Artwork
In popular belief, the rooster is deeply rooted. He is the symbol of readiness for battle and is considered the herald of the day. In Norse mythology, two roosters awaken the heroes in Odin’s and the powers in El’s halls. In Kyllburg the rooster is a recurring motif. He is the heraldic animal of the Kyllburg carnival and the town forest bears his name. As a weathercock, the animal indicates the direction from which the wind blows. Let’s hope that the wind does not come from the direction of the dung heap.
Artist
Prof. Dr. Dr. Ludger Erasmus Amadeus Graf Meier-von-Friedenhof (*1973) is a scion of an ancient Kyllburg noble dynasty. Its founding father was the legendary freedom fighter and national hero Knight Schmino. Meier-von-Friedenhof has been an honorary professor of comparative tantra studies and experimental poetry at the Open University “Genghis Khan” in Ulaanbaatar since 2014.
Under his stage name L.E.A., he regularly performs action art in completely dark rooms, where the observer only has to imagine the performed actions based on the sounds. L.E.A. is also considered the inventor of contentless boredom. An example of this is the “Reading of the Blank Book” that took place in 2019. L.E.A. read from a freshly opened box of printer paper – 2500 pages of blank paper. The reading was live-streamed around the world for 14 hours, reaching an average of 17 viewers.
In 2012, L.E.A. gave a remarkable reading from the Berlin telephone directory on the Wuppertal suspension railroad. This in itself would not be remarkable, as many artists did this before him, e.g. Helga Niddelwitz in 1987, Gunter Bromenschacht jr. in 1998 and Felix Weltdorf-Eberbach in 2001. What made L.E.A.’s reading extraordinary was a new variant of telephone book reading he created. He read the book from back to front and also omitted all vowels. This abruptly made him an internationally acclaimed action artist, celebrated by audiences and critics alike. In 2013, he received the prestigious Cornelius Meiselter Literature Prize for his reading.
Meier-von-Friedenhof is also successful as an athlete. In 2017, he managed to swim the English Channel in his mind in just 55 minutes. He has held the world record for swimming in thought ever since.
In 2021, his latest literary work was published. In it, he devoted himself to a rather unloved plant, tree mushrooms. The book entitled “Schmeckt nicht, gibt’s nicht!” is self-published and available in selected bookstores. 240 sides, 168 partly colored illustrations, 23,99 €.
Meier-von-Friedenhof is participating in the Kyllburg Art Route for the first time.