I Am Ridiculously Old-fashioned.

There Was No Special Event That Made Me Decide. I Had Collected Some Photos And The Idea Was In The Back Of My Mind For A Long Time. It Was Growing And Growing, So Finally I Said, 'i Must Paint This.' I Come From East Germany And Am Not A Marxist, So Of Course At The Time I Had No Sympathy For The Ideas, Or For The Ideology That These People Represented. I Couldn't Understand, But I Was Still Impressed. Like Everyone, I Was Touched. It Was An Exceptional Moment For Germany.

Architecture Was, Or Is, A Kind Of Hobby, An Inclination I Have To Fiddling Around And Building Things. Putting Up Shelves Or Cupboards, Or Making Tools, Or Designing Houses ... It Always Has A Functional Or Social Motivation. If Social Changes Are In The Air, I Am Gripped Immediately By The Desire To Build, And I Think That I Accelerate Or Anticipate Changes In My Life By Doing So, At Least In Draft. In The Case Of My House, That Was Anticipation: In Other Words, First Build, Then Change One's Life.

If I Don't Know What's Coming - That Is, If I Have No Hard-and-fast Image, As I Have With A Photographic Original - Then Arbitrary Choice And Chance Play An Important Part.

I Didn't Actually Know What The Protesters In The West Really Wanted. It Was Fantastic Here, So Much Freedom, And That Was What They Were Calling Musty, Middle-class, And Fascistic, A Bleak Period. Bleak Was What The Gdr Was, And It Alone Had Adopted, Almost Unchanged, Nazi Germany's Methods Of Intimidation And Ideas About Propaganda And The Use Of Force.

Cage Is Much More Disciplined. He Made Chance A Method And Used It In Constructive Ways; I Never Did That. Everything Here Is A Little More Chaotic.