FROM A CREATIVE KNOWLEDGE TO CREATIVE IGNORANCE
Our real illiteracy is not the ignorance to read and write and not the incapability to repeat other people’s knowledge, but the inability to create.
A child possesses this creative ability,
the seemingly illiterate, seemingly ignorant child
is not ignorant and not illiterate at all.
On the contrary, it is in full possession of his own creative powers.
By our educational system, he is being degraded to a true creative illiterate.
For the grown-up, who suffers
under this creative impotence, which was forced onto him, the only possibility left is to return to his own childhood and to start again from the last moment,
where he was dragged out of his dreams.
But these dreams were not just longings, but his real basis, without which he can never grow into a human being.
Written in Salzburg on 7 August 1981 as a forword for a brochure on the occasion of the international travelling exhibition of the SOS-Kinderdörfer »Kinder Kunst« (Art by children), Palais Palffy, Vienna, September/October, 1981 (German).
Published in:
forword for a brochure on the occasion of the international travelling exhibition of the SOS-Kinderdörfer "Kinder Kunst" (Art by children), Palais Palffy, Vienna, September/October, 1981 (German)
Brochure for Festival of Fantasy, Wiener Festwochen 1983, p. 6 (German)
phantastisch - Das Jugendkunstschulmagazin 1995/96, Unna/Germany, 1995/96, p. 4 (German)
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. 82-83 and ed. 2004 (Munich, Langen Müller Verlag), p. 99 (German)
Du bist wichtig...Prominente schreiben Dir. Schrift zum 30-jährigen Bestehen der Städtischen katholischen Hauptschule Marienschule, Essen-Steele, 1998 (German)
Schmied, Wieland (ed.): Hundertwasser 1928-2000, Catalogue Raisonné. Vol. II: Fürst, Andrea Christa: Catalogue Raisonné. Cologne: Taschen, 2002, pp. 912-913 (German and English)
Walden, Rotraut (ed.): Schools for the Future, Design Proposals from Architectural Psychology. Göttingen: Hogrefe & Huber Publishers, 2009, p. 263
Hundertwasser. New York: Parkstone Press International, 2008, p. 85
Bildbetrachtung in der Grundschule. Hundertwasser: Der große Weg. Schwarzenbruck/Germany: Grundschulstunden Verlag e.K., 2010, p. 2 (German)