1. September 2003
Yaso
Japan
Yuichi Konno
Editor in chief
YUICHI KONNO TALKS WITH GOTTFRIED HELNWEIN
“Children and lunatics cut the gordian knot which the poet spends his
life patiently trying to untie.” Jean Cocteau
Yaso: 1. About the images of the Nazis.
You began your life in the wake of World War II in Vienna, and you have often
used Nazi images in your works. I suppose you received very diverse responses
in 1960-70s when people still remembered those tragic sights and experiences
vividly as opposed to what you get today when young people only know about
the war through books and films. For example, we see many works of art in
which artists combine Nazi images and the ones the Nazis banned as "degenerate"
art.
Do you intend to make any differences in the way you treat the Nazi-images
today from decades ago, or is your methodology the same?
Helnwein:
Let me try to explain how I ended up using this imagery in my work – it’s
far more simple and less scientific than you might think.
My art is an ongoing dialogue that I started 30 years ago with my public. Since
the early days of my childhood I was under the impression that the world I
lived in was a madhouse. I could never figure out what this was all about,
nothing seemed to make much sense. People around me, especially grown-ups who
pretended to be in charge, acted extremely weird. Everybody seemed to be entangled
in a web of complex invisible rules and laws.
I figured this out because whenever I got smacked or kicked I was told that
I had just violated one. I always thought – how did I end up in a place
like this? What was I doing here? The only thing I knew was that this was not
home – I didn’t belong here. But who was I then? Where did I come
from? Obviously I was in a state of total amnesia.
However, for the time being I seemed to be stuck in a no-fun two-dimensional
world -- a cheap, silent, black and white movie in slow motion. What I didn’t
know then was that I had been born in Vienna shortly after the second of the
two world-wars that my stupid ancestors had caused within the last 30 years
– and lost.
Many buildings were in ruins, destroyed by the bombs of the allied forces
now occupying the city. I never heard anybody sing and I never saw anybody
laugh. And when I found the photographs of my father, my grandfathers and my
uncles all in uniforms of Hitler’s army, I started to ask questions.
Unfortunately, I was speaking either in the wrong tounge or they also suffered
amnesia, because I never got any answers. But I was a very insistive child
and I never gave up asking, despite the fact that it didn’t get me anywhere.
When I was 18, there was this one miraculous moment when I suddenly knew that
there was a way out: I had to become an artist. And I started to paint. I didn’t
know much about the art-world and other artists, and I didn’t care about
styles and techniques. I just began to formulate my old questions now as images,
and step by step I developed my own visual language.
But I was not prepared for the avalanche of emotional reactions that my little
watercolor-paintings triggered. I was quite surprised to realize that suddenly
I seemed to be in possession of a superior magic language, capable of cutting
through everything and reaching deep into the hearts of people and moving and
touching them.
And to my amazement this nation of mutes started to talk, to respond. I suddenly
found myself in a very powerful dialogue with a growing number of people. It
never stopped and became the momentum and destiny of my life.
Yaso: 2, Reality that occurs in two-dimensional fields.
In Japan today, comic books and TV animation are dominantly influential to
the degree that many of the boxers took up the sport after they had read
comic stories about boxing. The two-dimensional, virtual rendition of boxers
feels more real and overwhelming than actual ones.
What is your idea about the reality that two-dimensional representation has,
such as cartoons, and the potential it has to affect the human subconscious?
Helnwein:
Of course imagination and illusion are always so much more powerful and bigger
than this mediocre and boring thing called reality.
What is reality? At any given time or place in history it was always the ruler
– this priesthood of power – that defined and told you what reality
is. All the education-systems had (and have) only one purpose: to make you
agree with their fabricated “truth” or “reality” and
the attached little belief-systems, and to abandon and betray your own reality – your
own magic and boundless inner world – your spiritual home-universe.
Of course their arbitrary, stupid, little belief-systems vary from time to
time and from nation to nation, but their methods are always the same: threats,
punishment, pain and terror, if you don’t submit yourself. It was one
of these twilight-zone
“realities” that I woke up to in post-war Vienna, created by the
very same people that had just completed the killing of 50 million people.
And into that limbo of my childhood some merciful god (or goddess) dropped
the first German Micky-Mouse comic-books with all the Donald Duck-stories by
that genius Disney-artist, Carl Barks. Opening my first Donald Duck comic-book
felt like seeing the daylight again for someone who had been trapped underground
by a mine-disaster for many days.
I blinked carefully because my eyes hadn't gotten used to the dazzlingly bright
sun of Duckburg yet, and I greedily sucked the fresh breeze into my dusty lungs
that came drifting over from Uncle Scrooge's money bin. I was back home again,
in a decent world where one could get flattened by steam-rollers and perforated
by bullets without serious harm. A world in which the people still looked proper,
with yellow beaks or black knobs instead of noses.
And it was here that I met the man who would forever change my life –
a man who, as the Austrian poet H.C. Artmann put it, is the only person today
that has something worthwhile saying: Donald Duck.
Whenever I closed my comic-book I was back in this two-dimensional nightmare,
but it was not the same anymore because - now I knew there was another world
to which I could always escape if I wanted.
Yaso: 3. About death.
Your photographs including the portraits of Joseph Beuys, Andy Warhol, William
Burroughs, Keith Richards, et al have an odor of death. I suppose human faces
have many expressions inherently and one can often display the solemnity
that he/she will show at the moment of death when he/she is still alive.
Do you choose the expressions that look like dead faces deliberately when you
take portrait photographs and create paintings based on them?
Helnwein:
My series “Faces” is also the result of a dialogue. I keep the
procedure as simple as possible.
Usually I meet somebody I am curious about, and I leave everything to the moment
of encounter. I have no plan or preconception of what the person should act
or look like. There is always a moment of uncertainty involved, also on the
side of the person to be photographed. Nobody really knows what the next step
will be.
Andy Warhol, after his usual compliments and small-talk, sat down and didn’t
talk or move for more than an hour – it was a strange, uneasy silence
at first, and I didn’t know what to say; everything seemed to be frozen
in time, like Andy’s face, and slowly I felt a relief. All the social
veneers were crumbling, and I started to shoot. I felt like I was floating
in outer space – only Andy and I – a moment of truth.
All of my better photographs caught a moment similar to that one. Developing
a photograph of a face is always an adventure because you never know what the
outcome will be. It’s like opening a secret chamber and unearthing something
for the first time that nobody has ever seen before. It’s rare, but in
the hand of a master the camera can reveal aspects of a personality that are
invisible for the naked eye.
William Burroughs said that faces never stay the same, they constantly change,
acting like a screen onto which different images are projected from within.
for full interview with pictures, click here: http://www.helnwein.com/news/update/artikel_1393.html