Radical Artist Julius von Bismarck Brings His First Australian Solo Show to Melbourne

“When a hurricane destroys your house, who do you blame? Do you blame the gods of the storm? Or do you blame the humans who changed the climate?” This was Julius von Bismark, the acclaimed German artist, on a walk-through of his first solo show in Australia.

Von Bismarck has scaled mountains, chased lightning and ventured into hurricanes for his practice. He was the first artist in residence at Cern in Geneva, and studied under the great Icelandic Danish artist Olafur Eliasson. He’s fascinated by the intersection of humans and the natural environment, and has created staggering works of video, sculpture and photography in exploration of it.

This Is Not the Storm, now on at ACCA, spans more than two decades of von Bismarck’s remarkable career, and features work never before seen in Australia. We took a tour of the exhibition, with von Bismarck as our guide, on opening day.

Tell us why you decided to whip the ocean in the Punishment series.

I didn’t plan to do this. It was a spontaneous reaction to the Atlantic, which looked exactly how I imagined it to be in this piece. The Punishment series is about whipping an image of nature. It’s inspired by [fifth century Persian ruler] Xerxes, who sent out his troops to punish the ocean after it destroyed a bridge he had built.

I was interested in translating that into today’s world, where gods and the power of nature have a completely new meaning. Nowadays, the ocean is connotated with surfing, fun sports, bikinis and, in this case – Ipanema Beach [in Rio de Janeiro] – with Caipirinhas. This doesn’t fit an angry ocean you punish. But when I arrived in Rio and I saw this ocean, I said, “Wow, that’s actually the serious ocean I had in mind.” It was perfectly fitting.

You just happened to be in a suit, had your whip, and off you went into the ocean?

Exactly. It’s hard to believe but that’s how it was. A colleague standing next to me just shot it with the camera he had on hand. It wasn’t a very good camera, but good enough to make the point.

So much of your practice requires incredibly careful planning. How much involves going out on a spontaneous whim like this and how much is methodically planned, almost scientific-style work?

I would say 99 per cent of work is planned and one per cent is spontaneous. But that one per cent can be very important and become very big in an exhibition. The planned work sometimes takes up to two years of engineering.

You were struck by lightning on a camping trip. If that hadn’t happened, do you think this exhibition and your career would have looked very different?

Being struck by lightning is a very intense experience. It sounds a little bit like the beginning of a Marvel movie, but that’s how it was actually. That’s perhaps how some people imagine artists work – something falls on their head and then there’s a genius idea for a new work. Normally it’s not like that, but in this case, yes, it was like that.

I wanted to revisit the lightning. The lightning came to me; I wanted to come to the lightning, or to invite it again, asking, “What is the lightning? Who is controlling it? Can I control it? What happens when I’m trying to control it? Will it hit me where I expect it? Will it do something else?”

We shot rockets into thunderstorms with cables attached – that’s how we can trigger lightning. Often it just doesn’t work. For a whole month, we were doing it and didn’t catch any lightning.

In your new kinetic work, Two Heads With One Stone, two sculptural heads and a rock are flying around the space. What is this piece about?

It’s about your understanding of the movement you see and your brain trying automatically to predict what the movements will do.

Is it organic movement or are they on a planned rotation? It’s organic. We are putting energy into the pendulums, which have their own natural frequency at which they want to swing. The program is reacting to the reaction of pendulums. We can control it but we also have moments in which we just let the chaos happen. Sometimes the movement of the pendulums gets very big and they might hit each other – or maybe not.

Have you seen them hit each other?

Yes. Yesterday, at the opening night, they were hitting each other.

In I Am Afraid I Must Ask You to Leave, you blew up natural monuments that you recreated. Can you tell us more?

We were trying to make it look like Utah, because we didn’t want to blow up real monuments. We built the monuments in Mexico in an area that looks exactly like Utah, blew them up, and then posted all the videos of that online and it went viral. A team of 30 workers worked on [creating the monument] using real rock. It was about 90 tonnes of rock.

[The work was inspired by an idea I had that a] group of ecoterrorists would attack natural monuments in the US as a penalty for Trump exiting The Paris Agreement. It was also inspired by the Buddhas of Bamiyan statues in Afghanistan, which were blown up by the Taliban, saying, “This is a monument for the wrong god, so we have to destroy it.”

We tried to translate that into a contemporary culture. A lot of my work or my interest is trying to get rid of old monuments and make space for new ones, because I think we have the wrong monuments. 

What do you mean by that?

We’re celebrating the wrong things. What is a natural monument? In this case, it’s a stone arch or a column in the desert, which people assign meaning to as a monument for nature. I think that’s not something we should use as a symbol for our ability to preserve nature. If you destroy the atmosphere while praying to a rock column, you don’t understand you’re hurting yourself doing that.

How did you blow them up?

This was in a mining town in Mexico, so they have a lot of explosives for the mining businesses. We just hired them. Blowing it up was very easy compared to making it.

When it went viral, did you confirm they weren’t real or did you allow the story to just run?

We allowed the story to just go viral for a while, and only when we exhibited the work the first time did we tell the public it was us. Then I got another interview with Fox News, revealing that it’s me. Again, there’s a question around why would someone do this, and I wanted to leave the people alone with that question, without giving the answer right away.

When you think about people who will be coming into this exhibition, who might not know your work, what are the feelings you hope for them to experience?

My wish would be that they see something they don’t know whether they like or hate, or that they don’t know how to place in their idea of the world. Maybe a week later they will still remember it, and it will become part of their critical approach to the world and how to change that.

This Is Not the Storm is free and runs at ACCA until June 14.