HERBERT MAIER

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slow time for seeing. The picture does not save the viewer the effort of thinking; it is only complete
once it has arrived by way of his eye in his brain. On the highest level, however, he demands
of himself that he integrates the future in artistic presentiments, visions and utopias – not in an
oracle-like sense, but rather in the physical-philosophical sense: How would it be if, once space
had reached its maximum point of expansion, time were reversed as space collapsed? Then the
effect would precede the cause, the "conditio sine qua non". Maier explores nothing other,
there fore, than a "spherical form of time", nothing other than the association of past (memory
of shapes, processed motifs), paper-thin present (seeing time) and future (tentative vision, return
of the past), in order to acquire them for his painting. That this intellectual desire in its most outstanding
examples quite naturally goes hand in hand with creating vibrant and delicate presence
as the supreme dictate in painting is experienced by visual people as a great moment of auric
intensity. These are powerful pictures, declares the art historian and philosopher Gottfried Boehm,
that "metabolise reality", that "make something of reality visible to us that we would never discover
without them." 1) However, the fact that it requires an outstretched antenna on the part of
the viewer keeps Maier’s work from being embraced universally.
Interlude II. It is of great benefit for all who study Herbert Maier’s painting to listen to those
compositions which set milestones in musical history around the year of his birth in 1960. This
applies in particular to John Cage (born 1912), Bernd Alois Zimmermann (born 1918) and
György Ligeti (born 1923), but also to the painter Yves Klein (born 1928), who between 1947
and 1961 developed a form of sound pattern that ultimately transformed his monochrome
paintings into acoustic resonance. It can come as no surprise that all the artists mentioned
were also philosophically preoccupied with time, temporal perception and space. An example
of this is Ligeti’s "Continuum" for harpsichord (1968) that within a maximum of four minutes
of "prestissimo" compresses two racing voices into oscillating resonance and Ligeti’s orchestral
composition "Atmosphères" (1961) which attempts to do away with the traditional sequence
of sound and silence (rest) in a continuous acoustic presence. John Cage, on the other hand,
composed what was probably – in contrast to his silent "4’33" (three "Tacet" movements for
any instrument or combination of instruments) – the first piece in musical history without a
fixed time frame. The decisive aspect of the graphically notated "Variation IV" (1963) is that
optional sound sources have to emanate from predetermined places in the room. Bernd Alois
Zimmermann deserves particular attention. He too is an artist who posed himself aesthetic
questions in order to arrive at concrete artistic solutions. Last but not least, in his opera "Die
Soldaten" (1957 – 1965, based on a play by Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz), he underpinned the
"spherical form of time" which he propagated – i.e. the unity of past, present and future by
means of the layered use of quotations from different times and origin like a montage.
Zimmermann wrote in the conviction that diverse perceptions of time could be reflected
musically like objectively measured and subjectively felt time. In his last works up to 1970 he
even laid several time lines on top of each other ("Photoptosis", 1968). In the mean time, Yves
Klein’s "Symphonie Monoton Silence" for 32 musicians and 20 singers, in this version probably
notated by the composer Pierre Henry, is hardly ever performed. For years, Yves Klein
experimented with the idea of allowing a sound such as the D-major chord to float in a room
for several minutes, followed by prolonged silence as an echo. In 1960, the "Symphonie