"You Gotta Say Yes To Dieter's Excess" 
Blitz: No. 13, July/August 1983
by Tim Hulse


Dieter Meier is not just the frontman for Swiss band Yello.  Performance
artist, silk fabric-designer, novelist, filmmaker, Meier has seemingly done it
all, and in the strangest possible way.  TIM HULSE finds out why...


"Moderation is a fatal thing, Lady Hunstanton.  Nothing succeeds like excess."
(From _A Woman of No Importance_ by Oscar Wilde.)

In the mid-sixties, a strange figure frequented the gambling clubs of Zurich.
He could only have been around twenty years old and he was known to come from
on of the city's many prosperous families.  Rumour had it he'd been kicked out
of school at sixteen for spending all his time playing golf -- he'd even
played for the national team.  But now he was a total gambling junkie.  Buy
him a drink and he'd tell you how, when he couldn't find a game, he'd sit at
an empty table and deal cards to three imaginary people, then play all four
hands himself.  He'd buy books, newspapers, literary magazines and they would
all gradually turn yellow at home, unread, not even flicked through.  His
parents were supportive, despite their friends' protestations -- for the
genteel bourgeouis families of Zurich, a gambling son was like a daughter
who'd turned to prostitution.  Worse, maybe.

But it wasn't so much the fact of the Meier kid's addiction to gambling which
attracted the attention.  It was his method.  So much so that people would pay
money to be able to sit behind him in a poker game and just watch him play.
Most gamblers attempt to impost some kind of rationale on Lady Luck.  They
play the percentages, check out the odds, play it safe.  But this kid was just
crazy.  Wild.  Unpredictable.  You never knew what he was going to do next.
You only knew that when he played, he played it right down the line.

***

On the 17th November 1969, at the age of 24, Dieter Meier took the biggest
gamble of his life.  He confronted his creative limitations, took a chance on
his self-esteem, and came out... an 'artist'.

On the 17th November 1969, Dieter Meier did one of the most stupid, boring
things that anyone could possibly do.  He sat in a public square in Zurich,
surrounded by a four-yard wooden frame, and began to count ten thousand pieces
of iron into bags of ten pieces each.

Zurich was shocked and baffled.  Whole classes of schoolchildren came with
their teachers to watch.  Some people tried to make him explain himself by
pulling his hair.  Others abused him or tried to kick him.  Everyone agreed
that what this guy was doing was utterly pointless.  But of course, that was
the point...

"For me, this thing was kind of the naked statement of creation.  This thing
was there because I wanted to do it, not because I think I'm a talented
painter or a talented writer or a talented musician, not because I can do
something special or I am something special, but because I wanted to do it.
And that was my birth, so to speak, as an artist -- whatever that word means
-- I'd broken through the wall."

This was Meier's first step into the cerebral world of performance art.  Later
projects were in much the same vein -- apparently pointless, vaguely amusing
and, most of all, defying attempts at simplistic explanation.  "I remember
when I had my first exhibition, there were some TV people who wanted me to
stand in front of my work and talk about it.  And I said 'listen, if there was
any better way to say what I have to say than what's up there on the wall,
then I would be an idiot to have something up on the wall'.  I don't see art
of music or whatever as just a transformed statement which can be
retransformed into what we call rational, normal understanding.  Of course I
believe that each of these pieces has its meaning, but its meaning cannot be
separated from the piece and its meaning is probably very different for every
person who looks at it."

At first people laughed at Dieter Meier.  The professional art world refused
to take him seriously and the press just scoffed.  Then when he began to be
successful, when he was granted prestigious exhibitions, the critics changed
their tack accusing him of having bought his way in.

Meier has never used his parents' money to buy success.  Nor has he ever made
any secret of his background.  "Even when I was pissed, with not a single
penny, just sitting in the harbour of Rio de Janeiro, I knew that if the worst
came to the worst I could make a collect call to Zurich and ask my parents to
send me a thousand dollars -- and they would do it."

"The big lie is not to admit to that.  I know many of the rich kids from
Zurich who became left wing and always pretended it was not true that their
parents were rich.  I always said 'yeah, of course it's true,' but there is no
reason why I shouldn't, as a result, use the freedom which it gives me.  I
have to accept the situation, and then use it."

***

Twice a year, Meier spends a whole night in Paris painting Japanese figures
onto hundreds and hundreds of pieces of paper.  The designs are then examined
by the director of a highly regarded Parisian silk company.  Out of these
hundreds, fifteen or twenty are chosen and later reappear in the most
prestigious fashion collections.  ("The other day even your Queen was wearing
one of my designs.  Of course, she doesn't know, but I saw it in a German
magazine.")

The importance of Meier's designs and their relationship to the rest of his
work is the fact that he insists he has no skill whatsoever as a designer.  He
insists that the designs which are chosen look good only as the result of
sheer chance.  It's a bit like the old story which says if you give a monkey a
typewriter, after several million years of random tapping at the keys, it will
eventually produce a Shakespearean tragedy.  "Yeah, it's a bit like that
process.  But then I have to work my way into the status of being a monkey,
which is probably the most difficult thing.  That's probably why at the end
Christian Dior likes these designs, because they are so unpretentious.  But to
work your way into being so unpretentious, that's the difficult thing."

Dieter Meier is now 38 years old (David Bowie is 36.  Does age really matter
anymore?) and together with Boris Blank and Carlos Peron, under the collective
title of Yello, has recently crated what is arguably the most exciting album
for years -- _You Gotta Say Yes To Another Excess_.

The three met as the result of a mutual acquaintance.  At the time, Meier had
done a little singing with other bands, while Boris and Carlos had been
experimenting with sounds on cassette recorders.  "I remember the first
meeting was very funny 'cos they, especially Boris, were very shy.  Boris
didn't want anyone to enteer his musical world.  He could not imagine that
somebody else would add to his musical picture.  For him it was almost like if
you are a painter and up comes another guy and he does something in your
painting."

The Yello approach to recording is a long way from the conventional one.  "It
was never the approach of a rock'n'roller who can play his instrument.  It's
more like just arranging sounds.  And that's why we never had these normal
three steps of composing and rehearsing and recording.  The recording is the
only thing we do.  We never compose, we never rehearse, it's just using the
tape in the way a painter uses his canvas or his piece of paper, which I think
is the beautiful thing of the tape, that you can put things there which you
cannot repeat."

Meier's role in the process of creation, he says, is more that of an actor
than a singer.  "The music Boris does, for me always evokes something very
visual.  I always see a certain movie scene and certain figures in a certain
movie scene, so the situation and the mood of the lyrics in most cases is
immediately there.  Then I talk with him about these visual ideas I have for
the figure I'm going to be.  I'm like an actor who has been given a script and
then tries to find his identity as a figure within this given script.  In most
cases I go straight to the microphone and we just start recording.  But not in
the way other people record, when you already know what you're doing.  I just
start singing and defining this figure."

It may seem a strange way to go about recording an album, but then again,
Meier has never trodden the common road...

***

Every day, Dieter Meier goes swimming.  One day he wants to swim a certain
number of lengths in a time so fast that probably not even an Olympic swimmer
could manage it.  He knows he will never do it, even if he trained five miles
a day.  But every day he goes swimming and he things about that distance and
that time...

"I think this line, You gotta say yes to another excess, should be, like, the
theme of everybody's life.  I see excess as something very important and I
think everything you do you should do to a certain excess, you should go for
the total.  If you do it, you do it.  If you're a gambler, you're a gambler.

"By excess, I don't mean drugs or liquor or all these things.  If you hear the
word excess you usually think of one of those nights when you had a lot to
drink.  That's just one possible excess, I think quite a boring one."

What Meier is talking about, and what his life is a bizarre sort of testament
to, is commitment.  It's a question of never taking half measures and
realising that life can only truly be lived when it is lived to the full.  For
Meier what's important is the intensity of the experience, whatever it may be.

"For me the total excess, the craziest excess is trying to create something --
for example sitting at my typewriter and trying to work on my novel.  This to
me is real excess, real, total excess.  Almost exploding and having to sit
there and being confronted with, excuse me if I use a nasty word, with these
fucking words and the fucking situation of wanting to create and to get it
together.  This is total excess.  This is is what I mean by 'you gotta say yes
to another excess.'"


PHOTO 1: Dieter Meier with arms crossed and nose high, sporting longish black
curly hair.

PHOTO 2: Boris Blank standing in front of Carlos Peron, with Dieter Meier in
the background.

PHOTO 3: Dieter Meier, wearing a scarf and jacket, standing behind a sign
which reads "DIETER MEIER BUYS THE WORD YES OR THE WORD NO FOR ONE DOLLAR.
FEBRUARY 25, 1971".  A woman is looking at the dollar she just got.  Caption
reads: "Feb. 25, 1971.  Dieter Meier buys the word "yes" or the word "no" from
unsuspecting passers-by in New York."

PHOTO 4: Dieter standing in a mostly-empty square in Zurich, surrounded by
small plastic bags and a large wooden frame on the ground.  Caption reads:
"Dieter Meier comes out as a performance artist: for five days he spent eight
hours every day counting one thousand metal objects into separate bags."
[Note that the article says 10,000 pieces...]