‘Not Yet’ Materialized: Carlfriedrich Claus's ‘Talking Papers’

Abstract

From the 1950s through to the 1980s, the East German artist Carlfriedrich Claus produced thousands of sheets titled Sprachblatter (‘Speech Sheets’); these often perplexing semi-transparent papers – covered on both recto and verso with dense drawings, patterns and handwritten texts – are the subject of this essay. The abstract, conceptual and performative nature of Claus’s work was antithetical to increasingly aggressive, stultifying, anti-modernist and anti-formalist cultural policies. Reading this corpus of work as ‘talking papers’, heavily influenced by an idiosyncratic blend of Marxism-Leninism, oriental mysticism, cybernetic theories, and, most profoundly, by the utopian thought of Ernst Bloch, I argue that they need to be understood as enacting a complex dialectical philosophy which attempts to anchor the production and reception of art in the transformative nature of utopian belief.