Holger Bär’s new series of
paintings runs under the title “Glück.” The German term “Glück” has at least
three quite distinct meanings. Its original meaning, the positive outcome of
an event, refers to a lucky coincidence, a singular external event not
controlled by the individual, such as winning the jackpot, and could be
translated as luck, good fortune. In the philosophical sense
“Glück” designates a temporally extended state of subjective well-being and
contentment based on the individual’s internal attitude to life, i.e. happiness.
A third meaning can refer to short-termed feelings of intense pleasure due to
chemical processes in the body that can also be artificially induced by drugs: pleasure,
ecstasy, euphoria.
Holger Bär has spent many
years developing and working with computer-controlled painting machines
capable of transposing images—usually photographs prepared in a certain
way—onto canvas, pixel by pixel, brushstroke by brushstroke. For this purpose
Bär has always used numbers to encode his images, using certain algorithms to
transform numbers into colors. This led him to the idea to base a series of
abstract paintings on the numbers of the lottery. He supplemented this “lucky
series” with images of lottery winners and prizes, and added renderings of
chemical processes caused by dopamine, serotonin and Ecstasy. Bär thus extended
the play with randomly generated numbers to effect a more penetrating analysis
of our contemporary understanding of happiness.
The search for happiness has, of course, accompanied the various human
civilizations since the very beginnings. Chinese, Indian, Middle-Eastern and
Greek philosophers and founders of religions of antiquity have already pondered
the question, as well as numerous thinkers in the areas of religion,
philosophy, sociology, economy, politics, psychology and others ever since, all
the way to the contemporary researchers of happiness who drafted the UN’s 2012
World Happiness Report. Strongly influenced by the philosophy of the Age of
Enlightenment, the United States incorporated the “pursuit of happiness” in
their declaration of independence, basis of the world’s first democratic
constitution, while the king of Bhutan replaced the Gross National Product
with the “Gross National Happiness” as guiding principle of its economic
policies and created a national commission to oversee it. The enormous flood
of self-help books published every year, as well as the expanding sector
devoted to Wellness, are strong indicators of the fact that the pursuit of
happiness has lost nothing of its urgency. On the contrary, it might be
questioned whether humanity has made any progress in this respect since
antiquity, or whether human history has not rather consisted of occasional advances
and recurrent bad setbacks. Holger Bär’s images for once, particularly the
images of lottery winners and prizes, can be read as a scathing indictment of
the fact that our consumption-oriented culture has a tendency to substitute
external factors such as material affluence—especially that which does not
require a contribution from the one enjoying it—as well as drug-induced states
of ecstasy for a truly happy life based on the mental attitude and social
integration of the individual.
