| German-Danish sculptor, painter and performance artist Christian Lemmerz has been known for his incredible life-like marble sculptures, blood paintings and installations of dead pigs in display cases since the 80s. I had a rather arbitrary talk to Christian about his oeuvre, audience and the current state of art. Much like Christian’s artworks, our conversation circled around the paradoxes of being, experience and creating. |  |
Christian Lemmerz – Matilde Digmann
German-Danish sculptor, painter and performance artist Christian Lemmerz has been known for his incredible life-like marble sculptures, blood paintings and installations of dead pigs in display cases since the 80s. I had a rather arbitrary talk to Christian about his oeuvre, audience and the current state of art. Much like Christian’s artworks, our conversation circled around the paradoxes of being, experience and creating.
Matilde Digmann: What would you say is the relationship between the Cararra marble you use and the at times very morbid and untraditional sculptures you do such as Mermaid, which has been interpreted as a play between classical and timeless materials and the decomposing body?
Christian Lemmerz: Marble is no longer a pure and timeless material, in fact it never was. It’s a contaminated material—contaminated with and through kitsch, art history and myth. This is exactly why it is an interesting material to work with.
MD: Can you explain what you mean by “contaminated”?
CL: Well, because of the myth of marble being pure and timeless, marble is like Walt Disney or Wagner—a sort of sticky substance. It is also contaminated for the avant-garde, a material that cannot be used or which can only be used in an ironic context.
MD: You’ve also worked with other media and with performance art. How do you see the role of performance today as compared to earlier, and what do you think are the qualities of performance compared to other art forms such as painting and sculpture?
CL: To me, every media has its own domain. Performance has that moment of time, but it also has the freedom that it isn’t one thing. It is neither theatre, dance nor music. I don’t think performance is a clear or pure art form such as painting. It is more of an in between stage in art, as well as for most artists. Most artists only use performance in a limited time of their life, mostly when they are still experimenting. Later on, when they are half dead, they go back to being “pure” painters, musicians and so forth.
MD: You have, among other things, made one of Denmark’s most talked about artworks called Body (mirror) where you let the bodies of pigs rot inside of display cases, which resulted in major media hype. How did you perceive the (public) discussion that this piece brought about?
CL: Idiotic and stupid.
MD: Care to elaborate?
CL: Art in the media is usually idiotic and stays on the same level as the caricature drawings. What I mean is that some people get pissed off and others say they don’t care. And then they try to defend art, believing that real art is something entirely different.
MD: Since you bring up the term “real art,” I’d like to know what you perceive as the definition of real art?
CL: The point is that there is no such definition; it is closer to a question than to a definition.
MD: So you think the attempts to define art are beside the point?
CL: Every artist tries to redefine art over and over again through their work.
MD: So what you’re saying is that Body (mirror) was more about defining art itself than about getting the audience to react?
CL: Art is about art is about life is about death and so forth, but art is in the way of art—for good or for bad. Art can only be understood through art. The pure experience in art is a myth.
MD: Decay and our mortality seems to have been of great importance to you. You have described your works as pieces of poisoned chocolate that lure the spectator in—what does the reaction of the spectator mean to you when you create your artworks?
CL: Nothing. But, I try to put myself in the position of the spectator or, in other words, I am first and foremost a spectator myself—an artist is a voyeur. An audience is an impossible idea to me in connection to art. A rock concert has an audience, a sort of homogenous and jumping mass.
MD: But art without an audience…
CL: Is idiotic.
MD: So you place importance on the object and not the experience?
CL: I make the light bulb and you provide the electricity.
MD: What I mean is: A lot of artists talk about the object being of little or no importance and put their emphasis on the experience, thus saying that the work of art is nothing without its audience and that the work of art is created in the interaction between object and spectator.
CL: Disneyland says the same thing.
MD: What is the reason for the use of, for example, blood and urine in some of your works? You’ve said that art lies in the space between the living spectator and the dead object, but what kind of revelations do you intend to create with the viewer using blood, urine and inner organs?
CL: Maybe it is an obsession that I share with my time.
MD: How so?
CL: A great deal of the information in our society is about death, disease and so on. And all of it is broadcasted through a nice and pure, flat screen TV.
MD: In the piece Virginia, you use pictures from the media to make a classical sculpture. What are your thoughts on media aesthetics and the way we deal with the images of death that we see every day?
CL: Information twists our experiences—makes the world simpler than it is. I react to the image and information world with art as my self-defence. Consciousness does the same through dreams.
MD: The philosophical aspect of your works seem to be closely connected with the physical expression—your work is far removed from conceptual art—what is your take on the popularity that conceptual art has enjoyed since 1960 and how do you see your work in relation to the conceptual tendencies?
CL: I don’t divide art into abstract and figurative or conceptual or not. In fact, all art is conceptual. But there has been a lot of dry thinking. Too many artists have been unhappy art historians, or half dumb hobby philosophers.
MD: So, you don’t think art should be about its own history? Or about…
CL: About life. Philosophy is also about life. Through philosophy you need a tool in order to experience life.
MD: Speaking of life and art, you have recently exhibited the piece City of God (CPH) that is an exact copy of Copenhagen after a bombing. What do you wish to achieve by making the fear of terror so concrete?
CL: I react to the media. I see the media as a kind of stupid air we all inhale, a kind of collective subconscious. But, to me, it is also connected with enjoyment. It satisfies that infantile desire to destroy, to build a disaster.
MD: But, even if you are fulfilling a desire to destroy, it is a well-crafted piece with a lot of patience put into it.
CL: That is what I’m saying: To build a disaster. I like paradox. All art is trapped in paradoxes—that’s the fun part of art.
MD: Yes, I kind of sensed that. In the work The Prophet (Bin Laden) you’ve depicted Bin Laden as a kitsch saint in a mix of references from Catholicism to Islam. Also, in other works, you take away the innocence in faith, thus infecting it with taboo. What is your relationship to religion?
CL: I hate religion. How many people are killed in the name of God? I like the idea that, through the existence of God, everything can be justified—not the good, but the evil. I think the idea of God was a great human invention.
But, realising that God does not exist was a much more mind-blowing idea. Bin Laden portrays himself as a prophet. I just reflect on the iconography for that type of image.
