RvG: But you are one of the rare people who would have the opportunity to live somewhere else.
EW: For many years I thought about this question. I lived in New York for one and a half years and I lived in Berlin a little. But I grew up here in Austria, I was born here. My roots are here and then my friends are here and my family is here, so where should I go? At my age, any age I think except when you’re very young, it’s difficult to make real friends. That’s one of the reasons why I felt lonely in the States. Every weekend I went to the Metropolitan Museum to visit European Art. I like Europe as an idea very much.
RvG: Do you have to feel comfortable and happy and secure in your relationship with your family and friends to be able to work? There are artists who, on the contrary, need to suffer in order to be creative.
EW: At first, I thought this is 19th century romanticism, the idea that you need to suffer and to have had a big drama in your life in order to create something. But I’ve learned since then. Something very bad happened in my personal life and history, something really, really bad and for a very, very long time I was paralysed, almost for two, three years. After that I started with the One-Minute-Sculptures which brought me my success. So, now I look on this issue from a different angle. Before I had the feeling, here I am, the little artist and over there is this kind of higher level where all the great artists are with their philosophies and their theories and I could never connect. There was no link in a way. After this big tragedy in my life, I didn’t care about these things anymore and all of a sudden something happened which made it flow, which made it fluent.