Between Sound, Noise, Deconstruction, and Melody
Thomas Mießgang in conversation with Robert Muntean and Dirk Schönberger

Robert Muntean, your paintings contain countless references to pop songs, bands, or the pop milieu in general. These range from titles such as Pink Moon, an LP by Nick Drake, Kesey, which refers to the novelist and acid test activist Ken Kesey, or works such as Digital Hardcore, in which one believes 
that one can recognize- or at least sense- a photographic motif of the actor River Phoenix through the layers of color. Songs by the archetypal American underground heroes Sonic Youth are name-checked with particular regularity. Is this reference to pop a generational issue or simply a personal passion?

Sonic Youth were a key experience of my youth. You could even say: an epiphany. On one occasion in the mid-90s I wanted to buy a video cassette of Nirvana and it also happened to contain the film 1991: The Year Punk Broke, which featured a tour by Sonic Youth. Experiencing the music in this way in a live setting provided the first spark. For me, this describes the formal way in which I would like to paint: the way in which Sonic Youth wield their guitars in order to create their own sound. After all, the members of the band originally played in the group of Glenn Branca, the godfather of noise. There, they had experimented intensely with sound and with open guitar tunings that could no longer be directly related to chord progressions. This detachment and decoupling, this new way of using guitars, fascinated me.
 I tried to find a form of brushwork that could equate with this specific relationship between sound, noise, deconstruction, and melody in which atonality can still give birth to melodic elements.

In art one naturally finds synesthetic phenomena such as the famous ocular harpsichord of the mathematician Louis-Bertrand Castel from the 18th century or, later, the synesthetic experiments of the composer Alexander Scriabin, which made use of a silent clavier à lumières: when a key was pressed a particular color lighted up. I assume that your interest in sound was somewhat different?

I’m not really concerned about such a direct translation of acoustic phenomena into visual ideas. It’s simply that Sonic Youth and a few other pop artists accompanied me on my path to adulthood. One could put it dramatically by saying that music determined my approach to every other way of experiencing the world. When I then started to study art at the age of 18 I already had a certain sense of how I wanted to tackle my work. It was never about visualizing the sound of Sonic Youth but, rather, the attitude behind the sound: an attitude that lines up against the decorative, against easy consumability in such a way that a certain form of resistance develops. It was this that I also sensed upon hearing Sonic Youth for the first time: you were confronted by a complex sonic structure that was impossible to decipher and you had to hear the music several times in order to get any sense of orientation. However, if you managed to overcome this opacity, many things took on new, different forms. In my painting I also seek to create such a feeling: a feeling of turbulence and resistance that activates the viewer so that they see things differently and, perhaps, make their own small contribution to the overall image.

Nirvana may have become huge on the back of the hit Smells like Teen Spirit and the album Nevermind but before this they were part of the same independent scene as Sonic Youth, albeit of the Seattle variant alongside sub pop bands such as Mudhoney, Tad, or Screaming Trees. Dirk Schönberger, as a long-term observer of this scene how did you experience this transition of a scruffy underground combo into superstars?

If one considers the past 
two and a half decades Nirvana was perhaps the final teenager revolution. But for me they then developed very quickly in the direction of pop: the entire structure reminded me very strongly of that which I knew from the seventies and eighties. And I also regard The Jesus and Mary Chain as a pop band- whereas a band like Sonic Youth was, in comparison, always far more unwieldy and inaccessible. When you, Robert, talk about these things and I look around your studio it immediately all makes sense: this complexity that remains elusive upon first hearing is reflected in your art, the fine structure of which is also indecipherable when examined superficially. The aspect of deconstruction, the wall
 of sound, the carpet of noise- this 
is all apparent to me, even without knowing anything in advance. But so is this sense of complete control that looms somewhere below this carpet of noise. It is this that I find unique about Sonic Youth: their sound is composed, not random.

Indeed, Sonic Youth themselves always pointed out that, for them, it was about a transfer: they came from Glenn Branca and the No Wave scene in New York and wanted to introduce this noise aesthetic to the pop scene.

But returning to Nirvana’s relationship with Sonic Youth: I saw Kurt Cobain as a sort of exemplary sufferer who voiced his pain on behalf of the thousands in the audience. The cool thing about Sonic Youth, on the other hand, is that they interposed something else between emotion and performance- a kind of artistic filter. For the first time I had a sense of what art can be. Of the fact that it’s not about self-destruction but, rather, working with the resources of reflection and transformation.

A form of rock ecstasy in inverted commas, as it were...

For me, excess is too expressionist as an approach, and nor does it really interest me as an artist. My paintings aren’t vehicles for portraying my ego with the help of a brush but, rather, means of developing strategies for combining, for example, the energy of sound fields with a universe of motifs.

If you want to you can identify this affinity with rock and noise 
in the visual cataclysm that erupts 
in the paintings of Robert Muntean. Dirk Schönberger, you have bought some of these works. How do you see this as a collector? To what extent are you aware of this musicality in the work?

I acquired a portrait painted by Robert entitled Digital Hardcore in which a motif slowly becomes discernible that immediately teleported me back to my past. It radiates a sort of new wave aesthetic but isn’t immediately recognizable. And it’s this that fascinates me: the fact that one has to work one’s way through a couple of layers in order to get to a core essence or insight. In my opinion it’s this sense of the deconstruction of something figurative that leads directly to the heart of the art of Robert Muntean.

So what is the motif that underlies this work?

I like working with photographs that I’ve found: I collect these and have created a small archive that I’m always turning to. On occasions one of these motifs will appear in several of my paintings. The portrait mentioned by Dirk is based upon a photograph of the actor River Phoenix. Digital Hardcore naturally refers to the German band Atari Teenage Riot and I can form a visual link between the figure and Alec Empire. But it equally has a David Bowie-esque quality. I also tried to express this in another work. But it’s never my intention to portray a particular individual. It’s more about attempting to transmit moods and feelings. I believe that there’s some sort of innate essence that’s always beyond any temporal axis - it’s simply there, waiting to be activated.

When I read that one of your works was entitled River I initially thought—due to my advanced years—of the record of the same name by the now forgotten singer Terry Reid from the 1970s. The cover of this album radiates color, shimmering yellow tones, which one could readily associate with your painting. You were obviously thinking of something completely different but it’s wonderful that the titles of the paintings trigger chains of association that can set off in every possible direction.

I don’t want the titles to offer any explicit visual information. It’s
 a tightrope walk: How far do I nudge the viewer in a particular direction? To what extent can I retain a certain openness while still creating the feeling that there’s a consistency about the message, the aesthetic, and the basic approach of a work? This painting (he points to a large work hanging on the wall of the studio), for example, is entitled Storm which immediately makes sense, because there’s 
a certain turbulence to the visual organization—one can interpret it thus. On the other hand there’s a song of the same name from Godspeed You! Black Emperor and the key thing for me in this case is that the 20-minute post rock epics by this band unravel in such a way that they can no longer be grasped as a whole. Only after being listened to several times do they become accessible, layer upon layer. In my painting I also have the feeling that everything’s dissolving, whirling, as it were, away into infinity.

The development of music since the 1960s has been characterized by the ever increasing number of tracks which a recording can have. This has made it possible to create a monumental density of sound that would have been unimaginable earlier.


Yes, this makes me think of bands like Animal Collective, who record tracks in opposition to each other, or Nine Inch Nails, who pile up entire mountains of sound. Here I can see clear parallels with my work: I paint in strata, in layers, not in the sense of putting down a base coat and slowly building up the picture but in the sense that each layer really works as a stand-alone film with its own formations. These are then laid over each other and often clash, creating a prism. Only at the end is the figure woven in. It’s no longer possible to tell which layer was the first, the lowest, but it all resonates. In a certain sense, a polyphony of color is thus created.

You only paint with oils on canvas?

Basically yes.


I ask because I recently spoke with Martha Jungwirth in whose work I see certain parallels in terms of the relationship between figuration and abstraction. She’s an artist who paints with oils or watercolors but, most significantly, on different papers, which lends her work a very special character.

I adore her work and also have here the catalog of Wirklichkeiten,
 the group to which she belonged in the late sixties. Her paintings always contain a figurative reference but it
 is their abstract qualities that prevail. The legibility of the motif is no longer important. This is also the thing that enables me to recognize the visual sound: the fact that a picture resonates. The motif is no longer in the foreground, everything should be of equal value. It’s no longer about whether one is looking at an abstract color sequence or a face. And even the face should be created with a certain level of abstraction. In every work I actually try to avoid painting— in the sense of painting eyes or noses. I want the figure to structure itself in another way.

Robert Muntean, our conversation gives me the impression that you’re principally interested in complex layered music which builds up an enormous pressure. That means that the Swans, the forefathers of New York noise, must play a role in your universe?

Exactly. Especially the early recordings. There’s a live album called Feel good now that documents the 1987 European tour, but the final records are also interesting. I saw the Swans a couple of times
 in Berlin at the Volksbühne and
 at Berghain. Those were brilliant concerts. A presence in which sound is experienced as a body. Like a sonic sculpture that pushes you away.

Earlier decades also saw such convergence between music and art. In the case of punk this was almost a conditio sine qua non. One only has to recall Albert Oehlen, Jiří Dokoupil, Martin Kippenberger and their relationships with the German music scene in a number of cities. In those days almost every wild young painter played in an avantgarde rock band, even in Vienna.

Yes, yes, that was the sound of my youth in the early eighties. We always went to the clubs and bars where the artists and musicians also met up. Of course they influenced each other, in terms more of attitude than technique. Brilliant dilettantism and stuff.

It’s interesting that it was in painting that the spirit of punk most sought to manifest itself, 
in this art form which is declared dead on average about every ten years. Before this we’d already had concept art, performance, Actionism—all movements which were considered at the time as significantly “more modern.”

Perhaps painting is simply the best form of expression when one wants one’s work to be direct and immediate. More suitable, for example, than video or sculpture. It probably also has something to do with the gestures of painting which make it easier to lend expression and form to an issue.

That sounds plausible because the aim of punk was to find a direct and genuine form of expression that wasn’t burdened by technique. And maybe the same applies to certain forms of “punk” painting in the wake of, for example, A. R. Penck. Brush in the hand and let’s go...

It doesn’t have to be dilettantism, but there is the possibility of developing something simply by doing. I also started with just a canvas and a brush in the hand and, with practice, acquired a certain technique and professionalism. I can’t formulate this into a general thesis now but can only speak for myself: painting is an analogue medium which means that, if you want to make a musical comparison, it’s related to the sound of the guitar. And just as the guitar and its symbolism is a highly determined territory that has to be constantly broken open by new ideas, painting is also dominated by star painters from the 1980s full of macho bravado who have to be confronted with a different position. This is what is so exciting: you can still express something with painting today and definitely don’t have to adapt a macho attitude to do so.

As we’ve so far seen in this conversation, this pop component
 is a very important part of your art. But in this context I would speak of a broader definition of pop. Because I consider that the way you deploy an image of a Mount Everest expedition or a photo of Egon Schiele in your art is also pop.

I agree. For me there’s no great distinction here. If I were to read Michel Houellebecq today I would also describe it as pop. Take the novel Submission in which he writes about Joris-Karl Huysmans and which brought me back once again to the decadence of the fin de siècle. This is how reference systems emerge that mostly end with a pop phenomenon and which I try to use productively in my work. None of these are processes that are consciously controlled by me. Rather, they are interests and it’s the activity of painting that offers me the opportunity to plug myself in and address them.

Robert Muntean, we spoke earlier about the fact that photos play a major role in your work as both starting point and source of inspiration—you have a consciously limited collection of these and individual motifs can also appear more than once. What makes an image suitable for inclusion in a painting by Robert Muntean?

For me, the idea of sampling in music plays a role. In a sense I “sample” the material and can then work on it artistically in any number of ways.

Is it also a question of the “star power” that’s sometimes found in the photos that you select? Of the symbolism?

Of course I find the figures
 on the images fascinating because they also act as metaphors for that which they themselves do and represent. But in the end this is no longer legible in the painting. It’s the personal level that’s legible, the level that triggers my interest in working with this motif. This can be someone’s gesture or posture and, ideally, this will inspire me to create more painterly variations, all of which can be traced back to the same motif.

In order to underline this once more: the archive of images to which you turn is limited. You don’t need 50,000 photos in order to be able to select appropriate motifs?

If I’m preparing an exhibition with 13 new works then this doesn’t mean 13 new motifs but, perhaps, 
4 or 5. Beyond this I will reuse motifs that have already appeared in other constellations. Given that I create my work in a very abstract way and that when I start I often haven’t a clue about the direction in which
 the painting will develop this is an open process. This means that it’s always really good for me if I already know a motif. But there’s one thing that I’d like to emphasize: It’s not a question of recreating a painting that’s already worked, of producing some sort of remix, but of creating
 a truly new work. Perhaps one could also say that, in being repeated, the motif liberates itself from its content even more: that its transformation into a form or an intermediate state becomes even more pronounced. The main question raised by this approach is: How is it still possible today to paint figuratively or even to deal with figures at all?

The question is even more pressing because we’re living in an era in which we’re flooded with images. In contrast with earlier centuries painting is facing competition from countless other visual offerings.

Yes, this is an age in which virtually every image can be retrieved anywhere. You have an 
idea, enter something into Google and are answered with millions of images which fit your three words. This is why I find it important that one is neither too general nor too random. In my work as a fashion designer I’m always striving to keep my reference system manageable because otherwise everything will get out of hand. Music, the art that I’ve grappled with and the books that I read were always important to me. The territory is thus relatively clearly defined and this is vital because otherwise one would end up chasing every meaningless hype. Whether The Jesus and Mary Chain or Palais Schaumburg—these are simply things that were important in one’s youth, that enabled one to establish oneself as an individual and that one can retrieve at any time. It’s about finding an approach that sticks. Of course one develops throughout 
life but a basic approach gives one
 a framework for organizing new phenomena.

What do you see on the contemporary scene that reflects your approach to pop culture?

I’m not a huge fan of hip-hop but I was at the Kendrick Lamar concert here in Berlin. Support act: James Blake. In principle these two don’t belong together and yet they appear together because there’s a musical connection that only becomes clear at second glance. I find such things interesting: the moment one suddenly notices the extent to which Kendrick Lamar is influenced by James Blake and how Blake’s pop is, in turn, inluenced by hip-hop. This is what I mean: One has one’s clearly defined and staked off territory but there are always disruptive factors that ensure that one doesn’t repeat oneself.

I’m also always looking for opportunities in painting to start a dialogue and establish connections with other things in order to keep up the suspense. Of course this can be achieved internally within the framework of art but it can also be triggered by external influences. The above-mentioned disruptive factors are also at play when you break something open and then 
put it back together again slightly differently. In this way the work of art is always in motion. But you can always refer back to what you have. This is the reservoir from which you can draw.

I’m a little schizophrenic when it comes to my “basic collection” of music: I like Sonic Youth and The Jesus and Mary Chain, I like Kraftwerk and the Pet Shop Boys. These are all pieces of a puzzle that are continually being joined together in different ways. Sometimes I ramp up one fader and ramp down another and sometimes vice versa.

In my opinion it’s not a question of stylistic differences but of attitude, something about which we’ve already spoken. For me, the nineties continue to set the tone: the off shoots of grunge, that which has been labelled Generation X, anti-consumerism.

But pop culture, even the so- called underground, can also of course be used to drive consumption. Brands such as Nike or Adidas are the best examples of how sportswear can be made hip for young people.

I don’t believe that Adidas discovered youth culture and used it for commercial purposes. It was more that the pop scene and, in particular, hip-hop liked sneakers and that this led to a certain brand fetishism. The song My Adidas by Run DMC from the 1980s is a good example of this. They spurred each other on. The music certainly made it possible for a company that, in reality, produces functional sports clothing and shoes to suddenly become a cultural icon. In the cases of techno and rave, etc., sports clothing became the uniform of the young. This naturally had an impact on popular fashion taste and led to certain social conventions going out of the window. Today one often goes to the office wearing sneakers rather than a tie. This is certainly fascinating. With reference to Adidas: it isn’t that we changed our product but rather that society itself, influenced by the pop scene, changed to such an extent that our product suddenly found itself at the heart of popular taste.

Adidas had the advantage 
that a hip-hop group popular in the eighties wrote an advertising song for the sneaker—voluntarily, without being commissioned by the company to do so. In the eyes of a sceptical young public this transmitted essential street credibility onto the training shoe. Robert Muntean, are there also such phenomena of transmission in art? Do paintings become hipper if they work with pop references?

It’s hard for me to judge. One thing that certainly plays a role is the fact that the fine arts are part of the bourgeois system of culture whereas rock ’n’ roll traditionally always tended to lurk in the shadows. If these two systems come together friction is inevitable. Although I have to say: my work was never based on strategic considerations. Everything occurred naturally and organically because I had an interest in pop and music that I wanted to take further in my painting and by using artistic means. This also made it possible to cast off certain traditions of painting and think of art in a new and different way.

One image from the universe of motifs that you use in your work shows the “High Priest of LSD” and prophet of drugs Timothy Leary. Does the notion of the expansion of the mind and the enhancement of the self as a result of the hallucinogenic experience also play a role?

I have to admit that this fascinates me. I was greatly inspired in this connection by the documentary Das Netz (The Net) by the Leipzig artist Lutz Dammbeck: In the film he seeks to highlight the parallels between Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, the Grateful Dead, who celebrated their concerts as acid tests, and the people who invented the term personal computer while experimenting with LSD. It envisages an utopian space
 in which drugs, computers, and the computer art of an artist such as Nam June Paik play a role. I readily make use of such hallucinatory conceptual and imaginary spaces.

So drugs, ecstacy, and excess can also be sources of inspiration for your art?

Absolutely. There’s undoubtedly even something appealing and liberating about self-destruction 
but more, in my view, when used as a tease. At this point I can also turn again to Sonic Youth who are, after all, pretty normal guys. Kim Gordon once said that they appeared on one occasion with another band whose members were strung out on drugs yet played really conservative rock. Sonic Youth, on the other hand, were “clean” and preferred to transfer the excess to the music. Which sounds to me like a pretty valid approach.