LT: We were talking earlier about when you were teaching in 1968 and ’69, of the effect of that time and its politics on your work and thought.
PD: I was 35, a young teacher, and I was interested in the ideas of my students. At first we appeared to be on different sides. After some time, my students learned that we had some of the same interests. Their idea was that painting wasn’t necessary anymore, at least not as long as the revolution and the development of society didn’t succeed. As long as that struggle was going on, you had to do that work — revolution — and not paint. When revolution fulfilled its aims, its goals, you could paint again, make art again; but then, it wouldn’t be necessary anymore because people wouldn’t have any frustrations.
LT: Could you ever imagine an absence of all frustration?
PD: At that time I didn’t really believe it, but I thought it was a nice idea, it was a good idea. A human idea. We have lots of human ideas that never come to reality. But it’s necessary to have ideas. I respected their ideas. I tried not to paint anymore, but I couldn’t.
LT: How long did you try not to paint?
PD: I realized I couldn’t stop painting, that my desire was too big. I tried to find a way to show that I must paint, that there are people in the world who have this desire and cannot deny it.
LT: So you’re making a continuous statement by painting this glass. No matter what the social conditions are, someone might just have to paint? Even if other people think it’s no longer necessary, some will still need to do it? It’s interesting that you’ve chosen to paint an object that’s considered a necessity.
PD: The object, the glass, is a simple, simple thing. An abstract painting is something much more difficult to understand. You have to have a certain education to understand it.
LT: If it were just one glass, I’d agree with you. But when you produce and show hundreds of them, it does become abstract and conceptual. It raises many issues. You can think about the glass as a kind of container of ideas, you can think about the glass being half full or half empty, a kind of philosophical statement. The project’s also about art history — painters have been painting still lifes for a very long time.
PD: Yes.
LT: There’s the way you demonstrate your desire for painting, and there’s also an emphasis on the artisanal quality of painting, because you have to be able to know how to paint glass; that’s not easy.
PD: It’s easy. That’s not the problem.
LT: It’s not a problem?
PD: It’s just to look at it, to paint what you see.
LT: Do you think anybody could do that?
PD: Yes. I think so.
LT: Have you ever taught a class how.
PD: How to paint a glass? No. They can do it if they want, but they don’t. They see it as a project which is so special they don’t imitate it. I’m really lucky to have this project…
LT: Because nobody else wants to do it.
PD: Right. When I began the project, Berswort, who is a famous gallerist in Germany, saw it. He’s a very intelligent man. He said, “Beware of somebody who steals your idea, maybe he does it more intelligently or better.” I thought, yes, maybe he’s right. But nobody tries to imitate me. The glass — if you do it once, everybody says, “OK, how nice, what is he doing?” But if you do it a lot of times — do you know the game, saying “table, table, table” a hundred times?
LT: The word becomes garbage.
PD: Yes, it becomes something else, it’s no longer the word. I think that’s the same with the glass. Again, if you’re trying to do something very simply only to show that you love to paint, it’s good if the glass after a time goes out of the painting; then its meanings and its philosophy, and so on, become apparent.
LT: Do you think that if you look at it long enough, the painting becomes empty?
PD: If you do it a hundred times, people will ask themselves, “If he does it a hundred times, it cannot be to portray the glass. It must be something else. And what is it?” It’s just what I see, and I don’t see a glass, I see a painting. I see the work of a painter.
LT: In our first, lost conversation, we discussed seriality; Warhol, Pop Art. Was that an influence on your thinking? Were you thinking about Walter Benjamin’s ideas about photography?
PD: When I started, in the ’50s and the beginning of the ’60s, the Abstract Expressionists, Jackson Pollock, reigned over the whole art world. You were asked, “What do you paint?” If you said, “I’m a realistic painter,” they went away.
LT: Nobody was interested.
PD: You were not an artist anymore if you painted realistically. Then in Venice in 1964, at the Biennale, I saw Pop Art for the first time, and I was happy, you can’t imagine. It was quite late. I didn’t know the work before — and I loved Jasper Johns, Oldenburg. Great, great experience. But it had come from America, which I adored since I was a child. They were great things that Warhol did. I think he was a great artist. Then, on the other hand, there’s On Kawara and Opalka. Some people compare me with them. Opalka writes millions of numbers. It’s something else because On Kawara and Opalka are working with signs. I’m working with reality. My idea was only to paint something in the way painters did 35,000 years ago, say they painted elephants. Then, when the work was finished, it was forgotten. They had to do the painting again and again and again. So it was one, then five, then a thousand. But the idea was not a series. The idea was just a lifetime, doing something in your lifetime, doing it with concentration, and showing that it’s not necessary to change the reason, the motive.
LT: I remember you said, not changing the object, your desire in doing that, related to your history. Having been 12 when World War II ended, you felt uprooted, unstable. Your father was dead, shot at the Russian front. You were in your mid-forties when you decided to paint a glass forever. Before that you felt you were wandering around in your work.
PD: Maybe I couldn’t think so simply as to get to this point. After a while I figured out this idea about floating and building a home, not by building a certain place, which I did. When I was 29 I built a little house by myself.
LT: Where?
PD: Near Hamburg. In the countryside. It was cheaper then to do that. I spent one year of my life at it. I learned this was not the way to get home or to get a home.
LT: It wasn’t the physical place.