“IF AT SOME POINT THE IMPULSE TO DISCOVER SOMETHING NEW IS NO LONGER THERE, I’D STOP IMMEDIATELY.”
By JOACHIM BESSING

I met the renowned collector at her home located on the grounds of her private museum above Herzog Park in Munich. The floors of the inconspicuous house are laid with polished sheets of slate. The furniture in the living room is comprised only of one giant sofa covered in bright orange and a key lime pie green rug on which one of the two dogs, the Labrador named Dino, situated himself. Our conversation evolved into the third instalment of our series on the nature of our present times, a series begun with our talk with Alexander Kluge in Issue 07 and continued with our interview with Chris Dercon in the last issue. So I turned Dercon’s central idea of a synchronicity of various epochs into a point of departure in the discussion with Ingvild Goetz.

INGVILD GOETZ: The way I see contemporary art – contemporary is everything contemporaries produce. Whether it’s good or bad art, whether its important or unimportant art simply doesn’t matter at first. I think we’re living in a time in which older art forms are being revived, as is happening, for example, with painting. I think that there’s a generation being brought up in an age of digital media that yearns for the romantic. I see that, for example, in my daughters, who like to think back to the days of the hippies although they never experienced them themselves. And those days were very special days because they were driven by intense concepts.

JOACHIM BESSING: What, then, is contemporary, the new? All that one could call new, really, is video art.
Take that a step further! Video art as such was already being done in the ’60s. Now one is able to arrange video and film, projected large, within space or with objects. These are works that particularly interest me.

Who’s doing this sort of thing?
A lot of artists. For example, Doug Aitken, whom we’ve recently exhibited. He shot a film about Montserrat, a Caribbean island devastated by a volcanic eruption. He wandered with his camera for seven miles over the island until he reached the volcano. A viewer can experience this wandering through the jungle, the ruins of villages and over fields of lava in three separate spaces via seven projections. Another example is Hans Op de Beek. You sit on a little bench in front of a ruined house and look to a window, behind which drawings are projected that relate memories and experiences in and around the house. Or Steve McQueen; many were able to see his work at the last Documenta.

They “traveled” with the film in an elevator 3,000 meters down into a South African mine. Ear-shattering noise, the cage rattling; it was a physical experience. At first you think a machine is vibrating the seats, but it was only the waves of sound from the speakers that created this impression. These are works that mean something new in art to me.

But all of them are variations of performance art, with the action simply playing out within the viewer: “Art is doing something with me.”
Exactly. It’s also a new form of performance which makes it a step forward.

So the viewer, now that the world is discovered, is given a new experience by the means of art.
Exactly.

But that’s closer to an approach that one can date back to the ’70s.
Yes, painting, sculpture, performance, and Arte Povera – we’ve seen all this. But the question is, “What is the next step?” That’s what makes painting so problematic for me. The difficulty is that the artist transforms something into something else that has never existed before. If performances were to be made again as they were in the ’70s, the artist might have contemporary concerns, but for me, it’s merely déjà vu.

But aren’t artists like John Bock or Jonathan Meese doing precisely this?
But those are steps forward! In the ’60s, the performance artists’ concerns were very political. Now, it’s practically Dada, all irony and persiflage. In the ’70s, the methods were far more serious and fundamental and not articulated so much via multimedia.

They were also able to provoke much more.
But today nothing is provocative anymore. Sometimes I think it’s a shame that no one gets upset anymore.

Gerhard Merz would find our entire discussion here regressive. He sees the erection of a giant, monolithic black or white sculpture as the only way to the non-sentimental, the true contemporary.
I don’t know if that’s progressive.

Or contemporary?
Yes, maybe contemporary, but so are a lot of things and they needn’t all be new. There is a lot that’s old-fashioned in contemporary work at the moment. In what comes to our contemporaries’ minds. But not much of it is innovative.

How decisive is the role of the market in the valuation of contemporary art?
In the short term, it plays a very large role, but in the long term, less so, I think. There are momentary trends that later, once the hype is over, wane. Only the top artists remain. I do think, though, that there are now two directions. With one, art works are valued on pure speculation even though they’re not being exhibited in museums, and then there are the works that are valued by museums. There used to be only the second version. A collector could watch an artist over a long period of time and, when he’s exhibited in this or that museum and carries on making good art, one would decide to buy. You can’t do that anymore. You can really only evaluate the quality of an artist when you’ve seen one of his large exhibitions. You can’t base such decisions on four or five works.

The main thing that’s changed is the influence of the market – does the increasing aggressiveness among buyers at art fairs in Basel and Miami reflect the conditions of the New Economy?
Just about everything has changed. Hysterical conditions. Catastrophic. No one would believe what I saw and heard at the last art fair in Basel; serious collectors in fistfights over art works. They rip objects out of each other’s hands. Or there was the morning I had to find out that a gallerist couldn’t hold onto what I’d reserved because he’d been violently assaulted.

Violently assaulted?
People pull and yank the gallerists around. After what I saw there, I can only confirm that the conditions of the New Economy are being revived in their worst possible form.

But this isn’t about the bargains?
No, they’re fighting over the really expensive items! They don’t worry about the bargains until later.

Do you then concentrate on collecting those that are overlooked now?
Well, my criteria for making choices certainly has nothing to do with what’s overlooked. I collect what speaks to me, art works that engage me personally. I’m interested in the concerns of the current generation. That’s why I always collect very new art. In the ’70s, it was Arte Povera, a somewhat political art that broke with the traditions of painting and incorporated trash from the street. In the ’80s, it was a group of Americans who addressed their thematic concerns in a very aesthetic way. The ’90s were, for me, shaped by the English, and all throughout, there have been interesting loners. And at the moment, I’m interested in the current generation.

And where does this current generation come from? Before you seem to have always been able to distinguish them by their nationalities.
They come from different parts of the world, but especially California and Germany.

Could you name at least three of them?
From America, Thaddeus Strode; among the Germans, Andreas Hofer and Markus Selg. They bring together our entire cultural history. With Hofer, it’s the comic figures for whom he gives new meaning. Sometimes he places them back in the Middle Ages, sometimes in the future, or the present as well. In essence, they’re merely projections he connects with history. He himself even calls it time traveling. Selg, on the otherhand, also reaches back into history, to 5,000 BC – Indian mythology. But he doesn’t interpret it in the form of comics; rather, he’s interested in iconography. He generates his pictures on a computer. Strode, though, takes these comics and creates his own mythology. As opposed to Hofer, who works a lot with film noir, Strode is interested in Pippi Longstocking – themes from his childhood. He’s told me about the books by Dr. Seuss which we’ve always had from him, and then, of course, American television series. When he reaches way back, then it’s to the silent film era; but it never goes further. But that’s what I find interesting, that he doesn’t reach deep back into history. History begins with his birth.

Isn’t it strange that young German artists – despite so-called globalization – regard it practically as a given to see their own births as the beginning of history; that here Pop couldn’t place mythology in the shadows after all; that a German like Markus Selg wants to reach back to earlier high cultures and not merely to Babelsberg?
Strangely enough, I’ve always divided artists according to their backgrounds. An artist’s roots play such a vital role! This so-called globalization has, as far as I can see, really only played out over the surface. An Indian who speaks English and has grown up in America, when he comes back to his country, he’s immediately at home again. Roots cannot be denied.

With regard to literature, it’s said that it’s made of books. Isn’t art, then, made of images?
The artist creates from himself. He might use comic figures or other materials of the present since it’s there that he finds his protagonists, but they remain connected very strongly with his own person, with his roots. You can see that in Selg, Hofer, and Strode. On the surface, it may seem as if they’re working on the same themes – but their methods remain very individual.

So an artist is ultimately resistant to trends?
For me, there really is only art in which the artist has invested himself. A lot of the so-called New Painting – with the exception of Neo Rauch – has me wishing this aspect were there. Here, I can only see a trend. Pretty pictures. Nothing more. The art of a Jonathan Meese, on the other hand, has called forth a whole new generation of artists. This is the first generation that has no qualms about reaching back to Germanic tradition. This was impossible for my generation in Germany.

Is that true?
They were taboos! The Nibelungen, the symbols, the rites, and so forth.

But the Nibelungen are hardly taboo!
Oh, yes, oh, yes, they were for my generation. This culture was far too much associated with the Third Reich.

Really?
I never learned Germanic history when I went to school.

But you’ve got this first name, Ingvild.
Yes, yes! That’s what’s so terrible!

It’s a Germanic name.
My mother read a wonderful novel and she liked the name.

What’s the title of the novel?
It Began on a Midsummer Night.

By Olav Gullvaag? I like that novel very much.
You see? That fits with our present; I thought it was kitsch.

Yes, but there are some wonderful stories of the forest in there. There are also similar currents in art right now that aim to deal with nature and Romanticism again.
But we’ve had all that already. I’ve got problems with this. It’s déjà vu.

But Gullvaag’s great success in his time had to do with the great disappointment people felt in the face of industrialization and its unfulfilled promises. Many were out of work, the world had become more ugly instead of more beautiful as had been promised. People liked to flee to the world of upright farmers. And now we’ve progressed 100 years and in principle, for all that we’ve learned, we’ve also known for a long time now that things are not going to get much better. There will be no utopia. Not everyone is going to be happy.
I’m just wondering whether one has to evoke utopia with old instruments? There are new media, there are computer simulations, so why does it have to be painted?
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Just ask your daughters! They don’t want to be neo-hippies; instead, they want to repeat entire epochs. Woodstock all over again.
By all means, Woodstock. But I just wonder whether our time is to be taken seriously at all – artistically speaking?

I think that this is a time in which we’re being driven to revision. That’s important, because we’ve had enough of progress. And I think that it’s in this vein that it’s slowly beginning to become clear how wildly free, how wildly unlimited and enabling the period of the ’60s and ’70s actually was.
But it had already happened in the ’60s.

But there’s this tremendous feeling of having missed it all.
That I understand, this concern. But, will it ever be important? This is a question that’s permanently on my mind. I don’t have the answer.

But art at the moment is evaluated only in terms of its market value. If, in 100 years, you look at a large Gursky and then read that this photograph of the present would have paid for an entire house, do you think that you would then still be able to comprehend the meaning of the work?
I doubt that the large format will be so important in any case. But I do think that Andreas Gursky will remain an interesting artist – regardless of the format. But of course, I would want to ignore the financial hype. That’s momentary speculation, which doesn’t necessarily have to have anything to do with art.

Can you remember a substantial discussion that took place in the last fifteen years?
There was the discussion of gender. And the theme of evolving homosexuality, AIDS – these themes played a large role in art works.

I don’t mean “in art,” but “about” the work.
There was no general discussion. It was all about positioning. I’m thinking of Felix Gonzales-Torres, for example. There was also, to an extent, the discussion surrounding the Young British Art of the ’90s. The ones that came from these suburbs and came up with very drastic works about poverty, illness, and rape. Extreme examples would be Damien Hirst and the Chapman Brothers, but there were also those who worked somewhat more subtly. There was quite an impulse there, I think.

But bourgeois taste isn’t in danger at all anymore. Everything’s being sold, valued.
Sure. Like I say, there are two lines that need to be separated. One is the trend. As a collector, you really have to watch out there to not get caught up in it. And the other is truly interesting, truly engages you and is, therefore, not immediately consumable. Because the trend at the moment is for what’s easily consumable.

At the same time, this opportunity, led by trends, to make a lot of money very quickly with art means that there are artists who produce for the trend – who are less concerned with the development of their art than with the market for it.
That depends on the artist, of course. There are some who study the auction catalogs, and when they see their work in there, they think, “Oh, God, hopefully it’ll bring a good price.” Then there are the others who ignore the market completely. A Thomas Schütte couldn’t care less! And then there are those who’d like to get away from all that but who are begged by their gallerists again and again to, please, just one more time, repeat their most successful work – simply because it’s still selling so well. And many are weak, dream of an apartment they could afford with that money, or of fame or prestige, and they produce that work one more time. And then maybe once more. Until it simply can’t be done anymore. We saw this happen with the Jungen Wilden. Only a few of them had the courage to break out and start again with something new. The basic desires of these artists aren’t even reprehensible.

But isn’t it also possible that an artist who makes something other than his most successful work again is very quickly written off?
It can happen. But I think that an artist has to be able to live with that, too. If he’s concerned about anything other than selling. Look, for example, at Thomas Schütte or Roni Horn: They’ve pulled back. For a while, then, there wasn’t much demand for them. Maybe depression sets in. But then you catch yourself again and make what you want to make. Or have to make. Because you’re an artist and can’t do anything else.

Are there still artists who, like in the stories of old, are dirt poor? Who only live for the colors?
But of course – the untalented, for example! And there are those, too, who are a bit more complicated. But they’re encouraged by the knowledge that they’re doing something good. And that hope that, after plugging away for twenty years, their time will come. The danger is actually much greater when one’s discovered right away and then thrown to the market.

Is that dangerous?
The danger is serious, like I say, of producing that one success over and over again. And the artist never had the chance to try things out, to produce crap for a year, and he’s already caught up in the machinery of success. An artist who works his way forward over a long period of time, when success finally comes, he’s got a work history that he can look back on. I think it’s important for an artist to be able to work on his own for a few years. Without anyone really looking on. Unless he’s unbelievably strong and can pull away from the market.

Is it still possible for you to discover an artist on your own these days?
Yes, of course! Sure. For example, somewhere in a small gallery exhibit. It’s wonderful. I can buy in peace at a point when there still aren’t very many interested in the work. These early discoveries are also a reason I’m able to do so many solo shows; because often, for years at a time, I’ve been able to buy works by an artist without being hassled by other collectors. That artist over there on the wall, for example, Ivan Morley. Not too many are interested in him yet. I’ve now got six works of his and I’m hoping to be able to carry on collecting his works. Or, for example, Richard Prince. For a good ten years I was able to calmly buy his works, and now he’s utterly trendy and I can’t afford him anymore.

But your collection is quite famous. Doesn’t word get around when you start buying?
I don’t talk about it.

Don’t artists talk about it?
Yes, sure. And the gallerists, too, of course. Strangely enough, though, I always have this feeling that no soul in the world is interested in what I do.

You own more art that can fit on your walls. Why do you collect?
It’s an obsession. I never think about whether or not my collection will be complete. If at some point the impulse to discover something new is no longer there, I’d stop immediately. I don’t need, for example, any more Mario Merz of this or that year. For me, it’s not about retroactive completion.

Do you sometimes go into the storage and look at the works?
Yes, but also in the various exhibitions outside my own museum. There are usually around two hundred works out on loan. If you buy from an artist early on, you can also acquire a masterpiece and I’d find it very unfair if that were simply stored away somewhere. Art, after all, is meant to be seen.

And when do you look at your art works?
Whenever I have time, I go to the storage and look at something. We also have a room for graphic works down there and a storage room devoted exclusively to photography. But I like seeing the works in my museum most of all. We always allow the exhibitions to run over a long period of time so that I can see my fill of it.

www.sammlung-goetz.de