For over thirty years Wolfgang Müller has been making multimedia art and writing books that challenge conventions in both the mainstream and the avant-garde. Having started the music and performance art group Die Tödliche Doris (contemporaries of Einstürzende Neubauten and Malaria!), Wolfgang went on to write 1982's Geniale Dilettanten, a semi-serious manifesto for an underground movement, named after the post-punk festival held in Berlin the previous year.
Since Die Tödliche Doris ended in the late eighties, Wolfgang has been busy developing projects on everything from Icelandic elves to the Goethe family, extinct birds to dancer Valeska Gert, and collaborating with everyone from opera singers to photographer Nan Goldin. Currently living between Berlin and Reykjavik, Wheel met with this founding father of the contemporary avant-garde at the Crystal Ball gallery in Kreuzberg to celebrate the opening of his recent exhibition, Séance Vocibus Avium.
By Ananda Pellerin
Your installation features drawings and the reconstructed sounds of extinct birds. What does the name mean? Séance, you know, is from French, a spiritual meeting with dead people. Vocibus avium is ‘voice’ and ‘bird’ in Latin. It sounds like abracadabra: mystic and magical. Our society believes they are not mystical and not magical – that this is something exotic other countries have. They say we are very rationalistic, very serious, but I don’t think so.
There are different descriptions of these bird sounds in every language: French, German, English. You cannot hear the original sound so only the different interpretations make the truth. The drawings work a bit like this too – similarities and differences.
I thought it was a nice idea to get musicians and singers, including a Grand Dame of the National Icelandic Theatre, to reconstruct sounds of birds that were never tape-recorded. I wanted a natural record.
How do the drawings work with the sounds? If something is extinct it’s disappeared and you have just the relics – drawings from painters or scientists. Sometimes there’s no image at all, just a stuffed bird in a museum, and I tried to make variations for each. There’s one bird that’s really 1800s so I’ve done a very stiff drawing, others you feel are really romantic, some looked like Stone Age writing on the wall.
How did you come to open the installation at two different galleries on the same night? It was a plan. The Crystal Ball is a so-called independent gallery and Dörrie Priess is a serious gallery. They have two styles and you can see the difference: underground/overground. It was the same artwork but the atmosphere was completely different. In Dörrie Priess the pictures look more elegant, there’s better light. At the Crystal Ball the pictures are not so elegant, it’s more natural.
It shows that the space changes the image. This is something that people deny at the moment, they say “I’m objective, it doesn’t matter how people look, I just look at content.” But I want to show this is not true. You can see this installation is different in these two spaces – and me too. I’m not free from it.
You did a book with photographer Nan Goldin called Blue Tit, which is also about birds. Why do you keep returning to this idea? I have a lot of other ideas, this is just one. Elves is another theme, but also bats and Iceland.
What’s your interest in bats? When I made music in the 80s I was interested in the invisible; the un–hearable. In 1989 I produced my first solo record entitled BAT, just two months after Michael Jackson released Bad. I made a recording of bats done with a special instrument that creates a frequency to make the unhearable, hearable. This is the first record at all with the sound of bats. It was a raw, experimental record – I mean the sound of bats is just like “tchk, tchk, tchk tchk.” It was a very bad seller.
And elves. You wrote a book entitled Neues von der elfenfront (News from the Elf front) about the history of elves in Iceland. Is this also about the invisible? Yes. It’s like when the money from the banks in Iceland just disappeared. We are all working with something which is not real, just like elves and fairies; they are invisible but if everyone talks about them, they become visible.
In Iceland the people are working with the idea of elves very much. In Germany it’s a bit contaminated by Nazis because the elves come from the old German paganism and the Nazis liked that stuff. Not in Iceland and maybe not in England, but in Germany I find it interesting how ideologies move so elves become Aryan.
How did you end up starting an ‘alternative’ Goethe Institute in Iceland? In 1998 the German cultural institution, the Goethe Institute, said they had no money and they were closing the Institute in Reykjavik, one of the smallest countries in Europe. They also closed the Goethe Institute in one of the poorest countries in Africa. Then they opened three new ones elsewhere, so I thought, it’s more business thinking, you have to open where the new market is. As an artist I cannot accept this because it’s money from all the people in Germany funding the Goethe Institute, a government institution. I want money not just given where the economy is very good but also to a poor country, a small country. Art and communication are not only found in the centres.
So I opened a private Goethe institution in Iceland. The central Goethe Institute laughed and said this is a funny idea. But after three years I got a harsh letter from their lawyer telling me not to say any longer that I’m the leader of the private Goethe institution of Reykjavik, because my idea had become more and more a reality.
It wasn’t funny to them anymore... No, because it was too successful. And then I found out Goethe had two grandsons and both of them, the last Goethes, were gay.
The oldest, Walther von Goethe, was a very success-less composer and also the last in the family. Since his death in 1885 there are no real Goethes in Germany: they are extinct. His mother was very bitchy, pressing him always. I found many of his compositions and they're not so bad, they're very kitsch. So my lawyer wrote to the Goethe Institute saying “Mr Müller has changed the name of the Goethe Institute to the Walther Von Goethe Foundation” and they accept this. Now my project is named after Walther, the loser of the Goethe family.
How did you come to write your book Geniale Dilettanten? I was still in art school and this was when David Bowie was living in Berlin, 1977-1979. He called West Berlin the Metropolis of junkies. It was a really sad city in a way, but very cheap so you could live on very little money at this time. The official art scene was very conservative, only focusing on realistic paintings in the East and the same in the West. This is something people don’t want to hear in Germany because they say the West is completely different to the East, but no inter-disciplinary art was possible anywhere, so this is how the movement of Ingenious Dilettantes grew.
I published a book with Merve Verlag entitled Geniale Diletanten, which was a kind of manifesto. They were a tiny publishing company but had all very good authors: Foucault, Deleuze, Guattari. I was 24 or so, I was their youngest author. In this movement a lot of people met who were not satisfied with the structures of art, the official institutions. It grew very quickly because there were a lot of squat houses and culture places.
What was Geniale about? I play with two things in the same moment. In the book I was acting very serious, very German. No humour. But of course it was full of humour, but I hide it. I think this is what people call British humour or maybe ostrich humour – understated.
Like there was a chapter about fanzines such as Sniffing Glue, but I wrote about them like they were literature – using words that are absolutely strange to fanzines in this time. I mean now people take them seriously and collect and archive them but then it was absolutely bizarre because it was just happening and already I write about it like it’s in a museum. In the book I use this kind of self-mummification. You can see in the index:
So you were creating a philosophy of the counterculture and making it seem official, or even like it had already passed? Yeah it was much too early. It was just on the way in and I wrote it like a dictionary of all these elements, film, music, all the things underground. It was scientific but about punk and fanzines, which were still fresh.
I was part of this movement and in a way I think I am the philosophical head because Neubaten were not able to write texts. Their lyrics are not to my taste, there’s not so much humour, or no humour, I would say. It’s also very masculine and it’s the typical image of the rock star.
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