Urs Lüthi’s performative practice extends into the book format in this first publication from 1973. Tautological in its composition, the book consists of precisely what its title announces: 12 Zitate und 6 Streichungen (12 Quotes and 6 Deletions). The interview in German conducted by curator Jean-Christophe Ammann, reproduced on the book’s first page, offers an early glimpse into Lüthi’s self-oriented work:

“Why do you almost always use yourself as a model?
Because it represents the most emotionally direct form of expression.

What is the difference between you as a person in life and you as a person in a painting?
The painting is something abstract and actually has very little to do with me anymore. I treat myself like a stranger. But if I still keep choosing myself as a model, it's because I have the strongest connection to it. The painting as a painting thus becomes more real, because I try to illuminate the multifaceted aspects that are connected to my person.

In what way could one describe ‘illuminating’ as ‘exposing’?
Of course, it is an intimate matter. Like if I were to write my most personal thoughts to someone, but in such a way that anyone could read them. The boundary between private and public is a matter of the manner of communication (form) and not of content.

It seems to me that the expression in your paintings has almost something sad about it?
The constant confrontation with myself is, of course, also a confrontation with loneliness, a constant reflection between image and reality, reality and image.

Which reality?
The reality I encounter in everyday life fascinates me. At the same time, I am aware that it can overwhelm me. As a product of this reality, I try to distance myself from it and thus from myself. Sometimes this works, not always. I can experience a motorway service station in all its bleakness with playful detachment, down to the smallest detail, almost as an equivalent of myself. Conversely, it can be unbearable, just as I am to myself.

In what way is the belief in what you do identical with what you do?
Faith without illusion is suspect to me. My illusions can give me distance. And often it is precisely the case that belief coincides with illusion. Faith alone would somehow have to presuppose a measure.”

Six portraits of Lüthi, dressed in a snakeskin outfit and adopting gender-fluid poses, were taken for the book by photographer Iwan Schumacher and paired with six quotations that appear to be excerpts from Hermann Hesse’s Flötentraum (A Flute Dream, 1914). In each instance, the artist carefully deletes specific words – such as “den Schnittern” (“the reapers”), “sie” (“she”), and “Brigitte,” the name of a young female character – as well as entire paragraphs. Among the passages, roughly translated from the original German, are:

“But just as I was thinking this and grew very quiet and strange because it had never occurred to me before, Brigitte stopped and held me tight by the basket handle.”

and

“…for when I tipped my hat and climbed over to him into the ship, the ship immediately began to move and ran down the river. I sat in the middle of the ship, and the man sat in the back at the helm, and when I asked him where we were going, he looked up and gazed at me with veiled gray eyes.

‘Wherever you like,’ he said in a muffled voice. ‘Down the river and into the sea, or to the great cities, the choice is yours. It all belongs to me.’”

In short, Hesse’s fairy tale follows a young man who leaves his father’s home with a bone flute to see the world, embarking on a journey that begins with joy and harmony before turning to sorrow and disenchantment. Within Lüthi’s artist’s book, the strategic blacking out of words and passages can be read as an act of identification – not only with Hesse’s male protagonist but also with the female character Brigitte. The deletions thus introduce a productive instability into the text’s gendered identities, mirroring the fluidity of Lüthi’s self in his own work.

Jungian in its unfolding, Hesse’s tale invokes dream states and archetypal transitions. Lüthi’s appropriation of these passages, however, shifts their meaning into the realm of artistic self-fashioning. Through the combination of textual erasure, self-portraiture, and androgynous performance, 12 Zitate und 6 Streichungen stages an early form of the performative alter ego that would become a defining feature of Lüthi’s practice. His body becomes both subject and material: something to be examined, estranged, exposed, and repeatedly reconstructed through the interplay of image, text, gender, and identity.