FRANZISKA BECHER in conversation with DIETMAR KIRVES on NO!art
NO!art Headquarters Berlin | Nov 19, 2010 | 6:50 pm
Desk detail at Dietmar Kirves' studio: Cat with NO, 2008 | Photo: Franziska Becher
[Translation: Boris Lurie 2001: My sympathy is with the mouse, but I feed the cat.]
It was difficult for me to get back into art in 1978. I was fed up with the conventional art scene ‚the muzzle’. I didn't want to have anything more to do with it. During my studies in Kassel in 1963 I participated in documenta III as a press, public and artist advisor. Then, in 1968, I gained experience in the Duesseldorf art scene. At that time a ‚important’ art center in Germany. The whole machinations disgusted me. How it all works. How it is manipulated. Who dies when. When the prices rise. Which collector to court and so on. What art is and who stays outside the door. And that's I left Duesseldorf 1974 for Berlin, the city of the Berlin Wall, to distance myself from the art scene. No one here was interested in art and its manipulation. Berlin was more about social political issues like East-West conflict, autonomous movements, squats, the punk movement, demonstrations and so on. There was no saturated society here. —Dietmar Kirves
FRANZISKA BECHER: What role did you play in NO!art?
DIETMAR KIRVES: Yes, when you talk about roles, you are actually thinking of theater. But NO!art is not theater. NO!art is reality. I have brought NO!art back to the public because for a long time NO!art was not noticed beyond New York. I got ►Boris Lurie's works through ►Armin Hundertmark in Berlin in 1978. I already had contact with Armin back in 1969. At that time, he published smaller editions with Joseph Beuys in addition to his work as a cemetery gardener. I knew ►Joseph Beuys personally. In 1974, Boris had sent Armin a bundle of NO!art documents in a jute bag for publication on the initiative of ►Wolf Vostell.
I found this sack in Hundertmark's closet in the Berlin allotment garden colony Kleeblatt in 1978. It is remarkable here that a later Lurie reviewer was also called Kleeblatt. He mentioned NO!art and Boris Lurie in 2002 in the exhibition ►Mirroring Evil in New York. At that time, Hundertmark was more involved in ►Fluxus as an editor and not in NO!art. That did not necessarily fit into his program. But Boris wrote him at least three letters every week with requests: „When are you doing something? When do you do what? When will this finally get going? When will the anthology come to light?“ Hundertmark then asked me in early 1978: „Can't you do that?“ I had used Hundertmark to design a cultural magazine that appeared under the title ►AUSGABE. The first issue came to light in 1976. That's how he knew that I knew about layout and print design. And that's also why he asked me to take on NO!art.
So, I took a look at this, and I found the input relevant for me. Their maxims corresponded to my refusenik existence, which the NO!art individuals propagated there. They fought the inhuman, selfish, better-knowledge-being-mainstreamers. They fought against the manipulation of the art market and were against the hypocritical aestheticization of everyday commodities to increase consumption. They fought against the pop art mainstream. Hopefully the Pop artists died happy with their Rich Money. Long live Lukas Cranach, Leonardo DaVinci, Van Gogh and Tatlin.
And so I found my way back into the art world. Started again to occupy myself with the "miserable art manipulation" and to work against it.
My activities developed from there. In 1988 with the first ►NO!art anthology compiled and designed by me and Boris Lurie. Then the big ►NO!show 1995 in Berlin, the ►Boris Lurie show 1998 in Buchenwald. 2003 the book ►NO!art in Buchenwald with texts and pictures of Boris Lurie, supplemented with works of his friends, as well as the ►NO!-ON show 2003 in Berlin with further involved artists. And in the year 2000 - at the turn of the millennium - I started the NO!art website on the Internet with the publication of a part of the previous activities. I have been maintaining this NO!art website for ten years now - and still do. I have thereby brought the acceptance of NO!art to more than 100 thousand page views per month. See ►www.no-art.info
And what interested you most about NO!art?
As already mentioned, NO!art fought against commerce and against the manipulation of art. I quote Lurie: "NO!art is the strategic crossroads where artistic production and socio-cultural action meet. The goal of NO!art is the completely unhindered self-expression through art, which flows into a social commitment." On the one hand, you have to let yourself be manipulated, but if you think about it, you also need a livelihood. From what should one live? You also need food and an apartment and so on. And Lurie financed his livelihood by speculating on shares. He traded in 50 cent shares, which later increased in value more and more. So he was not totally dependent on making a living with art. He was interested in making art. But if you make art, you have to bring it to the public somehow. And the problem of bringing it to the public was difficult for him. And that's why it was a happy connection through Hundertmark and me to bring NO!art into wider circles.
What kind of relationship did you have with the March Group?
The March group was a forerunner of the NO!art movement and had its sphere of activity in the Lower East Side, that was in the basement gallery on 10th Street in New York Downtown (Bowery Scene). From the March Group I got to know Lurie, ►Rocco Armento, ►Allan Kaprow, ►Jean-Jacques Lebel, ►Gertrude Stein and ►Suzanne Long. Later on I also got to know ►Aldo Tambellini.
According to which criteria did the artists find their way into NO!art?
Any artist who did not want to exhibit in the white cube galleries and who had a critical attitude towards society and art could participate. Lurie with ►Sam Goodman and ►Stanley Fisher selected the artists according to the space available in the March Gallery. At times there were more than twenty artists. They had no exhibition opportunities elsewhere, so the March Gallery became an exhibition opportunity. There were many galleries at the time near 10th Street. The artists just wanted to express their opinions and found that the March Gallery was a way to show something in spaces that were low rent. It wasn't even about commerce. At the time, in 1960, they got together there and presented their ideas, but later they split up again. Because, for the most part, artists also insist on individualization and everyone thinks of his or her own advantage, so that there has never really been any real movement. There was only the basic tendency. Namely the ►NO!art involvement.
The ►cellar gallery - as can also be seen on the Internet - was then full of pictures, sculptures and assemblages at the time. An installation and an environment of shared thinking. At that time, many art speculators were running around downtown because New York was the center of the art world. And the speculators were just interested in finding new artists with whom they could continue to speculate. And that was basically too much garbage for them in the gallery, so they said: „That's not art! “ So in English or American „That’s NO!art! “ That's how the term NO!art became established with Lurie and the others.
And there was even an art collector who wanted to buy everything they were doing at once. And they didn't want that at all. They threw him out of the gallery. He wanted to buy everything in one fell swoop, so that he could get something cheap in the background for his speculation, if it became known later and ‚valuable’. And they rejected that, too. And thereupon even Goodman - who has already died - said to the collector: “I shit on you, and I piss on you because you can't pay for something like that with money".
And then the artists there did the ►Vulgar show, and the ►Doom show, that is, the downfall show and the ►Involvement show. Involvement is difficult to translate, but in the meantime, here in this area, we also understand what involvement is. And there were just a lot of people there and for a certain time it was a place where you could express yourself unhindered. And where many art critics came and wrote about it. Which can also be seen on the NO!art website. Only, this has not gone down in art history. Why should it? Manipulation, social commitment and artistic freedom do not get along.
Can one then even speak of an end to NO!art 1964?
No, absolutely not. I would like to quote Lurie again: „NO!art cannot be limited to a certain period of time, which, however, is what art historians advocate and consider it to have ended in 1964. Begun even before 1958, the movement continued to develop. Such cutting-off dates are common among art historians, to manifest them in catalogs and to increase the value of the works for commercialization. These limitations are primarily destructive to the production of the artists, who are to be convinced that their production is of secondary importance after a cutting-off date and no longer belongs in the ‚Present Time’ “. [See conversation with ►Max Liljefors.]
There are different artistic activities. ►Trojans, for example, are a good instrument, because, NO!art can also be seen as a Trojan, as a Trojan in the art movement, which unsettles the whole thing. But it's a lot of work to unsettle the scene, if you're not capitalistically heavily saddled to control it. That's why it's a good way to do that on the Internet these days. It's not expensive. But you can at least make something known, which you can see in the fact that I have many visitors on my NO!art website, which I have been running since 2000. Since 2000 because before that the internet was not yet perfect and there were still many obstacles with the computer machines to publish this. And if I remember the time before 2000, I remember that you had to pay 20 Pfennig per minute for receiving from the Internet and all that. And nowadays you can do all that with flatrate. And in the meantime the flatrate has come down so far that there is already flatrate fucking.
Where can we still see NO!art today?
Only on the Internet. Or maybe next time in the forest. Or at a garbage dump. The conventional exhibition possibilities are all too commercialized and characterized by daily nonsense. Yes, only on the Internet. This is a wonderful platform to get in contact with people involved in other countries and continents. The traffic rules on the Internet are currently still completely free for everyone. There is anarchy, but still the completely free self-expression is possible. Only it must be findable. And if you do it intelligently, there is no censorship in the systems. I have many people who write to me or as it is called today „mailen“, who are involved. Who want to participate. And which I also publish on the NO!art website bit by bit.
Unfortunately, all this is connected with a lot of work. For example, for every new artist that I integrate into NO!art - I'm only a „one-man-business“ -, you could say: It costs me at least a week of work, several hours a day, to weave all this into the NO!art folders, to organize everything and to get feedback. Then there are the daily mail replies. And I also have artistic ideas. And the day doesn't have that many hours, if you think of how many hours you spend sleeping, washing, eating, shopping, waiting at the checkout in the supermarket. Still things are progressing.
To what extent could NO!art establish itself?
NO!art has never established itself. Because, first of all, there is nothing to sell and what there is to sell, the ►few video films or the few ►offset prints or something, nobody is interested in that. And who wants to hang a hearse with a striptease girl on the wall or genitals with NO on it. You also have to consider that the world has become so run-down that people don't really want anything critical anymore. They only want to see the beautiful and stand out from the rest. They want to be something better and reject the ugly critical.
Do you think that this is a kind of anaesthesia, a kind of delusion takes place?
Yeah, I'd say so. Only, there must be a continuation somehow. And that's the problem then to find people to continue it, like the NO!art movement and many artists who are and were part of it. For example ►Brown, who painted over ►posters, very early in the 60s. He says he is not a NO!art artist. There are actually no NO!art artists and there is no NO!art movement. What many people say, this is a generic term, where some people, once contributed something to it and contributed an idea to what NO!art could be or what NO!art maybe is. It is a non-commercial NO!art involvement. The veneer must be broken.
So NO!art does not have to establish itself at all?
No. Establishment is commerce. In addition there is the whole problem with the name „Art“. I am actually against all these „ART“ names, concept art, land art, copy art, happening art, street art and all such directions. These are just drawers for the art historians. For me, the expression NO would have been enough. If one had simply said, that is NO. But how do you want to set something in motion in the art scene if you always say NO. An example of establishment: A renowned Berlin gallery owner, Vostell's son ►Rafael, wanted to have an exhibition with Lurie, and he asked him: „Yes, what are the prices for your works? “ Lurie answered him: „Lichtenstein currently costs $300,000 and my works cost $400,000. When I think about what the storage costs will be in 40 to 50 years, then my things would have to be even more expensive. “ And then, of course, the gallery owner says that he cannot sell it for such a price, if the gallery owner lives from selling. And so the NO!art show fell out with him.
So the whole NO!art and NO is actually a current that moves between utopia and reality. You cannot always say NO, you have to say YES or ON. So the oscillation between NO and ON. I see the movement more like a picture puzzle. Or like a multistable perception phenomenon. Like in the works of ►Escher, for example, where the perspective in the picture constantly swings back and forth.
Large exhibitions are also part of the establishment. I don't believe that an institution would make such a big NO!art exhibition with the corresponding costs. I have already tried to make it clear to several curators that I need 400 meters of wall length to show all this. On top of that, many of the artists have lost their works. Many have died, nobody has taken care of the estate except for the garbage collector. Here in my archive I only have documents and prints, copies and isolated works. So you could put something together, but someone has to be up for it. In the meantime, the situation in Germany is such that the cultural institutions have no more money. An example: When I had arranged my first ►NO!art exhibition in Berlin at the ►Neue Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst (NGBK), the lottery company had provided a larger sum of money, because the transportation and insurance costs were very high from New York to here and so on. But then the money was shifted, first because not enough money came in for other exhibitions there and then there was less for NO!art. I left the organization there, especially since they wanted to regiment me. Only Lurie and not the other NO!art artists from the NO!art-Involvement should be exhibited. A pathetic arrangement. Finally, Lurie was separated from the involved artists and shown at another location. This no longer corresponded to my and Lurie's intention. So I left the NGBK working group that I had founded with good will. But to establish something like that is not so easy. But Lurie still got through it. He did not understand the machinations of the NGBK. So the working group traveled to New York without me and enjoyed themselves there with their friends, without any fruitful results.
What is your relationship to NO!art today?
I will continue to defend and represent them, that is, until my end. And new artists, who show interest in NO!art, I also accept, as I said before. It just takes a lot of work to integrate them into the context, but I do it. I'm currently trying to get a book financed about what I've brought to the websites from the ►Boris Lurie Art Foundation in New York, which is very wealthy. Maybe 800 pages, so that it can be documented again in a handy way.
What is your relationship to Pop Art?
So I think Pop Art is just an aestheticization and a glorification of the consumer world, the mass media and advertising to satisfy a certain audience, which now can't cope with the abstract. Who want to hang something on the wall, where the architect has forgotten the window, which suits their taste. It is interesting that Lurie and Andy Warhol lived on the same street in New York's uptown.
What do you think about the statement of Marcuse „Capitalist progress has not only restricted the starting point for freedom, the open space of human existence. But also the open longing, the need for such a starting point?“
Clearly, capitalism has restricted and encouraged much. For example, that many people first think of increasing their money and capital. Likewise, capitalist progress has introduced human capital. What a terrible word. Capital no longer has a conscience. And the art market boils with manipulation. For example, the painting of ►Gerhard Richter with a blurry painted ►Nazi officer is auctioned off for millions. What does the artist get out of this? But on the other hand, there are still enough niches for an artist, where he can do something, where he can undertake something, in a small circle and still exchange ideas, that everything is not yet so down. Only, you have to find a way to make a living, to feed yourself from other ventures. One cannot feed oneself with critical art.
And let's get back to Boris Lurie, what kind of person was Boris Lurie and how did you meet him?
He was courteously friendly. He was critically open-minded politically, which can be explained by the NO!art. He also had a bad past in his young years, which are really important for the development of a person. From the age of 17 he spent five years in various concentration camps only among men. This of course brings with it problems to get relationships and experiences with women. Later he never married, never had a steady girlfriend and so on. That's probably why his artistic work was influenced by all the pin-up stuff he saw in New York. This is probably also the reason for the creation of his ►Railroad Collage. He was also a poetic person, wrote a lot I did the whole poetry book together with him and edited ►„NO!art in Buchenwald: Geschriebenigtes und Gedichtigtes“ with texts in Baltic German language. He came from Riga and loved Baltic German. It should also be mentioned that he speculated with shares on Wall Street and made a large fortune. The New York Times was published at night, which he always fetched and then, lying in his bathtub, studied all the pages with the stock prices. He first began to trade in stocks with a woman's name in the title, which were under one dollar.
I got to know Boris personally in 1988 on the occasion of the presentation of the first ►NO!art anthology in the Galerie und Edition Hundertmark in Cologne. We had both compiled the NO!art anthology in ten years of work. However, we had been in contact by letter, fax and telephone since 1978. And then he also supported me financially. He even sent me a small amount every month with dollars in an envelope. In the envelope, because the bank charges were too high. And so he also started to move from time to time as an old man, because he had to walk from 66th Street to 69th Street, where the next mailbox was. But in the end the bills became so old that the exchange office had to check in lists whether the bills were still valid. Boris had probably stashed them under his bed. He probably had a lot of money lying around in the apartment. Before he died, he was in the hospital several times for a long time and then friends of his renovated his apartment and threw away the refrigerator with old things in it and all that. There must have been money in it, too. He had a complete row with the apartment renovators. Yes, he supported me and we talked on the phone, at least once a week, and exchanged ideas, and then I visited him from time to time in New York to exchange ideas, view the art warehouse and so on.
And could NO!art have been like this at all without Boris Lurie, his experiences and art? So to what extent has it shaped his life and NO!art?
No. Absolutely not. Because he had initiated the March Gallery together with his artist friends in the Lower East Side - near Bowery Street - and thus shaped NO!art. And Boris was the only one who continued the NO!art idea with me until the 21st millennium. To mention here is also ►Clayton Patterson, who has supported NO!art in New York since 1994 and had an exhibition with Lurie, Aronovicci and Tambellini in his ►Clayton Gallery & Outlaw Art Museum.
As always in loose associations, many artists often go their own ways and thus separate, some wanted nothing more to do with it, and, many have died in the meantime. And so, together with Boris and Clayton, I have involved other artists in NO!art. So NO!art shaped him and his life until the end. Up to the end he still made shifts in the NO!art involvement and also partly fixed it by notary. Art was for him the means of expression in society. Even his father wanted him to become an artist. Already at the age of sixteen, Boris made book illustrations for the Latvian Communist Party in Riga.
And of course Boris’ concentration camp experiences have also shaped NO!art. His father was liberated by the Americans in Buchenwald in 1945 and, strangely enough, immediately ran around outside in a black suit, Boris told us. And Boris himself was in Magdeburg, a subcamp of Buchenwald. It was a labor camp at the Poltewerke for the production of ammunition. So he had been fed there, more than those in Buchenwald, but he had to work hard every day. He was protected by some secret powers to prevent him from entering the gas chambers. He also never saw gas chambers and mass exterminations. The labor camp in Magdeburg was dissolved in April 1945 because of heavy bombing. Immediately afterwards he was recruited by the C.I.C. - an American military secret service - with his knowledge of English - I don't know where he got it from. He could translate for them, German, English, Russian and so on which was then used to find Nazis in around Magdeburg. Lurie probably exaggerated that - cinema was interesting at that time, there was no television - he invited girls to the cinema who didn't fit in with the secret service. Thereupon the C.I.C. dismissed him. And then he ... His father had already arrived in New York in 1945. He only arrived in New York on June 18. And his father immediately started real estate business there.
And Lurie started with stocks?
NO. NO. He was to become a painter, become an artist. That is why his father sent him to Paris. I think for one or two years. In the NO!art anthology there is also the one picture where ►Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp are shown in front of a NO!art painting during an exhibition in Paris in 1964. In any case, he was to get into art. And it developed because he was interested in art at an early age. At eleven he already knew ►Marc Chagall.
And in the concentration camp, under the protection of the Jewish SS officer Scherwitz, he advanced to sign painter and carpenter. He also had to build coffins for those who had been shot. Because he had always been in smaller camps, where nothing gassing was taking, no mass deportation or the like, he never actually saw those trucks full of corpses. It was Sam Goodman who first brought this to his attention. He had a whole suitcase full of photographic documentation from that time. And then Boris realized that and contrasted that with his lack of experience in adolescent sexuality and what goes on there and so on. That's how his ►RAILROAD COLLAGE came on the light.
Yes, his father was a real estate agent and financed his art studies. Boris was a good painter. You can see that in his paintings. In the 60s his father died, which saddened Boris and from which he suffered a lot. However, Boris was probably fixated on money multiplication from an early age. So he came to the conclusion that the easiest thing to do is to buy 50 cent shares in bulk. He always got - as already mentioned - the New York Times. A very thick thing with very small letters. Two millimeters high; the names of the stocks. At first he only bought shares with women's names. And at some point he saw that Olivetti had also gone down to 50 cents. So he took it. After all, he had been in Italy with his sister in 1939. He loved that country. Later, the exhibitions in ►Milan and ►Rome also came. Olivetti then rose several times over. He also bought Norwegian hotel stocks for 50 cents. The hoteliers later came up with the idea of filling their empty Spanish coastal hotels with computer specialists and software developers. And then suddenly the computer bubble burst and the 50-cent stock was at 170 dollars.
I remember it well. That day I was even still with him in New York. When he heard this next to me on the phone, he jumped in the air. I immediately told him: „Now we're going to buy a castle in Thuringia, a NO!art castle! “ the GDR had just gone to ruin and you could get something like that cheap. He then immediately commissioned ►Naomi in Weimar to take photos of suitable objects. She immediately sent wonderful photos of an ►castle nearby, what was still available and so on. But all that didn't get started . Because, stock speculation also has something to do with love. And once you've gotten involved, you can't let it go. That's why he kept speculating, on and on, on and on. His friend ►Martin had 18 million dollars. And Boris only had 17 million. In his „Poems“ he once wrote that if he had ►17 million dollars, he would stop. But he never stopped.
And why was the book ►Geschriebigtes / Gedichtigtes [Writings / Poems] published only in 2003?
This was originally intended to be a 30-page catalog for his 1998 exhibition at the Buchenwald Memorial, with some illustrations and so on. But Boris wanted to include his texts, his exhibited works and the pictures of his artist friends in the catalog and I designed them. The director of the memorial - Volkhard Knigge - agreed to this. Boris now began to write, write and write That would actually never have found an end. Slowly, the memorial site management set deadlines, so that the catalog book was ready for printing at the end of June 2001. Unfortunately, the book did not come to light until 2003, because the printer's editor delayed this for a long time. It became a very thick thing with 448 pages. When I told Boris: „This is it! “, he sent me the following poem: My sympathy is with the mouse, but I feed the cat. I was able to include this statement in the book and it actually says a lot about Boris himself.
He is socially minded. But through stock trading and so on he feeds the capitalists. That is why he was not dependent on selling anything. All the people who were involved in NO!art and had once participated had actually sold nothing at that time. A few became even more famous like D’Arcangelo for example. He even made the poster for the Munich Olympics. Or Dorothy Gillespie created some sculptures in the courtyard for Rockefeller Center, and so on. But what then basically had nothing more to do with NO!art, only that the beginnings were rooted in NO!art's social criticism.
And where did Boris Lurie store his things?
He had an apartment on 66th Street and since his father was a real estate agent, he also owned a house on 77th Street called the ‚studio house’. And there he had six or eight tenants living in it, and they made the returns on the house. And there in the basement he had stored all his works of art. But stored in such a way that they were not protected from damage at all. And in New York, the cockroach plague is actually everywhere. They probably enjoy paint and works of art. Some pictures are really beautifully eaten up. Often half of what was stretched on the stretcher frame is already missing. Actually this makes some works even more interesting. The tooth of time.
In 2001, I was there with my son at NO!art art camp to prepare for the big exhibition at ►Block Museum in Evanston. We wrapped the rest of the works in plastic so that the cockroaches couldn't get to them so quickly because we realized they didn't like plastic. In 2008 Boris died and then I couldn't follow up on that anymore. But now I want to go there soon to see what is left of it.
And what happens to the headquarters, what are your plans?
Yes, I have here the correspondence with the many artists and his friends who were acquainted with him. I have all that here in the folders. And I would like to bequeath it to a museum. But the museums are not necessarily interested in it, because they cannot yet classify it in their art history. I would like to see what battle scenes and sculptures were created in the 19th century. There are whole museum cellars and archives full of them in Berlin and nobody wants to have them anymore. The museums don't want to throw it away, but they don't have much room for new things either. This means that the museums and archives are actually no longer ‚in time’. They only archive what was created for the wealthy. And the art scene is so diversified that artists actually give themselves over for everything in order to satisfy the bourgeoisie with their machinations. And if NO!art is added to this, it will be problematic. I have to find someone who appreciates what is going on there.
So with the preservation of art, it's such a problem. It's mostly about trade and what was traded at the time. Van Gogh was not in demand at all in his time. He had trouble buying his brushes and paints, for example. Or other movements like „the bridge“. They were also only together temporarily. Or „Fluxus“. Someone took part here and there, or something like that, and then everyone went their own way again. So it's all a question of how one looks back at history. It's all a question of how to look at it and who it is important to and why it is important. Also in the context of temporal events, what happens in time. Therefore, in addition to the website NO!art, which I have been maintaining for ten years now, I have also published a page with „mindshots“ on the Internet (mindshots.info) . „mindshots“, which means to set something in motion in the brain. Where certain things are taken out of the temporal events to show people what happened in the time, which is relevant from the point of view of NO!art.
And the estate of Boris Lurie?
Yes, the estate is now held by the ►Boris Lurie Art Foundation in a New York camp. The estate is unsorted. Because the people who stored it, under the supervision of Gertrude Stein and her lawyers, have no idea what it actually is. I'm actually the only one who can classify it, put it in a row, or say anything about how the development continued. Gertrude actually said goodbye to Boris already in the 70s. Boris sporadically visited Gertrude. But there was always the difference between upper class and ‚artist dirt’. So I'll be heading to New York soon and take a look at the rest, what's still there and what needs to be done. And to quickly find people to make an exhibition of the whole thing. I've already been offered one in Munich, but I can't get along with Bavaria. I still have someone in Athens and other connections.
Only, at the moment this is a „one-person business“. As I said, I would like to do one more big exhibition and then that's it. I can't do so much anymore in my old age. There are currently about 9,450 files on the NO!art website. So you have to think about the following: If it takes you 10 seconds to look at each page, then you've been sitting there for a month and a half reading and looking at it all in an eight-hour day. Who wants to do that? That is already a lot. And that's about a tenth of what's in the archive. A group would really have to carry on, some interested staff or something, to keep it going. But who is interested in something like that, which basically nobody wants to have because it is too critical and doesn't correspond to the mainstream.
Or misunderstood?
Yes and misunderstood too. The problem is that even today, in this multifaceted media age, people all prefer oil or acrylic paintings, sculptures in iron and stone or something. They want to have something solid in their hands.
NO!art is only virtual on the Internet. So if I were to adapt to that now - I have already gotten offers from China, they would brush it all in oil and do everything according to my wishes - and then I could throw it on the market. But that is not my will.
The times are changing and many artists reject the internet. But some are already using it. There is a very strong upsurge in art manipulation at the moment. And just here, where Berlin has become so open now, and the rents here are still quite cheap - a new gallery is opening on every street corner. But nothing new and nothing critical is happening. They repeat the old things again. And then some collectors come along and want to buy the whole store. So that the artists are satisfied and then think that this is being pushed up.
Thank you for the NO!art interview.
Dear Franziska, I also thank you for coming from Weimar to Berlin and being involved in NO!art.
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