published in:

Josef Mikl (Hrsg.), Josef Mikl, Arbeiten 1988 - 1993

Wien 1994

Painting only goes in one direction at a time, towards the truth.
It does not look back, it looks forward, it moves forwards - and yet it makes no progress.
Not in the sense of progress.
It is, in its own way, sometimes better and sometimes worse, sometimes closer and sometimes further away from the goal.
Painting works differently to technology, it uses no electricity, it needs no calculators, no television sets, it produces no hazardous waste, nothing to throw away.
It does not live through fluorescent galleries, floodlights are disasters for it, loudspeakers remind it of Hitler or Stalin - or of church priests who otherwise cannot make themselves heard.
Painting costs little - if it is meant seriously.
It works for the future, beyond the present and often against it, it is always one step ahead of its time and is therefore hushed up and despised by the zeitgeist.
The zeitgeist likes to decorate, it works with the masses as its strongest force, with sentimentality, stupid content, the wrong form, poor technique, the sham philosophy of the arts and crafts.
The word zeitgeist is an insult.
Entrepreneurs and directors, politicians and church leaders love it.
That is the rule, there are hardly any exceptions.
Painting doesn't get along in this society.
It has to keep its distance in order to be able to depict something.
It does not cast a sideways glance, it focuses on the essential, it works with time and space.
Time and space were never separate in it, they were treated together from the beginning - long before the engineer invented himself and then space-time.
Painting overcomes the engineer's mind and the drawing board as well as chaos and dissolution.

Since she is not sick, she does not need a confessor or a psychiatrist.
It has its own order and can build a structure that is unrivalled.
How it is created and where it is created is irrelevant.
The painter Morandi never left his homeland, but he had more insight into the workings of the world than many a widely travelled art peddler.
Throughout his life, Morandi missed congresses and did not read art magazines.
He did not have the modern feeling, he did not have the zeitgeist.
Vienna will get enough of this modern feeling.
Our government, the tourism industry and especially the Rectors' Conference like it that way.

They want the World Expo.
The World Expo is a great crime against the environment. Millions of visitors in aeroplanes, buses and cars will prove it.
The Rectors' Conference wants to aesthetically utilise the four elements of the ancient Greeks, water - air - fire - earth, for the coming tourist chaos.
It has ignored and suppressed the exhaust gas that reigns supreme over these four as the fifth, and will subsequently receive poor marks from history.
Good marks from professors in the subjects of showing off, spending money and killing.