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Wenn Sie einem Blinden Ihre Bilder beschreiben müssten – dann wie?
O mein Gott. Mit so einer Frage fangen wir an? Keine Ahnung, was ich da sagen würde. Die Frage stellt sich doch nie. Ich würde überhaupt niemandem meine Bilder erklären, weder einem Blinden noch einem Sehendem. ...

LOS ANGELES - Lou Reed took a walk on the wild side, down to Hollywood's RockWalk, where he placed his handprints and signature outside the Guitar Center music store on Sunset Boulevard. ...

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"This album is about expression. The imagination and personality of the individual cannot be trapped by small minds or defined by any one person. The genious of arts finds sanctuary among children and madmen to survive. That is who we are."
Marilyn Manson has collaborated with Gottfried helnwein for the album's artwork which is part of a greater series that will be published in a book and exhibited in museums across the world. ...

Marilyn Manson takes his inspiration from the glamour of 1930s Hollywood, the grotesque of Vaudeville to the height of cabaret decadence and so-called "degenerate" art in Weimar Berlin before its deconstruction.

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SPIEGEL:
Helnwein gilt wie Sie als Provokateur des Kulturbetriebes - haben sich da zwei verwandte Seelen getroffen?
Manson:
Ein Künstler, der nicht provoziert, wird unsichtbar. Kunst die keine starken Reaktionen auslöst, hat keinen Wert. Helnwein hat das verinnerlicht und entspricht damit genau dem Kern meiner Musik. Unsere Zusammenarbeit erschöpft sich nicht darin, dass ein Künstler einem Musiker ein Cover für sein Album malt. Wir schaffen zusammen Kunst, die unseren Gemütszustand wiedergibt.
SPIEGEL:
Helnwein sagt, Sie seien ähnlich einsam wie er.
Manson:
Ganz bestimmt. Es ist übrigens nicht nur schön, sondern auch befremdlich, jemanden zu finden, der tatsächlich das Gleiche liebt wie man selbst. Ich bin gewohnt für meine Ideen verurteilt zu werden - und plötzlich ist da jemand, der mich auf Anhieb versteht. Ich war nie ein geselliger Mensch. Das ist einer der Gründe, warum Leute wie ich Entertainer werden - weil sie anders nicht kommunizieren können. ...

"High above Marlene Dietrich Blvd. in the city of Berlin, the sun smoldered below the concrete gutter sky like a cigarette burn in a stained bedsheet. We set forth to the Dome of Berlin at dusk and I felt like I was in my own painting, "The Death of Art." Helnwein and I created a living installation with two disabled nude women as families stopped their picnics to stare. Of course we documented this for future viewing. But it didn't begin there...
"Determined, I headed for the birthplace of Expressionism, humming "The Alabama Song," by Kurt Weill. It was time for The Grotesk Burlesk and dozens of mice scurried from the Kinderfeld. Their political organs had to be removed and we set them in formation, creating a metaphorical "question mark."
Marilyn Manson ...

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"The good news for Manson's fans and his accountants alike is 'The Golden Age of Grotesque' may well be his best album yet."
[posted 4/25/2003 U.S.A.]
Manson reveals Album Cover Artwork!
posted: 2003-04-04 ...

D'autres photos sont visibles sur le site www.helnwein.com. ...

The Austrian artist Gottfried Helnwein is well aware of the discomfort the public feels when confronted with images of children not represented as innocents but to whom a powerful sexual identity (and an awareness) is designated. In his work, and especially his paper drawings, he has created some of the most powerful and disturbing representations of abused childhood in history of art. We are not talking about the form of abuse commonly described in the penal code. By altering or removing the inbred pulsation that spurs us to stubbornly refuse or deny what we do not recognise, the manipulations and interferences (The Intrusion) adults perform on the social body of childhood are denounced. ...

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If you are already familiar with Gottfried Helnwein then you proably knew more than I do about art, and I apologize on behalf of the commercially saturated masses.
Helnwein is a ridiculously talented artist. That is basically all you need to know. Anything you could imagine art doing for you, or to you, any feeling it might instill in you or emotion it might remove from you, he captures, then cripples, reformats, and pastes into the cleft pallet of a 20-foot-tall gray-scale rendition of a deformed fetus soaking in formaldehyde.
The essence of realism and ability that every art major ever clamored to grasp, he manages to expel onto canvas with apparent ease. He produces paintings, and photographs that you can't help but wish you could recreate with the same vision, depth, and intrigue. His art is without gimmick and his persona is without persona.
Helnwein is simply someone who enjoys creating, and has been doing a pretty damn good job at it for 35 years. ...

"Kleines Helnwein" is a play written and directedby the Argentinian poet Rodrigo M. Malmsten.
Inspired and based on the early paintings of Gottfried Helnwein
First performance: Teatro San Martin, Buenos Aires, 2000
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Autor: Rodrigo M. Malmsten
Actuan: Martín Von Tumpling, Belén Blanco
Iluminación: Alejandro Le Roux
Música: Mariano Durand, Marcelo Vignolo
Producción: Julieta Almada
Dirección: Rodrigo M. Malmsten
Esta obra formó parte del evento: III Festival Internacional de Buenos Aires ...

We have seen something of the 'look' created via Manson's collaboration with artist Gottfried Helnwein -
While the Album remains a sealed box in musical terms, Manson will wax lyrical about the inspirations and influences that helped shape it. There are the people - as well as Calloway, he nods to Oscar Wilde and the loose collective of radical artists and agents provocateurs - collaborator Helnwein among them - who were dubbed the Viennese Actionists.
" The Grotesque Burlesque takes what we've done in the past and brings it to a completely different level. This is making everyone a part of your creation. It's realising that art is more than music, more than people listen to it, more than people who play it - it is the combination of all that.
Gottfried Helnwein is someone who knows how to artfully provoke. He would take some of his creations and he'd bring them out into the streets. It became an instance where people wouldn't know what was the show and what wasn't the show. That's such a beautiful thing. It's like being in the playground - you're not really sure who's on what team, or what the real objective is. ...

1987 - Helnwein-Performance at tank-camp Kopal of the Austrian Army ...