A memoir of Dr Martin Heine

A short memoir of Dr Martin Heine,
his art and performances

By David Bromfield

‘Nothing will come of nothing’ 
- Shakespeare, King Lear, Act 1 Scene 1

I met Martin Heine in 1991. He was one of the first year student intake for the BFA degree at UWA. He wore remarkable red and cream striped trousers. His first words to me were, ‘You will get no trouble from me!’ He first came to Australia in 1982 as a tourist with his then wife Caroline. They returned permanently to Western Australia as immigrants in 1987. Caroline is an anthropologist, she could easily find work in the West. Martin studied art at Claremont.
 
He was the most widely skilled and experienced student I ever met, already a highly accomplished three-year trained cabinet-maker and a well-qualified silkscreen printer. He brought the attitude and expectations of an impeccable craftsman to all his creative work from painting to performance. He also boasted a wide, if opportunistic, familiarity with philosophy, which he had mostly acquired during his years as a punk in 70’s Berlin.
 
He also brought and maintained a unique dialogue with German and European art, with artists like Kippenberger, Peter Zimmerman and Fischli/Weiss. When David Weiss died we presented a memorial exhibition at the Kurb. It was the most unpopular thing we ever did.
 
It was a great privilege for Pippa and me to share his friendship, his wicked sense of humour, to work with him over the next twenty-four years. By the end of the 1990’s he was already the most interesting artist here. His retrospective at the Kurb in 2007 established him, beyond doubt, as the most significant artist of his generation working in Perth. He remained so until his recent death.
 
A few years ago, Pippa and I invited Martin to some theatre performances including Waiting for Godot and King Lear. He was struck by, ‘Nothing will come of nothing,’ Lear’s arrogant threat to his daughter Cordelia, when she refuses to perform for her share of his fortune. It became a private joke, a permanent personal catchphrase with many suitably ironic meanings. Martin fully appreciated its irony when he used it to suggest that only hard work would make art possible. He also used it to refer scathingly to the Perth art world and ‘community’, which gave his work very little active support.
 

In 2006 he told me:
 

In terms of creating new and original artwork, Perth was never there. Never there! But interestingly Perth was, in my opinion, the first place that understood how to cripple and streamline the art world in terms of aesthetic commodities – far more than in Germany, Austria or Switzerland. The Perth art world became the world centre of the avant-garde of art made for fashionable consumption.

 
Nonetheless he had decided to stay here to work, almost as if he thought the all-pervasive, even hostile disinterest a stimulating challenge. During the 1990’s he attracted a small but devoted group of friends and supporters, through a sequence of compelling original performances and the development of his unique ‘reverse icon’ approach to painting, in which he pushed paint from behind the support. This was initially fly screen or shade cloth, but, more recently, as his technique improved, expensive screen-printing fabric.
 
Later, Martin often joked about one of his best performances Mediocre Shunga – Use your Head (2004), in which he painted the walls of a gallery with a mop attached to his head, while dressed in a kimono and rubber boots. Mediocre Shunga attracted an audience of six, but, so far, he said, he had met about 200 people who remembered seeing it.

Martin was always an artist; he never set out to become one.
For him art was an unending adventure in being human.

As he argued in his doctorate, he believed that great art should always be a means to active liberation, not passive gratification. He was a great reader of Adorno. For years he had a studio close to Ticino, Adorno’s summer home.

He wished ‘just to do my work’ as he regularly declared. He discovered this work for himself, one creative problem at a time, each thought through with utmost integrity over three decades. He detested fashionable bourgeois attitudes to art, intellectual laziness, emerging artists (you either are or you aren’t!), cultural cowardice, second-hand post-modernism, and the slow, miserable descent of local art, artists and their audience into show business and commodity retail.
 
From Joseph Beuys, whose work he knew very well, he took the idea of art as a seamless, vast, humanist social enterprise. In order to recover Beuys’ generous spirit in a far more cynical and desperate times, he tested it to breaking point with practical criticism in his performance. ‘The Honey Pump is Kaputt’ (Lawrence Wilson Gallery, 1999), when he ‘famously’ poured a bucket of honey over his head.
 
Martin, the ex-punk, rejected the soft-headed sixties delusion that the entire world and all its business could become art, but his entire practice was an experiment in art as an ever-increasing state of freedom. The reverse paintings emerged in part from his desire to remove the oppressive presence of the artist from the gaze of the audience. By painting from behind the support he hoped that the audience would become one with the artist in front the work. His performances, never aggressive or coercive, also sought to allow the audience to enter the work on their own terms. 
 
It was the unique breadth and diversity of his achievements that most captured one’s imagination. Unlike nearly all contemporary art, this was something really useful, riotously alive, a good example of freedom at work in the world. His virtuoso painting technique, his extraordinary presence during his performances, were driven by highly challenging and articulate creative goals.

In 2006 musing on the limited support for his work he declared
 

I think that what supports my art is a philosophy, a way of looking for alternatives in terms of how the work has come about, in terms of all these years of performances and as the reverse iconography. If you look at it this way, you become aware of philosophical ideas about life. Art has more to say than just being an image or being a work.
 
It is a thing that accompanies you, if you are interested in art you must surely need to engage with it. People fool themselves that it makes perfect sense to buy a car or pay the mortgage. I will not play chess like Duchamp. I will just continue living as an artist without irony, as an example. 

 
Martin was the most committed artist I have ever met. He lived with a minimum of possessions and slept, like Brancusi, in the studio, with his works around him. His regular diet consisted of oats, pot noodles, tinned sardines and kidney beans, all from the bottom shelf at Kakulas Brothers.
 
He never stopped working. He was absolutely ruthless with himself, though not with others. He was always happy to discuss his art with anyone interested and generous to a fault with ideas and practical assistance for other artists, especially those who showed at the Kurb. Martin always looked for companions on the way. He was less sympathetic to those who, in the approximate words of Dave Graney, want to get there but don’t want to travel.
 
In a town where people look sideways at you if you ask a serious question about art, Martin was a blessed relief. I shall miss our Friday evening discussions about art (and everything else) over a bottle of ‘Chateau Kurb’ red. We both had an interest in Nazi history. Verge management meetings were often derailed by topics such as what exactly had happened to Martin Bormann, where was Hitler’s skull and just why did he invade Russia (pace Ian Kershaw). Martin had a battered old blue Corolla which, for obvious reasons, we nicknamed The Hindenberg. Its only redeeming features were an unstable roof rack for carrying artworks and a superb radio permanently tuned to Classic FM. We played ‘guess the composer’ while delivering art. Martin was more than chagrined that I proved best at recognising the classic Germans, Hayden, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert but he never missed with Wagner or Strauss.
 
At the memorial drinks for Martin at the Kurb, Merrick Belyea generously described Martin and me as a double-headed dragon. If only! Martin outdistanced us all without even trying by ‘living as an artist without irony, as an example’. We were all there to celebrate a generous life of dedication to art. Many also mourned the loss of this great example. Martin was living proof that it was still possible to be an exemplary artist here, in an era of cowardice, corporate sponsorship, hypocrisy, networking and hopeless indifference. I doubt there will be another.
 
Martin died after triumphant exhibitions and performances in Singapore and Manila and a delightful short holiday. His show at the Drawing Room in Manila contained the best work he had ever made. It was the triumph of a lifetime. He had found a very sympathetic audience and many new friends. My friends in Manila tell me that he was happier than he had been for a long time.
 

A short memoir of Dr Martin Heine, his art and performances

By David Bromfield

‘Nothing will come of nothing’ 
- Shakespeare, King Lear, Act 1 Scene 1

I met Martin Heine in 1991. He was one of the first year student intake for the BFA degree at UWA. He wore remarkable red and cream striped trousers. His first words to me were, ‘You will get no trouble from me!’ He first came to Australia in 1982 as a tourist with his then wife Caroline. They returned permanently to Western Australia as immigrants in 1987. Caroline is an anthropologist, she could easily find work in the West. Martin studied art at Claremont.
 
He was the most widely skilled and experienced student I ever met, already a highly accomplished three-year trained cabinet-maker and a well-qualified silkscreen printer. He brought the attitude and expectations of an impeccable craftsman to all his creative work from painting to performance. He also boasted a wide, if opportunistic, familiarity with philosophy, which he had mostly acquired during his years as a punk in 70’s Berlin.
 
He also brought and maintained a unique dialogue with German and European art, with artists like Kippenberger, Peter Zimmerman and Fischli/Weiss. When David Weiss died we presented a memorial exhibition at the Kurb. It was the most unpopular thing we ever did.
 
It was a great privilege for Pippa and me to share his friendship, his wicked sense of humour, to work with him over the next twenty-four years. By the end of the 1990’s he was already the most interesting artist here. His retrospective at the Kurb in 2007 established him, beyond doubt, as the most significant artist of his generation working in Perth. He remained so until his recent death.
 
A few years ago, Pippa and I invited Martin to some theatre performances including Waiting for Godot and King Lear. He was struck by, ‘Nothing will come of nothing,’ Lear’s arrogant threat to his daughter Cordelia, when she refuses to perform for her share of his fortune. It became a private joke, a permanent personal catchphrase with many suitably ironic meanings. Martin fully appreciated its irony when he used it to suggest that only hard work would make art possible. He also used it to refer scathingly to the Perth art world and ‘community’, which gave his work very little active support.
 
In 2006 he told me: