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| Edward Hopper 'Approaching a City' (1946) |
What lures me, amongst many things, was when I first went in there, there were great segments of the city that were empty. There were lots, where buildings had stood. The first thing that it reminded me of was when I was a child, in the Bronx. We used to play in lots that looked like that, of course they were lots without buildings. But here the buildings were destroyed, erased. So there was a correspondence between the lots that I knew as a child and this place in Germany that had these empty lots. That was number one. Number two, what struck me was, although the buildings had been destroyed, and had disappeared, the aura came through the ground. In other words, the physicality of the buildings were not there, but one could feel the sense of structures having been there. That was what we were talking before. There were disappearences that had occured, but yet the atmosphere of these structures was coming out of the earth. That was two. Number three, the strange condition of sensing Edward Hopper. Hopper's paintings were basically of Hoboken and places like that. Somehow, there was a condition in Berlin that brought back senses of Hopper. That was I tried to do, by the way, in my structures that I built in Berlin now. To capture some of those, amongst other things, some of those things.
JOHN HEJDUK in conversation with David Shapiro (1991)