Here, too, the alienation between artist and audience, the refusal to communicate a message, is the trigger for a way to truly communicate ... Gerz reclines rigidly on his side, his back to the audience, blocking a door that is slightly ajar, revealing a dark room where a singer repeats Schiller’s song "Mit dem Pfeil, dem Bogen" (with his cross-bow, and his quiver). This scenario is so open to interpretation that it may suggest to the viewer various readings: the hunter out to kill... the motionless pictorial situation, a turning toward darkness, to a woman... without being resolved into a specific symbolism. It is also about loneliness, about the hunter’s fear, the desire for being.

Erich Franz 1981. Translated by e_CR editors

Auch hier ist die Fremdheit zwischen Künstler und Publikum, die Verweigerung einer Mitteilung, Auslöser für eine Möglichkeit echter Kommunikation… Gerz liegt starr mit dem Rücken zum Publikum, auf eine leicht geöffnete Tür hingerichtet, hinter der im Dunklen eine Sängerin das Lied "Mit dem Pfeil und dem Bogen" ständig wiederholt. Das ist so offen, daß es im Betrachter sehr viel auslösen kann: der Jäger, der auf das Töten aus ist… die bewegungslose bildhafte Situation, die Hinwendung zum Dunkeln, zur Frau… ohne daß es in einer bestimmten Symbolik aufgeht. Es geht da auch um die Einsamkeit, um die Angst des Jägers, den Wunsch nach Sein.

Erich Franz 1981

He tries to produce insights. Emotional insights. Insights that spring from an awakened (or re-awakened) memory. From that perhaps unexpected occurence that you might begin to be probing something deep down in yourself who confronts his art projects. It presupposes that a chord is touched. That something happens between the art work and her or him (at any rate, an individual in a given society, at a given moment in history) who chooses to turn to, and perceive, and marvel, think, deam about what he has just encountered. Or encountered a day ago, a week ago, a year ago.

A.B. Meadows 2010