What is doppeldenk and what does DOPPELDENK (German for doublethink) mean?
DOPPELDENK are two artists from Germany.
They live and work in Leipzig. The concept of doublethink comes from George Orwell’s dystopian novel “Nineteen Eighty-Four” and describes the power of having two contradictionary beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them. Unlock the Idea of George Orwell’s novel from total brain-wash and combine it with self-responsible human acting, and you can achieve a new complex form of thinking. In this case you are able to accept the connection of two contradictionary relations and,
as a conclusion, to create your own new conviction.



That sounds like the very German idea of Dialectism to me. Thesis - antithesis - synthesis. Do have any reference to that considering you are based in Leipzig, the hometown and domain of many German philosopher, Leibniz, for example?
We don’t like cookies. No, seriously: we are especially familiar with Leibniz as one of the inventors of the dual number –
or binary – system. We don’t have any connections to other philosophers, from Leipzig or otherwise, and we rarely read purely philosophical works. Instead, it’s more literature that handles philosophical themes through fictional means of storytelling. For us, dialectism has a very practical meaning, since we work with the results of arguments and counter-arguments that occur when working in a team. Teamwork perfectly corresponds to our means of working. Debates on content are always a part of it. We work together, though we have two very different characters, and while this doesn’t always make for easy collaboration, it has a positive effect on the outcomes. Consequently, „Doppeldenk“ has a literal sense in addition to the aforementioned definition: we think things up as a pair and realise them together.
 
We don’t scrutinize everything in our lives, certainly nothing in a scientific manner. Many levels of art are often times too intellectually illuminated. Scientific authenticity gets packed in. Overloads on content with foreign words. Philosophies get quoted. In the “Art-Art” scene, every brushstroke is backed up by five written pages. This over-interpretation is foreign to us. More style than substance doesn’t relate to our attitude toward life.
Nevertheless, we are intensively reflective about our work; not from the angle of an argument in the Hegelian sense, but we lead concrete discourses on image content, humour, quotation, symbols, colours and form. New impulses, which have been interesting for us, have mostly come from other directions, namely comics, science fiction, graffiti, music, film, computer games. And while they are all philosophically influenced, we don’t enjoy them because we are thinking about Hegel, Kant or Leibniz. At universities, centuries old dust often gets swirled up, outmoded concepts and doctrines are followed and lecturers’ vanities satisfied. 


How long have you been working together?
We’ve worked together for more than ten years.

Some people might recognize that you worked for Lodown magazine a lot in the Nineties and at the beginning of the 2000s, formerly knows as ‘pact’. What happened in between?
Is Lodown still read by all the same people?
Over the past years, we’ve thrown our Blackred Crew Electro parties like rarely otherwise done in Germany. Guests have included DMX Krew, Dopplereffekt, DJ Godfather, Aux 88,
Boris Divider, Imatran Voima, among many others.
Moreover, we created and published a monthly club magazine in Leipzig. Since 2007, we’ve been realising our image ideas on canvas. Parallel to this, we’ve organised exhibitions and also taken part in some.


Would you call it a second approach?
No. We never disappeared. We just worked under various pseudonyms on numerous fronts. We would rather call it a logical progression of our work. The hope to realise our canvases independently of commercial contracts has existed for many years. But back then, we lacked the necessary time and the financial leeway for this free way of working. Ten years ago, we probably wouldn’t have been able to scrape together enough money to produce such complex and work-intensive pictures.
 

Where do you draw inspiration from, and what is your comment on society?
Literature: Stanislaw Lem, Philip K. Dick, Boris & Arkadi Strugatzki; illustration, art and comics, especially Albrecht Dürer, Hieronymus Bosch, Robert Williams, Anthony Ausgang, Mear One, Os Gemeos, Moebius and Syd Mead; music: Baile Funk, Miami Bass, Ghettotech, Detroit Techno, Electro Funk, Baltimore Club, Hip Hop, the Drexciya Univers: everything from James Marcel Stinson, Heinrich Müller, Arpanet, Dopplereffekt... Otherwise, our inspiration sources are extensive and independent of specific artists: people, music, video games, graffiti, architecture, typography, science fiction…

Comment on society: ¥€$

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Why do you refer to the prototype alien?
Can you give us a metaphor?
The alien is one foreign being within the terrestrial environment, and, for us, it is a symbol of our own alienation within contemporary society. After the fall of the Wall, we soaked up a lot of sub-cultural currents, and these as alternative streams to both that of the socialist GDR mentality that was known to us as well as the western middle-class society. This naïve thinking was relatively quickly followed, however, by the disillusioning realisation that these pseudo-underground-lifestyle-trends functioned, as a rule, exactly like the rest of society. Sell, market, grow, squeeze out, throw away and then buy up something new again, and so on. To enter this playing field and to operate there commands a lot of effort and always occurs with a conscious amount of reluctance, and then only when it becomes absolutely necessary.

Social inequality, excesses of violence and war, sick addictive behaviours in all shapes and colours, media consolidation, political foul play, delusional techno-scientific developments, stock market gambling, secluding nationalism, economic globalisation, restoration of nobility and religion – all of these insane, psychotic excesses of our society are incomprehensible to us. In spite of that, we have to learn to live with the impacts of this brave new world. We manage this with the help of irony and the belief in aliens and other utopias.

The thought of utopia alone appears foreign, unintelligible and unthinkable to many people. More than once, the feeling has been conveyed to us that to consider the existence of utopias is to commit a thought crime. “Out of touch with reality”, “unrealistic”, “impossible”, “nonsensical”, and other such arguments are posed in order to discredit alternative society models and to make us feel like we’re crazy. Paint aliens, dance to loud music in dark cellars, and partake in debaucherous sex and drug use. These are also among the outlets, which help us to deal with reality. That’s not particularly original, though. But at least it’s temporarily very effective. 


Aside from this, we share the feeling that other realities exist behind the obviously perceivable environment. For us, the prototype alien is also a metaphor for powers, which observe our terrestrial lives. We believe that, as humans,
we don’t exist alone in this world, and the alien helps us to communicate this perception to other people and to explore these questions. Your everyday extra-terrestrial as a symbol for conspiracy theories in the fog of unreliability.
We like that, and we look forward to the coming visit of our weird neighbours.

Do you think pop-culture is an adequate medium for you?
Pop-culture is no medium for us. We are our
own medium.

What is the distinctive line between illustration and art?
Illustration mostly fulfils a concrete purpose: as advertisement, packaging or visualisation of text. Illustrations are, therein, often only decoration and means of sales and become boring through longer observation. However, many are very good and intricate in terms of handwork. Art, on the other hand, fulfils no purpose and is simply enough in and of itself.

Illustration = slavery and truth
Art = freedom and lies

How do you develop your paintings?
Could we have a glimpse into the process?
We start by developing our canvas ideas together and prepare sketches. In the past, the pictures were designed on graph paper. Meanwhile, we transfer the sketches to the computer with the help of a vector programme. The actual painting process is old fashioned – just brush, canvas and paint. The computer is a tool, which enables us to finish the pictures in a halfway reasonable time frame.

<sub>interview: mrk
Translation: Emilie Bromberg
Fotos: Blackred
www.doppeldenk.com

Next Exhibition:
www.westberlingallery.com, 26.03.-11.4.2010</sub>