Hundertwasser moves! - A review

The Belvedere curator Axel Köhne writes in his contribution “Hundertwasser - Performative as cultural criticism” (2013): “Some of the photos show Hundertwasser on the street once again (the famous Ginza, for example), clearly engaged in performances. The motif of the line was once again decisive: Hundertwasser appears to be tracing an imaginary line through the city – one that is potentially endless. He is wearing clothes of this own design (velvet vest and striped coat), his coat, simply carried, is the seeming focus. The artist walks along the busy shopping street, the paving stones with the straight diagonal lines of their joints is clearly visible. He leans against a pillar on which traffic signs with linear motifs are mounted (including one forbidding U-turns). The degree and deliberate manner in which Hundertwasser was capable of stage-managing himself becomes abundantly clear: he crouches atop a fuse box on the side of the street and assumes the pose of a thinker or an artist; he spread out his coat, kneels down on the sidewalk, engages curious passersby who hold up his coat and in doing so bend its straight stripes, he raises his hands above his head as though under arrest. The photos picture a tidy street, everything appears to be orderly; Hundertwasser appears to be the only emphatically unassimilated foreigner, a disruptive factor in the sanitized public space. He is particularly obvious in one such street scene as he holds one of his paintings, Die erste Japan Spirale (The First Japan Spiral) from 1961, high up above the crowd for the camera. 

Just six years later that Daniel Buren had two people carry his stiped pictures through the streets of Paris.”