Interview with German Artist, Helmut Middendorf (Originally published in NakedButSafe Magazine, 2014)
I’d like to congratulate you on the recent publication of Helmut Middendorf: Berlin - The 80s & Early Works (Kerber Verlag). It is good that this important period of your work has now been collected together in one book. I first became aware of your work in 1983, when I saw the catalogue of the landmark exhibition Zeitgeist, which showcased the new breed of painters. It was an exciting and very inspiring group of artists, who ushered in a resurgence of figurative painting. Could you speak about your early days as a young artist – before you were catapulted onto the international scene - have you always painted?
I decided to become an artist when I was twelve years old. When I did my application for the School of arts in Berlin (Hochschule der Künste, Berlin) in 1972, I put together a group of small drawings and collages and paintings on paper. The collages were influenced by Max Ernst and the other works were a mixture of realism and surrealism. The following years at the Hochschule der Künste I worked very experimentally, trying different styles: I made big drawings and painted objects from cardboard, I made silkscreens and etchings and lithographs, and the size of my paintings started to get bigger over the years. At the same time I started to make a lot of short Super-8-Films, which were experimental and funny. The decision to concentrate mainly on painting came around 1977 when some friends and I founded our own gallery, the Galerie am Moritzplatz.
You attended the Berliner Hochschule für Bildende Künste. One of your teachers was Karl Horst Hödicke. Did you and your fellow students find him influential? Were students encouraged to challenge the prevailing art forms?
When I went to Berlin, in 1973, the reason was not the Hochschule der Künste, it was the city. Berlin was definitely the most exciting place in Germany. It was the time of the Berlin Wall and the city still showed the wounds of the Second World War. The Hochschule der Künste, then, was a boring, old fashioned and dead institution. Most of teachers were not involved in contemporary art and had extremely conservative opinions. Karl Horst Hödicke became professor in 1974, by coincidence. I immediately entered his class. Hödicke was like fresh air. He was a contemporary artist who did great paintings, films and objects related to the Fluxus movement. He showed in the than famous Rene Block Gallery in Berlin, where you could also see Beuys, Sigmar Polke or Gerhard Richter etc. Hödicke’s class had an open atmosphere, everything was possible, no restrictions. And that was perfect for me.
During this period punk rock had erupted as a major cultural phenomenon. Do you think that Punk (and later, New Wave) informed your work, or your world view?
I played guitar and in my youth I sang in different bands in North Germany. I knew the records of MC 5 from Detroit and I had seen a concert of this band in the beginning of the Seventies - that was pre-punk par excellence! I have seen a lot of punk bands in the infamous club CBJB at the Bowery in New York in 1978 when I stayed in Little Italy for a while. And punk became important in Berlin Kreuzberg with the music club SO 36 and it was deeply impressive. There was a new unknown intensity and rawness in this music. I did a great number of paintings that deal with this phenomenon. But my interest was to transfer the energy of the music into painted energy. You will not find the fashion elements of punk in my paintings, I was not interested how people were dressed and behaved. My paintings are not realistic, most of the compositions were done from memory, and I did quick sketches which I then transferred on big canvases. With big brushes and accompanied by loud music - a kind of action painting.
Amongst your generation of painters what was the attitude towards older, established, artists such as Georg Baselitz and Gerhard Richter?
Germany has always had a long and strong painting tradition. When I started with painting in the Seventies I was aware of the generation that came before us: Baselitz, Polke, Palermo, Lüpertz, Kiefer, Hödicke, Immendorf, Penck, Koberling etc. At that time these artists were not really famous, more or less painters painter, and you could hardly find a catalogue to see their work. I remember that Polke had his first museum show in Tübingen in the mid-seventies and as you couldn’t buy the catalogue in Berlin I ordered it by mail from the museum. That took weeks. The attitude, that you could see in Polke’s work, became quiet important for my generation, not only in Germany. As an art student I met very early painters like Lüpertz, Koberling and Immendorf and others. Polke I met the first time in 1978 together with his than students Kippenberger, Thomas Wachweger and Ina Barfuss. There was always a quiet relaxed relationship between the two generations of painters. Later in the Eighties it became normal, that I showed my works together with these guys in big museum or gallery group shows.
In 1977 you were a founding member, along with Rainer Fetting, Salomé, and Bernd Zimmer, of the Galerie am Morisplatz in Berlin, which is associated with the Neuen Wilden. Can you say how this significant development came about?
In brief: Salome and I were students in the class of Hödicke, and he told me one day about an empty space in Kreuzberg, and that we could use it as a gallery space and show our own works. We asked some friends to join us, which worked. Then we renovated the space and started to do exhibitions. One reason to found our own gallery was the boring gallery scene in Berlin at that time; the few galleries that showed contemporary art were mostly showing the so-called: Kritische Realisten. What we did, was totally different. In the first year of the Galerie am Moritzplatz, you could see performances, concerts, films, photos, paintings and drawings. Within the following years painting became more and more important. And from the beginning we had a fast growing number of visitors. A lot of the openings were like parties. And the older generation of artists like Lüpertz, Hödicke, Koberling or Polke liked the gallery and gave works for group shows.
Was there a strong community spirit amongst the painters of your generation? How conscious were you all of forging a new cultural direction?
In the four years we run the Galerie am Moritzplatz there was a strong team spirit amongst the painters. We found out that we were following similar strategies and ideas in painting. There were people who were totally against us and who told us permanently that it would never work what we were doing and that made us even stronger and motivated. Things changed when we had the big group show Heftige Malerei in the Haus am Waldsee in Berlin in 1980. That was a breakthrough. Very quick we got a lot of media attention and German and international galleries offered us one man shows. And the first serious collectors appeared. As with nearly all artists’ groups the team spirit faded slowly when it got commercial. And despite all rumors the Galerie am Moritzplatz has never been a financial success.
A great deal has been written about the difficulty faced by German artists following the Second World War. Painters slightly older than you - such as Anselm Kiefer, Jorge Immendorff, Georg Baselitz and Markus Lüpertz – all grappled with images from this period of German history in an attempt to exorcise the burden of the past. Do you think there any lingering residue of this burden for your own generation?
The older generation of painters grew up with the experience of the Second World War and so it is normal that you find this influence in their works. Beuys is unthinkable without this background. My generation grew up afterwards in another historical environment and started to show their experiences and reflections in the seventies and eighties. But also in my work you find echoes of the Second World War. The dark architecture paintings of Berlin that I did at the end of the Seventies and later my paintings of trains and airplanes, especially the big triptych: Das stumme Grün. One train painting even had the title: The War.
In 1979 Martin Kippenberger took over the management of the Kreuzburg club SO36, and he began to change its direction to include a crossover between punk, new wave and visual art. It soon became one of the finest new wave venues in the world, and it inspired a number of important paintings. How important was it for young artists?
Kippenberger arrived in Berlin Kreuzberg in 1978. He rented a big loft at the Oranienplatz which he called Kippenberger’s Büro ( Office) and here he organised exhibitions and curated group shows. I lived opposite to him on the corner of Oranienplatz and I hung out with him often in his studio, or he came over to my apartment. We always had a lot of fun. Because of an inheritance from his mother he could afford to become the co-owner of the club SO 36. The SO 36 in Berlin was beside the restaurant Exil, the most important hangout for the artists and painters of Berlin Kreuzberg. The audience in the SO 36 was a mix of squatters, anarchists, punks, artists, performer, fashion-hipsters and those from the underground scene. But sometimes you could also see David Bowie, Iggy Pop or Patty Smith among the crowd. The space was pure and naked, very minimalistic, and the music was incredibly loud. And it was extremely inspiring. Beside the music, Kippenberger started to organise other events. In 1978 Rainer Fetting and I created a big wall painting in the SO 36 and showed Super 8 Films. There was an opening and then, two weeks later, everything was overpainted. Bernd Zimmer painted a more-than-20 metres long painting of a subway, and showed it for only one night in the SO36. I remember also a great evening where you could see new short films from New York filmmakers, mainly from the Lower East Side.
1980 you travelled to New York, which must have been an amazing experience. How did you find that city?
I had been in New York in 1978 for a while, I knew Soho, the gallery quarter, already and most of the clubs. I had a scholarship from the DAAD to stay for one year. I soon had a small apartment in the Lower East Side, but it was to small to work on big canvases. So I did sketches and works on paper which became important for a series of paintings that I did in Berlin later. New York was a rundown city and many areas really dangerous. I felt never really secure in my small apartment in the Lower East Side, at night I often took a cab to go home. But beside that, I had a fantastic time and got a lot of new ideas for new works. In New York I also started to take a lot of photographs, mostly slides and black and white. New York had this incredible intensity, even stronger than berlin. You could feel that there was something changing in the art world.
How long did you live there? Was there much interaction with New York painters?
I lived there in 1980 and in the middle of the 80s I had a loft in SOHO on Wooster Street, corner Spring street. The loft belonged to Annina Nosei, my gallerist in New York. And each time I came to New York I could stay there and work. But beside the work, I stayed very often in New York cause I did a lot of one-man shows there, not to forget the big group shows “ Survey of recent tendencies in painting and sculpture” and later “Berlin Art” in the MOMA and at the end of the 80s the big “Refigured painting”- show in the Guggenheim Museum. Through all the years I had contact with a lot of New Yorker “art stars”, you could meet them on dinner and cocktail parties of collectors and gallerists, openings and after-show parties or in the than famous restaurants like Odeon and Indochine. But that doesn`t mean that there was much interaction, people mostly cared about their own business and were very competitive.
In the early ‘90s you and a group of artists ventured to the Greek island of Syros and inaugurated MoMAS (Museum of Modern Art Syros). What was the attraction to Greece? What other artists were involved?
Michel Würthle, the co-owner of the legendary restaurants Exil and Paris Bar in Berlin and his wife Katharina owned a house and a wonderful piece of land on the Cycladic island of Syros. I live besides Berlin since the beginning of the 90s also in Athens, because of my wife, the Greek gallerist Eleni Koroneou. As I know Michel Würthle since the late 70s very well from Berlin, we visited him sometimes on Syros. Martin Kippenberger, also an old friend of Michel and Katharina, did the same and he started to work and paint on Syros. He painted most of his world-famous self-portraits on Syros. As Martin Kippenberger had joint the gallery of my wife in the beginning of the 90s, he did some shows in her gallery with works he had done on Syros. And at that time he came up with his idea of a virtual museum which he called Momas, Museum of modern Art Syros. On a mountain opposite the port of Syros was an unfinished building of a slaughterhouse. Martin declared it as his museumsite. And he invited artist friends to contribute something to his Momas idea. Chistopher Wool, for example, did road signs with the word MOMAS, Cosima von Bonin cooked spaghetti, Steven Prina did a wonderful performance by the sea and Chistopher Williams showed experimental films in a small cinema of Ermopoulis, the islands capital. Most of the time I joined Kippenberger to Syros, there was never a big audience, just 10 to 15 people, but we always had a great time and lots of fun.
You are also interested in experimental film, which is a subject that you teach. Are you still involved in this area? Does it relate to your painting or are there differences?
I taught about the history of experimental film and films made by artists in the 20 th Century. From Bunuel, Dali, Picabia, Hans Richter to Jack Smith, Kenneth Anger, Michael Snow, Stan Brakage, Andy Warhol etc. I showed the students their films and at the same time I helped the students to shoot their own short films. That went for two years at the Hochschule der Künste in Berlin. As I became too much involved in painting and doing exhibitions worldwide, I stopped teaching and concentrated on painting.
You have said: “When I work … the subjects can come from many different things, such as photographs I have taken, images from magazines, drawings. I am not one of those artists who looks out a window and paints”. Has this always been the case?
Yes. The way I work is more conceptual then it seems. As an example: In the beginning of the 90s I started to live besides Berlin in Athens, Greece. And after some years I painted a big group of oilpaintings called Omonia, paintings about my experience of the city Athens. These paintings didn’t show anything realistic of the city. They were mostly abstract and they were paintings about the colour grey. These paintings have nothing in common with my paintings of architecture from Berlin in the 80s. The Omonia paintings were inspired by this endless sea of concrete, that you see when you overlook Athens from a higher point. And especially in winter the city shows all kinds of grey.
I have recently discovered your wonderful collage works, in which you combine seemingly unconnected found images and paint etc. How do you go about these works? Are they entirely random or is there a kind of logic behind them?
From the beginning I was interested in collage and montage. By the way: a film you cut is nothing else. At the end of the 80s I did a whole series of big painted collages which I glued on canvas and showed them in New York and Berlin. And in the next 20 yearsI did a lot of collages but didn'tt show them. In 2012 I did a book, OBSERVER, which showed a selection of my collages, mostly from the last 10 years. This works are mostly done from collected photo material. The photo material I collect is filtered very strictly and ca 90 % of it is thrown away before I start to work with it. And it takes time to finish a collage.
Can anything be the subject for art?
Sure, but not for any artist.
For two hundred years we have been told, with monotonous regularity, that Painting is finished as an art form. This has become a ridiculous cliché. What are your thoughts about the direction of painting today? Are there any painters that you particularly admire?
The death of painting is a dead boring endless story. No comment. The painters I was always interested in, have a disparate oeuvre, the line goes from Schwitters, Rauschenberg, Polke, Dieter Roth, Guston and Warhol etc. But this changes from time to time.
What are your thoughts on today’s art schools – and do you have any advice for young painters who are just starting out?
With art schools its always the same: When the right people in the right time at the right place meet, great things can happen. That was the situation in Berlin at the end of the 70s. That was the case at the Düsseldorf academy in the 60s and 70s, it happened in London with the Goldsmith College and it worked at CalArts in Los Angeles in the 80s. But there are no dead sure recipes.
Your work has constantly evolved and changed over your career and you have regularly pushed into new, unexplored areas - technically and conceptually. Would you agree that this is an essential position, for an artist?
For me, definitely. I never liked the idea of creating a trademark and following it endlessly until it gets shallow and academic. That’s totally boring. I’ve always worked in series and groups of works. I like to change the medium and the issues. Also, my way to create a painting has changed over the years. Times are changing and attitudes change. I always liked a phrase from the 80s: Art has to change what you expect from it.
I’d like to turn now to your works where you combine imagery and abstraction. Your painting ‘May the Farce Be With You (Phantoms)’, from 2001, combines a number of elements to form an intriguing, dislocated narrative. We see a network of webbed lines floating across the surface, and there is an isolated image of an animal in the lower corner. Did you begin this piece with a definite ‘subject’ in mind, or did the forms take shape randomly as the painting evolved?
I started the painting with a free, spontaneous, colourful and gestural composition. But I had already the title in mind: May the farce be with you. It is inscribed in the wet paint. Then I added the logo with the pig and a cow and the lines that float across the surface. This painting is one example of a big series of works where I combined and collaged gesture, words, prints, lines, dots etc. The paintings deal with high and low issues, with irony and cartoons but also with art history. In 2009 I did a big show in the Benaki Museum in Athens, Greece. I titled this exhibition “ Over the under the over”. This describes very well the concept, and the way the paintings in this show were done: With many layers, with different stylistic elements, with abstraction and imagery, with collaged parts, with gesture and frozen gesture, with parts which look printed but are painted etc.
The painting ‘The Lesson’, from 2006 features an enlarged image of a donkey in a jacket, seated at a table, reading from a propped-up book. Around this image are red spirals and abstract slabs of yellow and blue paint. Does the collage image dictate the direction of the work, or is it a later addition once the paint has been established?
What you see is a colourful abstract deconstructed background. On top of it I painted the image of a donkey from Goya. (Donkey as teacher, from an etching.) The background in this kind of painting, gives the image a new ironic direction and meaning. What is this donkey teaching? Painting? Confusion? Is it about politics? Is it about Greece? And so on.
In your beautiful, sumptuous canvas ‘Flaming Orange’, from 2007, you have fixed a plane of collaged images, which you have fully, or partially, obscured by paint. The effect is both delicate and dislocating as the viewer makes sense of the fractured narrative of disparate images. Is your choice of collage images entirely random, or do you wish to present a specific narrative thread?
It’s not random at all. I permanently collect piles of images from newspapers, books and magazines, downloads from the internet etc., but this material is carefully selected and in the end I throw away more than 90% of it. In this painting I don`t want to show a specific narrative thread. It deals with the huge and constant stream of images we are confronted with in daily life - the whole visual overkill of modern printed and electronic media. In 2012 Marina Fokidis wrote about my collaged works: “Carefully selected found images are Middendorf’s starting point, but as collage they are enhanced or erased, cancelled or fortified, or violated or reassessed, as well as alluding to unexpected narratives derived from the artist`s mood and critical attitude towards pop culture.”
Other works from this period contain references to art history. There are collaged images from Goya, Caravaggio, Redon, for instance. In ‘Skull (Dürer)’ you have a large reproduction of a skull from that artist, and in ‘View (Rembrandt)’ you have humorously placed an enlargement of a Rembrandt self-portrait on top of a field of buttery abstract paint. Was your intention to in some sense reclaim these artists from the swamp of history?
In the whole art history you can find links and references to other and older artists and reinterpretations of their works. I did a series of paintings where I used images from Goya, Dore, Dürer, Rembrandt, Daumier and others to create a playful mix of abstraction and image. But I did the same with cartoon artists like Wilhelm Busch, George Herriman or Robert Crumb. As an example: Dürer`s Skull gets a different meaning when you put him in front of a bright expressive colourful abstract composition. It’s a way to revive great images from art history in a new contemporary way.
Your 2011 exhibition, ‘Blots and Stains’, at the Eleni Koroneou Gallery in Athens, presented a series of abstract canvases. Spatially, these works are very compelling because of the various painterly surfaces you have layered together in overlapping planes, featuring brushwork; impasto areas; ‘prints’ from objects, such as plastic grills and paint cans; drips etc., amongst other things. Could you speak about your process for this body of paintings?
These paintings are dominated by big abstract grids, spirals, structures, dots and stains. They look as if they were imprinted by accumulations of giant stamps. In some of the paintings the background consists of an overpainted collage of newspapers, shimmering through layers of white paint. The result is a rich surface of light greys and whites. But if you go close enough you can recognize most of the words and images. It’s a pentimenti effect. Other works are under-painted in glowing pink, light blue and dayglow yellow. These paintings bring to mind Rorschach drawings and experiments with stains which the Surrealists liked.
Also in the ‘Blots and Stains’ exhibition you presented a large series of collage works in which you make powerful interventions to the found images. There are often art-world references within these works – one features an iconic photograph of Francis Bacon; in another we see Andy Warhol sitting with his mother, and these are spattered by white drips and splashes. Another work features the cover of Interview magazine which has been aggressively half-obscured by black paint. The effect is very powerful because the ‘authority’ of the printed page has been negated by the painterly intrusion.
The collages in the exhibition were created from cardboard, photographs, newspaper material, found stuff and painted parts. My collages can become totally abstract, or even satirical, make a political comment or a joke, or pay homage, they can also have sexual undertones, be enigmatic, silly, surrealistic, ironic or pretty harsh. The works in the show dealt with fashion, the art world, man and woman, celebrities, rock stars and Greece.
More recently, in your 2013 exhibition ‘Blow Up’ at MOTInternational, London, you again presented both paintings and collage works. Works such as ‘Untitled (Bengalred)’ and ‘Untitled (Hoggarblue)’ featured a grid or cruciform shape, with an image collaged into each corner, and, in a very powerful move you then overlaid all of this with frenetic, black, abstract marks which threaten to break through the formalism beneath. Could you speak of your intentions with these works?
The show in London with MOTInternational was a continuation of the “Blots and Stains” show in Athens. Some of the paintings had collaged parts in the corners, but were dominated by abstract allover structures in black or paynes grey. I always liked the idea, that you can see the 4 collaged and well selected photographs on each painting as a montaged short film, like film stills, and every viewer sees his own film.
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