THE SECRET WEAPON OF GAUDIER-BRZESKA
ENNE BOI
Somewhere in Europe...
2
3
4
5
Two hours later...
6
7
8
9
The day after...
I was painting...
10
Hey!!! I saw you yesterday... What the fuck were you doing???
Yes, I saw that. I mean... why?
...
11
...I remember myself when I was five years old. The year I first began to speak. Mother and I are going to the church. We are there. For a while she left me standing before a painting. It was a painting of infernal regions. There were angels on the painting. White angels and black angels. All the black angels were going to Hades. I looked at myself. I am black, too, it means that there is no Heaven for me. A child’s heart could not accept it. And I decided there and then to prove the world that a black angel can be good, too, must be good and wants to give his inner goodness to the whole world, black and white world.
12
Sounds as much poetic as pathetic... c’mon son, we’re in 2014. These days artists are expected to have an explicit strategy, an aesthetic which functions more or less like a building! They are all ten times more intelligent than me, but their intelligence prevents them from making good art. They deliver shit... They invent thousand of excuses a day to decorate walls, but one can’t feel intensity any longer.
13
I have no strategy for giving an answer, for formulating, preparing or introducing anything. Nothing like that.
No explicit strategies, no intelligence... So you are one of those painters who think they just got a gift, a talent...
14
A painter doesn’t need any of that. In fact, it’s better not to have it.
Are you saying it’s better to not be talented? Yes, much better.
Why?
Talent seduces us into interpretation.
15
Everyone knows that art requires to be interpreted!
Jesus, you’re full of old-fashioned dumb beliefs. What you said about talent is incredibly false... Just think about Rauch!
16
Art contains no information... The only way of using it is to look at it.
He paints pictures, and really perfectly, and really well-painted, but well-painted means, you don’t find a really bad one. There is such evennes – a homogeneousness – that’s in there. High quality, but not too exciting. So I’d rather hang two bad paintings in an exhibition, and they build up the other works. And you can recognize something. You can find something by yourself.
…!? I can’t see the point... you’re trying to look sure about painting, but actually you’re very confused. Don’t you feel that there is a pictorial crisis nowadays?
My argument is that there is a pictorial crisis in a way, but it’s in photography and film. That’s the twist. It’s not about painting. Painting will always be there...
What do you mean?
Only pictures show our actual condition. They have no truth. They consist in, or are impelled by, a subjective experience. The object expresses nothing at all. Painting is not a means to an end. On the contrary, painting is autonomous.
Mmm... So, neglecting that pathetic story about your childhood, I suppose you’re trying to say that you do not paint thanks to intelligence nor talent, but you paint for a will of autonomy...
18
Will is the wrong word, because in the end you could call it despair. Because it really comes out of an absolute feeling of it’s impossible to do these things, so I might as well just do anything. And out of this anything, one sees what happens.
Oh shit, you’re one of those idiots obsessed by decadentism!!!
There is something corrupt on art. Nothing do with any ‘ism’ but a thing in nature loses its innocence and becomes a grotesque thing... maybe this difficulty is personal with me, and maybe it is something that other painters have in common. Perhaps it is also something of today.
19
Where are you trying to...
I don’t know I else I could go about it. I don’t run around asking: “What am I supposed to do? What am I working for or against? What is to be done? Instead, I sit down and work away at the problems which have arisen from the previous problem and the one before that. There are certain things that keep on cropping up: I carry them around in my head for years on end. And those are the things that I work on, the problems I have to solve. It is from these things that I make pictures. But they have neither a positive nor a negative significance. They have no voice of that kind at all.
21
Perhaps the time has come for you to face those questions! At least, are you aware that as a painter you’re supposed to take a clear position toward the painting tradition? My position is seated when I paint small pictures, standing when I paint big pictures...
Don’t be childish. If you paint seriously you have to deal with a series of important values...
The question of assimilation to or into the values of Western HostArt will confound me ‘til I die! That’s why I resist swallowing values like unity, finish, spatial integrity, consistency and many other terms and values into my recalcitrant pictures. I fear the advantages of assimilation. My critics honor me by saying how incorrect I am. 22
You have a strange sense of honour... What about the great masters of the past? They influenced each other and vice versa. But all of a sudden, in that famous turn of the century, a few people thought they could take the bull by the horns and invent an esthetic beforehand. After immediately disagreeing with each other, they began to form all kinds of groups, each with the idea of freeing art, and each demanding that you should obey them. Most of these theories have finally dwindled away into politics or strange forms of spiritualism...
23
Seems like you just enjoy to critic everything... with this attitude how can you see any kind of value in your paintings?
If a painting of mine suits me, it is right. If it does not please me, I care not if all the great masters should approve it or the dealers buy it. They would be wrong. How could there be anything fine in my painting unless I put it there and see it?
This is not enough to give validity to your works!
24
I think that only time tells about painting. No artist knows in his own lifetime whether what he does will be the slightest good, because I think it takes at least seventy-five to a hundred years before the thing begins to sort itself out from the theories that have been formed about it. And I think that most people enter a painting by the theory that has been formed about it and not by what it is. Fashion suggests that you should be moved by certain things and should not by others. This is the reason that even successful artists - and especially successful artists, you may say - have no idea whatever whether their work’s any good or not, and will never know.
25
Please Sir, you should talk quietly...
WOOOOOOOOOOOHHHHH!!!
26
27
You should be less instinctive! Anyway, the art system works in a way that completely contradicts what you said...
The rush to historicize “live” the contemporary art and to immediately place it in the Museums, borns from the fear of the judgement of posterity.
Stop the bullshit, let’s go back to those important questions... What are you working for?
I always must work for the present moment because of this short interval of time you have as an individual. I use all means to build something that can stand on his own, that speaks for itself, because, before I am otherwise appreciated, say, for “hanging in a museum”, I’d rather see the directors of the museum hang. And this won’t happen.
I hope not. I don’t completely understand what you mean as working for the present moment... You’re too vague... from the beginning of this discussion the only thing I got is that you’ve chosen painting because you see it as an autonomous and pure language... You’ve spoken about despair but I think that you simply feel comfortable inside painting...
I alwavs seem to be wrapped in the melodrama of vulgarity. I do not think of inside or outside - or of art in general - as a situation of comfort. I know there is a terrific idea there somewhere, but whenever I want to get into it, I get a feeling of apathy and want to lie down and go to sleep. Some painters, including myself, do not care what chair they are sitting on. It does not even have to be a comfortable one. They are too nervous to find out where they ought to sit...
29
Mmm... and what brings you to start a painting?
I begin with an idea, but as I work, the picture takes over. Then there is the struggle between the idea I preconceived... and the picture that fights for its own life.
I meant what, not how... Anyway, what do you mean as a struggle?
My work follows a certain pattern. Say I’ve had an idea, or a vision, or an inspiration, and I’m working. If things go well, there invariably comes a point when I do something that makes me want to run away, a point when I say to myself: “It can’t be you who did that”. But it was me... However, it’s not something I can prepare for in advance.
Why cannot you prepare it in advance?
In the way I work I don’t in fact know very often what the paint will do, and it does many things which are very much better than I could make it do... It becomes a selective process which part of this accident one chooses to preserve.
ACCIDENT??? What the fuck... you really see painting as an accident? You sound as the parody of yourself!!!
31
I begin a painting with a series of mistakes. The painting comes out of the correction of mistakes by feeling. The final picture is the process arrested at the moment when what I was looking for flashes into view. My pictures have layers of mistakes buried in them - an X-ray would disclose crimes - layers of consciousness, of willing. They are a succession of humiliations resulting from the realization that only in a state of quickened subjectivity - a freedom from conscious notions, and with what I always suppose to be secondary or accidental colors and shapes - do I find the unknown, which nevertheless I recognize when I come upon it, for which I am always searching.
The absolute which lies in the background of all my activities of relating seems to retreat as I get on its track; yet the relative cannot exist without some point of support. However, the closer one gets to the absolute, the more mercilessly all the weaknesses of my work are revealed.
32
Mmm... what’s the purpose of this kind of accidental process... let’s call it chance? What so-called chance gives you it’s quite different from what willed application of paint gives you. It has an inevitability very often which the willed putting-on of the paint doesn’t give you.
33
OK, but in parallel to this process there should be a technical knowledge, at least for applying the colors... I make a little mystique for myself. Since I have no preference or so-called sense of color, I could take almost everything that could be some accident of a previous painting. Or I set out to make a series. I take, for instance, some pictures where I take a color, some arbitrary color I took from some place. Well, this is gray maybe, and I mix the color for that, and then I find out that when I am through with getting the color the way I want it, I have six other colors in it, to get that color; and then I take those six colors and I use them also with this color. It is probably like a composer does a variation on a certain theme. But it isn’t technical, it isn’t just fun.
34
This kind of working method seems more related to abstract painting... but you paint only figuratively, mainly human beings... why?
I think art is an obsession with life and after all, as we are human beings, our greatest obsession is with ourselves. Then possibly with animals, and then with landscapes.
35
Sounds as a close-minded hierarchy... What about these two figures here? I think that they...
Do you think it interests me that this painting represents two figures? These two figures existed, they exist no more. The sight of them gave me an initial emotion, little by little their real presence grew indistinct, they became a fiction for me, then they disappeared, or rather, were turned into problems of all kinds. For me they are no longer two figures but shapes and colours, don’t misunderstand me, shapes and colours, though, that sum up the idea of the two figures and preserve the vibration of their existence.
36
Have you ever had any desire at all to do an abstract painting?
One of the reasons why I don’t like abstract painting, or why it doesn’t interest me, is that I think painting is a duality, and that abstract painting is an entirely aesthetic thing. It always remains on one level. It is only really interested in the beauty of its patterns or its shapes... There’s never any tension in it.
37
You don’t think it can convey feelings?
I think it can convey very watered-down lyrical feelings, because I think any shapes can. We know that most people, especially artists, have large areas of undisciplined emotions, and I think that abstract artists believe that in these marks that they’re making they are catching all these sorts of emotions. But I think that, caught in that way, they are too weak to convey anything. I think that great art is deeply ordered. Even if within the order there may be enormously instinctive and accidental things, neverthless I think that they come out of a desire for ordering and for returning fact onto the nervous system in a more violent way...
38
If abstract paintings are no more than pattern-making, how do you explain the fact that there are people like myself who have the same sort of visceral response to them at times as they have to figurative works?
Fashion.
‌?! Do you really thi... OK, let it go. What kind of inspiration sources or reference images do you use for your paintings?
Since 9 months ago, I forced myself to paint without any kind of external source or image in front of me.
39
Why? A right reference image can be crucial to climb over some typical painting traps... I wanted to get so much involved with a thing that one can no longer keep from being influenced from outside... There is so much action which the poor brain wants to grasp and, in such a state, you start applying total new means of filtering. The heat determines this – the head as an appendage of a drudged body.
To be honest, I think that this pretentious imposition brings you to undefined results...
40
Too impatient; too sketchy; too unfinished, said the critics, and much worse... I’m impatient to find a painting way to my personal Promised Land. Fuck “finish”! Take a look at Picasso’s Demoiselles...
You’re too self assured...
I always work out of uncertainty, but when a painting’s finished it becomes a fixed idea, apparently a final statement. In time though, uncertainty returns... your thought process goes on.
41
How do you decide when a painting is finished?
When something is finished, that means it’s dead, doesn’t it? I believe in everlastingness. I never finish a painting – I just stop working on it for a while. I like painting because it’s something I can never come to the end of. Sometimes I paint a picture, then I paint it all out. Sometimes I’m working on fifteen or twenty pictures at the same time. I do that because I want to – because I like to change my mind so often. The thing to do is to always keep starting to paint, never to finish painting.
42
You paint a lot in series, of course.
I do. Partly because I see every image all the time in a shifting way and almost in shifting sequences. So that one can take it from more or less what is called ordinary figuration to a very, very far point.
43
Producing these big series, what kind of selection criterion do you employ to your works?
Some people say I don’t discriminate enough, that I should bring in much more hierarchy in my works, that I should not show everything that I’ve done... People still think I should have stricter selection criterion... I’m interested in seeing what people reject, what they accept, and why... I always wanted to be a therapist but now I’m pleased that I don’t have to sit and listen to people’s problems all the time; I get this anyway through the reactions to my work!
44
...Problems?
I don’t bother about it, but other people are always asking me: “Why? Why do you paint these things? Why does everything has to look so awful? Why do you paint such ugly feet?” I have to say that I myself have never seen in that way. When painting, I have always proceeded in a very sensitive manner, even if the result is horrible.
I think that the problem is more yours than theirs, and it’s caused by the lack of selection... If you visit an exhibition and you can find good and bad paintings by the artist, that’s good! To be able to cause controversy. But please don’t keep everything evenly good.
45
Mmm... Anyway, I believe that you shall have a kind of personal “rule” connected to your paintings, even if non-selective and controversial... Moreover, controversy is risky. Don’t you fear that it can originates big misunderstandings about your works? I shall not be of interest to dentists, and, it should not happen that I could be taken as one whose paintings are hung over the living room sofa – though I admit that I make small paintings in order to be able to pay for the kitchen, some of which look perfectly like “hang them over the living-room sofa”. But they should be exceptional. Two percent of my production is that way. I simply permit myself to do that. It’s my luxury, which I hope will result in an increasing possibility of public misunderstanding of certain paintings.
46
Sounds incredibly ambiguous...
You’re taking so many blind and risky choices that defending your own work turns out to be a huge effort...
Sometimes people ask me: “Why does it all have to be so ambiguous?”. But it’s not that I deliberately want to confuse anyone; that is how I experience things.
The many killings which I endure every day and the ignominy of having to defend my immoderate productions lead to an illness of the ageing of experience...
47
...An “illness of the ageing of experience??? What the fuck is that??? You’re falling again in your exclusively absurd and provoking sentences... let’s jump to another argument... which do you think is the worst enemy of painting?
FARTS???????? Please, you should concentrate, this is a terribly serious discussion...
48
Farts.
They found out that the farts destroy the paintings. When they’re coming in from the cold into the warm, and then they fart, those must be the most terrible gases possible. They destroy the paintings. More than light or anything. Or heat. The farts of the visitors, that’s the most dangerous thing.
On the other hand, what would be the ideal response to your work? Obviously, everyone is not going to get everything. I don’t expect them to, and sometimes there might be a personal allusion that I’m not expecting anyone to understand. A lot of times I think my work’s getting across when I know someone’s laughing. That’s something that’s nice. Maybe that’s my ideal response.
Strange, I was expecting to hear that you don’t care at all about reaching a public with your work... I like for it to reach the public. Because it can’t be seen in a museum, making it accesible to more than a handful of people after the exhibition, after the cominginto-the-world, I make my work public by other means: by books, publications of any kind, posters, actions...
49
So, farts as the worst reaction and laugh as the best reaction... but if someone farts in front of your paintings, this can cause a lot of laughing... It’s the first interesting observation you make!
Fuck you, I was almost falling in your absurd tricky mentality... Now I would like to focus more deeply on the objects in your pictures. The problem is not the object in the picture, but the picture-as-object.
50
Please, spare these ridicolous shakesperean aphorisms. Whatching your works, the first thing I saw is that there are some references to sculpture... why? It seems to me that sculpture is a shortcut to the expression of the same problem as painting: it is more primitive, more brutal, less reserved.
So why don’t you just make sculptures? I’ve decided to make a series of paintings of the sculptures in my mind and see how they come out as paintings. And then I might actually start a sculpture...
51
I would like you to try formulating something more specific and well-defined about the content of your paintings. There’s nothing I can say about my paintings, I paint, which is far from easy, and that’s all I can do.
Jesus, I’m exhausted, it’s like talking with a mule... Forget painting, let’s finish with the epic question of the questions: why do we need to make art? Yesterday... I went to the zoo. The beasts had a curious effect on me, which I haven’t hitherto experienced: I have always admired them, but now I hate them, the dreadful savagery of these wild animals who hurl themselves on their food is too horribly like the ways of humans. What moved me most was a group of four chimpanzees...
52
They were like primitive man, they walked helping themselves with their hands, and looked like old men, their backs all bent, they discussed things in groups, shared food without dispute but with much wisdom – the strongest giving bread and carrots for the oranges and bananas belonging to the others. It’s most depressing thus to see our own origin – depressing because we sprang from this, but that we may easily slip back to it. Our knowledge is so great but so empty! How ephemeral! So small a thing, and we lose all... Art comes instinctively to us, but it is uncertain. Perfect, you’ve begun with a pathetic anecdote and you finish with a similar one. But I can’t still understand clearly your point of view...
The first man who began to speak, whoever he was, must have intended it. For surely it is talking that has put “Art” into painting. Nothing is positive about art except that it is a word. Right from there to here all art became literary. We are not yet living in a world where everything is self-evident. It is very interesting to notice that a lot of people who want to take the talking out of painting, for instance, do nothing else but talk about it. That is no contradiction, however. The art in itself is the forever mute part you can talk about forever.
53
I have had enough. You should talk less and paint more.
Yes, you’re right.
Bye
Bye
54
Epilogue
Finished...
55
Why do you make sculptures?
56
It was a film I saw almost before I started to paint, and it deeply impressed me...
The End
NNNNNOTES All the images have been stolen from the movie “Savage Messiah” by Ken Russel (England, 1972)
- where Hockney says mainly how beautiful it is to draw on Ipads - to find one interesting phrase. 18:
Georg Baselitz Muthesius, A. op. cit.
Most of the text is composed by phrases stolen from other painters; here are listed all the authors and sources corresponding to the pages’ numbers, sorted from top to bottom and from left to right.
Invented Francis Bacon Sylvester, D. 1987. The Brutality of Fact: Interviews with Francis Bacon. London: Thames & Hudson
1-11: Invented 12:
13:
Arshile Gorky Matossan, N. 2000. Black Angel, The Life of Arshile Gorky. Woodstock: The Overlook Press Invented; from “These days...”: Franz Dahlem Muthesius, A. 1990. Baselitz. Koln: Taschen Martin Kippenberger Goldstein, A. 2011. Martin Kippenberger: The Problem Perspective. Cambridge: MIT Press
14:
Georg Baselitz Waldman, D. 1995. Georg Baselitz. New York: Guggenheim Museum Publications
19:
21:
22:
Invented R.B. Kitaj Lambirth, A. 2004. Kitaj. London: Philip Wilson Publishers 23:
Ibidem 24:
17:
Martin Kippenberger Goldstein, A. op. cit. Invented David Hockney Gayford, M. 2011. A Bigger Message, Conversations with David Hockney. London: Thames & Hudson I had to read all this obsequious book
Invented Arshile Gorky. Matossan, N. op. cit.
Georg Baselitz Muthesius, A. 1990. Baselitz. Koln: Taschen Invented
Invented Willem de Kooning Multiple authors. 1951.“What Abstract Art Means to Me. New York”, The Bulletin of the Museum of Modern Art, Vol. 18, No. 3
Ibidem Invented
Invented, inspired by a conversation with Wim Waelput Gino de Dominicis Koll, C. 1993. Intervista a Gino de Dominicis. Milano: Canale Cinque http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=OIfqnqSSaNY
Ibidem
16:
Invented Georg Baselitz Muthesius, A. op. cit.
Georg Baselitz Beyer A. and Knöfel U. 2013. SPIEGEL Interview with German Painter Georg Baselitz. http://www.spiegel. de/international/germany/spiegelinterview-with-german-painter-georgbaselitz-a-879397.html Ibidem
Invented Willem de Kooning Seitz, W.C. 1983. Abstract Expressionist Painting in America. Cambridge: Harvard University Press
Invented
15:
Invented
Invented 25:
Francis Bacon Sylvester, D. op. cit.
26:
Invented
28:
Invented Gino de Dominicis Torrealta, C. 1997. “Frasi di Gino de Dominicis 1969-1996”, XLVII Esposizione d’Arte Internazionale La
Ibidem
Biennale di Venezia. Sezione Futuro Presente Passato
Francis Bacon Ibidem
Invented Martin Kippenberger Goldstein, A. op. cit. 29:
39:
Francis Bacon Ibidem
Invented Willem de Kooning Multiple authors. 1951. op. cit.
30:
Invented Invented
Invented Georg Baselitz Auping, M. 1996. Elke. http://themodern. org/collection/Elke/398
40:
31:
Invented 41:
Invented
Georg Baselitz Genn, R. 2014. Art Quotes. http://artquotes.robertgenn.com/auth_ search.php?authid=1286
Invented Robert Motherwell Motherwell, R. 1947. “Statement” Motherwell exhibition catalogue, New York: Samuel Kootz Gallery Ibidem 33:
Invented
42:
Invented Willem de Kooning Ross, C. 1990. Abstract Expressionism: Creators and Critics. New York: Abrahams Publishers
35:
Invented
43:
44:
37:
David Sylvester Sylvester, D. op. cit. Francis Bacon Ibidem
38:
David Sylvester
Invented Marlen Dumas Multiple authors. 1999. Marlen Dumas. London: Phaidon Press
45:
Invented Georg Baselitz Muthesius, A. op. cit. Invented
Invented Pablo Picasso Friedenthal, R. 1963. Letters of the great artists – from Blake to Pollock. London: Thames & Hudson
David Sylvester Sylvester, D. op. cit. Francis Bacon Ibidem
Francis Bacon Sylvester, D. op. cit. 36:
Invented Arshile Gorky. Matossan, N. op. cit.
Francis Bacon Sylvester, D. op. cit. 34:
R.B. Kitaj Lambirth, A. op. cit. Invented
Francis Bacon Sylvester, D. op. cit. 32:
Invented Martin Kippenberger Goldstein, A. op. cit.
Invented Georg Baselitz Muthesius, A. op. cit.
David Sylvester Ibidem
Martin Kippenberger. Goldstein, A. op. cit. 46:
Invented Martin Kippenberger. Goldstein, A. op. cit.
47:
Invented Marlen Dumas Multiple authors. 1999. op. cit.
Invented
48:
Georg Baselitz Muthesius, A. op. cit.
Invented
Invented
Invented
Francis Bacon Sylvester, D. op. cit.
Martin Kippenberger Goldstein, A. op. cit.
52:
Invented
Invented
Invented Georg Baselitz Waldman, D. op. cit. Invented
Raymond Pettibon Multiple authors. 2001. Raymond Pettibon. London: Phaidon Press
Arshile Gorky Matossan, N. op. cit. 53:
Martin Kippenberger Goldstein, A. op. cit. 50:
Invented
Georg Baselitz Muthesius, A. op. cit.
Invented
49:
51:
Ibidem Invented Willem de Kooning Multiple authors. 1951. op. cit.
Invented Invented
54-56: Invented
Invented
57:
Georg Baselitz Muthesius, A. op. cit.
Francis Bacon Sylvester, D. op. cit.
Other books that have contributed minimally or not at all Baudrillard, J. 2005. The Cospiracy Of Art. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e) Berger, J. 1972. Ways Of Seeing. London: Penguin Birolli, V. 2007. La Scuola Di New York. Milano: Absecondita Ed. Ede, H.S. 1971. Savage Messiah. London: Kettle Yard’s Gallery Grant, S. 2012. Personal Reflections On Art By Today’s Leading Artists. London: Thames & Hudson Kippenberger, S. 2013. Kippenberger: The Artist And His Families. New York: J & L Books Lewis, B.I. 1991. George Grosz : Art And Politics In The Weimar Republic. Princeton: P. University Peppiat, M. 2008. Francis Bacon, Study For A Portrait. New Haven: Yale University Press Pound, E. 1916. Gaudier-Brzeska, A Memoir By Ezra Pound. London: John Lane THE SECRET WEAPON OF GAUDIER-BRZESKA A project by Enne Boi www.enneboi.com / enneboi.mail@gmail.com CM / F84 / 2BK Special thanks to Hans Theys, Cecilia Valagussa, Icio Borghi, Tommaso Falzone In memory of my man Henri G.B., I remember how you used to be... Printed by Press Up in Roma, 2014 / 50