Interview with Ulf Göpfert: “Obligation is a misnomer”
Ulf Göpfert was born in Freiberg/Saxony in 1943. While entering his carpentry apprenticeship and completing his A-levels between 1960 and 1963, he also took private lessons in painting and composition. After that he worked as a furniture restorer in Weimar, Dresden and Potsdam-Sanssouci. His initial encounter with pop art in 1983 inspired him to take up painting again. His first exhibition was shown in 1986. Göpferts preoccupation with small graphics, large-size canvasses and large-scale decorations of architecture account for the multidimensionality of his oeuvre. During the politically meaningful years directly after German reunification (1990-1994) he was head of the department of culture and tourism of the city of Dresden. Since then he has been working as a freelance painter.
In this interview, Göpfert discusses his work, the place of art in contemporary culture, and the ways that the arts can interact with politics and society.
Till the Last Curtain Falls, or Why the Theatre will not Die
Tragedy and happiness, pleasure and humour, forsakenness and comfort, grief and love; all this is known to mankind since primeval times. Not only does mankind know it, but experience it, need it, this something that can only vaguely be described as “emotions”.Since the day it came into existence, theatre tries to cater to the deep human desire for emotion, to beguile it and to transform it. The emergence of theatre, as can be seen in the origin of the word (teatron: "setting"), came about in a time when the authors of tragedies where offered the highest political offices, due to their talent to see through human characteristics. It came about in a time when rituals and veneration for the gods created categories like tragedy and comedy, and thereby influenced the writing and performance of theatre to this very day.
Theatre has – undeniably so, but to a varying extent – always been a part of society; there has been no era that could go without it, and even public executions or the performance of a pop star share the primal theatrical elements of pity and fear, stirring identification and entertainment). Keeping in mind historical continuity, the existence of a time without theatre is out of question. Still, theatre – like history itself – undergoes a constant fluctuation of highs and lows.
