Susanne Kretzer
Mystifictional Traces
Beyond the desk, the crossbarred window frames a prospect
where nothing stirs. Such an empty landscape does not
contain the sort of action which the "word mason"
once had wanted to fashion into literature, but it
did provide a stage which a mind "experiencing
much wider freedom inside the room than outside"(1)
could people with his own world fashioned from art
and imagination. Inside the Bargfeld hermitage, imaginary
pictures were turned into a surrogate landscape filled
with the liter(e)alism of the later Schmidt.
In Zettels Traum Schmidt described the process of perceiving
the outer world as one of "storing and sorting"
the elements among the four categories (Ego, Superego,
Id, plus "Humor") of the psychological apparatus.(2)
It is the reverse process which produces "Extended
Mind Games," from the lowly dream via hallucination
to the perfection of the artistic work. In that process
the Subconscious - rather than Ego or Superego which
don't possess the former's "incredibly strong
archaic energies"(3) - takes on the main responsibility
for spatializing the work: it produces the stage set.
Provided, so to speak, with "voluminous/ voluptuous
buckets of paint,"(4) it can evade the Superego's
direct commands, executing them instead with a brush
stroke all its own.