JOACHIM LUETKE has created arresting images for a variety of venues, including posters, ads and CD's. Born in 1957 in Germany, he studied art in Switzerland during the late seventies, and improved his unique, disturbing talent at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, Austria from 1980 to 1986. He still lives in Vienna as a successfull multimedia artist.

"I would like to take a moment to express my highest regards to the magnificent works that you have created for the world to see. To say the very least ,you are gifted with a remarkable talent of expression and that you define your work exquisitely. Every creation you have bestowed upon the naked eye thus far symbolizes the raw power that flows freely from the human mind and your work harnesses that power very well. So thanks for the darkness and keep it up............
yours respectively,
_/ /|- (v) I <-" (a visitor)

"Joachim Luetke is driven by a hostility against civilization: he feels so ill at ease in our culture that he simulates archaic and even prearchaic cults in order to get to the roots of real existence. In these antediluvian places of worship he becomes the designer of the most crafty theogonic machines. The more unreal the device, the bigger its hallucinating distinctness. When I look at Luetke's pictures, I find myself confronted with a sensational archaeologic discovery; its condition seems so fabulous that I can fully detect the sophistic technology and experience the subtle odd functionalism of these ghostly machines. It is one of the main features of these devices that their appearances are of almost seductive superreality and entice me to abandon my civilizing reserves in order to experience the true existence of the discoveries, which are presented with utmost credibility. I cannot evade the suggestive power of this extraordinary artist."

Prof. Rudolf Hausner †, Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna, Austria

"Luetke is crucifying newly and violently in his world, manipulates genes diligently, illustrates ironically mankinds' benefits and raises the "principle of doubt" to the "principle of principles" (© Edmund Husserl, inventor of the conception of phenomenology). To him the "principle of hope" and the "principle of responsibility" are not enough. Plastically-imaginative as Edward Kienholz he wants to guard what can be saved beyond all suffering. Inward balance plus outward solidarity is his basic mental attitude. A combatant, prophet, frightener with visions of homunculi, in short a lone fighter - like some artists, that succeeded later. May God help him. In any case Luetke is ready to help God and the world."

Viewless, speechless, thus WITHOUT EGO are those creatures, which we encounter in space after the DISAPPEARANCE OF "HUMANIST MAN". Reality is dominated by machine-effects. Within them, isolated, adjusted individual unities show their dismemberment. They are patchworks, disparate puzzles, freshadowed in futurist and surrealist phantasy - with their sign-reading capacity - as grotesque, at times mythologically associative collages, montages, assemblages from heteromorphous primary objects. Made of organic, cultural, technical remains left without function. "They search salvation in waste-products (salut par les déchet)", ridiculed Paul Valery the artists. "But the rags and the trash: I want to retreive their right - by using them." It is those constructions which reveal the true face of Being under the masks of surface-representation.

Postmodern, post-edipal, post-human: the female-denoted figure on the frontispice (after the bloody eye-scarcifice of Oedipus)is dependent on a system of survival and information. Fusion instead of confrontation. Suckers in place of nipples intice with their offering of infantile, addictive PURE PLEASURE (without allusion to food-intake). In contrast, the THING-Phantasma which is realized in a series of similar (non-personal, exchangeable), non-networking specimen. Even they are blind and deaf - those fixed and bandaged figures (mass-individuals) with their male-atribute of the "Things in Itself" in Procrustean beds. Would the electric bell above their sculls remain intact, they could signal their "BEING IN PLACE".

Mythologically, UNIFICATION and reception happen as a consequence of archetypical imagination. Real responsibility for it is carried by the IRON WHEEL OF BECOMING, driven by polar tensions (the male-female cross). Thereby the transcendental goal, hidden behind the black abyss of the centrally located, vaginal opening, is not reached (the fish are tied up). What remains, are phantasma and unquenchable DESIRE. The actual result of UNFICATION is the (gnostic) "fall into materia."This is guaranteed by dried twigs, bales of straw and cut-off feet of dead roosters which adorn the figures revered in the tryptichon (goddesses of fertility sided by two male companions): the fetus in the amnion, cut-open, is dead. Within the waste-products of civilzation, the BECOMING and the (THING) BECOME appear to be con-genital.

Without name (Duchamp, look away in disgust!), they are removed WITHOUT EGO, or transformed per Interface into unities in a switchbox-system. Thrown to scrap as veterans, they could be assigned the status of museum-like reconstructions. SIMULATION of a heroic HUMANbeing: the decorated continuous-flow water heater boasts off in front of an exhibit of cartographical, death-bringing slaugthers. Even an icon of the BIG THING is present. As SUPER-EGO it could look down blissfully onto the FESTISH OF DEFORMATION, would not his eyelids be sewn together.

This way, however, it is BLIND.The actual supervision is held by the (gnostic) archaic ELDERS looking and functioning like the BORG of the space-opera STAR TREK. In their containers, they are guarding the fallen souls.

Yet - how do things stand with the great PREDICTIONS? The christian-accidental CROSS-TOTEM is no roadsign to paradise. It signifies extermination (so much should be clear after Auschwitz). Life "sub specie aeternitatis": but how haevy weighs ETERNITY? PROPHETS have BORG-heads with nightmares roaming inside. BELIEF carries doubt within. Inner BALANCE means an end to the ultimate capacity of being moved. A state of balance of powers demands to hem in the dynamic of expression, to circumcize or block it: one bites one's tongue or locks one's mouth.The best method on the road to paralysis. The most immediate cause for the extinction of the reflex of simualted death is fear of the horrific REAL which might break unmasked. Announcing itself by the mysterious: incomprehensible occult machines and constructions, atmospheric disturbances, pre-human cult-objects and pre-historic, barbaric chaos-vampires on their return from the realm of the dead (underworld). We know this from the texts of Howard Philip Lovecraft, to whom Joachim Luetke refers. This Horrific is the essential traumatic core of our Self which we envelop with civilization and culture. We are (beings) of Marduks race.

Josef Dvorak, born 1944. Psychoanalyst and author. Studies of catholic theology. Co-founder of Viennese Actionism. Organizer of ritual-performances. Author of non-fiction "SATANISM".