Signposts

     The desire for a better and more agreeable world, a world more
perfect than the one on which we play sleep row dream, leads us to
call starlight beautiful.  Everyone knows the aria in Tannhäuser, "O
thou beautiful evening star!"  We simply forget that many of those
stars are giant and monstrous incandescent bodies that would consume
our earth at the slightest contact like a tiny butterfly approaching a 
flame.  Even as a child I would be terror-stricken at the sight of the
stars, while I loved the objects in my home and discovered friendly
faces in them.
     These two impressions, one of the familiar object and one of an
immense and fateful heavenly body, are still present in my work.  I
have interpreted and termed "amphora" a certain concretion on which
I am working continually.  The nucleus of this concretion is a home
object resembling a gentle doll with round and pleasantly contoured
curves.  From this shape there stretch maleficent limbs, murderous
and biting serpents anxious to strangle.  I let myself be guided un-
reflectingly by my work.  In the course of this work there appear
friendly and familiar shapes as well as alien and evil ones.  This
simultaneity, which is always welcome, occurs almost without my re-
alizing it.  It is with touched recognition as well as amazement that
we must accept the light and the dark that chance sends our way.
The "chance" that, for example, guides our hands when we rip up a
piece of paper-- plus the resulting forms-- often discloses the sec-
rets of the profound laws of life.  The very fact of interrupting or 
incidentally abandoning some work may be the decisive factor, the
action essential to the birth of an opus.  The "blind choice" of a
color may be what gives painting the very heart that makes it live.
     I gave some of my sculptures tiny onomatopoetic names like Alou,
Mirr, Orou, Hurlou, Pilli.  Sometimes I also try to interpret my
creations and to transfer them into poetic names.  Often I gather
these names in an occasionally humorous and completely private phil-
osophy of dream.  Other abstract and concrete painters and sculptors
may use mathematical formulae to label their works.
     Sculpture should walk on the tips of its toes, unostentatious,
unpretentious, and light as the spoor of an animal in snow.  Art should
melt into and even merge with nature itself.  This is obviously con-
trary to painting and sculpture based on nature.  By so doing, art will
rid itself more and more of self-centeredness, virtuosity, and absur-
dity.  
     The man who speaks and writes about art should refrain from cen-
suring or pontificating.  He will thus avoid doing anything foolish,
for in the presence of primordial depth all art is but dream and nature.
     If you lower your eyelids, your inner emotion will cross your hand
far more clearly.  In a dark room the ebb of inner feeling will mani-
fest itself more readily.  The conductor of intimate music, the great
artist of the Neolithic age, drew with his eyes in-drawn.  His drawing
thus became transparent, rendering into a deep breath all the superim-
positions, the emotions, the periphrases, and the repetitions of inner
song.

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