Andreas Schmid

"I couldn´t have done it (myself)", says Draesner, 40, referring to Space Poem , her collaboration with fellow visual artist Andreas Schmid that is based on Trains Over The Arcades, a poem inspired by Savignyplatz, a teeming entertainment area in Berlin. The spirit and decadence of one of Berlin´s most hectic squares - especially prostitutes who ply their trade and bustling atmosphere - is brilliantly recreated.
Draesner calls it " rough and real": seen it all cabbies, indifferent sex workers, the cacophony of clattering coffee cups and rumble of passing trains overhead. According to Draesner, the minimalist installation on view at the Goethe- Institut "creates tilts and loops into various angles, it is kind of out balance and this ingeniously hits upon the feeling the Savignyplatz emits, which is what the poem tries to capture".
Schmid hung photographs from the ceiling depicting the people and shops that set the stage shady massage parlours and quiet libraries, professionals in stylish restaurants and the homeless on park benches. With a bit of imagination, viewers can transport themselves to the centre of one of Berlin´s busiest areas. Draesner´s poem is omnipresent: fragments are printed on to walls and a recording of it is audible. Schmid visuals catch the viewers´eye, but it is the poem that holds everything together. To Draesner, Savignyplatz represents the frenzied urban mix that typifies big cities like Berlin. "I was attracted by its mixture of historical traces. The square is named after Friedrich Carl von Savigny, a lawyer and historian in the 19th century; there is Cafe Hegel, which is run by exiled Russians, and Kant-Strasse crosses the square," she says.
The space Schmid creates evokes the eeriness of Berlin´s streetscape: wide boulevards that are often devoid of people. "Berlin always struck me as immense. It´s huge, especially with the amount of people living there. in this regard, it´s just the Opposite of Hong Kong," she says. "Berlin , for example, is the only city I know, which contains woods right in its middle, where you can go and hunt deer."
Draesner´s studies took her to universities in Munich, Salamanca in Spain and Oxford. She dropped her academic career barely after receiving a doctorate to persue life as a full-time writer. With Space Poem, which made its debut in Calcutta two years ago, Draesner diversified into visual arts as well. "I thought about making the spoken word more lasting in an unusual way. i wanted it to remain in a space, even after I had left after a reading", she says.
"For me, poems always feel three-dimensional: the first dimension is the word, print out for the eye. The second is the word read aloud for the ear. From that point on it seems natural to think about the third dimension. "So, the idea is to make a space out of a poem, to build words into matter. This is in order to make the poem accessible for eye, ear, movement and feeling all at once", she says.

Mundry:
Space has been metaphorically present in music for centuries. We say top and bottom when talking about pitch, and we also talk about tonal spaces that are defined by the upper and lower extremities of sounds and melodies, but also by relationships within them. In Renaissance music these were known as modes, a notion that is also familiar from architecture – the Doric order in architecture and the Dorian mode in music, for example. And music is also fundamentally concerned with time, proportions and formal architecture. Speech also involves upward and downward movements. Music starts at the point where speech is placed on a scale. This is a crucial point of transition from prayer to song, and from there onwards pitch and the spaces occupied by sounds become essential categories. And of course thought has always been given to how musicians are placed in a concert hall or church.

Seidel:
If we are looking for a comparison with architecture, is it possible to see musical scales as 'auditory stairs'?

Mundry:
That's a good comparison, though the steps are different distances apart. You can move by a semitone or a tone, and there are gradations in tuning systems other than the tempered one. We are dealing with qualified steps, to a certain extent.

Seidel:
We've talked about the height of our space. How does it develop in terms of breadth? How do you build musical balconies and terraces beside the steps?

Mundry:
Breadth would be the tonal space extending into time. Contrapuntal Renaissance music defined spatial thinking essentially within the
linearity of individual voices. But there were laws of harmony even then, and these became even more important in subsequent centuries. Then all-embracing systems and musical languages faded away increasingly in the course of the 20th century. Now I have to ask myself before every piece how I can make sense of the 'great white noise'. All the parameters have to be thought through afresh for every piece, and spatial musical thinking is an important consideration. The idea behind a composition creates its own spatial concept on the
planes of time, scope and sound.


Seidel:
What does time mean in this context now, as it has actually stayed the same ever since clocks were invented?

Mundry:
And what do we really know about clocks?! Clocks are constructions that tell us relatively little about the phenomenon of time. In tonal music, it is essentially harmony that determines the architecture of time. Harmonic orders and thematic and melodic sequences are indivisible categories. When I write the first note nowadays, the horizon that this particular note relates to is considerably less clearly determined. This means that very different approaches to time develop. For example, John Cage staked out periods of time and threw dice to determine what should happen in them. The sound events are not related to each other through their inner structure, but exist as individual entities. There is no processual relationship in the way they are put together. I often realize that Cage's music triggers a sense of time, as though it were possible to look at time from a distance.

Seidel:
Andreas, your performance with Claude Horstmann in the Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart addresses the space that is created between two bodies. It seems to me that this is a similar idea to the one that Isabel has raised about Cage's pieces. In his case a place of silence is created in the time between the sounds, an empty space. In your thinking you relate to a three-dimensional, empty space.

Schmid:
You're raising an important point there, the 'empty space' that we bridge in quite different ways. In Stuttgart there was this space between Claude and me, between our approach and between the actual things we were 'dealing with'. In my case this happened with the act of carrying a large wooden beam. I felt myself to be part of the piece of timber that was working on the gap between me and the public. Rather like writing a piece of Chinese calligraphy. There it is the gaps between the individual signs that is the key: linked and yet separate. Everything depends on leaving something empty, on the rhythm. A quite different, much more restless kind of situation arises when you notice that there actually is something 'in the air'. That is how I relate to space. I go into the space, experience it as such and take it up as it is presented to me. What is important here is that this process always needs time, but differently in each case. At first it is the time that I spend in the space, and then the time when I carry the space around with me. Later I become more active, and reinforce what I have identified as its characteristics, as it were. Emptiness is all activated by my interventions, and rhythmic sequences are created. But this is nothing to do with harmony, in the same way as Isabel explained it for music. Harmony is the wrong term: it no longer corresponds with the reality that I have found.

Seidel:
You say that you reinforce the aspects of the space. What are the concrete resources that you use to do this?

Schmid:
The space itself makes a major contribution, among other things because of its history. Isabel and I are both working on Haus Huth, its interior and exterior. We exchange ideas about the things that seem important to us: surroundings, proximity, distance. It's exciting that Haus Huth provides a circular space to a certain extent, with views through, view outwards, situations that influence each other. My working resources are very simple, often just a line, taken in its broadest sense. A rope can be stretched out, a line can also be buried, as in the outdoor work Wüste fegen [Sweep the Desert] gerade in Berlin. There is no recipe, but it can start with that. The structure of the space is an important starting-point for me. And the light in it. In other words, what happens to the light in time. That has a considerable influence on the work. In Marfa (Texas) there was a lot of light in the exhibition space during the day, and I worked with coloured lines on the wall, floor and part of the ceiling. The lines related to the changing light and shade and the different proportions they created in the space, which took on different sculptural forms as a result of their interplay. Ultimately I am able to make things overlap, penetrate and become abstract. That is how I reinforce the overall presence of the space.

Seidel:
On the subject of the presence of the space and changing it I'd like to come back to your music again, Isabel, and the way you handle it
spatially. How do you integrate time and space in your music?

Mundry:
Personally I am interested in how time is perceived, i.e. time as perceived and not time as an abstract compositional model. Here I increasingly concentrate on the 'moment', on other words a time phenomenon with an extreme quality of perspective. I am concerned with the question of what we experience about time when we focus on something we cannot escape from anyway, our own temporality as an accumulation of moments. A moment is not the blinking of an eye, it is not a second or minute, I define a moment as something that develops a particular form, with its own internal time, a beginning and an end. This is a spatial notion through and through. A space is something
that draws a boundary out from an open field of possibilities. And this boundary is defined by inner structures. Who can tell me what a space is? A space can be created between my hand and my eyes, an eternity between the table and Andreas.

Seidel:
Does that mean that the definition of space is highly subjective for you?


Mundry:
Yes, but not in the sense of randomness and chance. On the contrary: the more a moment is identified as a particular one, the more it is available, and can be objectified. In music I attempt to create a radical transitoriness by intensifying temporary particularities. For example there is a piece called traces des moments that relates to a precise moment that I experienced in a Japanese garden. After I had been looking at a gravel garden with timeless wave patterns for a while I went round a corner and came across a waterfall. Here too there were wave formations, but this time they were in a permanent state of regular movement, influenced by random factors like a jumping frog. From then on I suddenly felt an incredible desire to observe resonance phenomena inside these gardens, and also between the gardens and the world around them: transitions between the shaped and the random, between eternity and the moment. Another example would be clipping plants. A lot of bushes look as though they are distant trees. But behind the bushes are wild trees full of contours and the presence of utter transience, so that they suggest proximity, even though they are in the background. I also address this kind of time and space perception musically, and I am increasingly working on linking time and space sequences indivisibly.

Seidel:
So if someone is listening to one of your pieces that works with a spatial distribution of the instruments, are they aware of an audible multiple perspective that transforms the time-space continuum into moments?

Mundry:
Yes. In classical music you know precisely where the instruments are placed on the platform. It is a frontal sound experience. But in my pieces it is important that spatial perception is first created by the sound sequence. Each composition implies particular positioning for the musicians, and this is laid down precisely in the score. In Ferne Nähe [Distant Proximity], for example, there is only a string quartet on the platform, and all the other musicians, about 70 of them, are distributed around the space. Here the spatial movements of the sounds are indivisibly lined with their forms and structures.

Seidel:
After talking about space and time structures in music, Peter, I now have a question for you as an architect: how are time and space organized in your Zoomtown? I have the impression that in Zoomtown we move from the static space of the classic city, something that is static and locks together via various function units, into a dynamic time-space. Space, seen as distance, can be bridged very quickly.

Haimerl:
Well, in my Zoomtown city concept space can be bridged very slowly as well. It is mainly about the high speed with which it is possible to cover distances within Europe. I am concerned above all with access to spaces. Here I would like to come back to Isabel's statements about the relationship between space and music, to changes in the frontal listening situation and its access to time. You see, I think that big spatial changes are happening in architecture as well, in terms of space as a construct. Traditionally space is seen as 'staking out' an area: you have four posts that you ram into the ground. This defines a space, and in principle all planners still work on this pattern in order to create space. If you put several spaces created in this way together, you come up with a hierarchical sequence from inside to outside in the classical city. From the centre via the industrial areas to the garden city.

Seidel:
Which brings us to the problem of over-development…

Haimerl:
The over-development phenomenon arises from treating space as an accumulation of areas. This breaks away from the sense of a hierarchically sequenced arrangement. People are disturbed by it, but still accept it. There is no longer any such thing as a beautiful and perfectly structured city. 'Unsuitable' functions keep being mixed in: sports facilities, shopping centres etc. A lot of people think this is the wrong kind of development. But some town planners, like Rem Kohlhaas, handle fragmented spaces like this very constructively. They say that airports and railway stations are today's urban squares. I would like to develop this approach a little further. I'm not bothered about going back to the classical, static cityscape, that 'is correct and remains true', but about opportunities for us in non-static space, which can be handled more effectively. Which we can also perceive more freely and with greater command. So we get away from the idea of space as a structure bounded by walls to an idea of space that is sent through gates that can be turned to face in various directions. Space can flow through this imaginary frame, and this spatial flow can be overlaid and complemented by other individual currents.

Seidel:
So can we imagine spatial flow as a kind of air current that passes over or through an object? Like the wind tunnels that are used to test the aerodynamics of a car?

Haimerl:
Yes, for example. But material markings do not disturb me, I see them as available elements that create a spatial flow anyway, and also allow it to be felt. Other things are added to the spatial flow in my mind like imagination, fantasy, sounds and feelings that shape the spatial flow and can also be shaped.

Seidel:
How can we work with spatial flow when designing a new town?

Haimerl:
First you imagine that you are sending out a subjective stream of space. This encounters part of a building, for example, and changes
as a result. What happens here? When the stream meets a solid boundary, spatial turbulence ensues. This is a very subjective idea of space, but it is no more or less subjective than the traditional one based on areas. Though it has to be said that the sender-receiver relationship between human being and space changes with the image of spatial turbulence, and you can wonder how you generally stand yourself in terms of the surrounding space: am I penetrating the space, or is it that the space is penetrating me? Thus we have another approach to the way in which real space is shaped.

Schmid:
That is a very interesting phenomenon that I'm working on as well: space defines and we then define space. The inner courtyard of the music college here in Frankfurt, where we are sitting now, is a space that is doing something to us. At the same time we can handle the space ourselves as well. That is an exciting, mutually active relation-ship. Sometimes I hear space and sometimes a space actually seems more constricted or more open than it actually is. Space is dynamic.

Haimerl:
Yes, you can see that in architecture in some places. I don't think that morphed construction forms are based on the computer's ability to make things visible, they are caused by seeing spaces as something fluctuating. Dutch architects in particular develop spaces that are difficult to realize in technical construction terms. And their functional advantages are not always obvious either. But they are spaces that correspond with a momentary sense of space. For me, morphed spaces are a visible form of the spatial flow that we imagined earlier. They are 1:1 translations of this imaginary world.

Seidel:
The spatial turbulence will be less violent because of the streamlined shapes of morphed architecture, a form of urban aerodynamics is created. As you say, the functional advantages really are questionable in many places. For me this change of urban form is seen largely from the point of view of exteriors, what happens to the interiors? How do people come to terms with humps and bumps in their homes?

Haimerl:
I believe that nowadays, and I think this is a fundamental change from earlier, interiors relate to the particular individual. While formerly space was always seen as protective, and surrounded by solid walls that led to rigid urban structures, protective space now consists largely of the knowledge that we have acquired.

Seidel:
I would not completely agree with that. I find that net curtains, especially in the case of new, open architecture, contradict this argument. For me net curtains are a clear sign that someone feels in need of protection. The interior is curtaining itself off.

Mundry:
For me there is a fundamental question about the general definition of space. An increasing number of spatial situations question the relation-ship between interior and exterior. This starts when we lose ourselves in the public worlds of television behind the lace curtains.

Seidel:
But all I can see there is pure convention, backing up the frills at the window. I don’t think that what I see on television runs against the way a large number of people live in their homes or experience space.

Haimerl:
These are arguments that you often hear, and as an architect I think I can respond to them very well. The biggest problem that architecture has today in particular is that it is the last bastion of the spaces of the past, so to speak. It is the snail shell in which people spend time in a 'distant past' that is set against our 'here and now'. But people are not just obsessed with these snail-shell needs, they like leaving their conventional spaces: I have heard that airports are among Germany's most popular excursion destinations. So people live in
everyday spaces that they are used to, but sometimes like to look for parallel spaces. Architecture perhaps develops more slowly than fine art. But the set-pieces that are already turning up here and there will mean that people will accept more open and more variably built architecture in the medium term.

Seidel:
I think that trips to airports don't have anything to do with changing needs in the first place. It is perhaps more that people get a sense of technology and speed there, and also a longing for faraway places. But don't they turn round and say: I want to go home, back to territory that actually belongs to me.

Haimerl:
I think that all these ideas about 'home' are simply constructs. It's just a world that you create for yourself and zoom in on like an airport.Construction makes you feel closer to reality. That is a false conclusion, like the belief that you can get closer to nature by trying to be more 'physical'. I come from the country, and observe this tendency, which I find extremely artificial.

Seidel:
Does back to nature for example mean setting up your mobile unit Cocobello somewhere you want to be at that particular moment? Cocobello, the module with a bathroom unit, provides everything you need to settle down somewhere for a certain length of time.

Haimerl:
Cocobello is a mobile unit, a sending and receiving station that can dock at social and cultural focal points like an acupuncture needle. Distributed all over Europe, it forms a network of independent mobile units and has an effect on a particular place for a certain length of time. Temporary structures and the actions emanating from them inform the space in a different way, and this change within the space remains when Cocobello moves on. The memory network of former locations is spread over the whole of Europe and forms a soft spatial dimension that corresponds with the Zoomtown hardware. This makes Cocobello different from current architectural power manifestations based on the urban hardware of a hundred years ago. At the moment we are working on an out-of-date basis in our techno-world, and disregarding the fact that people's needs have changed. And that is actually the kind of nature that predominates in our towns. In other words far too much nature, in the sense of an unbridled, uncultivated infrastructure and building set-up.

Schmid:
The Berlin Schloss is the best example of this. It harks back to what are supposed to be the 'good old days'. And using a cover, like a dummy, indicates that we are flying from the present. It means suppression and lifelessness, and leads us to believe in a kind of pseudo bourgeois comfort. It is going back to 'monarchical greatness'. Actually facing up to the future would be a very courageous and appropriate sign.

Seidel:
And so how do people live in Zoomtown? It's not actually a utopia, but a design that can be realized.

Haimerl:
First of all, Zoomtown promotes big cities that come together like groups of companies to make use of synergy effects. So I have developed the 500 kph Zoomliner to cover large distances like Berlin-Paris. The Zoomliner network links the individual Zoomtown cities at particular points, so it's an Intercity for Europe's major cities. But within the individual metropolises, which are districts of Zoomtown, as it were, the Zoomliner network behaves differently: it is placed on a three-by-three kilometre grid above or below the city, and so it is not part of the city in the way that current roads are. The quality of life is not damaged by this new means of transport. And the network itself should not be imagined as a rigid grid either. What actually happens is that points emerge that exert a kind of natural strength, but it is not a grid that defines the structure of the city. So Zoomtown creates new spatial opportunities for the individual, and these correspond with the telecommunications networks. The city we experience in the network when we are exchanging with a friend in Spain will become a favourite place in Paris in Zoomtown, where you can meet from time to time.

Seidel:
Assuming that the cities agree with these links, how do synergy effects come about?

Haimerl:
The cities suddenly start to relate to each other in quite different ways. Zoomtown does not try to link up transport systems. It is simply a basis on which cities can interact with each other. This is the point at which it starts to get exciting for me. The individual Zoomtown cities would have to take on certain tasks, they either have to come into line with each other or establish definite differences so that they achieve a certain degree of accuracy. My aim is to differentiate cities qualitatively.

Mundry:
Zoomtown also gives me the impression that it is an interpretation of situations that already exist. As if the language had already changed anyway, and a new rule is being developed from this.

Schmid
Well, these rules of course only apply to one tranche of the population, the one that lives in these big cities. If I live in Rostock I can't take advantage of Zoomtown.

Haimerl
Yes, that's true, but it is quite deliberately done like that. I want to create a counter-image to everything that has happened in the last 30 years, where only the country has developed strategies.

Seidel
I am reminded of Le Corbusier and the plan voisin to a certain extent, where transport organization is superimposed on mature towns.

Haimerl
Not just that. Passenger transport happens above ground, and goods transport under the ground. And no technological 'plus' is needed: the fact is often overlooked that a bundle of out-of-date infrastructure can disappear at the same time, and so Zoomtown brings a technological 'minus' with it. Unlike Le Corbusier's idea, the network is stretched across the town and no longer cuts through it. Zoomtown means that roads are cut back within the individual towns. Inner city transport only involves the Flowters, in other words these 30 kph track vehicles that take up a lot less space. Ideally I'd like to think of further inner-city development as it is in some Arab towns: they have formulated themselves over the centuries by shifting and removing things, and then they fit themselves together again organically by rebuilding. Commerce has to be integrated again, and the city can feed itself once more. The moment that façades stop having to be a protective wall against traffic noise it is possible to imagine the city as a complete whole again, and not as an accumulated series of isolated parcels. The whole city area becomes a force field.

Mundry:
I would describe that as a narrative city. People channel a certain form of movement and the rest is left for organic growth to cope with, to chaotic processes.

Schmid:
For me that also means a change in the political structures, as that is part of space as well. So the framework within which citizens participate should also be enlarged again, instead of further driving out creative, organically growing processes. I recently took part in a colloquium about rebuilding a kindergarten. There was to be no discussion about the external areas. And when we asked why, the answer came: "There's no point, because the standards are set by insurance requirements." So safety questions determine material and form, and only prefabricated materials are admissible. This eliminates any sense of life. It is no longer possible to deal with space responsibly.

Seidel
This development definitely comes about because of clear ideas about safe, clean cities. I think this is one of the greatest hurdles that a reinterpreting the city has to get over. That's why I'm very interested in the kind of work that Andreas does. You start by interpreting a city by sweeping a square clean. This involves a drawing that uses derelict land as a means of reflecting about urban spaces. I see Cocobello as comparable from an architectural point of view: demonstrating a new approach with few resources. And another important thing is that the acoustics of the city have simply been forgotten about in a lot of new urban designs. I find Isabel's work in the context of this exhibition very exciting and I am already looking forward to hearing the voice of the city. And finally a question that related specifically to the situation of Haus Huth in Potsdamer Platz, once one of Europe's biggest building sites. How is Potsdamer Platz reflected as a force field in your work?

Schmid
The way Potsdamer Platz's development makes an impact on the gallery is important to me. Not so much as an assertive presence, which is in fact essentially modest in comparison with Peking, New York or London, but as an everyday outside space. If you walk through the gallery in Haus Huth you don’t have a sense of image, of a frontal presentation. That was what I meant earlier as well, when I mentioned a circular space. For example, on one window side the development comes so close that you can't cut it out of your field of vision. That is why distance and proximity are very important for my work. It seems important to me here that musical and visual work do not simply run alongside each other, but that this intensive mutual exchange leads to visual appearance and acoustic presence helping us to understand the space as a membrane. So that new processes, transitions and events emerge for the benefit of the visitors.

Mundry
There is one thing about this project that is really new and very challenging for me: I have noticed that a lot of artists are thinking about threshold phenomena at the moment, and thus raising the general question of where a space actually starts to become a space, and what is inside and what outside. And we are understanding more and more that this is a question of interpretation, perception and perspective. There is a haiku that sums up this phenomenon: I am in Kyoto now – but when the cuckoo calls – I long for Kyoto. This describes a moment when an acoustic signal makes a spatial feeling start to tip over into something else. Kyoto isn't Kyoto any more. We experience something similar when the last notes of a piece dies away and we suddenly get a completely different impression of the space. I'm interested in the fact that in our project the transition between the arts and the ways in which they are perceived is not left just to the exhibition visitors, but is part of our own work. My piece moves on a ridge between fully composed music for four trumpets and acoustic raw material that is drawn from the gallery and its surroundings. The noises are gradually brought closer to the composed sounds and the listener's imagination makes them into part of the space with the instruments through acoustic aspects like echo, reverberation, resonance etc. This creates composed spaces that would not be possible in a normal concert situation, or when walking through the gallery.

Haimerl
For me Potsdamer Platz is a square packed with history and stories. I understand space as a story that we are constantly relating ourselves. Zoomtown emerges from this thought as well. When spaces come so close to each other in time as they do in Zoomtown and the mind is not able to grasp this, then these spaces have to be brought together in a different way. It is only possible to do this by understanding space as a narrative. You can always bridge this self-narrated space in that same way that we bridge it in the world of our imagination, and that this is where the parallel with the virtual world lies. The reconstruction expectations generated by Potsdamer Platz as derelict land and its myth largely ruled out urban development experiments. And so this led to even more disappointment. In Zoomtown we would not have had to link up with the old myths, we would have invented new stories and been able to revive old relationships with Paris and Moscow. Potsdamer Platz would have been an ideal starting-point for Zoomtown. Haus Huth would have been particularly significant as the only relic, as it is now. Now Zoomtown takes off from the inside, emerges from the building, as a force field.

It's not intelligence, and it doesn't necessarily have anything to do with education. It's not sophistication, or the lack of it. It is exactly the same element that makes one person gleefully enjoy a slasher movie and another person cringe with disgust. It's the same thing that makes a joke funny, and not funny. I believe that to engage with a work of art, or to find any experience fulfilling, you first have to "tune yourself," so to speak, to be open to the positive qualities of that experience. Take a painting, for example, a Norman Rockwell. There's a kid at a dentist's. He's scared, and the dentist is paternal. It's really cute, and it clearly communicates a narrative and the emotional states of the characters. For many people, that's a positive quality.
Additionally, there's the draftsmanship, which is impeccable, and the economy of the painting in evoking light and texture, which shows considerable skill. These are positive qualities that, while equally present, are less obvious to those who haven't spent time observing drawings arid paintings and their varying levels of skill and technique.
Now let's try another painting, a Mark Rothko. There's a square of color floating in a field of another color. It isn't a picture of people or their physical environment. so the potential positive quality of storytelling is unavailable. The drawing is so simple that "technique" doesn't really enter into it, so we're less one more potential positive. What's left? The two colors and the softness of the edge between them. The square's relationship to the shape of the canvas. If you want to fully enjoy the experience of this painting, you first have to build up sensitivity to colors and shapes, the edges that hold them in, and the spaces that they suggest. It may take a considerable time investment, and it may take a teacher to lead the way. I think it's worth it, but hey, that's me.
So we're back in this empty room with its few lines. What are its positive qualities? What sensitivities are required to experience the work? Where do we even start? In my own process of fishing for an answer to these questions, I had assistance, in that the artist was in the room when I got there, and he personally walked me through his thought process as he worked on the piece. I probably could have eventually attuned myself to the work and enjoyed it without his help, but I freely admit that the time it might have taken to figure it out was cut easily in half, especially since my personal enthusiasms run more to painting and drawing than to sculpture and installation. In a nutshell, one of the things we need to enjoy a work of art that exists in space is a sensitivity to space itself. Schmid expressed to me his appreciation of the room, its volume, the slabs of the floor and their interactions with the shapes of the light falling through the windows, and the way they changed throughout the day with the movement of the sun. He formally introduced me to the room, in a sense. Once I was sensitized to the space, I could feel the way the lines he had painted ''activated" (his word) the room. His goal was to engage in a collaboration with the qualities that appealed to him inside and outside of the room, rather than to impose his own qualities onto its blank surface, thereby dominating and effectively replacing it, which is what we would usually expect, and look for. Rather than seeing only the painted lines, we need to see the room and the lines together and how they effect each another. Being a drawing fan, I could also enjoy the way that his lines formed into three-dimensional drawings that were dramatically different depending on your location. My personal favorite viewing spots were right at the front door as you walk in, followed by the right hand front comer of the room, but I expect to .find many more when I go back again.
I strongly recommend checking out Schmid's work at the Locker Plant during the hours he plans to be there himself to greet visitors:
At the opening reception, Saturday, December 16, at 5 p.m.; and Sunday, December 17, from 2:30-6 p.m.; Monday, December 18, from 10 a.rn. to 2 p.m. If you can, go by earlier in the day, when the shapes of the light from the windows are at their best, according to Schmid.
Andreas Schmid 's installation, as well as a suite of lino cut block prints which will be on view in another room at the Locker Plant, and an outdoor piece on the grounds of the Chinati Foundation will be included in the regular tours of the Foundation through January 8, and by appointment.

His work has been shown in group and solo exhibitions in Europe and Asia. This is his second exhibition in the United States. During the 1980s, Schmid spent several years in China to study calligra­phy and seal-carving, history of calligraphy, and art history at the Chinese Academy of Fine Arts in Hangzhou. Since that time he has curated several exhibitions of contemporary Chinese art, and frequently writes on the subject for the art magazine Neue Bildende Kunst.
Schmid's outdoor work and Locker Plant installation will be on view through 8 January 200I. In addition to the Saturday open­ing, Schmid will be in the Locker Plant on Sunday from 2:30pm to 5:30pm and on Monday from 10am to 2pm to show the instal­lation and answer questions about his work. Schmid's exhibi­tion will be shown as part of the Chinati Foundation tour until January 8. Please call the mu­seum office at 915 729 4362 for more information or to schedule a visit during the holidays. The Chinati Foundation is very grateful to RobertArber for res­urrecting Chinati's print studio and working with Andreas Schmid.
Chinati 's Artist in Residence Program is generously supported by the Elizabeth Firestone Gra­ham, Hamman, and Lannan Foundations.
6, at the Locker Plant on Oak Street in Marfa.
Linear wall paintings and a group of new prints will be shown at the Locker Plant. An outdoor work is installed at the Chinati Foundation grounds at former Fort D.A. Russell, and can be visited Saturday afternoon or al any time during the week.
Schmid has been in residence at Chinati since early October. He lives in Berlin, Germany, and was born in Stuttgart, where he studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts and history at the Technical University. His work has been shown in group and solo exhibitions in Europe and Asia.
This is his second exhibition in the United States. During the 1980s, Schmid spent several years in China to study calligra­phy and seal-carving, history of calligraphy, and art history at the Chinese Academy of Fine Arts in Hangzhou. Since that time he has curated several exhibitions of contemporary Chinese art, and frequently writes on the subject for the art magazine Neue Bildende Kunst.