Asked by Heinz Norbert Jocks in an interview from 1994 what his art was aiming at, Schütte answered: ‘I only see the official direction, which for a hundred years has been the tabula rasa. Always nonrepresentational, always the empty
table, on which there is nothing. Art as science, as discourse, as analysis, decayed down to the bones.’
Since his 1980 exhibition at the Rüdiger Schöttle Gallery, and with all the works which followed, Schütte has shown humour and his antenna for the stubbornness of art. Whether alone or in association with fellow artists, he has continually proved himself not to be complacent. With his mind, both hands and both feet, he has increased the truthfulness of a realisation formulated in 1967 by Michelangelo Pistoletto, that the intellect is suitable for raising and putting questions, but really quite useless as a tool for finding answers. As Thomas Schütte put it in 1983: ‘The only thing that leads to something is to identify the situation and constructively work on it.’


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