Text installations constitute a spatial setting as the result of a thought process. Prerequisites are not only content but also the conditions of its emergence.

Through the indicative function of the words, the visible evokes something imagined. This refers to certain aspects of the perceptible. What is addressed is the connection between word, objectivity and constructivity.

A line at eye level from a corner of the space to another or on all four walls could be the edge of a pedestal or a dividing line. However, if it is combined with the word ‘horizon’, then the lower half of the wall becomes the foreground, the upper the background. Likewise, the word transforms a point on the ceiling and on the floor into endpoints of an invisible vertical. This thought vertical differs from the mere word in its being fixed to a predefined place in the space. Language makes a single aspect of the visible absolute and produces a relationship between perceptible and conceptual reality.

When describing a small black rectangle on the wall, one might refer to its size, colour and position and question its meaning. Yet if underneath there stands the word ‘opposite’, then a category is addressed that comprises not only this rectangle, but all things. The separation of subject and object causes this being opposite, hence also the word of the ‘object’. The word ‘opposite’ reduces the rectangle to this one function. What else it is or might be takes a back seat.

The Spiegelung [Reflection] realized in Buchberg Castle corresponds to the concepts described here.

(Text by HEINZ GAPPMAYR, in: GAPPMAYR RAUMKONZEPT BUCHBERG VIII, 1988)