Every single thing is connected with all there is in a most magnificent, enticing way

 22 February 1993

Dear Phillip:

What a joy to receive your letter. This envelope of yours is surely packed with a lot of news. Your family is now situated in a kind of paradise! The land, the hills and vegetation must be beautiful. Your wife is teaching. And you cannot find work. For a while, this may be a blessing in disguise? Working, thinking as an artist, that means to sense life as it is. Few artists are truly artists - because they cannot, will not sense life, clouds, mountains, plants, children, people as they are. Why not? Why can these many people not sense life as it is? --preconceived ideas? You bet! In a rush? You bet! once in a rut there is hardly any chance that these people ever come to their senses; ever. 

Proof? Well we may look at what Nixon called the silent majority. Silent? Perhaps the more appropriate term would be = silenced !!! Well, you are still thinking and aware. NOT lost yet. Keep up, keep your head above the water, look at life between the rocks, between the leaves of your environment. And I gather you are taking your children with you when walking into this island paradise. Ask them what they see. A Gecko? A lizard? A bird? -what kind? what color? what pattern? what does it live on? The same when we see people = what do they think? Why do they think money-? and not: how can I help you? or how would you like it if I make you so free that can tell me what you think of me! And what we do together, planting a garden, a forest.

Your work, as represented in the photos, show me a person whom we in older time (60 years ago) would have called a master. A master knows/how to/make things work in a given setting. That includes the Zen masters. ONCE a very rich lady in Canada addressed me with that word. I sort of shivered. I thought it inappropriate for me, since I never thought of, to have mastered anything -forever growing into what there is- to let "things" "speak" for themselves. Never a system or structure or method. That is all delightful = the older I says to the younger = teach me.

Perhaps in your remoteness, removed from the self accelerating stimulus of a hectic civilization you may discover what Cezanne (the only painter who did?) discover when he painted simple people, simple landscapes. (If I dare make a verbal statement: and as a fool as I am, I love to dare) Cezanne in his way, and Van Gogh in his, and Gaugin never, neither Renoir or Matisse or... 

Cezanne in his way discovered what every mother knows by heart (until civilization tears it out through education and indoctrination?) that things out there = every single thing is connected with all there is in a most magnificent, enticing way. This I can see too in your work. (only?!!) Cezanne kept the image, the pattern, the direct connection to the very "thing" which was his cause for looking + thinking + feeling + action. He celebrated life, he was in an overwhelming way (illegible) of the interwovenness  of all there is = stone, air, plants, animals, and stars (i.e. our sun, light, room to be in.)

You know all this too well. So? Do not lose it, strengthen your self in it. How? By talking with the children of the land with the land with the water with the people 

                                                                                                  no comma

Now I will go back to my lump of clay. Then to town to mail this letter. Then up into the hills, two feet of snow. I do feed the birds, rabbits, squirrels and deer, one raccoon and one very old (big) opossum. 

Designing a foldable (collapsible) modeling stand to take with me on the airplane - to Europe. The first try weighs 40 lbs, the second 22 lbs, now the third try...? I'll let you know how I make out.

In the meantime, keep your wonderful spirit refreshed with mountain air. Perhaps when convenient I may be able to save enough and visit you over a weekend? Greetings to your dear wife and the children. Soon I will write you again Phillip and send a few photos. Thank you for your photos. 

Love, Wolf

The similarity was there in the first twenty minutes

 St. Peter near Freiburg

(near Swiss and French border)

(6-93)

Dear Phillip,

Your letter and critiques of your publications are still fresh in my memory. And I admire your drive and intent to bring about an improved sense of interrelatedness among the many various outloooks among us human(s).

Here in Germany, as I may have already indicated to you, I am working on a bust in clay of Dr. Maria Schätzle (Dr. M.A.C. Otto) author of many books; especially = The Begin (archai). The similarity was there in the first twenty minutes. However, that which inspired me in the book (and other books of this author) required considerable changes during the ensuing days - and there are still more changes to be initiated.

Yesterday evening, the publisher Dr. R. Jona of Freiburg arrived with his wife for a little celebration and we all had a lively exchange of thoughts, as they had occurred during our life.

Saturday I will visit my step mother (near Heidelberg).

Often I wonder how you and your dear wife and child make ends meet when there is no work? Why is there no work when the banks and the stock of the large companies are at an all time high?

Take care; best greeting, my thoughts are with you.

Your Wolfram

In Atlanta I was immersed in an entirely new world

Virginia 1993

7, August

Dear Phillip,

Your letter followed me from Wheeler to Atlanta, Georgia to Manassas, Virginia - long enough that I want to write you now some greetings. Not much time is left in my work for private time. Especially in Atlanta I was immersed in an entirely new world - reading the gestural and physiognomic pattern-forms of primates, especially Bonobos, a "related form" of small chimpanzees (they are not chimpanzees look superficially similar). The request is = can a bronze sculpture be made, which conveys by gesture of body and face an intention of the Bonobo to help a child which is unable to speak (totally mute) to express itself via a "keyboard". (keyboard = a plate with symbols, when touched will give (illegible) the sound of the meaning of the symbol). I entered this task with great commitment, as it should help the children to receive such keyboards and to further the research in general on an improved approach to teaching (NOT training)

With Cliff and Belva I had the chance to discuss the project of research and the form given in clay for bronze, in detail. 

Soon more of it's development.

How are you? Did you obtain some work? When you left California did you know the conditions at Guayama? You were properly informed or not?

Best wishes, your Wolfram

Exhibition Press Release: University of Minnesota Duluth, 1963

October 31, 1963

A UMD art faculty exhibition of paintings and sculpture opens with an 8-10 p.m. reception November 5 in Tweed Gallery. It will remain up through December 1.

The contributors will be: J. Dorrance Kiser, Rudolph I. Schauer, assistant professors; Orazio Fumagalli, associate professor; and Forrest R. Bailey and Wolfram F. Niessen, instructors.

Fumagalli and Niessen will show sculpture. A first-year member of the faculty, Niessen's work deals chiefly with life experiences. Many of the pieces were done while he was at Michigan State University.

 

Stout State University Sports and Fitness Center, 1966

MENOMONIE (August 19, 2020) - The sculpture on the east wall of the Sports and Fitness Center has caused students over the past 50-plus years to pause and take a look at it. After studying it, the sculpture appears to be a football player getting ready to catch a ball.

But, like any art form, the sculpture can be more than that, according to the artist who created the sculpture - Wolfram Niessen. 

Niessen, a Stout State University art instructor at the time, designed the all-aluminum sculpture to be attached to the building in 1966, two years after the 1964 completion of what was then called the Health and Physical Education Center.

The following is a Sept. 9, 1966, article from the The Stoutonia, the school newspaper, outlining Niessen's work on the project and what his vision of the project was.

ATHLETIC ACHIEVEMENT FOR STOUT FIELDHOUSE (Sept. 9, 1966, The Stoutonia)

In designing an image of athletic achievement, a Stout State University faculty sculptor instructor captured the integral spirit of athletics striving throughout the entire university in his latest work for the University's Health and Physical Education Center. 

 

Wolfram Niessen, assistant professor of art and sculpture, has designed and constructed a 36-foot by 21-foot piece of sculpture in recognition of Stout's athletic achievement this past year. 

 At the suggestion of president William J. Micheels, Niessen designed a figure that was to represent the Stout athletic teams – the Blue Devils; however, the artist feels that his aluminum sculpture can be interpreted in many ways. 

 

"The essence of the idea is to convey the spirit of the university, whether an individual or a team," Niessen told the student newspaper The Stoutonia. "The design represents a figure. He could be a football player, a man in space or a man reaching and receiving at the university. It could also be a Blue Devil, due to the two horn-like projections on the "head," but they all culminate in the explicit urge of reaching and receiving." 

 

Wolfram Niessen assembles the sculpture that will be affixed to the health and physical education building

Wolfram Niessen works on the sculpture that would hang on the east side of the Sports and Fitness Center.  

The artist chose to carry out his two-dimensional design with sheet aluminum to complement the new health and physical education center on which the complete work is mounted. 

 

"The brick wall of the physical education center is such a covering over a steel skeleton that the wall itself has not much body compared to the entire building structure. Since the weight is relatively light," said Niessen, "the open spaced aluminum sheet sculpture work is a most fitting enhancement as the brick shines through the open design." 

 

The four-piece sculpture, completely hand-worked by Niessen, is mounted six inches from the east wall of the physical education building, facing the athletic field. 

The German-born Niessen has also taught drawing and sculpture at the University of Saskatchewan and the University of Minnesota, Duluth. He has exhibited three or more works at Kunsthalle, and Kustveriese, Schloss, Manheim, Germany; Bilkende Hande, Stuttgardt, Germany; Franfurt, Germany; and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Montreal, Canada. Niessen taught three years at Stout, from 1965-68. 

 

Our educational (system) ... destroys the potential for the individual ever to make for themselves a whole world again

2 January 1987

05:40 calm, cloudy, 32° F

Dear Phillip,

Repeatedly I am reading your letters.

The last one, where you describe your impression of the wind and clouds is so well expressed, so full of life, that I can identify feelings of similar kind, an insight and presentiment of strongly being moved by the deepest recesses of our feeling, knowing and wanting to act, all at the same time.       It shows your favorable disposition to be an artist in that you drew some patterns in your letter. Oh! If people only would know how important, decidedly and singularly it (is) to be a preposition to be active. [the dope, the inhibitive poison generated by watching routinely T.V. or listening routinely to a person talking or looking, thinking, doing anything routinely without the active innermost elicitation and awareness of the full participation of our being (thought, feeling, action) plus (notion, sensing vaguely, still other involvements and implications and to be in movement physically). Various thinkers express this state as with the word = awareness. It would be totally misleading to think of awareness without the full presence of action. Your drawing is action, this can be seen readily, your wish to point out your awareness at the moment when the event over powered you (impressed itself upon you, which is an overpowering, overriding of all else) is less obvious to be recognized as direct action, since it is on a more covert location in us and little does come to the fore.

The "artistic" action is a sane happening (actually: a must, an absolute must to progress from passive to active).

comparison = [the bankers
                        the military
                        the industrialists] are active

                        [the "workers"
                        the "teachers"
                        the "farmers"
                        the "artists" (the many with the preference of "making" art which of course is not art)                                       the million fakes] passive

_______________________________________________________________________________

Let us remind one another to the fact, that no one on earth is singularly active. In the same sense of grasping the core of this concern = no one is singularly passive.

Let us be observant and see: when a person becomes to any extent passive, the person feels "imbalanced". Initially it is this fact, that the person feels. Should the feeling be "lost", the imbalance will increase until we recognize "sickness".

                                                        (my explanation
                                                                excursion - may be too fast)

In some way I see you do know ( in your action, your life, your drawings, your paintings) the degree of certainty is somewhat different since our educational (system), without knowing, destroys the potential for the individual ever to make for themselves a whole world again.

That makes these people "dependent" = i.e. passive.
[in that same sense = the football hero on the field is passive! -though he is running successfully a touchdown yet this is a mechanical toy that is running. The human being, the Mr. Hero football player is passive in that he is imbalanced and has no means to restore balance; someone would have to help him there -of course no one does- surely not the coach, "teacher" who made him dependent in "helping" him to "act" so well.

The writing so far, is a sequence of excerpts, short blurbs of a vast store, a writer will sort this - having time.

I have very little time at this moment for writing. If I do not cut wood and carry it out of the woods I will freeze.  Since there is no money for oil, coal, gas or "electric heat". If I do not move now and put up the 2 x 4 as liners and the sheet rock as covers I will live on a concrete floor and fiberglass open walls - contamination of lungs and inner organs.

If I do not move now  …  I remain out of balance.

Therefore, Phillip, forgive me for the shortness of this letter, the inadequacy of response to your most important events. I love you, I trust you are being /as there is so much evidence/ active.

                                                  to be active: means too = to balance feelings and thought.
                                                  to be thinking: means also = to balance action and feeling.
                                                  to be feeling: means too = to balance thought and action.

The funniest thing = when we are imbalanced  we become aware!

When we are balanced (painting) 2 or 5 hours "go so fast" we are unaware of the time that passes.

Back to the 2 x 4's! With love, Wolfram



                     

This ought to be on the higher level of love

06:03 20 Nov 1985

Dear Phillip:

We are here "in the middle of" I.A.P. (Individual Art Production). It took us years (you know how slow human beings communicate and how long it does take us, indeed, to implement physically, of which we are aware of, as if we are paralyzed by some injection)        To take some of the terror out of this I.A.P. experience.

1. I never liked the name (still, it is offensive to me)
2. This ought to be on the higher level of love. The student trust(s) us with his/her best work to look at, to make our best comments, to give our best feelings and thoughts. Great. So what could be distressful?

______________________________________________________________________________

Of course, it is not on the level of love - but on competition, conformity of various kinds and indoctrination - at least to some extent. So, we are working on an improvement, whereby the student will find larger and greater possibilities for personal development.

At this moment, it looks to me as if the people/powers who guide the curriculum, do not see or even believe a bit, that a well developed student is equally a cheerful and effective citizen. [this is one of the many conditions which baffle me about human behavior]

I wish you a cheerful day, Phillip.

Your, Wolfram