Making the decision was easy, but carrying it out was more difficult. Now that it is over it seems so matter-of-fact: I gathered together from various locations all my paper works which bad not been sold, and assembled them in chronological order. I pulped down this material, and from it, in a new measurement, made as many sheets of paper as possible.
The destroyed works included pieces from each of the seven years I bad been making paper. In them was written the story of my adventure with paper. They reflected my exuberance as well as my hesitations and doubts. There were traces of the evolution of my thoughts as the paper echoed and fuelled the development of my ideas of ground. This was to be the whole of my material for a new work. Suddenly I reached the moment when I was confronted with the irony of a situation I had created for myself. I had never intended to reject these works, and yet all these pieces were to be destroyed. The action was irrevocable. My only interest had been to pull all the pieces together. Radically.
lt seems now that some awareness of tbe possibilities is suspended for the sake of beginning. In fact so often the moment of beginning doesn't seem to be a matter of choice at all. Sometime later we understand what has been happening. I began thinking about paper and grounds and blankness by making a piece of paper. I got involved in paper-making through painting. I didn't know what I was getting into when I began painting. How in the world could it have come to this? From one clear moment to the next I never knew what was going to happen. I never knew what the result of this integration would be.
Every paper piece I still owned was included here. lt all fitted in, there was never a question of accommodation until after the work was finished. Afterwards, it seemed, every exhibition space was too small. The intimate can fit gently in the palm of one's hand. The monumental is more fragile, more dependent on the externals of the space in which it can function. This is a dependent work. lt consists of 420 sheets of paper, each 70cm by 70cm. lt was completed in September 1975 and only now is having its first public installation in a single space. At the time of its fabrication and first showing in the Städtisches Museum Mönchengladbach, it was dispersed throughout the entire museum, filling all seven rooms and spilling out into the staircase. Its first presentation betrayed the spirit of the work.
The old papers had been pulped and added to the vat in their original chronological order. After eacb new paper was made a small amount of fresh pulp was poured into the vat. This new material brought about changes of colour in the following sheets. This large work in a sense relives its original chronology. The separate moments are de-articulated forming a single conjunction out of themselves. The result is what you see here: a gradual blend of colour: simple paper filling the space of a room, contained by the walls which are in turn clothed by the covering. lt is a final simplicity, a relative simplicity.