To coincide with the installation »Empty Formalism” by Brian Eno, Thomas Oberender – Director of the Berliner Festspiele and Artistic Director of the Immersion programme series – spoke to the English musician, composer, record producer, singer and artist.
Thomas Oberender: I think a good guideline could be, if we speak about one aspect of your work, that is in every field you ever have been working very important. I would say it’s the turn or the shift from an object-based understanding of art and institutions to something that is more oriented to the process of making art, experiencing art. And this is changing a lot, it’s changing the way of production, it’s changing the way of presentation. Everything begins, I would say, with your education in the Ipswich Art School. What kind of art school was it in these late 60s you came in?
Brian Eno: Yes, I had a very lucky choice of art school. In fact, I originally chose another art school, because the well-known art school in my part of England was in a town called Colchester. Well, my parents didn’t have any mother and I couldn’t get a grant from the local education committee to go to Colchester. So I rather reluctantly ended up going to this other art school, called Ipswich Art School. It’s a very small college and it didn’t have a good reputation really. But it just so happened that exactly that time a very charismatic teacher, called Roy Ascot, had taken over that college. And he had hired a whole lot of new staff, very interesting new staff, who were cybermaticians, mathematicians, painters, sculptors, installation artists actually some of them, that were not at all like the kind of people you’d normally find in an art school in the 60s. I was there… I went there in 1964 and I was there for two years. And that art school actually only lasted for those two years in that form, because it was so radical that the education committee fired everyone (Lachen im Publikum). And the whole accent of the college very surprisingly to me, as a 16-year-old turning up with my little box of paints, thinking I was gonna do pictures of nudes, if I was lucky (Lachen im Publikum), no nudes (lacht), we didn’t even use the paints. We were set projects that were very, very different from anything I could imagine. For instance, just to give you an example from one of the projects: We were told to go out and buy all of the newspapers that were available for a particular day, then to find one topic that they all had in common, that appeared in all the newspapers. And then to make – using only black ink and newspaper – a presentation of that topic as it was discussed in all of those magazines and papers we read, but not using language at all. Now, this was really quite difficult for a 16-year-old, who had never had any experience of that, of art being anything like that. In fact, the very first project we had, it was so interesting, and I think it kind of set a pattern for a lot of the things I did afterwards. The very first thing that happened, was that the 36 students – that’s how many of us there were – were divided up into 18 pairs, quite randomly I think. »Random”, this was a big feature of this art college (lacht), we were divided up into 18 pairs. And each pair of students had to device or invent a game or a test or an ordeal or a challenge, that every other student had to go through. And then, when every other student went through that, you had to kind of make an assessment of the student, of the person’s character, based on how they had behaved in the ordeal – and some of the ordeals were pretty awful. I remember my best friend, a guy called Richard Airs, build a tiny little (Wort leider unbekannt – cubbord? Cabaret? 00:06:05), a very small (unbekannt, s.v.), and when you stepped inside the … the door slammed behind you and a piece of rotten fish fell down (Lachen im Publikum), but you couldn’t get out. Some of the other things were a little bit more intellectual than that. So, having been through the 17 other ordeals or tests, you then had all of these reports about you, »this person is timid, this person is quiet, this person likes to be told what to do”, it was a whole description of your character. But then, the very interesting thing was that we were told to device exactly the opposite person and to be that person for the rest of the following ten weeks. So I became… since I was always talking a lot, I had to be quiet (Lachen im Publikum), I couldn’t speak unless somebody spoke to me. And I was very physically active, I was not allowed to move of my own free will. So I was set on a trolley, and if I wanted to go anywhere I had to get somebody to take me.
TO: Hard school it would seem. If I hear that I would say, one of the main points is there was no training to be a good trained artist in traditional abilities of let’s say drawing, the classical techniques. So, it was another understanding of what a good artist is that starts to become important.
BE: Yes, I mean, people who were interested in the craft of painting were not discouraged, but they weren’t encouraged either. It was fine, »if you wanna learn to draw that’s fine, but it doesn’t have much to do with what we are doing here”, that was the feeling. The sense was that what we were there to do, was to learn to be creative, to learn to think about situations.
TO: Is this possible, to learn to be creative?
BE: I think it is, actually. Yes, I really think that it is. One thing I took away from that place, was that there are always perspectives on any working situation or any thinking situation that you can take, that are fresh and new.
TO: It’s your chords strategy oblige, trying to have a different perspective on the situation you are stuck in.
BE: Exactly, that idea, which was something I did with an artist called Peter Schmidt, who was born in–
TO: He was also a teacher for you.
BE: He was also a teacher for me, yes. He was born in Berlin, his mother was Jewish, so in the early 30s they came to London. And his father, actually his stepfather, was a man called Sebastian Haffner, who wrote a very amazing book, which I always tell everybody they should read. Anyway, Peter came to England and became part of the sort of 60s art movement there, he worked with Mark Boyle – do you know Mark Boyle? And they involved in a sort of… the fringe of the psychedelic scene in the 60s. And they were involved in what was not then called, but which became installation art and so on and so on. So he was an important figure. And like… we met, we were 19 years different in age, but we became very close friends and we were close friends till he died in 1980.
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