Chopping Order
In german, the words copping and pecking both are the same word “hacken” . So the title “Hackordnung” in the context of chopping wood for “Pecking Order” is a play on words.
The title Hackordnung is a play on words with the biological term and the chopping of wood as a technical process in the sculptures. The outside of the assembled sculptures with their right-angled lines shows a different pattern than the sum of the loose parts. Opening the multi-part sculpture removes the superficial overview. It takes a little attention and time to reassemble the whole from the few individual parts.
In 1995, I made the first five-part sculpture from a peeled, heavy log of robinia wood. It took more than twenty years to produce a second chopping order. I have varied the artistically arranged wood splits with saw and axe on different logs in lengths from a few centimeters up to one meter.
about the Title “Choppin Order”
“Politics is not about truth, but about the process of exchange in front of diverging interests.” James M. Buchanan, neoliberal theorist. Politics and government business are hidden from the public eye. The public should only see politics from the outside.
Political refugee Edward Snowden said in a meeting in Moscow in 2016: “A democracy is not about the people’s trust in the government and in the state, but about the participation of the population in decisions on the affairs of the state.” The socio-political term “Simulative Democracy” describes the power structure of democratic states on the threshold of oligarchy and includes the observation that citizens believe they are in a customer relationship with the state, or that they share in the “profits” of state business like the shareholders of a company. The neoliberal approach avoids transparency.
The “pecking order theory” circulating in economics deals with the entrepreneurial method of capitalizing companies and projects. One aspect of the pecking order theory is the asymmetrical level of information between the management on the one hand and the owners of a company on the other: the current details of financing, profit prospects, risks, company assets, etc. are only known to the management. For reasons of cost, the profit-oriented owners (e.g. shareholders) do without information on the current business operations and, in line with their lack of knowledge, forego co-governance in the company.
This asymmetry of information between investors and managers in the capitalist economy, as described in the pecking order theory, has been transferred to citizens’ expectations from the government. Blatant information asymmetry between the governments of democratic states and their citizens is a matter of course today. The public expects no transparency about the policies whose consequences they have to bear.
In terms of the Chopping Order sculptures the outside look of the assembled logs with their right-angled lines shows a different pattern than the sum of the loose parts.