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Fabian Seiz - three heights tall

30.1. - 21.3.2009

End starts You’ve already started. That’s the first thing. The first thing is that you’ve already started, you’re already working, you’ve been working on this, working up to this, for some time. Now start again. Start with a passage from a book. An image or a description. Make the work, make a work, make it work. That’s a start. Now start again. Start with the ends, the bits and pieces, the scraps and remnants, now make them fit, make them work. That’s another start, a fresh start, now you can start up, once more, and. Let me explain. You are in your element. You have everything you need. You always have more or less everything you need, and if you don’t, if something’s missing, if something’s needed, then you can always make do, make ends meet, make the little ends meet to make the big end work. Let me explain myself more clearly. You seem to operate within a certain economy. Nothing, it seems, almost nothing goes to waste, with the exception of a certain dust, a certain expense or expanse of fine grit. There is no such thing as a scrap, everything is a piece, everything is more or less of a piece, somehow, somewhere, every scrap has its origin, just like every cut has its reason, and every endeavour its end, its destination. Let us say that you set out to build some thing, perhaps a machine or a contraption. Let us imagine that you succeed, then perhaps out of the scraps, perhaps or rather certainly out of these odds and ends you will want, you will set out, you will end up building something, something else. Something different, something without an end, something built out of odd ends, odds and ends, bits and pieces, flotsam and jetsam. Allow me to give you an example. A stage gives out onto a series of curtains (this is a work). These interlocking pieces of wood form a model of the human inner ear (this is another work, a model built from its scraps). Here is another example: it’s an archive, an archive of scraps. There’s a drawer full of odds and ends, except the drawer is full of glue or resin, and the resin or the glue has hardened, and the bits of the pieces are irrecuperable. Or this, this one last example and then we’ll call it a day. You’ve made this and that, you’ve stacked things here and there. You’ve made these things, but you’ve started on some new things, and the first, I mean, the older things, as far as you’re concerned, they’re done, finished, I mean, more or less or just about, they’re just about finished, because there’s always a remainder, and the remainder is a scrap, and scraps are the seed, and the scraps pile, and the works pile up, and if you have something over there, that’s right, under there, under that heap, under that pile, that pile of things that you neither need nor really care to move, then you may as well have lost or destroyed it, you may as well have gotten rid of it. But you haven’t and you won’t and so there will always be a remainder, and the remainder is a scrap, and the scrap, the scrap is the seed. And the seed is there at the start, for the start, the start of something else, something new. Julien Jonas Bismuth