Montoliu-Kostüm/Bühne

Biografie 019

Artist: Christiane Fichtner Photo: Stephan Fallucchi March 2008

Christiane Fichtner – Biography

The biographies of the artist Christiane Fichtner unfold before the viewer like a register of the various possibilities of her life's journey.

Apart from the fact that she is an artist, only her date of birth proves to be a reliable constant. These are the only details and guidelines that the authors receive from the artist. It is not the artist herself who invents her life plans or plays with the possibilities and masquerades of a reimagined past; rather, she invites others to write her biography and reinvent it. Costume and fashion designers lend the biographies an outer contour, designing appropriate clothing. Christiane Fichtner is then portrayed in costume, playing the role of her fictitious identity, by various photographers who stage her according to their interpretation.

Text: Natascha Muler
Costume design: Belén Montoliú
Make-up: Katja Weinhold
Photography: Stephan Fallucchi

Biography 019

How did I become an artist?

That is a difficult question. Did I become an artist? Or have I always been an artist, but just did not know it? Am I an artist? Sometimes I think that I simply bring to the outside what has taken form inside of me. If the rest of the world wants to call that art, then so be it. Am I the one creating, or do the ideas, colors and forms use me as a way to take shape, to become part of a reality that is perceived objectively? And what about the question “how”? Is someone an artist already in her mother’s womb? Does an artist live out her fate with passion, creating out of the impossibility not to create? Or can one learn it through practice and patience? Does the artist in me become apparent through an experience – one of suffering or happiness? When I look back, I think that it was a little of all of this, but it was never obvious or easy.
Art has always been a part of my life. Oh, how I admired them all – musicians, poets, photographers, and painters. For me they were the priests in the holy temple, blessed and dammed creatures who have access to other worlds, are slaves to their own genius, and who enjoy the highest freedom. It would never have occurred to me to dare, even to think to become an artist. Just knowing Michelangelo exists would have kept me from being so bold as to lay hands on a chisel.

Besides, I saw myself as someone from the other side of the canvas, as an object of art. The admiring gaze of an aesthete was often the beginning of a joint project, a friendship, or a romance. My great childhood love once came to me, happy and excited, carrying a picture book of Rodin’s work, which he was writing a speech about for class. He showed me a large black and white reproduction of Rodin’s “Danaide” and explained to me, his eyes shining: “That is you. That is your ear, your hip.”

I gave my time and friendship freely to these nice crazy people and received passionate poems and songs in exchange. I posed as a model and received beautiful paintings and pictures afterward. I was not vain, just happy to be a part of it all. What changed everything was an insignificant event, almost ridiculous. My boyfriend at the time was not only an artist but a very nature-loving kind of guy. Naturalness was his highest maxim. His head and his (creative) works were full of it. After several months of debating about the unnaturalness (which was the greatest sin) of the pill, about which he said my university girlfriends would surely protest if it were banned, I gave in. I did not want to be a woman who took nasty pills. I found out all I could about the fatal effects of the pill on the female body. I was also in the middle of my oh-so-sensible law studies, so that I was very susceptible to the free, natural thoughts of an artist, especially since he happened to be my boyfriend. So I quit the pill. Soon after, I quit my boyfriend. I was too civilized for him after all.

My decision was sensible and good, but it still hurt (naturally, right?). But it was not only pain in my heart that I felt, instead I started seeing colors with a new intensity. (Let the doctors think they are right after all, that the pill does affect a woman’s sensory apparatus dramatically.) How shall I explain? The first time it happened, I was doing the dishes. It suddenly occurred to me that the liquid soap, though it had always been very orange, was oranger than I had ever seen it before. I asked my roommate what she thought. She said it was not oranger than usual. But it was for me. For days, I could not stop thinking about it. It was simply an incredible orange… A color like those you see in your dreams… a living structure full of nuances and movement. And it did not stop with orange. The next color was green. A green that I liked very much but was particularly intimate or exciting became suddenly so intense that I felt simply overwhelmed that there were so many shades of green. I could spend hours in the forest, just walking from tree to tree, from shrub to shrub. Thousands of greens, each like an arrow through my heart. In this way, all colors became clear, one after the other, every day. I did not know how blue someone’s eyes could be, how brown the earth, how black the night. And then, dazed by my own discoveries, I stumbled upon my first artistic problem: No one understood me. Soon, it became embarrassing to talk about it. But the colors lived on in me, telling me their stories, revealing new depths, sparkling with the first rays of sunlight and becoming seductive and heavy at nightfall. Then I gave in again. There was a painting set on sale at Lidl and I bought it: paints, a paintbrush, a canvas, and an easel. I had no ambition, only the hope of being able to put down on canvas what my eyes could see. That is how it started: the first tries, the first critiques, the first good critiques, the first picture sold, the first exhibition. “The color-happiest artist in Germany,” said one article. Now my life is really full of color.