NEVER ODD OR EVEN

Press release:

NEVER ODD OR EVEN 

Art is always and everywhere the secret confession 
         Karl Marx

Marta Stratskas / Margus Tamm Hobusepea
Gallery 24.01 – 04.02.2013

Exhibit architect: Argo Peever
Sound: Taavi Tulev Thanks: Lotte Jürjendal, Tauno Pääslane

Extended explanation (written for magazine Echo Gone Wrong):


NEVER ODD OR EVEN
Sentence which is conventionally untranslatable yet conveniently interpretable.
As characteristic to palindrome the characters in the sentence are placed in symmetric order. When letters can be read in the same way in either direction, the sentence itself cannot. The one-directional passage of meaningful reading is defined by placement of whitespace.

Art is always and everywhere the secret confession 
First half of “Art is always and everywhere the secret confession, and at the same time the immortal movement of its time.” - a widely popular maxim attributed to Karl Marx. 
Yet - if one starts to look for german-language original, it cannot be found. (And now - let the archeological quest begin!) What can be found is somehow similar maxim "Die Kunst ist stets und überall das geheime Bekenntnis und unsterbliche Denkmal ihrer Zeit." from Adolf Bernhard Marx, a German classicist composer. If translated to English, it would be "Art is always and everywhere the secret confession as well as the undying monuments of its time." As much alike those maxims would seem, one carries unmistakably the ideas of class and other the ideas of classicism. Semantic difference between two maxims from two Marxes lays in phrase “unsterbliche Denkmal (undying monuments)” vs “immortal movement”. German word unsterbliche can be translated both immortal and undying – so we can forget this difference. What is left is Denkmal vs Movement. Denkmal can be translated as Monument, Memorial, Benchmark; Movement can be translated as Bewegung, Entwicklung, Verstand. We can now start to look for intersection and cross everything else down. What remain are Movement and Monument bound by somehow similar pronunciation. It is now grounded to conclude that the transition from Adolf Bernhard to Karl, from classicism to class struggle didn't happen through interlanguage translation but through innerlanguage exchange; the final maxim is a result of mishearing. 

Karl Marx 
an Marxist theoretician

symmetry 
“Beauty depends on size as well as symmetry. No very small animal can be beautiful, for looking at it takes so small a portion of time that the impression of it will be confused. Nor can any very large one, for a whole view of it cannot be had at once.” 
         Aristotle