Thomas Huber In control of yourself

I've already mentioned that I've been producing one work for the last 25 years. Of course, I've been painting for longer than that. I think I was 15 years old when I first became interested in art with a professional seriousness. But it wasn't until I was 25 before I could say that I had produced something which I myself found convincing. That isn't meant to be a benchmark for you; there are artists such as Barnett Newmann, he was 50, or even Beuys, who only sorted themselves out very late on.

You are a generation younger than I am and obviously want to make art. The question is whether my experience can be of benefit to you on your journey; whether you can or even want to learn anything from an older artist. Now, you are studying here at an art college. One tenet of academic thought says that art comes from art. Art is therefore not a craft, nor is it inspiration, but rather it is developed through the interaction with art which already exists. This makes it clear that, at least according to the self-perception of this institution, that you can learn something from me as the older artist, or develop your work in relation to or in reflection of my work.

Whether that is true is another question. Testing this academic truism as a professor often made me shudder. Can I teach my students anything? Do they actually want to learn anything from me? On the other hand, I've also learned that you shouldn't burden yourself too much with these fundamental questions: the Academy exists, it provides space in which to work, you can meet nice people of the same age with similar interests. Sometimes you meet the professor, but it's not always a good thing to meet the professor. You don't want to listen to a lecture like this one every day. But sometimes you do want to. Or you have the need to show your work to someone. That's what the professor is there for. He is paid to do that, after all, to take an interest in the students' work.

One of the most pressing interests of up-and-coming artists and art students, I have noticed, is to show their work. Unfortunately, this youthful exhibitionism is still latent in many older artists. However, it is in my view important that this young and therefore quite legitimate need for affirmation is coupled with a curiosity and a strong interest in the work of others. I once decided that for me a good artist is one who shows a clear interest in the art of his contemporaries. The same applies to good art students.

Moreover, young people have urgent questions about the life of an artist in general. This was certainly the case for me. I always noted or read with great curiosity depictions of artists' lives, autobiographical texts by artists or observations of the idiosyncrasies of artists.

I'd like to talk now about the strangeness of being an artist and the way an artist sees himself. I will talk less about painting, sculpture, new media, etc. I don't want to talk about what an artist produces, although it will be touched upon in passing. I won't be talking about the job called 'artist'. There's no such thing, in my opinion. There is no job outline or job description, no list of required qualifications. But there is a need for your own individual view of yourself. This will be the focus of my remarks today.

When I talk about the self-perception of an artist, I'm talking from the perspective of a man. Female artists have a different view of themselves, which is natural. But even as a man, I can also - in a very relative way - recognize myself in the self-perception of a female artist and, conversely have difficulty understanding the ways of a male colleague. The irreconcilable difference between a male and female artist lies in history. A young man studying art can look back on 800 years of art history and can find artists - men - of varied temperaments, whereas a young woman can only find a few, if any, role models in the past. This can be seen as an opportunity, their journey of self-discovery less burdened. However, it also means more insecurity because there are no terms of reference within which they can find legitimacy. But the work of male and female artists is still judged by the same criteria. I see no difference on this point.

At first, before and during college, I think everyone wonders what will one day define their work as unmistakably theirs. They ask themselves: what am I? What does the element that defines me look like? How, and most importantly when, will I find the key which will make me a great and unique artist?

It may be because of our Christian cultural heritage that beauty, truth and goodness is always promised as a reward, if you like, at the end of a long and, if possible, arduous journey. You find the same in fairy tales where peace with the world or with a woman is only achieved after difficult trials. Perhaps it is also down to our way of thinking, which is heavily influenced by the idea of research. You only get to the heart of the matter through long and intensive research. From this perspective, the world is a dark place, murky, mostly terrifying, too. The paths leading out of this misery towards rapture are long and difficult, and there are billions in research grants which, at the end of the subject matter help unlock its secrets. In short, our cultural self-perception always places relief, revelation and happiness just beyond our grasp. The world has not yet arrived at itself; we may exist, but we haven't yet met ourselves, we haven't yet recognized ourselves. We are still waiting for self-recognition. We live in a culture which is focussed on the end and which attaches little importance to the beginning.

This is why you study, are brought up, had to go to kindergarten and school. Not because you didn't know anything, but because our culture believes that we hadn't yet become ourselves, we hadn't developed into ourselves, that we still had to find ourselves. A rose doesn't have to study; it blooms and then loses its petals. It blooms and is beautiful. It has no failings, at any point in its life. It is always a rose. You will have noticed that I have my doubts about our cultural handicap.

I'm convinced that every one of you already has whatever it is you want to say on your tongue. You just have to open your mouths. The way you move, the way you place your right hand on your left, that is the gesture of your unique being. The way you breathe, the rhythm of your breathing, will not be changed during the course of your studies and breathing is, after all, the way you constantly take in, breathe in and return the world.

Your pictures, they are already inside you. Whatever is inside you is constantly being answered by the outside world. Pay attention to that. You see something somewhere, catch a glimpse of an image somewhere else. You should accept these encounters as a meeting with yourself. Keep a record of them, every hour of every day. That will become your personal treasure trove, your atlas. The scrapbook, the record inside of something you've seen or noticed, or the scissors you use to cut out a picture from a newspaper and stick into your notebook, these all lead you on the path to yourself.

As a teacher I was often in the strange position of having a clear image of what a particular student could do. It would appear to me in a small drawing or an arrangement of objects in the studio. I would laugh with joy and point it out. I would be excited, but the student concerned would just look at me in confusion. There was no point in explaining to him who he was. It would just take time for him to recognize it himself.

This is true for you, too. Everything is already there. Nothing will be added. No wonders will happen which will fill you with artistry. The wonder has already happened. The wonder that you exist.

You won't grow through your study of art. The idea of gathering knowledge through study is absurd, at least at an art college. That is pure capitalist thinking: the gaining of knowledge as an accumulation is false. An artist has no more than anyone else.

The knowledge of my own limitations, the acknowledgment of my own outer limits helped me to define myself as an artist. I found it was decisive. It was quite clear that I was less, I can do less, I know less, I can bear less. It was also a relief. The little that I have is enough. Even if it doesn't amount to much at the moment. Take the work of the minimalists, for example. One of them just turned a stone round, one that was just lying there, and he was completely content with himself as an artist.

I have a friend, who I started college with. Now he lives in New York. He goes for a walk, sees something, takes a piece of paper out of his pocket/bag and places it over the thing he is looking at. He is convinced that the picture is transferred on to the paper. He says that the energy of the moment is transferred on to the paper.

Your studies are therefore not the gaining of more, the heaping up of knowledge. Certainty is not knowing a lot but an insight into one's own possibilities. You should recognize your own limitations and internalize your outer limits. Being happy, accepting your own potential terrain.

"Dissolving freedom in bonding" comes from Hölderlin. In philosophy something like that is called a paradox which resolves itself. According to Hölderlin, freedom exists in bonding, in the very opposite of the free. Freedom is bound to the unfree. This is where my interpretation comes in. The unfree is one's own lack of freedom, limitation, one's own inability and the realization of it. You become aware of your own vulnerability, of your wounds, as Beuys, that teacher of humanity, would say. ("Show your wound…") Freedom, your very own freedom is based at the very point where you are at your least free, in your own inadequacy.

Now I've become very existentialist. To lighten the mood, allow me to recall an encounter with a fellow artist who I met in Düsseldorf in 1984. Penck. There is even a hotel here in Dresden which is plastered exclusively with his works. So you must be familiar with him. We met at an exhibition we were both participating in called "von hier aus." Penck invited me every morning to the bar of the conference hotel and plied me with champagne. It was the first time I'd been completely drunk in the morning. Penck described to me his experiences as an East German in West German brothels and how he's first caught pubic lice in the West. At the time I was just a little older than 20 and listened with amazement to all this. In the exhibition hall Penck then demanded my painting equipment, including a brush. You know that thick wide square brush for painting. I had painted a wall with it. Penck used this brush for his painting. He had had huge canvases mounted which he then worked on with my brush. He explained to me that he was a painter of detail, a miniature fanatic if you like. He mixed his colour on canvases eight metres wide. His idea of a picture would be the exuberance of detail. Only, and this is where his personal limitation came in, he had a signature style which corresponds to the size of the brush, the very brush he had borrowed from me. In order to produce the richness of detail which the size of the brush required, his canvases had to be several square metres in size. They had to be so huge to allow for details which could be painted with this brush.

I often think about that encounter. I check what brush, what size I want to produce something with. Size 1, 0/2 . That's sometimes just one or two hairs. How small can you paint? How low can you go in terms of brush size? As Penck's example shows, that's related to the scale of the pictures. It may be banal, but picture sizes are cultural temporal and finally personal idiosyncrasies. It is the individual limitations of the body which determine the scale of pictures.

If we look at artistic limitations we can clearly see that man is an idea, each one unique, unrepeatable, which can have the good fortune to express itself, but which can also, of course, wither away unnoticed.

Looking back over the history of art I've come to the conclusion that every artist is in fact just an idea, a gesture, a sound. Nothing more. That's enough. After all, we don't have that much to say. All we do is present the same thing over and over again, incessantly repetitive and insistent.

An observation of myself: Again I reach the point where I can't think of anything, I am artistically paralysed, inhibited. Every attempt to make a start on something fails abysmally with clumsy attempts and embarrassing results. I no longer know who I am, what I like, what I despise, why I became an artist. I look at my earlier works and don't understand why I did them. In other words, a catastrophe. And then I see an angle in the room, the sky at noon or whatever and make a note of it and get the impression I reinvented the world, as if everything were a beginning, a start, undiscovered. Life has a purpose again, art is beautiful and I paint and then someone comes along - perhaps even myself - and says: that looks like a Huber, a real Huber, unmistakeable. I thought I had reinvented everything and have to accept that it is a continuation of what I've always done.

We don't reinvent ourselves every day; we pick up from where we left off as whoever we have always been. The most we can hope for is to repeat ourselves. Our whole life we paint the same picture over and over again.

Fellow artist John Armleder remarked that it's a poor artist who has too many ideas. Many ideas block the artist, for he's supposed to decide which idea to go with and is compelled to give up on what might be a better idea.

I've been speaking about the lot of an artist, about his freedoms and dependence. Part of this lot is worrying about being successful. The following thoughts nag us: Will I be invited to this or that exhibition, to take part in it, will I win the prize, will the renowned gallery owner be interested in me, will I sell a picture, will the newspaper write an article about my exhibition?

Such thoughts can finish you off. Particularly, of course, if all these questions are answered by life negatively, i.e. in rejection. You lose heart, perhaps even become bitter and possibly soon after lose the desire to work.

Tormented by these questions, you should always ask some fundamental and much more important questions. One such question is: What is an artistic being, i.e. what makes something artistic? For me it's freedom. Because this word can be understood in a political sense and possibly misunderstood, I prefer the phrase 'being in control'. I think of being in artistic control in two ways. Firstly, it means that the artist is his own master. He does what he thinks is right. He alone decides what he has to do. Nobody gives him instructions. This freedom to tackle something which you think is feasible, e.g. to paint a picture in such and such a way is for me accompanied with an enormous feeling of joy. Secondly, being in control involves responsibility. I take the responsibility for what I have done. There is a nice detail of artistic self-perception, which is relevant here: that fact that we still have the signature. The artist signs the finished work. He thus assumes the responsibility. We all know that there is often a long and difficult process before the decision is taken to start a work, i.e. to place yourself within the possibilities of freedom and in this freedom to complete a work. When we finally sign a work and thus take responsibility for it in the face of the freedom in which we began it, we are 'being in control' in both senses of the phrase. The artist's signature is a phenomenon of recent art history. Dürer is among the first to have signed their work (Dürer fecit, DF). Perhaps you know his anagram with two intertwined letters. Dürer is well known for having a self-perception which ahs endured to this day, namely as an artist in control of himself.

Address to students of the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts, 2 December 2005, an excerpt.

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