Mr. Peanut

MR. PEANUT / FATHERLAND

HOW DO PEANUTS GET INTO THE GROUND?

The French artist Robert Filliou (1900c - 1987) once proposed that countries should exchange their monuments for a better understanding of each other. That is actually happening. Soviet and Red Army memorials from the Great Fatgherland War are cared for and respected in East Germany. German soldiers who died at Stalingrad are being exhumed and there is grief for them amongst many Russians. The town of Coventry, destroyed by German bombs at the beginning of World War II, has constructed and donated a new cupola for the reconstruction of the Frauen Church in Dresden, destroyed by allied bombs at the end of the last war. Gestures of reconciliation. Fatherland means homeland, and a sense of one's own soil. Where borders have eliminated as in Western Europe, other places with the end of the Soviet Union are more concerned with the difficulties and conflicts of the process of culture, social, political and economic transformation. Other people still live in the non-place, or as the South African Breyton Breytenbach notes, in the middle world. "It is distant from east and west, north and south and doesn't lie in the middle. The middle world lies on the edge, it represents the periphery, the non-place everywhere. It is sphere of non-aligned, unbound, unrestrained identities, a territory of wanderers of non-citizens". Breytenbach with this concept engages in the debate about transnationality and transculture. He conveys a place of the imagination, of opposition, of a non-homeland and yet a social responsibility. This could mean the imagination and aspiration of the artist.

by Vincent Trasov
aka Mr. Peanut
Germany, May 2002


Single artistamp, 5 x 3.5cm each.

From a full sheet (27.9 x 21.6cm.) of twenty-five stamps.
Perforated, initialed, 3/3

Permanent Collection
Gift of the artist


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Copyright ©2002 Jas W Felter, all rights reserved.