| Julian Frederick: Matthias, your new book Hotel V is one of a series in which you make photographs, largely of yourself, in hotel rooms around the world. What is it about hotels that attracts you to them? Matthias Herrmann: They are both public and private. Hardly any other space combines these two features as much as a hotel room. They have the stories of hundreds of people inscribed in their sheets (and mattresses!), but one does still feel that a room is truly theirs for a night. How many dramas have happened in each room before I enter it to add my mini-drama…. How much sex, love, and hate have those walls seen? There are layers and layers of history in each hotel room, like in history books. And every single layer is present in my photos, both as a backdrop and as the content of the photos. JF: So you’re participating in an orgy with history: fondling the ghosts of guests gone by, then becoming one yourself. Text is also an important element of your work; it even occasionally serves as a lynchpin for the meaning of a photograph. MH: The role of the hotel room and of text is not so different: both add further, hidden layers to what we actually see in the photograph. The texts and the authors of the texts contaminate the photograph and the person depicted (and vice versa); their history is forced onto the body displayed, like an invisible tatoo. Most of the text I use is by “famous” people, like art stars, or hollywood stars, or pop stars (Madonna is a constant source). Much has been written about the queering of space (in this case the supposed privacy of the hotel room) which is quite an ephemeral idea. The question seems to be whether the space returns to its original, unblemished straightness once the queer element has physically left. Or does the queerness stay with the space like a stain? How does that apply to text? If you put a quote by George W. Bush in a photo of a faggot posing in a Tuscanian landscape with a raging hard-on, will that have any effect on the perception of Bush? Probably not, but I guess it’s worth a try. Especially as the invisible stands in such high regard with the Born Again Christians… JF: Yes, your text is very aggressive socially and politically, but also sometimes very referential. For instance the note next to you in one photograph reads “I’m not a person today. I’m an object in an artwork. It’s about emptiness.” It’s like Magritte and David Letterman met Andrea Zittel in a dark alley and beat her senseless with a dildo. Sexuality, art history, and queer theory collide in a hilarious supernova. MH: Yeah, it’s all about referentiality. That IS what makes art interesting to me. I don’t get your Andrea Zittel reference, but I could imagine a nice menage a trois of Letterman, Andrea Fraser, and William Burroughs in one of Zittel’s tents. After they went for a guided hike, those three could beat themselves up with their giant dildos. Oh, would they have fun. Burroughs would then use a flesh-colored butt plug instead of an apple and restage his William Tell shooting his wife with Fraser. Andrea would give her Kippenberger talk while waiting to be shot at. But I’d insist that Burroughs does hit the butt plug and not at Andrea in this case. No deaths this time. MH: In a solo show in Vienna in 1995 I showed a really beautiful asshole triptych. My dealer overheard the guy responsible for all federal Austrian arts funding comment with disgust: “that’s HIMSELF,” as if every other asshole were morally more acceptable. I reckon it was then that it became clear I can do whatever I wanted, and that nothing could possibly be too personal anymore. “Outing” myself as HIV positive was a further step, though. Strangely I never needed to out myself as being queer, even though somebody told me the other day that an elderly lady asked, after flipping through all my books, whether I might eventually be a homosexual… JF: Are you afraid of death? Do you think gay men in general have a different relationship to the inevitable than the public at large? MH: I love my life, so I’ll be happy to go on for a while. Every now and then, especially when I feel low, I think of how lucky I am to be alive and be well, and that I need to be grateful for that and make the most out of it. I tend to not to be afraid of death, but of dying. It seems too big a procedure to imagine, especially premature death, when too many things have to be left open. On the other hand I had a burst appendix three years ago and was on the verge of dying and that wasn’t that bad. I was just slowly fading away, I didn’t realize then how sick I really was. If my partner hadn’t dragged me to the hospital, I would have just gone without much hassle. It seems to me that gay men today are more afraid of aging than of dying, which of course was different some time ago, before protease inhibitors…. JF: I personally feel that gay culture has lost something profound in the last thirty years, the fear of death notwithstanding. My generation missed the both the clandestine, back-alley culture pre-1950 and the explosion of “pride” and resulting bacchanalia post-Stonewall. What do you think of gays today? MH: I just watched Queer as Folk on DVD and realized (again!) that I have absolutely nothing to do with what is portrayed there as contemporary urban gay life. Although it might be an exaggerated depiction, it seems to be true in its core. But my distance doesn’t mean that I despise it. Foucault once remarked in an interview shortly before his death that he missed the secrecy and camaraderie of gay life (and sex!) in the 50s. But let’s not forget that this life”style” was available only to a very small portion of homosexuals: those who were daring enough to submit to what could be a very dangerous and threatening zone. Not every gay man is a Genet. So I am grateful that gay lib opened up many different possibilities for following generations. That so many gays today seem more bourgeois than suburban middle class families might be sad, but who’s to throw stones here? Why should gays be any more interesting than anybody else: just because they fuck men? Julian Frederick |