June 1999
Museum of Lower Austria
Catalogue for the Installation in the Dominican Church, Krems, 13.6. - 31.8.
1999
Peter Zawrel
Director of the Museum of Lower Austria
AGAINST HARMLESSNESS IN ART
Apokalypse, one man show and Installation by Gottfried Helnwein at the Dominican
Church in Krems
Only in this way was Helnwein able to trigger the shock that he intended, a shock with a possible healing effect whose first target was the repression of the greatest trauma of our century. The repression of National Socialism, the Austrian people complicity in it and its consequences had been declared an official policy in Austria. In this way the generations born after 1945 had no chance to deal with the barbaric, neither with its outbreak a few years earlier nor with its lingering latent presence.
Everything had become harmless again. The revelation occurred only in 1986 when Kurt Waldheim became President of Austria and a "case" that was discussed world-wide. Based on this specifically Austrian situation Helnwein developed a visual language of apocalyptic vision that can be understood all over the world. The beautiful and the ugly, the fear of the terrible and the power of its fascination, the clearly recognisable and that which cannot be interpreted but lurks outside the painting as well as outside the nursery door, and more closely intertwined in these pictures than those of any other living artist.
The enigma of Helnwein's paintings always has to do with guilt and atonement,
perpetrators and victims, accusation and remorse. He has never escaped the Christian
world of ideas and images of his childhood, but instead has used it for his
own artistic purposes.
(English translation from German)
In 1965, when the seventeen year old Gottfried Helnwein began his training at
the "Höhere Graphische Lehr-und Versuchsanstalt" in Vienna, the
Austrian Freedom Party, which is not being headed by Jörg Haider put up
posters for 1 May that demanded: "Forget about the past! Look ahead at
the future!" Just a few days later earlier the anti-Fascist Ernst Kirchweger
had died of the severe injuries that violent right-wing extremists had inflicted
upon him at the demonstration against the National Socialist university professor
Taras Borodajkewyez. While working with burins and knives at the "Graphische
Lehranstalt" Helnwein spontaneously turned accidental minor injuries into
his first self-inflicted wounds and in 1969 painted a portrait of Adolf Hitler.
As a consequence he was expelled by the school on the grounds that anyone reminding
people of the National Socialist era was damaging the school's reputation. By
that time the artists known as the Wiener Aktionisten had already been forced
into exile or thrown into prison as a consequence of their Aktion at the University
of Vienna entitled Kunst und Revolution/Art and Revolution in 1968, the year
of the international student revolts, although in a political sense no such
revolt actually took place in Austria. Günter Brus' Wiener Spaziergang/Vienna
Walk (1965), in which he addressed random passers-by in public spaces, marked
the climax and end of the original Wiener Aktionismus, which had always started
with an Aktion directed towards a specific object or subject and carried out
in a non-public space. In the subsequent aggressive phase the artists attempted
to find a way to turn from art to reality. Between 1965 and 1969 Rudolf Schwarzkogler
staged his own reality to be captured by the medium of photography, which Helnwein
did not know about until the mid-70's. During his student days Helnwein had
been too busy creating his own outsider's world. In contrast to the Aktionsisten,
form the very beginning his world was meant for a wide and undifferentiated
public, to be covered by the media.
What must have been obvious about the Aktionsisten was the campaign which the
media waged against them. Günter Brus, Otto Muehl, Peter Weibel, Oswald
Wierner and Hermann Nitsch had attacked bourgeois moral concepts and behavioural
norms and broken aesthetic taboos, without ever taking up an obvious political
position. Helnwein, on the other had, did the opposite. He conquered the media
world-in 1973 he did his first cover for the newly established news magazine
Profil, and his later works for Kronen Zeitung have made Austrian media history-by
providing for the aesthetic establishment what it expects of the arts, namely
the perfectly executed proof of mastery of all available means to outdo reality
ijn its depiction. Later he furnished proof in front of the camera in his studio
that art implies technical mastery but that alone is not enough to be an artist.
Only in this way was Helnwein able to trigger the shock that he intended, a
shock with a possible healing effect whose first target was the repression of
the greatest trauma of our century. the repression of National Socialism, the
Austrian people complicity in it and its consequences had been declared an official
policy in Austria. In this way the generations born after 1945 had no chance
to deal with the barbaric, neither with its outbreak a few years earlier nor
with its lingering latent presence.
"In diesen Tagen werden die Menschen den Tod suchen, ihn aber nicht finden;
sie werden sterben wollen, aber der Tod flieht vor ihnen."
(Die Offenbarung des Johannes 9,6 zitierte nach der Einheitsübersetzung).
Apocalypse means Revelation; in the biblical sense it is the vision of the imminent
end of the world, the vanquishing of Satan and ensuring kingdom of God. The
end of the world will be brought about when the "Saviour" opens the
seven seals of the mysterious book which the Lord of the World holds in his
hands. The terrible consequences have been described by Saint John the Divine-who
is not identical with Saint John the Evangelist-in images that have captured
the artists' imagination for almost two thousand years with undiminished force,
which does not mean that this fascination must necessarily be reflected in an
illustrating interpretation of the traditional text with its abundance of images.
One characteristic of the apocalypse is the intensification of all opposites,
the forcing of a decision. The archangel Michael thrusts the dragon Satan down
upon the earth, which determines the fight against evil in heaven, but also
triggers that inferno on earth which is the precondition for passing through
the Last Judgement into the "New Jerusalem"
For the current exhibition in the Dominican church in Krems-doubtless a place
that further enhances the intensity of Helnwein's painting due to its aura and
cultural-historical and cultic significance-Helnwin has supplemented a number
of existing worlds dating back to 1986 which new painting creating specifically
for this exhibition. Apocalypse, the title chosen by the artist, is to be understood
not in the colloquial meaning of the word but in its real meaning in the sense
of a "revelation of the last things". These are terrible and in Helnwein's
painting there is no bypassing the darkness of anguish which they elicit.
While Gottfried Helnwein is preparing this exhibition in Ireland, NATO had begun
the war in Serbia and as I am writing this test the latest horror reports are
being broadcast hourly about the expulsion of the Albanian people from Kosovo
and the attempt to eradicate them. We become witnesses of how the people living
on the Balkan peninsula are being traumatised for the third time in this century
and we understand that for an artist like Helnwein, who has chosen pain, danger
and exacting demands- see note 1! - there is no reason to paint other kinds
of pictures.
In 1965, when the 17 year old gifted draftsman Gottfried Helnwein began to conquer
the world of art, political conflicts erupted in violence not only in his small
native country of Austria. After the Viet Cong attack on the American bases
at Pleiku and Que Nhou in February 1965 the United States had stepped up thier
bombing of North Vietnam. The Vietnam war was the first war of the media era.
Although its character was not yet determined by the media - as was to be the
case with later wars- for the first time the reports on an ongoing war triggered
world-wide protests. It was also the first time that it became easy to understand
what it means when the inconceivably horrible does not occur at some distant
future point in time - "looking ahead at the future"" - but RIGHT
NOW.
The photograph taken by a war correspondent shows a child mutilated by shell
splinters on a hospital shop in Dacany. The photographic rendition of reality
always leaves it in its original site. The distance between the viewer and that
which has been photographed remains irreconcilable. The American artists Aziz
+ Cucher work with digital photography. They represent a new generation of artists
who have grown up in the media age and recognise simulation as the only truth
that we can rely on. Helnwein, on the other hand does not supply us with anything
we can rely on. He pulls away the ground from under out fee, both in terms of
our distance to the object and the subject's reassurance.
The war correspondent who reports on the terrible and the virus so at the computer
are existences that we can easily grasp. Anyone, however, who can create a painting
like Helnwein's famous Peinlich/Embarrassing of 1971 must make the viewer uncomfortable.
How can one represent visually not only the presence of the terrible Other,
but also its actual superiority that no one can escape from? In 1979 Apocalypse
Now, the so-called Vietnam epos by Francis Ford Coppola, caused the world-wide
irritation of movie-goers by its uneasy balance between accusation and an aesthetic
glorification of war, which the director stages with an authenticity that endangered
his own existence and that of his crew. The same accusation is regularly raised
against Helnwein. It is due to the fact that Modernism has made it more difficult
for us to gain access to works of art that use mimetic techniques in an almost
classical sense, ie that try to make us grasp reality by copying it and by various
degrees of transformation.
Only by a subversive strategy of transferring familiar pictorial types into
a new context of utilisation, by the substitution of pictorial motifs and a
syncretistic intensification of carriers of meaning of different origin is it
possible to make fascism, violence and abuse "aesthetically commensurable"
(Gorsen 1988): to show the world as it is and not as it is portrayed to us by
the media apparatus.(5)
A decisive aspect of Helnwein's art is that he does not show the causes of the
terrible. The tortured children of his early years, the self portraits as victim,
the staging of groups of person whose meaning remains enigmatic, the heads of
the Poems and the free painterly designs of heads that appear damaged: all these
pictures are part of an iconographic tradition in Western painting and refer
to familiar types of pictures (portrait, group portrait, pictures of saints,
vanitas motifs, etc)
At the same time they do not provide what usually makes pictures readable,
namely an unambiguous interpretation in terms of the reality portrayed. These
pictures lack the one story that can be narrated whose culmination they are.
They can be recognised as being linked to photography and some of them resemble
film stills - such as the Nacht/Night series created after 1989: in other words
they remain indecisive in their relationship to a possible before and after.
Helnwein never shows the act of violence as such. Instead he shows it results
and its latent threatening existence. This distinguishes his oeuvre significantly
from that of his frequently quoted "precursors" - from Hieronymus
Bosch and @Francisco de Goya to Alfred Kubin, all of whom represent a surreal
attitude.
In Helnwein's paintings more than in any of his "precursors" we find
open narrative structures of the kind developed in film. Helnwein himself never
referred to traditions of "high art". He had repeatedly and intentionally
provocatively pointed out that he has been influenced more by 20th century popular
media than by a bourgeois art-historical canon that has also appropriated Modernism
including its avant-gardes. Thus the visitors to Hermann Nitsch's Six Day Spectacle
at Prinzendorf are no more to be considered addressees of Helnwein's pictorial
world than people who fly somewhere for a weekend to see an exhibition of Monets
or Vermeers. Helnwein has refused - even though in part certainly only rhetorically
- to appropriate this canon.
Nevertheless in reflecting upon his oeuvre the influence of photography and
film has not yet been sufficiently considered. Omission - a fundamental technique
of filmic narration - and ambiguity as it was cultivated by Alfred Hitchcock
as "suspense" - throw the viewer of Helnwein's paintings into a state
of inner turmoil which is familiar to us from the movies. At first sight it
seems paradoxical to be able to paint "suspense" given that a painter
has only one frame at his disposal, to speak to cinematographic terms. That
it is nevertheless possible is explained by the fact that Helnwein's paintings
raise questions and demand explanations that leave no way out, no loophole,
for the viewer.
In 1975, the year the Vietnam war ended, one of the most shocking films ever
made reached the cinemas, but was immediately forbidden in most countries: Pier
Paolo Pasolini's Salo or the 120 Days of Sodom, which shows how in 1944/45 in
a villa in Salo - where Mussolini had proclaimed the "Republic of Salo"
in 1943 - eight young people were slowly and painfully tortured to death by
four powerful men with the aid of four whores. Each frame of the film, even
those or especially those frames that do not show violence, can throw the viewer
into panic as to what might happen next or may already have happened although
we have not seen it. This is the same effect that Helnwein achieves with his
paintings and it allows for a surprisingly high degree of enigma.
Due to its superficial banality and lack of content a particularly interesting
example of this approach is the painting entitled Türkenfamilie/Turkish
Family, which esists in two versions of approximately the same dimensions. As
the title explains the painting depicts a Turkish family. Four children and
a middle aged woman are dressed traditionally and inconspicuously. The kids
wear Micky Mouse ears, a device to demonstrate their cultural assimilation.
"Turkish Family II", 1996 , 210 cm x 310 cm, mixed media on canvas
Two young blonde women in seductive poses are dressed in fashionable "Western" clothes. Three personal computers are intersperses between the people. The 1988 version somewhat resembles a photograph for which the family is posing. The children look at the camera with bored expressions or at the floor in embarrassment, the woman in the centre smiles proudly and one of the two young ladies on the bed who look out of place between a clothes drier and Turkish carpets likewise smiles at the viewer. it is obvious that the painting shows two different cultures, their appropriation and rejection.
However, a good painting always has more than one level of meaning and how come Helnwein paints such pictures? One has to look at this picture for a long time before one notices that something is not right. if the two long-legged "assimilated" Turkish daughters were to stand up they would be out of proportion to the other figures although they would still fit into the painting.
In the 1966 version this effect was further enhanced by the perspective and
the tension between the people depicted was heightened by the arrogant look
and pose of the two daughters. Usually when the unity of one many and the surrounding
space is disturbed in Western painting by a being that is strange and arrogant
it is an angel, beautiful, terrible and all the more seductive when it is a
fallen angel.
In this three Epiphanies that were created between 1996 and 1998 Helnwein achieved
a hitherto unknown degree of complexity in the relationship between photography
and painting. In the Adoration of the Magi, which shows Nazi soldiers and the
Führer in the style of a group photograph, Adolf Hitler was replaced by
a young blonde women with an infant what clearly bears Hitler's features. Like
the photographic staging of Nazi propaganda the representation follows a common
type: the infant looks straight at the viewer who thus participates direly in
the salvation emanating from him while the Madonna presents her son with a casual
gesture and a proud mien. It looks as though the soldiers decorated with oak-leaf
and Iron Crosses were to be rewarded here.
They are stand-in for the viewer in a painting that demonstrates to us in
an underhand manner and not at all innocently what can be done with the pictorial
inventory of our culture. The syncretism of different media (photography, painting),
types of picture (group photograph, epiphany) and cultures (Christian religion)
Nazi cult of the Führer) creates a feleing of uneasiness (7).
A similar strategy underlies the Adoration of the Shephards, which shows the
infant Jesus as a blind seer whose utterance obviously meet the merry approval.
The Presentation in the Temple is different. It is based on a photograph of
World War I British prisoners of war disfigured by shell splinters. They are
standing around a table on which a girl lying, which the soldier on the right
paradoxically bearing Adolf Hitler's features. The iconography refers to the
"anatomy lesson" which was a popular them in 17th century Netherlandish
painting: a group portrait depicting scientists standing around a corpse or
skeleton.
"Epiphany (Adoration of the Magi)", 1996, 210 cm x 333 cm, mixed
media on canvas
Here the Presentation becomes a "sacrifice", which it is in the
proper sense of the word, and that in turn becomes an "examination";
the representation of an unmaking of power which is still future emphasised
by the reversal of the child's sex, which makes one think of the circumcisions
of girls in the so-called "third world". are the perpetrators victims
themselves? Why do victims become perpetrators? One thing is clear: children,
particularly girls, can only be victims. Similar consideration apply to Helnwein's
painting Späte Reue/Late Regret (1997), which was inspired by a photgraphy
from Aktion Sorgenkind (1972).
One question that is raised by all these paintings is: Who is the fictitious
viewer for whom these people pose-not to be confused with the painter Helnwein
or the photographer who took the original picture. Who are these people looking
at? Helnwein has succeeded in updating this literary level of meaning for our
time. He turns the actual viewer of the paintings into an involuntary accomplice
of the fictitious viewer who-it is pretended - has made these pictures at the
site where they occurred. it is this subversive mixture of a strange, inexplicable
content - which we readily accept as something invented! - and a brilliant visual
rendition whose effect is more powerful then that of any photograph - of which
we would know anyway that it might be manipulated. Anything that Helnwein shows
seems possible. That is upsetting.
The way in which he shows it is facetious, since it is a painting, but it is
so concrete that is seems "close enough to touch". This is even more
disquieting.
Helwein went a step further in pointing out this relationship between documentary
naturalism and artistic fiction in the group of world entitled Poems (1996),
reworked photographs of deceased people. By making their identity unclear the
dignity of those depicted is preserved: what we do not want to see too closely,
however, upsets us even more if we cannot actually see it in detail.
The past has been withheld from us just as the sight of death has been withheld. This is the meaning of the apocalypse: the appropriation of that which has been revealed. With Helnwein appropriation is always painful. The Poems have their pendant in the heads of the German music group Rammstein, which Helnwein photographed in 1997, squeezed and deformed by adhesive tape. These photographs have been used as the basis for a painterly transformation by the artist. For the first time he has not maltreated his own face, but someone else's.
Whenever Helnwein has depicted children he has shown them bandaged or otherwise
victimised. Here the face is subjected to a distancing effect and the "Other"
is pointed out. It is only the deformation which reveals the willingness to
also be a perpetrator. The terrible is coaxed from that which seems harmless.
Helnwein chose the exhibition title Apocalypse not because this is what he paints
or because the apocalyptic in the broadest sense of the word is the theme of
this paintings. Instead these paintings themselves want to be an apocalypse,
a revelation. The biblical text is called "Revelation". The mysterious
is an integral part of any apocalyptic vision. Helnwein's paintings contain
a recognisable mystery. That does not mean, however, that they cannot be understood.
Quite the opposite is true. At the end of this century a considerable proportion
of contemporary art has become unintelligible to most people. Is it not as though
the works had become so hermetic that their enigma can only be solved with relevant
training and connoisseurship - this has always been the case- but rather because
the mysteries have disappeared from art. In this way it had often become harmless.
The enigma of Helnwin's paintings always has to do with guilt and atonement,
perpetrators and victims, accusation and remorse. He has never left the Christian
world of ideas and images of his childhood, but instead has used it for his
own artistic purposes. Nevertheless he has not become a John of painting like
the John of the biblical Revelation, who depicted his compelling visions. Instead
Helnwein uses his entire oeuvre as a weapon in the apocalypse of this world.
For this alone can be the revelation of his art. that salvation has to occur
in reality rather than in art.
http://www.helnwein.com/texte/selected_authors/artikel_767.html