Well…Radio. Of course, in Cologne I was always going on the radio, so I would have a radio script.
And the radio scripts were very simply the time of day, the weather, whom I might be seeing that day
and did I really not like my hair cut today? Which, I really don’t like. The quality of the text was
immediate, personal and pretty boring I guess. Or…Trying to remember the ingredients of a certain
dish, someone from the audience might ask, just what did I put in my beans when I cook them? So
I’d go through the process of soaking them overnight, sautéing the onions and putting the spice and
again I was… I think I brought a lot of domesticity into performance that wasn’t there at all. And I
think it has changed, but I think young men are more interested in looking at a certain way…
speaking of higher things (laughs).
Say I go to another country, in Cologne and they would like me to do a performance, then I bring
my…I have a bag of beans and I have my performance drum, so I can shake the drum before the
microphone and click the beans in the air. Also, I like very much the sound of different papers, so I
usually have three or four different qualities of paper. A very fine thin one, and a heavier one, and all
this is going on while I’m talking. So it’s like a couple of things at the same time. I very much enjoy
again, using the audience. „Will someone come up and play with this paper and I’ll play with this
paper.“ and you get three people all doing paper sound. Because people don’t think of paper except
to write on or wrap something up. But the sounds of varieties of paper, it’s really an instrument…I
would carry around different papers. Well, because I had this brown paper in my file and I noticed
that having torn these, I didn’t want the white wall behind, I wanted to see the tears, so I got the
brown paper out and than this I had around for ages. I don’t know how this got bent from being, you
know, a regular thing in the closet, but somehow, I mean I did not do this, so I must’ve found it on
the street. Why would it be bent like this unless someone wanted to hang something? So that
interested me, and I picked that up. Of course these bean works are, they look like simple, easily
made, but as a matter of fact, these take a lot of work, because the beans have to be baked for two
hours and they have to be frozen overnight, so they are completely without any life. They have been
stilled I call it, and then I can wrap them into wet paper, and they don’t sprout [Demonstration of
Bean instrument with paper]. This feels good. Beans feel good, haha! (laughing).
