work, those consumed by doubt, those who never arrived in Berlin, victims of turpentine and of double liter wine bottles. He translates shattered ideals into macabre, gloomy ink drawings, accompanied by bitter epitaphs. The Abecedarium of the Artists Death is the title of this exquisite book (also available in a limited watercolored edition of 20), a homage to the whimsical poetic Abecedaria of Edward Gorey (1925-2000).
In particular, Kone borrows from the latter's The Gashlycrumb Tinies (1963), which describes in ironic, unsentimental rhyme the fatal accidents of 26 children - a reaction to the obsessive moralism of the Victorian era. Kone's wicked reckoning with the art business is at the same time a memento mori for real, deceased companions: "Every one of us knows a Susi.”
Quoted from a book review by Anne Katrin Feßler, Der Standard Album, April 18, 2015, p.A6 (translated from German)