Brus,Gunter quotes

Oswald Wiener had just dropped by. We were watching a football world championship game. Suddenly,in the middle of a game with Germany,the reporter said,“Bertie Vogts slid in like an Irrwisch [Jack-o’-Lantern]”. Eureka! That was the title I was looking for,and Oswald wiener commented,“That fits perfectly-an irrer Wisch”

As a boy,I was extremely shy,certainly as a result of my upbringing. I was an expert blusher,and some of my harsh actions may echo this shyness by way of compensation.

Poetry is when words are robbed of their attributed truth.

My body is the intention. My body is the event. My body is the result.

Color will play no part in the art of future.

My thinking at that time was determined by a kind of wilfully repressed pleasure[Freude] in Freud ,and I wanted to be as artistically direct as plumber illustrating the history of art with a spanner.

Being covered in white paint ,you demonstrate behaviour intended to create a public nuisance,which did in fact cause offence to members of the public ,and created a breach of the peace and public order.

“Ritual” might be an acceptable term, if shorn of its overtly religious connotations.For me,breaking taboos became nothing less than a stylistic means. I allowed my body, my self, to be pushed into such extreme situations that certain norms of social behaviour could only appear utterly absurd to me.

The white room is an interior to be made devoid of any specific sensualism emanated by objects. Ultimately it is classic white canvas expanded into three-dimensional space.

The pencil-stroke is like cutting into the heart.

You become an artist to upset your family.

Self-painting is a further development of the art of painting. The surface of an image has lost its function as the sole means of conveying expression. It was taken back to its roots,to the wall,to the object,to the living being,to the human body. By using my body as a means of conveying expression,the result created is a happening captured by a camera as it progresses,and an experience which viewers can share.

I want to cover all areas that can be depicted visually. This ranges from fairytales to attempts to enter the abstract and view oneself as a social outcast or someone struggling to stay alive.

Art is created in a state of delirium. Anyting else is the restoration of monuments. Collectors are artist that do not have a home. they have to make one for themselves.

Majorca,Spring 1960: As chance would have it-and chance always has something up its sleeve-I bumped into another academic renegade. He was about to leave for Majorca,where,he said,two stone houses were waiting for him and for me. So off we went. On the boat from Barcelona it was bitterly cold,and I arrived in Palma like a lump of ice on two sticks. My stone house was an aesthetic delight,especially as there was no furniture at all in it. We made straight for the local fishing village,where we soon met an Englishman suffering from a skin disease who lent us two matrasses. Later,other European artistic refugees arrived at the Café Marinero, including a Pole called Foot who had fought in the French army against what he called "very romantic barbarians". he painted too, alternately in monochrome and in abstract expressionist style. Abstract Expressionism was the only style practised by Joan Merritt,a brilliant woman from the United States. She transformed an artistic nature reserve into a jungle. In Franco´s empire you had to report to the Guardia Civil once a week. It was the same ritual every time. You knocked on the door and a voice answered "Un momentino!" You waited until eventually receiving a very loud command: "Entra!" A man with a big stomach,a moustache and a cigar would be leaning backwards in his chair at a desk with an oversize telephone. You stood in silence. The official would pick up the receiver and make an official call. A pin-up calendar hung on the wall,displaying a senorita in a skin-coloured bathing costume. Then the official leafed through your passport and bashed a stamp into it. A second ritual was Sunday mass, the Catholic way. It was conveyed by loudspeakers to the outside world, so it could be heard miles away. A third ritual was collecting your post.For obvious reasons,the Generalísimo would not allow post offices all over the place. In our village he left things to an itinerant clerk-cum-supervisor. she set up her office in one "cervecería"or another , as fancy took her. You entered the room and nodded silently to the other foreigners,all of us always somehow suspicious. A mother´s-milk monster with strictly arranged hair,a Generalísima, would be sitting behind a table on which she´d piled letters that had arrived. When she wasn´t disappearing into a backroom she´d occasionally call out a name. The whole business often lasted as long as the deep sleep of a dreaming donkey. Once you´d been given your post you had to go to the man with the moustache and cigar. The first ritual was then repeated, before the stamped postage stamp was stamped out of existence. Despite this, life in the fishing village was genuinely worth living. The sun shone every day,the fish were cheap,the wine even cheaper and mineral water free. The café proprietor reaked of tobacco and his customers smelled a fish. One fisherman had lost three fingers,and the lavatory´s aroma lay over the whole room. Once,when I was drunk,I called the Englishman with skin disease a "fucking bastard" and he scratched away at his scabs in fury. Red wine flowed from the barrels and murky blood trickled out of eyes. Smoke rushed through the room,the landlord fell over a barrel and,unbelievably,got up straightaway and refilled his own and customers´ glasses with what he had. this time,it was a bitter-tasting liqueur,spiced with filterless Peninsulares cigarettes. everyone smelled of ham and sweaty feet,and you´d sometimes tread on a rotten olive. One day a blonde Danish woman came to the Café Marinero,got to know me and invited me to her house,where she showed me her housekeeper,a local,who was pining for her unfaithful boyfriend. And there was an American woman who introduced me to My Fair Lady. Finally,I met an émigré Mongolian fisherman who couldn´t swim and drowned without a hope in the world. The fishing village had a soporiphic effect. Even when you were sitting at the bar and had to look for the owner to order another glass of red wine,it felt as though you were in a dream. And you were still dreaming when you crept along the dusty alleys with their weathered walls to visit the village barber. That man cropped my hair once. He sat down in a chair he´d probably got from a doctor. He begun practising his craft behind my right ear,worked his way up to the parting-and then vanished. I looked through some magazines he´d probably got from a dentist. Eventually,I decided to get down from the chair,which he´d wound up high,and went through several alleys looking for him. And Io and behold- there he was,waving down at me from a roof he was helping to tile. There I stood, like a half-finished Mohican, and carried on dreaming. Having grasped the way, fatalistic system worked, I returned to the barber´s shop,where you could also buy sweets,soap,toothpaste

In a certain sense,I never left Actionism as I understood it to this very day. Today,I work in “sittings” that are very similar to the course of the actions. Only the stage has changed on which the presentation takes place.

My picture-poems are linguistic margins on visual atolls.

For me,the Bild-Dichtung[image-poem] is the ideal form,because the drawing process is constantly being interrupted or contrasted by the writing. And since I always have something to say when I am writing,the effort has a balancing effect. Drawing and writing are wonderful complements.

I think my actions,like those of my associates,were possible in this form only in vienna. Our heritage was the vienna secession and Austrian expression,and that,along with the violent disapproval of our work,explains not only its frequently overwrought and agressive character,but also its radical psychological insights.

Pure painting or the art of drawing whose point of departure is based on purely formal criteria is,in my opinion,passé. I do not reject it if other artists make attempts,but as far as I am concerned,this is what I believe. if I do not place a text next to my drawings,I consider the work on such programmes to be futile.