Siegfried Herz
“There is more wisdom in your body than in your deepest philosophy”
Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
At the hour when the sun has reached its zenith, I stand upon a hill. Beneath me, bustle and movement: the bodies of people, plants and animals inscribe slow, unconscious lines into the landscape. Yet none of them knows its own significance. A tree does not stretch towards the sky for the sake of the idea of the tree; the buzzard circling above its crown does not fly in the name of morality. No body bears within its movement any message other than its own existence.
The day, and its noon, is the hour of the highest affirmation, for the sun no longer promises and does not yet regret. Then the shadows are at their shortest, and everything that sought to remain hidden is compelled to come into the light. The Great Noon is the sacred hour of this clarity, which is the greatest burden. The last thing belonging to the Earth that has not yet been conquered by interpretation.
Man yawns above the most eloquent abyss—the abyss of his own blindness. He has deepened it with a web of meanings, purposes, moral concepts and judgements until, intoxicated by its depth, he remained imprisoned within it for long centuries. What he called knowledge was nothing but an all-too-human fear of the spontaneity of living forces. What he called truth was merely an ancient, all-too-human lie that outlived all its self-assured spokesmen, those who mistook the weakening of life for wisdom and called that goodness.
And so the body, too, became a problem, nakedness a question, and the senses came to be haunted by creeping suspicion. Modern man has once again grown accustomed to looking upon nakedness through the lenses of eroticism or morality: one eye desirous, the other guilty. Yet both are equally blind. Nakedness is an argument neither for pleasure nor for virtue. It is a state of existence in which the body is wiser than thought, and the Earth truer than any word about truth.
The works that I bring here into the light were born of distrust towards everything that seeks to redeem life from its own corporeality; distrust towards every preacher who would place law between man and his blood, morality between man and his breath, consolation between man and his fate. And vain consolation has always been the subtlest form of contempt for life.
Far removed from all nihilism, I stand face to face with the life-giving forces, in which nothing is redeemed, purified or excused. What reveals itself here is mere existence, both in its contingency and innocence and in the relentless cruelty of matter—in the very midst of nakedness itself.
I offer you neither memories of intimacy or bodily union, nor even my own longing, but only distance. The figures in my works are not a celebration of beauty, which seems merely a fortunate and pleasing by-product of life's abundance. They are that which cannot remain unshown—the embodiment of those moments in which man approaches his highest possibility: unconcealment. I have come to bear witness to that rare hour when being overflowed from itself and sought forms in which to celebrate itself. Thus the female body, in all its manifold forms, became the language of the will to life.
These figures and their faces come from another climate of my life. Their blood was mingled with another sun; their smiles were born beneath another sky. They are the sudden command of the moment, the triumph of the Earth and its overflowing force, which sought no justification but became its own.
Today I stand before my works like a late pilgrim. I recognise their features, yet within them I hear the voice of someone speaking to me from a great distance. For between them and me lies transformation. What? Transformation? How strange! The hand that depicted them is the same hand, and yet it is not the same.
Man is a bridge and a crossing, a flame in ceaseless motion, nourished by his own transformation. Woe to him who today wishes to remain faithful to his yesterday's self! Let him become the guardian of a grave. Only the dead remain identical.