Artist Autonomous | Daniel Richter | An Interview

Daniel Richter has travelled a long way throughout Hamburg. Starting with “leftist connections” in the autonomous scene he has now made it to the Hamburg Kunsthalle [Art Hall], where his biggest individual exhibition to date will be shown. This path led him to study fine arts at the University of Art with Werner Büttner, one of the painters of the eighties, who at the time, together with Jörg Immendorf, Walter Dahn and Jiri Dokoupil, initiated the renaissance of painting after a decade of conceptional art without oil and canvas. Richter was briefly guest professor at the University of Arts Berlin between 2004 and 2006. Now it has brought him to Vienna. Since last year he has had a professorship at the Academy of Fine Arts and is in charge of the subject group “Expanded Artistic Environment.” We met up with Daniel Richter in his Berlin atelier.

In the mid-90s you started doing abstract paintings. Was that really a good time to achieve something as an artist?
Oh no, today I would say that that was just a half-hearted attempt to be modern. In the beginning I was a slave to the abstract language of expressionism, then it developed into a fascination, from graffiti down to artificial fragments.

More of a collection of disjointed impressions than a coherently organised composition?
That’s alright with me. The idea was more of a sort of chaos. But then you determine that it doesn’t make any sense at all to organise something like this. Let’s say, you want to place a thousand different codes on the canvas. The question is then: when does the picture become too full? When does that moment set in? It was all about cramming so much on to the canvas, until it was a case of information overkill, a big mess. The later abstract pictures then became more ornamental and have a floral impression, a little like Koran writings, they seem less crowded.

So, in the course of time the abstract surfaces structured themselves.
At some point it interested me to create a certain transparency by placing layers on top of one another. So as if you were in a mosque, but which you must imagine to be underwater. This then topples over into the decorative and provides a sort of repetitive carpet logic. That was exactly the moment when it all became too aesthetic and it started to annoy me.
There has always been this striving for orderliness. Also on the observer‘s side. For fifty years people have been trying to recognise objects in abstract pictures. Even in the dashes of colour and streaks by Jackson Pollock one always wanted to discover an object.
Always wanting to see a face even though there isn’t one there. It’s as if you look long enough until you see what you want to see.

In the mid-90s you went to the University of Visual Arts in Hamburg. Did you want to study painting from the beginning?
To begin with I went to the University of Visual Arts, because I didn’t know what I should do with my life. I thought that art would make a lot of sense. Plus there was also the money from the state. Werner Büttner, who was to become my future professor, exposed me straight away because he thought that I was just in it for the money. Bafög [the state funding for students], maximum rate. But that gave me some breathing space. I could comprehend, at least to some extent, the meaning of art. I may have always been involved with illustrations, but at the beginning it was all about how art distinguishes itself from this idea of, in inverted commas, autonomous artwork in relation to a usable object, that’s what it was about at the beginning. To start off with I wasn’t so crazy about painting. But ironically it is the artistic field, in which the independence of the artist stretches the furthest. In painting you are least reliant on other people.

Were there hierarchies between the art genres at the University of Arts? What was the image of painting like?
Painting was not done that much at the time. In the mid-90s the criticism of the institution was relatively intense.

You mean performative art, which didn‘t leave as many material traces behind. By Andrea Fraser or Rirkrit Tiravanija for example.
And by Judith Butler, as far as theory is concerned. But for me, painting was always contemporary. When you look at an Edward Munch or a Félix Vallotton, then it’s contemporary in your time. Because you create a reference to it, even if the pictures come from the nineteenth century. That works for you just like a song by Sly and the Family Stone. That is just as current. That’s what it’s all about. And that’s why one didn’t really notice that people of this time did not paint. There was only this Cologne Klüngel [nepotism], to which Albert Oehlen and Martin Kippenberger also belonged. In Hamburg there was actually only Büttner.

That time wasn‘t really the heyday of these artists.
No, the 1987/88 era was over and therefore no longer up to date. Except Kippenberger. But I never perceived him as a painter. Kippenberger as a painter is one of today’s lies, a populist lie.

And a Saatchi lie.
That’s correct. Also an art market lie. That definitely has a lot to do with the fact that pictures are most likely to be reproduced. Sculptures and this huge mass of commentary works, produced by Kippenberger, can all not be reproduced so easily.

Like Martin Kippenberger‘s giant sculpture “Kafka‘s America?”
Yes, and also his “Jetzt geh’ ich in den Birkenwald, denn meine Pillen wirken bald”. The man had an exhibition practically every month of his life. Kippenberger annoyed everyone. To now reinterpret him as an art patriot, whose goal was painting, is not fair on him. The really well-painted pictures were created towards the end of his life. The picture “Das Floß der Medusa,” which is modelled on the picture of the same name by Théodore Géricault from 1819 and in which the theme of the closeness to death of the shipwrecked on the raft on open seas is merged with his own experience as a drinker and the imminent sinking. That’s the great thing about painting. But Kippenberger’s strengths lie very clearly in the drawing. Kippenberger’s ideas are based on the lines.

The hotel letter paper, which he always drew on when he was on his travels…
In the drawings on hotel letter paper, one can see the simplicity, the simple, yet intelligent grasp.

We often read about your time before you attended the University of Arts, that you were somehow involved in Hafenstraße [a former squat in the St. Pauli district of Hamburg]. What attracts people to this anecdote? Your transformation? The journey from autonomous politics to autonomous artwork, so to say?
Hafenstraße? This cap doesn’t fit and I’m not wearing it! I have been involved in different squats, but I have never lived in a shared house and, to be honest, this idea of living with other people is a nightmare for me! I was politically active and I was involved in a lot of Antifa [anti-facism] activities. But Hafenstraße, that’s where one was associated with the autonomes. Because that was a synonym for radical design of life. That’s what the debate boils down to. The anti-imps [anti-imperialists] in the Hafenstraße were the biggest idiots around. Nobody could stand them. They were intolerable, stupid, arrogant Stalinists.

The next phase started for you towards the end of the nineties. You struggled your way through abstract. Did you then experience a breakthrough?
No, it was varied observations, which led me to change something. There were occasions like the “German Open” exhibition in Wolfsburg, a sort of exhibition of German art with Ackermann, Majerus, Meese and Kai Althoff. Neo Rauch and I were represented in a space, as an East-West contradiction so to speak.

That very old cliché, of the free West of abstraction against the objective East.
That’s the way it was. But gradually the big subjects appealed to me – death, misery, hunger, thirst, Germany. That’s what I wanted to deal with. The question was how could I let myself into the present, with a reference to painting. After all, the transfer of reality, the picture that we have of the world, through photo, film and internet, didn’t just fall from the sky. It is not a real but an ideologised illustration of the world. I was motivated by the doubts of the pictures, the observation of the falsehood of the pictures.

Your conversion to the figurative was generally received very well.
That was due to the fact that at that time there was little painting being done by the younger ones in Germany. Most of them expressed media criticism by the means of photo portraits. But this variation of the distanced glance is actually Photoshop painting with a brush. For me though, the picture is a means of creating commitments, which beyond a mere media commentary generate a kind of legibility, which one can respond to. Neo Rauch also worked this way, if not decidedly more conservative.

Is this an interest in telling stories and history painting?
Yes, neither of us have this basic irony. And plus, in my case there isn’t this need to be able to paint well either. That doesn’t interest me in the slightest. I am interested in more of a hysterical, paranoid view of the world.

As far as the images are concerned, it seems to be the real, lifelike happenings that people find interesting in your pictures. Rather wall jumpers and street riots than blazing horses and monkeys in front of high rise buildings.
I think so. Precisely because the real subjects look like familiar figures at first, but then appear somewhat strange after all. That’s the charm of it. In principle it works for the observer: there’s a picture, I know it. That is a statement about the world and the time in which we live. I established that the form of reality, which I had perceived in the newspaper or in the news, had not previously been reflected in art. That irritated me. You’re standing in front of the “Execution of Emperor Maximilian of Mexico” by Édouard Manet. That is the painted attempt of a political picture in that era. That was what I was missing in today’s contemporary art. This linking of the freedom of gestures with a distinct reference to the present day. I thought if that’s how it is then someone should deal with it.

Where does the presence of your figures come from? They look like outlines, as if we were looking at them through a thermal imaging camera. A medial dimension.
On the one hand this comes from one’s own perception. It is a mixture of views from the edge and perceptions. The night vision device is the controlling view. The police view of the darkness, of the invading strangers, infiltrating into Europe like a virus. On the other hand there is also the view, which oneself has of the strangers. Many peripheral views of the centre converge, psychedelically paranoid too of course.

This can lead to confusion, like in the picture „Dog Planet“ from 2002. It shows dark figures wearing motorbike helmets. First of all one has the impression that they are autonomes before a street riot. But then one also sees the sheep dogs that they have with them, and is no longer sure whether they are police officers, disguised as autonomes.
I have made a whole series of pictures, which aren’t narrative, but which function via the reversal of simple imagery. Upon inspection one determines that this clarity does not exist in this form. A picture like “Dog Planet” is based on a photo. Another picture establishes itself over that and then takes on a life of its own. Different views require different formats. Otherwise I wouldn’t be able to express several things that interest me.

Do your picture titles also correspond to these ambiguities of reality, when you invent words like Duisen, Nerdon, Tefzen?
It corresponds to the logic of the pictures. Such titles are simple adaptations of original words. Tefzen for example comes from Westen [meaning West] and Fetzen [which as a noun means ‘shreds,’ and as a verb is slang for fighting]. In Dog Planet the ideologisation of the observer plays a very significant role. A picture does not necessarily mean what the observer thinks it does. A picture like Dog Planet can be anything possible, anything from hooligans, a surreal nightmare, a poor Max Ernst and police troops. The picture is not clear cut; that is probably true of all pictures.

Text & Interview > Thomas Schönberger

Fotos > Andy Rumball www.rumball.de

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