Georg Malin

These letter-cubes have a special significance for me. . . . I have always investigated and questioned general elements and final elements. And because writing is for me the greatest invention of human- kind, I occupy myself with the elements of writing – letters. It is fascinating how everything that happens in the world, that human beings feel and what they think can be recorded (in the German language) with the aid of just 26 characters..8 Georg Malin The Disentiser Würfel [Disentis Cube] (1984–86) marked the beginning of Malin’s series of letter-cubes since the 1980s. It was created as a commission for Disentis Abbey. A special location in Malin’s personal history, this is not only where he went to school but is also a place to which he remained closely attached later in life. Following in-depth research and numerous preliminary studies and models, he eventually cast the cube in bronze; it measures 150 × 150 × 150 cm. The five visible faces are covered with a textured, almost porous patina. Recessed and protruding areas – including a number of triangular shapes – suggest two inter- secting diagonals. This is a nod to the Abbey’s emblem, which originated in the late Middle Ages: a silver saltire, (or St Andrew’s Cross) on a red field. The first cast, from 1987, is situated in the Abbey’s courtyard in a circular reflecting pool. A second cast (1988) was gifted to the museum by the government of the Principality of Liechtenstein and is now installed at Gutenberg Castle in Balzers. The St Andrew’s Cross is also an architectural element and can be observed in the castle’s half-timbering. On the one hand, in this series of works the historian and philosopher investigates letters as carriers of meaning, memory and origin (see the Gospel of John, ‘In the beginning was the Word’). On the other, the focus is on the significance of the cube in terms of natural philosophy. The cube is based on the elemental square, which Malin understands as a primaeval ‘symbol of the world’9: as a symbol of the material world and the Earth; the circle, however, stands for the emotional, immaterial world. With its four sides of equal length, the square – the shape on which the hexahedron is based – makes reference to the number four, the ‘world number’ that features recurrently in Malin’s oeuvre. For example, it corresponds to the four traditional elements of fire, water, earth and air. Plato paired the element earth with the cube in his cosmological writings – a pairing that Malin deliberately reprises by choosing bronze as his material. The number four continues to play an important role in modern-day science: in biology, for example, in the form of the four bases of DNA that form the genetic code (adenine, cytosine, guanine and thymine); or in physics, with its four fundamental forces of the universe (gravity, electromagnetism, the weak force and the strong force). For Malin, numbers are not only carriers of symbolic meaning but equally storage media of the world. He describes them as the ‘memory of the world’.10 In the digital present for example, this under- standing is manifested in the binary code of 0 and 1, which forms the very foundation of all computer tech- nology and is used to digitally store and process information. Leslie Ospelt 8 Interview with Malin, ‘Durch Kunst gebe ich Signale’, Liechtensteiner Vaterland, 22 May 1995, p.5. 9 Billeter (as note 4), p.21. 10 Ibid.