Harald Krodel - Author

"I wish I were some symphony by Beethoven or any thing that has been completed in writing. The process of being written is painful."

Dear Claus,

When contemplating your beautiful site I also remembered the projects during which I was allowed to accompany you. I believe this is a collaboration that has fostered our development in a fertile way. Your Augsburg-Cycle was our first joint work, a large-size sequence of pictures with which you have highlighted your relationship with the city in which you feel at home right down to the murkiest corner and reflected the mirror of your personality. What you wanted was to add literary texts to each of those pictures, create a vademecum which would ask the beholder to go beyond the mere visual joy and contribute thoughts and developments. For the artifact is not the object created but the confrontation with it. The texts were meant, and had to be tantamount to the pictures; anything more inferior would have caused an aching imbalance. And if there’s anything you excel at, it’s how to bring things into balance. I feel still flattered that of all people you had confidence in me and that you have trusted me with the once hated, once loved lecturer’s task. When reading those cycle-texts today, however, I feel rather tempted to start work anew. The confrontation goes on. 1997 saw the publication of "Trilogie des Ordnens" (Trilogy of Creating Order/Trilogy of Filing?) (your work number 229). Every single creator of art has a theory with which he addresses the others. This theory is the offer to learn something, to pick something up in Hegel’s treble sense. Without a theory no talk, no confrontation, and therefore no art can come into being. In the three essays of your trilogy "Über das Einüben und das Vereinbaren" (On Rehearsal and Agreement), "Über die Parteilichkeit" (On Being Partial) and "Vom Papageientum" (On Parrot-dom) you undertake no less than summing up, to create order within your work, make space for new things. I was also allowed to accompany these texts over a long period of time by smoothing them out and by helping with their interior. It is probable that the one or the other of my thoughts has sneaked into work number 229. One thing, however, is certain: "Theorie des Ordnens" has influenced many of my literary texts. Unfortunately, one artist is often the other one’s wolf. The grazing grounds are scarce and animosity is rife, particularly so in a city that has gone bankrupt like Augsburg. But this is not your way! Once convinced of an artist’s quality you cease to see in him a competitor, you are not his foe but his friend. You support him as best you can, you keep goading on those torpid buggers like me who are too lazy to write and you proffer me the opportunity within your own projects to read from my creative work. "I wish I were some symphony by Beethoven or any thing that has been completed in writing. The process of being written is painful." That’s how I quoted Balzac earlier on. But life and becoming are a process, a path; stagnation is the end of art. He who stands still is already going backwards. I hope we will continue walking our paths together.

Harald Krodel