From Dreams and Projects
Any work that is not rooted in myth and poetry or that does not
partake of the depth and essence of the universe is merely a ghost.
The means in painting and sculpture have remained the same since
the days of Pythagoras. But whereas the Pythagoreans admitted that the
contrast between what is straight and what isn't straight is the sub-
stance of all things, we, who lived through the years in which figur-
ative art (Abbildung) changed into shaping, configurative are (Bildung),
wanted to stress spirit rather than matter, and so we limited ourselves
to horizontal and vertical planes. The vertical and the horizontal are
the extreme signs available to man for touching the beyond and his
inwardness.
I draw things that recline, drift, rise, ripen, fall. I model fruits
that lie still, clouds that drift on and up, stars that grow ripe and drop,
symbols of the eternal transformation into infinite peace. They are mem-
ories of vegetative, biological shapes, colors that fade, harmonies that
die out. Genesis, birth, blossoming often occur in a dreamlike state to
open eyes, and it is only afterward that the rational meaning is revealed.
"Most of the time, however, I feel as if I were parachuting down, down,
with no hope of ever landing. I can't free myself of the anguished feeling
that I am dropping, never to land, dead or alive. The dread of never reach-
ing the ground nor finding any rest even in death-- which no longer even
seems like a brief slumber-- keeps a tight grip on my heart." -- I had
written these lines in a highly emotional state several months before finding
that sense of "falling" in one of my sculptures. Even today I still have
only a slight sense of the deep meaning of that "falling." But we "shall
understand everything" one day, when we are transformed by the second of a
thousand years, the infinite second of death. Just as a page of writing
becomes illegible when we look at it too closely, words and phrases eman-
ating from man's subconscious and seeming unintelligible in the light of
day will be understood by him in another space and another time. Man has
to step back a certain distance, as the painter does, and the sculptor.
Sometimes while working on my sculpture, in which the sensation of falling
seemed very salient, I managed to rid myself of the everyday task, the
eternal drudgery of man, the interminable "falling" beyond light, and I
found comprehension in waiting and forgetfulness in dreams. Often the
hands grasp more quickly than the head. Sometimes we learn to "understand"
better by observing the motion of a a leaf, the evolution of a line, a word
in a poem, the shriek of an animal, or by creating a piece of sculpture.
An unimportant line that I heard in passing, almost as if it had come from
backstage: "Those drops, those drops of ink that I spatter across the plate
of glass on my desk-- I could blot them away in the twinkling of an eye and
they would leave no traces." These words affected me like a magical formula,
arousing a state of euphoria as if a heavenly star, symmetrically and gigan-
tically radiant, had risen full of promise. Perhaps the spell has been in-
voked by the healing words "I could blot them away in the twinkling of an eye."
They stirred me as deeply as the sense of falling, and again later on in one
of my sculptures, beyond a very remote space, beyond the idiotic tumult of a
mechanized, rational, and modern world. This falling spoke to me about the
beyond, about my inwardness, and echoed in space-time, which in general is
hermetically closed to the reason of daylight. The aspiration to an immaterial
world can also be the contents of a sculpture.
We cannot use inner language to make ourselves understood except to those
men whom we meet at the outer limits of things.