Sunday, September 27, 2009
Wolfgang Tillmans
http://www.tillmans.co.uk/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=14&Itemid=11
Look, again
For 20 years Wolfgang Tillmans’ photography has been a sustained meditation on observation, perception and translation. His most recent major exhibition, ‘Lighter’, was held at the Hamburger Bahnhof, Museum für Gegenwart, in Berlin. He talked to Dominic Eichler about intimacy, objects, community and politics, abstraction and representation
DOMINIC EICHLER Looking back over the last 20 years of your art-making, it is striking how you have circled and constantly returned to a diverse range of genres, modes of reproduction and printing techniques while exploring both figurative and abstract images, and that all of these approaches still find their place in your recent exhibitions and publications, such as Manual (2007). Do you think there is a particular kind of quality that makes for a ‘Tillmans’? WOLFGANG TILLMANS In terms of one repeated style, no, but there is an underlying approach that I hope gives everything I make a cohesion. I trust that, if I study something carefully enough, a greater essence or truth might be revealed without having a prescribed meaning. I’ve trusted in this approach from the start, and I have to find that trust again and again when I make pictures. Really looking and observing is hard, and you can’t do it by following a formula. What connects all my work is finding the right balance between intention and chance, doing as much as I can and knowing when to let go, allowing fluidity and avoiding anything being forced.
DE Years ago I was in a friend’s apartment where there was nothing on the white walls except a photograph of an autumn tree torn out of a magazine. I kept looking at it; it had a kind of aura about it, and in the end I couldn’t contain my curiosity any more and so I asked him who the picture was by. It was one of your images. And that’s the thing about many of your photographs – their subjects might be something seemingly really everyday, like a tree, friends or leftovers from a party, but there’s something singular about them, and it’s hard to say what it is exactly. WT I just think all images should be significant. They should be able to stand alone and say something about their particular subject matter. If they don’t do that, then why make them? The picture you mentioned is titled Calendar Leaves because it is so golden it could be in a calendar; I took it in upstate New York during the Indian summer of 1994. Trees have been photographed so many times. It’s always a question of: ‘Is this possible? Can I take a picture of this?’ DE So making images is partly about some kind of impossibility? WT Well, I wanted to capture my experience of this tree in the first degree. I wanted to photograph it knowing that it was really hard to do, but on the other hand I didn’t feel that I shouldn’t take a picture of, say, a sunset or the wing of an aeroplane or autumn foliage. I am knowing, but I try not to be cynical. At least some aspect of the picture has to be genuinely new; it can’t be a ‘me too’ picture. I feel things like these have been photographed or painted so often because they move people and I’m also moved in that moment, and in this I see myself in a long continuum of people making pictures of these larger subjects of life. Trees have interested artists for a long time. I guess they’re one of the most consistent things in life and on earth. DE Are you thinking about the translation of the experience into an image or work? WT Considering that translation or, metaphysically speaking, the process of transformation, is the central aspect of my work. The experience of something in real life doesn’t automatically make for a good work. I can only really photograph things that I understand in some way or another. It’s about whether you can look at something for 60 seconds; it’s very much about being able to bear reality. DE The golden melancholy of the autumn tree makes me think of the Douglas Sirk film Imitation of Life (1959). But I get the same mood from some of your abstract colour images, such as the streaky and stained, fleshy and azure ‘Silver’ pictures (mostly from 2006) or, for that matter, your photocopy-based works like photocopy (Barnaby) (1994), which involve so much longing for what is only partly there. WT Imitation of Life is a beautiful title but it’s not what I aim for because art is always different from life. You can try to get close to the feeling of what it’s like to be alive now, but the result of that is an art work, and that has its own reality. When I work on the non-figurative pictures in the darkroom or use photocopiers, it is a direct engagement with physical realities: the colour and intensity of my light sources or the electrostatic charge on the copier drums. I use them and play with them to make pictures possible. For instance, under the burden of all the clichés it’s not really possible to photograph Venice, but I still wanted to, so I made the photocopier-enlarged image Venice (2007), in which the details that indicate ‘Venice’ are reduced heavily. That makes them feel almost appropriated, but in fact all the photocopy pictures are based on photographs, which I took for this type of enlargement. DE The abstract colour works such as the ‘Silver’ group of pictures (1994–2008) and impossible colour V (2001) also involve signs of their making and process. WT impossible colour V is a large pink octagon placed on a larger white picture base. It’s actually a rectangle with the same proportions as 35 mm film that has been turned ever so slightly against a frame with the same proportions. Unlike my other abstract work, the ‘Silver’ images are mechanical pictures made by feeding them through a processing machine while it’s being cleaned, so they pick up traces of dirt and silver residue from the chemicals. Because they are only half fixed and the chemicals aren’t fresh, they slowly change hue over a few days. Sometimes I use this instability to create different shades and lines on them, before scanning and enlarging them to their final size. DE Then there are your three-dimensional pieces ‘Lighter’ (2005–8), which are physically creased and folded photographs. WT Some of them I expose to different coloured light sources in the darkroom after first folding them in the dark, and some are made in reverse order. Some are not folded at all – they only suggest the possibility of a fold – but they are all highly intricate. We are still blind to what it exactly is that makes a photograph so particular, so deeply psychological, even though it’s supposedly a mechanical medium. The ‘Lighter’ works are a continuation of the three-dimensional approach of the ‘paper drop’ pictures (2001–8) of hanging and flipped-over pieces of photographic paper. DE What would you say to people who interpret your later abstract work as a retreat into some kind of formalism? WT Look again. It’s not a retreat. If colour is a retreat, then I checked into that retreat early on. The video of the moving disco lights Lights (Body) (2002) or the astronomical pictures like Sternenhimmel (Starry Sky, 1995), are all about light and colour. I never separate that experience from a social one. David Wojnarowicz, one of the most socially engaged artists of recent history, repeatedly says in his video ITSOFOMO (1990): ‘Smell the flowers while you can.’ How can that be a retreat? You have to be pretty senseless not to allow artists the freedom to deal with the whole width of their experiences and explore their medium to the extreme. The abstracted picture of that golden tree you mentioned earlier on is from 1994, when I was in the midst of making the so-called realist work that I was first known for. I was then, as I am now, involved in seeing and transforming that into pictures. DE How much system or discipline and control is involved in getting what you want? WT It sounds a bit square, but I’ve found that the chances of getting a good result are just so much higher when you spend at least eight hours a day on your work. That work is, of course, all play [Laughing]. Seriously, the biggest challenge is not always to do the right thing but at times to do wrong things, to act irresponsibly in the light of constant demands. When artists start out, they all have some sort of alternative vision in mind, and then career and success, or equally the lack of it, grind most of them down to become bored and boring. It’s really the biggest challenge not to believe your own system, so the discipline is, strangely, to be undisciplined. DE You’ve mentioned before the fact that in learning about the world you also inherit certain kinds of images, and that every image you make is going to have a relationship to the image banks that you’ve inherited from your culture. That makes me think of your shots of men’s bum cracks. [Laughs] WT There is always something unsettling about fearless looking as opposed to coy allusion or shockingly flashing. To look without fear is a good subversive tool, undermining taboos. Study the soldier or riot policeman, make him an object of formal considerations, see him as wearing drag. Look at things the way they are. DE With your cultural baggage alongside? WT Yes, even though I feel that after 150 years or so, the subject matter of a woman’s exposed crotch isn’t owned by Gustave Courbet. I attribute these overlaps to certain pictures being in your milk from a young age, so to speak. But still, once a picture is in the world as an object, it’s impossible not to think about your relationship to it. Is it too ironic? Is it too referential? Not everything is strategy because, despite these considerations, what is uppermost in that moment is to be an awake, attentive being. DE People often think that there are too many images in the world and that we have become numb to them, but from what you’ve been saying it’s almost as though your practice is trying to prove the opposite – that we’re still alert, and that we’re still intelligent about images, and that there can be necessary pictures, ones which aren’t redundant from the start. WT Absolutely. There are people who have no joy in viewing – who have no joy in life, perhaps. I think people don’t observe enough. I’m a great believer in observation. My first passion in life was astronomy. DE I remember reading that, and also that you didn’t take photographs as a teenager. I suppose your photographs from 2004 of the planet Venus passing in front of the sun – like a blank face with a beauty spot – suggest that the idea of looking at something unattainable and distant, but which still can be experienced and understood, has stayed with you. WT The experience of relative perception is something that keeps turning me on. The photocopy works I made in the late 1980s, before I found my first direct photographic subject matter in nightclubs, were really about this dissolving of details, of zooming into pictures and information breaking down. What makes me happy is when people pick up on the nuances, when you don’t need ten years to realize that there is a composition behind the picture, or that not every elongated object is a phallus, or that questions of authenticity and the identity issues of the 1990s are embedded in the work as deliberate contradictions. DE I think that one of the great achievements of your work is the way you have navigated those contradictions. You have never shied away from presenting compelling pictures of the world at odds with the mainstream or from addressing major socio-political issues like privatization and AIDS education, to name recent examples. And you have done this with a radical subjective gaze and with a consciousness of the difficulties and limitations of that position and what you can achieve as an artist. I’m also curious about your Memorial for the Victims of Organized Religions (2006). It recalls a serial Minimalist grid: are you suggesting that there is a correlation between religious belief and belief in art? WT I showed this piece for the first time in Chicago, as part of a three-city US museum tour. It reflects the helplessness I felt at trying to tackle a subject of such magnitude in a country so held in the grip of the more unappealing sides of religion, but at the same time I wanted to explore faith as a subject. The absoluteness of the grid is disrupted by using creased and scratched photographs, but in a way that is only noticeable after a while, and at the intersection point between the pictures the eye creates a black dot, which is not actually there. A third element undermining the rigour of the grid is the inclusion of some not quite black but dark blue photographs interspersed in the piece. Being installed in the corner the grid is reflected in the shiny surfaces of the prints in a totally warped and distorted way. The piece doesn’t depict religion in the same way that a picture of, say, a mosque would, but it still tackles the idea that all religions have a claim to the absolute. DE In the 1990s you often talked about your interest in communal activities and club culture and the possibility of alternative forms of collectivity and togetherness. Do you still believe in these kind of Utopian moments as a viable alternative to ideological, economic or faith-based social constructions? WT Absolutely. However, it’s dodgy territory because so many ideologies were built on forcing people into a pit of togetherness, so it seems odd to go looking for that in subcultures. Still, I was always interested in the free, or at least non-branded, activities that functioned outside control and marketing. Those pockets of self-organization – free partying, free sex, free leisure time – are on the retreat. A less commercial spirit of togetherness is worth defending against the market realities, which are the result of the implementation of an atomized, privatized model of society, of ‘free workers and consumers’. At least it’s worth asking what choices you have if you don’t want to belong to the mainstream types of belonging in the privatized model of society – nation, sport, family values or religion.
DE In your installation Truth Study Centre (2007) all of this takes a major battering from you through your own and collected images and newspaper clippings. It is at times totally harrowing to peer into all of those trestle-table vitrines full of conflict and extremism on the one hand and human tenderness on the other. In a way, some of your pictures from the 1990s, which rightly or wrongly were seen as fashionable or lifestyle-oriented by some, are more confrontational now than they were back then. WT Yes, a couple of friends and I went to see my show ‘Lighter’ at the Hamburger Bahnhof a day after the opening in May, and it was really interesting to observe how teenagers were looking at the depictions of bodies in, for example, the Turner Prize Room (2000). The sort of physicality I show in my photographs, which was always so important to me, hasn’t dissolved into harmlessness. It seems to have gone the other way, almost as if somehow it’s become more provocative. DE It strikes me that in all your images everyone looks as though they want to be loved. Even the guy doing what the title of one of your photographs says he’s doing in man pissing on chair (1997). WT What connects them, I think, is that, even though they are confident, one gets a sense of their awareness of their own vulnerability. The depiction of other people is terribly fascinating, and even more so if it’s a psychological undertaking or a lifelong focus on single people, like a few friends of mine who I have photographed for many years now. DE So intimacy is crucial too? WT Yes, because it connects us to the physical world, and there is, of course, a deep loneliness in us all. I find people interesting when they have a sense of their own fragility and loneliness, and that’s something that I feel alive in a lot of people, but many of them have problems embracing this or accepting it. DE Which is fair enough, don’t you think? WT Sure! The title of one of my first books is For When I’m Weak, I’m Strong (1996), and it’s not that I can always abide by that, or that I’m always living that. DE Your abstract works also reflect this fragility too. WT But, it’s a resilient fragility, I hope. Of course, a sheet of paper can be both an image of a person and a metaphor for a person. I truly appreciate the modest contemplation that completely gives in to the circumstances as they are. I don’t see anger as the only driving force for change – concentration can be an equally powerful state of being. DE How has your own view of yourself as an artist, and your practice, changed over the past 20 years? You have said that you’re an ambitious person. Do you ever get into any kind of conflict about your current status in, or have ethical issues with, the contemporary art world? Do you feel a different sense of responsibility to your audience, and other artists? I know, for instance, that you teach and have your own gallery space in London, Between Bridges. WT Even though I don’t think there’s free choice for everybody, there’s a lot of choices available for successful artists. You don’t have to disappear into your own super-high value systems, as some high-profile artists do. I try to use my voice as an amplifier for what I care about and stay out of gratuitous projects. Between Bridges is a way for me to engage in a different kind of communication, showing artists who I feel for some reason or other have been under-represented in London. It’s also a learning opportunity for myself. The next show is work by Wilhelm Leibl, a German realist painter from the 19th century who I came across and paid homage to in a photograph I made in 2002, and who I’ve wanted to find out more about ever since. DE How did you feel about your exhibition ‘Lighter’ being held in the Friedrich Christian Flick Collection wing of the Hamburger Bahnhof? I ask this considering that his family’s fortune was partially made through arms manufacturing during World War II, and given the public criticism he attracted for not having paid into compensation funds for forced labourers. He was also seen to be potentially enriching himself because initially he only loaned his collection to the city. WT I really didn’t understand why and had no sympathy for the fact that Flick didn’t want to pay the compensation at the time and instead used a similar amount of money to set up a foundation to fight xenophobia among youths in East Germany. He could have easily afforded to do both. At the same time I felt the witch hunt was unfair, because he never personally employed forced labour: it was his grandfather, and the lines drawn between clean and unclean money were drawn much too symbolically. I find it equally unsettling to think of collectors who actively in our lifetime earn their money with politically incorrect or destructive activities. But Flick did pay up eventually, and he’s also gifted 160 major works from his collection to the Hamburger Bahnhof, instead of building another private collector museum. Interestingly, these facts were hardly reported or acknowledged by his critics. DE There is an inherent contradiction in the fact that art is structurally implicated in money and power but at the same time ought to function like a cultural conscience. One interesting part of the debate around the Flick Collection is thinking about the extent to which an artist can or should control the distribution of their work. WT Yes, and I noticed that the least popular position to take on this is to acknowledge one’s own implication in it. It’s very attractive to be totally against the market, and it’s OK to not say anything at all and just get on with one’s work. I try to be as ethically involved in the distribution of my work as possible, but at the same time I acknowledge my inability to control everything. DE ‘Lighter’ was an overwhelming round-up of your work past and present. In particular it showed how the various types of abstract works and those that have to do with the basic condition of the image fit and relate to the more ‘traditional’ photographs. WT The exhibition was a new type of show for me. After ten museum survey exhibitions in the past seven years, this one was never meant to be a retrospective. In the first room there are six photocopy pictures from 1988, and in the last room there are another three, and in between is primarily work from the last five years. The Turner Prize Room from 2000 also featured but was a kind of show within a show. I made the exhibition completely irrespective of any retrospective duty. DE So the only duty was introspective? WT [Laughs] It was introspective, yes. No, not introspective, it was now-spective. It was what was going on. DE Even though a good quarter of the show was taken up by the mostly political and science-hugging Truth Study Centre installation from 2007, it seems that many of your concerns have become more abstract. WT I think it took shows such as ‘Freedom from the Known’ at PS1 in New York (2006) or ‘Lighter’ to bring this to the fore. I exhibited my first abstract and damaged, too dark and fucked-up pictures as a Parkett edition in 1998. From that time onwards I think that the abstract nature of earlier works like the drapery close-ups of clothing or the ‘Concorde’ pictures (1997) became more clear; an abstraction grounded in the real world. DE In some of the photogram abstract work I can’t help but make associations between body, fluid and cellular structures. There’s a kind of direct relationship with the body in the image. They’re abstract, but there are areas of physical and emotional stuff flowing around inside. Titles like it’s only love give it away (2005) or the big and bloody-looking Urgency III (2006) also suggest this to me. WT The human eye has a great desire to recognize things when it looks at a photographic print. I made use of this phenomenon and found I could speak about physicality in new pictures while the camera-based pictures could be seen in a new light as well. So they kind of inform each other, rather than being pitted against each other.
DE Is the key in the mix or the constellations; how one image sits next to another and how they influence each other? WT When I was working on the book Lighter earlier this year, which comprises some 200 installation views, I realized that this is actually the first book that shows what my work really looks like. You get an idea of how, in the constellations of pictures, I try to approximate the way I see the world, not in a linear order but as a multitude of parallel experiences – like now I look at you, seeing a portrait, now out of the window there is a landscape, here on the table the cups standing around, there my feet. It’s multiple singularities, simultaneously accessible as they share the same space or room.
Dominic Eichler is a musician, writer, artist and contributing editor of frieze.
Look, again
For 20 years Wolfgang Tillmans’ photography has been a sustained meditation on observation, perception and translation. His most recent major exhibition, ‘Lighter’, was held at the Hamburger Bahnhof, Museum für Gegenwart, in Berlin. He talked to Dominic Eichler about intimacy, objects, community and politics, abstraction and representation
DOMINIC EICHLER Looking back over the last 20 years of your art-making, it is striking how you have circled and constantly returned to a diverse range of genres, modes of reproduction and printing techniques while exploring both figurative and abstract images, and that all of these approaches still find their place in your recent exhibitions and publications, such as Manual (2007). Do you think there is a particular kind of quality that makes for a ‘Tillmans’? WOLFGANG TILLMANS In terms of one repeated style, no, but there is an underlying approach that I hope gives everything I make a cohesion. I trust that, if I study something carefully enough, a greater essence or truth might be revealed without having a prescribed meaning. I’ve trusted in this approach from the start, and I have to find that trust again and again when I make pictures. Really looking and observing is hard, and you can’t do it by following a formula. What connects all my work is finding the right balance between intention and chance, doing as much as I can and knowing when to let go, allowing fluidity and avoiding anything being forced.
DE Years ago I was in a friend’s apartment where there was nothing on the white walls except a photograph of an autumn tree torn out of a magazine. I kept looking at it; it had a kind of aura about it, and in the end I couldn’t contain my curiosity any more and so I asked him who the picture was by. It was one of your images. And that’s the thing about many of your photographs – their subjects might be something seemingly really everyday, like a tree, friends or leftovers from a party, but there’s something singular about them, and it’s hard to say what it is exactly. WT I just think all images should be significant. They should be able to stand alone and say something about their particular subject matter. If they don’t do that, then why make them? The picture you mentioned is titled Calendar Leaves because it is so golden it could be in a calendar; I took it in upstate New York during the Indian summer of 1994. Trees have been photographed so many times. It’s always a question of: ‘Is this possible? Can I take a picture of this?’ DE So making images is partly about some kind of impossibility? WT Well, I wanted to capture my experience of this tree in the first degree. I wanted to photograph it knowing that it was really hard to do, but on the other hand I didn’t feel that I shouldn’t take a picture of, say, a sunset or the wing of an aeroplane or autumn foliage. I am knowing, but I try not to be cynical. At least some aspect of the picture has to be genuinely new; it can’t be a ‘me too’ picture. I feel things like these have been photographed or painted so often because they move people and I’m also moved in that moment, and in this I see myself in a long continuum of people making pictures of these larger subjects of life. Trees have interested artists for a long time. I guess they’re one of the most consistent things in life and on earth. DE Are you thinking about the translation of the experience into an image or work? WT Considering that translation or, metaphysically speaking, the process of transformation, is the central aspect of my work. The experience of something in real life doesn’t automatically make for a good work. I can only really photograph things that I understand in some way or another. It’s about whether you can look at something for 60 seconds; it’s very much about being able to bear reality. DE The golden melancholy of the autumn tree makes me think of the Douglas Sirk film Imitation of Life (1959). But I get the same mood from some of your abstract colour images, such as the streaky and stained, fleshy and azure ‘Silver’ pictures (mostly from 2006) or, for that matter, your photocopy-based works like photocopy (Barnaby) (1994), which involve so much longing for what is only partly there. WT Imitation of Life is a beautiful title but it’s not what I aim for because art is always different from life. You can try to get close to the feeling of what it’s like to be alive now, but the result of that is an art work, and that has its own reality. When I work on the non-figurative pictures in the darkroom or use photocopiers, it is a direct engagement with physical realities: the colour and intensity of my light sources or the electrostatic charge on the copier drums. I use them and play with them to make pictures possible. For instance, under the burden of all the clichés it’s not really possible to photograph Venice, but I still wanted to, so I made the photocopier-enlarged image Venice (2007), in which the details that indicate ‘Venice’ are reduced heavily. That makes them feel almost appropriated, but in fact all the photocopy pictures are based on photographs, which I took for this type of enlargement. DE The abstract colour works such as the ‘Silver’ group of pictures (1994–2008) and impossible colour V (2001) also involve signs of their making and process. WT impossible colour V is a large pink octagon placed on a larger white picture base. It’s actually a rectangle with the same proportions as 35 mm film that has been turned ever so slightly against a frame with the same proportions. Unlike my other abstract work, the ‘Silver’ images are mechanical pictures made by feeding them through a processing machine while it’s being cleaned, so they pick up traces of dirt and silver residue from the chemicals. Because they are only half fixed and the chemicals aren’t fresh, they slowly change hue over a few days. Sometimes I use this instability to create different shades and lines on them, before scanning and enlarging them to their final size. DE Then there are your three-dimensional pieces ‘Lighter’ (2005–8), which are physically creased and folded photographs. WT Some of them I expose to different coloured light sources in the darkroom after first folding them in the dark, and some are made in reverse order. Some are not folded at all – they only suggest the possibility of a fold – but they are all highly intricate. We are still blind to what it exactly is that makes a photograph so particular, so deeply psychological, even though it’s supposedly a mechanical medium. The ‘Lighter’ works are a continuation of the three-dimensional approach of the ‘paper drop’ pictures (2001–8) of hanging and flipped-over pieces of photographic paper. DE What would you say to people who interpret your later abstract work as a retreat into some kind of formalism? WT Look again. It’s not a retreat. If colour is a retreat, then I checked into that retreat early on. The video of the moving disco lights Lights (Body) (2002) or the astronomical pictures like Sternenhimmel (Starry Sky, 1995), are all about light and colour. I never separate that experience from a social one. David Wojnarowicz, one of the most socially engaged artists of recent history, repeatedly says in his video ITSOFOMO (1990): ‘Smell the flowers while you can.’ How can that be a retreat? You have to be pretty senseless not to allow artists the freedom to deal with the whole width of their experiences and explore their medium to the extreme. The abstracted picture of that golden tree you mentioned earlier on is from 1994, when I was in the midst of making the so-called realist work that I was first known for. I was then, as I am now, involved in seeing and transforming that into pictures. DE How much system or discipline and control is involved in getting what you want? WT It sounds a bit square, but I’ve found that the chances of getting a good result are just so much higher when you spend at least eight hours a day on your work. That work is, of course, all play [Laughing]. Seriously, the biggest challenge is not always to do the right thing but at times to do wrong things, to act irresponsibly in the light of constant demands. When artists start out, they all have some sort of alternative vision in mind, and then career and success, or equally the lack of it, grind most of them down to become bored and boring. It’s really the biggest challenge not to believe your own system, so the discipline is, strangely, to be undisciplined. DE You’ve mentioned before the fact that in learning about the world you also inherit certain kinds of images, and that every image you make is going to have a relationship to the image banks that you’ve inherited from your culture. That makes me think of your shots of men’s bum cracks. [Laughs] WT There is always something unsettling about fearless looking as opposed to coy allusion or shockingly flashing. To look without fear is a good subversive tool, undermining taboos. Study the soldier or riot policeman, make him an object of formal considerations, see him as wearing drag. Look at things the way they are. DE With your cultural baggage alongside? WT Yes, even though I feel that after 150 years or so, the subject matter of a woman’s exposed crotch isn’t owned by Gustave Courbet. I attribute these overlaps to certain pictures being in your milk from a young age, so to speak. But still, once a picture is in the world as an object, it’s impossible not to think about your relationship to it. Is it too ironic? Is it too referential? Not everything is strategy because, despite these considerations, what is uppermost in that moment is to be an awake, attentive being. DE People often think that there are too many images in the world and that we have become numb to them, but from what you’ve been saying it’s almost as though your practice is trying to prove the opposite – that we’re still alert, and that we’re still intelligent about images, and that there can be necessary pictures, ones which aren’t redundant from the start. WT Absolutely. There are people who have no joy in viewing – who have no joy in life, perhaps. I think people don’t observe enough. I’m a great believer in observation. My first passion in life was astronomy. DE I remember reading that, and also that you didn’t take photographs as a teenager. I suppose your photographs from 2004 of the planet Venus passing in front of the sun – like a blank face with a beauty spot – suggest that the idea of looking at something unattainable and distant, but which still can be experienced and understood, has stayed with you. WT The experience of relative perception is something that keeps turning me on. The photocopy works I made in the late 1980s, before I found my first direct photographic subject matter in nightclubs, were really about this dissolving of details, of zooming into pictures and information breaking down. What makes me happy is when people pick up on the nuances, when you don’t need ten years to realize that there is a composition behind the picture, or that not every elongated object is a phallus, or that questions of authenticity and the identity issues of the 1990s are embedded in the work as deliberate contradictions. DE I think that one of the great achievements of your work is the way you have navigated those contradictions. You have never shied away from presenting compelling pictures of the world at odds with the mainstream or from addressing major socio-political issues like privatization and AIDS education, to name recent examples. And you have done this with a radical subjective gaze and with a consciousness of the difficulties and limitations of that position and what you can achieve as an artist. I’m also curious about your Memorial for the Victims of Organized Religions (2006). It recalls a serial Minimalist grid: are you suggesting that there is a correlation between religious belief and belief in art? WT I showed this piece for the first time in Chicago, as part of a three-city US museum tour. It reflects the helplessness I felt at trying to tackle a subject of such magnitude in a country so held in the grip of the more unappealing sides of religion, but at the same time I wanted to explore faith as a subject. The absoluteness of the grid is disrupted by using creased and scratched photographs, but in a way that is only noticeable after a while, and at the intersection point between the pictures the eye creates a black dot, which is not actually there. A third element undermining the rigour of the grid is the inclusion of some not quite black but dark blue photographs interspersed in the piece. Being installed in the corner the grid is reflected in the shiny surfaces of the prints in a totally warped and distorted way. The piece doesn’t depict religion in the same way that a picture of, say, a mosque would, but it still tackles the idea that all religions have a claim to the absolute. DE In the 1990s you often talked about your interest in communal activities and club culture and the possibility of alternative forms of collectivity and togetherness. Do you still believe in these kind of Utopian moments as a viable alternative to ideological, economic or faith-based social constructions? WT Absolutely. However, it’s dodgy territory because so many ideologies were built on forcing people into a pit of togetherness, so it seems odd to go looking for that in subcultures. Still, I was always interested in the free, or at least non-branded, activities that functioned outside control and marketing. Those pockets of self-organization – free partying, free sex, free leisure time – are on the retreat. A less commercial spirit of togetherness is worth defending against the market realities, which are the result of the implementation of an atomized, privatized model of society, of ‘free workers and consumers’. At least it’s worth asking what choices you have if you don’t want to belong to the mainstream types of belonging in the privatized model of society – nation, sport, family values or religion.
DE In your installation Truth Study Centre (2007) all of this takes a major battering from you through your own and collected images and newspaper clippings. It is at times totally harrowing to peer into all of those trestle-table vitrines full of conflict and extremism on the one hand and human tenderness on the other. In a way, some of your pictures from the 1990s, which rightly or wrongly were seen as fashionable or lifestyle-oriented by some, are more confrontational now than they were back then. WT Yes, a couple of friends and I went to see my show ‘Lighter’ at the Hamburger Bahnhof a day after the opening in May, and it was really interesting to observe how teenagers were looking at the depictions of bodies in, for example, the Turner Prize Room (2000). The sort of physicality I show in my photographs, which was always so important to me, hasn’t dissolved into harmlessness. It seems to have gone the other way, almost as if somehow it’s become more provocative. DE It strikes me that in all your images everyone looks as though they want to be loved. Even the guy doing what the title of one of your photographs says he’s doing in man pissing on chair (1997). WT What connects them, I think, is that, even though they are confident, one gets a sense of their awareness of their own vulnerability. The depiction of other people is terribly fascinating, and even more so if it’s a psychological undertaking or a lifelong focus on single people, like a few friends of mine who I have photographed for many years now. DE So intimacy is crucial too? WT Yes, because it connects us to the physical world, and there is, of course, a deep loneliness in us all. I find people interesting when they have a sense of their own fragility and loneliness, and that’s something that I feel alive in a lot of people, but many of them have problems embracing this or accepting it. DE Which is fair enough, don’t you think? WT Sure! The title of one of my first books is For When I’m Weak, I’m Strong (1996), and it’s not that I can always abide by that, or that I’m always living that. DE Your abstract works also reflect this fragility too. WT But, it’s a resilient fragility, I hope. Of course, a sheet of paper can be both an image of a person and a metaphor for a person. I truly appreciate the modest contemplation that completely gives in to the circumstances as they are. I don’t see anger as the only driving force for change – concentration can be an equally powerful state of being. DE How has your own view of yourself as an artist, and your practice, changed over the past 20 years? You have said that you’re an ambitious person. Do you ever get into any kind of conflict about your current status in, or have ethical issues with, the contemporary art world? Do you feel a different sense of responsibility to your audience, and other artists? I know, for instance, that you teach and have your own gallery space in London, Between Bridges. WT Even though I don’t think there’s free choice for everybody, there’s a lot of choices available for successful artists. You don’t have to disappear into your own super-high value systems, as some high-profile artists do. I try to use my voice as an amplifier for what I care about and stay out of gratuitous projects. Between Bridges is a way for me to engage in a different kind of communication, showing artists who I feel for some reason or other have been under-represented in London. It’s also a learning opportunity for myself. The next show is work by Wilhelm Leibl, a German realist painter from the 19th century who I came across and paid homage to in a photograph I made in 2002, and who I’ve wanted to find out more about ever since. DE How did you feel about your exhibition ‘Lighter’ being held in the Friedrich Christian Flick Collection wing of the Hamburger Bahnhof? I ask this considering that his family’s fortune was partially made through arms manufacturing during World War II, and given the public criticism he attracted for not having paid into compensation funds for forced labourers. He was also seen to be potentially enriching himself because initially he only loaned his collection to the city. WT I really didn’t understand why and had no sympathy for the fact that Flick didn’t want to pay the compensation at the time and instead used a similar amount of money to set up a foundation to fight xenophobia among youths in East Germany. He could have easily afforded to do both. At the same time I felt the witch hunt was unfair, because he never personally employed forced labour: it was his grandfather, and the lines drawn between clean and unclean money were drawn much too symbolically. I find it equally unsettling to think of collectors who actively in our lifetime earn their money with politically incorrect or destructive activities. But Flick did pay up eventually, and he’s also gifted 160 major works from his collection to the Hamburger Bahnhof, instead of building another private collector museum. Interestingly, these facts were hardly reported or acknowledged by his critics. DE There is an inherent contradiction in the fact that art is structurally implicated in money and power but at the same time ought to function like a cultural conscience. One interesting part of the debate around the Flick Collection is thinking about the extent to which an artist can or should control the distribution of their work. WT Yes, and I noticed that the least popular position to take on this is to acknowledge one’s own implication in it. It’s very attractive to be totally against the market, and it’s OK to not say anything at all and just get on with one’s work. I try to be as ethically involved in the distribution of my work as possible, but at the same time I acknowledge my inability to control everything. DE ‘Lighter’ was an overwhelming round-up of your work past and present. In particular it showed how the various types of abstract works and those that have to do with the basic condition of the image fit and relate to the more ‘traditional’ photographs. WT The exhibition was a new type of show for me. After ten museum survey exhibitions in the past seven years, this one was never meant to be a retrospective. In the first room there are six photocopy pictures from 1988, and in the last room there are another three, and in between is primarily work from the last five years. The Turner Prize Room from 2000 also featured but was a kind of show within a show. I made the exhibition completely irrespective of any retrospective duty. DE So the only duty was introspective? WT [Laughs] It was introspective, yes. No, not introspective, it was now-spective. It was what was going on. DE Even though a good quarter of the show was taken up by the mostly political and science-hugging Truth Study Centre installation from 2007, it seems that many of your concerns have become more abstract. WT I think it took shows such as ‘Freedom from the Known’ at PS1 in New York (2006) or ‘Lighter’ to bring this to the fore. I exhibited my first abstract and damaged, too dark and fucked-up pictures as a Parkett edition in 1998. From that time onwards I think that the abstract nature of earlier works like the drapery close-ups of clothing or the ‘Concorde’ pictures (1997) became more clear; an abstraction grounded in the real world. DE In some of the photogram abstract work I can’t help but make associations between body, fluid and cellular structures. There’s a kind of direct relationship with the body in the image. They’re abstract, but there are areas of physical and emotional stuff flowing around inside. Titles like it’s only love give it away (2005) or the big and bloody-looking Urgency III (2006) also suggest this to me. WT The human eye has a great desire to recognize things when it looks at a photographic print. I made use of this phenomenon and found I could speak about physicality in new pictures while the camera-based pictures could be seen in a new light as well. So they kind of inform each other, rather than being pitted against each other.
DE Is the key in the mix or the constellations; how one image sits next to another and how they influence each other? WT When I was working on the book Lighter earlier this year, which comprises some 200 installation views, I realized that this is actually the first book that shows what my work really looks like. You get an idea of how, in the constellations of pictures, I try to approximate the way I see the world, not in a linear order but as a multitude of parallel experiences – like now I look at you, seeing a portrait, now out of the window there is a landscape, here on the table the cups standing around, there my feet. It’s multiple singularities, simultaneously accessible as they share the same space or room.
Dominic Eichler is a musician, writer, artist and contributing editor of frieze.
Wolfgang Tillmans
http://www.tillmans.co.uk/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=73&Itemid=25
Images from venice biennale
Images from venice biennale
Tobias Rehberger
http://www.gms.be/index.php?content=artist_detail&id_artist=35
Often playing with 1960s and '70s design styles, Tobias Rehberger's environments, furniture, sculptures and ceiling installations have made him a focus of interest for art criticism stressing contextual approaches and cross-over aspirations.Tobias Rehberger operates within these fields of critical definition without considering them to be particularly meaningful for his work. At the point where design not only produces the "utility" of commodity articles but also supplements usefulness with an immaterial surplus value, Tobias Rehberger concentrates on transferring to the field of art these questions of functionality and added value. In doing so, he deftly puts out of action the entire policy underlying art-critical interpretations.By giving the visitors the possibility to co-determine the furnishing and design of the exhibition space, by translating the proposals or specifications submitted by friends and acquaintances into artistic environments, furniture or portraits that then bear the signature of both the proposer and the artist, and by making the function of his installations and objects dependent on the willingness of others to use them, Rehberger always discusses one basic question: What is actually a work of art, and how much of it is conditioned by notions, perceptions and external influences?In this way, the artist shows possibilities, and at the same time makes proposals that depend on the viewer's notions and expectations in order to become "legible" in the first place. Thus, everything could be done differently, if one only knew how. To this extent, the typical fashion phenomena of "ambient music" and "ambient space" are, in Rehberger's work, only apparently conditions of an "ambient art" that shows how easily one can move away from the centre ground of a clear statement or never come close to that centre to begin with.Interview by Leontine CoelewijCurator Leontine Coelewij talked with Tobias Rehberger about the first major survey of his work in the Netherlands at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam: the chicken-and-egg-no-problem wall-painting, which travelled to the Museum Ludwig in Cologne.First of all, please explain the title?Of course, but first I should talk about what I want to do in the show. I am playing with the idea of what a “work” actually is: where does it come from and where is it going? If you’re not entirely into the idea of the romantic genius, then it is quite an interesting question to pose to yourself: where do the works come from and how do they develop? That is the “chicken and the egg problem”. The wall painting from the title also relates to the structure of the show. I will use three-dimensional objects to produce a two-dimensional image on the wall. That’s also “the chicken and the egg”, where the existing works are used as the material for a new production. But it also relates to how a work is always material for future work. All the sculptures in the space are lit from different angles, so they produce shadows on the wall. There is also a sketchy wall painting, roughly based on the shadows, which I made on the spot. I like the idea that something elaborate and solid could be the starting point for something vague and sketchy. And on the other hand a wall painting is in a way the most solid way of doing a painting because it is fixed. I think that all these discrepancies create a very nice confusion about how work is produced. This issue has a wider relevance than just my own work: how aware are we as artists about how the things we do come together? This has to do with the fact that I am highly sceptical about this idea of the genius artist, which remains a very big issue…Do you think that this idea of the romantic genius is also at the basis of today’s art market?Yes, I think so very much, especially in relation to the concept of “authenticity”. The market is based on these romantic nineteenth-century ideas. It’s not that my work is a statement against that; I just think that it’s not such an interesting concept anymore. And I am trying to ask myself what other concepts are possible in this exhibition. I continually question the perspective.In your work you’re looking for alternatives to this idea of the solitary genius, such as shared authorship. You have worked together with other people, such as the craftsmen from Cameroon who made the design “classics” Breuer andRietveld chairs based on your sketches …That’s right, but it also exists in a lot of my other works. But I think it’s not so much about shared authorship as about realising how absurd the idea of control is in our concept of production. But you can also find it in the idea of the “model” with which I am very busy: Mutter 93% an almost life-size model for a garage. If you buy the model, you have the right to build the garage according to your own interpretation of the model. You can also see our show from this perspective: on the one hand the sculptures stand for themselves, and on the other hand they represent something else.Some of your works such as “Mutter 93% or Cutting, preparing, without missing anything and being happy about what comes next” suggest a kind of use …Well, the works actually have a use. Often an art work is defined as a “useless” object, but this is actually a myth just like the myth of the neutral white space of the gallery or the museum. Art is used as a tool for cultural definition or as a tool in the art market or as a “happy-maker” on the wall above your sofa. There is always some kind of function. I always play with this question of function, of what defines function and the range of clichés about the “non-functionality” of an artwork. My work has often been misunderstood as some kind of social interference. For me it’s always more a struggle with the definition of what an art work is or could be. For example, I could use a bronze Giacometti sculpture to hammer a nail into a wall. However, an artwork is often more successful as a tool to develop your ideas than as a hammer. It all depends on the perspective from which you view the work. Another misunderstanding is that my work is close to design. For me that is not an interesting question. I am not particularly interested in design as design. There are design strategies that raise interesting questions about how I think about art. And that’s why I use it. My work is more about differentiating between art and design, trying to define the differences rather than merging the two fields.I also had the impression that you use different strategies from design to introduce the element of time. Such as the work “Cutting, preparing, without missing anything and being happy about what comes next”, which is an installation based on asking your friends how they would define an ideal place to relax.The first edition of the work was made in 1996, the second one in 1999, both in the design styles of those years … One very interesting phenomenon in relation to time is fashion. The idea of fashion relates to the definition of something in time. The work you just mentioned poses the question: what happens if the visual appearance of a work changes in time without the content having changed? To what extent is the surface of the work the actual “work”? Or is the surface completely irrelevant? There is this very general question for artists which is about the “understandability” of the work they make … And that is a rather weird idea … Of course we, as artists, communicate structures, but how far does this “understanding” go and what are the processes of making things understandable? Just as photography took on some of the “duties” of art in the nineteenth century, so advertising did this in the last century: the controllability of the message. Advertising tries to be “scientific” about the effect it has on people. And advertising does this well, so that is something we artists need not concern ourselves with, just like we no longer need to concern ourselves with an exact naturalistic representation in a portrait.What do you see as the role for art now?I believe that art is a completely open field where questions can be raised that can’t be raised in other fields. But I think in the end it’s a theoretical game. Art is mostly about the possibility of making art, about its circumstances and its conditions. And in this respect it is an example to other fields just like mathematics is. It’s a field where you can discuss things that are not of any direct, practical use. I also think of mathematics like this because in a way it runs parallel to the production of beauty.Light plays an important role in your work; sometimes you use it to make connections with different parts of the world – like the village Arroyo Grande – or moments in history – like the day Nancy Spungen was killed in a hotel room in New York in 1978; but also in the exhibition you are working on now …The use of light in my work is not about “branding”, it’s simply a material that I use, like you use a piece of wood to make chair, to repair a ceiling or as fuel to cook with. For me it’s just a material like wood or metal. It’s not the content of the work. But it is an extremely interesting material to work with because it can be used in so many different ways. And it is also the essential material of communication. It’s the first thing a baby sees, it’s crucial for the visual arts, and it conveys a large amount of knowledge. I can use it in different ways as a strategy to change perspectives: literally and metaphorically.Can you tell me something about the choice of works for this exhibition? You explained to me already a while ago that, “this is not going to be a retrospective.” What did you mean by that?Since we said from the beginning that it should be an exhibition of existing works, I thought about what that means. I thought about the classic way of dealing with this – which is the retrospective. But I was not interested in the more “historical” approach to the overview of existing work. Therefore I asked myself what, from my own point of view, could be interesting about an exhibition of existing works. For me it was how this presentation could produce “non-existing” works. That was the initial idea. The question was how could I make all this into an interesting visual product which could give other people a certain understanding of the work, but could also give me a new understanding of the work. And at the same time I am not completely fulfilling the museum’s demand, because I am producing a new work.I like the idea that the show has a slight retrospective touch because it brings together a couple of important works, but then I am disrupting that with works that might be less important for me – which is sometimes not so obvious – which appear less understandable. Then a technical aspect came in: how to create this new “sketch” on the wall of the museum space. I tried to combine objects that work very well and objects that do not work at all, in this structure with light and shadow.By using your sculptures as raw material in a new installation they will also acquire a different meaning. What happens to works such as your Videolibraries – sculptures used as an archive for film fragments which are visible only as flickering lights because the TV sets are placed facing towards the wall – when they are placed in the middle of the space as an object to create a shadow on a wall?It’s again this question of a change in perspective. In this case the object is normally positioned in front of the wall to produce a reflection of the light from film clips. Now it’s placed in the middle of the space. First of all, you encounter it from the front and it looks more or less the same as before; only the reflection is less obvious than it normally is. So it’s rather close to what the work usally is. But then you go around and it’s just like a Madonna from the fourteenth century, which is three-dimensional from one side and hollow from the other side. So now you see the mechanism of the work itself – which is almost like a pathological perspective on the work. Suddenly it lays bare its organs. I could only do this in this situation where the sculpture is used as raw material for the wall painting. It is comparable to the role of the model. On the one hand it is one thing, but then when you look at it in a larger,smaller or broader sense it could be something different. It’s all about the ambiguity of things, the ambiguity of reading the art work as a final product.Does this position also come from a dissatisfaction with the role art has nowadays?No not dissatisfaction, but more doubts or uncertainty about what seems to be so clear and easily understandable. Perhaps I would be happier if I simply made “nice” art; but my work is more about the uncertainty about what you call art. And in the end it’s very satisfying. It’s great fun posing all these questions. I am always grateful for all these “problems” I have. For me it’s fun to deal with them.Are you inspired by the way other artists in the past have dealt with these questions?Of course. I don’t know how far back it goes. I have a great appreciation for “old” art, but the work of the last hundred years has more relevance to my way of seeing art. Contemporary art is closer to the “confusion” I am in.Do you mean the work of artists of your own generation such as Olafur Eliasson and Rirkrit Tiravanija?Yes, but also an artist like Donald Judd, whom I admire very much but also have problems with. He dealt with a lot of the problems I deal with as well, like the idea of the genius artist or the “artist’s hand”. But then I have difficulties with the idea of production; that an industrial-looking object or a spray-painted metal box has nothing to do with the fight the person who made it had with his wife the night before. It’s almost an inhuman attitude towards the object, at least from my point of view. It’s not about good or bad. It’s more a matter of whether it really makes sense.
Often playing with 1960s and '70s design styles, Tobias Rehberger's environments, furniture, sculptures and ceiling installations have made him a focus of interest for art criticism stressing contextual approaches and cross-over aspirations.Tobias Rehberger operates within these fields of critical definition without considering them to be particularly meaningful for his work. At the point where design not only produces the "utility" of commodity articles but also supplements usefulness with an immaterial surplus value, Tobias Rehberger concentrates on transferring to the field of art these questions of functionality and added value. In doing so, he deftly puts out of action the entire policy underlying art-critical interpretations.By giving the visitors the possibility to co-determine the furnishing and design of the exhibition space, by translating the proposals or specifications submitted by friends and acquaintances into artistic environments, furniture or portraits that then bear the signature of both the proposer and the artist, and by making the function of his installations and objects dependent on the willingness of others to use them, Rehberger always discusses one basic question: What is actually a work of art, and how much of it is conditioned by notions, perceptions and external influences?In this way, the artist shows possibilities, and at the same time makes proposals that depend on the viewer's notions and expectations in order to become "legible" in the first place. Thus, everything could be done differently, if one only knew how. To this extent, the typical fashion phenomena of "ambient music" and "ambient space" are, in Rehberger's work, only apparently conditions of an "ambient art" that shows how easily one can move away from the centre ground of a clear statement or never come close to that centre to begin with.Interview by Leontine CoelewijCurator Leontine Coelewij talked with Tobias Rehberger about the first major survey of his work in the Netherlands at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam: the chicken-and-egg-no-problem wall-painting, which travelled to the Museum Ludwig in Cologne.First of all, please explain the title?Of course, but first I should talk about what I want to do in the show. I am playing with the idea of what a “work” actually is: where does it come from and where is it going? If you’re not entirely into the idea of the romantic genius, then it is quite an interesting question to pose to yourself: where do the works come from and how do they develop? That is the “chicken and the egg problem”. The wall painting from the title also relates to the structure of the show. I will use three-dimensional objects to produce a two-dimensional image on the wall. That’s also “the chicken and the egg”, where the existing works are used as the material for a new production. But it also relates to how a work is always material for future work. All the sculptures in the space are lit from different angles, so they produce shadows on the wall. There is also a sketchy wall painting, roughly based on the shadows, which I made on the spot. I like the idea that something elaborate and solid could be the starting point for something vague and sketchy. And on the other hand a wall painting is in a way the most solid way of doing a painting because it is fixed. I think that all these discrepancies create a very nice confusion about how work is produced. This issue has a wider relevance than just my own work: how aware are we as artists about how the things we do come together? This has to do with the fact that I am highly sceptical about this idea of the genius artist, which remains a very big issue…Do you think that this idea of the romantic genius is also at the basis of today’s art market?Yes, I think so very much, especially in relation to the concept of “authenticity”. The market is based on these romantic nineteenth-century ideas. It’s not that my work is a statement against that; I just think that it’s not such an interesting concept anymore. And I am trying to ask myself what other concepts are possible in this exhibition. I continually question the perspective.In your work you’re looking for alternatives to this idea of the solitary genius, such as shared authorship. You have worked together with other people, such as the craftsmen from Cameroon who made the design “classics” Breuer andRietveld chairs based on your sketches …That’s right, but it also exists in a lot of my other works. But I think it’s not so much about shared authorship as about realising how absurd the idea of control is in our concept of production. But you can also find it in the idea of the “model” with which I am very busy: Mutter 93% an almost life-size model for a garage. If you buy the model, you have the right to build the garage according to your own interpretation of the model. You can also see our show from this perspective: on the one hand the sculptures stand for themselves, and on the other hand they represent something else.Some of your works such as “Mutter 93% or Cutting, preparing, without missing anything and being happy about what comes next” suggest a kind of use …Well, the works actually have a use. Often an art work is defined as a “useless” object, but this is actually a myth just like the myth of the neutral white space of the gallery or the museum. Art is used as a tool for cultural definition or as a tool in the art market or as a “happy-maker” on the wall above your sofa. There is always some kind of function. I always play with this question of function, of what defines function and the range of clichés about the “non-functionality” of an artwork. My work has often been misunderstood as some kind of social interference. For me it’s always more a struggle with the definition of what an art work is or could be. For example, I could use a bronze Giacometti sculpture to hammer a nail into a wall. However, an artwork is often more successful as a tool to develop your ideas than as a hammer. It all depends on the perspective from which you view the work. Another misunderstanding is that my work is close to design. For me that is not an interesting question. I am not particularly interested in design as design. There are design strategies that raise interesting questions about how I think about art. And that’s why I use it. My work is more about differentiating between art and design, trying to define the differences rather than merging the two fields.I also had the impression that you use different strategies from design to introduce the element of time. Such as the work “Cutting, preparing, without missing anything and being happy about what comes next”, which is an installation based on asking your friends how they would define an ideal place to relax.The first edition of the work was made in 1996, the second one in 1999, both in the design styles of those years … One very interesting phenomenon in relation to time is fashion. The idea of fashion relates to the definition of something in time. The work you just mentioned poses the question: what happens if the visual appearance of a work changes in time without the content having changed? To what extent is the surface of the work the actual “work”? Or is the surface completely irrelevant? There is this very general question for artists which is about the “understandability” of the work they make … And that is a rather weird idea … Of course we, as artists, communicate structures, but how far does this “understanding” go and what are the processes of making things understandable? Just as photography took on some of the “duties” of art in the nineteenth century, so advertising did this in the last century: the controllability of the message. Advertising tries to be “scientific” about the effect it has on people. And advertising does this well, so that is something we artists need not concern ourselves with, just like we no longer need to concern ourselves with an exact naturalistic representation in a portrait.What do you see as the role for art now?I believe that art is a completely open field where questions can be raised that can’t be raised in other fields. But I think in the end it’s a theoretical game. Art is mostly about the possibility of making art, about its circumstances and its conditions. And in this respect it is an example to other fields just like mathematics is. It’s a field where you can discuss things that are not of any direct, practical use. I also think of mathematics like this because in a way it runs parallel to the production of beauty.Light plays an important role in your work; sometimes you use it to make connections with different parts of the world – like the village Arroyo Grande – or moments in history – like the day Nancy Spungen was killed in a hotel room in New York in 1978; but also in the exhibition you are working on now …The use of light in my work is not about “branding”, it’s simply a material that I use, like you use a piece of wood to make chair, to repair a ceiling or as fuel to cook with. For me it’s just a material like wood or metal. It’s not the content of the work. But it is an extremely interesting material to work with because it can be used in so many different ways. And it is also the essential material of communication. It’s the first thing a baby sees, it’s crucial for the visual arts, and it conveys a large amount of knowledge. I can use it in different ways as a strategy to change perspectives: literally and metaphorically.Can you tell me something about the choice of works for this exhibition? You explained to me already a while ago that, “this is not going to be a retrospective.” What did you mean by that?Since we said from the beginning that it should be an exhibition of existing works, I thought about what that means. I thought about the classic way of dealing with this – which is the retrospective. But I was not interested in the more “historical” approach to the overview of existing work. Therefore I asked myself what, from my own point of view, could be interesting about an exhibition of existing works. For me it was how this presentation could produce “non-existing” works. That was the initial idea. The question was how could I make all this into an interesting visual product which could give other people a certain understanding of the work, but could also give me a new understanding of the work. And at the same time I am not completely fulfilling the museum’s demand, because I am producing a new work.I like the idea that the show has a slight retrospective touch because it brings together a couple of important works, but then I am disrupting that with works that might be less important for me – which is sometimes not so obvious – which appear less understandable. Then a technical aspect came in: how to create this new “sketch” on the wall of the museum space. I tried to combine objects that work very well and objects that do not work at all, in this structure with light and shadow.By using your sculptures as raw material in a new installation they will also acquire a different meaning. What happens to works such as your Videolibraries – sculptures used as an archive for film fragments which are visible only as flickering lights because the TV sets are placed facing towards the wall – when they are placed in the middle of the space as an object to create a shadow on a wall?It’s again this question of a change in perspective. In this case the object is normally positioned in front of the wall to produce a reflection of the light from film clips. Now it’s placed in the middle of the space. First of all, you encounter it from the front and it looks more or less the same as before; only the reflection is less obvious than it normally is. So it’s rather close to what the work usally is. But then you go around and it’s just like a Madonna from the fourteenth century, which is three-dimensional from one side and hollow from the other side. So now you see the mechanism of the work itself – which is almost like a pathological perspective on the work. Suddenly it lays bare its organs. I could only do this in this situation where the sculpture is used as raw material for the wall painting. It is comparable to the role of the model. On the one hand it is one thing, but then when you look at it in a larger,smaller or broader sense it could be something different. It’s all about the ambiguity of things, the ambiguity of reading the art work as a final product.Does this position also come from a dissatisfaction with the role art has nowadays?No not dissatisfaction, but more doubts or uncertainty about what seems to be so clear and easily understandable. Perhaps I would be happier if I simply made “nice” art; but my work is more about the uncertainty about what you call art. And in the end it’s very satisfying. It’s great fun posing all these questions. I am always grateful for all these “problems” I have. For me it’s fun to deal with them.Are you inspired by the way other artists in the past have dealt with these questions?Of course. I don’t know how far back it goes. I have a great appreciation for “old” art, but the work of the last hundred years has more relevance to my way of seeing art. Contemporary art is closer to the “confusion” I am in.Do you mean the work of artists of your own generation such as Olafur Eliasson and Rirkrit Tiravanija?Yes, but also an artist like Donald Judd, whom I admire very much but also have problems with. He dealt with a lot of the problems I deal with as well, like the idea of the genius artist or the “artist’s hand”. But then I have difficulties with the idea of production; that an industrial-looking object or a spray-painted metal box has nothing to do with the fight the person who made it had with his wife the night before. It’s almost an inhuman attitude towards the object, at least from my point of view. It’s not about good or bad. It’s more a matter of whether it really makes sense.
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