Günter Brus quotes

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)
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
My body is the intention. My body is the event. My body is the result.
Günter Brus
Art is gushing hot bile on the fields and harvesting the looks of nasty dwarfs.
Günter Brus
You become an artist to upset your family.
Günter Brus
The pencil-stroke is like cutting into the heart.
Günter Brus
Writing without making mistakes is like vomiting hot air.
Günter Brus
Poetry is when words are robbed of their attributed truth.
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
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
Color will play no part in the art of future. (Günter Brus)
My picture-poems are linguistic margins on visual atolls.
Günter Brus
As a boy,I was extremely shy, certainly as a result of my upbringing. I was an expert blusher,and some of my harsh actions may echo this shyness by way of compensation.
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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)
"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
I hate people, who force their way through at traffic accidents to see blood. They...rape and dismember virgins, and have orgies.
Günter Brus
It′s always seemed odd to me that people don′t paint with both hands. I mean, if I′m technically so shackled that I can′t paint with my hair, stomach or bottom, what about my other hand? You′ve got to live in painting. All-round painting... Indefinable space-at least indefinable in traditional terms-that′s what I require of my paintings. There must be absolutely no central focus... There can be no progress until that damned centre has been eliminated... My paintings are sublimated stamping, screaming and hissing-I try to translate a process experienced physically into a physically visible one.
Günter Brus
Creative children do not paint. They mess around. If they have to draw, creative children always end up being the ridiculous kind of child, who produces childern′s drawings Creative children wipe spinach round their gobs, that′s all. Any thing more that these crappy daubnings is the result of education-and before long we′re on a level with Paul Klee.
Günter Brus