Monty Richthofen, HARD 2 4GET
Gallery / 18 images
“Droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven” would read very differently painted on the nose of a bomber plane. This is the kind of perceptual shift that interests the German artist Monty Richthofen. In HARD 2 4GET, his roving exhibition staged during Berlin Gallery Weekend, the quote about mercy from Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice appears alongside real phrases lifted from WW2-era nose art – “heaven sent”, “problem child”, “heaven can wait” – on a fleet of white vans.
The idea for HARD 2 4GET began with a series of photos from the Vietnam War, Richthofen tells Dazed, which showed anti-war slogans painted onto soldiers’ helmets. “It deeply touched me,” he says. “These were works of art. And they completely broke the idea of uniformity, but the military tolerated the freedom of expression in order to boost morale.” Looking deeper into this phenomenon, he stumbled on an archive of aeroplane nose art spanning the Second World War, Vietnam, and the Iraq War. As a distant relative of the Red Baron – the infamous German fighter pilot who flew in the First World War, and painted his plane bright red – his connection to these artworks was particularly strong.
“You don’t get to choose what family you’re born into, but you get to choose how actively you engage with your family history, and how much you challenge it,” he says. “As an artist, it’s important to be conscious of this. I want to use my work to promote peace and challenge the political ideals that unfortunately dominate the times we’re living in.”
To cut a long story short, this is how the slogans ended up graffitied on vans, remixed, recontextualised, and set loose around Berlin with masked drivers behind the wheel. “It would have been amazing to have them on planes,” the artist says. “But where do I get a bomber? It’s impossible.”
Even with vans, the performance proved logistically difficult: within the first 20 minutes, some of the drivers were pulled over at gunpoint by the police. Technically, they’d broken a German traffic law against driving with your face covered, and the police suspected them of planning a robbery. “I don’t think any person with criminal intentions would be stupid enough to drive in a fully spray-painted van,” says Richthofen. “But maybe this is where me and the police think differently… to say it the diplomatic way.”
“Me and the police think differently… to say it the diplomatic way” – Monty Richthofen
On May 1, as May Day parties filled the streets across Berlin, the vans came together for two performances outside Dittrich & Schlechtriem, the gallery presenting HARD 2 4GET. The first, featuring Dafni Krazoudi and Muriel Seiquer, saw the masked duo scrub a phrase from one of the vehicles. In the second, performer Jérémie Bezençon climbed on top of a Richthofen-painted Tesla, stripping to the waist and repeating the word “maman”. For Richthofen, it was a display of vulnerability that circled back to the messages painted on the underside of warplanes.
“There is nothing glorifying in battle, or dying for your country, or returning with PTSD,” he explains. “With all these images of war from Palestine, from Ukraine, we get desensitised to the toll it takes on people. As an artist, I feel that these experiences need to be continuously addressed, in the real world.”
Richthofen speaks to Dazed over the phone while walking home from his studio, occasionally stopping to call back the dog – a “free-spirited” Vizsla named Penny – who accompanies him pretty much everywhere. Other interruptions come in the form of angry cyclists, a small fire at the city’s central station, and a faulty line. It feels like the appropriate backdrop to discuss an exhibition where language is fragmented, displaced, and breaks out of the white cube to circulate the city streets.
“In the city, so many things can go wrong,” he notes. “But I’m very good at reacting. To trust the situation is a fundamental part of my practice, to think that somehow it will all work out.”
In that case, should we start with what went wrong during HARD 2 4GET?
Monty Richthofen: That’s a really good place to start. The things that went wrong are the most important things to discuss, because we always see what went right. People rarely talk about what didn’t go as expected.
Two days after the police stopped the vans, another truck got pulled over by the police because somebody called and said that the performers had vandalised it. Actually, what they were doing was cleaning the truck. Again, it’s interesting how perceptions differ.
Another thing that didn’t go as planned was that the performances started late. Of course, in the moment, you’re thinking, ‘Oh no, 200 people are waiting.’ But this is only happening inside of your brain. Nobody [in the audience] knows what part of it is and what is not. I actually developed my writing that way. When I was tattooing back in the day, I definitely made spelling mistakes, and on human skin you can’t just erase it. This forced me to react. I started playing with errors to blur the lines.
When you talk about being surprised by people’s perceptions, is that much more likely to happen on the street than at a gallery opening, where people rarely wander in by mistake?
Monty Richthofen: Yeah. Nobody would call the police in the white cube gallery and say, ‘Hey, somebody is spray painting on the wall.’ They would just assume it is part of the show. What happens as soon as you put an artwork into the public space is that the lines of intentionality get totally blurred. Some people might not have even realised that this is a work of art driving through the city. Some people might have been irritated by it. There’s a lot of room for things to unfold in ways one could never anticipate or expect.
My practice is rooted in graffiti, which I started when I was like 15 years old, when I painted my first train. Later, I thought, ‘Okay, what is it actually that I love so much about painting graffiti?’ And I realised it’s not the final product, but the whole performative aspect of it. It’s about cutting a hole in a fence, or climbing over wall, having to put on a mask, checking out a spot. The outcome at the end is just the cherry on top. It was even fun if you spent the whole day in the bushes, and you didn’t get to paint. So, leaving the safe space and the white cube is definitely necessary for me. I think that the public space is much more democratic.
Does it also mean that the art touches the real world in a way art in a gallery can’t?
Monty Richthofen: This is something that the art world – curators, gallerists, institutions, and also artists – needs to rethink and reconsider. Especially in times where there’s such a proliferation of images on the internet, what are the memories and experiences that we really want to create? There are a lot of reasons, also, why people don’t want to come inside a physical space. And I think certain messages should not be contained within walls. People need to see it, to share it, to engage with it and react to it.
How has your background in tattooing influenced your work as an artist?
Monty Richthofen: I first had little texts that I would write next to my graffiti, as placeholders for my handwriting. People really liked them, so I started doing more and more of them. I quickly wanted to test the boundaries, and to see how far people would go, and tattooing… there are very performative and ritualistic elements to it. So I developed this performance, My Words Your Body (2017-19), where I sat down with a person, and based on the conversation I would tattoo them a text. With that, I traveled and tattooed all over the world [gaining popularity under the name Maison Hefner].
I started understanding that there is a huge difference if text is on canvas, or if it’s a tattoo, or if it’s on a truck, or if it’s spoken, or if it’s on a wall. ‘I love you,’ if it’s spray-painted on a wall, can still aggravate somebody. Most people wouldn’t complain about ‘I love you’ in the form of a song. The medium that you write it on totally defines our perception. I started experimenting with sound, and installation.
Why do you think it always comes back to language for you?
Monty Richthofen: I almost failed high school because of German and English. I hated French, so I stopped taking French. Language was never my strength. But I think that within language…
Hello?
Monty Richthofen: Hi?
Oh, I can hear you again.
Monty Richthofen: What fascinates me about language is that it’s an attempt at communication, but it’s bound to fail. Literally! There’s so much room for misunderstanding, for misinterpretation, it makes it quite exciting, and also quite loaded. There’s so much room for error.
If you look at a painting… for me, as soon as I have it figured out, I can let go of it. The things I’ve not figured out, they don’t let me go. They draw me back. It’s a really interesting process to accept the unknown and maybe never have the last piece of the puzzle. We, as humans, have developed language, and it is something that is really quite unique to Homo sapiens. This is where a lot of my passion lies, because there are so many layers to it, I can’t master it. Maybe language is a little bit like the ocean; you never know how the tide will change.
Monty Richthofen’s book THE LIFE AND DEATH OF MAISON HEFNER is available now via Dittrich and Schlechtriem.
