I’m on the phone with the artist Edward Dean. He’s supposed to be in German class right now, but he’s ducked out early and is walking through the snow. He finds himself living in Berlin, by way of Lisbon, by way of Melbourne, originally from Albury, NSW. We’re catching up on the state of things, the state of Germany, and where it all seems to be headed...
EH: How’s German school going? Are you getting culturally oriented?
ED: I’m thinking about whether it’s worth my time trying to assimilate in some way because so many people don't, and just end up living whole entire lives here, and I think they miss out on so much that affects them. I get this idea that, particularly for American or Canadian people as foreigners here, life becomes kind of mystical.
EH: Right, so they could announce a policy saying 'all Canadian expats are banned.'
ED: Well that's what's happening at the moment. I was like 'I don't really care about politics here' because it seemed too complicated for me to understand, until I started watching it and saw that, from what I understand, the main conservative party wants to revoke people's citizenship if they commit criminal offences, then the even more conservative party wants net immigration to be at zero percent, and I was like, 'Oh okay, this has massive bearing over my life.'
Ed pauses to check whether the coffee shop he’s approaching takes card payments.
They don't.
ED: So I don't know, ever since that happened-
EH: -German school has become more important?
ED: Well, I think I always knew it, but also you can kind of ignore it if you just go to the studio each day. Also, I find that I can kind of trick myself into a state of election fever. I've been watching so much German political TikTok to learn German but because I'm also interested in it, and it's been kind of really fun.
EH: Okay, so there's the fun aspect of learning the language and then the added intrigue as to whether you'll be able to utilise it by actually staying in the country.
ED: Yeah, basically.
Ed stops to order a coffee.
Hallo. Einen cappuccino bitte. For here. Um, nicht.
EH: What kind of art have you been into lately in Germany?
ED: I went to a gallery in Cologne, and I'd never had – I mean, I feel like the best experiences of art that you ever have are the kind of ones where you encounter something and it grabs you. That sounds basic to say, but I had a really ‘grabbing’ moment with Emil Nolde. He was a German expressionist part of Die Brücke, the Berlin expressionist movement. So I’ve been having a bit of a moment with that. Emil Nolde was the kind of ‘cancelled’ artist from there, because he wasn't a Nazi, but he was very sympathetic to Nazi ideas I guess. I don't know how to put this - that's not the reason why I like this painting, but anyway, it's of an Aryan blonde family that have drunk so much alcohol that their cheeks have gone red, and it was painted in such a scrappy, crazy kind of way in 1932. When I saw it it felt so inextricably linked to history without the consciousness of itself. I was really excited when I saw that painting because it could explain itself so effortlessly: it could tell you so much about the attitudes of the time. It sounds so basic and anthropological, but you know when you see a painting and you're like, 'oh, this kind of contains it'?
EH: It encapsulates something—
ED: Yeah: attitudes, stylistic concerns, what's happening historically, who's represented in painting. I guess this is what they teach you all in art history, but for some reason that that painting just really interested me, so then I started reading about Emil Nolde a lot, and Die Brücke.
EH: There are these moments that are almost tipping points before the big anvil of history drops on everything, and there are always kernels of things to pick apart later.
ED: Maybe why I liked it so much as well is because of his history - he's so unfulfilled. He was sympathetic to the Nazis, but then all the Nazis hated him and thought he was a degenerate and put all his work in the Degenerate Art Exhibition and tried to, you know, get rid of him, so he had to flee Germany, but he was still really anti-Semitic.
EH: Right, so there's this period of his life where he's rejected, or spurned, even though he's aligned with the dominant ideology.
ED: It's kind of funny. Another reason I thought it was interesting is because it's gonna happen to so many people now; the people that are sympathetic to these really bad ideas will fall on their own sword. You see those tweets all the time now, from Americans that were federal employees (under the Biden administration), and you don't know whether they're real or not, but federal employees who voted for Donald Trump begging for their job back even though they're low-tier employees. Maybe that's what's happening; you sympathise with it and then it destroys you.
EH: Sort of a poetic justice?
ED: Irony, like a reverse poetic justice – well, it is poetic justice I guess.
EH: Before you left Melbourne you used to have a studio above a cafe. Do you think it had any impact on the work? Did you feel extra caffeinated?
ED: Let's think about this… it probably wasn't the best studio to make the work that we were trying to make because it was kind of too small. It would have been so good if you were a graphic designer or something and you wanted to be above a cafe, whereas if you're making heavy sculptures and you've got to drag stuff through an industrial kitchen it's not really the most practical thing. But I liked it because I would sometimes work a shift there and then that would pay my way for the month, so that's good, and I enjoyed working there. I enjoyed the atmosphere of it and I enjoyed the people all the time. I do really like seeing people, obviously I’m very social and I like when I can have people just come look and then dart out.
When I left art school, that was one thing I really struggled to get used to; how do you go into a studio space where you constantly have people to bounce things off and just go for a walk? One good thing about Berlin is that I've got a studio at the moment which is in this giant complex and I know heaps of people in the complex, so you can just walk around and bump into someone that you know, and that's nice I guess - although some people hate it.
EH: Okay, the lone wolf kind of practitioners?
ED: Yeah. I realise that's also probably why people make art.
EH: As an escape route?
ED: Well just because it's a creative process that only requires yourself. Whereas I'm a big time collaborator and I need people around me to do stuff. But I've become less like that here.
EH: Before you left Melbourne, a lot of your work included collaborations with artists like Brayden van Meurs or Chris Madden, but now that your life has had to be more self-contained with going to Lisbon and now Berlin, has your practice also leaned more towards being self-contained?
ED: Yeah definitely. I would like to go back to having a collaborative practice, but in my head I feel in some ways kind of guilty about it or something - I can't just be a collaborator whore in every city I go to.
EH: Like a body count but for collaborators?
ED: Exactly. For some reason I thought it would be a betrayal of Chris and Brayden if I just so easily moved to a new place and then I had a new collaborative art practice or something.
EH: A lot of the work that you and Brayden did for your joint show at Asbestos - aesthetically it was really unfinished, and it had this air of dereliction and abandonment in a way that feels specifically Australian, so I was wondering whether it connects to something we’ve discussed before - Australians being creative with their sense of right and wrong? Where there's not a sense of reverence placed on historical objects, and so they transform when you leave them for a long time.
ED: It’s probably that we were both really really really looking at Edward Kienholz when we were making our show, and I think this is so cringe to admit, but maybe what I became obsessed with about it was that in Germany there were always historically anti-historical objects that came to be imbued with so much cultural meaning. There are a lot of reasons for why that happened in Germany, one being that direct representation became seen as alluding too much to fascism or something. So we were both interested in Kienholz, and I guess I was interested in the way self-reflexivity and all these lo-fi aesthetics were used in order to imbue meaning on things, and I think also because I was working in film at that time as well. There are people in film who can make things really well, but also it feels like set builders have this appreciation for the lo-fi-ness of things, the jagged-ness of things, the way that shit kind of does become derelict or representational of the derelict.
EH: Because there's a sort of knowledge that what the set is being produced for will memorialise the object, so there’s this lack of attachment to the object beyond the art that it's being created for — looking at the object as a means rather than an end, or something.
EH: And you were specifically working on the remake of Metropolis - I'm curious about the German link there as well.
ED: That was really funny because I remember I went into the art department’s office and the reference books that they had for the remake of Metropolis were, like, Taschen coffee table books like ‘Brutalist Block City’ and ‘Le Corbusier,’ really kind of basic references. And then I thought, to remake a movie like Metropolis you kind of have to be a film historian or something, you have to know 'you can and you can't do that.' Obviously it's a sci-fi film so there's nothing where you can necessarily say you’re representing history wrong, but also historically it’s an important film made within a certain period that represented certain things.
EH: History has to be mashed through a post-truth sieve now, or something. I feel like there's been a lot of criticism lately that discusses some kind of end to art, or a reminiscence on semi-recent glory days, you know, Dean Kissick for Harper’s, the associated rebuttals, etc. Do you participate in the doomer economy or are you still sort of optimistic that we could continue having moments?
ED: Yeah I mean, in Germany at the moment there's a recession going on. There's a contraction happening. A lot of money spent on art through COVID is contracting which has meant that a lot of things are slowing down, and I think that the scarcity of a recession thing has greater mental effects than we initially perceive it to have. It's what Dean Kissick is describing. I don't know, this feels like such a hairy topic to get into.
I don't completely agree with him, but I think it's a fun polemic piece to read and I'm glad that he got up on his soapbox and said it. I think that what I'm trying to say is that I don't think we're all doomed. I think it'll just come back round again. But I also think that in the current structure that dictates the boom-and-bust cycles of making art, and there being the space to have interesting ideas and then that space contracting until there isn’t the space to be interesting, there needs to be something else. The problem is that if it's so hyper-capitalist, where art is just reflected by the market, there should be another driving factor outside of that to push people to make interesting things and do interesting things, and that's not really viable, so it would require some more radical restructuring.
EH: As in, critics may feel that their job is to create a framework for the possibilities that’ll shape things differently, or something like that?
ED: I don't know, I also think it requires a lot of people participating in the conversation and not being so scared that they're going to kind of be judged in a certain way for saying the wrong things.
I remember I had a conversation a while ago about this, and I was saying that I think the thing that sometimes is lacking is that your voice is present. Like, I don't resent Dean Kissick for saying something that I don't 100% agree with. I wish more people would just kind of get over themselves and say something.
EH: It's like what we were saying about collaboration: sometimes you don't even know why you like or don't like something until you have to defend and justify it, and it opens yourself up to possibilities beyond what you thought, and it's not always an enjoyable process, but I think it's never not worth it.
ED: I like reading all this stuff; I don't agree with most of it. I kind of want to be almost more optimistic, just blindly accepting one of these opinions or something. Stop being so nuanced and start being kind of a little bit more dogmatic.
EH: Yeah. Bombastic.
EH: I guess I'm also curious… now that you're on the European continent, you seem to come across a lot more art historians by trade. What are art historians like? Are they having bombastic opinions?
ED: No.
EH: Okay.
ED: And more conservative than Australians.
EH: Okay. In a diplomatic sense?
ED: Yeah. They're not as they're not as willing as Australians, who want to say their opinions straight away because they feel less historically burdened. And then in Europe you’re contending with a lot more European context, so there's a lot more to dispute what you might like or what your opinion might be.
I'm trying to think of how many art historians I really meet - I meet some and they're the same as they are in Australia I would say - smart, funny, interesting to talk to - all that stuff I guess.
I don't think art historians in Europe are that different from art historians in Australia but I think artists are. Like art itself is different.
EH: True. I guess a lot of it's to do with funding structures… and real estate… and…
ED: Yeah. But also there's something else that you realise about Australians when you leave for so long.
It's different, they're more crazy and wanting to have a good time and be crazy, whereas particularly Germans can be very conservative. I showed my friends here some pictures from a VCA grad show because I was really hyped on some of the stuff. I thought there were some people doing really funny things, and obviously I’m aware people have a completely different opinion to me, but I showed it to my friend Cecilia and she was like, 'wow, people have so much more bravado in what people do, they're really just trying to make a big thing,' whereas you go to some of these European grad shows – I was talking to Calum the other day and he was like, 'yeah, they're just all making grey little squares without ever questioning why they shouldn't be making grey little squares, someone needs to be more crazy.'
It's kind of funny because I guess it's working - it's both kind of the same thing: in Australia there's the orthodoxy of going big or going home. You have to make a spectacle and it’s not questioned as to why it is that way, and in Germany it feels like there's the orthodoxy of making a little grey square, hardly producing anything and that's not ever questioned. I would obviously opt towards more bravado, I think that's cool.
EH: An Icarus moment, or something.
ED: Well it also does what I was saying before: it puts you out there and it puts your opinions on the line a bit more, rather than being so conservative and playing a game or something.
EH: How do you think that bravado translates when you do enter the game or ‘the market,’ so to speak?
ED: I think that there are a lot of really deserving artists in Australia that should be able to have careers. But I think if you come to Europe with that kind of sensibility, people are really excited by it.
Some people are really excited by the bravado. Their life is the grey square and they've been missing the kind of like…
EH: Technicolor.
ED: Oversaturated Technicolor Australians doing drugs and vomiting everywhere.
EH: Even, you know, like recently when Hamishi Farah painted Joe Chialo (the Senator for Culture and Social Cohesion)’s portrait and got censored, but exhibited it anyway.
EH:Yeah. Stuff like that. Thinking about it, you're probably less likely to get away with that if you haven’t come from living in Australia…
ED: Yeah, I wonder… probably not, and not in the same kind of way, where the humour of it doesn't go unacknowledged as well.
I mean, I read the Instagram caption of it and I was going to go to that but I was too hungry.
EH: … larrikin style.
ED: I wonder how that'll end up and what happens after that in a place like Germany. The thing is that he's not represented by a German gallery, I don't think.
His market is more in England and the US, and I think his transition to that kind of thing is obviously really cool. Because you know someone's going to do that. If you don't have people like him and Nan Goldin who use their ability to talk to actually fucking talk, it's kind of stupid.
I was thinking about the relationship with the curators or the arts admin people facilitating this. They all know that this is going to happen. Klaus Beisenbach has to facilitate Nan Goldin being able to do a speech at the Neue National Gallery at a certain time when she's obviously going to talk about Palestine or something. And then he gets shit for it, and it's just because he can't say anything because he's a fucking bureaucrat. He’s got to present himself as being objective and then let the artists say the crazy shit. They're the stuntmen.
ED: Sometimes you’re just over the postwar German art. The obvious show in Berlin at the moment is the Sigmar Polke show - did we go to it together?
EH: No, I would have loved to have seen that though.
ED: It was the most disappointing thing I've ever seen in my life. No. I was just like, 'oh shit, freedom is dead in Germany,' seeing that.
EH: Oh! When were the works from? I'm curious.
ED: Well this is the thing. Apparently the works they wanted to loan, because the gallery - I forgot what the gallery is called. It's that gallery that they usually show post-Internet art in. Usually it's got Anna Uddenberg's thot chairs in it.
So the gallerists say, 'Let's have a Polke show!' but obviously they don't have any proper temperature control. So whoever had all these works that they wanted to loan said no. I guess there would have been a more succinct presentation of works if they could have done that. But because they didn't have temperature control, lots of people didn't want to loan the works, and so it was this real mishmash of art over a lot of different periods.
I think maybe the Australian bad boy appreciation of Polke and Kippenberger and stuff like that has made his work seem kind of naff, especially at this political time in Germany. Maybe that's too extreme to say, but it's like, 'Oh yeah, let's have a show that's all about freedom and being able to paint a swastika' from the 1980s, while people are being essentially deported.
It's a bit weird as well, because there’s all this historical geography about Germany and who the families were that were empowering Germany after the Third Reich. And then you look at this kind of work, and Polke – and I hate saying this, but Polke was only able to express this because he was a white male, so his self-reflexivity was seen as acceptable and non-threatening, whereas a person of color exercising that kind of reflexivity can be seen as violent and dangerous.
Do you know what I'm saying? Kippenberger and Polke don't really politically pose a threat to anything, they just reinforce the fact that Germany is a good western liberal democracy or something.
EH: They’re saying 'it's a good Western liberal democracy… for me.'
ED: Yeah exactly. So I don't know, seeing this show, all of this becomes really apparent. There are all these video works, and I just would not have included them. There's this video work of him tracing the Berlin wall with his ear against the wall and then this other one where he goes on tour to tribes in Papua New Guinea, and he's in a pair of Levis 501s and a dress shirt. I would have just left it out. I was looking at what works Australia owns of Polke, and the main works that we've got of his are in the National Gallery of Australia's collection. They’re these photos that he took of homeless people in Cologne from standing over them. And it's like, 'Aaaah, okay, he really was just an edgelord.' I kind of didn't really… I guess I just loved the latex paintings…
EH: For real…
ED: …all that kind of stuff, but then all those paintings, ugh, they look terrible now — I can't unsee his annoying edginess about Germany.
EH: There's a 'what the Sigmar' joke in here somewhere… unfortunately. My brain is rotting. Interesting to know that I didn't miss out on much.
ED: I guess it's just the disappointing thing in Germany — well, not disappointing — it's just that things are changing and attitudes are changing with all of this political upheaval. New dimensions get revealed that may kind of contradict your initial impressions of it. I guess I always had it in the back of my mind. But part of what was interesting about German art history post Second World War was the manipulated reconstruction of it, and the way that they had to do all these things to show self reflexivity; to show how far they'd actually come from their bad past.
EH: The artist as the mouthpiece for the institution again.
ED: Yeah, but you know, way more sophisticated than we could ever do in Australia because, you know, they're doing all this crazy shit.
EH: Like, soft power.
ED: Yeah, like really, really sophisticated-
EH: South Korean, K-pop level, cultural—
ED: —Bioweapon.
Ed starts slipping on the snow.
I kind of need to send you a photo of where I'm walking right now, because I'm in a graveyard and there's snow everywhere.
Ella Howells is a writer, editor and artist working on unceded Wurundjeri land. Her time as an Editor-in-Residence for unExtended has covered the unfurling of local, non-institutional art history.