he Berliner Jim Avignon is considered the pioneer of a new generation of Pop-Artists. A lauded and much-respected cult figure in the Techno subculture in Berlin, where he continues to live and work.

Jim Avignon started painting when he was 21 years-old, exhibiting in techno clubs. His ideas on art were very clear: "I'd rather sell a thousand images for one dollar, than one image for a thousand dollars." He demonstrated his commitment to this philosophy when he exhibited his work in Frankfurt in 1995: the public was allowed to take any of the 800 originals on display home for free. This exhibition was aptly named "Get Rich With Art". At a 1992 exhibition in Kassel, he created one painting each day only to destroy it in the evening. A documentary was made about the exhibition, called "Destroy Art Galleries". Jim Avignon has proven himself a prolific, provocative and highly original artist. Two of his books are: "Popbones" (1996) and "Busy" (with DAG, 1998).

Art Interview: Were you born in Germany?

Jim Avignon: Yes, I am German. But I am not originally from Berlin; I was born in southern Germany. I spent some time in different cities but about fifteen years ago I came to Berlin.

Art Interview: I read somewhere that you were from Sweden and I was confused by that.

Jim Avignon: During my career I separated my real identity from my artist name, so when it came to biographical information I often just told people what they wanted to hear. I never took information about where or when I was born very seriously. But since then I have had many discussions about this issue. Some people believe that it's important to know the artist's roots in order to get a better connection to their artwork. I think more about this now, but when I was younger it was just a joke. I felt where I was born had nothing to do with my work as an artist.

Art Interview: What town where you born in?

Jim Avignon: In Munich.

Art Interview: Did you move around a lot before you settled in Berlin?

Jim Avignon: Yes.

Art Interview: Did you ever attend an art school?

Jim Avignon: No, never. I grew up near the town of Karlsruhe. Karlsruhe has an art school but there were some really scary rumors going around about the place. One of the figureheads of the Kunstakademie was Markus Lüpertz who is really into soccer. There was a rumor that if you wanted to study art there, you had to be either a girl or you had to play soccer well. But I'm not a girl and I'm really crap at soccer. I also couldn't see the point of competing with other people and going through portfolio screenings just for a school to decide whether I was good enough to learn art. At that time I was very interested in music and I thought to myself: the bands that are releasing records and are on tour never learned music at a school, they just want to express themselves and they do it. So I did the same with art. I knew I wouldn't excite galleries with my ideas so I went to bars and clubs, the places I often go to myself, and I asked them if I could hold an exhibition there.

Art Interview: Was your connection to these clubs over your music?

Jim Avignon: No. I didn't play music at that time. I just looked for places that I liked.

Art Interview: So you began your painting career before your music career?

Jim Avignon: Yes. I found that the DJs I liked to meet and hang out with always had good taste in music but they had almost no ideas about what they could do with the walls when they were playing. So I began doing exhibitions for those people. It wasn't long before I had five or six places around Germany. I had one in Munich, one in Cologne, one in Frankfurt, one in Berlin and a few others. I toured with my exhibitions.

Art Interview: How could you afford to travel from city to city?

Jim Avignon: The railway had a special offer for people under the age of twenty-six. For 200 DM you could travel anywhere within Germany for a month. At that time I had a very cheap flat in Cologne. I was eating breakfast in Hamburg, meeting someone in the afternoon in Frankfurt and sleeping at night somewhere in Munich. I had traveling exhibitions throughout Germany for two years. I found that there are things that sell well in Munich; there are things that sell well in Frankfurt. I developed a kind of off-scene market and I learned as I went. I made a living off that for two or three years with my five or six places. I invited my friends to do exhibitions in these cities and was able to help them to break into areas where they had never exhibited before. These were places that the young people went and I sold my art quite cheaply, but high enough to make a living from it. So for two or three years I had a perfect time touring with my art.

Art Interview: What type of materials were you painting with? Was it the same as you work with today?

Jim Avignon: Yes, I work on paper using water-based paints. When I started my career I had a strong desire to do everything the opposite of how it was usually done in the art world. I avoided the art places, sold my work cheaply and produced a lot of work rather than producing a few high-price pieces. I knew that the people I wanted to attract could not afford to pay really high prices for my work so I decided that my paintings had to be cheap. At that time I sold my work for around 100 DM or 200 DM. I decided that if I wanted to sell my work cheaply then I had to use cheap materials because if I painted on canvas and used oil paints I couldn't sell it for those prices. Further with paper I can just roll it up and carry 20 pictures under my arm. So I wouldn't need a lorry. Everything was very connected: I had my way of traveling, I had my means of transport and I could hang the things directly on the walls like painted posters. I could sell the art right off the wall; the people could put it under their arms and take it home. If they paid 200 DM for one painting it meant for me the complete rent for my flat for one month. So if I sold five paintings in one month, which I often did, I had the costs for my traveling, for my flat and I had enough extra money to have a good time. For someone between the age of twenty and twenty-two it was perfect.

Jim Avignon: My approach is similar but it is also different. Keith Haring tried to explain the world with a limited pallet of icons. He would recombine his icons in various ways throughout all of his paintings. My work is more a macrocosm of elements, of figures and of symbols. I am not so much into reduction as Haring was. I had a period where I was working in a large-format cartoon style with only three or four colors. It was almost abstract. Then my work came under the influence of German expressionism and my color palette turned darker. I was not focused on developing a real set style that would be instantly recognizable. I have had periods in my work and it has developed over the years.

Art Interview: But today you are working in a defined style and your work is instantly recognizable as your own.

Jim Avignon: Yes, well after so many years of painting I've discovered that somehow all my work looks the same. Even if I'm working on the computer it still looks the same. But the ideas that are represented in my paintings tend go back and forth between very serious issues and light-hearted issues that make fun of life. I didn't have a master plan about who I wanted to be and who I didn't want to be because in the beginning I didn't expect to make a career as an artist. During the first three years of my career I thought I would just make art for a while. I figured that I would go on and study something or get some job. Before I started painting I did a civil service job, which is required here in Germany. I was working in a place for elderly people and I liked that job very much. I discovered that I was good at entertaining those people. I became the fun person at work. All the other people working there did a good job but no one else would try to bring a good mood to the elderly people. The people living there liked me very much and I thought that I would continue that job for the rest of my life but I was fired for some stupid reason and that was the moment when I decided I would become a painter.

Art Interview: How did you manage to survive financially at the beginning of your art career?

Jim Avignon: I had some money saved from my civil service job but I went through that in half a year. On the one hand I was quite lazy but on the other I really hated the idea of looking for a job. That was a time in my life when I wondered to myself what I was going to do. But in the back of mind I knew that I could somehow draw. When I was in high school I messed around with fantasy art. I played around with an airbrush and drew "Lord of the Rings'"stuff. It was completely different from the art that I'm now famous for.

After getting fired I started asking at clubs if they would let me do exhibitions. At the time I was living in Cologne and I went out to clubs almost every night. I went to a place called "Six Pack", which still exists today, and I told them that I would do an exhibition in one week. Everything went quite quickly. I had no real experience in painting and I hadn't done a drawing in three years. The work I did there turned out to be almost in the style that I do now and I think the birth of my style simply came from thinking about what I could do in one week.

Art Interview: How many paintings did you manage to finish in one week for your show at "Six Pack"?

Jim Avignon: Twenty, in the size of A0 (84.09 cm x 118.92 cm) (33.11 inches x 46.82 inches) or A1 (59.46 cm x 84.09 cm) (23.41 inches x 33.11 inches). I did them all in my little flat, at the same time, a way of working I still do today. I think it's not bad to work on all of the paintings at once and use the same colors for each painting since they should fit together when they are exhibited.

Art Interview: How many paintings do you usually produce at the same time?

Jim Avignon: Well, it depends. At my peek career point I had a big studio and I was producing ten to twenty paintings a day with the help of assistants. But at some point I realized that it was not good for my work to be mass-produced. So I gave up my studio and decided to work at home on only one or two paintings at a time. I've found that it is better for my paintings if I spend a little more time on them. But from time to time when there is a lot of work to do I can still work on twenty in a day. For example, I completed all five of the large paintings you saw hanging in the windows in one hour. So if it is necessary I can be quite quick and it makes me feel good and I get a lot of power when I paint so fast.

Art Interview: How old were you when you first started painting?

Jim Avignon: I made art all throughout high school but my career started at the "Six Pack" exhibition when I was twenty-one, almost twenty-two.

Art Interview: How old are you now?

Jim Avignon: I am thirty-nine years old.

Art Interview: You have managed to hold on to your career and stay in the press for quite a long time.

Jim Avignon: In 1988 I had my first full-page interview in a newspaper and the journalist asked me a question, he said: This year you are in the trend but what will you do next year when you are not in the trend? I remember I was so scared by that question and I thought to myself: "Oh my God, what am I going to do if I fall out of the trend?" In the meantime I've past through three, four, five trends. I've had periods when life style magazines were constantly knocking on my door and periods when every week there was another TV team coming by and I've had other periods when there was almost nothing going on and everyone was saying: "Oh come on, we really can't see it anymore, it's really done with."

Art Interview: Do you feel the media coverage has helped your career?

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This oral history transcript is the result of a tape-recorded interview with Jim Avignon on November, 29, 2004. The interview took place in Berlin, Germany, and was conducted by Brendan Davis for Art Interview Online Magazine.