Hundertwasser's comment on the work

An early documentation of what later was to become a style of expression in art. Every scrap of discarded paper, garbage, cigarette butts etc. were sacred to me. I decided to collect everything anybody threw away in a limited segment of the street, about 50 meters long, and to put it together in a collage. I am very proud of this picture, which proved that everything is valuable. Hence the name, Values of the Street - Putting side by side of objects found on the pavement. I kept my eye on the street when I walked down it, and I saw the most fantastic lines, forms, colours and compositions, as if I were going through a forest of wonders. It was in particular the cracks (lézardes) in the sidewalk, but also the rivulets of spilled milk. I wanted to produce a book, with photographs of segments of sidewalks in Vienna, Paris, Rome, New York and Tokyo, with precise data on the streets and location of the sidewalks. If I don't do it, somebody else surely will. It would be a magnificent textbook of automatic Tachism, with pictures which every abstract painter can only dream of. I myself can't help continually photographing sidewalk segments from right overhead. (from: Hundertwasser 1928-2000, Catalogue Raisonné, Vol. 2, Taschen, Cologne, 2002, pp. 232-233)