Describing Olaf Breuning’s work is something of a fool’s errand. Inevitably one is reduced to paltry terms such as “eclectic” or “wide ranging,” and most attempts to get below the surface of it are met with the feints and parries of an aesthetic sensibility that is ever directing one back out at the world with all of its humor and absurdity. Refreshingly, one gets the sense that none of it is meant as a prop for “Olaf Breuning, the Artist.” The photographs, sculptures, drawings, videos and installations—these are simply what the artist does. For Breuning, it is not art as life, nor art into life, nor even life as art, but rather perhaps the more simple and direct equation: art = life.
Jonathan T. D. Neil: What motivated this new work? Was it LA?
Olaf Breuning: For the last few years, all my productions—films, photographs, and sculptures— have been very narrative. They tell stories about something, and they also orient themselves, like sculptures or objects from daily life, as information connected to the world. Here I just wanted to focus on four colors and nothing more. And that was a relief. I could understand Pollock sitting in his studio for years doing the same kind of work. Not that I would do that in the future, but I had this energy and this feeling. That’s the LA thing, and probably, the LA thing is now done.
JTDN: It seems that the four-color scheme came out very quickly, and you have a series of color studies—photographs—that you’ve made as well within the last year or two. Some of those photographs are very self-consciously art historical. As you said with the paintings, you’ve got the Pollock painting, or Marden painting, or something that looks like an Arp, but then you have that photograph of the four figures dressed in Hugo Ball’s Cabaret Voltaire outfit as well. Were you thinking more about the history of art? I feel like your work, at least for a while now, has been refreshingly free of having to deal with that burden.
OB: You are right. You actually mention the only photograph that really does that. I knew the Hugo Ball, and I know Dada quite well. I had this person, and we made this costume, and I said, yeah, that actually looks the Ball costume, so I forced it to be like that. The whole color series I did half a year ago is mostly referential to my own work. I said I’m not done with these four colors, so I gave it a try, and then I ended up doing these new works that you saw at the show in LA. Okay, you say, you want to be abstract, you have four colors, and you want to focus on these four colors; you think you can make stripes, you can make circles, you can make drops. It’s a very easy thing. And all of a sudden, you end up in a referential area. But, I didn’t plan that, I just ended up there, and sure, with my small knowledge of art history, I realized that could be Pollock, that could be Jasper Johns, it could be a lot of things; but my art is always the beginning of an interpretation. I like it when the art does something and people come to me and say, “It looks like…”
JTDN: It’s interesting to see that suddenly appear as a kind of image amongst all these other images, given the freedom with which you normally approach any given image; so I didn’t imagine that there was any kind of, “now I’m going to deal with art history” or “now I’m going to deal with these previous artists of some significance,” as if Hugo Ball was going to be the one, as if there was some sort of connection to the introduction of Swiss Dada in 1916. Somehow, that doesn’t seem like something that you would be specifically interested in, insofar as it’s just another set of images that are available.
OB: You’re right, it’s just another body of work. When I look at my work from the last ten years, hardcore art freaks would maybe be offended [by this kind of art]. Maybe they would say, “How can he touch such a holy subject?” I just go from the point of view that you have this one life, and you try to figure out certain things in life, and my work is a process meant to figure things out. What I’ve figured out may not be very interesting for other people, but I really had fun just limiting myself to the guidelines of these four colors, not more. But, in my case, it was not an art historical reference: I chose the four colors because you go to a store and buy a hat and you see it in blue, green, yellow, and red—it’s like a kid’s toy; it’s always in these four colors so it’s like this universal color scheme.
JTDN: In the LA show, why did you decide to put the work in a black gallery?
OB: Eighty percent of what I do is guided by my guts. I knew one thing about these four colors: they react differently on white than on black. I made a series on black, and then I made a series on white. How did I decide to do that? It’s more something that comes out of a feeling. As an experience, I used it as a tool to make it more dramatic. It’s more of an aesthetic question.
JTDN: Do you think there’s irony in your work?
OB: Humor.
JTDN: But humor’s different from irony, right? There may be humor, but in particular, let’s say, with regard to the videos that you’re pretty well-known for, the two Home videos, there’s a kind of irony involved that gives it humor, but there’s also a kind of sincerity, a kind of genuine enjoyment in what’s going on that peaks through once in a while. I wouldn’t say that the films are necessarily sincere. They can be maddening to watch, and you can get irritated by what’s going on in them, but at the same time you think: but that did happen, those experiences were being had, and the reality of the situation breaks through. It’s neither completely a joke on the viewer nor a joke on the people in the situation.
OB: That’s a fine line in my art because, sure, it has a kind of a humor, it is not too serious, but I never want to be an artist who makes “fun art.” In Europe, there was a big scene, especially in the 90s, making this fun art. I hated it. I don’t like it. I think a certain seriousness has to be there. But the only serious part of myself is my personality. I think I’m of a postmodern generation. If you watch music and fashion, people just use signs that have been made before. All the young kids now make punk rock music. I grew up with the Sex Pistols. You cannot blame them, you cannot say, “You stupid idiots, why do you do that? That’s already been done.” They are kids. They just have a guitar and a bass and sing, and that’s rock. Maybe that’s just art history. For a long time, I have held that I would never reference art. But a few pieces will do it.
JTDN: You can always look back at what you’re doing at any given point in time and ask of yourself, “Why did this become interesting at that point?” Why was it, for example, that in the middle of 2009 there was a decision to focus on this very reduced palette of colors and this very formal set of strategies? Art historians and certain critics who are minded this way will immediately start asking, “How does this then relate to the history of abstraction?” “How does this relate to the history of the monochrome?” “How does this relate to Rodchenko in 1921?” “How does this relate to Ellsworth Kelly?” I understand what you’re saying, that there’s a sense that your work doesn’t have to do with any of that, that the work, simply by the sheer fact of deciding that you’re going to restrict yourself to a certain set of strategies or a certain kind of palette, has no choice but to resonate with these other things.
OB: Maybe I’m the first artist working in this free way. Donald Judd did his work because he had to step away from modern art, to make a break, to be avant-garde, to be extreme. It was more extreme to be an artist and do these things because you were breaking the rules; maybe it was more often about breaking the rules, but that’s not it anymore, because you don’t know where the rules are. I’m a naïve artist, a child of postmodern times, a little bit stupid, just using four colors and having fun without pressure. The pressure comes now because you are asking me!
JTDN: The other way of looking at that same question is not to say that it resonates then with Pollock, Marden, Johns, Rodchenko or something like this, but that the approach or the sensibility of the naïve artist who has the freedom to appropriate and choose however he wants is like Warhol; at the same time you had artists like Judd, trying to work against the rules of painting, then you had this other figure who took the attitude of a naïve artist and would silkscreen, pick up a movie camera, and do all of this without seeming to worry about the material. I would not make the statement that what you are doing is Warholian, but the approach is similar.
OB: But do you think Warhol was aware of art history?
JTDN: At the time, he desperately wanted to be like Johns and Rauschenberg, but at a certain point, he took on the guise of a naïve character for whom [imaging strategies] were universally available to make something anew, whether that was going to be a magazine or an environment like the factory—whether this was done strategically or self-consciously we’ll never know for sure. But Warhol offers the model and the promise for a lot of artists right now, the idea that one can adopt that sensibility; artists are licensed by the example of Warhol to approach art-making with a freedom of access and appropriation and to unburden or liberate themselves from art history in particular.
OB: There is one difference: artists of my generation do not have to step back from something anymore. Warhol was probably very aware, even Duchamp was very aware, of this need to expand the horizon of art in a way. When I make art, I want to compare it to how my interns, who are kids, handle the archive of knowledge. That archive of knowledge grew in the last few years so incredibly; that is a new development. We don’t need a library, all we need is a phone, and with Google, we can know everything.
JTDN: Your work has a freedom to it, an accessibility in its approach to the image world where everything is equally available. Other artists who work in this way are some of your Swiss compatriots, Urs Fischer and Ugo Rondinone.
OB: We have a lot in common, but it’s about a general language. I like a universal language, I like simple things; it’s something like a Brechtian point of view: narrow everything very simply and behave like human beings. I like Urs Fischer very much, and Ugo Rondinone is the best copy machine ever. Rondinone has a very strong art historical point of view. One thing I’m really proud of about my art is that it’s always a reference to life. Maybe people say “pop culture,” but I never narrowed it down to that. My new Metro Pictures show will be very traditional as a show. It’s very art-like. I would say it’s a language we have in common, Urs Fischer, Ugo Rondinone and me, but what we speak about and how we speak about it is very different.
JTDN: I don’t mean to imply that the work is similar, but it seems that there is an approach to the material of the world, that has a kind of freewheeling, liberated approach; it seems like with the three of you, the work is no less rigorous for it, but there is an eclecticism, a kind of diversity, a freedom to jump from one set of activities or mediums to another without fear. One of the things that is interesting is that both you and Urs began primarily as photographers.
OB: We went to the same school, but we were not in the same class.
JTDN: I think it’s interesting that you came to photography as part of a generation younger than the photographers who were educated under Bernd and Hilla Becher, who approached photography in a methodical, artistic, large-format tableau style, one that was self-consciously pictorial. By contrast, the kind of photography that you became interested in was a kind that again simply looked at the world as universally available out of which to make images. I guess I’m sneaking up on this, but I’m curious to think about that method of working being one that developed from beginning with photography at a moment when it didn’t have to become those big tableau-style pictures, photography didn’t have to worry about itself as photography. Photography was simply there in its early digital age, one that was liberated from its own history. Does that make sense?
OB: Yes, it makes theoretical sense. When I was in school, photography became contemporary art. It became a new serious artform in the 1990s. When I got out of school—maybe that’s what you’re talking about—we were liberated.
JTDN: What I mean is photography as an approach to the world as a potential material, photography as being always oriented outwards toward the world, either as the object that it has available or the various mechanisms of light and chemistry of which it is made. However photography wants to characterize itself, it always has this orientation outward, hunting for something to capture; so, even if we’re talking just metaphorically, it’s no longer photography as a theoretical model but rather as the approach to art-making in general.
OB: I think you’re completely right. When I was in art school, in my photo class, we would go out and see the world, and the art class next to it would stay in and study art history books. That’s a good example. It’s always about the world. Even when I make sculptures or films, it’s never about the seriousness of the material. For the sculptures at Metro Pictures, they have to look like one guy in his apartment just thinking about this life and maybe screwing something together just that moment, in the way that a photograph is a document of an action I did.
JTDN: There is a sense that the activity of making, whether drawings or sculptures, is the kind of activity that one would do to stage a photograph, to stage an image. But now, making the image is no longer important. What was important was the process of making these worlds, and then the photograph could happen or it didn’t have to; the photograph didn’t become the determining factor.
OB: You’re right. In the photograph, it’s a window out there; its reference is to the world, and that is very obvious. And that is my background. If I had gone to art class instead of photo class, I would be a different artist than I am now. It’s also just, “What do we do as an artist?” As an artist, I get up in the morning, and I have the freedom to just think about this world and be open to whatever I want. So I could limit myself to [work with] just these four colors for my whole life and that’s it; but I can also say that life might be more complex.
JTDN: Some artists find that very daunting.
OB: And then they would turn around and go back to bed, but that’s not my personality. As an artist, if I did not have to make money with art and be in that system, I would be even more free, I wouldn’t give a shit, I would just do what I want the whole day long. But as an artist, you have to narrow it down, because you move in one circle called contemporary art, so you have to fit in there somehow, you have to have a language.
JTDN: On the other side of that equation is the viewer. There is this freedom to wake up each morning and address yourself to whatever it is that is of interest and make your work according to those interests and to move however quickly between those interests as you see fit. What is it that the viewer or the audience takes away from that activity? Or do you care?
OB: I would be a very bad person if I said I didn’t care.
JTDN: To a certain extent, you are perfectly within your rights to do this work and not be concerned with its legibility or how it registers on the part of the public that is going to experience it. That is certainly an attitude or sensibility that a number of artists have shared over the years because to be concerned with one’s audience in a certain sense is to be involved in a different kind of artistic project. People who have a very narrow focus or work within a restricted set of parameters understands that they will have a restricted audience. So, there is a dialogue that is happening between those artists and a small segment of the public that includes critics and curators and others who are interested in developing these ideas. With someone who moves quickly across a wide range of ideas and media and interests, it seems like there is a different kind of dialogue, if one at all, that is broached. What do you think that dialogue looks like? What would you expect or hope for someone to take away from that engagement with your work?
OB: I think it’s a temporary engagement. My work, Home 2, was about an idealized Western person approaching other countries, about the different perspectives collapsing. For the Metro Pictures show, I will take a step back to deal with the big questions in life; so, in short, at the moment when I care about these things, I would like to share them with other people. I was never so arrogant that I would really believe that my art would be any kind of an education, that I would show people a way of looking that they couldn’t figure out for themselves. I talk about something in this life and this world, and I would be happy to have other people join me. I try to understand the world and the complexity of being completely blind to it.
JTDN: The Internet is something that critics and commentators on your work endlessly go to, as if it’s part of Internet culture or as if yours is work that is reflective of YouTube, Flickr, Google, or what have you. On the one hand, I understand, but in a way, I don’t know what that means. When someone says that it’s reflective of the Internet, that’s like saying that someone’s work manifests television or radio. Does it make sense to you? Do you agree or find that those comparisons of your work to a kind of Internet-based language make sense or ring true?
OB: Obviously, I guess, because I’m a person who spends a lot of time on the Internet, I think that probably seems true. Even though I grew up without a computer, now I’m on the computer like a sixteen-year-old kid. I’m not Twittering—that’s the only thing I’m not doing, but I’m very active with these media, so I guess it’s reflected in my work and also in the way people speak about my art, and you know this as a critic yourself: You don’t write an essay now quoting media theory from the 80s or 90s. You also want to keep up. My work often offers lots of points to speak about in relationship to our time. Whatever it is, it’s for our time.
JTDN: Do you think that is because people understand the work? Or do you think it is because they don’t yet understand it and digital media or digital culture seems like an easy way to get into it?
OB: That’s never the full understanding of my work. For me, a work is good when it has a big battery of different possibilities to speak about. I want to produce something with the endless dream of interpretation.
JTDN: Do you judge it all as equally valid? Or do you think that there are commentators and people who have a better idea of what your work is about than others?
OB: Equally valid, I would say. But that’s the beauty of our time, a media-rich time, in which there are so many possible ways to speak about something.
JTDN: But surely not everything is universally available, so you must have an approach to the world where there are things that you find important and unimportant. Some things have to be uninteresting, or you would be in a naïve conundrum; you would be like a schizophrenic just constantly amazed and perplexed at the world, as if you were unable to shut your eyes.
OB: I wish it would be like that.
JTDN: That’s the old Modernist dream, the idea of getting away from all the conventions of society and being able to see the world as if you had never learned how to look at things or never learned the names of things. There’s a great line by Stan Brakhage about how many colors there are in a field of grass to the child who has never learned the word “green.”
OB: As a kid, you have naïveté, and then you lose it with time, then horrible things happen like the repetition of things. Maybe through my art, I’m able to keep these naïve dreams. I would say to you “we are so irrelevant in the universe,” and you would say “oh what a naïve ass,” but it’s true; It’s a cliché, but it’s true. Art gives me the freedom to really experience these things because, as a person, I’m someone who goes to a restaurant and if something is not really good, I will complain; I’m a person who knows good and right; on the issues, I say “I like that” or “I hate that.” I have my opinions about things. But I try to open up in my art to experience things differently.
JTDN: Your art forms an opposition to restriction, to a conservative focus, and it attempts to be affirmative towards the manifest diversity of possibilities that are available to you as an artist. Given your chosen profession, given the skill set that you developed over the past twenty years from art school until now, is the challenge for you to maintain that openness to the world?
OB: I’m a little bit jealous of people like Matthew Barney—even though I got bored of his productions over the years—because they seemed to be so incredible, colorful, and intense; it’s impressive what this guy was able to spit out as an artist. There is no other artist who can, after ten years, put out work like that with so many different images and so much material; it’s really impressive. But his body of work is more or less the same narrow stream. I think his biggest enemy is actually Cindy Sherman—you know, she doesn’t change. With her last show, everyone mentioned Cindy Sherman making sculpture. She will not do it, and she could not do it, because people will just not appreciate it. They will say, “Why sculpture? We like the photographs.” But compared with Cindy Sherman, Matthew Barney probably put just a bit too much sugar over the whole thing. It’s just a big cookie. After you eat a lot, you get the taste, but then you think, “Eeww.” Cindy Sherman stayed conceptual with the photographs—very simple, a body of work, twenty photographs…wild. I think that’s a big difference, and maybe what I want to say is that I’m a little bit jealous—my first four years of making art, when I focused on horror movies and these kinds of things, I felt more in a field; I was narrowed down. And that’s something my art has not been for a few years.
JTDN: Do you ever get worried that some work that you will do will become iconic or so very successful or well-disseminated that it will become something that will…
OB: Do you speak in money terms?
JTDN: It could come with money as well, but in a way, what you’re describing is that there’s a danger, let’s say, that you, as Olaf Breuning, become associated with one body of work which achieves this kind of success. I think that there were certain works such as Home 2, which was in the Whitney Biennial—a lot of people recognize that and thought it was very good and were very interested in it, but I don’t think that anybody expects to see that kind of work again. It’s important work, but it’s not iconic for you. In contrast, I see mentioned more and more the smoke-bomb photograph, and so that becomes a shorthand for “this is Olaf Breuning’s work.” Artists can have this “success,” where a certain kind of work becomes so well-known very quickly that it becomes the kind of work with which someone is associated, and then they have a hard time getting away from it.
OB: I’m very happy that in the last ten years, I’ve reached the base camp of Mt. Everest. I’ve been sitting for ten years in base camp, and I will sit the next ten, twenty, thirty years in the base camp, and I’m not really interested in going to the top, because then you make something you can’t get away from.
JTDN: Because the restriction that you’ve set for yourself is exactly one of not becoming restricted; it’s almost a way of forcing yourself or being compelled to constantly find a way of not getting hemmed in or not finding a body of work which is the one body of work which becomes iconic and becomes associated with your personality as an artist; so it’s the kind of oppression that comes with total freedom, this kind of contradiction. It’s an interesting problem to have, and it’s one where you have to constantly look back to your own work and look at what you’ve done and try to figure out a way of outrunning it, and part of that is about being open to the world and constantly affirming what it is that you experience as an artist today, but it’s also about being constantly aware of your practice as an artist and what has come before and what terrain you have gone over. Is that a fair assessment?
OB: Yes, but it’s more like—the fact is that that’s a painful thing to do because to extend yourself is always more difficult than to stay with certain images. The show in LA surprised me because when I walked in, I felt like I had entered something new. I may not focus only on art that speaks about certain things but an art that focuses on how to extend myself—I have a continuity, I made Home, I made Home 2, there may be a Home 3, 4, 5, 6, or 70—who knows? I think there are certain things in the drawings in the past six years too.
JTDN: In the photographs too, there’s a formal consistency with these group portraits.
OB: Good example, the group photos, that’s exactly it: I really would say that’s something I figured out in my art. But after doing forty photographs like that, I could not do it anymore.
JTDN: So that’s over.
OB: I will probably do it again, if I still like it; but to jump out of that and try to do something else, for me, that’s more interesting and that’s also what drives me to always make different things. Maybe these days I have even more chances to jump from one thing to another. But we’re speaking about a theoretical thing, and I’m not really a theoretical person. A lot of things come out of my gut. At a certain point, I just can’t do one more of a kind of thing because I’m tired of it. Art, for me, is like writing in my diary before I go to sleep. I’m just interested in creating art. I’m actually not so interested in showing it. I do it, but I’m not someone who would look much at the art I did a few years ago. I’m someone who just likes that touching of something new, and then on to the next thing; perhaps you could say I’m a single person in art, and I’m like someone who likes brief contact with others.
JTDN: But as you said, there’s a constant return to it, like those group photographs or the lineups. You do it and you do it, and then you get away from it but find yourself drawn back to it with different characters, but somehow there is this thing that you’re revolving around.
OB: I’ve started to make some big drawings on the wall, but I would never have begun to make just big drawings alone. They’re like Kippenberger; he made art in another time, but the materials he used were very art-like. The hotel drawings are something that persisted for a long time.
JTDN: The hotel drawings are very interesting; for someone who jumped around from medium to medium, the hotel drawings become this datum that runs through all of it and serve as a demonstration that he could draw! He could draw in fifteen different ways, and the ability needed to make those things is undeniable. For me, it becomes this thing that ties everything else together, or it becomes a retort to people who would claim that he was a charlatan who was doing whatever he thought would get the most impact or would draw his audience in. Kippenberger is one of those artists for whom there are two camps: those who like him and support him and those who think that he is a charlatan and a fraud. You’re either in one camp or the other, or you’re undecided; but inevitably you are on one side or another.
OB: I like his work.
JTDN: So you’re in that camp.
