Gerhard Merz "Lecture"

''There is no self-realization in art. That's something for unhappy people.’ This was said by the German artist Gerhard Merz (born 1947) in an interview recently. In Merz's installations there is a complete lack of personal expression and painting is reduced to a composition of areas of colour. The texts, images and objects that Merz uses are laden with meanings from the past. Some see them as symbols with a universal power, while for others their application in history gives them a bad taste. According to Merz, what is created in an installation where architecture and image harmonize is not a decor but a reference to universality. Nor is the final form a question of a new creation by an artist, whose personal feelings should in fact be formless. Merz compares it with the difference between a spoken 'a' and a written 'a'. 'The sound 'a' is inside you without form, but if you want to write something has to be ordered. [...] Language does not exist in us as form. Feelings, which are shared after all by billions of people, are nothing special and are not worthy of art. That would mean underrating other people. What we are dealing with is a world of art forms, and that's a fixed programme.' (Gerhard Merz, Kunstforum, 92 (December 1987 / January 1988), pp. 176-187.) Whether art really does come down to a re-arrangement by the artist of elements already used in the past, and what the consequences of this might be, will be discussed in Gerhard Merz's lecture on March 27th.’ (‘Universal order’, Newsletter De Appel, 3 (1988) 1.)