THE ANTIPODAL TIMEPIECE
We live in an absurd anti-time. Values are topsy-turvy.
Uglyness is considered honest and worthwhile. Beauty is branded populist kitsch.
Time, the clock, has become the symbol of pressing deadlines.
More than ever before we need to hark back to the course of eternal events in harmony with nature and creation. Timelessness - lasting values, awareness of the cosmos, where there is no up and down, no right and left, no clockwise or counter-clockwise. That is why the antipodal timepiece does not actually indicate time in the sense of our business mentality, but rather an anti-time.
Time is not the important thing, but the organic course of events in organic, beautiful form. Time should create new life, slowly, spiraloidally, vegetatively and surely and creatively. Time should not destroy the time before and cause panic about the time of tomorrow, which will be dead the day after tomorrow.
That is why the antipodal timepiece has hands which move to the left as well as the right not in a circular, but in an organically dented housing, which can also be situated vertically in several positions. Lasting values are represented, such as ecology and creativity. The measurement of time is a human, bogus idea and invention, as is the straight line, but eternity and the eternal course of events are all there is. So this antipodal timepiece is intended as a simile of these higher laws.
Written November 1, 1990, for a brochure for the object 908
Published in:
Broschüre, Männedorf/Glarus 1992
Schmied, Wieland (ed.): Hundertwasser 1928–2000, Catalogue Raisonné. Vol. II: Fürst, Andrea Christa: Catalogue Raisonné. Cologne: Taschen, 2002, p. 1080 (German and English)
The yet unknown Hundertwasser. Catalogue on the occasion of the exhibition at KunstHausWien, Munich: Prestel Verlag, 2008, p. 206