Interview by Ashok Adicéam
* André Butzer is in conversation with Ashok Adicéam*. The interview took place at the studio of André Butzer in the village of Rangsdorf, near Berlin, Fall 2010.
1. André, your art work that one can find in each continent (because you have chosen to have several galleries all around the world), seems nevertheless to be pulled between just two poles, geographic and historic. Past and Future. Germany and the world (via the US). In your paintings, are you in a way sharing the spectacle of your childhood, which would be the source of a tightness between two poles?
When I was young, I thought that this planet would only consist of Germany and the USA. So I felt very homesick at home. When I started painting a bit later, after I had finished school in Stuttgart... I wanted to address those two stupid countries with my art first, and then combine German history and American history; the history of expressive art, which is the history of all visual art at least since Giotto in 1300. Then the history of abstraction, mass production and serialization, and therefore the history of mass murder. The history of painting is very inclusive. By history I mean in terms of past and future only. Not in terms of the present. Everything that is now is not interesting to me. I cannot see what is now. This must be something that is very agitated... like a milkshake.
2. You said "when I paint, I make things clean", finding even that significance in your own name with the word "Putzen" which means to clean… what are you cleaning? And how has that evolved in your recent works?
It took me a long time to realize who I might be, and fortunately, I still don’t know who I am, and I will never know. At least, painting helped me find out what I am supposed to do instead of literally helping people by saving lives or bringing peace on earth... which would still be the best thing one can do... but I can’t. Painting the history of color made me see how peace might also be the concept of artistic balance. A balance inside a holy stuff that is highly motivated to express itself as something that is very delicate and almost too sensitive to deal with. Making something clean relates to this holy substance, and the spaces. When artists like myself bring to life this substance by the help of brushes or their fingers, we are bringing peace into this very tragic and difficult relationship. In the beginning I tried to pollute my canvases with topics that didn’t belong there, and this pollution legitimized my will to try to clean them off, for the rest of my life, in front of the eyes of the audience. And here again... they will never be clean those canvases... that´s for sure.
My name also means something like "devil mask with larvae", or it´s about handcrafting windows centuries ago – think of colourful windows in a church. "André" is a French name and there is another hidden future meaning through this, but in German it´s just "the other one", which is true, because I am really the other one, since my younger brother André died before I was born.
People call my recent works abstract now. They think, they are clean now, or at least they are way cleaner now, as compared to say, portraits of Adolf Eichmann, or Heinrich Himmler, that I made years ago. But I call all my works since I have started to paint "abstract". Also, I especially call abstract my, more or less, really obvious "figurative" ones. What else should they be than abstract? So, part of my fun is to paint for people who think today: Now this is finally something abstract! But I can feel, and I know how deeply polluted everything is that I do. I made grey monochrome paintings and I wrote something on top like "Walt Disney". Some thought it’s just the signature, but it was a last Good-Bye.
3. "Art is all about the image" you say; although your works could sometime appear violent and scary you do not seem to take a nihilist position. Your act of painting seems rather affirmative. Is there hope in your paintings?
It´s all about tender hope: the image is hope and is always, and only, affirmative. I have no idea what people want in art with their critical opinions and concepts concerning their self-chosen reality they live in. It´s about magic, about heaven and stars, or it´s not.
4. Your recent works seem to mark the passage from a third to a first person narrative, and the apocalyptic environment almost disappears to leave the canvas with a "superflat" dimension (which reinforces the abstract turn of your recent work). Is it the triumph of style over substance?
No! I have avoided using or inventing styles in general. Although this seems contradictory, because some thought Science-Fiction Expressionism, Science-Fiction Impressionism or Neo-Cézannism is my style, because I gave them those terms in their heads. But these things are just meant to be historic models of abstraction, like thinking-machines, and abstraction is all I do. So I am happy to get rid of apocalyptic environments, I am happy to get rid of anything I do not need in order to get abstracted.
My favorite painter Titian did it the other way around, I think. He got more and more apocalyptic, so I have to go the other direction again.
5. You are very often compared to major masters of painting, some you like, others you dislike. To mention a few: Kippenberger, Ensor, Pollock with his action painting, Basquiat, Buffet… how do you react to that? Is it because your techniques and dialectics between Abstraction and Perception, Parody and Emotion, Grotesque and philosophic Absurdity, discomfort the critics and the audience that they need to find you a comparison or a "school of thought and painting"?
I like being compared to all these people. I particularly like being compared to the ones I do not like at all. If people in the so-called "art world" today would believe what I do looks somehow unique and well designed, I would be the next one to be forgotten like the other "contemporary" artists who will be forgotten anyhow, and everywhere, very soon. Being contemporary, and being recognized, as the contemporary producer of a somewhat special art product... it is too easy to accomplish. Being historic in the way I have tried to explain is a very hard job, but is the only way to make something really new in art, if you know what I mean.
6. Few years ago, while inventing N, the utopia place which combines Anaheim (the original home of Disneyland) and NASA, you said you wanted to create a new place towards which the paintings should travel. Do you think you have reached that place?
No. We will never reach it. That is part of the idea. But N is more than just a place you can´t go to... it is about a number. It is a heavenly number that artists need to get as close as possible to in order to compose. N is not a method... it is an assumption... an eternal outlook towards something very complex and something substantially sad and painful. You do not want to go there or be there... maybe you want to see yourself seeing and looking at it combined in one moment, but there is a technical problem that prevents you from existing within this moment. In the end, I do not know what it is: I only know that it is, but it is a projection.
7. What is your next move, both physically and conceptually (that one can’t see in this exhibition)?
Well, if you are talking about what will actually be happening on the canvas, I must say that I will try getting better, or getting closer, although I have said that as an artist you will never get better... actually all artists including me are in danger of getting worse. I will try to follow what has been prepared for my works, and for my family, and that is just a life-long thing. Besides, I have no idea what to do.
*Ashok Adicéam is an independant curator (Hope! in Dinard June 2010, Farideh Lashai at Isabelle Van den Eynde in Dubai, Big Brother - artists & tyrants in Dinard, June 2011). He is currently the artistic director of the Institut Culturel Bernard Magrez in Bordeaux, France.
