THE HAMBURG LINE (excerpt)
I wanted to draw a spiral climbing horizontally up the walls like sedimentary layers of rock.
At the designated moment I began drawing a line counterclockwise around the room, starting about one centimetre from the floor. When I arrived back at my starting point, I began another line about one centimetre higher and loosely parallel to the first. Thus the spiral grew. I continued the line across all the intervening obstacles, across doors, radiators and the like. Some obstacles were avoided and left free. I had moved all the furniture away from the walls so that I would have plenty of space. Thus I drew my line on hands and knees, crawling between the legs of the spectators, and only a very few could see what I was doing. People had probably expected a conventional demonstration from the front of the room, with me talking from a podium and so on, and not from down between their feet. They were probably expecting a show, an explosion, and not this silent evolution. And so they left the room after an hour because as far as they could see nothing was happening. It was strange: they were in the centre of a demonstration which was even surrounding and enveloping them, and nobody noticed.
I began the line in black, later it was red, first with colour pencil and then paint and brush. When I grew tired, I handed the brush to Bazon Brock, who took over from me like in a relay race. I went down to the hall to relax and found a grotesque situation: here were all the people who had received an invitation to the demonstration and wanted to come upstairs. The Hundertwasser School was on the upper floor, but the visitors were being prevented from going up by a group of five custodians. In perfect fighting formation these were punching the crowd of visitors back down the wide staircase, just like in the famous film by Eisenstein. A number of people were bleeding. It degenerated into a proper fight. On the instructions of the Deputy Rector, everyone was boxed out of the building, among them a high-ranking judge, who demanded compensation. A poster was rapidly put up on a stand with the information: “No members of the public shall be admitted to the Hundertwasser experiment.” But the press was there, and the incident became public. The Rector of the Institute, who was in Rome at the time, learned of what had happened from the newspapers and took the next plane to Hamburg.
Meanwhile I continued the line. The line passed across the inside of the door. Every time the line reached this point, the entrance door had to be closed. It took about twenty minutes to draw one spiral circle around the room, and about one minute to complete the section across the closed door. With the exception of this brief minute, the door was always open. At just one such moment, when the line was crossing the door, the Deputy Rector appeared outside demanding immediate entry. I called out from within: “Wait a minute, I can’t open the door now, the law of the line forbids it. Wait a minute until the line has left the door.” He was furious and flung himself at the door trying to force his way in. He understood nothing. I calmly continued the line, and once it had passed the door I opened it.
It was like being on the Mount of Olives. I was alone with the two poets, Schult and Brock. Though students were not permitted to be in the Institute at night to participate in drawing the line in my class, I witnessed parties and drunken students from other schools in the corridors at 3 a.m. That made me angry. My students disavowed me. It was forbidden to photograph the line. Our electricity was cut off during the night. I went out to get candles from a nightclub. We took turns: one person drew the line, another slept on the sofa and the third went out to get something to eat and drink and candles and to talk to the press. We worked until dawn. It was like being on a ship in high seas: we each held watch in turn. The line was red and grew like the Red Sea, a red spiral sea. And then came the second day. The newspapers reported everything in detail. The scandal was complete.
The cathedrals of true faith, the cathedrals of creation, cannot be built with straight lines, because the straight line is godless. My “experiment” was actually supposed to end at a point somewhere on the ceiling. The line would then be a spiral which comes from outside, from a distance, seems to grow narrower and narrower and seems to end at a centre, similar to the peak of a pyramid or the spire of a cathedral, of a faith, which are also charged with special energies. In reality, however, the spiral condenses itself into a centre which signifies life and death simultaneously and concentrates immense forces for a rebirth into another plane.
Unfortunately, I was not permitted to find this point. I didn’t get that far. During the second night, I abandoned the line because they threatened to bring in the police.
Written in 1975/1983.
Published in:
Catalogues of the World Travelling Museum Exhibition 1975–1987: French edition: Paris, Luxembourg, Marseille, Cairo, 1975; Copenhagen, Dakar, 1976. English edition: Tel Aviv, Reykjavik, 1976; Cape Town, Pretoria, Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, Brasilia, Caracas, 1977; Mexico City, Toronto, 1978; Rome, Høvikodden, 1980; Helsinki, 1981; London, 1983. German edition: Warsaw, 1976; Pfäffikon/Lake Zurich, 1979; Cologne, 1980; Vienna, Graz, 1981 (in English language version). Japanese / English edition: Tokyo, 1977.
Schurian, Walter (ed.): Hundertwasser – Schöne Wege, Gedanken über Kunst und Leben. (Beautiful Paths – Thoughts on Art and Life) Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag (dtv), 1983, pp. 126-135* and ed. 2004 (Munich, Langen Müller Verlag), pp. 146-154 (German) *revised by Hundertwasser for this publication in 1983
Das Hundertwasser Haus (The Hundertwasser House). Vienna: Österreichischer Bundesverlag/Compress Verlag, 1985, pp. 52-53 (German, excerpt)
Hundertwasser Architecture. For a More Human Architecture in Harmony with Nature. Cologne: Taschen, 1997, pp. 52-54 and Edition 2007, pp. 38-40 (excerpt)
Rand, Harry: Friedensreich Hundertwasser. Cologne: Taschen, 1991, p. 95, abridged edition 1993 and edition 2003, p. 79 (excerpt)
Hundertwasser. New York: Parkstone Press International, 2008, pp. 60-68
Hirsch, Andreas (ed.): Hundertwasser – The Art of the Green Path, Exhibition catalogue KunstHausWien. Munich: Prestel Verlag, 2011, p. 76 (excerpt)