A.V.
During most projects a long maturation process unfolds. Sometimes
the vision is clear immediately and to think it through might be
simply a matter of a few hours. But then comes the next phase when
I have a tremendous need to allow the thing ro rest. That means
that while it is seemingly set aside, it is nonetheless residing
in my head and I think about it day and night, not ceaselessly,
but subconsciously. It keeps coming up and revealing itself to me.
It must simply remain untouched, so that I can know that it is maturing
in there towards the feeling of certainty. It is also possible that
the very fast and spontaneous first proposition was definitive,
and that my hesitation was unnecessary, that it was simply an expression
of my need to reassure myself. Or I may just want to enjoy the time
when the thing is still in a transitional state, like the whitehot
malleable magma before the irreversible moment of definitiveness.
...I
am not satisfied with the idea alone. I always have to experience
the feedback during the process of emergence and creation, which
means that while I make it almost definite I am still compelled
to bounce in ten or a hundred times more back to myself, as if
off a mirror. That is the dialoque with oneself, or whatever we
call it.
M.S.
The game with oneself.
A.V.
Yes. In fact I have to reassure myself at least two thousand times
through feedback, that this is the way it is. Maybe this is actually
the way to animate those things, a way of breathing life into
them. Getting the pump started. Possibly it is nothing more than
some magical act, which carries no other significance. It is exactly
the same when I make a drawing, I have to try it many times in
different ways. It is as if I am tempting myself and seducing
the thing. I am curious whether it will always respond to me unambiguously.
...I don´t work with themes, since I have, in effect, made one
and the same thing all my life, but from different sides. I don´t
want to use any big words in dealing with this, but in principle
it involves a basic, global, or universal matter. I don´t know
how to express it any better. It is outside any volitional resolve;
it is only related to sensations. I simply want to find something
out, something quite basic. Actually it is nothing more than great
curiosity. All that I do is just another way of finding out. That
means that it would most likely not matter in the least if I would
learn instead how to discover the world in another way. It most
likely satisfies my need to see the world subjectively. After
all, science is just a little bit more objective. I say ´´a little
bit more´´ because even there the subject is very important. The
most independent position of my existence as a human being is
when curiosity takes over as the basic theme of my life.
...Reality
is brutal, but it is the kind of brutality, which I don´t perceive
as negative, but rather as authentic. It has laws or rules, it
is the way it is. I see the fact that I speak openly about the
thing as it is as an expression of positive perception, since
I accept the thing.
...I would
say that from the eternal point of view it is proper if a person
makes something without being rationally aware that he made it
in a certain way. I like the situation that sometimes happens
quite fortuitously, and which often results in the person not
realizing that he did something. He simply arrived at the state
of completely natural bliss. A state when anything that a person
does - anything that he touches - happens almost unconsciously.
Then he awakens. I consider that to be the ideal state. Surprisingly
it can be achieved even during hard physical labor. I believe
that volitional elements are misleading. If I am concerned with
certain primal things I must remove as much of myself from it
as is possible. It is unusual that I should be the one saying
it, being that I am a person who makes terribly subjective things.
They are certainly that, but nonetheless I try to create them
in a state of unawareness - of bliss. That moment must be completed
by and of itself, holding nothing back.
...A person
is not limited by what he has done before. It is what he does
at the moment that counts.
...I would
like to add another important thing. There is ambivalence in what
I am trying to say, in that what I want to say is simultaneously
what I want to find out. Through that process I at the same time
find out about it, although the formulation will always remain
only in the language that I used. That means that I will in any
case not decode it. I wish there was an apparatus that I could
connect to something, which would extract from it the principle
of the matter and transpose it into words or some other, more
accessible, form of communication. Unfortunately that is not possible.
But that is completely appropriate because the whole thing would
become meaningless. In the instant that a person makes something,
he is already separated from it.
M.S.
How important is the space in which the objects
are placed?
A.V.
The place is terribly important because the space that surrounds
the thing is part of the whole. But I, nonetheless, rely on my
instinct that first and foremost the thing is viable in and of
itself. Even when utmost respect is paid to circumstances in which
it will occur, upon removal from this context the work should
have enough of its own energy to exist independently. Thus, from
the very beginning, I was in fact involved with assembling entities
as such. A large part of my work consists of individual elements
which can by separated and which constitute a whole when put together.
The autonomy of individual is always important to me. All of these
must have a life of their own. The relativity of this condition
is of course important, since with some works it would be problematic
to remove certain parts from the entirety. Neverthless, I think
that ideally any part should be capable of living its own life.
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