⁰¹ Thomas Helbig, Engelchen, 2007, mixed media, 80 × 37 × 40 cm
⁰² Thomas Helbig, Hoheres Leben, 2008, oil and lacquer on wood, 170 × 140 cm
⁰³ Thomas Helbig, Complete Birth, installation view, Eleni Koroneou Gallery, Athens
⁰⁴ Thomas Helbig, Schwelle, oil and lacquer on wood, 140 × 115 cm

— Do you think the work of Thomas Helbig is nihilistic?
— No, it’s more romantic, but by someone who, as a child, knew the short poem by Schiller that goes: “Only through Beauty’s morning-gate, dost thou penetrate the land of knowledge.”
— He describes his work as the ‘past and future melted into each other.’ Does this lack of historicity lead anywhere?
— To the present!
— Now I understand … Perhaps that’s why he likens his paintings to ‘windows’. Windows to the present … But why do you think he relates his sculpture to ‘figures’?
— They are figures and in a strongly Promethean manner, in fact — something like A Dying God Coming into Human Flesh. I don’t know if he would like to be called ‘Wagnerian’.
— It is a kind of ‘flame-shaped’ art … If Pasolini’s Salò were to be filmed today, it is not at all unlikely that Helbig’s works would have been used to decorate the villa of the orgies!
— Yes, if we assume that the ‘blue bloods’ of Salò had full aesthetic consciousness of their acts (and they probably had). However, Helbig is clearly an egotist.
— Is it this ‘egotism’ that makes German artists ‘so different, so appealing’?
— ‘Moral egotism’ is a German concept but all artists work with their ‘ego’ even those that want to obliterate it by idealizing their self-refutation.
— You talked about this and that and we are going to end up with Stirner again … Is he so current after all?
— I didn’t make things turn out this way, it just happened! We should have asked Helbig. The price of egotism is the ‘fall’ — that’s probably current again!
— It is an art only for itself in other words. Possibly, that, in itself, has a political dimension.
— Politics for itself also exists! Every human act has a moral dimension, politics is a refined method for handling power and art is a noble handling of morality. It’s possible that handling morality is the main concern of all three of us!
— Who is the third?
— Helbig!
— ‘Mournful fate! There are great men who live longer than their genius. But in Berlioz genius lives longer than will: It is there and one feels it in the brilliant pages of the third act of Les Troyens à Carthage. But Berlioz no longer believed in it; he no longer believed in anything. His genius died because of lack of nourishment. It is a flame that burns on an empty grave’.
— ‘The wind fills our shrouds / as if we are traveling with our sails. / They fall in our path and tear away / the hollow bones, and scatter on the ground.’
— I suspect that Helbig’s painting Höheres Leben, 2008, refers to Hölderlin’s poem with the same title: ‘Der Mensch erwählt sein Leben, sein Beschließen, / Von Irrtum frei kennt Weisheit er, Gedanken, / Erinnrungen, die in der Welt versanken, / Und nichts kann ihm der innern Wert verdrießen.
Die prächtige Natur verschönet seine Tage, / Der Geist in ihm gewährt ihm neues Trachten / In seinem Innern oft, und das, die Wahrheit achten, / Und höhern Sinn, und manche seltne Frage.
Dann kann der Mensch des Lebens Sinn auch kennen, / Das Höchste seinem Zweck, das Herrlichste benennen, / Gemäß der Menschheit so des Lebens Welt betrachten, / Und hohen Sinn als höhres Leben achten.
Scardanelli.’
— Perhaps Helbig is more optimistic than we thought. Or more sarcastic …
— So, in the end, nothing explains anything?
— Everything explains itself.
— So what does Helbig mean when he says that “he doesn’t know what he is doing” and that his works ‘just happen’? Something tells me that you share this idea.
— No … Anyway, even when you know what you’re doing, various other things can still occur.
— To fall is to understand the universe?
— Only when the fall precedes understanding on purpose, otherwise it’s just bad luck.
— Or simply decline (Verfall) … Isn’t there something ‘decadent’ in Helbig’s work? Or does the anachronistic feeling that his works emit confuse us?
— Is it perhaps simply nostalgia? But perhaps nostalgia is decline in itself. I think that it is simply a negotiation.
— Negotiation with what?
— Negotiation with the process, with the before and after.
— But the process, as we know, is by itself a work. It must be something else.
— Process is the only work and that is why it is always under negotiation.
— Now you speak like Derrida, who, by the way, says somewhere that all the major writers suffered from aphasia. In other words, they can’t be orators or great conversationalists. Does that, perhaps, also apply to artists?
— I don’t know. Do we think of Oscar Wilde as a minor writer?
— He wasn’t a writer.
— Why? Neither was Derrida …
— Wilde was a tailor of writing whereas Derrida clothed it. Let’s forego this nonsense so that we can come back to our subject. What do you think, does Helbig approve of nature? And how?
— How can one not approve of nature? Or even ignore it? To alter nature is one of the oldest syndromes but I think that Helbig’s issue is the emotional perception of nature.
— He returns to certitude, in other words, to the ‘surface of common experience’ as Valery so nicely puts it. This experience has something dreamlike about it — it both is and is not ours.
— Helbig gives me the impression that on the one hand he leans on Friedrich and on the other he has his eyes turned toward Ridley Scott’s Alien. I think that a great part of sci-fi concerns solipsism; in any case, he is certainly a ‘child’ of romanticism.
— More of a ‘distant relative’, I would say. It is the future that makes him different. The original romantics limited themselves to the past; they wanted to escape from the present, they despised egotism and wanted to ‘revive’ the Middle Ages. But I won’t say anything more, since you already know all that.
— The reference to the Middle Ages concerned a disdain for common sense and industrialisation, which science fiction also does and which derives from the literature of the imaginary, which is a creation of the romantics … But I don’t think what is original concerns us.
— Not for the time being. However, Helbig is a ‘child’ of 1980s romanticism as it was expressed primarily through music. Don’t forget that he was born in Bavaria, in Rosenheim, in 1967. I can imagine him listening to Bauhaus, Cure, the Cocteau Twins and, why not, to classical music!
— We should have asked him. He probably listened to Die Krupps.
— And yet, the Cocteau Twins’ Garlands fits in well with the circumstances: ‘Well, with these etchings / Cravings convince / My cravings commence / Garlands evergreen / Forget-me-not wreaths / haplets see me drugged / I could die in a rosary’
— It suits us, as ‘readers’ of Helbig …
— I think that, finally, what is at stake is how one singles out the authenticity of the perception.
— Perception is always authentic.
— Don’t be so absolute … Why should we undermine the intuitive aspect?
— I’m not undermining it, that’s why I said it!
— Allow me not to comment on it. I think that Helbig’s romanticism rests on the fact that he returns to his subject again and again, in an attempt to correct it …
— I agree … and it is very egotistical on his part.


Thomas Helbig’s solo show, titled Complete Birth took place at Eleni Koroneou’s gallery, between 9 May and 30 June 2008.

Christopher Marinos is a writer and freelance curator. Panayiotis Loukas is an artist.

Translated from Greek by Vicki Politis