"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 ...

...

...

"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. ...

...

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
.
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 ...

...

William Friedkin - the director of The Exorcist, perhaps the most famous horror film of all time, and The French Connection, one of the best films of the 1970s - visited the studio of Gottfried Helnwein. ...

We have INDEED just finished mixing the final song for the album and have scheduled the GROTESK BURLESK all across the world. The artwork and much more of my collaboration with Gottfried Helnwein is also complete.
The details of our AKTION and the sounds that accompany it will all be revealed quite soon. ...

Poems and novels, films and photographs, paintings and performances, monuments and memorials, even comics are the cultural forms that engage us with catastrophic and traumatic history.
Through these eyes we have come to know events which defy the possibility of representation. We have come to bear witness to history. ...

...To this day, there is still controversy over when to operate on these fixed nasal deformities acquired during midfacial growth. The painting by Helnwein, entitled "Mean Child", depicts a terrified child who has just undergone a reconstructive operation to form a new nose from a frontal flap (Fig. 46). Blood drips from the tubes projecting from the reconstructed nose. A purulent scrap of granulation is seen in the left medial canthus, while a fresh scar from which the sutures have just been removed stretches from the angle of the mouth to the left ear. The flowered wallpaper in the background contains these words: disobedience allowed, taking pleasure in punishments, unchaste things, and other words which are connected with lines to the pathological alterations in the face. Do these harken back to the mediaeval belief that sickness is a punishment for greater or lesser human failings?

Artists:
George Grosz, Gottfried Helnwein, Albrecht Dürer, Rembrandt, Peter Paul Rubens, William Hogarth, Otto Dix, Velásques, Hans Holbein the Younger, Bernard van Orley, Vrubel, Jacob Jordaens, Juan Carreno de Miranda, George Catlin, Jan Provoost, Honoré Daumier , Heinrich Zille, Wilhelm Busch, , Gaetano Guilio Zumbo, Manfred Deix, Simone Martini, Cornelis Cornelisz van Haarlem, Marc Chagall, Chicotot, Laurence Sterne, Utamaro, Ferdinand Bol, Master of the Wenemaer Triptych, Liberale da Verona, Jules Lenepveu, Alexandrowitsch Wssjewoloshskij, and Ancient Egypt-, Phoenician-, Roman-, Greek- and Mayan -artists.
...

Art Direction: Gottfried Helnwein
Editing and primary director of photography:
Benjamin at the Barbarian Group
Second camera: Charles Koutris
Location: studio Helnwein, Los Angeles ...

...

Marilyn Manson:
About a year ago, I hooked up with Gottfried Helnwein, and he and I have been working together on various projects that, again, cross the boundaries between photography, painting, film, and installation. It's part of what I'm going to unleash and put into effect as the next couple of months unfold. It's stuff that people dont get to see anymore; it's stuff that happened in the '30s, '40s, '50s and even the '60s with the Panic Movement and Action. Gottfried really pushes the envelope, not just for shock value but for the betterment of art, to make people want to have style because they like it, not because they want to impress other people, to want to be creative because it feeds them and it makes them exist. ...