MH: Yes, especially in its conceptualization and while I'm taking the pictures. That's something I really like...when the viewer has the sense that the artist enjoyed what he was doing. Later, in publications or exhibitions, my feelings are no longer quite so much at the forefront, since the work becomes quite distanced from me as a person - not least because of the many steps it takes to get it published. Some photographs and contexts are actually rather "embarrassing" for me, which, at least in my case, results in rather the opposite of a turn-on.

ML: What do you mean by "embarrassing"?

MH: Embarrassing? It's quite banal, really: when I'm standing around at an opening and people are able to see things or parts of me that are generally - at least in public - not shown here; even in my case there is that which might be called a natural sense of shame (regardless of whether it's really natural or a societal construct), and that's never fully disappeared. I suppose I must have a certain tendency toward exhibitionism - but since it's directed into my work I feel no need to run around with my zipper undone in everyday life, too.

ML: You have an ironic way of dealing with certain normed images of masculinity and femininity. Still, isn't it also important for you to raise consciousness about minorities through your work, to make a plea, as it were, for greater openness, acceptance, and public awareness?

MH: "To raise consciousness about minorities" - that sounds a little too much like an adult continuing education class - it's not quite how I'd like to have my work seen. An important jumping-off point for my work is the attempt to create a self-assured and, above all, self-evident visibility; if my work strives for anything, it's not assimilation, but pride in being different. All that "gender identity" stuff and its accompanying external classification codes are constantly being re-evaluated these days - in an interview not long ago Dolce & Gabbana noted that fashion had so appropriated gay (life)style that many gays now prefer to wear suits. In an age when even heteros have started to shave their balls, gays have to come up with something new... - because there is also clearly a kind of pleasure that stems from being different. I'm aware that in this regard I've held onto a rather old-fashioned way of thinking, one that has its roots in a pretty fixed division between hetero/bi- and homosexual. In today's urban youth culture the boundaries truly do seem to be more permeable - whether that's just a passing fashion or whether these things are actually undergoing a profound change, I can't tell.

ML: Like many other artists, you consciously work with current trends made manifest, for example, by advertising. Nowadays, through youth and pop culture, the edges of the field of what's considered art are constantly being transgressed, or "fringed", and this form of overlapping is increasingly being made a part of the work of many artists. Do you see yourself as belonging to this "movement"? Are you a reflection of it, and does it inform your work? Because especially if, as you say, the gay (life)style has been appropriated by the fashion industry, it must certainly be difficult for you to come up with a fitting form of (self) presentation. Or are you more concerned with marking out your own territory in the context of your work?

MH: I try not to set myself apart from this phenomenon, but I'm more interested in making it visible. How different realms influence each other, bring each other about - that's something I think is important. I have some difficulty with this "transgression", or "fringeing", as you call it. For example, I'm not sure whether a museum becomes a more lively place by virtue of the fact that you can order tea or drink a beer there now. I don't know that a museum has to be, or ought to be, a lively place at all. I often find the desperate struggle for pop and all this running on at the mouth about "real life" on the part of certain artists and curators abundantly distasteful - does every other exhibition hall today really have to look like a bad '70s club?

ML: In your artistic beginnings your work was politically motivated and during that period you did work whose subject clearly revolved around questions of homosexual identity. In which direction has your focus shifted today? What strategies can you think up as a medium for your message - what do they look like?

MH: Ultimately, I have no "message" I'm trying to illustrate through my work. ONE aspect of my work is still the question of gay identity - although I now see that question as something much more highly differentiated than I did a few years ago; among other things I see it in terms of the distinction between gay/queer which has been much-discussed over the past couple of years. Early on, my work could easily have been read as a kind of ritualized coming-out; but now I've really put all of that behind me.... I wouldn't want it to be reduced to that, because I think (and hope) that the text pieces, for instance, cover a much broader territory.

ML: I'm convinced that our behavior is conditioned, down to our minutest gestures, toward a counterpart; in other words, that we have developed a behavioral apparatus that precisely regulates how we present ourselves in various situations and how we are perceived. To me it seems that you take up that idea of observation and being observed and that you try to break it down into its collective mechanisms.

MH: I'm especially interested in those moments in which we briefly slip out of the role expected of us and into a comical or absurd situation, the kind in which we might not necessarily wish to be seen by others, minor indelicacies. Or when, through text/image combinations (and through color and light), one is transported into a glamorous state that (unfortunately) has little to do with daily life.

ML: This "slipping out of the role", as you call it, but also those moments of being caught in revealing situations of producing ourselves which we normally - if at all - only try out by ourselves, alone in front of a mirror - these seem to be extremely intimate and, for lack of a better word, intensely human. In this regard your work not only has its ironic side, it also has the potential for allowing the viewer to identify with it through its "recognition effect". Is that an aspect, apart from the question of "gay identity", you're trying to focus on to a greater degree today?

MH: The question of self-portrayal is one everyone has to come to terms with on his own - that having been said, it may, perhaps, be possible to push the boundaries of what is acceptable in terms of portrayal through the use of specific exemplary images. The author of a Robert Mapplethorpe biography claimed in her book that Mapplethorpe must have suffered from low self-esteem because he published a self-portrait showing himself with a whip stuck up his ass. While I can probably approximate the process by which she reached that conclusion, I find her kitchen psychology rather grotesque and hopelessly antiquated. It's important to establish what role taboos play, what purpose they (should) fulfill, and who, finally, stands to gain something from them.

ML: When a camera is pointed our way our behavior becomes especially conscious: we automatically begin to pose. Your work has a certain tragi-comic side - we're all familiar with the desire to appear in the "right" light, but it doesn't always happen. Is part of what you're trying to achieve in your photography - and here the medium of photography itself plays an important role - a clarification of such moments?

MH: In portrait photography, in particular, there is supposedly what is called "the right moment" - but the others, the wrong moments, so to speak, are every bit as interesting. In snapshot photography, which is quite topical today, they're after a kind of "in between"; I try for that, too, but do it via classical studio photography. I'm interested in the spaces in between, where something is at a tipping point or threatens to reach that point - the drag queen's makeup is miserable, her wig is sliding off, and she's unshaven; the leather type looks fierce, as we expect him to, but the text places him in the context of his mother. Leather types normally don't have (public) mothers and yet mothers are still one of the big themes, not only for homos. Throughout, the series is about displacement of context and meanings and I try, through the use of found texts, to install a further plane, one which has an influence over what's portrayed in the photo. To a certain degree it's important to know who said something (that Greta Garbo, for example, considered herself the origin of women's liberation because she never wore a bra, p. ). For this reason I've included the sources.

ML: You use text as well as image citations. When you read, do you do so with images in mind, or do you just snatch up things that may later inspire you to a picture?

MH: Sometimes I use citations that simply catch my eye for the text pieces; most of the time, though, they're researched - for instance, I've worked through the last 15 years of Interview magazine. I reached a point where I couldn't concentrate on any text without looking for usable tidbits. In the case of some pieces, I had the idea for the photo first and then looked for a specific quotation.

ML: I wouldn't have thought that there might be images for which the picture idea was there first - the image/text correlations are perfect. How does the process of inspiration work for you - do you continually return to existing images, or do you depend more on your own fantasy or your acting talent?

MH: Even if I'm reacting to existing material, that requires "fantasy", as you call it, and acting ability as well - it's always an adaptation. In this particular series there are a few pieces in which I quite openly cite well-known works of other photographers (Mapplethorpe, Herb Ritts, Bruce Weber, p. ), and the texts underscore that - I steal from everybody I possibly can. But I also go back to my own earlier ideas for images and vary them. At some point the possibilities are simply exhausted, every part of the body has been photographed before. As to your puzzlement over my occasionally first having the ideas for the images - that seems odd to me - why should the correlations be any less perfect if the image is there first? Are you speaking as a text-fixated theorist?

ML: My puzzlement probably has something to do with the fact that I don't do artistic work myself - my way of working with art has its expression first and foremost on a theoretical or critical level. For me, it's much easier to imagine someone creating an image while starting with a text...with every piece of literature as an inspiration to create a picture of what's been described. This is much easier than to imagine the opposite, the creation of an image to which a text is later affixed. In your recent work do you see yourself as sharing proximity, in terms of content, with other very prominent contemporary artists such as Tracey Moffatt, who likewise made the connection between image and text (or whose texts have a profound effect on a [re-]interpretation of the images) in her much-exhibited series "Scarred for life"?

MH: When I started with the textpieces in '96 I didn't know Moffatt's work; I first saw it at the Biennale in Venice in '97 and was somewhat taken aback.... But it's so often the case that certain topics and problem areas are kind of in the air and are taken up by a broad range of people and groups at once; since artists don't act out of a vacuum, certain parallels are bound to occur - besides the fact that originality, in and of itself, is no longer the main thing today, as we all know. To me it seems relevant in more than formal terms that the texts in my text pieces are photographed together with the image and not copied in afterward; this naturally enhances the performance character of the work.

ML: Do you feel that your work with images has a performance character in other ways than that? Or is it more about a pastiche, a re-creation and de-familiarization and, in this context, the art of (self-)production? How would you define the difference between performance and mise-en-scène?

MH: I wouldn't differentiate between the two very much. The setting and the various characters are, of course, quite consciously staged; the photography itself, however, has a strong performance character - I'm performing something for the camera. That's something that's especially present in the work with sexual content - the various states of arousal, the various poses - a performance closed to the public, from which a photo survives as a kind of relic....

ML: That opens up a new way of looking at your work, one that points, for instance, toward Viennese Aktionismus. Schwarzkogler, in particular, planned his "actions" specifically for the camera. But in the case of Brus, Mühl, and Nitsch, too, the photograph - alongside films and manifest treatises - acts as an important (time) document, if we are to speak of the actions. Do you see any connection between your own work and this genre?

MH: Naturally one can make the connection to the actionists. The latent Catholic, less-than-open-climate here in Vienna apparently encourages actionistic potential and pleasure in (supposed) provocation. Historically speaking, the U.S. West-coast artists are equally important to me - their manner of dealing with sexual content seemed less stuffy to me than that of the Viennese actionists, whose work tends to emit a kind of sour, sweaty smell.

ML: Tell me about your new magazine SLUTS, the first edition of which recently appeared. Whose voice do we hear there, and to whom does the magazine speak?

MH: First and foremost it's my voice - what did you think?

ML: I would have thought that in SLUTS you speak for (and, perhaps in part, against) "the gay community" or "gay artists"; that "SLUTS" speak, that is to say, those who would like to be known as such, or those who are so designated but aren't, in fact, but whose artistic interventions are belittled as "swinish"...that you provide those who are part of the business of art with what they "always wanted to know but were afraid to ask". Who is your public?

MH: In the first place, I work for myself, for the satisfaction of my own desire.... And as far as public goes - it's more or less anyone who sees the work, regardless of how he or she reacts to it. I don't have a specific target group.

ML: As an artist who is part of the whole business of the marketing of art you can't divorce yourself entirely from the question of reception. Do you worry about being "misread" when you begin to lose - at least partial - control of your work by virtue of its circulation?

MH: I'm not afraid of any of the diverse contextual tie-ins that might be established, and I always find it interesting if something I've done works in another context as well; but, as you say, that can naturally only be directed to a certain extent and, in the end, the viewer can do with the piece as he pleases.

ML: Isn't it important to you to distance yourself from certain contexts, i.e. pornography - to have your work recognized as ART?

MH: To start with, pornography is a question of definition.... If one has decided that something is pornographic because it can be used for jerking-off, then my work is something that can only foot that bill to a certain degree. Which is not to say that I have anything against that use of my work, on the contrary, I'd be rather flattered. When a piece attempts to leave the field/frame of reception known as art, then it should be able to stand on its own in another field. For me that's a big problem with many of the social/sociological (art) projects, that oftentimes they only work via artistic reception (Marc Dion's examinations of insects in the jungle, for example, aren't up to scientific standards and therefore can "only" be art, see Babias/Bauer, Kunstforum, vol. 121, p. 455).

ML: Apart from SLUTS, you recently published a series of "booklets", not as documentation of your oeuvre, but merely as a forum for presenting some new work, like, for instance, the hotel series. Do you see publishing as an alternative to exhibiting, and, if so, in what way?

MH: All the publications I make have nothing to do with work catalogues, it's true. They're more like artists' books. I see them as independent pieces of work and feel them to be at least on the same level as the photographs on display in exhibitions. I say at least; possibly they're even more important to me because of their greater independence. Through the publications (which are, for the most part, financed through my photography work for advertising) I can achieve a certain independence from the art market; I can create my own publicity without having to mess around with gallery owners and curators (p. ).



Maren Lübbke, 1998

Published in Textpieces 1996-1998