BERNHARD MARTIN
Total Liquidation Impact
26 August – 30 September, 2017
“Description”
Aoife Rosenmeyer: Bernhard, in ‘Total Liquidation Impact’ there’s a major shift in your painting. You work in cycles, and there are conceptual and thematic threads that loop through your painting, but it’s nonetheless a significant change – stylistically you are pushing at the boundaries of what is bearable. Why this hard break?
Bernhard Martin: I don’t see it that way, but as the logical continuation of my approach to the medium of painting. I’ve always viewed it as a field ripe for experimentation, inexhaustible in its way, and as a reaction to our continually changing surroundings: acting in rhythm with our time and its conditions. Think, for example, of the time before and after smartphones. The fingerboard, the subjects and the broad research area of painting (the hardware) have all stayed more or less the same – a bit more mature, possibly more complex. Superficially things have changed, in the style of painting and the intention – you could say it’s the shift from analogue to digital. Still, compare the young Goethe’s writing style with his mature work and the difference is enormous, but in literature you don’t speak of leaps or breaks but of maturity.
I’ve never been interested in the safe side of any given, be that in life or in art, for that means the everyday, or boredom. I don’t want to see or show the quotidian in my painting. I’ve always wanted to bring together 500 years of painting history in one work (without quoting, mind you – I’m not interested in quotation, variation or revivals). I’ve always wanted painting to adjust to the continual changes in the outside world, even if it is slow and moves in the opposite direction and thus can’t really react at all. So the form of narrative and of style must evolve instead. That’s why I chose the form of a serialized novel or a soap-opera – a kind of narrative that accumulates, which can change its rhythm and aesthetic at any time; creation emerges from the form itself and from the story.
AR: You’ve used the words ‘sleaziness of metamorphosis’ and mentioned an element of surprise when describing your painting; you’ve also said that you have no desire to please. But you seem to be trying to repel the viewer!
BM: Fundamentally I do want to serve beauty. A long time ago I said that I wanted to make pictures with user-friendly surfaces and user-unfriendly content. But this relates to different layers that can be seen and appreciated if you want to find them; they won’t reveal themselves if you don’t want to engage with the material. I’ve never been interested in boorishness, or provocation as a form of style. Yet a new, unfamiliar aesthetic, or a different idea of what painting might be is per se unfamiliar, provocative and possibly unbearable, like you say. It’s in the nature of the thing. Nearly all modern art was such a phenomenon to start with, was initially seen as hubristic. I don’t serve the wishes of the base bourgeoisie or the politically correct.
AR: MOMA in New York has six of your works on paper from 2004 in its collection. They are in a mixture of techniques, most of them are on your letterhead and in frames you built. Through these you generated a clear sense of the works’ materiality and of the gestures that made them. More than a decade later, you are showing works on canvas, and the painting style is illusory: it slithers like mercury. You leave no traces of your gestures and the reduced colour palette underlines the artificiality. Why are you doing this?
BM: Initially I wanted to make it simpler, and more honest; to banish any trickery, I mean. I wanted painting that repudiates itself, so it uses no form of reference and avoids what was understood as painting before – gesture, brush stroke and formal games. Strangely, the painting became much more painterly as a result. I want, let’s say, intellectual painting, one free of beliefs or ideologies. Though reducing the palette to 4-6 colors is not my invention, but dates back to the Italian Renaissance.
Hybridity and exaggerated artificiality are results of digital developments; therein lie endless, fantastic possibilities. I love a degree of coolness, which enables a certain distancing from my pictorial intention – this is a whole supermarket of stuff from which you can create. I continue to combine elements, though no longer using technical flourishes: within the image instead there are leaps between illusionism and cartoons or comics and realism; gesture or mannerism; surrealism, film still or theatrical scenography; and text or photography, etc.. But not in such a way that they are ostensibly stylistic tools. Generally speaking, all possibilities are now open to me, and I can avail of all pictorial languages, swirl them around and backtrack too – everything is legitimate. And ultimately it makes no difference. My tool is a paintbrush but it could just as well be a computer, a camera or a 3-D printer.
AR: In this exhibition you are showing works from a new series around press conferences. Appearances, statements and press secretaries have become an absurd fixation (of the media in particular, the snake that eats its own tail). Still, I find Ungenaue Formen geben eine Pressekonferenz (Indistinct Forms Hold a Press Conference, 2017) one of the more reassuring images in this group; there’s an attempt at exchange going on. What is the draw of the press conference for you?
BM: The show is primarily about liquidation and the dematerialization of all areas. Whether that be through sweating, heating up, swimming away, dissolving, melting, foaming, spraying, escaping or getting drunk – all of which are states that I find exciting to visualize. Naturally they are all unbelievably difficult and at the same time unbelievably captivating to depict in paint. It only works through metaphor. Press conferences are one such metaphor: the figurines you can invent to represent the loss of the meaning of words, or the convolution of statement and meaning, as well as morality and double standards, fake and real, apologies and denials… A society that lives from the news, be that meaningfully or nonsensically, and / or directs their life accordingly – isn’t this fascinating, or is it the opposite? On the other hand, to paint a girl in a tutu right now would be total mindlessness, as Thomas Bernhard would rightly say. This could become an extensive series.
AR: Do you agree with Giorgio Agamben’s idea of the contemporary – as something that resists the drum beat of its own time? Is this a principle you pursue?
BM: No, I can’t share Agamben’s opinions on that. I want the drum beat, or the pulse, the direct feed. What Mr. Agamben suggests – doesn’t it sound a lot like Biedermeier, fear and comfy slippers? These are the times in which we live; you cannot escape from them though there are, if you wish, strategies enough with which to evade them. Ultimately it’s about form!
AR: Are these works as a psychological portrait of our times? Or are they a warning of what we might become?
BM: They may be both, or perhaps something entirely different. But it’s in the pictures; the chain of association starts with the viewer, and so it should be.
AR: What should we be reading right now?
BM: Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables. Still. Repeatedly.
Interview by Aoife Rosenmayer, Zurich, August 2017.
