ART
GOTTFRIED HELNWEIN – AN INTERVIEW – PART THREE (OF THREE)
AssociatedNews.US
(AN) – In this interview with the Polish website Celebritarian.pl, world-renowned artist Gottfried Helnwein talks with writer Michal Szyksznian about the freedom of living and working in Los Angeles, the differences and similarities between art and entertainment, and the importance behind the inspiration of Disney cartoon character Donald Duck.
In this, the final installment of a three-part interview with the Polish website Celebritarian.pl, Gottfried Helnwein discusses how art is able to communicate with everyone, how he’s able to explore new methods while still improving on his old techniques, and how a cartoon duck changed the post-war world he found himself in as a child.
CELEBRITARIAN: “Modern Sleep” series: this girl is not sleeping. She’s got her eyes open and she’s conscious. Her look isn’t childish, she seems to be more alienated, more adult. Why did you called it “Modern Sleep”?
HELNWEIN: I never explain or interpret my work. My work isn’t giving answers, it’s asking questions.
CELEBRITARIAN: You are creating your works on a big canvas and gigantic installations. How can artists communicate with people who know nothing about art? What kind of visual language is needed?
HELNWEIN: it’s easy to communicate to people “who know nothing about art” as you put it, but it’s almost impossible to communicate to people who think they already know everything about art. Allow me to quote Kandinsky again:
“And the academics that find fault with or praise a work of art based on their analysis of the already existing methods of procedure, are the most detrimental misleaders, erecting a wall between the artwork and the naive onlooker. From this standpoint (which unfortunately, as a rule, is the only possible one) the art-critic is the greatest enemy of art.”
CELEBRITARIAN: As a beginner-painter I have some nice ideas but I just cannot find the way to bring them to the two-dimensional image. I’m trying to find a connection between thoughts and canvas which could help me to make my concept clear and readable. It is the hard part. How do you transport your ideas into canvas?
HELNWEIN: That’s the part I usually worry the least about, I never cared much about methods and techniques. I pick up whatever tools or techniques are available (and often I mix or apply them in unorthodox ways). And of course I experiment and always try to improve and refine my technique and explore new methods, but that is the easy part. The only thing that really counts, that what it’s all about — the basic IDEA. What is it I want to express, what is it I want to cry out? What is it that needs to be thrown into this world?
CELEBRITARIAN: “The American Prayer”: Donald Duck – why is this character such a great inspiration for you?
HELNWEIN: I was born in Vienna after the war. It was a dark place and I was a stranger, whose spaceship was stranded on this unknown planet with no possibilities of ever leaving again. Not only did I loose my orientation through the impact of the crash, but also my memory, because I had forgotten who I was and where I came from. There was only one thing I was certain of: that this was an alien world in whose merciless embrace I was now caught. It was like the after-math of a sloppy end of the world, where the few people that had survived, now continued cautiously to vegetate amongst the ruins, hoping to remain unnoticed by the Eternal Judge.
I spent lots of my time in cold churches where I encountered art for the first time, and stared in awe and fascination for hours at all these tortured and blood-bathed saints that squirmed in ecstasy while their bodies were spiked with arrows or nailed against crosses; or the pale Madonnas with their cold and strange beauty, ripping their dresses open and revealing a big, floating heart pierced by tiny swords. These were the images that haunted me in the sleepless nights of my childhood.
That all ended one day when I opened my first Donald Duck comic book. It was like seeing the daylight again for someone who had been trapped underground by a mine-disaster for many days. I squinted 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 decent, 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.
After all these years of cultural and aesthetic absence, a great culture had finally embraced me. What a joy it was to dive into the thirteen trillion dollars of tycoon Scrooge McDuck, and to burrow thorough it like a gopher, to toss it up and let it hit me on the head. Donald was my savior. He rescued me from a world that was like a bad silent movie in slow motion and opened the door to a 3-dimensional universe of colors, infinite imagination, miracles and wonders.
End Part Three Of Three
Durk Dugan is a journalist and publicist for AssociatedNews.US, a free news service for the media. For more information on AssociatedNews.US go to http://www.AssociatedNew.US. For more information on Gottfried Helnwein visit http://www.gottfried-helnwein-interviews.com/interviews/celebritarian.html.