Wolfgang Walkensteiner has titled numerous new works with the enigmatic abbreviation ZZOT. The short form of 'Zur Zeit one Titel' (Untitled for the Time Being) refers to the creation of his works that grow out of the immanent logic of the work process, having no reality external to the picture as their subject, nor a specific theme to which they are subject. Many of the works thus only receive their name once they have been presented; until that point they exist in a state of namelessness, complete, yet untitled. Moreover, the naming of the work usually follows an intuitive process. In this, the artist takes certain formal aspects of his paintings or particular constructional principles, which he has borne in mind when painting, as the starting point for finding a title. The round shape that he inlaid in the paintings of his 'Sisyphus' work block reminded him of a stone that he - someone well-versed in cultural and intellectual history - associated with the myth of Sisyphus. The series itself is neither based on the ancient myth, nor does it refer to the famous essay by Albert Camus, who imagined Sisyphus as a happy person. The title, however, symbolises the artist's epistemological and ontological interests and aspirati-ons. Whenever Walkensteiner is not working in his studio or just preparing an exhibition, he immerses himself in Western intellectual history and traces the meaning of everything that exists, yet his philosophical insights and reflections rarely flow into his titles in a superficial way. Of course, there are exceptions, such as his exhibition 'Why art and not not' at Bildrecht Bodensee in 2023, where the swan was staged as a symbol of beauty and the giraffe as an allegory of the idea of the sublime. For the most part, however, he leaves it at associative names such as landscape, aggregate, fragment, configuration or debit item. But right now he finds no title, no language for the wrong time, but also no approach to processing the inhumanity in the picture resurgent in the present. Two wars on the margins of Europe, a global arms race, antisemitism reestablishing itself, the onward march of far-right parties, not to mention the excesses of turbo-capitalism and the already-palpable effects of climate change. Is it impossible to do justice, whether verbally or visually, to the dark side of humanity? Walkensteiner has primarily worked in the abstract form in recent years. Yet not only personal experiences and philosophical considerations have served as the starting point for his works and brought about both the mood and certain formal decisions - political events, too. The war in Ukraine ('Sounding Mars') or the fate of many thousands of refugees perished in the Mediterranean ('Boat) have provided an impulse for his works.Thematically important, too, has been the general readiness to be seduced by power that emerges from a blood-red pictorial space in the triptych 'The Flute Player', a skeletal hybrid creature located between Pied Piper, Scarecrow and Grim Reaper. We think we can make out a smile in the mouthless face. Together with Diogenes we could light a lantern and walk through our cities in broad daylight in search of a human being. We will not find him, just as we search in vain for humans in Walkensteiner's pictures. But the light is important - the light of enlightenment and the light in the picture itself. It is painting that presents the artist with the problems inherent to the medium. He modulates abstract forms with light-dark contrasts, allowing them to float sculpturally in an indifferent pictorial space. At the same time, he extends painting into real space, letting it become sculpture and transforming it into constantly new manifestations: naturalistic, yet abstract, mimetic, with a reality of its own. A medium always coming into being, an artist always searching: no time for titles. SNOW SHOVELS FOR KLAGENFURT The present publication is intended as a reflection and extension of Walkensteiner's exhibition at the Alpen-Adria-Galerie in Klagenfurt and provides insight into his work of recent years with a few limited reviews. The artist suggested a painting as a subject for this, which in preparatory correspondence of winter 2023 quickly became 'snow shovels' and was given the title 'In Advance of Roman's Arm' by him in reference to Marcel Duchamp. Again, the motif was not the starting point for the painting, but the formal similarity led to the attribution of the snow shovels through intellectual banter, which in turn received their enigmatic title through a filtering of art history. In 1915, the year he moved to the USA, Marcel Duchamp purchased a conventional snow shovel in a hardware store in New York and described it with the phrase 'In Advance of the Broken Arm: It was not only his first American readymade, also the first he ever labelled as such. The industrially manufactured product, which he took from the anony-mised world of commodities, was given the status of a ready-made sculpture through the inscription and his signature. The artist explained his unusual choice as follows: 'The idea was to find an object that had no attraction whatsoever from the aesthetic angle." He also hung the snow shovel from the ceiling, thus depriving it of its original spatial position. Duchamp's principle was as brilliant as it was far-reaching. By removing the object fr its original context of meaning, by isolating it and placing it in the context of art, not only causes confusion, but the ready-made also becomes the carrier of new, co plex ideas. Generations of art historians have since tried to argue a causal connect between the snow shovel and the broken arm, but Duchamp confirms both in an early letter to his sister Suzanne and in a late interview with Pierre Cabanne that he wanted to avoid the tendency towards meaningful imagery inherent in the combination of object and writing as far as possible. It was a snow shovel. In fact, I had written that phrase on it. Obviously, I was hoping it was without sense, but deep down everything ends up by having some. Even if it is not superficially apparent in his works, Walkensteiner has engaged closely with Duchamp's work. As part of his 2018 exhibition 'die kuh, von ihrem Hirten gemol-ken, dereinst' ('the cow milked by its shepherd, one day'), he even wrote a humorous text about the French artist, in which he not only alludes in the title to his famous work 'The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even' (1915-1923), but also compares the 'Large Glass' to a cow that goes by the name of 'r.Rose Celavache' and is called Rosi.3 Duchamp, who achieved legendary status through his refusal of the art business and his positing of ready-mades, repeatedly expressed ambivalence about the momentous elevation of an object to the status of a work of art carried out by the artist. In an inter-view, he explained that the ready-made was not a work of art for him; rather with this gesture he wished to 'put an end to the desire to create works of art?' It is the viewer who contributes to this through their part of the creative act. 'In Advance of Roman's Arm, actually in advance of Roman's hand, because he has to write about it: the snow shovel picture is now on the cover of the book and awaits its explanation in the introductory text. For the parallels in oeuvre between the artist and Duchamp are not straightforward at all. In Walkensteiner's work, too, we search in vain for a meaning that the artist has hidden in the picture, for the shape of the snow shovels, for example, has as it were emerged by itself through the inlaying of set pieces from other paintings. But as Duchamp logically recognised: It is not easy to be nonsensical, because nonsensical things often turn out to make sense. It is a creative act that Duchamp concedes to the viewers of his works and that is also evident in Walkensteiner's work. Entirely in the spirit of Umberto Eco's idea of the 'open work of art, the meaning is not found exclusively in the work itself, but in its communicative structures. Duchamp presented a text on the creative act at the 1957 Convention of the American Federation of Arts in Houston. In this, he propounded the intention of the author, the interpretation of the audience and the relationship between the two. The text is all the more astonishing because the artist, whose life and work have always had the appearance of effortlessness and playfulness, talks of the sometimes agonising challenges and difficulties of producing a work of art: 'In the creative act, the artist goes from intention to realization through a chain of totally subjective reactions. His struggle toward the realization is a series of efforts, pains, satisfaction, refusals, decisions, which also cannot and must not be fully self-conscious, at least on the esthetic plane.'6 Duchamp also speaks of the difference between the intention and its realisation and the gap that separates the two. For him, the finished work is therefore caught between 'the unexpressed but intended and the unintentionally expressed. Not only can we find in these lines an effective explanation for Walkensteiner's snow shovels, but Duchamp also speaks convincingly of the artist's struggle for every brushstroke and that a finished work does not always have to correspond fully to the original intention; rather it manifests itself in the process. But how can Walkensteiner's intentions be summarised? What does his creative act look like? Walkensteiner's cunning For some years now, Walkensteiner has been building his pictures according to the same principle. He begins quite classically with a drawing. Instead of sketching a preliminary drawing with a graphite pencil, which sketches a first idea as a concetto, or tearing open the composition as a background drawing, he creates the background for his pictorial events from gestural abbreviations and graphic condensations. The stre-aks, tangles, curls and bundles of strokes that he quickly places on the primed canvas express gestural immediacy as well as intuition and years of experience. With his wildly proliferating markings, Walkensteiner creates a kind of primordial base, a materia pri-ma that heralds the potentiality of all that comes into being. For the French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, the open form of the drawing reveals its 'dynamis, the power of the pointing form, which indicates a 'future of possible realities. By analogy with the 'natura naturans' that is always in the making, Nancy speaks of drawing as a 'forma formans, of an art form that is always in the process of being created.' It is precisely this 'dyna-mis, this power of the drawing, that Walkensteiner draws on for the construction of his pictorial space, which he sets vibrating by the trembling, flickering lines. Into this amorphous chaos, he now literally places a form of order which in its colourful-ness clearly stands out from the grey primordial ground. He forms an abstract body from many small brushstrokes, chisels it as it were, letting it float above the original graphic state or, more accurately, in the billowing pictorial space. Just as the all-over style of his graphic structures knows no top or bottom, the artist paints his abstract configurations from all sides, too, moving around the horizontal canvas, given that the egg tempera does not allow painting on the easel. Walkensteiner may thus also sign his paintings on several sides, as he also composes them from several angles. Unlike the drawing, the forms themselves are not created spontaneously, even if the 'restless ground, sometimes corresponding to chaos' forms the basis and pre-condition. 1º To begin with, Walkensteiner moulds Once a painting has been completed in this way, it is occasionally cut up radically by the artist and recombined with other fragments of the picture. Now, cutting (out) and collaging pictures is not really a novelty, as it is one of the favoured strategies of the avant-garde. However, the principles of this technique already existed prior to the supposed invention of collage and were used in inlays, mosaics and papiers collés. Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque produced the first collages in 1912, George Grosz and John Heartfield the first photomontages in 1916. The first exhibition to exclusively present collages was the 'Exposition de collages: la peinture au défi' at the Galerie Goeman in Paris in March 1930. This featured collages by Arp, Braque, Dali, Duchamp, Ernst, Gris, Miró, Magritte, Man Ray, Picabia, Picasso and Tanguy. Of interest, apart from the art-historical context, is the combative subtitle: 'In Defiance of Painting. Louis Aragon writes in the catalogue text, which is also the first longer text on collages: 'From now on, why use pigments?'' The artists in the exhibition employed the technique of collage to thwart narrative, destroy logic and undermine and attack conventional notions of reali-ty. Regardless of their roots in handicrafts and folk art, they saw collage as a gesture of defiance and at the same time an extension of traditional painting. The post-war avant-garde once again turned against the traditional concept of panel painting and sought to overcome it. The American artists of Minimal Art, Conceptual Art and Light Art de-materialised the picture to the point where it dissolved between four painted corners (Robert Barry) or was completely absorbed by light (Douglas Wheeler). European artists such as Lucio Fontana, Yves Klein, Otto Piene and Günther Uecker attacked the panel painting with knives, fire and nails, destroying its surface. The image was also restricted time-wise by new art forms such as the action, happenings and Flu-xus and spread both onto the body and into space. Walkensteiner now draws on both the tradition of collage in modernism and the struction of the panel painting in the post-war avant-garde and merges the two str gies. He cuts open his paintings, damages the intact picture surface, removes esser components from the work and inserts them back into another opened picture. In trast to classical collage, he does not extend his paintings with fragments from o media, but takes the image fragments from his own work. One could say that the a samples his own catalogue of works, even if he himself speaks of inlaying, as he pr sely selects the elements, cuts them out and places them inside one another. His ai to break up the structure of the panel painting, to bring about a moment of confus surprise, a break with the pictorial logic that he cannot achieve in the well-practi process of painting. The artist seeks to outwit himself, for as Duchamp already notec return to the starting point of our reflections: I have forced myself to contradict my in order to avoid following my own taste.' While Walkensteiner uses ancient techniques such as graphite drawing, egg temper painting, pottery and inlaying, his aesthetics are fully located in the present and natu ally integrated into the current discourse on painting. The strategy of cutting out an pasting in his works is also of course to be read as a reference to the cut-and-paste o the computer age; the abstract forms - his materialised brushstrokes - floating in a indifferent pictorial space can be seen as analogous to various computer programme and CAD software. Even in our digital age, most computer animations still work wit algorithms that produce a central perspective representation of three-dimensionality. Time in the picture In her theoretical reflections on contemporary painting and its indexicality, Isabelle Graw spoke of the painting as a repository of the artist's work and lifetime. 3 She has thus added a new aspect to the art-historical analyses of the different forms of the representation of time in painting, which is of course also relevant to Walkensteiner. But even if time is an essential factor in his work, we must begin by asking ourselves, like St Augustine, 'What is time? Who could explain it easily and briefly? Who could grasp it in thought and then express it in words? And yet - can we name a word that is more familiar and known to us than time? We know exactly what we mean when we talk about it, we understand it when we hear someone else talk about it. So what is time? If nobody asks me about it, I know it, but if I explain it to someone who asks, I don't know it."1 This is not the place to provide excerpts of the scientific theories on time, nor to subsume and discuss the philosophical implications. With St Augustine, we therefore avail ourselves of the general understanding of the concept of time and leave the rest to those more qualified. 'Everything that has an apparent existence is subject to time,' wrote Johann Wolf Goethe.' It follows that everything that appears must visualise the time to whic subject. The central question is thus how a certain sense of time is communicat a picture through its formal language. Ernst Gombrich points out that 'even the test snapshot [...] captures traces of movement, meaning that 'a sequence of even matter how short' is spatialised in the image. 1 As previously discussed, Walkenst has developed a specific combination of techniques for his impressive images, v are not only executed at different speeds, but also lend the picture a different sen time in their formal realisation. The graphite drawing is placed on the canvas rapidly, spontaneously and immediately. The tangle of strokes indicates a constant movement and transformation, an incessant flow and coming-into-being. Before and after permeate one another in a momentary experience of constant flow and change. The all-over approach, which has neither beginning nor end, reinforces this boundless experience of time. The drawing as a 'forma formans' symbolises the dynamics and presence of permanent emergence. Egg tempera painting, on the other hand, requires slow and careful application. An abstract form composed from many short brushstrokes appears to float in space, perhaps even moving deliberately within it. According to Aristotle, the general character of movement is metabolé, that is the turnover, or better, the transition from one thing to another. The spreading of colour, its condensation or dilution, its transition into another colour is not only a process in the picture, but also in time. This transition is harmonious, calm and slow in terms in time. The American art historian Norman Bryson has also attributed a temporal dimension to the difference between drawing and painting. He writes that 'the drawn line always exists in a certain sense in the present, in the time of its own unfolding, the forward-mar-ching time of a present that is constantly pressing forward. Painting, by comparison, exists in the time form of the completed past: we only get to know the picture in its final, arrested state, not the progressive present of its becoming form. If painting presents being, the drawn line presents becoming. unity in the pictorial whole, but the disparities on display also render the latent connections and the so-called red (i.e. connecting) thread through his oeuvre visible. St Augustine speaks of the spirit doing three things: 'It expects, notices and remembers. The expectation of the future passes through attention to the present into the memory of the past.'9 The spiritual movement that Augustine outlines in the context of his reflections on time flows mutually, in both directions. The three techniques that Walkensteiner uses to formulate his thoughts correspond almost paradigmatically to Augustine's characte-risations in their sense of time. The expectation of the future is therefore always present in the mind, as is the memory of the past. Who still has time to find titles?