PD: Right. I came to the conclusion that you have to build it by something you do or think, or something you paint. When I was a boy, after my father died, his house was destroyed. I had to leave Mannheim, my hometown. I told you I felt uprooted. But maybe, more important, is a feeling that perhaps I was born with, that everybody is born with: that one is somehow floating between thoughts, between literature, speaking, continents, races, and so on. I think, more or less, each of us today, maybe more than a hundred years ago, has this feeling.
LT: Of floating.
PD: Of being homeless somehow. Everybody has to find out how to deal with this, how to get around it.
LT: When you’re painting the glass each day, do you feel in a place? Or do you feel like you’re floating with it?
PD: It’s very funny to say, it’s the only place and the only hours in my life when I really feel quiet. Maybe I don’t make the impression of being unquiet, but I am.
LT: You’re anxiety-ridden?
PD: Yes.
LT: You’ve had many shows in Germany, and since ’74, this is what you’ve exhibited. What’s the response been?
PD: At the first show, I saw people come in, and they looked around for half-a-minute, and said, “Oh, it’s all the same.” I remember a story the director of the Baden Baden Kunsthalle told me about a very famous German art critic, who came in and said to him, “Do you want to cheat me? Make fun of me?” That was 1975. But, at the same time, half of the people came and stayed three hours, looking at the work. When they left, they said, “I have to return tomorrow.” These are the two reactions. And from art critics — I really never had bad criticism. I don’t know why. Germans understand it somehow if they are familiar with art, opera, philosophy, ideas, and so on.
LT: You’re going against the grain of what other painters of your generation do and have done. How does that feel, to you?
PD: To me? It makes me happy.
LT: You don’t feel the need for their approval?
PD: No, but I have it from some. At my opening here, for instance. Wolfgang Laib came. He’s a very good artist. I was very happy he was here, because he’s the person who’s possibly closest to my ideas. He’s doing something else, though. By doing what I do, I have the distance to be friends with lots of artists, because we don’t touch each other. I really like seeing the work of other painters, other artists, my students, discussing, learning what they’re thinking about art. I’m very happy because I’m like a frog to them.
LT: A frog?
PD: A frog, or a dog, or something…
LT: Just a sort of odd creature to them.
PD: I saw a film of a Zen Buddhist master. The interviewer asked him, “What is your task?” He said, “To become a dog.” I think that’s a great idea. Because a dog has no intention of influencing anybody. I think you know what I mean.
LT: Yes, I do. There’s a joke going around: “In cyberspace, nobody knows if you’re a dog.”
PD: Today I told Lucio Pozzi a story of “the frog who fell into the milk.” The frog was afraid to drown. He was working with his feet, very fast, to keep his head above the milk. So he made butter and then he had an island he could sit on. That’s what we, I, do.
LT: I’m still fascinated by the idea that you paint the glass every day.
PD: 14 days after I began the glass, I got in contact with a woman who was very familiar with Zen Buddhism. She lived in a Zen cloister in Japan for three years. She told me that a tape I’d recorded off the radio was a Zen Buddhist ceremony. She told me exactly what it meant, and what she told me — it was like coming home. I’m not a Buddhist. I’m a Christian. But these ideas made me very happy — I learned that there are thoughts in the world which try to express what I try to express with the painting of the glass.
LT: The idea of doing a simple thing that shows you’re in the world, doing something every day, not more, not less?
PD: The Buddhists say everything has the same value. The grass and the king. I say, “That’s right. I feel that too.” But also, if you do it again and again and again, it’s worth the same, and the thing is new every day. It’s as worthwhile as anything else, but — it’s difficult for me to express — it’s also worthwhile to look at it again and again and again. The glass is the glass is the glass is the glass. Gertrude Stein!
LT: Why don’t you consider yourself a Buddhist?
PD: I’m European. I’d like to be a Buddhist, but it’s not my culture, it’s not my heritage. When I lived in New York in 1980, I thought I’d find the sources of Pop Art, and on every corner would be Pop Artists; I’d meet Warhol, which I could have, but I didn’t. When I was here, I realized I’m a European. I can do what I want to, but I will never be a New Yorker. I will never learn how to think like a New Yorker. I have to deal with that. There’s something else I wanted to tell you. Do you know the German painter Otto Dix?
LT: Yes, I do.
PD: The Nazis didn’t allow him to paint his social satires, so he had to paint landscapes, and he said, “I look to the landscape like a cow.” That’s good. I would say, “I look to the cat like a dog.” I try. I’m not good enough to really do it, but I try.
V is for Virtual
The Virtual President
Ordinary people get the news, they don’t make it. Mediacs report, repeat, spin, repeat and pummel non-ordinaries with self-serving rhetorical questions, and, except for dead people and “undecideds,” or the living dead, Americans are addicted. Media junkies, by definition, can’t stop: They need more of that blah-blah powder. Obama himself, the public recently learned, had to go cold turkey off his BlackBerry — and the world sympathized. He too needs instantaneity, to be connected, like most 21st-century characters.
Once the dramatic presidential race reached its historic conclusion, the news was suddenly less tantalizing. Instant by instant, the yawning gap widened. O’Reilly, Matthews, Olbermann, Blitzer et al. chewed over Obama’s cabinet picks, happily eviscerating Hillary Clinton again, but their hyperbole only exacerbated the emptiness left at election’s end. Like Bush, the mediacs had become lame ducks too.
The man who had just won the globe’s most visible job dominated America’s attention. President-elect Barack Obama: Intelligent, witty, knowledgeable, eloquent, telegenic, photogenic, aurally pleasing. Gone, the faulty neologisms of the past eight years. Gone, the irrationality of God-directed foreign policy. Gone, the ramblings and the wacky syntax.
Obama’s timely intervention into the abyss began on November 15, just 11 days after the election, when he streamed on YouTube from his website. The video opened on a modified version of the presidential seal, zooming out to reveal the words change.gov (his website’s handle), and underneath, the office of the president-elect. Then it scrolled down to the approximated presidential seal again, with these words beneath: Your weekly address from the president-elect. November 15th, 2008.