Physical Dramaturgy: Ein (neuer) Trend?

Dramaturgie im zeitgenössischen Tanz ist ? positiv gemeint ? ein heißes Eisen. Idealerweise sind Dramaturginnen und Dramaturgen während der Erarbeitung eines Stücks die besten Freunde der Choreografen. more more

GoetheInstitute

01/03/2005

It's not a picture. What is it then?

Uta Baier talks with painter Georg Baselitz about home, folk art and provocation.

Georg Baselitz was born in 1938, in what later became East Germany. In 1956, he moved to East Berlin and studied painting. In searching for alternatives to Socialist Realism, he became interested in anamorphosis and in the art of the mentally ill. In 1963, his first solo exhibition caused a public scandal; several paintings were confiscated for public indecency. After this he moved to West Germany, then Italy. In 1980, his reputation established, Baselitz was chosen to represent Germany at the Venice Biennale.

The provocative days that launched Georg Baselitz's career are over. The painter looks back on his life and approves an initiative of the city of Kamenz to found a Baselitz museum.

Uta Baier: Mr Baselitz, I would like to talk to you about your return to Kamenz, your home.

Georg Baselitz: You should talk to Gerhard Richter about that. He seems very happy in Dresden.

Baier: But you support Kamenz's plans for a Baselitz museum?

Baselitz: Yes of course, but the problem is that so many people have left Kamenz since the wall came down that it won't be easy to make it a popular destination for art tourism. Until now it was known only for Jägermeister herbal liqueur, Müllermilch milk products and Radeberger beer. Art certainly has considerable potential, especially if you think about Hombroich island in Rheinland. Josef Paul Kleihue's plans for rebuilding the old hospital in Kamenz are fascinating, but how many people are interested in this sort of thing? We are talking about contemporary art after all, and there's often a lack of understanding where that's concerned. This goes for Kamenz as well as for Germany as a whole. Are there tourists who are curious about art?

Baier: Well, quite a few...

Baselitz: But only if other factors are involved. The exhibition of the Flick collection in Berlin gained an unpleasant aftertaste with the discussion about blood money. There's no doubt that far fewer people would have visited the show just to see the works exhibited! . And th e MoMA in Berlin exhibition at the Nationalgalerie was only interesting because the collection came from outside. The Nationalgalerie collection is very poor, especially in comparison with Dusseldorf. The status of contemporary art has certainly changed a bit, with art stars almost on a par with film and sports celebrities.

Baier: The concept of home has been a recurring theme in your work in recent years.

Baselitz: That's true. These are the sort of things one thinks about as one gets older, the absorbing, moving but also stimulating sort of things which act as a positive stimulus during a mid-life crisis.

Baier: Mid-life crisis?

Baselitz: Being preoccupied with your past gives you something to hold onto. I spend my entire time absorbed in the past, where I used to live, where my family lived. I absorb myself in the music, the culture, Easter egg painting, and folk dancing. I've painted pictures and made sculptures about it. Sometimes it's a kind of a self-justification, because I was separated from my family in East Germany. I always felt it was destiny, not luck, that I was on the other side. But I grew less concerned about it as the years went by. And then when the Wall came down, everything I had forgotten about was back again.

Baier: And are you still preoccupied with the fall of the Wall?

Baselitz: I'm so caught up with it that I no longer feel part of the rest of the world. I'm hardly aware of what other people are up to. When I read the newspapers, I have no idea what all the writing is about. So I'm really not informed about what's going on. This obsession has made me so eccentric that I've become rather impassive towards what others are up to.

Baier: You take pleasure in saying that you make Saxon folk art.

Baselitz: It might sound strange, but in coming to terms with my past, at some stage I realised – and now I don't know if it is overcoming ! me or if I am overcoming it – well, I suddenly realised, that there's not only such a thing as Swabian folk art, there's also a very specialised form of folk art from Oberlausitz. Folk art is a very clean form of art in my opinion. I spend a lot of time immersed in it, especially in the form of music. And I have to say, I find it fascinating.

Baier: Your name has cropped up a lot recently in biographical notes of young artists who studied under you.

Baselitz: I always think of myself as the young artist.

Baier: What do you think about this new painting of your students, some of whom are extremely successful?

Baselitz: There was certainly an element of self-interest to my becoming a professor at the university. I wanted to know what I had to say to people, what I could share with them. I enjoyed it very much. When I started painting everyone was saying that painting was dead. But we kept on doing it. Now the younger generation is painting again, so painting isn't dead, it will never stop changing. Everyone is creating new images, no one paints like Rembrandt or Picasso, especially in Germany. It’s like Paris in the days of emigration – not quite as great. Paris flourished from the influx of émigrés from Eastern and Southern Europe. This is happening in Berlin today.

Baier: Is painting the most innovative art form?

Baselitz: Painting is dependent on the art market. Not on funding. That's the difference between it and music or theatre, that what drives it, motivates it, keeps it fresh and interesting. America dominated the world after the war, and American art dominated the market. Initially it was just an educational programme against Nazi art, and it eventually became a role model. We painters did not miss out on this.

Baier: Painting evolves because of the market?

Baselitz: It's o! ne of th e factors. That was also the case with Mozart and Beethoven. Mozart did not survive as an interpreter of Bach, but as Mozart. The same goes for Beethoven.

Baier: What are you working on at the moment?

Baselitz: I've been painting portraits of Stalin, as Picasso drew him, as a friendly young man with a moustache.

Baier: You based them on a Picasso drawing?

Baselitz: Yes. Of my Stalin paintings, only two or three are any good. I have painted over the others. In keeping with my theory: paint one thing over the next. In 1963 I painted my first feet, and these feet keep surfacing again and again. Then I started painting them with shoes, with black shoes. With so-called loafers, black men's loafers. These loafers now hang all over my studio. It's a bit idiotic, these loafers hanging all over the place, some of them with trouser legs, but I keep at it. Yesterday it occurred to me after I'd painted 30 pairs of loafers: why not paint just the shoes - what an idea! - without the trousers. Just the loafers. And look – it works. It is so ambiguous that I stand in front of it and say: that's not a picture. What is it then?" (Image)

Baier: And will you continuing with this?

Baselitz: Now I'm sitting around again, turning things over in my mind, and trying to take images that I use all the time anyway, such as the portrait of my wife or my self-portrait, and put them in the situation of the black loafers. Recently I painted Munch's legs, because I saw this photo of Munch as an old man, where his legs were cut out of the picture. I have always been preoccupied with Munch.

Baier: You made Munch complete?

Baselitz: It's those black loafers again.

Baier: You always said you wanted to paint the “new image”. Isn't it time for new provocations?
Baselitz: I think about this incessantly. Lots of my pictures are provocative even if I didn't intend them to be.

Baier: Would you change the way you work to make your art provocative again?

Baselitz: I change it constantly. I have changed my style, my subject matter and my formats so often. No one notices anything remarkable, everyone thinks it's fine. For example, I painted a portrait of my wife using the negative colours of an earlier portrait. I painted it six times. I thought: now this is a great idea! Not just up-side down but negative too! I exhibited it New York and everyone thought it was wonderful. That's what happens with provocations.

*

The article originally appeared in Die Welt on 2 February, 2005.

Translation: lp.

Get the signandsight newsletter for regular updates on feature articles.
signandsight.com - let's talk european.

 
More articles

When soft power fails the acid test

Wednesday 14 March, 2012

Western museums are opening their halls for huge state exhibitions in collaboration with non-democratic regimes. The British Museum is currently hosting an exhibition on the Hajj which is funded by Saudi Arabia and reflects the royal family's position on the ritual. Should an institution dedicated to secular learning accommodate such religiously doctrinaire exhibitions? Yes, says Malise Ruthven in the New York Review of Books blog, who evidently believes in the conciliatory effects of such cultural politics. Tagesspiegel author Nicola Kuhn sees the new "Roads of Arabia" exhibition in Berlin's Pergamon Museum more critically. Image © National Museum, Riyadh
read more

Art in circles

Wednesday 7 March, 2012

TeaserPicFrankfurt's Städelmuseum has just opened its new subterranean contemporary art extension, the culmination of a radical overhaul of the building and its collections. Hans-Joachim Müller ventures down below the surreal domed lawn and is left to meander through a refreshingly idiosyncratic retrospective that turns its back on received ideas about the progress of art. (Image:exterior view of Städel extension by Norbert Miguletz)
read more

Hokusai and the quest for perfection

Tuesday 20 September, 2011

The Martin Gropius Bau in Berlin is currently hosting Germany's first major retrospective of the legendary Japanese artist Hokusai, featuring over 430 exhibits, many of which have never left Japan before. It is hard to believe that such incredible diversity could stem from the hand of just one artist, but it is the product of a lifetime's dedication. By Katrin Wittneven. Image: "Onikojima Yataro and Saihoin Akabozu"© Katsushika Hokusai Museum of Art
read more

Who's afraid of Ai Weiwei?

Tuesday 12 April 2011

German museum director Martin Roth, who has just organised the exhibition "The Art of Enlightenment" in Beijing, belittles the attention focused on Ai Weiwei. His response to the arrest of the Chinese artist is alarming and clearly shows how marketing takes precedence over ethics in the world of culture. A commentary by Rüdiger Schaper.
read more

Protected by pictures

Friday 6 November, 2009

TeaserPicAi Weiwei - the modest megalomaniac, the relaxed rebel. Hanno Rauterberg met China's most interviewed man in the cellar of Munich's Haus der Kunst, where the artist was preparing to turn the place into a battlefield.
read more

The aesthetics of notation

Monday 4 May, 2009

TeaserPicAn exhibition in ZKM Karlsruhe explores the enormous range of artistic processes that exist between the moment of conception and finished work. By Kathrin Peters
Image: Dieter Appelt "Partitur" © 2009 ZKM
read more

Inflated phrases

Wednesday 28 May, 2008

When matter leads to immateriality and transcends the actuality of the object, we are reading a text about art. Notes on the crisis of criticism by Christian Demand
read more

Coincidence and illumination

Wednesday 19 September, 2007

Cologne Cathedral looks back at a long and eventful history. The inauguration of Gerhard Richter's stained glass window for the South Transept adds a new chapter, bright with 72-colour, frame-breaking abstraction. By Petra Kipphoff
read more

Poison in the air

Thursday 19 July, 2007

Now, as the last eye witnesses are dying out, totalitarianism is tempting a new generation to warm their hands in its fire. From Bernd Eichinger, Jonathan Meese and now Tom Cruise, is there no letting go of the Führer? By Georg Diez
read more

Summer of political art

Thursday 21 June, 2007

Both the Venice Biennale and the Documenta in Kassel have taken the dark side of modernity as their theme. Looking at how the two mega-exhibitons do battle, Hanno Rauterberg prefers Kassel's investigation of evil to Venice's concession to it. (Untitled, from the series Spring-Sow-Plum-Scene, 1996, mask 6, 2003. © Aoki Ryoko)
read more

Art on the cutting edge?

Thursday 14 June, 2007

Is today's art no more than the fashion of the day? Are there only niches in art, each with its own cutting edge? Brigitte Werneburg asks what contemporariness means in a world where the lines are blurred between fashionable art and artistic fashion.
read more

Art to the rescue

Wednesday 6 June, 2007

In a disused dockyard in Rostock, the "Art goes Heiligendamm" initiative has put the final touches to its G8 intervention. The preferred topic among the artworks is borders and overcoming them. Aside from that they deal anything that's good: information, documentation, irony, utopia, anti-consumerism. By Irene Grüter
read more

The unofficial documenta list

Thursday 3 May, 2007

Probable, silent, public, inofficial - there are many categories of participant in this year's documenta. What's lacking are the official ones. Because the exhibition organisers are keeping tight-lipped about what artists have been invited, we are left to guess, speculate, hope and dismay. By Ludwig Seyfarth
read more

Wurm holes everywhere

Wednesday 11 April 2007

Dada is back. Erwin Wurm is the great grandson of the Surrealists. The hilarity and hidden meanings of his stagings and sculptures unsettle and get under your skin. To coincide with a major retrospective in Hamburg's Deichtorhallen, Werner Spies visited the artist in his studio in Vienna.
read more

Smiles permitted, grins less welcome

Thursday 29 March, 2007

The art of glimmer and of deception. Seminal works show the roots and origins of the Op Art movement in an exhibition at Frankfurt's Schirn Kunsthalle. The dynamic of black and white fields meets snuffling electric motors. And a bachelor machine makes jokes and winks. By Ulf Erdmann Ziegler
read more