Before I meet Hermann, we share a brief exchange via email. Once we have arranged to meet he asks me, “What do you look like? Or will you have a red rose in your left hand?”

We meet in the late afternoon at the Café Eiles in Vienna, near City Hall. As soon as I walk in I spot him cowering at a small table opposite the entrance, wearing a grey shirt, green slacks and sneakers. The waiter arrives and I order a small beer. Matthias orders juice. He eyes me and levels with me, anticipating my question.

“A couple of years ago, I wanted to quit smoking,” he says. “It didn’t do me good and when I drank, I always wanted to smoke, so I decided to give up both – and I am a very happy not-drinker and not-smoker.”

Matthias has piercing blue-grey eyes which are set inside a stubbly, trim face. His body is lean and relaxed. He’s been compared to an action figure and it’s evident from his photos that he is attentive toward his appearance.

“I go to the gym about four times a week,” he says, though he immediately tries to renege on this and says that lighting makes everything more impressing.

There is an air of spring about him, a freshness and candor that distinguishes Matthias from most celebrities and certainly photographers. Part of this nonchalance may stem from the fact that he is no longer the director of Vienna’s highly prestigious, highly combative Secession – a self-proclaimed Exhibition Hall for Contemporary Art, it was founded in 1897 by Gustav Klimt, Josef Hoffmann, Koloman Moser, Joseph Maria Olbrich, Otto Wagner – in order to break away from the stuffy salons of fin-de-siècle Europe and create a critical bottom-up approach to contemporary art. The Secession later included such names as Oskar Kokoschka and Carl Moll and Klimt himself was the first president of the group until 1905. Nearly a hundred years later, from 1999 to 2006, it was Hermann. When I ask him if he misses this job, he vehemently shakes his head and gives a little chortle.

“I hate to travel,” he says, folding his hands in his lap. “So I wasn’t exactly perfect for that part of the job. I am quite content now with my work and my life and am happy that there are no more Biennales, that there’s no more advertising to do. Where I go, if I go, and why, are all up to me.”

Hermann, despite a few forays into photographing other men, remains the sole protagonist of his work..

“In the beginning it was the most handy,” he explains. “I was always there. I didn't have to go through the ordeal of asking other people if I could take pictures of them. The most interesting thing, of course, is that in this way object and subject fall together in one person, one mind, one body.” He takes a sip from his glass and looks at me to make sure I can follow him. “Power relations, which always exist when it come to photos of humans, are much more interesting I think when the photographer, the photographed and the first public are one person. Of course, it's also a question of control. Controlling the image, but also controlling the more general output.” He gives me a big smile.

At this point he turns the tables and starts asking me questions, something he does frequently throughout our conversation. It is very engaging. At different intervals we rise to compare height (I’m shorter), I talk about my parents and he talks about his mother’s death. I learn that he met his partner, Bernhard (also an arts professor in Vienna but at the “rival” school), 24 years ago while he was at ballet school – Bernhard was doing the costumes. They’ve been together ever since. We talk about dancing (he later broke his foot and went on to art school) and return to the topic of appearance and physique.

“I’ve always seen my becoming a ballet dancer as a rebellion against my rather bourgeois family life. Ballet as a possible profession for men was non-existent – as it is in every other upper-middle class European household – and I assume it was the corporeal aspect that did it for me. I didn’t have the guts to become a hustler, so I became a dancer. Of course there does seem to be a strong urge from down below, from my soul I suppose, to express things via my body, to emphasize the body in ways you cannot with words - and ballet does fulfill that need quite well. I feel that the work I am doing now is quite a direct continuation of my life as a dancer, only by other means. Also, I am definitely too old to hustle the streets, even if I had the guts for it now.”

I nod, pondering what he has just said. He eyes me and then says cautiously, “You’re quite alright, you know. Maybe your stomach could use some work.” He pats his stomach to emphasize his point and I take another chug from my beer.

Hermann’s work is at once comic and primitive, superficial and frank. Like a one-man circus, he gives us a pass to a freak show of the self, often – but not always –portraying parts of his self through a landscape that is convoluted and ephemeral. A recurring theme is the hotel and the all-purpose utility of checking in and checking out. In the results of these bawdy sessions (such as we are allowed to see) Hermann invites us, his voyeurs, to question the boundary between public and private. After all a hotel room is nothing more than a private space which, for a fee, is made accessible to the public and whose makeup is essentially repeated in room after room as standard issue, down to the Bible in the drawer.

“I really started with these works when I was traveling a lot being the President of the Vienna Secession and never had enough time for being at my studio in Vienna,” he says. “The hotel room, of course, has been a constant source of inspiration for many artists: the anonymity, the idea of melting pot, the layering – every single guest adds another layer to the identity of the space. Queering that space seems to be a great, and even safe, thing to do.”

Provided we are capable of gleaning an answer to this query (in this regard he is not about to help us out), there is to be found a sure sense of humor and playfulness in it as Hermann toys with his audience to find its ground. Who are we supposed to identify with in his photographs, the spectating camera or Hermann himself?

“Why not identify with the camera and the subject?” he suggests with a little laugh. “That is what makes photographing the self or one’s own body so alluring, no?”

A renewal of this idea of privacy has also drawn Matthias to some less private public spaces, most recently the Tuscan countryside around his home. The daring glare of his earlier work seems less important now and has given way to a more natural, less artificial absurdity.

A question presents itself, how erotic Hermann finds his own work and, above all, whether or not it is supposed to be erotic or just kinky and funny. He pauses.

“I think there are too many different layers in my work for it to qualify as erotic in a classical sense,” he says finally. “There might be some aspects one can find erotic but as soon as one looks closer, boom! – it’s not anymore. It either becomes pornographic, or boring in regard to arousal, or both. At its best, I do hope my work combines all three aspects: erotic, kinky and funny. Humour is a great means to get the beholder to enter art, but then it must be turned over, as in good clownery; your laughter should get stuck in your throat when you look closer. Eroticism is something I personally am not so interested in. I’d rather go for pornography. Erotic art gets you in a special mood, which is still socially acceptable, while pornography aims directly at giving you a raging hard-on, which I prefer.”

In 1999, Matthias became infected with HIV through a broken condom, which, in turn, had a large impact on his work. It became more and more morbid as he began to feed off of the negative energy suddenly surrounding him. Eventually this plunged him into a self-imposed deprivation and grief, and when he finally resurfaced he wanted to impart his feelings of despair, his trials and, above all, his mastering of them, to others. Beyond that, Hermann admits that his status will always affect his work and impinge on the body of it. It would be hard for it not to when the second focus of Matthias’ work, and often the sole one, is his penis.

Lawrence Rinder, Dean of Graduate Studies at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco and former curator of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, wrote this in his introductory essay to Hermann’s book Hotel 2001: “Sometimes it’s hard to tell Matthias Hermann and his cock apart. He’s so cock-like, pert and amusing. And his cock acts just like a silly guy in a hotel room. The two of them seem to have a wonderful time together. It’s rare to see such shamelessness. What an instructive performance!”

For some, Rinder’s statement may seem very candid and personal, but that’s the nature of the beast, says Hermann.

“One cannot do this kind of work and expect people to talk about the formal aspects of the works alone. My favorite story is how in the Mapplethorpe trials, art historians defending Mapplethorpe were trying to do so by completely avoiding to talk about what we see and what is depicted, but talked solely about the symmetry and formal beauty and elegance of let’s say a fisting photo. This is my work and for me there is a certain distance between me and the work or the body I use to illustrate my ideas. That might be difficult to understand, I know, but a secret is only a secret as long as nobody knows. As soon as you tell more than two people, it’s common knowledge. There is no space for secrecy here.”

I ask him how it makes him feel in his role as teacher to know that most every one of his 60-odd students knows the details of his anatomy. His eyes twinkle.

“Teaching is not so different from performing in a way,” he says plainly. “One is under constant inspection, so it does not bother me that they know what is to be found in my pants.”

At a meeting with three of his students, C Michael Gangemi from Chicago, told me that this lack of secrecy was refreshing. Another, Georg Petermichl, from Upper Austria, told me that when Hermann was voted in as Chair of the Institute of Art and Photography, people had been ready for a change: “We had a lot of hearings and his was one of the very, very best and he was such an interesting person even in this simple context of a hearing.” Gangemi agreed.

“I find Matthias much more inspiring. He wants to know what you’re doing and why you’re doing it, he asks loads of questions and he’s very interested in what you want to do and he’ll tell you flat out if he thinks that what you’re doing isn’t working. From my previous experience I didn’t get much feedback at all, so this was a welcome change.”

Petermichl added that he felt Hermann’s position to be quite important in the art world of Vienna.

“Vienna is this very static town and there are a lot of traditions regarding gender and the like. [Matthias] brings this extra quality to the table, this circumspection, always, which is very important because there are a lot of art styles and movements that he fits into with his kind of work, but he also tries to convey a feeling of context to broaden students’ perspective. We are at the beginning of our careers and it’s very important that we have a sort of a leader, although he would never say anything like that about himself; he’s just engaged in this position.”

In his experience as an artist and as president of the Secession, Matthias is able to help his students in a way that doesn’t just develop their work but also helps them to market. Linda Reif, from Vienna, told me that he does this strictly in a back alley, cloak-and-dagger fashion.

“I once went to my mailbox at the academy and there was an envelope with application forms inside it for a video festival. It was from Matthias. I think he wanted to tell me, ‘Hey, I think your work would be good there.’ And I hear that from a lot of people, like, ‘Matthias sort of told me that I should send my stuff there, or show it there.’ But he’s very much in the background in that aspect because of the competition among students.”

By being both nude model and sculptor, Matthias, like a sideshow streaker, flits back and forth between forefront and background. He is simultaneously the Wizard of Oz and the man behind the curtain, pulling levers (or, in this case, pushing a button). The things he confides in us, the things we may confide in him, the range of topics he overtly addresses and the questions he asks us are all part of his persona and add to his allure. There is more to him than meets the eye and while his body, his penis, are the focus of his work, the cogs and wheels turning add up to more than just blatant exhibitionism and slapstick (no pun intended). His message, as with Duchamp’s urinal sculpture, Warhol’s soup cans screens and Pollock’s splatter paintings and so much modern and post-modern art, comes not in the form of “Here’s what I see”, but in the form of a question asked to the viewer: “What do you see?”

The sun is beginning to set outside the Café Eiles and Matthias has a plane to catch. We end the interview and he excuses himself to go to the men’s room. I have to go, too, but can’t quite bring myself to go in directly after him. I think about penis envy and whether I should have carried a red rose in with me. On the street, we say goodbye and Matthias gives me a big hug. He walks toward his car and I hop on my bicycle and ride off. While riding I’m pensive and giddy.

At one point during the interview I told Matthias that I wasn’t going to ask him the old cliché, if he thought of himself as a gay artist. He, however, had immediately jumped into the question. “I am!” he said, smiling and raising his hands. “As much as I am a gay gardener, a gay reader, a gay consumer. But I am also a lot more...”

Dustin Cosentino
Published in DNA #93 (Australia), October 2007