DYNAMO SECESSION, 1997
When I was invited to be part of a show in the famous Secession Building
in Vienna, they stuck me down in the basement, making me feel
simultaneously present and forgotten. So I got even: I took a couple of
bicycles, set them up on stands, and connected the pedals to the
building’s electric system. Then I told the maintenance guys to get on
the bikes and take turns pedaling: If they stopped, the lights would go
out. They accepted the task, and people who visited the show noticed
that the intensity of the light depended on how tired or lazy the
janitors got. To make art requires a lot of energy—some profitably
invested, but much of it wasted. My career as an artist is a bit like
those incandescent bulbs in Vienna: The light comes and goes depending
on how hard I pedal. Sometimes my artistic energy bill is high because
I’ve been burning through ideas at a tremendous rate. Then there are
months in which I don’t use any artistic fuel at all and fail to
generate so much as a single idea.
The year 1997 was an especially high-energy year. In the German city of Münster, I was asked to create a public work, so I rode around on my bicycle and passed by the town’s lake. Out of the blue—an expression that became the piece’s title—it came to me that it would be fun to throw a cadaver into the water. A week later I returned with a dummy corpse, rented a rowboat, and threw the lady into the lake. Well, maybe I did that: The piece became an urban legend, and nobody was sure the corpse actually existed, though many visitors grabbed boats and hunted for it.
UNTITLED, 1999
It’s been said that I’m an artist of spite—that I have a need to
humiliate and embarrass. That’s not quite accurate, but it’s true that I
occasionally get respect and disrespect a little mixed up. And if I have
contempt for someone, I do get a yen for mischief. I’ve always detested
soccer fans, for example—those drunken hooligans who seem to come
unhinged whether their teams win or lose. So in London once, I informed
a gallerist that I wanted him to exhibit a black granite stone on which
I had engraved the list of matches that the English national soccer team
had lost. He looked at me with cold eyes and an idiotic smile, which I
took to mean that he hated me but was too polite to say so. When the
show opened, we received death threats. I have never worked in that
gallery again, and very little in England as a whole.
