Of politics and painting: in the first installment of a two-part conversation, the artist looks back on his eventful early career—student days, learning from Beuys, Maoist and Green Party activism, clandestine visits to East Germany, the genesis of the Cafe Deutschland series

Art in America, June-July, 2005 by Robert Storr

RS: His paintings were being smuggled out? That money represented sales of his work in the West?

JI: Right. I don't like to make it more exciting than it really was. Some of his works went out by post. The paintings looked like a child's drawings--crazy things--so the police didn't care. But later it became more difficult. The East German police had a good espionage system, and an art administration department looking for things by East German artists in the West--what reviews they got, how important they became, and so on. After a while, Penck had important shows in other countries, and suddenly they recognized the same child paintings as his art.

RS: What happened the first time you met him?

JI: We met in a cafe where better-off East German people went, and you could pay with West German marks, though ordinary people didn't go there. I sat at a table, with a tape machine under the newspaper, because I was prepared to have an interview with him. He came in very aggressively to show off to these established functionaries and said, "Red Front," very loudly. Everybody was surprised, because even though it was a Communist country, they were not used to saying it. Probably only at the May Day parade. Then we talked, and it was such a surrealist talk. I tried to make him a member of the Maoist movement, and he was talking to me about Perry Rhodan, a cartoon and comic-strip science-fiction figure. Then he showed me his cellar studio. Every wall was painted, and it was completely crowded with paintings. Outside was a space for children, where there was a ping-pong table, but no net. Instead they had had to make a wall out of stones. And I thought, that's it: Penck stood here and I stood there. I used it later in a painting.

RS: It was like the Berlin wall between you.

JI: Exactly. And then there was a break of three years. He wrote, and the letters made a connection between us. I still have a letter in my kitchen in Dusseldorf that I see every morning when I have tea. He drew a polar bear, and he wrote that the ice is now broken. I knew what he meant--we were ready for this. So I went back in January 1979--this time, to Dresden. Before I went, I gave him a call and asked him, "What do you need?" He told me, "I need oil colors, canvas, and pineapples, citrus fruits, whatever you can get." I filled my suitcase with materials and paint.

In Dresden, I went looking for Ralf [Winkler--a.k.a. Penck], but he had disappeared. It was minus 25 or 26 degrees centigrade. The snow was so heavy that nothing worked--no taxis, no buses, no trains. Eventually I found out that he was staying with his mother. I came in and found him lying in a bed with many blankets on top of him. His mother's whole living space was crowded with paintings. I was tired--the train trip required 24 hours, though normally it would be eight hours. After a while we went to his studio and he started to play drums, very loud. He was testing me to figure out what level I was on. And then we started doing a conversation with drawings. I have the first drawing he did--"Jorg has a headache." We ended up with 40 or 50 sheets. Later, we waited in line for a bus, and he asked me, "Did you forget my bananas and pineapples and everything? Please give me a banana," and I opened the suitcase, and everything fell into the snow--oil colors, canvas, fruits--I couldn't invent such a symbolic situation!