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 Posted: Fri Oct 17, 2008 12:14 am Post subject: BLOODIED BUT UNBOWED |
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14. September 2008
The Sunday Times, Ireland
Culture
Gerry McCarthy
BLOODIED BUT UNBOWED
Fury greeted Gottfried Helnwein's Waterford Installation, but his art
deals in public trauma, says Gerry McCarthy
Again and again, he has painted children in brutal, violent settings.
He has used Christian iconography to depict Nazi officers, and
juxtaposed rampaging soldiers with Images of childhood innocence.
Visceral reactions come with the territory: one Installation in
Cologne was physically attacked by neo Nazis. And yet, he says, he
does not set out to shock. "Shock is a useless effect," he says.
"Somebody in shock is completely useless. I want to make somebody
think."
Instead, Helnwein's work speaks of a deep psychological need for
meaning, even as it takes the form of violence and confrontation. Such
an approach is rooted in the uneasy silences of growing up in post-war
Austria and the shattered illusions of his early adult life, yet is
still infused with an uneasy idealism.
His art has brought him material rewards. Over the past 30 years, he
has become an art superstar. His paintings and photographs command
large prices. As he talks in his Co Tipperary castle, garbed in black
clothes and dark glasses, Helnwein has the air of a veteran rock star
and the lifestyle to match it.
They left Mickey Mouse undamaged, says Gottfried Helnwein. Whoever
attacked his photographic triptych, The Last Child, as it was
displayed in a Waterford street, concentrated their fury on the Image
of a girl with a bloodied face. "Somebody slashed it from bottom to
top," he says. "But we will keep it on view. When you put art in a
public space, the reactions are part of it."
If Helnwein seems unfazed, it is because he has been in situations
like this before. The artist, Austrian-born but now an Irish citizen,
has a long history of attracting controversy. His paintings employ
impeccable technique in the service of disturbing Images.
Again and again, he has painted children in brutal, violent settings.
He has used Christian iconography to depict Nazi officers, and
juxtaposed rampaging soldiers with Images of childhood innocence.
Visceral reactions come with the territory: one Installation in
Cologne was physically attacked by neo Nazis. And yet, he says, he
does not set out to shock.
"Shock is a useless effect," he says. "Somebody in shock is completely
useless. I want to make somebody think."
Instead, Helnwein's work speaks of a deep psychological need for
meaning, even as it takes the form of violence and confrontation. Such
an approach is rooted in the uneasy silences of growing up in post-war
Austria and the shattered illusions of his early adult life, yet is
still infused with an uneasy idealism.
His art has brought him material rewards. Over the past 30 years, he
has become an art superstar. His paintings and photographs command
large prices. As he talks in his Co Tipperary castle, garbed in black
clothes and dark glasses, Helnwein has the air of a veteran rock star
and the lifestyle to match it. Marilyn Manson's Wedding was held here
at the castle.
His own paintings hang on the Walls inside, vast in scale. A human
foetus, 50 times larger than life, seems to have the face of an old
man. Others Works are loosely based on Goya's Disasters of War. The
castle's huge rooms can barely contain them.
Such opulence is a long way from his roots. He was born in a poor
quarter of Vienna in 1948, when the City was still occupied by the
Allied powers. His family lived in the Soviet sector: he remembers
grim-faced people and Russian tanks on the streets. But while the
effects of war were everywhere, there was little talk about the root
causes of such devastation: the subject of the Holocaust was taboo.
"Nothing was mentioned in school, there was complete silence. It
didn't exist," Helnwein recalls. "But I researched it on my own, I
talked with witnesses. I was obsessed with the search: it had to do,
in a naive sense, with justice. When I found out all these gruesome
details about concentration camps, everything stopped for me. I
didn't belong. I didn't want to be a part of that society."
Helnwein's generation turned against their parents. "They were all
part of it in some way," he says. "But they were unable to reflect on
it." Yet he also scorned the revolutionary styles of the 1960s. "There
were Trostkyites and Maoists, all middle or upper dass, all fighting
one another. They talked about the working class, but the real working
class thought they were weirdos and idiots. I was more interested in
the victims." For a while, he had sought redemption elsewhere:
"America was my first hope. In the darkness of my childhood, when I
got my first Donald Duck comic-book, it was like opening the doors to
heaven."
But this hope soured, too, first with the Kennedy assassination, then
with the Vietnam war. He began to make paintings based on atrocities
committed by American troops, while remaining aloof from those who
marched against the war. Marching, he says, is a very German thing to
do: "Every country has its dark side, but that's the Germans. They
need to march, and to beat people up. We know they are very efficient
when they work in groups. I don't say Austria is better. You don't
have neo-Nazis marching, but you have people with cellars. And a
second family down there."
There is nothing coincidental, he adds, in the fact that the notorious
cases of the imprisoned Natascha Kampusch and the incestuous Josef
Fritzl have lately come to light: "Austria is more covert. It's all at
home. You have your little concentration camp underneath.“
Yet for all that, Helnwein admits he has not been able to leave his
homeland totally behind, particularly when it comes to the uncomforta
ble concerns of his work: "My art is rooted in Austrian art. That's
something you can't escape. I'm in that tradition. It always had a
very dark side - look at Kafka or Egon Schiele."
When he began painting, however, he knew little of art history or the
art market. He was taken aback when visitors to his first show asked
about buying some works: selling them had not occurred to him. He lad
been too busy painting obsessively, combining a prolific output with
his parallel research into atrocities.
His obsession now is globalisation and the corporate forces he sees
behind it, mostly American. He was delighted, too, when Ireland voted
against the Lisbon treaty: "It shows that the people are still
stubborn, still have independence left; they’re not completely
carried away by the propaganda. This treaty would have ended the
sovereignty of every country in Europe."
For someone, seemingly, so sceptical, Helnwein still exudes the air of
a dreamer, particularly when it comes to his adopted home. In
Ireland, he says, he has found peace, and a sense of being at home.
This came as a shock to him. He was already middle-aged, married with
four children, wealthy from his art. He had turned his back on his
original home in Austria and grown estranged from his surrogate
parent, America. He did not expect to experience the sense of
belonging anywhere again.
"I look out of the plane, I see Ireland and I almost get tears," he
says. "I feel so attached and so connected that I think it's where I
belong." Does he know where this feeling comes from? "It took me a
while to figure it out," he replies. "The landscape is great, but it's
the people and their culture. I don't mean the high culture, I mean
the culture they have passed on for a thousand years."
But he has noticed that Ireland, too, has built silences around
certain topics. When he first arrived, he was eager to talk about
Michael Collins, whom he sees as a great hero -"a genius, politically,
doing the right thing at the right moment and changing the course of
history." But he saw the shutters come down when the civil war was
brought up.
But having grown up among much deeper silences, Helnwein understands
our occasional evasions and reticences. He respects them: they are
"qualities in people that don't exist in other places - I never felt
any prejudice here, which is weird".
Even so, he anticipated that there might be some negative reaction in
Waterford. Art is one thing when confined to a gallery, but when out
in the open, it stakes a claim on public space: "There are some very
tough pieces, children with uniforms covered in blood. I suddenly
realised, Waterford is so innocent compared to other places. It's not
New York or Vienna."
This explains his phlegmatic response to the attack: he had expected
it. For Helnwein, it even validates the work.
By confronting us with images of brutalised children, he has goaded
somebody into brutalising an image of a child. It is this Pavlovian
dance of image and reaction - which goes far deeper than merely trying
to shock - that his work aims for.
"Whatever I do comes out of inner necessity. That's how I started to
paint: it was my response to the world around me. At first, I was
surprised by how emotionally people would react. Then I saw the
response in the media, and I thought, ‘I have a really powerful
language.'“
Despite the repeated failure of his icons, Helnwein remains a dreamer.
His earlier illusions turned to ash: now he is starting to dream of
Ireland. Apart from some landscapes and one of the children depicted
in Waterford, he has not yet used Irish themes. But he says that he is
thinking about it.
This may be a more difficult task than he knows. For a man whose art
is so deeply rooted in pain and secrets - in Austria's Nazi past and
America's betrayal of hope - it may be impossible to move serenely on
to less disturbing work. For all his new-found sense of belonging,
Helnwein is still the artist formed by the country where he was born.
A man may change his nationality, but an artist needs deep roots -
however repellent he may find them. |
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