..A clarity of vision in his subject matter was emerging in Helnwein's art that was to stay consistent throughout his career. His subject matter is the human condition. The metaphor for his art, although it included self-portraits, is dominated by the image of the child, but not the carefree innocent child of popular imagination. Helnwein instead created the profoundly disturbing yet compellingly provocative image of the wounded child. The child scarred physically and the child scarred emotionally from within.
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"Children and lunatics cut the Gordian knot, which the poet spends his life patiently trying to untie."
Jean Cocteau ...

"Helnwein's meticulous Irish landscapes, which are the cornerstone of this Crawford show, are unashamedly aesthetic: gorgeous confections of pure, delicious spectacle. The typically epic but not inhuman scale imitates the subject matter. The tonal realism will make people go "Wow, are they paintings?" - thanks to the photorealist finish which seems free of the foibles of the human hand. Helnwein works with very small brushes - highlighting and subtly magnifying here, muting colours or creating shadows there; pushing some paintings towards momentary sleights of impressionism; and others towards seamless, burnished hyperreality. The bird's eye view suggests a kind of superhuman vision which can simultaneously take in the entire view with breath-taking clarity, like some bionic eagle."
Mic Moroney, from the essay "Out of the Apocalypse into the Sublime - bursting into Irish Landscape: Citizen Helnwein" ...

* Helnwein's Epiphany I has been up on our site for years now. For a while I used it as wallpaper on my desktop. Perhaps that explains how the first hypertext poem came to be one about the Virgin. But as I struggled with updating the site, I checked all my old resources and came across materials that explain Helnwein's commitments and meanings far better than I could alone. ...

Checklist
THE POLAROID COLLECTION ...

"The world doesn't like people that are different than the average. Rulers throughout history have always hated those people that stick out of the masses, - the geniuses, the poets, monsters, artists, witches and saints; and usually they burned them or put them in dungeons, concentration-camps or mental institutions, thinking of what a nice and peaceful slave-camp this planet could be without them.
But for some miraculous reason this desert-town here seems to be different than the rest of the world, because here they don't mind these monsters, they actually seem to like them.
L.A. is the sanctuary for people with weird visions and impossible dreams. Maybe it's the last place on earth where dreams are still legal." ...

Helnwein ...was born in war-torn Vienna in 1948 and received a classical education under Rudolf Hausner at Vienna’s academy. But in the late 1960’s, he and fellow art students rebelled, staging Aktions or happenings within the Vienna Academy and out in the streets. In one, Helnwein stood quietly for hours with an enormous three-foot papier mache sculpture of a hornet clinging to his back.
In 1971 he began the first of a series of troubling pictures showing children grotesquely disfigured with surgical scars. ...

Those who have used the same or multiple forms of the image many times over many years include Lichtenstein, Helnwein, Oldenburg, Pensato, Ospina, and Chagoya. Some have used the image more persistently than others have.
Most of the images are straightforward, but some are not. For example, Christian Boltanski installed photographs of children, who were members (fans) of the 1955 French Mickey Mouse Club (ills. 9.1, 9.2 and 9.3). Rhonda Zwillinger (ill. 76.1) incorporated the castle at Disneyland into one of her paintings. Burt Payne 3 and Steve Hillenburg (ill. 32.1) used the image of Walt Disney himself in a small plastic sculpture: Walt Disney with mouse ears encased in clear plastic—the frozen Walt doll.[10] Some of these artists have produced a significant body of work based on the Mouse. ...

Burroughs on photographer Gottfried Helnwein
"How can a self-portrait depict statuesque calm in the face of the horrors that surround us all?" ...

The films themselves range from documents of performances to highly structured experimental films. The Art of Destruction concerns the main protagonists of the movement and their own particular brands of performance/art/terrorism as well as a discussion of the major films and their influences. Each member is given space for biography (and there are some bizarre backgrounds to be sure) and key performances, all amply illustrated in disturbing black and white. Rather than just a catalogue of broken taboos the VAG are seen as natural extensions of both Dadaism and the "Happening" scene of the '50s, but one distinctly Austrian in the way that it rebelled against a harshly censorious government whom the performers saw as intrinsically unrepentant of its recent fascist past. This adds greater weight to the performances than perhaps the later New York transgressive movement, and their influence can be seen in everything from Helnwein paintings to mainstream Marilyn Manson videos. ...

...

Inszenierung, Choreografie: Gregor Seyffert
Bühne, Video, Licht, Kostüme und Maske: und Gottfried Helnwein
Dichtung aus "Lalla Rookh" von Thomas Moore
für Solostimmen, Chor und Orchester ...

Contrary to what his critics may believe, Manson in no way supports Hitler or Nazism. Not only is it "impossible to be fascist when you're into fashion," but the very nature of Hitler's rise to power sounded a death knell to the very art movements that Manson was inspired by. The final track on The Golden Age of Grotesque, Obsequey (the Death of Art) and the painting by the same name, demonstrates how fervidly anti-Hitler Manson really is. The painting shows the dome of Berlin burning, a direct result of Hitler becoming chancellor. According to Manson in an interview with NY Rock, "Hitler tried to define art and outlawed some of it by calling it degenerated and decadent. Hitler imposed his will and banned art he considered immoral. I'm not sure if the people who adopt those phrases and try to ban my art are aware of the implications they carry."
Interestingly enough, when the same outfit was used in the mOBSCENE video, the insignia was missing. Of course, the time period for that song was exclusively Weimar Berlin, before the Nazi takeover. The outfit was also similar to that worn by Marlene Dietrich in the film Seven Sinners
Helnwein's 'Album Covers that Never Were'
... Some of Manson's other wardrobe is reminiscent of Nazi dress as well. In the series, Album Covers that Never Were, (Manson's record company deemed the photographs too risque to be used for the cover) in which Manson collaborated with Gottfried Helnwein, he wore a typical Nazi officer's cap. The same outfit was used when Manson posed for the cover of Metal Hammer. He dressed in Nazi regalia, clutching a gun as a young girl looked on. His expression, however, again shows exactly how he feels about the Nazi movement. ...

The following suicide notes were left by Japanese schoolchildren, aged ten to fifteen, who killed themselves within the last several years. Some of them met in suicide chat rooms, which are becoming increasingly popular in Japan.
translated from the Japanese by Patrick Luhan. ...

In fact, his work is insistently open-ended. Like Goya's Disasters of War, his art queries time and again, "How can this have happened?" Sometimes viewers reply, assaulting pictures of innocent children, worshipping those of a murderous dictator. Yet such reactions can only bring us to inquire again, louder and with greater urgency, "How can this have happened?" At last we recognize that Helnwein asks questions not in order to solicit answers - hate has no reason - but rather in order that we might begin to pose our own. ...

"Well, the world is a haunted house, and Helnwein at times is our tour guide through it.
I think in anything that is really relevant and emotional art, there is some kind of a mirror that people experience. I don't think that you can recognize a feeling from something that you look at unless it's part of yourself, and so when someone is willing to take on the sadness, the irony, the ugliness and the beauty in the kind of way that Gottfried Helnwein does.
Not all of Gottfried's work is on a canvas.
A lot of it is the way he's approached life. And it doesn't take someone knowing him to know that. You take one look at the paintings and you say "this guy has been around." You can't sit in a closet - and create this.
This level of work is earned."
Sean Penn ...

* Gottfried Helnwein, artist, born in Vienna, 1948
* Theodor Herzl "founder" of Israel, lived most of his life in Austria
* Adolf Hitler, dictator of Germany from 1933-1945, born on April 20, 1889 in Braunau am Inn ...

Helnwein:
"I think art always reflects the society and the time the artist lives in; it always tells you something about the condition of the culture.
This is the age of materialism and profit, accompanied by its favorite all-eating pet – the entertainment industry. Therefore in order not to sink into oblivion, in a desperate struggle to be heard and seen, many artists and curators try to compete with this multi-media-entertainment-Godzilla, trying to be just as loud and cheap and stupid. That’s why 70% to 80% of all the contemporary art in our museums is crap.
It’s true though that each time has its own aesthetic values and if you want to reach the people of today you have to develop an artistic language that they can understand. And that’s what I try to do – my audience is the great love-affair of my life. I am obsessed with my public, and all I want to do with my art is touch them and move them and to hold them tight – and sometimes I want to kick their ass. That is all I care about.
But I also listen to them and take them and their responses serious, because they and other artists are the only ones that ever taught me anything." ...

Blending Art and Music:
With the The Golden Age of Grotesque, Manson has attempted something not seen since Disney's unusual masterwork, Fantasia. Fantasia, the collaboration between Walt Disney and Leopold Stokowski, was Disney's first attempt to combine low art (his animation) with high art (classical music).
Manson's collaboration with world renown artist Gottfried Helnwein can be viewed in the same way: a combination of low art (rock music) with high art (painting). Manson was well aware of this, as he mentioned to NY Rock, "We grew up with the idea that entertainment is some lesser form of art, less valuable, less sincere, less worthy of our attention. I don't agree with it at all." ...

While Brown shares many interests with the surrealist Hans Bellmer (dolls, lolitas and bondage), the only other analogies within the world of contemporary art can be found in the early watercolours portraying bandaged children by Austrian artist Gottfried Helnwein and in the freak children sculptures by the Chapman brothers, besides the few artists (including Damien Hirst and Mark Ryden) that Brown declared to esteem.
(excerpt) ...

For me, the real highpoint of Conversations is the 1992 interview with Gottfried Helnwein, the Austrian-born creative genius whom Donald Ault has justly called "One of the greatest conceptual artists of the past hundred years."
His interview engages Barks in a spirit of imagination and play, and Barks responds to it: What if there were a real Duckworld? What would its layout be?
If anyone can take this idea into the 21st century in current available media, it's Helnwein, whose surreal Duck portraits reveal a dark undercurrent probably always present to one degree or other in Barks's own work—Helnwein's ducks are surreal, haunting, yet strangely funny at the same time. A parody of the dark side of the comic, the work reminds one of Chris von Allsburg, WeeGee, Jim Jarmusch, David Lynch, others. And this is just where the influence is most obvious, in paintings of Donald Duck. ...