Quotes

You've said that in the 1960s you were very impressed by Cage's Lecture on Nothing, in which he at one point said: 'I have nothing to say and I am saying it.' How did you understand that paradox then, and how did you relate it to your own desire to avoid making big declarative statements in your own work?
I thought that this was born out of the same motivation that makes him use the notion of chance, which is that we can't know or say very much at all, in a very classical philosophical sense: 'I know that I don't know anything.'

Back then, when you talked about your use of photography as the source for paintings, the range of choices you had, and the disparateness of your selection, were you thinking of the apparent arbitrariness of Cage's procedures as a model?
Cage is much more disciplined. He made chance a method and used it in constructive ways; I never did that. Everything here is a little more chaotic.

Chaotic in a sense of more arbitrary or more chaotic in a sense of more intuitive?
Maybe more intuitive. I believe that he knew more what he was doing. I might be absolutely wrong about this, but that was my impression.

Would it be fair to say that for you Fluxus triggered a kind of rebirth of painting?
Yes, extrinsically, but in terms of pictures it was Pop art with ist new picture motifs. But Fluxus introduced a further dimension, a sense of impropriety and lunacy. That was fascinating. Those actions in Aachen and Düsseldorf, by Cage, Paik, Beuys, and many others – I never experienced that again.

And what is it that connects Vermeer, Palladio, Bach, Cage?
It's that same quality I've been talking about. It's neither contrived, nor surprising and smart, not baffling, not witty, not interesting, not cynical, it can't be planned and it probably can't even be described. It's just good.