Danh Vo

Güldenhof is not only the name of the property that Danh bought four years ago but also the name of the surrounding settlement, which – with a population of 50 according to the latest census – is so tiny and remote that its only two streets are simply named Betonstraße (concrete street) and Farmweg (farm road). Besides the wood workshop, Güldenhof’s barns hold Danh’s studio, a large art storage unit, a ceramics workshop, an experimental garden and, first and foremost, loads of empty, unused space. The buildings measure roughly 60m in length and 20m in width. At least one of them was erected in the 18th century, during the reign of Prussian king Frederick the Great. They have not only seen “the times before democracy,” as Danh puts it, but also the times of the socialist GDR (German Democratic Republic), before German reunification. Just a few kilometres away is Stechlin, one of Germany’s most beautiful and clearest lakes, which in summer draws swimmers and nude sunbathers from all over the region. In the late 19th century, the lake became the setting-slash-main protagonist of an eponymous novel by Theodor Fontane, one of Germany’s greatest proponents of literary realism and a lover of Brandenburg. In the book, Lake Stechlin is portrayed as, according to a local myth, subterraneously wired to earth-shaking events around the globe. Whenever there’s a thunderstorm in Java, or a volcano erupts in Hawaii, a large fountain will purportedly rise in the middle of the lake, and a red rooster will appear on top of it, crowing.

Success has allowed Danh to acquire property in Mexico City and on the Mediterranean island of Pantelleria. Why on earth would he choose to settle on a farm in Brandenburg where, thanks to a neighbouring composting plant, the air occasionally has a subtle foul note, depending on the way the wind is blowing? Danh tells me that he didn’t plan on living here when he first set foot on the premises in 2016. Originally, the idea was that he and some “artist colleagues,” as he calls them – one of them relational aesthetics mastermind Rirkrit Tiravanija – would use the vacant farm as storage and as some kind of joint art laboratory. But then, step-by-step, the others dropped out of the project, and Danh – facing the ennui of Berlin’s endless cycle of openings and gallery dinners, and the tediousness of constant travelling – fell in love with Güldenhof. “My friends in Berlin said: ‘Danh, are you crazy? You’re gay, you’re an immigrant. Don’t go!’” he recalls. Pockets of Brandenburg are right-wing territory, but that didn’t scare him away. He got the manor house ready with “a new roof and a paint job.” Now he and his partner of ten years, artist and photographer Heinz Peter Knes (also a one-time cover star of Fantastic Man’s sibling-publication ‘BUTT’), spend most of their time out here, balancing work in the studio and work in the field, which includes tending a newly built greenhouse, a couple of vegetable patches and the chicken coop.

Danh was born in the city of Bà Rịa in Vietnam in 1975. His family fled their war-torn home country in a makeshift boat when he was four years old. They were picked up and rescued on the South China Sea by a Danish container ship which brought them to safety in Singapore, where they spent four months in a refugee camp. After receiving emigration papers, the family flew to Denmark, where most of them decided to stay, while Danh’s maternal grandmother moved on to West Germany. Danh, his parents and his three siblings settled in the suburbs of Copenhagen. He says he has no early memories of Vietnam, “not at all,” and he speaks about a feeling of uprootedness. He calls it “the trauma of not being able to afford to look back.” It’s a feeling his parents, who started out in Denmark with a small coffeeshop for factory workers, conveyed as he grew up. It has influenced a lot of his art-making, he says. Not necessarily in the sense that all of his work has to be related to a geographical place or a mythical homeland called Vietnam, or to working-class refugee stories per se. But his work has often dealt with questions around escape, moving on, having to give everything up, even risking your life. “It was always about questions, you know? I never could relate to art that provided answers,” Danh says.

He’s been criticised for that in the past. In preparation for our meeting at Güldenhof, he even sends me a link to a rather scathing review of several of his shows that ‘Artforum’ ran in 2015. He says he thrives on criticism. It seems when art critics try to wrap their heads around his conceptual practice, what irritates them most is the fact that, oftentimes, he exhibits sourced artefacts without changing them much, while at the same time making them about himself. Or, to quote from the art-speak in the ‘Artforum’ review: “The artist’s recourse to his own experience gives the work a frisson of historical significance, but this is ultimately grounded in biography and sensibility, two authority-granting aspects of the author-function that have long been criticized as regressive.” Danh, obviously, doesn’t see his art as regressive at all; quite the contrary: he states that one of his main interests is to question the cult of genius in art. “The best works I’ve ever done are the ones that I didn’t even need to touch,” he’s said in numerous interviews. For instance, around 2009 he managed to acquire three large Art-Deco chandeliers that had hung above the large conference table in the ballroom of the former Hôtel Majestic in Paris, where, in 1973, the Paris Peace Accords were signed. This treaty, while intended to end the war in Vietnam, eventually led to more chaos in the region in its aftermath, sending millions of Vietnamese so-called “boat people” on their perilous flights to safer lives. These chandeliers, when hung by Danh Vo in a museum show, are not just readymades. They come with their own story – and he has no qualms about mixing their historical significance with recourses to his own biography and background.

Moving inside, we settle by a huge hand-built Russian brick oven that Danh had newly installed in the manor house. It serves as a kind of indoor fireplace and was placed freestanding in the middle of a large living room-slash-kitchen-slash-workroom-slash- greenhouse. I ask Danh whether he sees Güldenhof as an art project. He shrugs. “It doesn’t matter,” he says. “Those categories are defined by other people.” He talks about the place as a playground that allows him to surround himself with people who challenge him to think beyond himself. In recent months, he’s been thinking mostly about flowers. He shares some preliminary plans to reuse a little ground-floor shop he still rents in Berlin (he uses it as storage) and turn it into a flower shop, the idea being that the shop would sell ecologically grown flowers from Güldenhof, and not just the ones that are deemed beautiful and desirable by prevailing flower-trade standards. In fact, following Danh’s aversion to categorisation, the shop will question the very idea of flowers and might offer blooming salad or weirdly shaped kohlrabi, too. This flower shop turned re- search lab for questioning value judgments and taste preferences wouldn’t necessarily have to be profitable. “That’s my privilege,” Danh says.

He picks up a stack of pictures from a table and shows them to me: his “three-minute bouquets”: flowers and weeds, vegetables and apples, arranged into still-lifes. He’s been making these recently. The concept is to use no more than three minutes, the snapping of the photograph included. The pictures – Danh calls them a “super nice exercise in learning to use whatever’s there” – are stunningly beautiful. They show all sorts of states of withering, blooming, crookedness, shrivelling.

Will he exhibit these in his Secession show in Vienna when, pandemic permitting,
it opens in September after a delay of nearly a year? “Probably not,” he says. “But there’s this one idea that probably will stick, which is to turn the roof of the Secession into a garden. One guy from the installation team, Hans, was already sneaking plants up there so he could use them for lunch. And I told him he should just make it full-on, and I’m going to pay him for it. They’re probably going to enjoy it a lot.”

So maybe the ideas from Güldenhof will start travelling into galleries and institutions. There they might prompt all sorts of interesting questions. Does the new, quite literal rootedness in Danh Vo’s practice add new depths to an oeuvre that has often dealt with the issue of rootlessness? Will there be kimchi-making? Will there be a flower shop? Will people, and critics, see it as art? Will it matter? It all seemed to be echoed in a message Danh had sent me just before I first drove out to visit him at Güldenhof. When I asked whether 1.30pm would be a good time to arrive, he’d replied: “Yes, or come earlier if you like. A lot to digest.”