Seen not in terms of transcendental transformations but as the hard-nosed transactions of the monster „history“, the accumulations of cigarette ends must evoke the conditions of postwar Germany, when they were collected and their contents were rerolled into cigarettes (five to one). As the butt became a commodity with a specific monetary value, people actually survived, in both body and soul, by that economy. Viewed from this angle, the transformation implicit in the works is presented not as spiritual or artistic but as bodily or chemical; the idea of transformation is retranslated as the exchange of one commodity for another.

Thomas McEvilley 1995