With „How I explain pictures to a dead hare“ Thomas Kratz will re-enact this key performance of the 1960s. He transforms the photographic traces and eye-witnesses’ description into a bodily-spatial ritual, which yet meets now a changed local and temporal context. He thereby examines Beuys’ test arrangement for its present-day effects, which it may have on himself as well on the audience. The Beuys-Performance, which has influenced the art world’s imaginary so much, is used as a camouflage. By producing a familiar impression at first sight, Kratz infiltrates a new refined lyrical metapherology between tragic and humour, addressing the big anthropological questions about life, death and reincarnation. Kratz positions himself and the public in a conflicting area generated by the pictures from memory and the actual happening in the presence. In his choice of means the artist follows reflections by Jorge Luis Borges: „I use the most hackneyed metaphors. After all this is what is eternal: the stars look like eyes, f. e., or death is like the sleep.“ The familiar is the door to the new, the work of another artist the door to one’s own oeuvre. The meta-individual culture is the condition of the particular experience, the archive the condition of contemporary art.

Kratz does not analyze the iconic figure Joseph Beuys, but the ritual, which he conceives as a determined form of action. Its effectiveness is proven only in its execution and its sources begin to blur. He does not only reconstruct the framework, in which the ritual will take place, but adapts it to present-day’s conditions and his own aesthetics. The arrangement for the experiment resembles the 1965’s performance to a large degree: The public is separated from the artist and can watch him only through two door-windows. Kratz moves in the gallery room with a dead hare in his arms, the face covered with honey and gold leafs, dressed in a Beuys-alike-outfit created by the designer Lara Torres. Within the same room the room he installed an exercise bike and placed a little robot singing „Daisy (Bicycle Made for Two)”. Kratz explains an imaginary art collection to the hare. The artists of this collection are listed on a poster in the public’s space, where loud speakers transmit Kratz’s narrative.

Beuys’ use of the hare as a symbol of rebirth reflects in Thomas Kratz’s ritual also the use of the imaginary archive of art. For the ritual about life, dead and rebirth of art Kratz defines new ritual objects: the exercise bicycle and the singing robot. Alfred Jarry once described the bicycle as a Christian device of martyr and suffering, Peter Blegvad identified the exercise bike as a metaphysical object, which makes us believe, that its use increases the distance to death. The little robot sings with „Daisy“ a song, which was generated around 1962 by the American Bell Research Laboratories. It was one of the first pieces with computer-generated voice. Stanley Kubrick used it for his 1968 „2001 Space Odyssey“. Next to the hare, this symbol for fertility and rebirth, Kratz places the machine, an artefact, which satisfies by simple means the human desire to see something alive. The machine will sing for the human and the dead hare a merciless love song: „Daisy, Daisy / Give me your answer do! / I'm half crazy, / All for the love of you! / It won't be a stylish marriage, / I can't afford a carriage / But you'll look sweet upon the seat / Of a bicycle made for two.”