In this interview with writer Michal Szyksznian, artist Gottfried Helnwein discusses the clash between artists and dictators, the mediocrity of society, and how he dealt with the attempted destruction of his “Night of November 9” installation in Germany.
MS: In the common notion, the United States is seen as the land of the free. But at the same time it seems to impose canons and defined models in the world and put the hand of censorship on the unconventional expression of the individual. I know you enjoy living in Los Angeles, because it gives you freedom. What kind of freedom does LA have to offer?
GH: LA is a strange place. A few blocks from my studio, the streets are filled with thousands of homeless people, huddled on the sidewalks or staggering through the streets, and every now and then some lost soul gesticulates frantically and shouts at unseen enemies. I live and work in the so-called “artist district” in downtown Los Angeles: a small innocent island with old warehouses and brick buildings that look like remnants of a film noir set, inhabited by artists, photographers, musicians, skinny girls with cute tattoos, freaks, and Japanese students from SCI-Arc (Southern California Institute of Architecture) placed in the former Santa Fe Rail Road freight depot, a quarter-mile-long concrete block.
The heart of the artists’ district is the “Groundworks” cafe in a red-painted building across from the run-down old “American Hotel” where Bukowski once wrote the script for “Barfly.” The air is heavily polluted from all these diesel trucks spewing their exhaust fumes unfiltered through their erected chrome pipes into downtown air. When I touch my paintings, my hands turn black from layers of black powder, which sticks to everything all the time.
But that’s just a ride in the theme park that is Los Angeles. There is also little Tokyo, Chinatown, Mexico, Russia, Armenia, Korea-town, etc. In total, more than 140 different ethnic groups and 224 different languages. Here you can find any religion that people have ever dreamed of, from the Church of Satan to Hasidic Jews who wear huge fur hats and tight-fitting caftans, like the ones their ancestors wore in Galicia 200 years ago, walking with their children on Shabbat under palm trees in the California sun.
In South Central, black kids hang out on street corners with magnums on their waists, keeping tabs on the drug trade. And in the tightly gated communities of the wealthy, private police officers in sleek black uniforms protect all the precious miracles that plastic surgery is creating these days. And all these different people live here in a kind of peaceful anarchy. And, of course, there is that industry that has been making dreams for everyone for 100 years: Hollywood.
LA is a city without a center and without memory: there is no past or future, only here and now. It’s like an open wound that no one cares to bandage. I never felt so free in my life. I think it’s a freedom that comes from the fact that nobody gives a shit.
MS: It seems that stereotypical thinking and censorship increase the willingness to push boundaries. I believe that these things are necessary for the artist to intensify his expression. What do you think?
GH: Most societies are run by mediocre people who have no vision and no imagination. Most rulers are afraid of creation and creative people. Artists are fun people. All they want is to touch and move, to challenge and surprise others. Dictators hate surprises more than anything else. All they want is to turn their territory into a little toy prison camp and play with their toy people. Shove them around, tear a leg or a head off from them every once in a while or throw them in the trash when they’re tired of their stupid little doll faces.
And it’s actually not very difficult to convince humans that the smartest and safest thing for them to do is to become puppets and leave all that boring thinking and decision making to the wisdom of God, or their deputies: the Führers, leaders, Popes, Presidents, Duces, Cesars, Presidents and Secretaries General.
Isn’t it interesting that Stalin, for example, lord over the life and death of hundreds of millions of slaves, the largest war machine, armies of secret police and a huge network of Gulags, was afraid of the poems of a lady named Anna Akhmatova? ? Deep down, the tyrants know that a seemingly innocent song or poem can have the potential power to ignite the final great fire that will turn their empire to ashes.
Hitler tried to destroy all artistic expression by frantically burning books and paintings, looting all museums, declaring art “degenerate”, and in typical German bureaucratic nerd fashion, even created a government agency called the “Reichskulturkammer” that handed out certificates official to the artists. which explicitly forbade them to paint or write poetry.
I smelled that breath of death a bit, when I had my first museum show in Vienna in 1971, when someone slapped labels on each of my paintings with the words “degenerate art.” I need censorship as much as I need an asshole on my elbow.
MS: Someone destroyed the photographs of children in your “Kristallnacht” installation. How do you feel about that?
GH: If I place an installation, a work of art, in a public space, I start a process that I can no longer fully control. I have to be willing to let it go and accept that the emotions and reactions it may trigger will become part of that work.
Sometimes as an artist you put your finger in a place that hurts and then you have to be able to deal with the screaming. And exactly that happened with my installation “Ninth November Night” (in memory of “Kristallnacht”). It was a 100-meter-long wall of 4-meter-high pictures of children’s faces lined up in front of the Cologne Cathedral, and one night someone came and slit the throats of all the children. I was surprised at first and didn’t know what to do with the cut vinyl sheets, but then I decided to patch them up with duct tape and include the injury. And although it was not my intention originally, this attack added another dimension to that work of art and made it more powerful.