The Geometrical God

Jonathan Meese returned to Hamburg, where he studied in the mid-1990s, for a large survey exhibition at Deichtorhallen. His visit was not, however, prompted by nostalgia for his student days: in late May the artist staged a performance that raged against the mechanisms of art education. On a slowly revolving platform at the centre of the exhibition, Meese delivered a monologue with occasional interjections from his 77-year old mother and his first collector, the painter Herbert Volkmann.

Jonathan Meese: Thank you. – Ah, ah, (has a drink of water). Oh, ah. Right. This evening is dedicated to four people. Firstly, the geometrical god. Secondly, Ezra Pound. Thirdly, my mother. And fourthly, Herbert Volkmann. Who’s the fifth player? It’s not me.
I’m here today to pay my respects to art as its own worldview. Art is not our worldview, it is its own. And this needs to be accepted in total humility. Absolutely and unshakeably. We have no place whatsoever in this game. The game is open. For the thing itself. For art. Art is free. It is total. It is beautiful and radical. The artist is not free. And that’s the beauty, when the artist has the pleasure to look into art’s hideous face. But he must leave his attitudes at home. He has to put aside his ego and his needs and his attitudes. The human individual has absolutely no place in this game. And here we see two people who have grown beyond themselves. Yes. And that is the essential thing in life and in the game. Art is child’s play. Anyone can master it, anyone whose instincts are intact. And who still thinks they might be capable of love, humility and friendship. But who thinks like that? Today’s players all get their reward before the game has even begun, right? I’m still playing the total game, I’ve been wounded by toads of one kind or another. But I didn’t get my fresh blood siphoned off at age 20 like most people. Yes, they held out their hands, all of them, at 20. Yes, and they all wanted the little treat. The little ticket to happiness. I always spurned it. Because the moment the little ticket comes, when your little arse is on the line and your pathetic little personal vision of life, the moment you hold out your hand for the little donation, there comes a machine, a machine comes, yes. And it comes very quickly. You. You hold out your hand for the little present and at the same time, the machine comes and shoots you in the eye. Yeah, it shoots you in the eye, really fast. You’re 20, 25, you’ve still got fresh blood and this machine siphons and siphons (slurping noises) and 99 per cent of your life has gone. 99 per cent. One per cent is all this machine leaves. One per cent. You see, this machine is cynical. Yes, this machine is totally cynical. But it only moves in if you’ve got fresh blood. My blood has been poisoned for ages. I’m not worth bothering with anymore. Yes, I’m past the point where this machine would come to fill me with its cynicism and its irony, right? [...] The rebellion of the thing itself must take place early: the committees that want something from you and want to make you small and weak, you have to give them the red card. And you have to poison your blood. Poison it. With names. With words. With concepts. With figures from the Stone Age and from history. To make this blood undrinkable, for any vampire. My blood is completely dead, poisoned. Which is why I can stand here and steer my vision forwards. Like Captain Ahab, I want to disappear into Moby Dick’s mouth and I want to call out to you as I go: Who’s next? Which of you is next? [...] I’m standing here, but it’s not about me. My mother is sitting here, but it’s not about my mother. Herbert Volkmann is sitting here, but it’s not about Herbert Volkmann. It’s about an intermediate entity created by them. Through respect, friendship, love and humility in the face of the ultimate power of art. We want to make art pathetic, make a mockery of it. Today’s artist is no more than a quirky creature that can be categorized according to privatisms, right? But the artist is the total power. The artist is an outlaw. And that’s a good thing. And art, if we let it, and it would do as it pleases anyway, will soon install a dictatorship. The neutral tyrant that will take us in its grip. In a stranglehold. And if we are capable of revolution, if our fresh blood wasn’t siphoned off too early, then we’ll be integrated into this new force and into the new power of a new era, right? But of course, if we bring our patheticness and our ideas and our ability and our skills to bear, then we are toads. Something that just has to be crushed underfoot. To gain a clear view of the ultimate action. From which we’re always being distracted. I’m fed up of people getting in my way. Blocking my view of the ultimate secret. Why should it be blocked? Why? This is not about me, and it’s not about you either. It’s about the thing itself. And you have to set your sights on the thing itself. Get it in the crosshairs. And there should be nothing in the way. And anyone who gets in the way is a goner. Three warnings are given, that’s the usual way, and anyone still sitting in the crosshairs then is a goner.
Why get into lengthy discussions? Anyone who wants to get in the way of art just has to disappear. This is not about my will. What I want is totally meaningless. I might want art. But what does art gain from that? It just says no. And then I want even more and it says no again. It’s not about my pathetic little fucking opinion. Or about how I want things. Or about how I see things. Or what I think of things. I have no opinion. I’m neutral. I fling things from me. And either art catches them, or it doesn’t. The more you throw, the more likely it seems that art will catch on. But even this is uncertain. Art is a game of roulette. I’ve been betting on red for 36 years and it always came up red. Is that my problem? Ask the machine. It’s the machine that guides and controls us, in its inalienable grace of having become a dictatorship of itself.
Why don’t we try a social experiment? And make the dictatorship of the thing itself the religion of the state. Why should politics be made by politicians? Why not by politics itself? Why do we want to dictate to freedom what it should and should not do? Maybe freedom doesn’t want us at all Maybe freedom’s vision is human-free? These are questions we don’t ask ourselves. I know other artists who have never in their entire lives asked themselves what status they have. What is an artist? An artist is a diffuse being. Abstract and nebulous. Like a child. That is the force. Having no status is the force. If I’m an art student, I have a status. I’m no longer capable of revolution. If I’m an art professor, I’m a bastard oppressor. Does that get me anywhere? Maybe in my pathetic little imaginings. In my pathetic little desires to oppress others. You have to ask people what they really want. Having the diffuse, nebulous status is decisive. [...] We can all talk about how what’s being said here is nonsense. But it’s a hundred times more charming than everything else that has ever been said about art, right? Because here, there is humility, friendship, respect and love. Art has the right to make me into a victim and a perpetrator at the same time. Who I am is completely irrelevant. I don’t get myself graded by any committees that want to decide what I am and what I’m not. That’s revolting. Human genitals are never obscene. Sexuality is never obscene. Cowardice, forcing the world to conform, arse-licking, making others fight for you, that’s obscene, perverse and revolting. We always reduce our own personal patheticness to laws for others. These laws don’t exist, because things formulate their own laws. But now I’ve got overexcited again. Which is why I just want to drink a glass of wine. Right, so, now it’s time to eat and I’ll hand over the microphone and if my mother or Herbert have something to say, they can say what they want. And what they have on their minds. Because it’s very important, and I’m going to fetch myself a chair.

Mother: ... well, I guess I have to talk, ahem, I’m more lumping it than liking being here today, because normally I don’t go on stage, nor am I usually at Jonathan’s performances at all, because I find them very hard to stomach. But Jonathan has put so much energy into these things that I’m afraid I had to do as he asked and now here I am sitting on this revolving stage. Jonathan is a phenomenon. Thank God he’s not my only child. [...] People have sometimes asked whether I’m proud to have an artist like him as my son. All I can say is: I’m not proud of it, because it’s just the way things are. What I am proud of is his immense energy. His willingness to give 150 per cent for what he does and to back it up financially and with all his strength. [...]

JM [...] I would like my mother, who was born in 1929, to talk about Salem, because that had the most profound shaping influence on me. Salem boarding school in southern Germany. Because I always wanted to be at Salem boarding school, during the war. I must say. And you were there. You’re 76 years old now. And you experienced one of the most extreme periods there has ever been. And you were sixteen, right? And I just want know about it, right? And I have the right and the obligation to somehow deal with this chapter, right? Salem. You didn’t send me there, why not?

M It was a coeducational boarding school. When I returned from Japan with you, you were still a very little boy and it wasn’t even an option. But as far as the other children were concerned, the drug problem was at a high point at the time and I said to myself that I can’t avoid my children taking drugs and if that’s the way it’s got to be then I don’t want the boarding school to call me one day saying we’re terribly sorry but your son or your daughter is addicted to drugs. If it has to happen, then I want it to happen where I can see it, so that I know that I wasn’t able to prevent it. And that’s why none of you went to boarding school.[...]

JM Well, I must say, in all honesty, it’s much heavier than that. You wanted me not to experience something you’ve experienced. And I’d like to know what you experienced, what I was not allowed to experience. Because I hold it against you that I wasn’t allowed to be there, because I love school uniforms, I love orders, regimented life, discipline, and I wasn’t allowed to experience all that. To this day, I’ve remained a dreamer because I didn’t go to boarding school. So I didn’t go through the character building and I didn’t get made strong for life. Which is why I’m only strong in art, right? Because life outside doesn’t interest me one iota. I’m not involved in what goes on outside. It doesn’t interest me. It scares me. It horrifies me. Only what happens here is important and decisive. [...] I’d like mummy to give another brief description. What happened in Salem between 1929 and 1945?

M Well, I don’t want to give an account of my time at boarding school. And anyway, I was born in 1929 and I wasn’t at Salem then. So you needn’t try to catch me out. […] It was the only school in the whole of Germany at the time, the only school in Nazi Germany that was not a Nazi school. The headmaster organized it very cleverly, he kept very quiet. We were in castles and old monasteries in the countryside and no one showed much of an interest. And so the Nazi period really did more or less pass us by, and at any rate I remember that in 1943, our boys shot at pictures of Hitler with air rifles. And if that had ever got out then not only would the entire staff have ended up in a concentration camp, but we probably would have too. And that’s what Jonathan is referring to and I don’t want to say any more about it. I went to this school from age seven to 19, and I’m very thankful that I wasn’t subjected to the Nazi influence that I would otherwise have been subjected to like every other child my age at a state school. And that’s all I want to say about it.

JM Sure. I certainly don’t want to look at these things illustratively. And I don’t want to see them documented, because that’s impossible. What I want to know is how did you manage to become such a dreamy figure, such a hermetic, powerful person. Why are you stronger than me? Why? Back then must be when all this was determined, so to speak. I’d like to know what everyday life was like for you. When did you get up? When did you shower, what was sport like? Yes, this is decisive. Because you’re hard, but soft at the same time. [...]

M Well, that has nothing to do with school. That has to do with genes, well, and a bit to do with the school. But you and me, we’re very different and that’s the way it should stay. And now I’d like to move on to a different topic.

JM No, we going to come back to this because it isn’t good enough. She’s been telling me this for years and it’s not enough.

M We’re not going to do this in public.

JM Oh yes we are! Yes. Because it’s important. My dear Herbert…

Herbert Volkmann: Yes, what’s on your mind.

JM We’ve know each other a very long time. You were my first collector. And back then I saw you and I knew that you were a god, a hermetic, Stone Age being, and that you weren’t for sale. Like all the pious pigs on this planet. You had something different going on.

HV I’ve had this little problem since childhood, that I can’t really distinguish between fiction and reality. And that automatically brought with it an urge to make pictures, painting etc., as well as an interest in film. And now, after a range of different phases of dealing with this phenomenon, it’s got to the stage that I’m trying to get to the point where I really won’t be able to tell the difference any more. Because I actually believe that for a process of painting, it represents something primal that takes place in the human brain. So I’m also quite strongly interested in dreams and things like that. It began when I was still a child. Me spending very long periods daydreaming, to the great dismay of many other people, my parents for example, because I didn’t say a word for 48 hours. Because I wasn’t really there.

JM But you once told me that your dreams are more extreme than everything Fassbinder ever created. And I take you at your word.

HV I didn’t say that at all, that’s not true.

JM OK, then it was wishful thinking on my part.

Translated by Nicholas Grindell