Günter Brus Quotes

22 Sourced Quotes

I covered the walls of both basement rooms with Milino, a cheap substitute for canvas, stretched string backwards and forwards across the rooms and attached widths of packing-paper to them, so that they reached down to the floor and as far as the walls that I wanted to paint. I wanted to create a labyrinth which would somehow help to prevent a compositional idea from establishing itself all too quickly. I had the idea of working on all the walls pretty well at the same time, as if they were one large painting completely surrounding me. By constantly wandering in the labyrinth I sought to realise a form of de-composition.

Günter Brus
I want to cover all areas that can be depicted visually. This ranges from fairytales to attempts to enter the abstract and view oneself as a social outcast or someone struggling to stay alive.

Günter Brus
I think my actions, like those of my associates, were possible in this form only in vienna. Our heritage was the vienna secession and Austrian expression, and that, along with the violent disapproval of our work, explains not only its frequently overwrought and aggressive character, but also its radical psychological insights.

Günter Brus
The seven dwarfs were devastated when an eighth joined them one morning before they went to work. He went straight into their house, took little plates and cutlery out of his waistcoat, grabbed the mining tools and was the first dwarf to set off for work. Caught off-guard by his cheeky but honest manner, the others followed, angry because he was showing them the way along the path they took every day and surprised when they found he had turned into dark grotto into a glass palace with Snow White hewn in gold. For these established prospectors it was terrible to behold the intruder appropriating for himself the right to mine the virgin goldmine.

Günter Brus
Being covered in white paint, you demonstrate behaviour intended to create a public nuisance, which did in fact cause offence to members of the public, and created a breach of the peace and public order.

Günter Brus
Art is created in a state of delirium. Anyting else is the restoration of monuments. Collectors are artist that do not have a home. they have to make one for themselves.

Günter Brus
Ritual might be an acceptable term, if shorn of its overtly religious connotations. For me, breaking taboos became nothing less than a stylistic means. I allowed my body, my self, to be pushed into such extreme situations that certain norms of social behaviour could only appear utterly absurd to me.

Günter Brus
In simple terms: art has not been a public nuisance for quite a while now. either the people have become well-behaved or the perpetrators of nuisances have become tired.

Günter Brus
My picture-poems are linguistic margins on visual atolls.

Günter Brus
In fact, my art generally nauseated me. Often, when I wanted to set down a poem on an uncontaminated piece of paper, I′d start feeling sick and I did actually throw up in front of many drawings. I tremble all over in front of each picture-poem and before every action I would swallow a jar of pressed vine vermin. Time and again I strove for a kind of non-art, and time and again I failed, like a chimpanzee wanting to throw away a banana without peeling it. My disgust at producing art naturally atracted collectors, and ocassionaly photographers.

Günter Brus
The white room is an interior to be made devoid of any specific sensualism emanated by objects. Ultimately it is classic white canvas expanded into three-dimensional space.

Günter Brus
I hate people, who force their way through at traffic accidents to see blood. They... rape and dismember virgins, and have orgies.

Günter Brus
For me, the Bild-Dichtung[image-poem] is the ideal form, because the drawing process is constantly being interrupted or contrasted by the writing. And since I always have something to say when I am writing, the effort has a balancing effect. Drawing and writing are wonderful complements.

Günter Brus
In a certain sense, I never left Actionism as I understood it to this very day. Today, I work in sittings that are very similar to the course of the actions. Only the stage has changed on which the presentation takes place.

Günter Brus
Self-painting is a further development of the art of painting. The surface of an image has lost its function as the sole means of conveying expression. It was taken back to its roots, to the wall, to the object, to the living being, to the human body. By using my body as a means of conveying expression, the result created is a happening captured by a camera as it progresses, and an experience which viewers can share.

Günter Brus
Art is gushing hot bile on the fields and harvesting the looks of nasty dwarfs.

Günter Brus
My thinking at that time was determined by a kind of wilfully repressed pleasure[Freude] in Freud, and I wanted to be as artistically direct as plumber illustrating the history of art with a spanner.

Günter Brus
Poetry is when words are robbed of their attributed truth.

Günter Brus
Oswald Wiener had just dropped by. We were watching a football world championship game. Suddenly, in the middle of a game with Germany, the reporter said, Bertie Vogts slid in like an Irrwisch [Jack-o'-Lantern]. Eureka! That was the title I was looking for, and Oswald wiener commented, That fits perfectly-an irrer Wisch

Günter Brus
Pure painting or the art of drawing whose point of departure is based on purely formal criteria is, in my opinion, passé. I do not reject it if other artists make attempts, but as far as I am concerned, this is what I believe. if I do not place a text next to my drawings, I consider the work on such programmes to be futile.

Günter Brus
Writing without making mistakes is like vomiting hot air.

Günter Brus
My body is the intention. My body is the event. My body is the result.

Günter Brus