Tekst: Sisse Malene Markvardine Petersen
www.arken.dk
www.klarawallner.de

Andreas Golder - photo credit - Arken

Tysk-russiske Andreas Golder (1979) har internationalt format, men er trods den pludselige og begyndende hype omkring sin kunst og sin person en beskeden ung herre, der heller underspiller end overdriver. Ligesom hans gigantiske farveloadede værker demonstrer en sjælden stor bevidsthed om og indsigt i kunstens historie og maleriets æstetiske og formale greb, imødegås den virtuose kunnen af et visuelt og sprogligt drilleri som man må holde sig for øje, snarere end at tage sig i agt overfor. For når Andreas Golder leger med kunsten, med sig selv og med visualiteten i det udvidede kulturelle felt, møder ironien også alvor. Dette fik Wonderland selv at mærke, da de mødte ham en råkold formiddag på et ARKEN, hvor der blev hamret og puslet ivrigt i kulisserne.Her faldt snakken på sammenstød og møder, mellem København og Berlin, mellem lokale gallerier og verdensspejdende museer - og mellem kunsten og livet i øvrigt. Men inden vi kunne begynde samtalen, fik vi lige til at starte på denne kommentar med:” I’m not very practiced in giving interviews. So I would like if you journalists have the answers already – Like with Andy Warhol - he once said to a journalist – ”You know what? Why don’t you just give me the answers and I say yes or no. I think it would be brilliant – then I don’t have to think about it”.Andreas Golder kan opleves på soloudstillingen ”It has my name on it”på Det ny ARKEN fra den 26. januar – 18. maj 2008

www.arken.dk
www.klarawallner.de

This is not the first time a Danish audience have had the chance to make an acquaintance with you or your work. In 2006 you were a part of the group-exhibition at Galleri Christina Wilson, with the suggestive title ”With peppermint you are my prince”, and last year you were represented at the exhibition Mad Love at Arken, of whose collection you are also now a part.But still, this is the first time we get the chance to see a wider selection of your Work, and the first time you are invited to do a Solo-exhibition at a Museum!

Yes. I have exhibited here in Denmark only two times. The first time with two other artists, where I was represented by 4 or 5 small pieces, and the last time with only one painting. So this is my first really exhibition.

Have you thought about the contrast or rather difference between exhibiting your work at a gallery and now in a Museum? And how does it all make you feel?

I have not really thought about it – and yet!Actually I prefer the museum show because it allows you to see more of the works, and combined with other time-periods. Many of the works have never been exhibited before – so I’m very delighted to see them now on display. It’s also good to see them in context – because a lot of paintings explain themselves when they are in a context with other paintings. In a Gallery-show you see maybe ten pieces and that’s it. What else can I say? It’s a bigger show and that’s pretty much it. Well it’s also a great honor to exhibit in a museum at my age and after such a short career! I’ve only been on the market for two years, and now I’m already in a museum. It’s really exciting for me. It has all happened so quickly - Maybe for some people too quickly? But that is not my decision – it’s a peoples decision. Maybe I can tell more about it after the opening. Right now I haven’t really realized the whole thing – I’ll see when the crowd is here. Right now walking through the exhibition, it’s just like a huge gallery. When all the people arrive then I’ll see their reactions and all their faces - then I know if I’ll feel good – and if they think it is good.

If we start to talk about your work, then there seems to be some kind of continuity in and between the separate paintings - motifs or separate elements as for example the light bulb or cartoon-like figures are to be found across the paintings. Do you work consciously in series or is each painting to be seen as a singular work?

I work in series. You have the coward-paintings, and then you have monster-series. There is also the series where I work with space versus outer consumption and abstraction. Right now I’m working on a black series, where everything is in black. But then off-course the series are also crossing: for example the pink monster-things and black ones - they do cross.

Do you work on a concrete theme? You are obviously dragging in perspectives on temporary culture, urban life, existence, identity, the flux of time and so on?

Well!There must be something like a theme. It just comes to me when I’m in the studio. But I don’t really think about it - it just pops up and I do it. Afterwards you try to figure out what it is. But actually I don’t really think it is my job to explain or figure out what it might mean. That’s a job for the critics and all the spectators of my work.

So what is Andreas Golder up to? What is going on in all these huge paintings?Yeah! Can somebody please tell me - I’m so very curios!

Though sometimes it can be very dangerous to think too much – but at the same time you should be reflective on what you do. When you start to think too much in the studio, suddenly something starts to seem stupid and you get caught in a space where you only think – and do nothing. It’s better if you stay in a sort of half-dream, are tired or hung-overed - then the best works come out.

So for you it is a bit about putting the head off and let come what will come?

Yes! It sounds a little like a cliché of a stupid painter - But how to explain this?All these decisions you see in the paintings, they have been done before, but not in a logic or rational way. Everything I’ve seen and everything I’ve experienced in my life, all come together there in the paintings, after a while.

What you are saying is that you can’t predict the motifs or your own method?

No! I Can’t. Actually is there a method at all? Do I have one at all?Yeah, there must be one. Maybe I can tell you in ten years from now, when I have figured them out.

Your paintings have an autobiographical reference or some kind of relation to your own life and person, which is more or less explicit.Why this need to be in the foreground, if it is a need at all?

There is really no difference in Art-making and Life for me - it all goes together. I guess every artist work like that. Even if you see the works by let’s say Anselm Reyle, whose work is not that personal, but somehow get the result by deciding and living with it. I believe he is also a kind of autobiographer.

So Art and Life is interrelated or closely connected?

Yes! If you work you don’t really see it. It’s a job. For myself, I’m even surprised that I’ve created all these paintings. It happens sometimes that I look at it afterwards and think – “Wauw!”

You obviously appropriate from contemporary culture, different visual expressions and not least Art History. This is not an unknown artistic strategy. Though there seems to be something different in the way you make your appropriations, when compared with for example artists from the 1980’ies and the 1990’ies.It’s not that kind of pastiche or the thematizing appropriation as an artistic strategy in it-self. Have you at any point thought about it in relation to how the view on Art was 15- 20 years ago, when concepts like the visual, representation and not least the question about identity was hung up on the postmodern dictum, saying that behind any representation there is just another representation and so ad infinitum? During the last 10-15 years it is again accepted to state that there is more than just representation mediating the relation between Art and Life – performatively and aesthetically?

How else?Every single artist, even if they may claim or say for themselves – that they don’t do any personal expressions - it’s always there. You can only get away from it if you start to try to be original or something, and you then start to calculate it and how an art-piece should look like. If you do that – I think you make a huge mistake. I don’t think I know any painter or big artist who do not express himself in a personal way - Everyone does. But off-course there is a difference in how important it is for the conception of the work. Look for example at Joseph Beuys who is a conceptual artist.

So conceptual art is the opposite of the personal! Or is it possible to look at the conceptual as personal as well?

Well! I think it’s actually always connected. If an artist wants to foreground himself or disappear it is the artist’s own decision. I don’t know intuitively where I am in relation to my work. What happens just happens.

If we look at your work, there is no doubt a lot going on here. Besides the sense of something humoristic, ironic or maybe grotesque there is also something deeper which seems to touch upon very serious and essential questions.Most of your paintings contain figures and different personas, but in some of your paintings they seems fading away or unable to grasp throughout with the paint. As for example the Catwalk-scene, where the central figure mostly is seen as just a movement.

As spectator, you see the painting. I just give it to you. For me there is only one topic and that is the painting.

Saying that the only topic for you is the painting does mean that you only care about the surface, and not what’s underneath? That sounds quite formalistic?

When I’m working, I’m working only in blank surfaces. Off-course there is something else in it. I don’t have like a defined concept - the painting itself is a concept. I can’t describe it and put it in to sentences. That’s why I do paintings. The whole experience of my life is in the paintings - but I will say it again. I don’t go in to the studio, and think- “Well I was drinking and there was this girl and she said No!”- and now I have to do something about.

You say that your work is both abstract and that each painting forms a concept of its own. Do you try then to make a statement in the way you make your paintings?

No I hate statements. I think people should make up their mind themselves.But what then about the provocative and ironic view, on contemporary life and modern Man?

I know that some of the paintings seems quite provocative and gives ideas on how life is. This is maybe why I do them.

Your references to and appropriation from other artists and art-history is not to be overlooked? But what does it more precisely mean to your works?

Actually, this is very important for me. Francis Bacon and all the others are very important – so is Salvador Dali. If you don’t see that reference it means that he was not that important. But I have decided not to do something because of somebody. Sometimes it’s more interesting to see what I’m not doing - but what I’m actually doing. You can also say that Bruce Naumann is in the whole thing.

You are quite familiar with the reception of Bacons work. A French philosopher once stated when looking at Bacons picture of the Pope screaming – what you see is actually not a picture of a Pope screaming, but the scream itself, which leaps through-out the whole surface of the painting. What do you think about that?

Actually I think that’s the whole point. But maybe it’s only true for some of us. There might be a lot of other people just seeing a painting of a Pope or a caricature of a Pope or a Pope-painting. For him it was Art-history, and it was just as important, as it is for me right now. Painting comes from painting and you can’t get rid of art-history. So one should just pick out the best things and make it look good.

For a long period the painting seemed to have lost its role as medium, not only among the new generations of visual artists but also in its theoretical counterpart. Now painting has a revival in the art-scene?

Back in the 1990’ies the paintings didn’t get much attention. But actually I think it was the medias fault, and the medias who created that view on the painting.There were still a lot of painters and still exhibitions with painting.So, I think the painting will always be there, no matter what. Now there is more attention on painting, especially in Germany.

But wasn’t there a long period of time, maybe ten years, where the professors and students in the Academies did ignore painting and focused more on video, installation and conceptual art?

When this boom with painting started you saw, almost only paintings at all the Art Fairs. And all the Video-artist who had started studying painting was thinking – “maybe I should start painting again. I was once a painter, so why not again”. But that’s a very wrong decision. Because when you come out it’s already too late. One should do what he needs to do. Not because of the market. That’s really stupid and the market will throw you out. People will smell it even from far, if you’re not doing honest work - if Art can be honest at all? Maybe it’s nothing but a lie, depending on how you see it?

You mean like the conception of the term reality and the real, which have been discussed a lot in art-theory since the middle of the 1990’ies?

Right now I come to think of one of Cronenberg’s film, where everybody has a plug-in at their backs and connect themselves to these computer-games and everything is just an illusion. I can’t help getting a little annoyed when the talk starts about this reality-thing. I think reality is just, what we call it.

Your paintings might as you yourself describe them – maybe with some irony - be seen as neat and well designed. The textures of the paintings, if watched at close are extreme and overloaded with paint and other materials for example cigarettes?

The materials I use depend on the painting. And yes, there are for example a lot of cigarettes in it. I should actually ask Gauloises, if they would sponsor me - It’s so expensive. Actually, when I start a painting I have some kind of Idea. For example is the work ”gekackt non est pictum” from a period when I used a lot of pictures from the Internet. I don’t do that often anymore. But here I just found this figure and thought it had an interesting position, so I projected it. It was more a sketch and then the whole painting just started. With some paintings I still use this transferring technique, for some part of the motif. It seems more reasonable, because I don’t have to prove that I can draw. We are not in the 19.th. Century anymore. Quite often I make sketches and ideas in a small book that I carry with me. Sometimes it’s just a title that I have, and then something happens.

What is the relation between the visual part of your painting and the verbal part of it? All your paintings have these more or less obvious titles, but what does the title exactly means to you or the paintings?

It seems to be very important in my work - I don’t know why actually. I always have a title. Sometimes it doesn’t even fit. Quite often I get titles from other people. There once was a girl who did send me a postcard every single day with a stupid little sentence on it. Some of them were quite good for a painting. But I don’t know why it is so important for me.

Some of the titles seem riddle-like and make the paintings look even stranger?

Maybe, what I try to do is to create a strange atmosphere. It is also interesting to see it, because it really creates a special atmosphere when you see all these paintings together. That’s also what I like about being in a Museum, where you can see them all together. And I think this verbal stuff helps. Sometimes it’s a little guideline and sometimes it leads to nothing.