A Consciousness-based Process

Hans Breder is a prolific artist who has worked in virtually all media: drawing, painting, sculpture, installation, photography, performance, and video. He was born in Herford, Germany in 1935 and studied at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Hamburg, Germany from 1959 to 1964 before moving to New York in 1964 with a fellowship of the Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes, where he became an assistant to the sculptor George Rickey. In 1968 he founded the Intermedia and Video Art Program at the University of Iowa, which he directed until 2000, and later co-founded the Center for the New Performing Arts there. He retired from the University of Iowa as the F. Wendell Miller Distinguished Professor in 2000, and in 2007 he was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Dortmund.

Breder’s work has been shown at the Richard Feigen Gallery in New York, multiple Whitney Biennials, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. He was included in Painting Beyond the Death of Painting (1989), the first group exhibition of American Art, at the Kuznetzky Most Exhibition Hall, Moscow. Among the places his work has been collected are the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; the Whitney Museum of American Art; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and the Museum Ostwall, Dortmund, Germany. His most recent show, Inmixing, was at White Box Gallery, New York, in 2010. This interview was conducted in January 2010.

What were the very beginnings of your formation as an artist?

Between 1953 and 1955, I apprenticed in my late teens with the surrealist artist Woldemar Winkler in Gütersloh, West Germany. What I remember from that experience today is that I was drawing and that, at some point, I had worked myself into what I can only describe as an altered state. When I came out of it, I looked at the drawing and said, this is the best drawing I have ever done—but I didn’t do it. After that experience, I ran accidentally into an older woman in Gütersloh who had a large collection of Buddhist literature, and when I described the experience of drawing and entering an altered state, she said, “You are talking about a Buddhist state. Here, take these books.” When I read them, they illuminated and validated my experience.

Did you have that insight on account of the performativity of a drawing?

Yes. Once I was aware of this transcendent state, I would try to get there again. I made a practice out of that quest. I learned that I could not make this transcendental awareness happen. This state of consciousness comes to you as a gift. But how does one sustain that kind of experience?

The issue of consciousness has been a lifelong interest of yours. Can you explain this in the context of your earlier work and how it developed?

Like most artists of my generation, I embraced the gesture, and at the same time I was inexorably drawn to Eastern philosophy. For the first time, I began to understand the harmony of thought, feeling, and consciousness.

In the past, you’ve talked to me about your mentor. Who was he and how did he set you on the way toward becoming an artist?

That’s an important question. As it happens, I had been walking down the hallway every day at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Hamburg, then still West Germany, where I was studying between 1959–64, and felt an energy that I could not explain. One day, I knocked at the door with my portfolio under my arm. Professor Willem Grimm looked through it, smiled, and said, “I am inclined to take you in.” In that moment, I had found my mentor, my spiritual father, who transmitted to me a set of values that continue to guide my way of being in the world. The generosity of this man, his insight, and how easily he could accept my very uneven education at that point, amazes me still.

Of course, both of...