Texts
written by the artist
Exactly two years ago Marina Bessonova* asked Hades to write about herself “in the third person”. Marina! Better late than never. Here is the text.
About myself “in the third person”
Paradoxical thinking is characteristic of Hades.Mutually exclusive contradictions peacefully coexist in her inner world and feed her artistic and scientific creative work. She called herself a traditionalist and is convinced that “tradition” or transcendental knowledge which is still present in all traditional cultures, can be gathered by her and arranged in a system. She calls this utopia “theographical Temple”. This is her reply to Nietzsche’s question: “koenntet ihr einen Gott denken?” — “Could you think a God?”
Each object of “cult” in her Temple is not just a fruit of artistic imagination (she doesn’t value imagination as high as other artist, since her own is initially superfluous), but a result of serious linguistic research, which is not merely research. Rather, it is free soaring, where there are no air corridors or foreign air spaces, where all cultural space is perceived as one’s own. She calls her method of assimiliating new knowledge “remembering”. She does not learn and study, she simply remembers something that was well familiar to her once, “in her past lives”. That is how the Orphics and Pythagoreans used to learn the world.
When reading the Egyptian Book of Dead, she recollects the names of gods in hieroglyphic scripture and, therefore, in her own memory discovers the origin of these names. Next, she paints, and her paintings make these discoveries visible. Otherwise how could the following fact be accounted for? — Most Egyptologists insist that goddess Nephthys (Nebt-het, or “Mistress of the house” in Ancient Egyptean), who is seen standing next to Isis by the throne of Osiris on the papyruses in the Egyptian Book of Dead, is an “artificially invented goddess”, whereas Hades does know and can prove that the hieroglyph “Nebt-het” is nothing else than a symbolic representation of the Primeval Temple arisen on the Primeval Hill.
“mathesis anamnesis estin ” or “learning is remembering”, Lena Hades frequently says it citing Proclus. She deduces strict, logical and fine parallels between the Book Bereshit (or Genesis for Christians), the Pythagorean Number and gods of Ancient Egypt; so she finds, what precisely are the Numbers 1-2-3-4-5 and also the Numbers 6-7-8. She gives a name to this discovery taken from a nursery rhyme. She is asking herself why a regular pentagonal star was the sacred symbol of the Pythagorean union? Then she searches and finds a precise answer. It is precise, because she believes
it is better to know nothing than to have half-knowledge of many things.”
Paradoxical thinking of Lena Hades ENVELOPS NOT JUST A FEW PAST MILLENIUMS OF HUMAN CIVILIZATION, BUT GOES DEEPER INTO NOT JUST THOUSANDS, BUT MILLIONS OF YEARS. For instance she keeps at home as a relic a petrified crest fragment of an ancient stegosaurus found in kamchatka, calls him dasia and often converses with him. this is another manifestation of her “love for far and remote.”
A childish or more exactly juvenile perception of the world, when everything is possible and everything is allowed — literally “alles isr erlaubt”, is at the same time her strengh and her weakness. She knows that “every child is an artist (Picasso)” and for her it’s not difficult to “remains an artist when one ceases being a child ( Picasso again)”.
Hades consciously refuses to become adult and perceive the world too seriously. Like a child, she is playing at adult life: her paintings and texts are her dolls and playthings. she calls them “her children” and, like a child, plays with them in full seriuosness.
* Marina Bessonova is an art historian, she died in the year 2001.
Lena Hades, 9 may 2003.