Arnulf Rainer was born in 1929 in Baden, a town twenty miles south of Vienna. Rainer was praised for artistic style ever since he was a kid. Exposed to international Contemporary art in 1947, through reproductions of the works of Paul Nash, Francis Bacon, Stanley Spencer and Henry Moore in a magazine published by the British Council, London. He was influenced by Surrealist theories that are very evident in his work. In the late 1950s, Rainer became mystified with the idea of erasing and effacing existing art. His famed Übermalungen (Overpaintings) series continued until 1964, wherein he covered paintings with monochrome paint. What followed in Rainer’s exemplary oeuvre is a series exploring the nuances of body language and movements emphasising expression. He later employed religious motifs and themes in his works, extensively studying notions of suffering and death, resulting in a sequence of overpainted biblical works in the late 1990s. His unconventional techniques of expression and dialogue rightfully made him the pioneer abstractionist that he is today. In 2009, the Arnulf Rainer Museum opened up near Vienna while his works are an important collection to MoMa in New York, Tate Gallery in London, amongst others.
SP: Throughout your oeuvre, we have observed you paint sentiments that are mysterious and innately absurd yet tragically human. What has inspired you to keep these emotions central to your expression of such themes?
AR: During the 60s, I drew faces day after day, faces which I had never seen, veiled and deformed, ugly grimaces, twisting profiles, comical diagrammatic schemes.
During moments of intensive drawing these caricatures mirrored themselves into my own face muscles. I grimaced with them. These anti-yoga, tragic-comic poses, mannered clowneries and tired gestures without grace or charm do not ask for a harmonious physical expression, but for a search for the unlimited possibilities and the unlikely people who are concealed in all of us.
SP: Shakespeare famously remarked that “…violent delights have violent ends”. Your works encapsulate the extremes of human emotions and sensibilities; delight and dread. Do you think that people actively try to conceal or repress emotions they feel? Furthermore, is your art a constant effort to voice violent emotions that are kept schtum?
AR: There must have been a stage in human existence, when people communicated by means of posture, gesticulation and gestures to a much greater extent than today. This may have been before language developed. We know that the primates, especially the chimpanzees, are very much inclined to communicate through facial expressions and that it is possible to ‘talk’ to such animals by means of facial expressions. It shows that there is a foundation in man that has been superseded by a higher rational evolution.
This is very interesting, since man is probably a backward being concerning the construction and abilities of his body, and man obviously suffers from this physical inhibition.
SP: The immense fecundity of your imagination birthed the “Body Poses” series portraying the nuances of expression through change in body movements and postures. What prompted your shift from the “Face Farces” series to this one?
AR: In general you can say that my work is a combination of descriptive art and fine arts. Body language has always existed in theatre and dance, except that it has been subservient to a higher idea, to the idea of roles or elegant and graceful form. These are implications that naturally are out of the question for me, but there are a lot of implications that are much more important for man.
SP: Through your works you challenge the conventional understanding of concepts such as the self and identity, and the complex relationship between the two. The observer is bonded into this lyrical language of retrospection. Did you specifically aim for the observer to be engaged in this process of self discovery? Tell us more about the idea.
AR: I have been concerned with drawing over photos of myself, for this gave me the feeling of realising a reproduction of myself and a symbolic transformation and extinction of myself at the same time.
When I am drawing, I am agitated, I talk to myself, I screw up my face, I shout at people, I keep moving and changing incessantly as body, character and person.
I wanted to create these side-effects of art to become independent. I had no intention of disclaiming my former products which, apart from overpainting, were devoted in particular to the drawing of imaginary faces, but I tried to leave the sphere of painting. Nevertheless, the documentation of natural mimicry brought me back to two- dimensional structure, especially when I could not help correcting photographs with pencil because I wanted stronger accentuation. I had no criterion like that in drawing when I formed faces. I had only certain means of identification. Later on I strove for familiar denotations again, through these graphic corrections.
SP: You’ve set the standards high for representational Abstract work which remains groundbreaking. Who are some of your favourite artists that continually motivated you to experiment more, and how?
AR: I carry on my artistic work mainly as a conversation with myself. Just as a dream continues in deep sleep, so the over-painting is the evolution of this self-conversation into a silence – a communicable one, because if not, others would not snatch from me just those pictures which I create out of pure self-communication and which I hope one day to bring to the point of expressing a complete stillness, a deep sleep.
I, too, am an art student. I, too, want to follow the masters, learn from them and bury myself in their work, to discover the secret hidden inside, to reveal the enigma of their artistic licence. I, too, want to surpass examples, that is to say: all the models that were and are still used at the art academies. Modelled on the work of their teachers, gifted students gradually develop a style of their own. First of all, however, they need a solid ground to depart from. Since I only attended the academy for three days and do not have such a ground, I try to catch up, wander, look around and feel about something to hold on to.
At my age it is even hard to follow other artists. Therefore, I decided to choose other examples, chimpanzees. The freedom of their souls really impressed me. To what extent this freedom manifests itself in painting, predominantly a human activity, is not yet clear. Probably it is hidden and should be looked for. While doing so, I discovered they had an artistic licence of their own.
SP: You’ve collaborated with several renowned artists, Dieter Roth, for instance, and created exquisite works. How was that experience for you? Do you think artists should actively collaborate with their contemporaries?
AR: Every mixture, every form of collaboration between two minds or systems of representation presupposes some kind of consensus. Ours was to tap new sources, ascend new branches, to probe new directions. We were full of curiosity, a will to transform and acrobatic high spirits.
Freed from the stress of stylization and perfection, we were always able to blame the other for things that were half- finished or unsuccessful, frequently resulting in success stories in these extremely interesting categories, as well as a few things that just happened without much effort, which I would not otherwise have achieved.
SP: Do you have a piece of advice for young and emerging practitioners in the art world? Please share.
AR: I see art as a means of expanding people’s consciousness. If people or artists do not make an effort, if they do not try hard, they are reduced in their being. That is their own loss, because a reduced being is a lessened being and they benefit less from themselves.
Every artist is indeed an initiator, an active person. Contemplative artists don’t really exist, they are more the speculative kind. To be an artist means having a lot to do with work. I don’t know any important artist who does not work very hard, in fact is obsessed by it. He experiences anything else as depression, lack or even loss.
There is also a tendency to laziness. This is only human. Laziness, because we haven’t yet got a strong enough motivation because we have no important ideas. And I find that before one embarks on just anything, it is better to be simply lazy. We need physical peace, because we can’t be continually exhausting ourselves. But we meditate about things, grumble silently about a lot of things, or simply doze. Yes, I doze when I can’t work and it’s quite a fertile sort of dozing.
Image Courtesy: Arnulf Rainer
Art Research: Asmita Singh
Find out more about the Artist and his artworks:
https://www.arnulf-rainer-museum.at/en/
https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/arnulf-rainer-1813
https://www.moma.org/artists/4792
