Inter views

Lida Abdul Sergei Bugaev Afrika Pawe Althamer Lara Baladi Matthew Barney Louise Bourgeois Wolfgang Capellari Maurizio Cattelan Nathalie Djurberg A K Dolven Marcel Dzama Tim Eitel Barnaby Furnas Michael Haneke Glsn Karamustafa Zilvinas Kempinas Amal Kenawy Zenita Komad Katarzyna Kozyra Paul Albert Leitner Linder Liu Ding Urs Lthi Ryan McGinley Olaf Metzel Olga Neuwirth Tim Noble & Sue Webster Ulrike Ottinger Poka-Yio Julius Popp Nedko Solakov Doron Solomons Ricky Swallow Pascale Marthine Tayou Spencer Tunick Paloma Varga Weisz Wang Wei Nari Ward Erwin Wurm Feridun Zaimoglu Ralf Ziervogel mijewski Artur Z

Gerald Matt

Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther Knig, Kln

Interviews
Gerald Matt

Interviews

Gerald Matt

Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther Knig, Kln

For Mimi Monplaisir

Content
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Foreword Lida Abdul Sergei Bugaev Afrika Pawe Althamer Lara Baladi Matthew Barney Louise Bourgeois Wolfgang Capellari Maurizio Cattelan Nathalie Djurberg A K Dolven Marcel Dzama Tim Eitel Barnaby Furnas Michael Haneke Glsn Karamustafa Zilvinas Kempinas Amal Kenawy Zenita Komad Katarzyna Kozyra Paul Albert Leitner Linder Liu Ding Urs Lthi Ryan McGinley Olaf Metzel Olga Neuwirth Tim Noble & Sue Webster Ulrike Ottinger Poka-Yio Julius Popp Nedko Solakov Doron Solomons Ricky Swallow Pascale Marthine Tayou Spencer Tunick Paloma Varga Weisz Wang Wei Nari Ward Erwin Wurm Feridun Zaimoglu Ralf Ziervogel mijewski Artur Z

Foreword
Art should never be popular. The public should try to make itself artistic.
Oscar Wilde

The publication at hand is the second volume of interviews recapitulating the conversations I have been able to hold with artists in the course of my work as a director and curator. It reflects and confirms my conviction that interviews within the art system present a particularly suitable form of creating an equal platform of exchange between creators and distributors of art. The artists confirm this point of view with their readiness to answer questions and to enter a dialog, they even embrace the opportunity to criticize or correct some of the interpretations of their work. The questions asked are not only results of the mere dialectics of each conversation, but are also shaped by the pre-knowledge of the interviewer, which is rooted in a variety of sources. Thus, the questions the artists are asked reflect the image that has been set by the art public. This, in turn, means that the interviewee is not only in dialog with the person asking questions, but retrospectively with the public itself. Through the medium of this publication, the feedback finds its way back to the public, with the potential of broadening and re-questioning prevalent images. As a result, interviews can serve as an important medium of communication within the art world as media which convey authentic information (from the artists) to an audience interested in art as well as to art critique and theory. A growing number of artists are voicing their opinion on various panels and platforms, articulating their position in written and verbal form. Self-positioning as opposed to heteronomy and submission is proving to be an adequate, or even essential tool in helping artists succeed in an art world that follows mechanisms similar to those underlying economies, politics or the entertainment industry. At the same time, it helps counteract the image of the speechless visual artist, which to a certain extent is still being perpetuated today. In spite of all the differences between the artists represented in this book, they all seem to have a certain amount of ruptures and changes (in form and medium) as well as continuity (in theme and content) in common. I would like to name Erwin Wurm as an exemplary member of a generation of artists who have established their names as brands by using experiments in a variety of media to create a basic theme such as the analysis of the notion of the sculptural in Erwin Wurms or Matthew Barneys work that can be traced like a basso continuo in the many stations of their oeuvre, rather than specializing on a certain genre, technique or linear sequence of artistic development. The factor of the recognizability of the artists identity, which is so important for both the art market and art critics, may be endangered by the transformational shift from visual to conceptual continuity especially when the media employed are ephemeral. This may be the reason why the documentation of experimental processes by the artists themselves has become an essential part of their work. A lot of Westerners couldnt comprehend how it was possible for one artist to create so many different kinds of art, Nedko Solakov remembers the 1990s, Now it is okay visually I can do whatever I want, people recognize my sense of the absurd under any disguise. A sense for the absurd is a characteristic of continuity in the art of many contemporary artists. It can be expressed as ironic


Foreword

distance, as humorous pointedness or as a play on reality and fiction. When the context of artists origins plays an important role in their work, the sense of the absurd can be traced in post-socialist society or capitalist consumerist culture, in the Arabic world as well as in Africa. Artists from formerly communist Eastern Europe often use these tools for socio-political critique, which probably stems from a specific tradition of underground strategies. Sergei Bugaev Afrika says: The type of irony developed by Soviet artists did finally lead to the destruction of Soviet ideology. When asked what political potential their work has, most artists react with a certain sense of reservation. Nowadays, nobody believes that art can really change the world the common attitude seems to be more like Katarzyna Kozyra defines it: Art can show that the world has changed, even if people havent noticed yet. These changes from the global conflict of values, general disillusion and our fast-paced lifestyles to capitalization and the concentration of economic and political power are perceived by artists internationally and are then addressed in a subtle rather than activistic way. The affirmation that politics and the world of advertisement practice excessively can no longer be an appropriate means for art to convey a critical message. Art rather aims at deconstructing a higher level of values that determine our Western way of thinking and acting: our belief in objectivity, in the calculation, explanation, proof and prediction of phenomena and processes. As Urs Lthi, for example, states, I think that there is no such thing as objectivity; there are only agreements for the sake of order. There is no such thing as one world, one reality, one truth; we live in parallel worlds and realities. The change of perspectives, references to art history or popular culture, art and life, shifts from one place to the next, using documentary and fictional images simultaneously all these and further strategies are used to create a subjective view of the world constituted by our own emotions, contexts and opinions, in opposition to a purely rationalist one. Approaching the localization of the subject but also the localization of the object by questioning authorship and reception aims at understanding and clarifying the current situation and condition of the entity art. Next to references to popular culture, contemporary art seems to be drawing more from art history than it has in the past whether by resuming certain iconographic characteristics and formalist references, which have traditionally been summarized as style, or reverting to historical epochs, which offer visual and mental stimulation or archetypes that artists process in their work. Aiming at re-interpretations, shifts or appropriation as well as translating the past into the present world of life and images, these references are expressed in certain narrative concepts, but also in an interest in technique and craftsmanship. As A K Dolven puts it, the history of art functions like an (imaginary) dialog partner: It is just like talking to someone. Most of the time a work at the beginning has nothing to do with art history. Then when it develops, I discover connections and an interesting dialog begins. As they did in the first volume of interviews, the integration of the narrative,


the personal, once again plays an integral role in the interviews presented in this book, becoming an expression of subjectivity, which reveals itself as the carrier of the artistic and oppositional, as a deconstructivist factor. It is less the belief in the revolutionary power of art, but rather an attempt to visualize a metalevel of truth, in which fantastic, real, individual and collective aspects are knit together in order to question the socio-political consensus and to reveal media structures. Art production in the digital age does not merely resort to the same visual vocabulary and technological means as the media, but uses them in a selfreflective-subversive manner. Doron Solomons describes this as taking the original material and cooking it to emphasize (hidden) truths that lay beneath. His work constitutes maybe as of yet, not a front, but maybe only guerrilla in the woods. It is the tension created between alleged realities and truths that significantly determines the practices and strategies employed by contemporary artists: I like to think my work is a continuum of experiences that ask people to think differently about themselves, and the world they live in; about how they move mijewski takes this a step through each day, remarks Spencer Tunick. Artur Z further and conjures an actual artistic profile: You can say artists are masters of reverse perception they see what cant be seen. They know the unknown. Or they know, semi-consciously, what we dont know we know. I believe its part of artistic know-how and could be used as expert knowledge, as a cognitive method, in other fields. For many artists, involving the recipients is of great importance. The audience does not necessarily have to be made up of members of the closed circuit of the art community. The public arena still seems to me the most appropriate space for any kind of reception, explains Olaf Metzel. Even in a country like Afghanistan, which is considered to be very restricted in terms of beliefs and values by Western standards, art in public space can work. Lida Abdul answers the question of how co-operations with people involved in her projects work: Beautifully. With tremendous respect. The artists interviewed for this volume all prove their open-mindedness in their individual biographies. They do not live and work in a singular place, they readily embrace the foreign, and even those who were forced to leave their home countries hardly ever feel uprooted. No, I dont necessarily see being-athome in relation to boundaries and borderlines. For me home is where I feel happiest, and from the moment where, in my own head, the borders no longer have any relevance, its only the institutions that remind me of the existence of borders, explains Pascale Marthine Tayou, who is originally from Cameroon and now lives in Belgium. I have been able to observe the work of most of the artists represented in this volume over a longer period of time, whether through the international art circuit or through personal encounters. Many have participated in exhibitions that I have been able to curate. Some of the artists are also new discoveries, who caught my attention in the course of preparations for exhibition concepts. I would like to


Foreword

thank all of the artists who participated in this project for the fascinating, inspiring insights they have granted me in their work in an often relaxed atmosphere, for their points of view and their visions, which, together, we are delighted to pass on to the readers of this publication. I would like to extend my special gratitude to Synne Genzmer, who supported the editorial work and coordination of this project with exceptional dedication. I also thank Lucas Gehrmann, Ilse Lafer, Thomas Miegang, Sigrid Mittersteiner, Angela Stief and Jrgen Weishupl for their assistance in the realization of this book and the graphic designer Dieter Auracher for his exceptional work in the design of this publication. Gerald Matt Vienna, November 2007

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Lida Abdul
Blank space is a modality just as the blanks between movements of thought are some early voice.

You are from Afghanistan, fled to India and Germany and finally emigrated to the USA. Why did you stay? Did the USA offer something as a country and a place to live that you didnt want to do without?

I suppose more than anything it offered anonymity, the anonymity that one needs after having lived in so many different places, after so much is taken away from one that one really feels powerless, the sense of self stripped of so much dignity that you just want to hide in order not to have to answer the possible well-meaning questions of people about what really happened. And then at some point from within this place I started making art, not realizing that at some point it would become the place where Id begin to live, the real world just sometimes intersecting with this imaginary world. I dont think I couldve done this anywhere else, because in the US youre absolutely free to create the most intense solitude without anyones noticing. Actually so many people live perfectly that way; they know TV characters much more intimately than their neighbors. Theyre exiles in their own societies.
Cultural difference or cultural heterogeneity has aroused great interest in recent years, not only in art but also as a political instrument. What is your view of cultural difference?

I suppose the problem arises when cultural differences which of course are underpinned by political and aesthetic aspirations become the starting point for talking about civilizations. I mean, who today can honestly say that she lives her life entirely within the parameters of her culture, what with the global pop cultural marketplace, which in some very banal way creates some lowest common denominator of identication for people. I dont know why people think they can actually force people to change the way they live their lives, knowing full well that cultures are accumulations over many years and for many people they are the ground of their existences. This is not to say that there are meant cultural differences, which I nd repugnant. So then the question becomes, What is my responsibility in the face of that?, and I suppose my answer to that is art.
Lida Abdul, Still from Bricksellers of Kabul, 2006

The destruction of your home country occurs as a theme in many of your works, combining seemingly quite contrary aspects. If I may cite you: In my work, I try to juxtapose the space of politics with the space of reverie, almost absurdity, the space of shelter with that of the desert; in all this I try to perform the blank spaces that are formed when everything is taken away from people. How do we come face to face with nothing, with emptiness where there was something earlier? Empty spaces are a constitutive element in the figure, which are what make

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Lida Abdul

tifiying answers. These are actions with purely symbolic functions, replacement activities. Is this a kind of allegorical grieving process?

Yes, because mourning, as Freud rightly says, is the attempt to come to terms with the lost body and in this scheme, repetition serves a purpose because in the unreality that loss brings, there is always the hope that the loss that one feels is really an illusion and it couldnt be and thus one checks again, Is it there? Are you there? and then again and again until at some point exhaustion forces one to give up. It is always the body, the stuff in it, that colludes with the mind and a decision gets made, but it is not of the order of a conscious decision. I am fascinated with those decisions that are not really decisions and nor are they defeats. So the repetition is simultaneously a distraction and the opening up of the possibility of rening the loss.
In your work White House you paint the walls of a ruin white: yet again an action without a rationally justifiable purpose. The functional quality of the architecture is transformed into a symbolic-aesthetic form of almost sculptural quality. In the end the walls appear in contrast to the harsh, desert-like landscape, abstract in brilliant white. You transform the ruin into a monument and conserve what has been destroyed. The gesture of painting implies conservation, branding, decorating, refreshing, and cleaning. The relations between the monument and the ruin are all recurrent aspects of your work. What is the relationship between this and the traditional memorial? What is the agenda of aestheticism in it?

Lida Abdul, Still from Upon awakening, 2006

it visible. What shape do you give your figure of emptiness? It often seems to be translated into aesthetic Formalism.

I agree. In other words, whatever cannot be reconciled with experience we just do not see and thus the empty spaces in our thoughts. So empty space is not empty in the sense of no-thing; it is not even a thing with a particular boundary, but it is always there even when we think and make art. It is there when we move from one idea to another, it is the background noise to our thoughts, that which allows thinking in the rst place. It is the lowest common denominator to which we compare all movements of consciousness and I feel when one is brutally traumatized, when consciousness retreats, that is when we come face to face with this hum of our inner blank spaces, which must have been there at the beginning, too, when as babies we registered the world but didnt experience it. Blank space is a modality just as the blanks between movements of thought are some early voice.
In one of your films there is a scene where one man after another steps to a hole in the ground like to a grave and buries a stone. The protagonists are asked about the sense of their doing: The stones represent our martyrs, are their jus-

How to preserve the workings of a disaster in such a way that it does not later elicit the desire for revenge, and at the same time it maintains within itself some memory of what has happened? Architecture is constantly threatened with destruction, I believe, because a form is really a condensation of the possibilities of that medium. The material that this laptop I am typing on is hard because at room temperature this material is hard and, if I were to increase the temperature, the plastic would melt, take another form. The ideas that one gets in peacetime dont necessarily have to be the same as those in moments of disaster. The form changes.
Many of your works come about in public space in Afghanistan, drawing in people you meet there. How does this cooperation work?

Beautifully. With tremendous respect.

Are projects like White House or War Games/Upon awakening seen as art in the sense of performance, or are they rather a part of the creation process, whose product is the film/video?
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Lida Abdul

The first major international responses to your work came from the presentation of the Afghani pavilion at the Venice Biennial of 2005. How do you deal with your success? Do you feel it as recognition and opportunity or also as appropriation?

Well, I am pleased that the work is being seen and that I have the opportunity to continue living and producing work in Afghanistan despite the political situation.
At present you live in the USA and Afghanistan. Do you ever plan to go back to your home country permanently, or has Lida Abdul become an American?

I dont know.

Lida Abdul, Still from War Games, 2006

Lida Abdul in conversation with Gerald Matt in August 2007. The artist participated in the exhibition program of ursula blickle video lounge at Kunsthalle Wien in 2007. Lida Abdul, born in 1973 in Kabul, Afghanistan, lives and works in Kabul and Los Angeles. www.lidaabdul.com

I think the latter, because they are the last term in some story of forms and creating machines that destroy forms to create nothing so that something new can begin.
Before you started to work in Afghanistan, you believed that making art there could seem ruthless considering the pain and destruction that the people and the land have suffered. Did this feeling disappear while working?

No, it has not been easy and at some point while making my work Ive had to give up and that signature of given up affects the form that is left. I could never make the same piece twice, even if I repeated all the same steps once again. The blank spaces would be different.
How do the great poetry and formal beauty of your works go together with the political background of the context in which they arose? It seems that you want to compensate for the chaotic conditions and political insecurity a compensatory gesture?

Ive always thought that poetry is what remains after something has happened. A friend of mine lives his life making the assumption that everything has already happened once and when he actually is doing things a second time, he has a choice to do it differently. I like that. Poetry is the catalog of choices and thus difcult for people.

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Sergei Bugaev Afrika

A study of post- and quasi-aphasiac conditions is my favourite topic. I try to nd possible ways of introducing people to this condition.

The opening up of human perception to the sensitive and emotional aspects, the if you like actual creative potential in us, which is largely inhibited by dominant logocentric structures in our society, seems to me one of the main focuses of your work. You use certain strategies towards this purpose that are concerned with perception and the deciphering of signs in image and text, as well as various potentials of human memory. The background to this, which provides the impulse for it, was a society that went through radical transformations during the time of your early artistic activity: the time between Soviet statism and the beginnings of perestroika. Before I come to speak with you about your artistic resources and directions, I would like to hear something about your beginnings within this framework. You once told me that even before you shifted to Leningrad, on the Crimea therefore, you undertook a self experiment, which seems very unusual to me, in order to track down various irrational structures: you had yourself committed to a psychiatric clinic and spent four weeks there in a dormitory with more than forty patients including five murderers. Could you tell me more about that?

Sergei Bugaev Afrika, Rebus (black on white)4, 1991 18

I think your question refers to the project called Krimania. As a youth, I had little to do with psychiatry but this project was in fact focused on a psychiatric clinic and we carried it out in Crimea. The experience that nally led me into a psychiatric clinic was related to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the difculties that followed it. However, at some more profound level, I was drawn to this project because I felt it necessary to illustrate such complex processes as annihilation of rmly established texts and contexts. Though painful, this experience after weve lived through it in the countries of the former USSR will be inherited in some form by the whole of humankind, since were all witnessing the enormously swift changes in our lifestyles together. The basic cause of these changes, I believe, is techno genetic, and it wont be long till well see the nal integration of technology and biology in human form. Psychiatric hospitals are very special places. Theyre inhabited by people who break all classications. The reasons for which murderers kept in hospitals committed their crimes lie beyond the borders described law and other human establishments. In this project, we considered going beyond the borders of one collective eld and rather entering several collective elds that are entirely discrete from one another. The point is that transition from one collective body (that of the USSR, for instance) to several other bodies is accompanied by a ssion that forms new experience. This was one of the most important elements of this project. While entering the international art scene we, former Soviet people, resembled newborn kitties or puppies with their eyes still closed, crawling out of the basket they were born in. But at the same time, one can also compare our experience with the emergence of new accomplished systems brimming with unique understanding. I think the experience that
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Sergei Bugaev Afrika

humankind acquired in the process of sovietization is extremely interesting. It deserves a thorough study and deep analysis. Unfortunately, Western society is still not ready for sober and contained analysis and perception of what was going on in the USSR because people in the West are still sticking to the norms and behavioral standards of the Cold War time.Verbally, everyone declares principles of peace, democracy and nancial independence while in practice we see rather the functioning of repressive mechanisms based on Cold War norms and ideas.
In the eighties and nineties you made whole series of collages sometimes on copper plate that are related to a rebus puzzle. In contrast to actual rebus puzzles, however, it is difficult or even impossible in any case for us Westerners to decipher the individual signs or their connections to one another, or to recognise a logical meaning. Olesya Turkina and Viktor Mazin analysed your rebus works more precisely in 1996 and described three different types in all, which came about one after another. According to this analysis it all begins with re-appropriated Soviet symbols from the fifties and ends with puzzle-like works, where Christian symbols appear, among other things. The two authors speak of a shift from the symbolic level to the imaginary one. What intentions were behind these semiotic works, and what interests me particularly how were they received and interpreted by the public, not only in the Soviet Union but also outside the Eastern Block, where you were first represented in 1988 at group exhibitions of unofficial art from Leningrad?

Rebuses were a good example of interconnection between the work of the Club of Mayakovskys Friends and the activities of the Tartu-Moscow semiotic school: we shared a desire to understand the functioning of unconscious structures and nd out what their relation to language and various image systems is. I chose the rebus form because when I was a child I used to collect rebuses from magazines and newspapers. Sometimes I did not even bother to solve them. I was fascinated by their structure: we see something that is not what it appears; in fact, it is something quite different. Twenty years later I got back to my old scrapbook and began using those rebuses in my artworks. It was at the time when the Soviet Union started talking openly with the West, revealing a profound discrepancy between the reality and the appearance of this reality: two similar objects did not have the same meaning. I turned to rebuses: I changed the meaning of the encrypted structures (made of letters, words and images) to make them unreadable. Then I had the lucky opportunity of presenting them: rebuses were shown at one of my rst exhibitions in New York City. A funny story about rebuses happened recently in Moscow. Some time ago I produced teacups with rebuses on them. These particular cup-rebuses
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Sergei Bugaev Afrika, Rebus #30, 1991

were made of a few real rebuses I took from my collection out of purely personal preferences (I liked one element in one rebus, then combined it with an element from another rebus, etc.). One of those teacups happened to be presented to our physicist Kapitsa, descendant of the Nobel Prize winner, Pyotr Kapitsa. Later I came to know this renowned physicist drinks his morning tea from that very cup and cant help trying to solve the rebus (all Soviet people are well familiar with the technique of solving rebuses). Yet he always fails to guess the meaning. At that moment I realized that I had reached my goal: a man with prominent abilities to decrypt extremely complicated systems proved unable to read that simple post-schizoid construction that was never meant to be decrypted. Western people were also curious about my rebuses. I saw that they were stunned. It is very important for me to come to my exhibitions and talk to the public. I dont like the system nowadays that is widespread in the art world, where a piece of art goes from artist to gallerist and from gallerist to investor. I am in constant search for new systems of representation. Thats why I often make exhibitions at places that may seem improper, such as
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Sergei Bugaev Afrika

a psychiatric clinic with its sub-marginal territories, wards for patients of socially unacceptable behavior. With these rebuses I did reach my goal: to make people speechless. Aphasia is quite a common phenomenon in a developing civilization. A study of post- and quasi-aphasiac conditions is my favourite topic. I try to nd possible ways of introducing people to this condition. One cant say its the condition of total incomprehension or collapse: it is apparently more complex than that and I try to trace the paths leading up to it. Another of my series related to this topic was based on the transformation of El Lissitzkys Beat the whites with the redwedge. I transformed the work according to Schillings isochromatic tables and showed them to a group of color-blind people. They were incredibly happy to see these works as they were. Color-blind people are often obsessed with the idea that they see things differently from what they are, when they saw the art works translated for them, they were happy to get rid of this constant obsession, at least for a moment.
In 1987 you played the main role, a labile musician, in the film Assa, directed by Sergej Solovjew (regrettably, I have never seen it, but it is accredited as the first Russian rocknroll film within the New Russian Film) and over several years you gave performances with the Leningrad Experimental Orchestra. Film, music and performance were these, or are they still, media through which you were able to transport your artistic and, perhaps, political ideas? And if so, under what technical conditions of production were you able to work at the time?

My relationship with music started at school where I played bugle in a Young Pioneer group. Later, we had a sort of light orchestra at school and even later when I moved to Leningrad I became a member of several bands. We had virtually no instruments, but used every opportunity to rehearse at various Houses of Culture and then to perform. Important bands appeared a bit later but, again, their activities were never restricted to pure music. Take Pyotr Mamonov and his Zvuki Mu as an example: in their performances, there were always some elements embedding their music into the Soviet cultural landscape, which was extremely heterogeneous and interesting. Today, Im inclined to consider Soviet art as an art of an entirely different civilization. And very often explanations suggested by Western art historians miss the point since they are rooted in Cold War rhetoric. In a word, one should understand that within the Soviet context of that time music was not music in its narrow sense. The functions we performed in Kuryokhins Pop Mechanics included management of industrial instruments (which means that we were responsible for producing some abstract noise effects) and zoological instruments. The famous Piglets Solo during our joint performance with Einstrzende
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Neubauten in Berlin was in the scope of our responsibility as well as the famous Gooses Solo. The goose started its extremely beautiful song after I plucked its tail accurately. It was singing together with a very famous Swedish opera soloist who started crying when the goose went off-key, though she was warned that were not into schooling the animals but trying to interact with them as they are. Thus, you cant say those were purely musical endeavours. Among our other para-musical activities, I should mention our joint performance with John Cage called Water Symphony. In our studio that occupied a room in Timur Novikovs communal apartment we called it the Assa Gallery we created a number of important noise instruments, including an utyugon (a scary-looking construction consisting of old box irons hanging from a rusty metal frame). Our music was based on such instruments and, surprisingly enough, we saw a growing number of fans. Perhaps, it was largely due to the fact that avant-garde music was always extremely popular in Leningrad despite all bans and prohibitions. By the late 1980s the Pop Mechanics orchestra performed at stadiums and large concert halls and they were always full. Its great to get a question about the lm Assa from a Western colleague. Such questions are rare because the lm was not distributed in the West and, above all, has lots of stuff that would resist translation. Also, it is not a pure rocknroll lm, but rather one seething with the ideas of non-ofcial Soviet art. Sergei Solovyov, director of the lm, made his best to invite all the most important underground activists. One should be aware that in the USSR, lm-making was overseen by the KGB. Every scene in the script had to be signed by KGB representatives and they later checked whether the footage shot coincided with the script approved. Assa was extremely popular it was never forgotten and people still identify me as its main character. When the actor who played the character killing me in the lm was running for president, people used to ask my opinion of him. I answered this question with another question: what should I think of the person who killed me?
There are rumours that Assa 2 is being shot ?

True. After twenty years of intensive public pressure, lm director Solovyov nally gave in and agreed to make a sequel to Assa. The shooting is nished and the lm is expected to be presented in Riga in June 2008. We did our best to continue the line of the rst Assa by showing the works of established musicians and artists and also searching people all over Russia who are doing similar things on their own. During the shooting, one of the featured actors, Sergey Shnurov (leader of the Leningrad band), became a victim of new Russian censorship his concerts are now prohibited. We also apprehend that the nal frames of the lm may be prohibited by
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Sergei Bugaev Afrika

the Moscow government, because Luzhkov, the mayor of Moscow, issued a decree banning any concerts of Shnurov and his band. This is a good sign for us: it shows that we are indeed dealing with pressing social issues. The rst run of the lm will take place in ten Russian cities and will be coupled with exhibitions of Soviet art retro exhibitions of artists and musicians who participated in Assa 1. Twenty years ago we had similar plans that were blocked by Boris Yeltsin, then a high Moscow city ofcial. Surpassingly, Gorbachev supported us at the time. Now we also count on the support of the Gorbachev Foundation.
At the exhibition Attack. Art and War in the Media Age at Kunsthalle Wien you were represented by your video Stalker 3, which refers to Tarkowskijs film Stalker. This work is based on a found video documentation from the Chechen war of 1996 and shows pictures of the morning after a battle between a Russian infantry regiment and Chechen-Arab fighters. You use documentary material even though it is edited and provided with a new soundtrack. How do you see the relationship between symbols spread by media propaganda, which are also used by you as documents of a certain ideology, and authentic documentations in association with the question of reality?

Sergei Bugaev Afrika, Stills from Stalker 3, 1996/2002

This lm is a good a good example of what we often encounter nowadays. To all appearances, it is a lm but it does not belong to cinema due to the lack of necessary characteristics required for it to be classied in that eld. I perceive such lms to be similar to the early Christian icon painting that lacked the author-agency and where the authorship was transported to higher invisible powers. Let me tell you how I acquired this lm. At the State Duma, I had a chance to meet one of the heads of a secret elite military unit who was working on the territory of the Chechen republic. I asked him what exactly they were doing and he uttered the usual phrase anti-terrorist activities but then mentioned they had knocked off another terrorists base. I asked what they had seen there and he listed the objects one usually nds at such places. A video-archive was on his list. Video recordings are used to justify terrorists activities for their sponsors. For instance, if they blow up a military truck, they can only receive money for that after they show footage of it to the sponsors. When I asked this chief commander whether it was possible for me to see an example of such a video, he handed me this video tape. I did not see anything extraordinary in this lm; after all, we are all used to seeing short excerpts from such lms in the news. But it was the rst time that I had an opportunity to consider such a video as a completed and edited lm. What you saw as Stalker 3 does not differ greatly from what I initially got. My task was to get this footage across to an audience capable of judging it, contemporary artists and art critics. When I saw this lm for myself, I got a feeling of completeness, something close to perfection. It
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seemed to me that the author of this lm (I mean the person who edited the footage taken from several cameras and from several points in a number of different places) did see Tarkovskys lm Stalker and was referring to certain moments of this lm. But since the Tarkovskys Stalker we all saw is not the rst Stalker he shot (he destroyed the rst version of his lm to shoot the second one from the very start), I called this video Stalker 3. What I meant was that nothing disappears completely. All things destroyed continue existing in some other form for instance, in the form of a found video. In this sense, there is no difference for me whether to work with established symbols mushrooming everywhere or to pick up some documentary material. Documents are as full of symbols and references as are symbols ofcially established as such.
Today it is often emphasised that the nationalist strivings of Russia go hand-inhand with the art markets wish for an explicit identification, whether ethnic or national. This identification could potentially culminate in a very real conflict for Russian artists when you consider the impact of the international art markets demands on them. For example, Dietrich Rschmann wrote on the occasion of the exhibition HA KYPOPT! Russische Kunst heute in The Staatliche Kunsthalle of Baden-Baden in 2004: Torn back and forth between the demands of the international art market, whose interest in exotica and the projection screens of the Other is still uninterrupted, and the effort to set up something individual in opposition to this force, many start by employing the gesture of distance in their art: irony, humour, provocation. At the shooting range of Sergei Bugaev Afrika, for example, the public is permitted to shoot at the booty art from Degas to Picasso with a paint pistol. How ironic is your art, really? And when you make use of irony, are you doing so from the platform of disillusionment?

I do use irony but I use it seriously. The type of irony developed by Soviet artists did nally lead to the destruction of Soviet ideology, which shows how effective irony can be.
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Sergei Bugaev Afrika

I think it was Jacques Derrida who grasped the function of irony in postSoviet society and also in my art better than anyone. After visiting my studio during his lecture tour in Russia, he said in an interview to Les Nouvelles Francaises: I felt in St Petersburg even clearer than in Moscow that these young people have reinvented their attitude to culture I could also see abashment, distress, lack of points of reference. Many students were informed of the minute details of Western culture; they feverishly appropriated it without renouncing their own culture. Sometimes they lacked instruments institutional or economic to go two ways at once: rediscover and reinvent their own roots. I could see the same doubts in young professors and artists I met in St Petersburg. I am thinking of Afrika, a famous artist, who collected and denigrated the fetishes of Soviet culture. His immense apartment is full of busts of Lenin and Stalin, various pennants, ags, insignia that he used in his satiric painting. From a certain perspective, this movement also corresponds to the Russian tradition of irony or destruction.* When they entered the contemporary international art market, Russian artists failed to recognize the danger of purely totalitarian mechanisms regulating it. They failed to recognize, for instance, that Andy Warhol was a totalitarian artist. Perhaps that was not his intention, perhaps he perceived himself as a product of American democracy, but in any case the global art market did impose his art on everyone. So for Russians, the contemporary situation is doubly-defective: on the one hand, Russian artists are not integrated into the international art process in the proper sense since they are still exoticized, but on the other hand, they are all too dangerously integrated in that they fail to see anything beyond their constantly growing bank accounts. The repressive mechanisms of the market are quite the same everywhere and this will gravely affect art both in Russia and abroad. Only its more hazardous here: it is even dangerous to speak of such things here because when you describe the situation, you are talking about rich people who are accustomed to using re-arms to reach their goals. However, we formed this specic form of irony to defend ourselves and we are ready to spread it throughout the West among our fellow artists as a means of self-defence against market repression. I am sure the experience of the Soviet underground will nally be assessed as extremely important to everyone who tries to create independent art regardless of where on this earth he or she lives.

One more question to finish with: is Lenin still a mushroom?

In talking of Lenin, we are in fact talking about fungimorphic structures that support the image of Lenin in the consciousness of humanity. In talking of Lenin, we do not mean this bearded fellow who had established the Soviet Union a long time ago but rather a specic type of affect his name produces. As such, he is perfectly alive and will be alive for a long time, like any fungimorphic structure. He is still only because he is a mushroom.

Sergei Bugaev Afrika in conversation with Gerald Matt in September 2007. The artist participated in the exhibition Attack! Art and War in the Media Age at Kunsthalle Wien in 2003. Sergeiv Bugaev Afrika, born in 1966 in Novorossisk, Russia, lives and works in St. Petersburg. Russian to English translation by Olga Serebryanaya.

Jacques Derrida, Les urgences de Jacques Derrida, in Les Nouvelles Francaises, October 1997, N3, p. 25.

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Pawe Althamer
My strategies, similar to the strategies of my peers, stem from the old shamanistic goal to communicate with the world.

In your article, Kantor in Spring, published in one of the Polish weekly magazines, you said that people increasingly compare you to Tadeusz Kantor. Do you mind such comparisons? One can see certain parallels between yours and Kantors work, such as the theme of mannequins and verisimilar objects, as well as the presence of tramps, travellers and wanderers. How well do you know his oeuvre? And is it at all possible to study art or be an artist in Poland without being familiar with Kantor?

When studying art history at the academy I surmised that it is more interesting to create or focus on art, whatever that means perhaps to focus on oneself than to study artists from the past. Now, I do both but with more emphasis on my own work. I dont know Kantor very well and I was also slightly put off by him because of his involvement with the theatre, which I nd hard to bear, though I liked the beach actions. I liked it when he said on TV that, as children dont often go to museums it would be better if they did something for themselves, like painting or sculpture, for example. In Poland you can easily study the ne arts without knowing anything about Kantor, although it is worth becoming acquainted with his work.
Tramps play an important role in your projects as they do in Kantors oeuvre and you introduced into the advertising campaign of a renowned daily, Obserwator, the character of a tramp, stressing his function as an observer. When you did the project for Vienna Secession, you granted it as a shelter to the homeless and unemployed for the duration of the exhibition. In other words, social outsiders found temporary asylum in cultural institutions as a result of your work. Some might even accuse you of hopeless social romanticism, in that such interventions only have a short-term impact and may even come across as anachronistic. How strongly do you still believe in provocative and agitational art that can expose differences and bring about change?

I believe in shamanistic art, in working with ones outer and inner worlds and learning about oneself in the universe, among others and amid the many different selves people, animals and plants. This has changed my picture of the world, or worldview, on a number of occasions, no doubt, as I lay myself open to confrontation with thoughts, feelings and beliefs of other the same people.
You unceasingly subvert the function of art institutions. In your installation in the Berlin neugerriemschneider gallery in 2003 you replaced the gallery with ruined premises; in the Migros Museum in Zurich you exchanged the museum attendants with children. In Bad Kids (2004) you allowed problematic youths to cover the walls of Bonnefantenmuseum with graffiti, turning The White Cube into a colorful space variegated with aggressive messages. You turn the order
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Pawe Althamer, Brdno, 2000

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Pawe Althamer

and the expectations of art institutions on their heads. The critique of museums and institutions has been a running artistic strategy since the 1960s. How do your strategies differ from those of artists such as Maurizio Cattellan or Hans Haacke and whats your particular goal?

I dont subvert the function of art institutions; on the contrary, I support them as forums for human communication. I dont turn them on their heads but rather put them back on their feet. My strategies, similar to the strategies of my peers, stem from the old shamanistic goal to communicate with the world.
You once said, all my work not only the sculptures, but the performances, actions, and films, form a peculiar autobiography. Your self-portraying sculptures, which function as your alter ego, demonstrate that very poignantly. Do you consider the position of people from the social margin the homeless, the retired, museum attendants or prisoners as comparable to your position as an artist?

The artists self is a perfect example of a transvocation the shifting of the self in innite directions, as well as enlarging and diminishing it (alpha and omega). It immediately recognizes and becomes interested in the phenomenon of the perplexed and suspended self the self bereft of place.
As part of the Staff en plein air for Kunsthalle Wien you sent the Polish and Austrian museum attendants on an educational trip. What were you trying to achieve by doing that?

The Staff en plein air project is rst and foremost a fascination with the invisible person among objects on display. This is also a gesture towards perfecting an institution that is preoccupied with the beauty of communication and arousing the sensitivity of the viewer. The role of the staff often seems to me to have been underestimated and strongly objectied.
You use a form of outsourcing in your projects and delegate tasks to institutions and their workers. This method is reminiscent of theatre. To what extent do you identify with the role of a director?

Pawe Althamer, Staff en plein air, exhibition staff of Kunsthalle Wien and Zacheta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw, Wien 2005

and organize the project. How do you perceive the relation between the creative process and the end product?

If we look at our life as a lm and our involvement in it as a role then the role of actor-director seems optimal.
For the installation Brdno 2000, you managed to persuade nearly 200 families living in your district of Warsaw to turn their lights on so that they would form the sign 2000 on the faade of their block of flats. The length of the action itself (which lasted only 30 minutes) was disproportionate to the time needed to plan
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If you look at Brdno 2000 as an outcome of creative passion, or the consequence of an intangible association or thought transferred into reality and this is how I see it time span means little (nothing?). It really just happened.
Your actions take place outdoors. You constantly look for new scenery and contexts. You and your protagonists are often on a journey. Are these journeys goals in themselves?
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Pawe Althamer

Outdoors is everything. We are both traveling and not moving at all. We are always in the right place (and time). See also: The Adventures of Matol the Goat*
Through experiments with hallucinogenic drugs, in isolated experiments on yourself, or hypnosis, you create situations where the artist operates as a medium for other, irrational, perception processes. To what extent can such spiritual and metaphysical experiences be, in your opinion, conveyed to an art audience?

What projects are you undertaking in the near future? Are you going to place even more emphasis on performance and theatre?

I like the fact that I dont know what I will be doing in the future. Im so preoccupied with the present.

As in for instance This is how I feel and understand it. And you?
If you had to choose between cynicism and humor, which position would you choose?

Pawe Althamer in conversation with Gerald Matt on the occasion of the exhibition The Impossible Theater at Kunsthalle Wien in 2005. Pawe Althamer, born 1967 in Warsaw, Poland, lives and works in Warsaw. Polish to English translation by Aneta Uszynska-Graham.

I hope I never become cynical. I love a good laugh.

You still live and work in Warsaw. Do artists working and living conditions in Poland differ from those in the West? How do they impact your work?

I was born here and it was here that my mother read Matol the Goat to me. The working conditions in Poland seem to be better than anywhere else in the world, so why would I move?
mijewski and Katarzyna Kozyra at Grzegorz You studied sculpture with Artur Z Kowalskis studio at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts. However, you and your classmates have been more drawn to performance and intervention into public space. What could be the reason a whole generation of young sculptors has consciously broken away from this traditional art form?

Artists (sensitive people) instinctively discover the most effective means of communication. The rest of the world is vital here. This is our rest.
On a number of occasions you invited other artists to collaborate with you. Artur mijewski conducted many interviews with you and you realized an exhibition entitled So-called Waves and Mind Phenomena together. What is the outcome of such a collaboration and how does it benefit your work?

Its wonderful to encounter passion equal to mine but from such a different direction. Its great to meet you, Alpha said Omega.
Do you see yourself as more of a chronicler and observer of the world than a creator of social environments?
* In the Polish childrens comic Matol the Goat (1933) by Kozioek Matoek, the literary figure of a young, clumsy goat, takes a journey to Pacanw, where he has his hooves shod, and finally after many adventures, makes his way back home.

Im both but I prefer to create, socially, for instance.

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Lara Baladi
It is a broken and fragmented memory which I try to x.

What was your inspiration for Shish Kebab that was shown in our exhibition Some Stories?

Shish Kebab is the result of research on the idea and metaphor of the music box, i.e. the melody which repeats itself, the spinning ballerina stuck inside and the only possibility of interrupting the music is by closing the box. I was invited to Japan in 2003 to work for six months. I was fascinated by the sheer excess of visual information and was drawn to the ubiquitous manga culture. As I experienced Tokyo, I continuously videoed and photographed with mobile phone, digital camera and 35mm. It was like building a visual diary. The music box idea was in the back of my mind but with all these images, the piece ended up as a mixture of sound, video and installation the images literally breaking the connes of the music box. The sensory overload of Shish Kebab was the immediate and necessary outcome of my stay in Tokyo. It is a condensed version of all the questions raised during my experience in Japan. The recurrent melody in Shish Kebab is taken from the Egyptian lm Ismael Yassin in the Mental Hospital. This melody is mixed with sounds from many parts of the world. Some more familiar than others, taken from fairground carrousels, popular lms, etc. All question stereotypical representations of places and create a brochette of the absurdity and dance we live in.
What key issues do you make the subject in your artistic work?

I work more with ideas than with issues all mixed up with personal history. My work attempts to highlight zones of cultural ambiguity. For example, one of my continual interests is with paradise and the loss of paradise. I gather images, writings, ideas and edit then re-edit them. The two digital collages Perfumes & Bazaar and Justice for the Mother are both part of this interest. One theme always ows into the next. Part of my interest in Shish Kebab was to explode the boundaries that separate one way of working from another I am sure that will happen in the next paradise work at the moment I think the right form is like a vast mosaic, but that may not literally mean a mosaic made of ceramic tesserae. Or it may. The theme of paradise is not escapism, but equally connected to loss and sadness. At the same time I have been recording donkeys braying, something which I always hear in Egypt these sounds have a profound resonance of that sadness they may end up in the work on paradise or they may form an independent work. So my interests and themes often run in parallel and cross fertilise each other.
Lara Baladi, Roba Vecchia, The Wheel of Fortune, 2006

In your work Oum El Dounia (The Mother of the World), for example, there are
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Lara Baladi

all sorts of fantastic figures who find themselves in the sand dunes of the desert mermaids, magicians, and hybrid creatures in shimmering costumes. What legends are behind this image? Are you telling a particular story here?

Parodying the Orientalist representations of the desert, Oum El Dounia depicts a phantasmagoric enactment of the third day of genesis. The water separates from the earth, humanity appears. Its original innocence is represented by archetypal gures from fairy tales. The rabbit stands for time. Alice represents childhood and virginity. The mermaid lives in the depths of the sea, symbolic of the souls search for understanding. She is a bewitching temptress, a fallen angel, the daughter of Mnemosyne memory the anima mundi, the soul of the earth. The mermaid is the collective memory moving through the ctional space I create. She is beyond time. Within this procession of time, the story of humanity unfolds against a backdrop of sky and sand, with humanity as mediator between the heavens and the earth. I try to turn personal experiences and thoughts into something archetypal, but try to keep the specic color and avor which makes them personal. This is a Once upon a time story, which is like saying this is not real although it is. This is in a time which is simultaneously past, present and future.
Catchphrase Globalisation: you once spoke of myth Is it possible to see pictorial inventions like Justice for the Mother as a kind of presentation of multiple parallel worlds in one world?

Lara Baladi, Roba Vecchia. The Wheel of Fortune, 2006

Recently, at the Sharjah Biennale 2007, you exhibited a piece called Roba Vecchia. The Wheel of Fortune. It looks like a huge kaleidoscope of pictures and obviously some of the pictures were from the Shish Kebab-video. Is the idea of the kaleidoscope as a kind of sampling machine also pre-visioned in your earlier multiple-part installations such as Sandouk El Dounia (The world in a box), which was exhibited in Cairo in 2002?

To some degree this is what I am doing: Building one world out of multiple sources drawn from all over the world. This is a reection of the world I have always lived in and so has my family for generations. Justice for the Mother is a visual non-linear narrative based on Jean de La Fontaines fables The argument of the strongest is always the best. The stronger eats the weaker, the law of the jungle. All the characters in the picture refer to wilderness in some way: destructive, instinctive, original nature as opposed to nurture. On a personal level, the work represents my father riding his motorbike towards the West, leaving behind his youth, his roots and most of all, the last thirty years of Middle East politics. He is wearing a leather jacket with the image of the twin towers collapsing. This image, taken from a Senegalese pro-Bin Laden T-shirt made in Africa in 2002, is the symbol of the global conict of values we are all facing today. Nothing is resolved, history repeats itself.
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Images and ideas collide in Roba Vecchia; they ow freely, but of course there is a direct connection between the way the images are used in the early collaged works and the way they ow through the kaleidoscope. In Roba Vecchia I wanted the viewer to be inside the work so the importance of using a mirrored structure of this scale is that you are immersed in the images when you walk into the kaleidoscope, you become part of the work. Roba Vecchia uses over 2000 images, which are selected semi-randomly through software. The selection process is based on color. The constantly changing juxtaposition of images is similar to the process I go through when editing the images its like walking in the street, each time noticing and responding to different things. The initial motive for making a work is always an extreme experience that gets digested into an idea for a piece. Then I nd the most appropriate way to convey or express that idea. However, working with images consequently challenges the medium itself. Sandouk El Dounia means the world in a box but it is also an expression that refers to Pandoras Box, the precursor to cinema. Sandouk El Dounia plays with conptemporary heroes archetypes coming out of the box, the television box, the computer, the lm screen. Most of my works question and challenge the history of image making, both still and moving, and most of all the consuming of these images. By mixing techniques such as 10X15 CM color print, x-ray and digital image modied by a photo shop, computer programming, physical structures, sound and mirrors, my work not only attempts to extend the limits of the photographic medium, but also to remain accessible to people not

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Lara Baladi

familiar with art discourse an emotional or aesthetic response is as important as an intellectual one.
In Roba Vecchia, the kaleidoscope, everything is organised into a strictly ordered structure so that it is even more of a tapestry-like collage of images. Did this structure come about from formal considerations or is there a substantial idea behind it, such as the presentation of structured systems?

As I mentioned earlier, Roba Vecchia uses specially written software that selects and orders the images according to a semi-random system these are projected onto a mirrored structure 11 meters long and 2 meters 45 cm high it is a constantly changing and developing carpet of images. The system (and the architecture of the piece) is part of the process of making the work the structured system is part of the materialisation of the object rather than an end in itself. The rst time Roba Vecchia was exhibited at the Townhouse Gallery in Cairo in 2006 it was interesting watching people waiting for the images to loop but due to the nature of the program the sequence of images never repeated itself. When I am working with my archive of images, I have to use systems to nd them. Ordering things is very important to me. There are over 2000 carefully selected images from several sources, but essentially from what I considered to be digital trash after my high consumption of images while I was in Japan. The ow of images and the experience of the color both contribute to the triggering of a physical experience. The images are ephemeral but resonate. In this work, I am less interested in the image as a xed formal thing. Roba Vecchia is a time-based performance.
A kind of puzzle effect seems to be a characteristic feature of your pictures ...

Lara Baladi, Oum El Dounia, 2000

The puzzle effect reects the way I think. Its an additive process that gives me a great deal of freedom. The resulting composite images have their own reality like a memory something very specic but with its own poetic dynamic. It is a broken and fragmented memory which I try to x.
Perfumes & Bazaarshows a bucolic scene, which is reminiscent of the Baroque in its motifs and composition. A golden scroll frame flourishes at the center revealing a view of the symmetrically arranged park, while the bazaar mainly offers pictures; in the foreground of the picture the saleslady in an elegant costume extends an invitation to discover her goods; the world of the garden is inhabited by playing children, naked angels, antiques etc. What symbolic meaning do you give to the rich art-theoretical motif of the frame?

my grandmother who during that time was designing kaftans with Syrian materials to feed her family. The selling aspect is there for sure. My extended family have had to leave Lebanon repeatedly over the last century and selling and trading are an important aspect of our survival. Leaving Lebanon was like leaving paradise both literally and metaphorically. I like your interpretation of her presence in the foreground of the image, however, my intention in this work was to depict paradise using the many levels and forms used across cultures to represent it. The title is based on the name of a tourists perfume shop in Cairo. The shop sign placed at the centre, on the front of the house reads Perfumes & Bazaar: The Garden of Allah. My mother, as all the other symbols in the image, represents one aspect of paradise, in her case the womb. The overall iconography of Perfumes & Bazaar is infused with a Made in China aesthetic that lls the streets of Cairo. I scanned a popular poster, a crudely photoshoped montage representing the idealised Western house with garden a wannabe Chateau de Versailles, itself an articial theatrical tour de force a formal, organised, perspectival and controlled enviroment that has come to characterise our image of wealth and luxury. A fake golden frame occupies the centre of the image a frame within a frame. The work has been shown several times as a vinyl print, but when it was in ICP in Snap Judgements, the frame within the frame was replaced with a physical frame containing a duratrans print mounted on a lightbox, emphasizing the ambiguity of the relationship between illusion and reality.
How do you perceive your role, as an artist, within society?

The sales lady is my mother in the 1960s in Lebanon. She is dressed by

My role as an artist is to process my experiences through my work in order to share the parts of them that strengthen me, to question the world around me without imposing a statement or theory and to produce work, which

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Lara Baladi

on creating an infrastructure to support the Arts. There is a general tendency in contemporary art to focus on socio-political issues.
What projects are you planning for the immediate future?

I am currently working on several ideas, but at the top of my list are two ideas. One is a diary of the future which will be mixing photographicallybased work with Internet online performance. The second one is building a kind of personal anthropological cabinet in the shape of a rococo sculpted environment.

Lara Baladi, Perfumes & Bazaar, 2005

hopefully can be a starting point for others to reect on. I wasnt formally trained or at art school and nd the role of professional artist problematic.
What artistic strategies work for you in accomplishing your aims, and what problems do you encounter?

Lara Baladi in conversation with Gerald Matt and Synne Genzmer in September 2007. The artist participated in the exhibition Some Stories at Kunsthalle Wien in 2005. Lara Baladi, born in 1969 in Beirut, Lebanon lives and works in Cairo.

In term of strategies, I choose to work with technologies available in Cairo whenever I can such as printing C41 10 X 15 color prints in a high street photo shop or building Al Fanous El Sehry (The Magic Lamp) in a family workshop in Cairo, or if I cannot nd sources here, I nd ways elsewhere to, for example, print on stainless steel in Madrid, write computer software in Denmark or make tapestries in Belgium. The main problem I encounter is that I am not a stereotype Arab artist. Being a woman and an Arab, every one expects me to take a political stance. Its true my work is not overtly political. But it is about the environment I live and work in, which has become the battleground of differing political ideals. Of course this colors and inuences the way I think and work and conditions the subjects I choose.
You live and work in Cairo, but have also stayed in London and Paris for longer periods of time. Do you also see your artistic strategy as a result of this back-andforth movement between different cultural surroundings?

Yes.
How is the art scene in Cairo like? Can you see particular tendencies thematic, media-related or of some other kind?

Its growing and evolving. In the past decade there has been a great emphasis

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Matthew Barney
the way I approach places has a lot to do with taking some of the myths that exist in that place and using them as part of the vessel that holds my language

I would like to start with 1997: your Cremaster-project was shown here in Vienna, that was more than ten years ago. You have finished Cremaster and we are going to show Drawing Restraint at the beginning of next year. What has changed in regard to your productions?

I feel that theres been an ebb and a ow in the complexity of production and the scale of the pieces in those years. Cremaster 3 was a three-hour long project; it took three years to make. The lm I made after that, De Lama Lmina was made in a very short amount of time and it was, in a way, a quite provisional piece. The experience in Brazil making De Lama Lmina was the enabler of Drawing Restraint 9, as a way of changing the Cremaster program and trying to work in a real context, in an environment that is more out of my control than the Cremaster universe was.
The earlier films of Drawing Restraint are smaller productions, theyre more in the frame of a video production but it also developed into real movie making. Did it become a bigger scale project because you had more possibilities or rather because your interest in it grew?

Well, I think my interest turned more towards narrative, it really crystallized in Drawing Restraint 7, which was made in 1993 after the Otto and Houdini works.
In the beginning your work was much more linked to performance, to yourself, to sculpture, to the relation of human and space. I remember when we spoke in 1997 you always emphasized that you feel very much like a sculptor. Has that changed with recent productions?

No, absolutely not.

So film as a medium of sculpture?

Yeah, I think its an easier proposal now than it was during the production of Cremaster for instance, to say that the piece was an earthwork, as it was intended to be. It was always conceived to be within the tradition of Land Art. So I never understood it as being anything other than sculpture. It was always a given for me.
Beuys for example spoke of social sculpture: society as a total work of art. You also consider your art production from the point of view of sculpture, i.e. the choreographies in your films, the formation of ornamental patterns with the human body. In regards to the Cremaster-cycle you speak of narrative sculpture, as a
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Production still: Matthew Barney, DRAWING RESTRAINT 9, 2005 42

Matthew Barney

sort of media collage, a complex of different visual forms of expression, where the moving image, objects systems and static image blend together to form of a Gesamtkunstwerk. Do you see any conceptual relationship between a social sculpture and narrative sculpture? Or lets put it this way: Where do you feel totally different from Beuys?

In that way I think Beuys was interested in the elemental in the resource and the nature of the materials that he was using. On that level you can certainly draw a relation.
Is playing with the artificial and the natural something you think that carries on in your work?

I think the project De Lama Lmina, which took place in public as a parade through the streets of Bahia was very social, was collaborative and had a lot of qualities that you could describe as being social. But Im not interested in making political works; Im not motivated by external systems but internal systems.
In the exhibition at Kunsthaus Bregenz, which was titled Myth, your works were presented together with those by Douglas Gordon, Cy Tombly and Joseph Beuys as a historical reference figure. What does myth mean to you?

Certainly.
something, which is an important factor?

I certainly identify what I do as narrative, and I think that myths are shared narratives, right? I think that the way I approach places has a lot to do with taking some of the myths that exist in that place and using them as part of the vessel that holds my language, so in that regard Im dependant on myth.
Beuys was interested in certain substances like grease and different kinds of metal and their transformatory qualities, the way they produce energy through heating and cooling. You work with Vaseline, which is a different material, but processes of metamorphosis also seem to be of great importance to you.

Its a way you can describe differences and similarities between Cremaster and Drawing Restraint 9. I think of Drawing Restraint 9 as a more natural piece in the sense that I felt like I couldnt manipulate the environment or abstract the environment to the extent that I had in Cremaster Im not sure if I would use the word articial. But I felt that I couldnt create a situation where there was a synthesis between the environment and my narrative.
When did this fascination with Vaseline as a material start?

I started using it right around the time of those rst Drawing Restraint projects. The rst pieces I made of Vaseline were about wanting to moisten something. The jelly was being used for its lubricating product qualities. I was thinking of all things that I was making at the time as literally extensions of my body somehow, and I wanted these objects to feel like they had just come out of me or could be put into me.
In Drawing Restraint 9 a love story is also told. A man and a woman come onto a whaling ship, where they are brought together in a kind of wedding ceremony. In the end the ship is flooded and they kill each other by wounding each other bit by bit, cutting the flesh from their bodies and practically eating each other. They are submerged in the ocean, transformed into whales ocean, love, death these are quite archetypical motifs and are often combined with each other in Hollywood and other film production sites. The shift to cannibalism, however, is disturbing How did you come up with this story? As far as I know it is also based on Japanese traditions. How did you adapt it to your vision?

Drawing Restraint 9 was an opportunity to think about the history of petroleum jelly, its development, where it comes from and how whaling is involved in its history the pre-historic animal (the whale), and the fossil fuel that comes from its body, and the process of rening it. Up to a certain point, the whale was the key source of the fuel and was later replaced by petroleum. This was another organizing principle of Drawing Restraint 9, trying to think about the history of petroleum jelly, comprehend it in more natural terms. This whole family of plastics which I am working with are petroleum based materials and they are understood somehow as synthetic materials, but in fact they are very natural.
So there is this use of artificial materials as if they were natural and natural materials sometimes look as if they were artificial, but, as you just said, one has to look at the production process, that natural material is actually the basis for materials like plastic.

Well, yes, it is based o Japanese traditions, but not in a direct literal way. It is in the sense that whaling in Japan is very specic to the fact that the whale is eaten. So the way the whale is ensed, the processes on the factory ship, are specic to Japanese whaling and its very different from the way this would happen on a western whaling vessel. With food, there is a relationship to Shinto. Particularly with the whale,
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Matthew Barney

which is considered an ancestor of the human and at the same time its a staple in the diet. So theres a kind of cannibalism built into the story. I would say this is where that aspect came in.
Has the whaling theme fascinated you for a longer period of time? How did you learn about the procedures on board, about whaling?

By traveling in Japan. But there was also a piece in London, titled Cremaster Field. It was made in 2002 during the tour of the Cremaster-cycle show. Ten tons of petroleum jelly were poured into a mould in a cinema lobby. The mould was more or less the scale of a whale, and the walls of this mould were pulled off and then the sculpture collapsed quite violently. The possibility of handling the sliding petroleum jelly interested me, not being able to stop it once it moves. I started to imagine being in a situation like that when youre trying to deal with the body of the whale. The behavior of the material became more compelling each time the process was repeated. That every room, the ambient temperature of the room, is going to affect the behavior of the Vaseline. So too will the shape of the mould and the temperature of the liquid as its poured. So I started thinking about how to shift the environment in a more radical way. What happens when its being poured on a ship and the ship is moving? How will it affect the integrity of the material? When casting petroleum jelly, if the material is agitated and air is introduced into it, it undermines the integrity of the jelly and makes it weaker. So that moment in the cinema lobby in London was another organizing principle for Drawing Restraint 9.
When I visited you in your studio, I think it was in Brooklyn then, you were working on the project. You produced partly in the studio, but also on the boat. How important is work on the scene?

That set is a good example of one which would be difcult to do in any other way. I think Im actually quite resistant to building sets or teams using digital effects. I often shoot scenes in real time just so I can have that experience. The physical experience is important to me, and I want the situation to be actual, rather than virtual if its possible. But then along come certain scenes like the tearoom scene, where theres this ambition to ll the room with uid, and to have the room moving so that it could suggest the movement of a ship, and for the uid to begin to coagulate. We couldnt have pulled this off on the Nisshin Maru, which is like a national treasure, as controversial as it is.
Production still: Matthew Barney, DRAWING RESTRAINT 9, 2005 46

You call your protagonists occidental guests and indeed they are like two strangers who convey a disconcerting story. You also talk about the settings for your stories as places that represent the host for a sculptural body, an analogy for
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Matthew Barney

the penetration of something foreign into a closed system. How does this concept of guest/host work for you? Its not always used as obviously, but still it seems to be something very important.

Its very important in Drawing Restraint 9 because I think its the thing that denes the difference between the Cremaster model and Drawing Restraint 9. For me, Cremaster has always been a kind of viral model where my language would enter an environment and become part of the environment; where it would integrate with the mythology that comes from that place and it would really become part of it. I think Drawing Restraint 9 is different in the sense that I felt like it was impossible to fully integrate my language into that culture. The guest and host model becomes quite interesting with regard to Ambergris*, which is the product from a guest body entering a whales body. It never stops being what it was when it entered, its just been informed by the intestinal walls of the whale and as its passed, a transformation occurs, but it never integrates. I guess I felt this way bringing my work to Japan, making an exhibition there, making a site-specic work. So these guest/host models became very useful and ended up becoming central to Drawing Restraint 9.
What has always fascinated me was your choice of persons, main roles were played by Richard Serra or Ursula Andres in your Cremaster-films, Drawing Restraint 9 was made with Bjrk. Persons also seem to function as allegories, bearers of certain concepts. Did you think of a certain agenda for them? Why did you choose precisely them?

I rst asked Richard to play himself in the sequence that was lmed in the Guggenheim, to be delegate for Cremaster 5, to be the death or lets say the end of the lifecycle of this idea. In his works like Splashing, the molten lead is thrown against the wall. It immediately goes hard; it crystallizes and becomes xed in a single gesture. This was used as a visualization of the end of the Cremaster Cycle.
Some kind of end to the process of transformation?

Production still: Matthew Barney, DRAWING RESTRAINT 9, 2005

a system thats not necessarily character-driven. It is driven by the set and the scene, therefore their history becomes important and part of their presence.
Would you answer this question the same way if I asked you about Bjrk?

Exactly, and in the discussions with him about that I was continuing to write the other parts of the story with the architect and the apprentice. He felt like a perfect character to play the role of the architect.
That means that you also like to work with the image of a person. But image could also be a disturbing factor.

It felt like a natural choice in the sense that we are in a relationship and Drawing Restraint 9 was going to be a love story, and a piece which is fundamentally about relationships. Again, it felt like a kind of honest choice instead of casting actors to act like something theyre not.
Encounters or unifications of two persons in your films tend to be presented as a ritual act, like a dance, a ceremony or a wrestling match more a kind of control49

Its something along the lines of the materials that are chosen to make sculpture. Its not really about acting; its about being a sort of aspect within
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led approach following prescribed movements than a spontaneous expression of a (passionate) feeling. Is a personal encounter still included or is the rituals function that the individuals are substitutes for a more general idea?

I had seen some drawings which were made to describe Shinto. There were many circles which were interconnected and looked like a molecule with cells overlapping, so that there was a shared space between every circle. In this model, Shinto could be understood as an innite, a system of billions of relationships, basically, and in each one of those individual cells you have the entire system. The whole is in every part. I think because of my feelings about Drawing Restraint 9 and this guest and host relationship, the piece was very much about describing a relationship or a system of innite relationships. So I think that the occidental guests describe a relationship, but a relationship within a system where two particles are magnetically attracted to one another, not as in an emotional relationship. It has more to do with describing the nature of a system. The art direction of the scene used aspects of the Shinto marriage in combination with the formal tea ceremony. These formalized rituals were used to abstract the relationship and to have it function more like a model, rather than as an interpretation of something that exists in the world.
You use Houdinis escape art as an analogy of the creative process. How can one understand more precisely the parallels between bodily functions and artistic creativity? We talked about the idea of restraint which is needed to create form. How would you describe that in reference to what you do now, especially in the last Drawing Restraints, where, as you said, you turned more towards narrative how does it function there?

Matthew Barney and Gerald Matt, Vienna 2007

was rewriting his biography all the time. That appealed to me, that level of mystery in somebody I never met, never saw.
You make drawing and film that generates sculpture and photography and vice versa. There seems to be no preference for a particular medium. Some people think that film is your most important medium, others think its sculpture. What is your relation to the media and what do you like about their different qualities?

I always learned things through my body and through a direct kind of experience. So I think that proposal in the beginning for me was quite literal, quite literally referencing athletics, because up to that point in my life that was my experience. That has changed. It has grown. But it continues to be my instrument of choice; its the tool that I know how to use best.
Is this the reason why Houdini fascinated you so much?

For me, they are all necessary. But there is a hierarchy in the sense of how one depends on the other. I visualize the system as an inverted pyramid. Drawing sits at the very top of this and from the drawing comes the lm or performance or text and from the text comes the narrative object and from the narrative object comes the drawing again. So drawing exists at both ends. I guess Im interested in all those forms, but I think that drawing is the more pleasurable for me because Im doing it by myself, though I would say the other forms are more exciting.
I remember when you first did performances you did not want people to be present, and you filmed them. Now you want people to be there like in Il Tempo di Postino, the theatre evening in Manchester. How did that change come about?

Well, I think that he had a duality that interested me. He was both a showman and involved in this hermetic practice which had to do with his relationship to the paranormal. He was a contradiction in a certain way. That conict in my understanding of him was something I was very interested in describing in those rst narrative works I made, between Jim Otto and Houdini, this hermetic space in conict with a more performative space. Its also important to me that theres so much interpretation in the understanding of somebody from that period, particularly from somebody who
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It has to do with this feeling that I had before about constructing a situation that could quite possibly fail and being able to use that situation as a way to improvise, I guess. I have this need that becomes stronger and stronger to be in a situation where the whole endeavor could fail or fall apart. This is why I dont want to make lm for a while, but focus on performance.

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When is the next live performance?

Im hoping to make a piece in Poland in a mine next year. I am starting to organize locations around the narrative, based on the book by Norman Mailer called Ancient Evenings. Its about a man who is going through the process of dying and losing the seven aspects of his soul.
Do you still want to continue the Drawing Restraints? It is not a limited project, right?

No, I think its important for me that its always available. That, you know, I could take up this set of forks next to me and make a Drawing Restraint.

Matthew Barney in conversation with Gerald Matt in September 2007 prior to the exhibition Matthew Barney: DRAWING RESTRAINT at Kunsthalle Wien in 2008. Kunsthalle Wien presented the exhibition Matthew Barney. CREMASTER 1 in 1997 and in 2000 Matthew Barney. CREMASTER 2 at Kunsthalle Wien project space. The artist participated in the exhibition Superstars. The Celebrity Factor. From Warhol to Madonna at Kunsthalle Wien and BA-CA Kunstforum in 2005. Matthew Barney, born in 1967 in San Francisco, lives and works in New York. www.cremaster.net www.drawingrestraint.net

Ambergris is the title of a sculptural work by the artist and in general a grey, waxy substance from the intestines of the sperm whale, which gradually hardens over decades through the contact with air, light and saltwater; historically it has been used in fragrance chemistry and in the 16th century it was more valuable than gold.

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Louise Bourgeois
Its a mystery, but if there is magic in the making, there is magic in the viewing.

Your life and your work have, from the very outset of your career as an artist, stood in a very close relationship to one another. You yourself utilise strategies of psychoanalysis both for the production and the interpretation of your works. You have extended the field of psychoanalysis by adding to its concentration on words a pictorial dimension. And you describe within the sphere of art an area which, to reveal its inner meaning, requires one to take recourse to your autobiography and hermeneutic models like psychoanalysis. Life and art run in close parallelism. To what extent can or may or perhaps even must art be an authentic expression of ones psychological state of being?

I am exclusively interested in form. Consciously or unconsciously, the invention of form connects to my pathology.
Your exhibition at Kunsthalle Wien has been subdivided into six thematically related rooms. The media of drawing and sculpture face each other, the drawings, with their lightness and swiftness on the one side, and the corporeality and heavy presence of the sculptures as diametrical opposites. What is the relationship between the drawings and the sculptures in your work? Are both media to be viewed as equivalents?

I am not interested in privileging any particular medium or technique. Each material offers possibilities and I want to explore them all. I am dealing with an emotion that I want to give a form. Sculpture allows me a relationship to my body that drawing does not. I need distance. I need to act out in real space. In this sense, the drawings are somehow more mental notations than physical, more thinking than actually doing. More and more I am giving the drawings a physicality. Drawing on both sides, piercing the surface, and constructing drawings out of fabric and sewing gives a physicality to the two dimensional surface.
I curated the exhibition, Saint Sebastian A Splendid Readiness for Death at Kunsthalle Wien. Susan Sontag once described the artist as an exemplary sufferer. Your contribution, entitled Sainte Sbastienne cast the male/androgynous figure of the saint into female shape, thus underscoring even more the characters indifference to gender differences. Do you yourself identify with Sainte Sbastienne?

Louise Bourgeois, Who Where When Why What, 1991 54

I dont feel people are against me. I take responsibility for my problems. What is the use of blaming others? My inability to understand the situation or the problem is my torment. Its my inability to seduce. Its my inability to make myself loved. I dont give up.You might not know it but the ferociousness in the work is my attempt to try and try again to make things better. I am an optimistic person.
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Louise Bourgeois

Many of the works exhibited in the exhibition Aller-Retour are works in a combination of images and texts. Your latter work, in its sketchiness, invites comparisons with a diary. You bestow upon the diary a rank as being artistic medium in its own right. One that in its immediateness and its direct expression stands as a logical continuation of your oeuvre so far. How do you, yourself, view your recent work, what is its distinguishing mark? How do you see your own role as an artist?

The artist has access to his unconscious and the gift of sublimation. This process and connection is complicated electronics. I am almost passive in this creative process. Its a mystery, but if there is magic in the making, there is magic in the viewing. As I always stated, my memories are my documents, but you have to be careful when talking about art and differentiate what I say as the maker. The only thing that counts is the form, not my biography. The form must be convincing. Now, if the viewer is not convinced or does not connect to the work, its not my problem. I am not interested in communication. I am interested in self expression. I dont owe anything to anybody.
And finally, what would you like yet to accomplish?

I have always had the fear of being separated and abandoned. The sewing is my attempt to keep things together and make things whole. Fear fragments you. Trust is the remedy. The more you know, the more you trust. I want to make peace with myself and with everyone else. I still feel I am trying to get there.

Louise Bourgeois, Untitled, 1991

Louise Bourgeois in conversation with Gerald Matt on the occasion of the exhibition Louise Bourgeois. Aller-Retour at Kunsthalle Wien in 2005. Louise Bourgeois, born in 1911 in Paris, lives and works in New York. Louise Bourgeoiss works and words are Louise Bourgeois

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Wolfgang Capellari
The real thing is the twentieth century; its disappearance the twenty-rst?

In Swanns Way, Marcel Proust writes: The reality that I had known no longer existed. To what extent do you campaign against disappearance and for memory?

As an artist today you are threatened with obscurity within your own lifetime if you dont send out e-mails round the clock and constantly advertise your projects to remind people you still exist; its like ghting windmills. To me the painting process itself seems a much more effective timeconqueror; its possible to become entirely absorbed in what you are doing, living intensively in the here and now, and at the same time to forget. Thats what makes the picture, and its then contained in the picture.
Is Wolfgang Capellari a melancholy artist?

Once I wanted to see myself like that, as someone with a romantic, melancholy sensibility. Looking at the luck I had with women when I was twenty, then more melancholy than romantic, but anyway with that kind of attitude you dont get a girlfriend or paint a single brushstroke. Nor can you make a sculpture, and your writing just becomes airy-fairy. What I am interested in however is when someone else is melancholy. Gazing at melancholy from a distance in other words.
You are a highly multifaceted artist. You are a painter and draughtsman, but sculptures, installations, music and performance also play a significant role in your work.

[laughs, screams, hisses, grunts, stands up, blinks, exhales, tears at the microphone cable ] Expressive diversity of is simply part of human freedom. In relation to the means for artistic expression it was always more stimulating for me to take an unknown medium and discover my own approach to it. [he calms down again.] At the moment I am taken up with painting, specically with egg tempera and oil painting, and combinations of the two. With egg tempera things just appear as such, whereas oil paint creates atmosphere if I can simplify it like this.
You are also a musician. Due to an artistic crisis you began to get involved with mediaeval music and took singing lessons at the Centre de musique mdivale de Paris. Following an unhappy love affair you felt the need to sing like a troubadour with an accordion, as it were, along the lines of the late-mediaeval minnesingers.

Wolfgang Capellari, o.T., 2000

That was the most appropriate means at the time. The story was as follows: towards the end of 1991 I moved to Paris. Id had enough of Vienna, I really was fed up with it; I needed a new beginning. I got to know a lot of new
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gle jigsaw piece. The question facing the viewer is then how far they look within.
There are many approaches to landscape painting, from the naturalistic to the expressionist right to the gestural and abstract representation; everything is possible. Generally we associate landscape painting with a contemplative attitude to nature, with her many diverse, atmospheric sides. Landscape as a cultural metaphor, as textual and referential system, also within art history. Landscape more as culture than nature. Landscape as product of the imagination. What is your relationship to landscape, to nature? Which landscape does Wolfgang Capellari invent?

Wolfgang Capellari, Meer, 2005

things there: French, the French, French art and food, but also mediaeval singing. I wanted to give up painting and be a singer. The unhappy love affair nally hauled me from bygone times back to the here and now, and I wrote my own songs with the accordion and bandoneon. Later the slides came to join them, because after all my background was in visual art. I managed to make people very moved with these slide and accordion shows, which however perplexed me. Music is direct, with painting its a much longer journey.
But painting remains your most important means of artistic expression?

Yes, painting is a long-term project. If we take my landscape painting; thats what I actually began with over twenty years ago, and practised repeatedly in phases since: a solitary business. Sometimes it was too solitary for me, and I did something else. Now Im enjoying it again, because Im otherwise so rarely alone. And an effect appears in some of the images which greatly interest me: the arrest of time. Not the way a snapshot arrests time in photography; here an innite period of time opens up in the arrest I paint jigsaws puzzles. The puzzle is however made up of only one sin-

Lets take the concrete facts, assuming I am in a landscape at the moment, which I perhaps also like. In my bag, as luck would have it, I have a few tubes of paint, a paintbrush and a board, which is at, rectangular or square (a piece of architecture). To change what I see and sense in order to get it onto this surface is a monumental undertaking. There are of course ways and means. For instance landscapes can be produced by actual folds; acting as if you were folding something can produce them too. And so on. I take my glasses off (Im very short-sided) and all I see is color. Without much intention I smear the contents of the tube around, look carefully at a particular shade, smudge the paint around etc. Eventually on the once dead surface something appears which might be compared to an amazing nd on a mushroom-picking trip. And back home the mushroom-picking nd seems even more amazing. It doesnt have to be cooked however, just looked at, and future generations will also then be able to feast their eyes on it. Otherwise without glasses I never nd a mushroom. Yes, in order to look I have to put my mushroom-glasses on immediately thats the difference from image-picking. That means, another different kind of knowledge is at play here. To describe this knowledge is not easy; its about entering a semi-conscious state, a kind of hunch which I have rened for years, and Ive learned that when I enter this state good pictures come about. If you ask me whether you can make good pictures on a hunch, then I would say thats the only way! I see life, nature, people, painting, and color very much from the energetic angle; experiences of nature and color charge me up, an espresso too wonderful dark brown!
I know you love nature. You return again and again to Kitzbhel, your birthplace; you love walking. Despite this you live for the best part of the year in the metropolis of Berlin. What is your position in your work too on the relationship between art and nature?

Simply not being there where you want to be is exactly whats exciting.
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Wolfgang Capellari

When Im in the country, I want to be in town; when Im in town I want to be in the country again. A bit of toing and froing, and before you know it a few pictures, texts and sculptures have mounted up.
What significance does beauty have to you? Also a source of energy?

Yes beauty too, of course.

You have a particular affinity with the nineteenth century. Does this reflect your interest in the sublime and the uncanny?

We like to chew over every century. Less so once its further in the past, but when a century is too close to you, you chew on the one before. The nineteenth century tastes of French cuisine: complex, and with its many ingredients complicated to dene. I nd nineteenth century art so exciting in the context of the realism issue. Im thinking of my landscape painting. In my spray paintings I lay the real thing on the surface of the picture, spray it with paint then take the thing away again. The real thing is the twentieth century; its disappearance the twenty-rst?
Your personal biography is also a story of personal migration. You left Tyrol for Vienna, Vienna for Paris, and Paris for Berlin. What does the choice of a place to live mean for you?

If we assign heading west to the future and heading east to the past then I have just backtracked towards the past into the debris of Berlin. Although after my last detour to Rome my movements are more along the northsouth axis. Its exciting to compare Rome and Berlin: both cities have experienced unbelievable ruptures, reconstructions and catastrophes. Rome has been rubble for over 2000 years, Berlin more like 200. I was in Rome for three months; in Berlin a few years already. Rome is very beautiful, Berlin actually fairly ugly. Berlin is in the midst of an enormous changing process, and that makes it very interesting, and its art-scene too. I still havent quite got to grips with Berlin. To put it poetically: I sit here in this greyish blue, hardly knowing if I am cold or warm, and look into every nook and cranny. By the way: in between Rome and Berlin comes Tyrol. Ive often thought about this intermediate situation. Is this why my art looks the way it does?
Your work is characterized by a high degree of diversification. To maintain your position in the art market it helps however when your work is stylistically distinctive, and to a certain extent becomes its own trademark. What is your attitude to the art market?

Wolfgang Capellari, o.T., 2005

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Wolfgang Capellari

My work is characterized by variety, in type and medium; the market doesnt like that. I became an artist in order to have the freedom to do what I want. Freedom what a word! Freedom of expression. Personal expression thats the thing. Great if you can achieve it. And its always up-to-date, however old it is. That was always more important to me than being in. Although its great if you can manage both.
You were taught by Oswald Oberhuber, an artist who doggedly tried to resist all classification by continually ditching interests, contents and formal solutions and made permanent change his personal style. How hard is it to keep your art within boundaries? What would you describe as the essential intellectual and formal elements of your work?

he brings together various dream scenes and objects in one image. That is a problem which interests me a lot too; how do you bring things, scenes, gures together in a picture, into a picture?
What tasks do you want to address yourself to in the near future?

When I was promised an enormous lottery win, which I naively believed for a short time, I imagined what I would do with the mountain of money. And I realized that what Im doing now is also what Id do if I had more money, but perhaps in a slightly expanded form. I cant get away from doing what I have to do. As regards painting, the most interesting thing is to want nothing. Just to paint.

Oswald Oberhuber ran his class in a free way, and there werent really master-pupil relationships. He represented a voice. His idea of permanent change is not exactly my idea of it. Without realizing it I worked for years on training my reservoir of ideas. I had to get myself into a wide range of situations in order to be able to invent. For years, without realizing it, I was concerned with the phenomenon of time, in my own way, with painting, music, writing, sculpture. Although I expanded out into every possible eld, in the end no-one can escape their own skin. Formally speaking my skin is square and round, small and large.
And your relationship to other contemporary artists?

Wolfgang Capellari in conversation with Gerald Matt for the artist book Wolfgang Capellari painting (Verlag fr moderne Kunst, Nrnberg, 2007) and prior to the artists exhibition at the project wall Kunsthalle Wien in 2008. Wolfgang Capellari, born in 1964 in Kitzbhel, Tyrol, Austria, lives and works in Berlin and Kitzbhel.

You can learn from many of them. Just to take one example; in Paris my encounter with the art of Martial Raysse from the beginning of the 1990s was important. He strengthened my resolve when it came to the diversity of the medium and of expression. And that you dont always have to pursue linear progression. The rift between his pop years and his narrative painting amazed me. My friends are also important. My closest painter friends are, for instance, Alex Amann, Andi Holzknecht, Markus Orsini-Rosenberg ... Really I shouldnt name any names at all; someone is always cross. My son Max (2 years old), the greatest artist of all time, has taught me to concentrate on one thing, painting. And got me to paint a big series of paintings, dedicated to him.
They are very narrative works which, in their coloration and painterly style, show clear echoes of the Neue Leipziger Schule (New Leipzig School).

What I like about this phenomenon is that painting is now being taken seriously, rather than being scorned, as un-contemporary. Although the whole thing is also very much a marketing strategy The great thing about Neo Rauchs painting, alongside the special coloration, is the way
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Maurizio Cattelan
It is hard to know whats right, when you grew up in the jungle.

There have been no retrospectives of your work so far. It seems your work is only conceived in relation to a particular historical and political context and also shown within that framework of reference. One might think that the artist avoids creating works outside such contexts or presenting them together in an exhibition. When will the first Cattelan retrospective be? Not until after the artists ascension?

I am not afraid of moving my work from place to place; I am always pleased when my works acquire new meanings, and their signicance is confused. But, I am afraid of retrospectives. I think that if I were to have one, I would be as good as dead. Where could I go from there, if I had already been summed up? Nothing scares me more it would be the end. On the other hand, I guess it would mean that I could relax, which would be nice.
For the Venice Biennale of 2001 you had a replica of the Hollywood sign placed on the hills of Palermo at the edge of a rubbish dump. Hollywood symbolizes a certain lifestyle, the famous letters from L.A. are something of a contemporary icon and the site for projecting certain desires, a symbol of the American Dream. What is the (Sicilian/Italian) tradition in which you are placing this emblem? What interested you about this context?

I think there has been a lot of confusion here. I love Hollywood the copsand-robbers movies, the Westerns. When I went out to California for the rst time, though, I was disappointed. The rst few days I couldnt see the Hollywood sign there was too much smog. I came there from New York, but imagine the disappointment if you had come further! So, for Venice, I thought Id save everyone the trouble and bring the sign over there. In a way, it was like a homecoming, the return of the spaghetti Western. As it happened, the trash dump was just the cheapest place that we could nd to install it.
The public is very familiar with the provocative Cattelan, the Cattelan of Hitler praying and the fallen Pope. The figure of the Pope was presented in London and in Poland. The latter station caused a big uproar. What is your own attitude towards these matters of art/provocation/ethics, which your works obviously bring up again and again?

I have often said that I nd reality to be more provocative than my art, and I think this remains true perhaps increasingly so. As for ethics, I dont think there is anything ethical about art.
In the Museum Moderner Kunst in Frankfurt a project is running at present, for which you think up and produce a new artwork every month, on which the curators may have no influence at all and which constantly provides surprises and
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Maurizio Cattelan, Untitled, 2007 66

is associated with expectation. The time for the presentation is always secret, so that the works are more or less smuggled into the museums collection. I would be interested in how you go about this. Do the new works refer mainly to the institution and its exhibits or is there also a golden thread that relates the works to each other, considering that they are to be seen continuously in the same building?

I love the idea of my work showing up like an uninvited guest, or sprouting in the night like a mushroom. This is perhaps the golden thread that connects the works in Frankfurt, if there is indeed such a thread: the art is like a magic act one day it is here, the next day, perhaps not. In that case, they could be self-portraits: I am here now, but soon, maybe, I am gone with the wind.
As in Frankfurt, according to what I have heard, there will also be a joint showing of several works in Bregenz. While Frankfurt provides areas that are spatially disconnected, the exhibition space in Bregenz is relatively difficult to manage, being a room that is so beautiful that it always rather creates mental associations with a jewellers shop. How will you proceed there?

As always, I will proceed with caution. Since I dont have a studio, I produce all of my new works in public, which is something that is always fraught with peril. If I fail, everyone will be there to see it. I have no private shame I am only constituted out in the open. That being said, I have always been the one who wants to rob the jeweller, rather than browse politely.
You are an artist who likes to exhaust the institutions he works with. You clearly enjoy generating heat from friction with the institution or place but obviously both sides take pleasure in, one might say, testing their strength against each other, while their cooperation is characterized by the anarchic actions of the artist, who constantly undermines institutional rules. At the same time he also cultivates his success inside these institutions. This gives rise to the question of subversion: who wins in the end?

Maurizio Cattelan, Him, 2001

Well, I dont want to sound defeatist, but I think we both know: in the end, they always win.
You have instituted a prize for artists that forbids the prize-winner from working for a year. Somehow that reminds me of the set-aside premium in the agricultural policies of the European Union Is it better if artists sometimes remain silent?

game, I was told art wouldnt be a lot of work, which was ne with me but I soon discovered that I had been lied to. Ultimately, all of my hard work raising the money for this prize, called the Oblomov prize, didnt pay off, since I couldnt nd an artist who would accept it. So, since I gured I had earned it, I took the money and used it to move to New York.
You have also founded your own genuine/false Biennale. This Caribbean Biennial invites selected artists to relax on a Caribbean island for a week. Like any normal holiday-maker. Photos are taken of the artist on the beach, at the pool and in the bar. The only thing missing is art right?

My intention was not really to silence, only to allow for a break. It seems to me that artists work too hard, and I nd this sad. When I got into the
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I dont think art was missing everyone had a really great vacation! Then again, Jens Hoffman (with whom I organized the exhibition) and I were
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Maurizio Cattelan, Frau C., 2007

very careful to do everything right: we took out full-page ads in the right places, we used the right language in the press release, we made sure the right members of the press attended, we got all of the right artists. I guess that means there had to haven been some art there somewhere dont you think?
You are also busy as a curator: at the 4th Berlin Biennale last year, for example, and also as an advisor to great collectors like Dakis Joannou. How do you see your role as an artist in relation to these activities?

Maurizio Cattelan, Untitled, 2004

Or do you have yourself interviewed by well-known personalities as well? And which questions may be asked?

People have gotten the idea that I have others appear as me, or write as me, and that I make up bizarre personae for myself because I have said this or that that I studied with Deleuze and Foucault in France, that I worked with Mother Theresa, that I was raised by tigers. The truth is that I am always me even when I am not. It is hard to know whats right, when you grew up in the jungle.
More than almost any other contemporary artist you play with the system of the art industry. Do you also see yourself in the role of a clown, a wag or perhaps a court jester, which is often assigned to you in other words the person who holds up the fools mirror to the powerful and to society acting roughly according to the slogan the strategy of parody and the parody of strategy?

They are not so different. When I make art, it is merely a matter of arranging and re-arranging images. With curating it is the same, only I dont have to put out my neck as much: I move things around, but they are not things that I am directly responsible for. Also, I like the fact that, when I fail, I am allowed to say, I am not a curator I am an artist! It gets me off the hook.
People say that you dont like journalists, which is why you sometimes send a friend who pretends to be you, or you give answers that turn out to be quotations from other people. Since we are doing an interview right now, I would be especially interested in your fictitious interviews. Do you think up certain roles for yourself, do you create imaginary people who you then have someone interview?

I only do what I can do to avoid getting caught. I sometimes feel like a naughty child, doing the things I do. I am just waiting for a father to come down on me for my stupidity, but I have managed to get away so far. I am not some kind of Houdini, who knows how to wiggle out of anything there is always something breathing down the back of my neck.
You are said to be one of the wittiest of living artists. At the same time, however,

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many of your works are actually based on cruelty: you take death rather than love as your theme and present acts of fate rather than acts of fortune. This seems to reveal a really macabre sense of humour. Do you laugh at your own work? What do you think is the source of wit for the viewer?

I think that in all laughter there is an echo of death that is perhaps what makes it the best medicine, like when doctors give you a vaccine that is both a disease and a cure. I remember when I was younger, I opened my closet door and saw a dead mouse, and there was another mouse eating it. It made this horrible sound, but I remember laughing. Maybe it was because it was absurd werent the little mice supposed to be friends?
On the topic of art in the public sphere: there your works are often found to be more provocative than in an exhibition. Consider, for example, the reaction of a man in Milan back in 2004, who freed three wax dolls hanging on a tree, removing them from their ropes. Do you find the public sphere especially stimulating?

Yes, public response is something I nd thrilling not because I have caused some provocation, but because there is a dialogue that has been created that shapes the meaning of the work, which is, most of the time, totally independent of any intentions I might have thought I had. In this case, the hung children, which for me were a vision of a nightmare childhood one where, presumably, the only way to escape or to act under ones own will was through an act of self-destruction, where the only exit was death became the catalyst for a much larger discussion of social and political violence. Of course, while these discussions are always useful, I dont have any illusions that I am providing solutions. I am only a conduit.
Maurizio Cattelan likes to play hide-and-seek. You once said that identity is overvalued these days. Creating a persona surrounded by secrets is also a way of creating an identity, isnt it?

I have no secrets I only tell the truth! Why wont you believe me?

Maurizio Cattelan in conversation with Gerald Matt in November 2007. The artist participated in the exhibition Dream & Trauma. Works from the Dakis Joannou Colletion, Athens at Kunsthalle Wien and MUMOK in 2007. Maurizio Cattelan, born in 1960 in Padua, Italy, lives and works in New York and Milan.

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Nathalie Djurberg
I was terried of a TV series that was called Fraggle Rock.

You were born in Sweden and you earned a degree in Fine Arts at the Malm Art Academy in the class for New Media, if I am not mistaken?

Yes.
You have made your home in Berlin for the past few years. Do you like it there? And why did you choose Berlin in the first place?

Ive been living there a little more than three years now. I moved there because I wanted to get out of Sweden, and I had never been to Berlin so I thought this was a good as time as any. I think its much better to go to a place where you havent been before, you have much less expectations. And, I really like it here, you can disappear if you want to, but that might also be a bad thing.
What does a typical working day of yours look like?

I try to get up at 8 oclock, when I dont succeed, Ill try again at 9:30. I actually really like sleeping; I think that I might be able to sleep 24/7 if I didnt discipline myself. I so much enjoy the moment just between being awake and being asleep, when your thoughts just wander off and create really illogical situations or theories. Before I used to chew a lot of tobacco the rst thing, but since I quit I just weep a little about it and then go right to work. Then, Ill mix the eating and the working until I have to go to bed again at twelve oclock. I will be ashamed of this, and Ill probably think of a way to punish myself for it, but I wont be able to think of any good punishment, so Ill continue working, while yelling at Hans for playing his music too loud and driving me crazy with his drum set which he plays a little every ten minutes when he gets stuck or bored with his work.
As far as I know, you carry out, entirely on your own, all the work involved in your elaborate productions, from the painstaking process of creating the plasticine characters and the sets to the animation itself. How complex and time-consuming is the actual production of a film? What are the technical work stages required for it, and what do they involve?

Nathalie Djurberg, Still from Viola, 2005

That was so many questions in one. Its very necessary to do everything by myself, because when I get an idea it evolves during the preparations of the lm. I think the preparations must be the most time-consuming. I put the least energy into the post-production, not because its not important, but because it bores me immensely. It always feels like Im done with it and I want to move on to the next project. A lm takes from a couple of weeks to a couple of months to make.

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Hans Berg almost always does the sound for your works, which oscillates between electronic and retro-baroque stylings. What role does the sound play?

I love the music of Hans and our collaboration. He sees my work from scratch, since he has his sound studio next to my studio. I think the music plays a big part of it, his music is not there for cosmetic reasons, the music has its own intrinsic value, which is there to bring the work up to another level. It is there to bring the story or the action forward, or in this case, since its not really lm Im working with, it might bring it backwards, turn it around.
You appear not to be interested in creating art with a smooth surface. Quite on the contrary, traces of the production process remain visible. The strings of the puppets are quite clearly in evidence and the spelling mistakes in the videos simply cannot be overlooked. Your art is accessible also for the reason that it does not present itself in a clean and distanced way.

No, the reason is partly because I am very impatient, I want to see the work done, which is also one of the reasons why Im making it, to see it done. For me, the most important thing is to push forward the idea and to be interested in the smooth surface would, for me, force the idea into the background. I love animation, but if I would know a more effective way to realise my ideas and thoughts, I would use that instead. Animation is just a mean to the ends.
What roles do TV-programmes such as Wallace & Gromit play in your work? Have you, in actual fact, been influenced by television programmes that were being screened when you grew up? Have you ever been inspired by any TV made for children?

Nathalie Djurberg, Still from There aint no pill, 2005

Not so much animation artist, except for the ones mentioned above, but thats not in ne art. Im inuenced though by the Chapman brothers, Rodney Graham, and Chris Burden.
The classic analytical separation of artworks into aspects of content and form is particularly noticeable in your case. The tension that is generated between the making of the figures and the setting, which seems so childlike and innocent at first sight, and the violent content of the narratives is raised to a maximum. What is it that appeals to you about this paradox?

It leaves you off-guard, that your expectations wont become true. Yes I have, though never from Wallace & Gromit. But we actually didnt have a TV until I was eight; so my mother read to us instead. When we then got a television, almost all the programs scared me. I was terried of a TV series that was called Fraggle Rock. One of the most beautiful animations I know is My Green Crocodile, made by the Russian animator Kurchevsky. In many ways I prefer reading to seeing, I like the idea that you produce the set yourself while reading. Im very inuenced by children and folk stories in the way that they make you able to look at the world from a different angle. But I dont give them much thought when I work; they are so integrated in me that I dont have to.
Are there any animation artists, fine artists or filmmakers that have particularly interested you and influenced you in your own work? You also do charcoal animations such as My Name Is Mud and The Flood, which remind me a little of the technique employed by William Kentridge

When I made My Name Is Mud I didnt know about his work, but after it was done I became very aware of it, though I must say that I think that my work resembles his much more in the ideas and interests than in the medium.
From June 2007, we shall be exhibiting some of your works in Dream & Trauma the exhibition from the collection of Dakis Joannou at the Kunsthalle Wien and the MUMOK. In your works, both of these aspects really do come fully to the fore the dreamy, escapist quality, the childlike approach and the traumatic one,

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which breaks with the notion of a safe and sane world, acting out the trauma itself, time and again.

This wasnt really a question, but I totally agree with you, and you put it nicely into words.
There are continual references to the dimension of the subconscious in your work. Do you attempt to represent, perhaps in some symbolical form, the collective anxieties, the repressed and perverse desires of people?

that the victim kept on making trouble and in that way making it worse for herself. I have to play all the parts; the victim and the perpetrator, the clash between them always caught my interest.
What are your plans for the future?

Yes, but not in a direct way, since Im the one making my work, I become the representative on human beings. I think that that is quite obvious, though I dont need to force it forward; Im not unique enough to be alone with repressed or perverse desires.
In one of your works, entitled The Natural Selection, some African people men, women and including also your own children are gathered together in one room. They are given written instructions to sort themselves according to sex, size and skin color. They are also instructed to stand really close together, leaving no gaps. There are a lot of characters clearly afraid as they follow orders, absurd as they may be. In this natural selection, discrimination, racism, even Nazi methods are confronted. To what extent do you reflect and act on issues such as military and dictatorial structures in your work?

Oh. Im so stressed about the future, and there are so many things I want to do, I want to become a veterinary and quit art and travel the world, and have total world domination. But instead Ill re-read Catch 22 take care of a dog and my brothers from time to time and work on ve new lms that might all be called In Our Neighbourhood.

Nathalie Djurberg in conversation with Gerald Matt on the occasion of the exhibition Nathalie Djurberg. Because it is wonderful to live at Kunsthalle Wien project space in 2007. The artist participated in the exhibitions Dream & Trauma. Works from the Dakis Joannou Collection, Athens at Kunsthalle Wien and MUMOK in 2007. Nathalie Djurberg, born in 1978 in Lysekil, Sweden, lives and works in Berlin.

Im actually quite interested in the discipline of the military. Discipline can really help you to get much further than you would have been without it. It can be a method to be able to cope with reality. However, if you just bring it one step further, this is what you have: fascism and dictatorship. Balancing on this line interests me, also the difference from discipline in one person and in a whole people and what is self-chosen or forced upon you or what you force upon someone else, what the conclusion of that might become even if you have the best of intentions.
In your works a whole slate of issues such as sexual abuse, violence, sodomy, paedophilia, and perversion occur. Human dignity, the love for ones neighbour, and the unwritten laws of social conduct are reduced to absurdity. How cruel are you, really?

Well the answer is in the question. No, just kidding. If I was as cruel as my work I wouldnt be doing my work, I would be living it instead. It is a way of dealing with these issues. Examining how far you can go and how it affects you, I became very surprised the rst time I noticed that I actually felt the impatience of a killer and rapist in one animation I did, impatient

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A K Dolven
Time and movement are additional tools, which add to the scene or gure, creating another thinking-space.

Interview 2005

In our exhibition Don Juan we are showing your work Stairs. In Hollywood history, staircases have always provided a popular setting for dramatic scenes. What do you find so fascinating about this ambience?

The Hollywood diva always approaches her audience head on. She descends the stairs with condence: Hello, here I am! But she is passive; she merely deploys her femininity, exposing herself to the gaze of the audience a subtle blend of power and sex. But my woman is shown from behind. She is very purposeful in the way she dresses; she is active and has a goal: she wants to go out and do something.
The hastily dropped clothes and the pensive way in which the woman gets dressed on the stairs are brimming with emotional tension and suggestive of a love scene immediately prior. Is that coincidental?

We dont know whether or not she has just made love. She is never naked, in any case. Right from the rst frame shes there in her underpants. She takes her time, thinks. She has come from somewhere and is clearly on her way somewhere, too.
In line with the titles homophone stares, the actual title of Stairs assigns us the role of the voyeur. Is this scene enlivened by the fantasising, erotic gaze?

By making the viewer observe the woman from behind, I activate that kind of gaze and I make it (partially) responsible for the resolution of the story.
Could this elegiac female figure be the victim of a contemporary Don Giovanni?

Most likely not: this woman exudes a thirst for action. She puts on her running shoes and could probably get out of there pretty quickly if she wanted to.

Interview 2007 A K Dolven, Stills from Stairs, 2002

Apart from film, your most important medium is painting: as far as I know you really began as a painter. How did you begin to make videos/films? Which aspects appeal to you in one medium or the other?

The rst day I started in the Academy in Oslo I was asked if I was a painter, a sculptor or a graphic artist. I wanted to work with art which was rst of all not a medium but a free space with possibilities for questions and discussions. I therefore started an alternative department with other students in 1983 called The Annex, based on international guest teachers in Oslo, where all
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kinds of media and views were present. I had three fantastic years (in the end that department was so successful that it was closed after those years as it threatened the other departments based on medium in the Academy). It is not right that I started as a painter and then became a video artist. That is a too easy a conclusion many before you have made as well. I worked early with sound, installation, paint and video. I was honestly never interested in technique. The different techniques occurred related to different issues or questions in my work. I am personally not interested in working with gures when I paint. If I work with gures, then I use the camera. I nd that abstract thinking works better in paint. A painting is still and therefore the possibility of abstractness gives me more space. With painting you start with a surface of nothing, a wonderful feeling and an open space. With a camera it is different. You open the lens and you see something. Cameras can grab that moment or with moving images you get other surprises over time you cannot control. Another wonderful experience. Time and movement are additional tools, which add here to the scene or gure, creating another thinking-space. Space in a work is crucial. With the moving image, I use video or lm. That has to do with light and color and the aspect of time in the work. Just now I nished a black and white 16mm lm. It has its own body; it is like a sculpture in its analogue image. In this case, where the very intimate part of a male body is the actual lmed area, 16mm lm in black and white is the right tool. Other times oil paint is the right tool. Does this make sense?
Iconography already established in art history seems to be a source for your work that you particularly like from where you take motifs and transfer them to our contmeporary reality. In your work Madonna with Man you work with the representation of the Mother of God with child we encounter the Madonna as a businesswoman, the child is replaced by a man or is this a piet motif? A new existential draft?

A K Dolven, Madonna with Man and Fig, 2005 A K Dolven, Madonna with Man and Fruit, 2005

who is dependent on whom in my Madonna works. If I knew I would not have been interested in making the work.
The Window on the World is also found as a motif presented in your works, such as in the form of the glass facade of an office building. Is this Albertis window transported into our times another art historic reference? You said once that you are mainly interested in the frame that defines the outline of the image.

It is not a piet. It is a woman with a man instead of the child. The man is absolutely alive. In my work I always co-operate with real people. Never actors but friends, neighbours, family and in this case real top businesswomen I know. They are dressed as if they had an important meeting to go to; they are seated in their ofces with todays background of course, a city landscape. This scene has a reference to the Renaissance painting where the Madonna is staged in a particular room, in a particular dress with the landscape backdrop.Yes, I enjoyed having the dialog between my women of today and these honoured female Madonna gures of the past. I chose to place a man there instead of the baby. The relationship is not clear just as I see it in the Madonna paintings. It is a male-female situation. It is power, irt and humbleness. It is not only about the mother and child. I dont know

Thats an observation about my work I have not really thought about. But yes, I have said that the frame, the edge of the work interests me very much. I am precise about the edge mainly because the place where the image stops makes us aware of what might be beyond that edge, what we actually do not see at all.
The history of art may be an inspiring resource for an artist of today but also an inhibiting burden. What is your attitude?

It isnt a burden. It is just like talking to someone. Sharing thoughts with experienced people is challenging and comforting. Living alone is no fun. Most of the time a work at the beginning has nothing to do with art history. Then when it develops, I discover connections and an interesting dialog begins. My thoughts have of course been thought before, but at a very different time. Our pain is not new. We often just think so because our world
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offers other treatments or possibilities, but major issues like pain or happiness are the same.
In regard to your photographic works, I am thinking especially of your series with naked backs, which are reminiscent of sculptural torsi that look out at a sunrise over the sea. A back-reference to Romanticism and a Caspar David Friedrich figure? Are you thinking of a specific shift in meaning with the nudity and bald heads of the female figures?

This body of work needed a camera. It asked for it. The landscape is in Norway above the Arctic. Here, where I have my home, on the 22nd of July the sun just touches the horizon in the middle of the night and rolls along it until it rises again. A dream light for photography. This even light makes no shadows for hours. A video camera could not record that ne shift in light. I therefore shot in 35mm and together with my cameraman Vegar Moen and local friends created large format color negative photos as well. To be in this landscape with the sun in that position for a period of time in the middle of the night is the closest Ive come to experiencing time standing still. It is surreal in its beauty. The sun neither sets nor rises. At rst glance my women here are timeless theres no hair hinting at a particular fashion or their origins, but then you start to see the marks from their bikinis on their tanned bodies, telling us they are contemporary women. They also leave objects on the beach. Some leave books and one has emptied her handbag. I dont know if Caspar David Friedrich would have accepted these women. Still I think he would have loved that landscape which has remained unchanged.
You have dealt intensively with the element of time. Silence and lack of motion seem to be characteristic aspects of your work

A K Dolven, Between two Mornings, 2004

Also your protagonists often seem removed from time and spatial proximity seems to meet emotional distance. It could happen to you, for example, shows a woman dressed to go out lying on a bed next to a man who may be asleep. What is the relationship between the two? Is it a married couple, are they friends? The unmoving scenery holds the nature of the human relationship in suspense.

I have a deep relationship to sound, music and silence. My rst visual work was record covers for a band I knew well. My rst lm, super 8, was made for a concert. Drum n bass and garage or pop music have been a way of placing my works in time. Like fashion. My 16mm lm Amazon was silent, although the lm is conceptually edited after the second movement, Allegro Molto, of Shostakovichs String Quartet No.8b in C Minor, Op. 110. The piece was composed after a visit to Dresden where Shostakovich experienced the devastating effects of the bombing of the city during the war. The lm is mute in the end. The music was taken away. The sound in this installation comes from the disturbing noise from the 16mm projector. But the music did the editing. This work has been strongly edited, 150 times in a minute and a half which makes everything move fast. This is a new route I have explored in my works for the last two years. It creates a restlessness which was not there before.

This particular work has been commented on in so many different ways. I remember a businessman who said, This is just what I feel when I come home from work. My wife wants something of me and I am not able to give it to her. We see a man under a duvet in bed; he has a shirt on (no pyjamas). She is fully dressed, with boots. The red hair is spread on the pillow, like Munchs sick child, only she looks very healthy and as if on her way to a club. And here she is on top of the duvet next to him. I did not think like the businessman when I made the work. But thats Ok. Its ne.
You once said, With painting, you have to give yourself time to see, in a film time is given to you, it is served in a different way. If painting and film constitute the time aspect of perception in different ways, how does the element of time differ in the particular medium itself?

No one tells you how long to look at a painting. In shows today where
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painting and lm/video appear it is interesting to observe the amount of time a viewer spends on the different works. We are told how many minutes a moving image work takes and we sit down and take that time. We are told, and then served. The painting is demanding. We are not served, we have to decide ourselves how much time to take and we are lazy. We often nd it difcult and then we do not spend time on the painting. The way we take time to look at art has changed. The viewer used to sit down on a bench in front of a painting as we still do in many museums. In contemporary shows the bench is now only in front of the moving image.
In Norway the light is quite different from that in Berlin or London, what are other geographic reference points in your life. Many artists have grown lyrical about the light of the south, for example on the Cte dAzur, where the greatest Modernist artists settled, such as Picasso and Matisse. Is the light in the north of special significance for your artistic work?

The light of the north is the light I know best. It is different above the Arctic. There is nothing romantic about it. It is a reality you live with rather than grow lyrical about. The light has a practical impact. To read my book in the middle of the night without a lamp is wonderful. I can paint or take photos 24 hours a day.You sleep less for certain months of the year and light makes you high. Still I can listen to the same music and read the same book on the Cte dAzur. I just need a lamp in the night. Light is energy. In the winter the days are short but the northern lights and the moon make it edgy, darkness with real kicks. You sleep more. You paint less.

A K Dolven in conversation with Gaby Hartel in 2006 on the occasion of the exhibition Don Juan alias Don Giovanni or two and two equals four or lust is the only swindle I wish permanence at Kunsthalle Wien in 2006 and with Gerald Matt in August 2007. A K Dolven, born in 1953 in Oslo, Norway, lives on the Lofotes, Oslo and London.

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Marcel Dzama
... when its obvious that something is hidden, much is revealed. A secret for one. Something to discover.

On the cover of your latest book, Moving Picture, a work is shown that reminds one of Marcel Duchamps Discs avec spirales from 1926. Duchamps Rotoreliefs often turn up in your work, in collage or in slightly varied forms. What is the significance of Duchamp or of Surrealism for your work?

Ive always been inuenced by Duchamp, Dada and Surrealism and more recently I had become interested in trying to convey a sense of movement through drawing and painting. I was reminded of Duchamps spirals and started to really study them. I felt it was important to reference. Around that time I started to work on what became The Lotus Eaters and the drawings from that same period of Moving Picture.
The medium you work in mainly is drawing. But you also make collages, sculptures and films. What opportunities does each medium offer you?

I like to change mediums to keep it fresh for me. I could draw several months to achieve something I really like but after that I need an escape to a new medium. Recently Ive been working only in sculpture, making largescale dioramas. Its still very exciting for me right now and Im really happy with the results, so I will continue to do it for the next while.
One representative form serves as a kind of aid to another? You often transfer certain motifs and formal solutions from one medium to the next. The masks in your drawings also exist as sculptures in the Ikon Gallery the furry costumes from your fantasy world were exhibited alongside them. Did you develop your system of motifs in drawing, sculpture or, perhaps, in performance?

I think at the beginning what comes most easily to me is sketching the idea out on paper. From there it can take any shape either drawing, sculpture, painting or video. Sometimes I have used the same idea for all mediums. When I have a good period of solid working a lot of the ideas blend into each other.
What fascinates you especially about drawing?

I like the freedom and immediacy of drawing. I can be anywhere and have an idea and am able to draw on paper or even something like a napkin. Theres something democratic about drawing the supplies are minimal and anyone can make a mark. When I was growing up we were a working class family that couldnt afford to buy art supplies so drawing was naturally the medium that I began with.
One typical utensil, which is found again and again in your drawings, is the mask. Your figures wear animal or tree masks, eyeshades or gangster caps. A central
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and arrows; people are shown dead or hanging. Do you see your art as a place where negative emotions are acted out and more or less sublimated?

When I was younger, I would say that was the sole impetus for making art in a way. I was a pretty shy kid and worked out a lot of issues through drawing. Now, when I look at the work after making it, I notice that there is a lot more hope; although theres always been a little bit of humour among the pathos. I like the idea that even when situations are dark that it isnt just dark, that it can be more complicated than just one emotion.
Yes, you also combine the macabre with the humorous. The graphic work of the young German artist Ralf Ziervogel reveals a similar conception of the narrative, a cheerful apocalypse. He speaks himself in this connection about the simulation of violence. Is that an idea you could relate to? Or is it rather a mythological coding of human cruelty? Your pictures were also once described as fairy-taleGoya.

I approach each work not with that idea in mind because it would be too limiting but of course I am a great admirer of Goya and love his ability to do that and am very intrigued by the idea of mythological coding.
Marcel Dzama, Unitled, 2007

theme seems to be concealing the self. Your protagonists slip into the role of another and dont want to be themselves ... Why all these metamorphotic transformations?

The aesthetic of your drawings remind one of old childrens books and comics. Are there any stories you especially enjoyed reading as a child? Or is retro a part of your artistic strategy?

I dont like to reveal very much of myself to people and I nd that giving characters masks is a way of holding back an aspect of their perceived personality. They are useful disguises. Sometimes Ive even masked a character that I originally didnt intend to mask at all but I looked at the face and thought they were revealing too much.
I once saw a photo of you, where you were holding an animal mask in your hand. It reminded me of a picture by Picasso, where he wears a bull mask and playfully slips into the role of the Minotaur, a mythological figure he often processed, part human part animal, a symbol of the animalistic in the human. If your masks conceal something personal, do you make something else visible in compensation?

Im not the type of person that can make art by having an artistic strategy. For me its more of an organic process and anything else would feel dishonest. A lot of my books growing up were hand-me-downs or from the Salvation Army. I remember getting a Brothers Grimm book from a garage sale and being fascinated and terried. Alice in Wonderland was a favourite, too. I think one of the reasons my drawings dont look terribly modern is because the city I grew up in peaked in the 1920s. When you are there, that feeling really pervades. The downtown is mostly boarded up and there are old painted advertisements on brick buildings that remind you of grander and more prosperous times. There hasnt been a lot of new business coming in tearing down and building anew like in New York where people are desperate to retain the history by turning areas into historical districts. In Winnipeg thats not really a problem. I never really understood where my interest in history or nostalgia came from until I left that city for another one.
By exhibiting the collection of Dakis Joannou we are trying to approach the aesthetics of the trauma in a variety of ways aesthetics which reveal things like traumas, for example, on the level of shock, decay, repetition, destruction of

I think when its obvious that something is hidden, much is revealed. A secret for one. Something to discover.
Your pictures are often very gloomy, your figures shoot with pistols, rifles, bows

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Marcel Dzama

I was happy to work with Beck because Ive been a fan of his for a long time and Ive always liked the work of Al Hansen, his grandfather. When I rst started out showing in galleries and making my art for a living I was very interested in the border crossing approach to art because it seemed democratic. But now from experience I realize that sometimes the idea is better than the practise. Mainly because you encounter people who you think have the same ideology and maybe they did at some point but in the end they just want to turn a prot. And thats depressing so nowadays I try to be more careful.
What are you working on at present?

Right now Im working on an edition with Christophe Daviet-Thery. We worked together before where I made a wooden box about the size of a cigar box. Inside was a leporello of an intaglio print. We made seven boxes in total. Im still sketching out ideas for the new edition. Im also working at a ceramics foundry in Guadalajara on some new sculpture pieces that Ill be showing there in December.

Marcel Dzama, 6 Pinocchios, 2007

perceptions and psychic injury. Could you describe your artistic position in relation to the themes of the show?

Marcel Dzama in conversation with Gerald Matt and Angela Stief on the occasion of the exhibition Dream & Trauma. Works from the Dakis Joannou Collection, Athens at Kunsthalle Wien and MMUMOK in 2007. Marcel Dzama, born in 1974 in Winnipeg, Canada, lives and works in New York.

I like dealing with trauma and destructions of perception in abstract scenarios. Putting in layers of some of the more difcult subject matter has a softening affect that for me can be more inviting.
What do you feel is abstract about your work? Do you also speak of formal qualities, as, for example, your work Untitled (Dancing women with rifles) would suggest an ornament of figures, in which human bodies are arranged into a pattern?

Yes, that is one way. Im nding recently that Ive really been moving away from narrative into formalism. Its been a gradual process but now when I am working I nd myself taking things away more, editing as opposed to before when I would add more elements.
Recently I got the new Beck CD and was pleased to find that your drawings are on the cover. How deeply are you involved in the music industry and how interested are you in a border-crossing approach to art production, which would include the applied arts?
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Tim Eitel
The trap of interpretation and the egoism of painting

This interview was prompted by the planned exhibition at Kunsthalle Wien with the working title Western Motel. Edward Hopper and Contemporary Art. We will be including some of your pictures in this show to allow us to sound out and examine possible links between the two positions. Connections are evident above all in the degree of isolation of both human individuals and objects in their surroundings, combined with a realistic or at least figurative painting style. For us viewers, then, what connects the two of you is a particular atmosphere that could be described as metaphysical because, on the one hand, it shows real things while, on the other, it creates moods that are unreal or transreal, if the word existed. We could of course find many other points of comparison for this in art history, from Romanticism which is often linked with your work through New Objectivity, though in the latter Im thinking more of its metaphysical proponents and their precursors. Christoph Tannert once pointed out that such comparisons with your painting fall right into the trap of interpretation, as your pictures show above all the world of the living capacity for correspondence of one color with the color next to it. That smacks of immanence in painting and calls to mind abstract compositions. My first question, then, is how important for you is this aspect of relations within the picture, and my second question is whether you see relations and if so, which between Edward Hoppers pictorial idiom or any of the above-mentioned artistic currents and your own intentions.

Tim Eitel, o.T. (Gepck), 2005

Christoph Tannert is right to warn about the interpretational pitfall of art history. The historian can easily go astray, ending up with an art history thats a history of quotations. Thats like playing Memory, a nice way to pass the time, but hardly enlightening. Painting is a great big family you can nd relatives in the farthest-ung regions. Hopper is the uncle in America, Friedrich the grouchy great-grandfather in Greifswald with his dusty tobacco box. I myself and I assume all artists do this always view the work of other artists through my own set of spectacles and ask it my own set of questions. Which is why few things feel alien to me, although my sympathy is spread very unevenly. What you refer to as the transreal, if Ive understood you correctly, is actually the opposite of the unreal, as it aims to portray the hypothetical core of truth, whereas I imagine the unreal as an enigmatic fairytale world. I think this mood is created by identication with ordinary everyday subject matter that has been generalized. We identify with the melancholy of Hoppers usherette, she becomes a symbol for our own sadness. But precisely here is where I see a fundamental difference between Hoppers approach and my own: when Hopper transforms an everyday scene into an overheightened picture, it remains a genre scene, though atmospherically intensied into a prototype. His pictures seem to be asking me to imagine stories to go with them. I dont think there are any stories to go with my pictures.
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Tim Eitel

The formal aspects of painting, like the color correspondences you mentioned, play a large part in the work of any painter. Thats part of the job and if I didnt enjoy pushing paint around then I would have to do something else. But the formal ideas should never be an end in themselves, they always need to be related to the motif. Painting thats only about itself or that merely runs through series of color relations is of no interest to me.
Hoppers pictures and motifs have been reconstructed by a number of directors in their films, from the motel in Hitchcocks Psycho through Hoppers Morning Sun in Wim Wenders The Million Dollar Hotel. This also means that Hoppers motifs and scenarios are especially well-suited to communicating certain moods or to being charged up with the directors own stories. In and of themselves, the moods or objects you use are hardly ever spectacular, so they are not suited as bearers of atmosphere, functioning only in combination with other picture elements or figures. An example although the garage-like architecture in your picture o.T. (Gepck) (Untitled, Luggage, 2005), with its view out into the void reflected in the floor offers a fantastic setting for this scene if the female figure were actually to move (as in a film) then the whole effect would be ruined. Perhaps, if I may put it like this, your motifs are, in and of themselves, much more banal than Hoppers?

Hopper also benets from lm in quite a different way: before Psycho, I doubt anyone viewed his quite harmless sunlit country houses with the same chilling sense of inscrutability as they do today. My impression is that people use Hoppers works especially when its a matter of shedding light on the American soul. And its interesting that both the directors you named are Europeans whose vision of America is surely quite different to that of an American.
So lets stick with Europe: as Ive already mentioned, writers dealing with your work often mention Romanticism, especially Caspar David Friedrich. Understandably, or a while, you painted comparable situations, figures seen from the back looking out over a broad landscape or out to sea (Kste, Coast, 2004). Or it may be an urban landscape with the figure looking through a window. In Friedrichs works, these landscapes are supernatural, so to speak; in them, the dwarfed onlooker recognizes or gazes in amazement at the power of creation. Your landscapes, on the other hand, are not especially imposing, or, as you once said yourself: Im certainly not interested in the divine in a landscape. So what, then, is your intention in using these romantic motifs? Are these trap pictures? Im also thinking here of motifs without human figures like Wagen (Trailer, 2005), where a neatly painted construction site trailer in white and blue, in a perspective that seems to obey rules of its own, looks out of a large gray room through a gap in the wall into the light. Im spontaneously reminded of Las Menias by Velsquez the half-open door, the sequence of rooms, the mirror with the royal couple, which in your picture is the tiny window on the trailer! I mention this free association also because of the spatial constructions in your pictures where I sometimes think I see irritating, deliberately incorrect details.

Oh, I dont agree. I would denitely be interested in experimenting with lm. I think Antonioni could have made an excellent lm of it. Just think of Leclisse or Il deserto rosso. But I dont think its acceptable to link an images banality and its lmability. And I gladly admit that my pictures only work properly when taken as a whole. Each element plays its own important part. Otherwise youd have to claim that each individual part of a picture must work on its own as a picture in its own right. The motifs in my pictures are much less narrative than Hoppers. In his work, the architecture and the interiors are precisely rendered.You can tell the milieu or the profession of the gures from their setting. So the setting also aids characterization. My scenarios are not so concrete, they are not milieu studies where even minor details like a rotary stamp rack have their place. In my pictures, the space remains more abstract. Stripped of its individuality, it serves generalization.You cant say whether the scene is set in Europe or somewhere else in the world. Hoppers popularity as a source of lm sets is indeed an interesting phenomenon. If you look at pictures like Ofce At Night, which seems to be captured with a wide-angle lens from an elevated point of view, then his appeal for directors and set designers makes perfect sense: they look like lm stills. The attraction was mutual, and his work was certainly inuenced by the movies. Its well known that Hopper went to the cinema a great deal and that he even worked for a time as an illustrator for a production company. But
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My pictures certainly arent designed to be traps, if you mean that I deliberately lay trails to lead the viewer astray. With the back gure (Rckengur) in a landscape I was interested in the question of what kind of relationship we have with landscape today. My working theory was that we see nature as one leisure option among many, comparable with a museum, a motif I actually wanted to get away from with this series away from self-referentiality, out into the world. I wanted to stop painting architecture until I had found a different way of approaching it. I asked myself what happens in pictorial terms if I place a contemporary city-dweller in the countryside, whether the open setting has a different effect on the gure than a closed interior. The form of these pictures creates a parallel to Romanticism I am, after all, very interested in the pictures we have stored away in our heads, and these of course include specically in Germany the legacy of Romanticism. Today I think some of my landscapes draw this parallel too strongly, pushing the viewer too much into an art-historical way of looking. In some peoples eyes, this experiment turned into a parade of nostalgic longing, which is not at all what it was intended to be.
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Tim Eitel

Las Menias is a great picture, unfortunately Ive not yet had the opportunity to see it in the original. Its a fascinating concept, painting a picture as a huge mirror image and not as the scenery seen as if through a window. That sums up the entire discourse on painting of the past 150 years. I nd it interesting that Wagen should remind you of it. Long lines of motifs extend through the undergrowth of the centuries it sometimes amazes me. It has something to do with recurring picture structures, with cultural memory: in this archive,Velasquez may be led away right next to Weegee, and a photo in a daily newspaper may be the rst item in the le on Degas. This touches on the question of what memory has to do with our perception and the way we understand pictures.
Id like to talk about something else that is often mentioned in the reception of your work: the isolation of your figures. Talking about this aspect with Sebastian Preuss of the Deutsche Bank Collection, you once made the distinction that one should not confuse isolation with loneliness it was more a case, you said, of being alone, also as an opportunity for concentration; these are moments when one comes closer to ones own identity. Do you see your pictures as little oases of contemplation within the noise of signs and the hectic bustle of society and business that work something like this: after a long time spent looking at them in search of a meaning or even a story, the viewer is finally left alone without an answer, and begins, in this state of being alone, to look for his own identity? Alternatively, this state your figures are in could be read as a reflection on a major phenomenon in our society, where businesses and the state label people as human resources and proclaim the freedom of the individual (e.g. in the MeInc. program [a German government scheme to fund one-person start-ups]) as a way of divesting themselves of any responsibility for that individual. Both interpretations suggest a social interest or even commitment. If this is the case, do you also believe that your art can have that kind of impact? By which I also mean the places where your work hangs, for example in the collection of a global player such as Deutsche Bank.

Tim Eitel, Wagen, 2005

The state is an administration and has presumably always seen the human individual in utilitarian terms, among other things as a generator of taxes, potential source of danger, and in our times as a voter. The state needs human individuals, but it would prefer to be left to get on with governing and not be pestered with unprompted demands. This seems to be in the nature of administration Kafkas major theme throughout his life. Of course I have a social interest, but art certainly isnt capable of righting societys wrongs and when it comes to education there are denitely much better instruments. Art is often co-opted by big companies to enhance their image an insoluble conict, since many projects would in turn not be possible without nancial support from businesses. Both companies and states use art to assert freedom, openness and a critical spirit Deutsche Bank just
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the same as the Peoples Republic of China. Which means that even the most difcult art is not immune to being used as a g leaf. For my work, I observe phenomena in society. Im interested in the force of conventions and the pressure of fashion. These are collective mechanisms which the individual can barely avoid. One useful method of establishing some distance is to be alone with oneself. Im interested in solitude in big cities, being isolated in the crowd, because here individuality and collectivism collide. Individuality always has to be carefully balanced: too little and youre a bore, too much and youre a weird outsider. And Im not talking about the uniform rebellion of the subcultures that merely live out a variation on the bourgeois collective. I spend most of every day alone, I dont have an assistant in my studio. Sometimes its pure self-torture, but its important for me because it takes time to focus ideas and to achieve the quietness inside my head thats necessary for thinking about pictures. This experience is part of whats behind
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the words of mine you quoted: being alone is useful as a way of seeing ones own thoughts. Although the question poses itself as to whether they really are ones own; as Ive read, neurological research has put an end to the notion of a stable core to be found in the brain or the mind. It claims that the self is a process, that identity is a constantly changing temporary state that depends on thousands of different kinds of factors. The fact that we perceive ourselves as characters in spite of this is the great lie of our lives. I often doubt the meaningfulness of what I do and think that painting is a totally selsh occupation that may fulll me but which is no good to anyone else. And it doesnt help to tell myself that as part of our culture, art helps shape our identity and develop critical awareness, or, put with more pathos: that one should not give up on humanism. But then I wonder if theres anything else I could do, and that always settles it.
Questions of identity have been reframed by the technical reproducibility and alterability of pictures. The visual world of the media played an influential role in new figurative painting from the late 1980s, for example, and for the artists of the Neue Leipziger Schule (New Leipzig School), which is your own background. Arno Rink, your teacher at the time, is considered one of the first proponents of realistic painting that reflects on media images. What was your relationship with Rink, how did you benefit from him?

you misread the visual codes. Only once youve been there for a little longer do you begin to see beyond the immediate impact. In my case, at least, this takes quite a while. Rather than actively going out in search of motifs, I carry a camera most of the time. The photos I take serve as sketches, I use fragments from them in my work.
During a visit to your studio, I saw large and small-format works. Whats the importance of format for you?

A large format has a totally different impact to a small one: the large format addresses the body and offers a direct spatial experience.You can stand back or step up close and dive in, as Barnett Newman considered to be the ideal for his monumental works, for example. It can develop a physical force, like a triptych by Francis Bacon. A small format, on the other hand, forces you to minimize the distance and to enter into a silent dialog. Its a more intimate form of communication and thus makes different demands in terms of pictorial language.
In your studio there was also a picture you were still working on with two shopping trolleys jammed into each other. You explained to me that they were makeshift cupboards or dwellings. They were clearly the shopping trolleys used by homeless people taken from scenes you came across in downtown LA. Why this motif?

Before I joined Arno Rinks class, there were rumors going round about how strict and ruthless he was. In my rst session in his class, as if to conrm this, he said, Anyone who doesnt work gets thrown out! But it wasnt like that. He treated you very much as a colleague, he kept his own work in the background and asked openly and undogmatically about the aims of his students. Then he would inquire and probe until even stubborn self-deceptions collapsed in on themselves. Thats what I got out of him the capacity for self-criticism.
Where do you get your subject matter from today? As far as I know, you take many photographs and use the pictures at some later point in time. Do you go out deliberately in search of motifs? And although you travel a great deal, there is rarely anything exotic in your pictures. Is there a cultural hunting ground you have fenced off for yourself, so to speak?

These were the belongings of one or two homeless people. My decision to use the motif was very spontaneous. I was interested rstly in the sculptural impression, the massiveness of the trolleys, the elaborately chaotic stacking of the bags. I asked myself what kind of order there was to the tangle of bags and boxes. To me it looks like layers with the new things attached to the top of the pile or onto the outside of the trolley and the things inside the trolley getting squashed and maybe buried for ever. Then a section through the trolley would show time like the annual rings in a tree trunk. As I worked, the motif became more and more a kind of symbol, maybe for an existential state of urban life thats not even necessarily linked to homelessness, for which the picture of a stack of moveable belongings represents a useful analogy.
You spent extended periods in Los Angeles and New York and then moved to Berlin. Is lives and works in Berlin a motto for artists today?

Denitely. I can only say something about my own cultural experience, anything else would be pure speculation. When I arrive in a new place, it usually takes a very long time before I nd motifs. That has to with the fact that I rst need to leave the representative surface of a place behind. This is something probably everyone knows: on a rst visit to New York youre overwhelmed by the scale of the buildings, many things appear strange and
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I had already lived in Berlin before. Berlin is a very rewarding place for artists. The reasons are well known: empty property, low rents, and an open and increasingly international art scene ... New York is much rougher and

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Tim Eitel, Asphalt, 2007

far more expensive, but very intense. By comparison, life in Berlin is pretty laid-back.
What are you working on at the moment?

A large vertical format painting that I was already working on when you visited me in my studio: a refuse container tilted slightly off balance. On the blue trash bags sticking out of the top, a group of pigeons has settled, they appear slightly too large in proportion to the skip. A small group of pigeons in no mans land. Maybe theres a link to Hopper there, too?

Tim Eitel in conversation with Gerald Matt in August 2007 prior to the exhibition Western Motel. Edward Hopper and Contempary Art at Kunsthalle Wien in 2008. Tim Eitel, born in 1971 in Leonberg, Germany, lives and works in Berlin. German to English translation by Nicholas Grindell.

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Barnaby Furnas
Are you familiar with the phrase whistling past the graveyard?

You are known for your debate with existential themes such as war, love and death. In your solo exhibition in the Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York, you took the field of religion as your subject matter: in the large-scale work, Red Sea, as described in the Biblical book of Exodus, the water opens up to give a passage to the fleeing Israelites and then the water swallows up their enemies. In another place, you present the suffering, crucified Jesus with a lot red paint. What motivated you to take up these religious themes?

At the time, I was reading the Left Behind books which are about what happens to non-Christians I should say, non-born-again Christians when the end comes. The books are not very nice, to say the least, and hugely popular here in the states. They amount to cloud watching; basically all these horrible things happen to the non-believers while the believers get to watch. I have been angry about where the Christian right has pushed my country and about the way they claim Jesus as theirs so I decided to make paintings about Jesus as a way of guring out how I felt about him. There has been so many paintings of Jesus, but because most were commissioned by the church, there are many moments in his life that have not been added to the visual discourse, because they did not jibe with the way the church wanted him thought of. The Red Sea paintings were inspired by the story. I got very interested in the Pharaoh and why he followed Moses into that hallway crazy decision. Most people would say hubris, which is a word that has been brought up in relation to what we (the USA) are doing in the Middle East. On the other hand, it is possible that Pharaoh realized that with no Moses around, his contact with God would end and he could not bear it, both ways are interesting in light of current events.
The paintings from the Red Sea-series are very similar in their form: against the background of a radiant blue sky, the blood-red waves seem about to swallow up even the viewer, the hissing foam spits into the sky. In an issue of Mens Vogue you said of these pictures: It was a real moment of relief for me to do these flood paintings, just a literal washing away of everything. Art as catharsis and personal cleansing?

Barnaby Furnas, Rock Concert (Slayer), 2007

I am afraid so. I have begun to think of these paintings as images of menstruation a necessary, beautiful and possibly benecial end.
What significance does the aesthetic category of the sublime, which was discussed in detail by Edmund Burke in the 18th century and which was also of importance to the Abstract Expressionist, Barnett Newman, have for you?

Its a foundational idea for me. For me the sublime is something that cannot be articulated, though Burke does a thorough job, its more of a feeling
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thing, like belief or what I imagine belief feels like. The Velvet Underground has this lyric in Some Kind of Love. Put jelly on your shoulder Let us do what you fear most That from which you recoil but which still makes your eyes moist. This is my favorite song.
Excesses of color and violence are typical for many of your pictures. It is almost orgiastic; the way color spreads across the surface of the picture and forms netlike structures. What is the actual process of painting like is it an ecstatic acting-out in front of or over the material you are painting on?

Yes, ideally. I am always trying to push my own buttons and I try to nd ways to break down my own criticality, to like, have an experience, to try to get those quotation marks to go away. Some of my approaches to this include; color, scale, subject matter, process, altered states etc.
I have read that on some occasions you have produced a painting together with friends, more or less as a collective experience?

Yes. Most of the larger works I have made in the last two years were made with assistants and volunteers. The best thing about working with people is not being alone something that has been difcult for me. Making painting a social (albeit paid) event takes so much of the drudgery out of it sort of like throwing a house painting party (never really works, even with, or because of drink). Goes back to the graftti thing again, as I would use younger writers to ll in areas on larger pieces.
By exhibiting the collection of Dakis Joannou, we are trying to approach the aesthetics of the trauma in a variety of ways aesthetics which reveal things like traumas, for example, on the level of shock, decay, repetition, destruction of perceptions and psychic injury. Could you describe your artistic position in relation to the themes of the show?

Barnaby Furnas, Before the Cross V, 2006 Barnaby Furnas, Bad Back (Night), 2006

On torture: presenting it as beautifully as you can ... This brings us very close to making life itself (too) aesthetic, so that even terror is levelled down by beauty. What do you say to Stockhausens comment referring to the terror attacks of 9/11: The greatest work of art ever.

There is nothing beautiul in death. Aesthetisizing it (death or life) may be our only way to distance ourselves from it, our only comfort. Unfortunately art is just art. Are you familiar with the phrase whistling past the graveyard? Its like that: feeble but necessary.
Transience and infinity those are big philosophical themes that you tackle again and again. Are your pictures, among other things, an exercise and confrontation in the sense of painting your fears, externalising some inner horror, trying to banish the terror?

Aesthetics of trauma is a chilling phrase. I have been working on a series of paintings on animal skin vellum called Bad Back, where I am attempting to represent torture in as beautiful a way as I can. As for my artistic position thats a tough question. I believe that fear has to be confronted in order to do something, in order to be. Lacan would say, to be you have to get over your phantasm your fantasy of yourself and the main obstacle to that is fear of death. Thats a complicated thing to chew on in an era when people are strapping bombs to themselves. Hows that?

Well yes, but less dramatic then that more like anxiety management. My practice (I hate using that word) is built around asking myself why this? Why on earth does someone like me need to make something like this? So the paintings are self-directed, they are questions that I pose to myself.
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Barnaby Furnas

You once worked as a graffiti artist. I have for a long time wanted to make an exhibition on street art for White Cube. To what extent is this early artistic practice reflected in your current art? Why did you leave the anarchist space of the street?

I got into trouble with the police, my mom, other, darker, elements within the city. The whole thing got ugly and dangerous as writing crews merged with gangs, which defeated the reason I got into writing in the rst place which was safety. Graftti was something I got into in order to nd some alliances in a dangerous city its what I could offer. As an art form it permeates everything I do, particularly the way I approach (misuse) materials. Gratti was a way to get attention that has not changed with my move to canvas.
A question you have probably answered over and over, but one that shouldnt be left out of an interview with an artist who works, to some extent, with abstract expressionism: what is the actual influence of the ABEX artists on your work? What do you think of Jackson Pollock & co? What other artists have influenced you or especially fascinated you? Are there any historical influences from Old Masters?

I had to blow them off in order to not be weighed down by them. I basically decided that Modernism was a grand experiment doomed to fail, but with great achievements in process, materials and scale, so I took those elements and droppped the rest. I wanted to go back the pre-moderns like Courbet, Manet and Gricault. The funny thing is that blowing them off allowed me to appreciate them more, so I do look at them or more specically; Rothko, Newman, Louis, Pollock, of course.
What are you currently working on? What are your future plans?

I have two shows opening in 2008. One in London at Stuart Shave/Modern Art, where I plan to show large paintings of rock concerts paired with the Bad Back/Torture images on animal vellum. The other in New York with Marianne Boesky, where I am thinking of showing Efgies and portraits.

Barnaby Furnas in conversation with Gerald Matt and Angela Stief on the occasion of the exhibition Dream & Trauma. Works from the Dakis Joannou Collection, Athens at Kunsthalle Wien and MUMOK in 2007. The artist participated in the exhibitions Go Johnny Go! The E-Guitar - Art and Myth in 2003 and True Romance. Allegories of Love from the Renaissance to the Present in 2007 at Kunsthalle Wien. Barnaby Furnas, born in 1973 in Philadelphia, lives and works in New York.

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Michael Haneke
Don Giovanni: his addiction to pleasure makes him our contemporary.

Mr Haneke, you have just restaged Mozarts Don Giovanni for the Opra de la Bastille. In a recent interview with Die Zeit you said that you had not chosen Don Giovanni, but rather that Don Giovanni had chosen you. Do you feel any more drawn to Don Giovanni now, shortly after the premiere of your opera?

The offer to stage the opera came from Grard Mortier, and the idea of staging Don Giovanni in Paris in honour of Mozarts 250th birthday was a temptation. I couldnt resist. But I would have to say that Don Giovanni is not the work of my life, or something Ive spent all my life waiting for. In fact, Cos fan tutte would have appealed to me more, but Patrice Chreau had already been commissioned to do that production. What I nd interesting about Cos is the model situation, which reminds me a bit of Marivaux the investigatory character of the thing really appeals to me. Apart from that, the music is to die for. Id have to say, though, that my favourite Mozart opera is Figaro, but Im too scared to have a go at staging it its too hard for me. With Don Giovanni you cant help but fail, which is not necessarily the case with Figaro; dramaturgically speaking, its a perfect machine. Figaro is so incredibly difcult, however, that I lack the experience to embark on such an adventure. I dont consider myself an opera director. I feel at home in lm, but Im only ever a guest in the operatic medium.
Your films often seem like experimental set-ups, like model situations, which are played through to their final consequences. Can you see similar constellations at work in Don Giovanni?

Not really. Don Giovanni is so inherently contradictory, and there are so many different levels to it that the model situations which can be analysed in a relatively straightforward manner in Cos fan tutte become impossible. On the one hand, thats what makes the opera so appealing, but on the other hand, it presents an enormous challenge. Theres no way you can really do the piece justice.
How did the character of Don Giovanni and your image of Don Giovanni change during the course of your work? What stages did the figure undergo in the miseen-scne?

Mise en scne Michael Haneke, Don Giovanni, Opra Bastille, Paris, 2005 110

The only thing that changed is that I nd the music even more beautiful now. Even after the three-hundredth repetition it never bored me. But I couldnt say that my impression of Don Giovanni changed as a result of the production. As a matter of fact, I dont even have an image of Don Giovanni as such. As a director, Im interested in the different character constellations and the question of how they would function today and for a contemporary audience. That was my point of departure. The piece is not least about social differences and power. On the one hand there are the noblemen, and on the
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other hand there are the peasants. The question that preoccupied me was how you can you take the sexual and social constellations that are touched upon in the script seriously; how you can lend them credibility for a contemporary audience. This is most pertinent in the concluding scene: How, in an age when no one believes in god anymore, can I go about dealing with the idea of divine retribution? One mustnt forget that Don Giovanni was written by Mozart two years before the French Revolution. There was quite a lot happening internationally, and that certainly didnt escape Mozarts attention.
The figure of Don Giovanni is distinguished above all by an innately anarchic element. He is someone who breaks all the rules, and, as a nobleman can presumably afford to. Yet why he is devoid of guilt?

I think that this form of amassing or accumulating desire is always a form of compensation. If someone truly lives for pleasure, without the stress of incessantly having to go out and do something, then he or she can do without this form of compensation. This addiction, this furious vitality, derives from a sense of impotence. It is the deance of resisting death.
In Molire we see the emergence of a Don Juan figure who is aimless, who is perpetually restless. Theres a fixation on the here and now, a transience that is coupled with constant haste.

That Don Giovanni is devoid of guilt is merely an assertion. He is proud, but that doesnt mean that he has no feelings of guilt. Every viewer should decide for her or himself how to interpret the gure. How do you portray guilt? You can show it through various forms of aberrant behaviour; you can show someone perpetually beating their breast mea culpa. But if a character, as he is described here with so much pride and vitality, would never admit his feelings to himself or anyone else, even if he were to feel guilty, then thats a different matter altogether. But the piece is denitely about the question of guilt or non-guilt. Theres no way of avoiding it, given that Don Giovanni begins with a murder. And we assume that it is his rst capital crime, even though its never explicitly stated. Why is this Don Giovanni, or the dramaturgy of the piece, such a success? If there were to be no murder at the beginning, then the whole opera would be null and void. It wouldnt be Don Giovanni; it would be Casanova. No doubt that would be entertaining as well, but the essence of Giovanni ultimately revolves around the question of guilt.
Doesnt the sense of guilt presuppose a moral sensibility?

Yes, hes always on the run: from himself, from death, from whatever. Ultimately its a fundamental category of the human condition. What is it about this person that we nd so interesting? We are all consumers in our way of life, tumbling from one pleasure to the next. And anything that might stand in our way gets pushed aside. That being the case, I dont view Don Giovanni as a monstrous gure. The only thing that distinguishes him from the average human being is that he has more courage to show his addiction to pleasure than other people do. But all the characters in the piece are egocentrics anyway.
The literary topos of Don Giovanni/Don Juan has witnessed an endless number of permutations since its creation. From the unscrupulous womaniser, to the calm cynic, to a man driven by desire. Occasionally, as in Roger Vadims film Don Juan tait une femme, Don Giovanni has even done some gender bending. The figure can essentially be situated somewhere between the poles of the dastardly usurper and the melancholic who has lost sight of the world. Doesnt the reality, or the tangibility, of the character get lost among the endless transformations?

I wouldnt want to deny Don Giovanni that. Every human being has a sense of morality shaped by his or her social environment. Whether or not people adhere to it, is another matter. But one can assume that he knows what is good and bad, and that it isnt good to kill someone. Everyone has a fundamental knowledge of the appropriate ways of behaving towards ones fellow human beings even mass murderers have that. An amoral human being is a hypothesis; there is no such thing. It is, so to speak, an empty quantity.
In an interview you once said that you subscribed to the romantic interpretation of Don Giovanni as someone who numbs and disperses.

I must admit that I am not particularly interested in the whole superstructure that the character is burdened with. Neither did I want to get caught up in some kind of staging concept. If youre transposing a piece from the time of its creation to another era, its always going to be complicated. One should always be cautious about updating things, and by that I mean things that are topical or what happens to be in or modern at a particular point in time.You can only try to make the characters and social constellations of a piece relevant to today, which means making it veriable or comprehensible to a contemporary audience. Thats what appealed to me about Don Giovanni, and its what Im generally interested in when I go to the opera.
What exactly did you make contemporary in your Don Giovanni character?

As I said before, his rabid pleasure-seeking makes him our contemporary. Reckless consumption as a principle of life that should no doubt strike us
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as familiar. Apart from that, we changed the 18th century social distinctions nobility/peasantry to refer to the present day: power resides in capital; the discrepancy between poor and rich, between rst and third world, is growing by the hour, as is hatred, the product of this constellation. The fact that divine judgement has shrunk to become nothing more than the revenge of the downtrodden amounts to a loss of grandeur that we have to pay for. It is not my task as a director to morally judge my characters. At best I can try to respond empathically to the situations and the characters in the piece without prejudice. Thats hard enough as it is.
Do you approach your films in the same way, so unreservedly?

rior. Men, on the other hand, simply succumb to female beauty. Thats just the way it is.

Michael Haneke in conversation with Gerald Matt und Thomas Miegang about his production of Don Giovanni at the Opra Bastille in Paris on the occasion of the exhibition Don Juan alias Don Giovanni or two and two equals four or lust is the only swindle I wish permanence at Kunsthalle Wien in 2006. Michael Haneke, born 1942 in Munich, lives and works near Vienna and in Paris. Translation from German to English by Catherine Nichols.

With such navet, you mean? Of course for me thats the only possibility. Otherwise you get completely blocked by fears and prejudices.You have to force yourself to read things without bias and prejudice. Its something you get better at with age and experience.
Did you ever consider staging an opera before Don Giovanni? In comparison to film, opera is determined by music. What is the relationship between music and text in your production of Don Giovanni?
Mise en scne Michael Haneke, Don Giovanni, Opra Bastille, Paris, 2005

You cant treat them as separate entities. Indeed, it is precisely the union of music and text that makes opera so exciting.You have a text and the music that goes with it, and hence the one necessarily interprets the other. The text by itself the libretto is, in most operas, banal. And the music by itself might be beautiful, but what is crucial is how it works in interaction with the theatrical situation, or with the social and psychological situations of the characters. You cant just read a libretto and start working on the mise-en-scne. I worked through the whole of Don Giovanni bar by bar using the piano score and CDs everythings in there. When Im making a lm I construct a storyboard; its the same principle: moving from one take to the next. However, the process of staging an opera is different insofar as the tempo is given by the score. In keeping with the tempo, you have to move people from A to B and from B to C. Thats where its different from theatre, where I can just introduce a huge pause while a character is moving across the stage.
Weve spoken about power and the social components of Don Giovanni. What do you think of the idea of Giovanni as the archetypal womaniser?

I nd it relatively uninteresting. Power always smacks of seduction. Thats why in our society so many ugly old men manage to allure such beautiful young women. Women are more attracted to power than to a pretty exte-

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I like to leave it to the audience to create their own stories and let them decide whether my work is political or not.

How did you actually become an artist, when did your interest in creative forms of expression arise?

I have never thought of being anything else but an artist. I was one of those children who always wished to express themselves with painting and drawing from the very beginning and I wonder if it was good or bad this was highly backed up by my family. During my schooldays I was praised for my painting and inevitably this ended up with me continuing my education at the Academy of Fine Arts in Istanbul, an institution which was founded in 1882 during the Ottoman Empire which followed a French style tradition in teaching. Of course it took me a while to pass beyond the methods of Modernism which was thoroughly proposed by the school and art environment around me, but I was quite controversial and was always looking for my way of genuine expression. My ambition and my extreme wish to follow my own adventure in art gave me the opportunity of doing what I wanted from the beginning.
Your works often involve the situation of women, Turkish women, both historical and contemporary, as well as that of certain groups of women. How much value do you place on the feminist slogan The personal is the political? Do you see yourself as a political artist? How political are your works?

I can easily say that many of my works have political connotations and it is also true that I frequently involve the situation of women in my works. At the same time my references are always personal and local. Regarding the question of whether I am a political artist, I wish to emphasize that my work is multilayered and is always open to new interpretations. The thing that makes me most happy and surprises me is the spectators comprehension and the kind of communication that is established with him/her wherever my work is shown. I receive variable comments about them. While one praises the political references and nds them very direct, the others relate their dramatic and romantic histories to it and interpret it very personally. I like to leave it to the audience to create their own stories and let them decide whether my work is political or not.
Installation view, Galerie im Taxispalais, Innsbruck 1999: Glsn Karamustafa, Courier, 1994

In recent years you have concerned yourself more and more with the film medium. What advantages does moving image have for you compared with objective and installation-type works?

In the mid-1980s I crossed paths with the cinema. I was invited by the very important Turkish lm director, Atif Yilmaz, to be the art director of his new lm which was about the immigration from the rural areas to Istanbul. It was one of the best things that have happened to me. The growing migration from the countryside to the urban areas, resulting in a quickly changing
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city, the new values arising from it and its reection had already left traces on my work and this occasion brought me as an observer in touch with new environments. Then I took on the challenge of shooting my own feature lm together with my writer friend Fruzan. We co-directed My Cinemas, a lm based on one of her stories and immediately received a call from the Cannes Film Festival. This was followed in Toronto, Tokyo, Los Angeles, New York. At the Fajr Film Festival in Iran it received the jurys special Crystal Phoenix award. After such an adventure in lm directing and having experienced the extremely good quality of 35mm lm, to turn back to my own eld and work with the video medium, which only had analogue systems, did not satisfy me at all anymore. But after 2000 with the new digital technology I was again attracted to the moving image. Probably this is why my new work is more video work, but it does not mean that I am completely cut off from working in other mediums.
How much weight do you attach to matters of the aesthetic, the documentary, the narrative and the political in your video work? Does your artistic strategy revolve more around the documentary and analytical or the sensual and narrative?

absolutely resembled the interiors in which I grew up. The Vienna style furniture from my grandmothers house, her kitchen with white lace curtains, my family house which had traces of cubic furniture from the fties were all in those displays. So I decided to contribute four lms in four displays: Folding, where the girl tidies her grandmothers lace, Painting where the girl carelessly paints her nails with red polish, Opening where the girl curiously opens the doors of the grand buffet, Jumping where the girl fervently skips rope. I shot the lms in my own apartment which still had the furniture from my childhood. They were all 3 minute lms, with music especially composed for them and when played together they created a bizarre quartet within the museum. To my belief what made the lms different for the German or any other European audience was not the outlook of the lms, but the heavy feeling inside them from another part of the world, which was alien to them.
Unawarded Performances documents a series of statements by women of Moldavia, who have come to Istanbul and now look after old women from well-off families as illegal unskilled workers. In spite of their lack of legal papers, they earn money to support their families in Moldavia and to finance education for their children. In some of the takes the women are seen from behind, their faces not visible, so that they remain anonymous. In other cases they are filmed in their everyday surroundings along with their female employers. The work reflects political conditions of migration following the disturbances in the east after 1989. Here you make use of the policies of oral history, which relativises the objectivity of official historiography with the subjectivity of affected individuals. You often choose the interview as a form of documentation and give your protagonists a face and a voice. Why is this so well suited to realizing your ideas? What role does fiction play in this?

I think those values that you mention are all included in my video work. The balance from time to time weighs a bit more than the other depending on what I am working on. I cannot say that I plan strict strategies before I begin. The search continues throughout the creative process and when it comes to a point of saturation, I know that I have reached my goal and have to stop.
Your video work Folding shows a girl in a mountain of textiles and cloths, which she folds together endlessly. From one point of view, the visual approach takes on, on an aesthetic level, ornamental beauty, something associated, at least in Western cultures, with the idea of Islamic-Arabian art, while, from another point of view, the girl enclosed in an indoor space and occupied with a typically female activity embodies a traditional gender role. Is this a reflection of reality? Does it illustrate a myth? Is the intention behind it to upvalue tradition or to deconstruct it? What is your personal message?

Folding is a part of a project called Personal Time Quartet which consists of four lms. This work was commissioned for an exhibition in Hannover which took place in several state museums. The artists invited were all women from diverse cultures and we were asked to contribute to the German culture in the city. That proposal was, of course, questioning us also about our own culture. On my rst visit to the venue I was impressed by the displays labelled Typical German Houses. They were German but they
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At the beginning of 2005, I so much wanted to make a lm on the Moldavian Gagauz women. Before 1990 many people in Istanbul were unaware of the Gagauz people, the Orthodox Christian community that lives in Southern Moldavia, who are of Turkish decent, whose ethno-genesis lies with the tribes that inhabited the plains of Central Asia and who speak pure Balkan Turkish. Being under the dominion of the Byzantine, Seljuks, Ottoman, Bulgarians, Romanians and Russians throughout history, they were obliged to live with the resistance against the linguistic, religious and cultural externalisations and pressures. In the last decade of the 20th century with radical changes in regimes they again were initiated by waves of immigration, their knowledge of language becoming a skilful tool for their women, enabling them to nd illegal jobs in Turkey as maidservants. By the beginning of 2005, in southern Moldavian cities such as Komrat Cadyr Lunga or Vulkanesthy nearly every family had one female member working illegally in Istanbul.
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contents and, from time to time, prostituted in order to keep up with the new trade, enabling them to return again to continue with this business. Between 1998 and 2001, I made a series of performances related to this issue called Objects of Desire /100 Dollar Limit with which I travelled to ve different cities. I started my purchases in order to ll my suitcase with 100 dollars, which was the lowest price for a foreign womans body in Istanbul. By smuggling the goods through European customs, I reached my destination where I would present my work, creating the same style of a market space in the venue where I sold my goods, leaving the money I received to a womens association in town. I ended the performance that year the trade ended, turning its players into businesswomen or the other activities like prostitution into organized women trafcking. Around the year 2005, seeing that we still have new situations related to our neighboring countries I focused on the most illegal one, that being the Moldavian Gagauz womens story. The rst impression of the lm may give you a feeling of documentation, but on closer look there is a second entwined story: The camera, while listening to the stories of Gagauz women moves among the details of the house, giving us clues about another womans life in Istanbul, highly bourgeois (as to afford a service like this costs quite an amount), living the last years of their lives, left by their families to the hands of these women. Therefore it is a more complex story than it seems.
For 16 years you were not permitted to leave Istanbul because of your political position. What effects did this time have on you personally? Do you think that your artistic work deals with such themes as migration, emancipation, identity etc. in a different way to that of your Turkish colleagues because of this background? Do themes like borders and crossing them consequently play a special role in your work?
Installation view, Historisches Museum, Hannover, 2000: Glsn Karamustafa, Folding, 2000

Since 1990s I was a keen observer of the changes happening around my geography. I was very interested in the border economies, which started within the permissive atmosphere of glasnost and which boomed with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the change of regimes in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Being the most attractive liberal market around that area, the traces of this new economy were clearly seen in Istanbul. A new economy emerged which was called the suitcase trade that created shuttles of women from neighboring countries such as Russia, Rumania, Bulgaria who came and lled their suitcases in Istanbul, took them back to sell their

Starting in 1971, I was deprived of a passport for 16 years, but those difcult years not only affected me, but the whole country. It was a hard time with two military coups, one after another within nine years (19711980), a time of isolation. Having no chance to connect to the outside world my focus was more on what was going on around me. I witnessed the realities around me and tried to interpret them in my works. Afterwards in the 1990s, when I had the chance to communicate with the world through my art, I immediately received a response. As I later found out, I was dealing, in my solitude, with similar issues as my colleagues in other parts of the world. From time to time I nd the courage to return to the old stories, which I choose from memory.
What was your situation as an artist like in these years in relation to national and

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issues was not easily accepted by the audience, who was still arguing about the beauty of the art work. Of course throughout this period, Turkey was very much connected by its internal problems. Communication with the outer world was totally difcult for artists.
You have been living and working in Istanbul for a long time. The charm of the city seems never to have lost its effect as a source of inspiration and a centre for your life?

Installation view, Nassauischer Kunstverein Wiesbaden 2002: Glsn Karamustafa, Mystic Transport, 1992

international opportunities to exhibit? Was there special interest from certain circles? What role did censorship play?

I like to call myself an artist from Istanbul. I live and work in Istanbul. Like a professional artist in any city in the world, I conduct my relationships from here. I know many of Istanbuls periods. I remember when the population was only one or one and a half million, and we could swim at its beaches. I remember the curfews of the dark times when one couldnt go out at night. And I remember the complaints of the city dwellers, Everything is changing and degenerating, when the growth of the city accelerated. And now I also know that, thanks to its innite energy, it is becoming a focal point as much for artists as for many other groups in the world. Istanbul is a city that constantly changes and always manages to cope very well with these changes. I am deeply involved with this city. It is very easy to see the traces of it in my work.
You are one of the best established Turkish artists. How has the art scene changed since the beginning of your career in Istanbul? What influences and tendencies come from the international exchange of contemporary art?

I had my rst solo exhibition in 1978 in an Istanbul municipality gallery. By that time there were not many private galleries in town and artists had to go through a selection if they wished to make their shows in state or municipality galleries and not all artists had the opportunity. Therefore it was an achievement to have such a space for your rst exhibition. What I exhibited were paintings of my own style, not peintures, and I was rather calling them pictures. They were quite controversial, presenting the new wave of migration to Istanbul and its consequences lling the environment with kitsch and hybrid images; some also spoke about my experiences in prison. At rst those paintings looked different and interesting to people and I sold many of them. Some small private galleries showed interest in my work and I had exhibitions in Ankara and Istanbul for the next years. Further on it became rather difcult as I was not satised with the at surface of painting. I continued with the hybrid material itself and began to create three-dimensional works. Then I lost all my allies. Galleries did not want to work with me and in 1985 I hired a at in an ordinary apartment where I organized a show on my own initiative, bringing together my latest works. They were installations and textile collages, which created a kind of excitement, but not enough condence about the artist from the audience. There was no censorship but a suspicion about them not being artistic pieces because they spoke about ordinary people, daily things and the quickly changing city culture creating its heavy subculture in a very small period. An artist bringing forth such
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The art scene in Istanbul has changed immensely since the beginning of my career. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, while I was a student and a debutante, it was more state oriented and all we had was a yearly painting and sculpture exhibition, where artists had the opportunity to show their work and where the state was only consumer, selecting and buying paintings and sculptures for their ofces and public spaces from those exhibitions. The 1980s were more active as private galleries emerged, as well as the Fine Arts Academy, playing the leading role in bringing new tendencies in exhibitions which they held although it was still all in the hands of the state. Radical changes took place at the Istanbul Biennials. With the third Biennial in 1992, curated by Vasif Kortun, we rst confronted the discussion on cultural differences. It was also a beginning for us to connect ourselves to the international art world as artists. The Istanbul Biennial is ourishing more and more, always adding to the artistic development of the city, creating interaction with the world. The number of art schools has grown, also the number of art museums in the city.
All female artists in the 2005 exhibition Some Stories objected to the words
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Islam and Orient in the title. However, you also said once: The gaze on the Orient hasnt changed since the 16th century. In your opinion, what form should a counter-discourse on the current fashion for New Orientalism take? Can we escape binary models of thought? Will Homi Bhabas Third Space remain only a wish?

I still believe that there is a barrier. I noticed this recently when the world applauded the new government in Turkey as Islamic. It looked more like a wish for it to be Islamic. They were not willing to understand the difcult situation in the country that was created by the military threat and that this governments real function is to defend democracy and secularity. Turkeys relationship to Islam is rather complex. I have always had the impression that the West doesnt wish to understand things in detail.
What are you working on at present?

I am working on a project in Istanbul right now. It will be an installation with video lms. I am installing a movie theater with two stories in the gallery where I will show my own lms. One of them is related to the arguments about the outlooks and current debates about the womans body, whether it should be covered or not or the ethical problems related to it, while the other is about the subculture of the city as I am working with a Punk group.

Glsn Karamustafa in conversation with Gerald Matt and Synne Genzmer in July 2007. The artist participated in the exhibition Some Stories at Kunsthalle Wien in 2005. Glsn Karamustafa, born in 1946 in Ankara, Turkey, lives and works in Istanbul.

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suddenly, a boring room became magical and surprisingly spacious

You are originally from Lithuania but have been living and working in New York for many years. What brought you there?

I came all the way to New York so you could ask me this question! If I were sitting in Lithuania right now, you would never ask me Zilvinas, what keeps you in Lithuania? But seriously, there came a time when I was ready for a new step. I wanted to learn more, to experience more, and New York seemed to be one of the most open-minded cities in the world, a true cultural capital. As someone who had grown up in a country occupied by the Soviets for over half a century, I had a lot of questions about art and was hungry for information. Lithuania is a small country with a population of 3.2 million people. I wanted to become an artist, not just a Lithuanian artist. Ironically, ten years later, I am more of a Lithuanian artist than ever, seeing as how these two words are always appearing after my name! To be Lithuanian has become a signicant part of my identity, and always will be; Ive come to embrace this.
One material you like working with is the tape from video cassettes, quite an unusual work material, which you use as an optical-graphic element as well as a sculptural, space-shaping one. What is so special the tape and what makes it so extraordinarily suitable to your work? How did you discover it as a work material?

Video tape has perfect sculptural qualities; it looks ephemeral but is actually a durable material, at once super light, micro thin and highly exible. Its pure black, yet has a shiny surface that reects light and becomes even more animated when set in motion.Videotapes inexpensive, replaceable and easily recognizable by everybody as a familiar commodity, yet at the same time it has the ability to be perceived as an abstract line. It has connections with the idea of time and memory, and I like the fact that its a medium being pushed aside now by new technologies. Very soon, perhaps, there will be no such thing as magnetic tape. So there is a moment of nostalgia imbedded in it already. Before videotape, I worked with lm as a sculptural material and back in Lithuania I worked with microlm (already extinct!). My piece Painting from Nature (1994) is a large-scale installation with 35mm lm rolls.
You explained your work Flying Tape very vividly to me at the Cinq Milliards dAnne exhibition in the Palais de Tokyo in Paris. The fascination emanating from this installation is closely connected with the play of gravity. Ventilators arranged in a circle make a spliced video tape dance ceaselessly in the air in a circular formation. Weightlessness and poetry are two key words that are often
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The installation has a natural, aggressive soundtrack produced by the fans. It anchors the ballet-like movement of the tape and lls the physical space like natural wind would. You hear the fans before you step into the room and you still hear them after you leave. The piece is engaging and interactive, but not in a robotic-computerized kind of way. Once in a while it touches visitors, and they touch it too, like a friendly animal. The setting is simple, limited to two visual elements: the giant loop of magnetic tape and a circle of industrial fans.
An important element in your work seems to be the illusion of monumentality, which you generate with geometric bodies that, however, are almost de-materialised, coming close to a purely optical existence and demonstrating an extreme material lightness. An example would be your installation Columns in the Spencer Brownstone Gallery. There you structured the space with columns of video tapes, around which the visitor could walk, could be felt and touched as a sculptural-architectural body in the experience of space; this was a transformation of the space which constituted itself partly in a optical-graphic way but was not pure illusionism in the sense of an optical illusion. What makes playing with these oppositions so exciting for you personally?

Installation view, Palais de Tokyo, Paris 2006: Zilvinas Kempinas, Flying Tape, 2004

used in connection with it. Would you explain once again how you thought of this work?

Flying Tape is generally a kinetic sculpture with the ability to change its shape and position in space with every split second. If one were to take a billion photos of it, there would not be a single identical image. These characteristics are common for living creatures but unusual for an artifact. While constantly moving among the room, the tape is able to keep its circular structure and never lose it. Its a self-balancing sculpture, able to stay entirely in mid air. The idea of gravity, of course, is an important part of the piece. As a natural force, gravitys a comparatively weak one, yet eventually everything and everybody must succumb to it. I see Flying Tape as a rebel, dancing against the universal direction. Its movement is slightly hypnotizing and you might lose a sense of time while looking at it. The wind from the fans is an invisible element here, but you feel it with your whole body when you are in the room. You understand immediately that its the wind from the fans that carries the sculpture. Its not a pedestal, not a wire, not a rope, not even a oor it is an invisible matter, a current, a vortex produced by primitive wind-making machines. Magnetic tape is simply surng the waves of the circulating air and revealing them in a three-dimensional diagram against the white of the gallery walls.
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I nd Columns more difcult to comment on than Flying Tape. There are some delicate visual and physical effects, which should be experienced in person instead of described verbally or even with the help of photos. When you walk through Columns, your peripheral vision is involved and your sense of scale and space is evoked. They are not kinetic sculptures, but are optically animated by the movement of the viewers, which creates a rotating effect. And there is an absolutely perfect verticality of the columns, extending from the oor all the way up to the ceiling, so there is the visual occupation of an entire volume of space, not just a part of it. Its an environment, not only a display of objects. By the way, these columns are not columns at all. They are actually the opposite, at least from the idea of columns as architectural elements that carry weight instead they hang from the ceiling like chandeliers. And you can see through them, from anywhere in the gallery. The previously mentioned rotating effect is not just a pure optical illusion, because the stretched lines of videotape actually serve a constructive function in the system of the installation.
Do you conceive your installations for a particular space or is there an idea which is then adapted for a certain exhibition venue? In other words, is it the manipulation of spatial perception in the foreground or rather the object quality of the object within its own system of values, producing a particular interaction between space and objects within that space?

Architectural space is a signicant part of my work and I always use it to its

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full potential. For some pieces, certain space proportions are critical, and it must look as though the piece were made for the particular space. But most often the core idea is abstract and independent from given circumstance. Usually, its a mathematically calculated adaptation to a certain space. In the past, however, I have done a few strictly site specic projects (time specic as well), which cannot be recreated anywhere else. These really are some of my favorite works and dear to me, since I know I will never be able to repeat them again.
The materialized lines of your minimalist installations remind me in a certain way of the work of Fred Sandback, who arranged acrylic thread into formal spatial figures and who, so to speak, made the (geometric) line spatial. Are there any artistic affinities there?

the past spent their entire careers developing ideas and forming entire movements. Not to use these brilliant perceptions would just be disrespectful.
For your video work Bike Messenger you cycled throughout New York City with four cameras attached to your bicycle, recording a constantly 360-degree panorama while riding. Here again the element of movement is important both for the work and for its reception. Could you explain this project more in detail? Specifically, any connections that may exist between this and other works weve been discussing?

The afnities are rather supercial. Besides the idea of the line in space, which is essential in his work but not so much in mine, I see only differences. His ascetic approach feels claustrophobic to me. Fred Sandback is a great artist and I respect his work, but I am not inspired by it. Speaking of a thread in space, however, I do recall my very rst installation! I was six or seven years old, waiting for my parents to come home. I prepared a surprise for them by stretching mothers whole supply of wool yarn across and throughout the entire apartment by tying it on every piece of furniture and wherever else I could I was really excited by the idea that my parents would not be able to enter the room due to the wool spider-web covering the entire space! This beautiful wool yarn, hand-made with love by my grandmother, had no value to me until it went up in space. And then suddenly, a boring room became magical and surprisingly spacious, the thread was no longer merely wool yarn, it became something else. I didnt know I had made my Sandback or my Duchamp or whatever you might call it of course, it was just a childish game, of course, but this metamorphosis of the thread and the excitement of conquering the space by something so insignicant entrenched itself in my memory and apparently affected my interests many years later.
The way your installations recall works of Op Art, whose optical effects you translate into three-dimensionality, is often mentioned. The association of space optics seems to be a central aspect of your artistic strategy, where you mainly use graphic effects of white surfaces and black lines. A chance resemblance to certain artistic movements?

Bike Messenger is another articial environment with a strong visual aspect. The idea is simple, as in all my work. In this case, I collected images and sounds of New York City by placing four video cameras on my bike and riding it non-stop for an hour. Later, I recreated this experience by projecting synchronized raw video material on four gallery walls. The result is like an incredibly long, 360-degree snapshot of the city. A few decades later this project will look like a time capsule from November 17, 2005, 3:30 4:30 p.m. Its connections with my other works are more by contrast than by similarity. Bike Messenger was originally installed at the back of the Spencer Brownstone Gallery, while Columns was installed in the front. So, two very different installations were set up back to back, complementing each other Columns was vertical, mathematical, architectural, silent, still, black, and white. The installation took up the entire space, the illusion of rotation appeared only if you moved throughout the columns, videotape was used as a sculptural material, and the piece was indoors. After you walk through Columns to Bike Messenger, everything suddenly changes. The piece is outdoors and totally horizontal, speeding through the streets of Manhattan. Everything is rapidly moving around you, all colors and shapes are racing through the screens, and sounds of the city streets reproduced by eightchannel audio tracks are bombarding visitors from all corners of the room. Some people feel dizzy and sea-sick watching Bike Messenger. They leave this chaotic room and walk back through the silent and translucent Columns.
As an accompanying text for Flying Tape you chose an excerpt from Dr. Chaim Henry Tejmans The Fundamental Forces. United Nature Theory. Wave Theory. Unified Field Theory by, a natural scientist concerned with the metabolic nature of electromagnetism, gravity and nuclear forces, as well as the circulation of streams of energy that emerge from them. By aligning your works with his, you invite an interpretation based on natural science. What exactly is this connection, in more detail?

Yes, I use elements of Surrealism, Abstract Art, Pop Art, the idea of the Readymade, Op Art, Minimalism,Video Art, Kinetic Art and perhaps a few more events could be on the list if I were to think harder. Great artists of

Scientic hypotheses are somewhat similar to works of art. In fact, they are often more inspiring to me than art pieces. I see poetry in the attempt to explain the unknown, to connect the dots. Its an alternative world of vision
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and the wall. Light comes through this tiny gap and creates the illusion of a sphere, and since the wall is gently lit from the side, it reveals its texture and resembles the surface of the moon. One eye looking into the tube-telescope has no stereovision, therefore it cannot calculate the distance and the moon appears to be oating in space. So the moral of Moon Sketch is: art adds nothing to our empirical knowledge of the world, but sometimes it allows us to see a glimpse of the universe just by staring into a wall.

Zilvinas Kempinas in conversation with Gerald Matt in September 2007 prior to the artists exhibition at Kunsthalle Wien project space in 2008. Zilvinas Kempinas, born in 1969 in Plunge, Lithuania, lives and works in New York. Zilvinas Kempinas, Moon Sketch, 2005

and fantasy, where a sense of beauty plays an undeniably signicant role. I chose this specic text because it resonated with Flying Tape in an indirect way; I saw peculiar overlaps, which made Flying Tape look as if it were the proof to some scientic phenomenon, which, of course, its not! And the text played along with the concept of the entire event at Palais de Tokyo. Also, Dr. Tejmans Wave Theory is accompanied by a number of his funky red and blue pencil drawings! I dont know how Dr. Tejman ranks as a scientist, but he certainly is a visionary. He presents a picture of the world, which may not be a bulletproof truth, but it does make a kind of sense to me.
And my last question: what do we learn about the moon from Moon Sketch?

I am afraid I have nothing to tell you about the moon that you do not already know! But perhaps I can show you a drawing you have never seen before. Like most of my works, Moon Sketch is meant to be seen in person, not to be described. But I can explain what it is and how it works. There was a group show at the Spencer Brownstone Gallery, which was basically works on paper (and out of paper) by gallery artists. I decided to use traditional drawing materials such as paper and charcoal. I covered an entire sheet of paper with charcoal so it became pitch-black, and then rolled it into a tube, dark side facing in. I hung the tube on the wall by a long wire with one end of the tube pointing directly to the wall. The other end (the one sticking out towards the viewer) I covered with a small piece of cardboard and used an empty 35mm slide frame to make a peephole to look inside. So now the drawing remotely resembles a telescope absurdly pointing straight into the wall. However, when you look through this paper telescope, you can clearly see an image of the moon shining in a night sky. The moon in fact is nothing but a natural crack between the paper tube
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As an individual cannot remove or separate himself from his social and cultural environment, his perception of events is no doubt tied to them.

Today, the loss of self-determination dominates discourse on the relationship between the individual and the globalized world in which different cultures still define different frontiers. Your video Frozen Memory fathoms the socio-cultural codifications of marriage and death two events that mark breaks or transitions, especially in Muslim culture; although the work exposes a central ganglion of collective clichs by focusing on emotions hidden beneath the surface and the visual recollections resulting from them, it also deals with identity as a product as well as a mirror of ones immediate vicinity. Do Islamic traditions, their social and religious codes, provide a direct or indirect frame of reference for your practice as an artist?

Amal Kenawy, Still from You Will Be Killed, 2006

As an individual cannot remove or separate himself from his social and cultural environment, his perception of events is no doubt tied to them. Thus, my exploration of the subjects of birth, marriage, and death is inuenced by my societys/cultures views on them. While it would be dismissive to deny or underplay the inuence that Islamic traditions and codes of behavior have on the customs and rules of a given Muslim society, it must be recognized that Islam is only one determining factor in this societys social regulations. To say that Islamic traditions or codes provide a direct or indirect frame for my work would be to lump Islamic countries/societies into one extremely simplied and generalized category, overlooking the diversity of Muslim societies. Even Arab societies differ greatly, with Algeria, for instance, bearing little resemblance to Syria. My work then is not an expression of Islam or the Muslim world or even the Arab world; rather, my art reects Egyptian society, as a product of its socio-cultural, political, and economic climate as well as of its cultural heritage and history.
The complexity of the female identity and the intense, intimate exploration of dialectical, even parallel, emotional and intellectual spaces constitute a central field for your artistic practice. Reviews of your work relate it to various feminist artists such as Louise Bourgeois, Eva Hesse, or Carolee Schneemann. Are there certain artistic positions you feel akin to? Or in other words, which artists and traditions are important for you?

I would not say that my work has a conscious feminist direction. It is pertinent to all human beings, not only to women; its main concern is to explore the emotions that are felt by humans, including love and pain, as well as how experiences are perceived in life. My art, as mentioned above, deals with the inuence of society on humans, on how society affects their understanding of certain events or feelings. Most societies have ideas about gender differences that are incorporated into their values and codes of conduct. This is one of the reasons why one could say there are differences between the way women emotionally respond/react to experiences and the way men do. Thus, gender may be said to play an indirect and unconscious role in my
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work but it is denitely not a central one. That said, my views on my own inner world and the world that surrounds me, which are expressed through my artwork, are denitely affected by my identity as a woman. With regards to my work being compared to that of the female artists mentioned above, I see this comparison as being drawn mainly for two reasons: rst, a connection has been made based on what has been perceived as our shared use of certain symbols or imagery. However, our actual use of these symbols, the contexts we place them in, and what they signify, differ. One cannot talk about a similarity in my use of symbols and the above mentioned artists because doing so would be like talking about a part of our work and ignoring how this part ts into the whole. Secondly, I believe this link can be largely attributed to my being a woman. I participated in an exhibition entitled Nafas, which, it was stressed, provided its viewers with a look at the work of eight female artists from the Islamic World. If the exhibition had featured the work of eight male artists, the gender of the participating artists would have been considered a subsidiary detail and not a denitive feature of the exhibition.
The space of your early works was mostly an abstract space of imagination. Your recent work You will be killed focuses on structures and recollections of a real space. The rooms you show in your video were used as a hospital in colonial times: you tell us about the place and your dismay at the traces of violence to be felt even after thirty years. In the video, the materiality of these rooms dissolves beneath the superimposition of abstract drawings, symbolic archaic motifs, and your portrait. The sequence of metaphoric pictures sketches a self-portrait by inscribing connotations onto the hospital walls. You show the social space as a network of more or less anonymous relations of power: are you alluding to certain political events here?

Amal Kenawy, Still from The Room, 2004

continuously repressive attitude concerning the establishment of a theoretic critical discourse. Since the mid-1990s, private initiatives by the Townhouse Gallery, the Mashrabia Gallery, and others have created a public interest in contemporary art. This entailed an unheard-of and dynamic change for the younger generation. How do you position yourself within these local structures? Could you tell us a little about your methods of networking with regional and international artists, curators, and cultural institutions?

As you mentioned before,You will be killed is set in a real place/location a military hospital. Fantastic images and spaces are projected onto the walls of this actual space, converting the hospital into an art space. The location has an undeniably intense history: it is a place that has witnessed conicts/relations of power and violence. The superimposition of my portrait onto the walls of the hospital emphasizes that this is my personal interpretation of the place. The work however is not about a specic event; it is about violence in general, whether on a personal or political level. It deals with instances of violence, locations that have witnessed these instances, and the effect that these instances have had on those whove lived through them.
Compared to other countries of the Near East, Egypt seems to be more aware of the continuity of its culture and its deeply rooted traditions. Nevertheless, the development of a Modernist movement was blocked by structural limitations in academic education, insufficient institutions for artistic exchange, as well as a
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Up until now, and even now, most galleries and art institutes in Egypt are nationally supported by the Ministry of Culture. I am against this centralization in the eld of art, against the control of education, resources, opportunities, and even ideas that produces artwork made with a purpose in mind. As you know, since the mid-1990s, a number of independent galleries have opened up, and private as well as individual efforts are being made. Artists are no longer linked to a certain gallery. A number of institutions have also emerged, offering artists greater opportunities, more choice, and complementing the activities of up-and-coming galleries. At the same time, the increasing international interest in the Middle East and Muslim societies has carried out a positive effect on Egyptian artists, and the region as a whole. It is this combination of local developments and international interest mentioned above that has increasingly led art in Egypt to become, on an international level, a change that bears on all Egyptian artists, including myself.
Your work has been shown in numerous exhibitions. You have not only participated in the Biennials of Singapore, Dakar, Cairo, and Alexandria, but also in thematic group exhibitions such as Africa Remix, Nafa in Berlin in 2006, and Some Stories in Vienna in 2005. These curations are primarily themed around culture or, more specifically, on cultural dialog. How do tendencies towards generalization or geographic standardizations affect the perception and positioning

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of your work? And do you see Egypt as a country which is still dissociated from mainstream international art?

There are certain criteria which I use when making a decision as to whether or not to participate in these thematic exhibitions. First and foremost, I look at the title and theme of the exhibition and see if and how it is structured. As I mentioned, topics related to the Middle East and Muslim societies have become extremely fashionable/trendy. I have used the many thematic exhibitions, which often times tend to make generalizations and geographic standardizations that have resulted from this fad, to exhibit my work. I make a point however of presenting something contrary to what is expected, contrary to clichs. I do so by focusing my work on a subjective level, by producing art that looks at the intimate. I believe this is an effective way of changing existing perceptions and misconceptions. As for your question concerning Egypts disassociation from mainstream international art, I believe its once again due to the large amount of control exerted by national institutions over the art scene. This monopoly has led to a lack of serious research, very few international artists working or exhibiting in Egypt, as well as a small number of international exhibitions being mounted in the country.
Your means of artistic expression comprises an enormous range of different media: you have been a director, scriptwriter, and actress rolled into one. Drawing, sculpture, photography, animation, video, installation, and performance seem to be part of a continuing and multitudinous project which resists the categorizing grid of Western norms. You first studied design in Cairo, and it was only later that your education also included film and painting. This diversified focus has obviously determined your language as an artist; what do you think, therefore, about the general education for artists in Egypt? More specifically, what kinds of options or support networks exist for teachers and students? Lastly, since video is a very young medium in contemporary Egyptian art, were there any difficulties you were or are confronted with concerning the technically intricate production of your works?

In general, I would like to point out that art schools mainly focus on the academic aspects of art and do not cover/teach contemporary art. I believe that a greater importance should be placed on art educators/teachers. Formerly, teachers were sent abroad so that they could keep up-to-date with the developments of the international art scene and maintain a link between Egypt and the rest of the world. As I have mentioned earlier, there are private and independent efforts being made towards change but they are just not enough. In regards to my working with the time-consuming and technicallydemanding medium of video, especially in Egypt, I nd the biggest challenge to my work is that theres simply not enough variance of supporters who are endorsing independent lms and cinema. I prefer to produce independent lms in a setting without support than to be controlled or censored by a backing institution.
Since 1997, you have realized eleven projects together with your brother Abdel Ghany, projects for which you have received numerous awards like the Pro Helvetica Grant (2004) and the Leonardo Global Crossings Award (2005). Though your approach is based on a decidedly subjective autobiographical symbolism, you describe the collaboration with your brother as a creative process encompassing all phases of the work, from the development of the concept, including structural-visual considerations, to the production of the work itself. Could you describe in more detail how such an introspective and intimate form of expression can be realized in conjunction with another person? Finally, in what way has your method of work changed since you have developed and realized your projects without your brother?

When I was three years old, I started designing clothes. When I grew a little older, I came to realize that I wanted to work in, and combine, drawing and design. I eventually studied lm and design. The program was very academically focused and was not very strong. From there, I moved onto painting but I encountered the same problems in my study of it. I was always working and researching alongside my studies, beginning in my rst year of training and continuing up until I left school. This was an attempt on my behalf to reinforce my education. For these efforts, I received the UNESCO prize at the Cairo Biennial and the rst prize at the Salon of Youth exhibition in Egypt.
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My collaboration work began with Abdel Ghany in 1997. This was actually at the beginning of my career as an artist. We collaborated on everything, from producing our work to exhibiting it. Our collaboration was not limited to a technical cooperation; we liased on the ideas behind our work as well as the concepts expressed through it. Such collaboration was novel at the time. Our art focused on the relationship between man and his surroundings or nature. The last work that I created with Abdel Ghany was Frozen Memory. My work has changed since then, but I would not say that had to do with our separation. Frozen Memory was an extension of the subjects we had previously dealt with, but it took a small step in a more intimate direction. After nishing that work, I began to question the purpose of my art. I realized then that art is a tool for expression not a nal project to be exhibited whenever and wherever possible. I also became aware that I wanted to express my ideas on more personal topics, such as how experiences or surroundings affect an individual or how, conversely, an individual reects his surroundings. Since then, my art has moved in this direction.

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You will be showing the works Frozen Memory, The Room, The Purple Artificial Forest, You will be killed at the Darat al Funun in Amman. Could you outline your concept for the presentation? As both the dramaturgical organization and the time structure of your work make us think of a finger repeatedly pushing the STOP button at random, what role does narration, however fragmentary, and narrative structures play when you prepare a presentation?

The presentation of my work in this solo exhibition outlines the developments and transformations that have taken place in it. It displays how my works have affected one another. The combination of them in one location is like the combination of my diaries to make a story. As for the question on narrative structure, the chosen progression of narrative and the rhythm of time in a work most certainly have a function. I edit my tapes in a way to make a story out of my footage, to bring across a message to my viewer, or to invoke in him a certain emotion. Not all of my works are fragmentary. For example, The Room has an organized narrative; it also conveys a message. My last two projects however have moved in a more fragmentary direction. They are both cut up to disturb; they are carefully edited, with their scenes and music meticulously arranged, leaving the viewer with a sense of visual and aural discomfort. In You Will Be Killed, there is not even a specic melody. This technique of cutting produces a sense of anxiety in the viewer, a sense that strongly explores violence, pain, and fear.

Amal Kenawy in conversation with Gerald Matt on the occasion of the exhibition Amal Kenawy at The Khalid Shoman Foundation Dart al Funun, Jordan 2007. The artist participated in the exhibition Some Stories at Kunsthalle Wien in 2005. Amal Kenawy, born in 1974 in Cairo, lives and works in Cairo.

Amal Kenawy, Non Stop Conversation, 2007 140 141

Zenita Komad
I use myself as material and slip into thoughts as if into roles

During the term of the exhibition Living and Working in Vienna II in the main exhibition room of the Kunsthalle Wien, you gradually let a project develop, which was connected in more ways than just its subject matter with The Legend of the Grain, concerning the invention of chess: beginning with an empty chessboard measuring 8 x 8 metres, Operation Casablanca grew exponentially, so to speak, in several direction, not only climaxing in a chess opera but also generating a whole series of events relating to chess including a grand masters tournament a video, a cubic catalogue, multiple games and, of course, 30 sculptured chess figures. All this was realised within clearly defined time and budget limits. What secret strategy was behind this operation?

I can best describe that by using a snowball system. The foundations of this work were basically laid in my childhood. Chess and music were and are of existential signicance in my musician-parents home. I have spent many, many hours watching my parents and my grandfather play chess. My mother often told me The Legend of the Grain when I was a child. My approach to chess-and-music was originally irrational, biographical and subjective but my triumph was to come in working out the story as a child I felt a huge, almost unconquerable respect for chess and music. My intuitively based mind turned towards rationality only from a distance. In the course of working on the piece I became aware that a chess player per se has to act in a highly intuitive fashion. Lothar Schmid told me about the famous game Spassky versus Fischer in Reykjavik, where he acted as referee. He was deeply concerned not to think the game through in order to avoid any possible transference of thought. Again and again I have come across spiritual moments of scientic dimensions. I love and admire the work of the composers Bernhard Lang and Nadir Gottberg, and so I approached them both with a request to compose music to my libretto. And the snowball grew and grew. Stefan Lfer was willing to organise a grand masters tournament. The youngest chess player, Arik Braun, was the winner. Regina Pokorna played blindfold against you, where my objects were really chased all around the eld ... and the snowball went on growing. I had a fabulous crew and a totally fantastic team. The rest is a matter of hard work, powers of endurance and a strict denial of doubt. The budget was extremely tight, and so one can see that an iron will can sometimes move mountains, for creating a ship does not mean hoisting the sails, forging the nails and reading the stars but arousing joy for the ocean.
Zenita Komad, Operation Casablanca, 2005

Improvisation clearly plays an important role in your artistic work and the word improvisation conceals the Latin term proviso/providere, meaning pre-vision. Is there a pre-vision in the course of (artistic) actions?

I work out my productions very precisely in advance. An extremely strict action framework is developed during intense rehearsals. I do not improvise.
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If some moments want to make that impression with a certain lightness, every step has been planned and worked out with absolute precision. Precision opens up certain freedoms for the actors, because their roles t them like perfect custom-made suits.
At the chess opera project mentioned at the beginning, it soon became clear to me that Zenita Komad does not only live and work in Vienna but also in what you call Zenita City a virtual city with a large number of real inhabitants and clearly an excellent communications system. How is Zenita City managed and administered? Who acquires civil rights and who has to leave and why?

One feels like a released prisoner who perceives in astonishment the endlessness of the ocean. Zenita City accommodates souls and intimate friends, freaks, thinkers, enlightened beings, word specialists and thought doctors, providers of joy, builders of castles in the sky, inventors of jokes, laughter muscle masseurs, total art workers and many more, not to forget that Zenita City was made up of Liebien (Lovia) and Nettland (Niceland).
In that case, something you once said I doubt everything for ideological reasons also applies to politics in Zenita City, and it is reflected in a form that can be directly received in your text-images, which often consist of combinations of quotations from various sources formed into a kind of visual poetry, in that they are often interlocked in contradictory ways. For example one says: Religion is dangerous, those who dont resist end on the cross, or: God is (not) nothingness. And then again, sentences emerge that have a whiff of ideology, even if it is only something pacifist: Stop Word War, or: How can we dance when the World (is) burning while in the last image the word burning could also be read as boring, or, more precisely, as both. That almost looks a bit cynical, even though I would not view cynicism as a major component of your work and your utterance. What is your attitude to our society and, in particular, to the society of art? How do you find your text fragments and quotations? Deliberately looking for them or spontaneously finding/inventing them?

I agree with this observation: cynicism doesnt suit me very well. I have an undogmatic attitude, looking for insights and aspects of the real: one aspect contradicts another. But in reality as a whole all these aspects are accurate; they mix with each other and become one. A dogma has to be self-consistent. I dont want to convert anyone to a particular belief. I want to convey a vision, not dogmas.
Recently trunks and eyes and aerial roots have been sticking out from your pictures, growing into the room. The psychologist August Ruhs calls these works root sculptures, and in his opinion they dont only take the root topos with its various connotations as subject matter but they also point out that the artists
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Zenita Komad, Alle Tassen im Schrank, 2006 145

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subject is always also themselves, parts of their own selves or else manifestations of their desire deposited in their visual designs. The urge to secure their identity and their anchorage in the world, in other words their urge to be at home somewhere and put down roots, is doubtless one of the primary needs of mankind. The topos of the search for identity now goes through all the arts and contemporary reflections. Are your root sculptures (for example) a contribution to that from your point of view?

I nd August Ruhss interpretation very interesting. This cycle of works came about in a dispute with the regions of existence that are invisible to us. One theory says that every living being has invisible root canals into other spheres. This idea appealed to me because it comes before the need of the earths dwellers to put down roots. A young tree that is exposed to strong winds will grow strong roots. With its roots the tree draws water and nutrients into itself so that it can put out blossoms and fruit. The deeper its roots go, the more stable it is in the world. It is an attempt to make the invisible visible.
You grew up with theatre; your mother is an opera singer; you yourself sometimes work as a director. What is the meaning of staging to you, especially in relation to directness and therefore truth?

Sadly my mother has not sung for a long time. I have vague memories of her Schubert and Mahler songs ... she made it possible for me to have a wonderful childhood: as a child of the theatre to go to rehearsals and performances, to look down from the y loft, to inhale the smells of the make-up room all that was much more exciting for me that going to kindergarten or school. To get a beer coaster with the words, Oh you precious child, not yet at your zenith scribbled on it by Lampersberg; to travel through the sky with poets in ying rooms; and to get a direct link to the Easter bunny from the conductor in the orchestra pit made my childhood years very entertaining. When I had to enter adult life by force of necessity, it was rather the un-staged things that were unfamiliar to me, and sometimes even incomprehensible. The truth ... I strive for intensity and lots of little truths bound together go to make quite a big one. For nothing is truer or less true. Only more or less effective.
You once said that you have an affinity for Viennese Actionism and that you also know some of its representatives well. For you, is Viennese Actionism a historical matter or do you find intentions located there that are still relevant, and, if so, what are they? Has your active interest in actionism been fruitful for your work? Do you see any new actionist tendencies in the contemporary field of art?

Zenita Komad, Omphallus Der Nabel der Welt, 2007

that is never the case.) And then I discovered that the more knowledge one acquires, the bigger the eld on the unknown and the unsayable or unknowable becomes (one of my text-images: Wissen ist eine komplizierte Sache Liebe auch [Knowledge is a very complicated matter, and so is love]). Actionism is a form of psychic and physical cleaning through effective shocks. There the post-war misery, the pain, the desperation and the pressure of suffering are strong features of the act of liberation. And they did a good job, right! My generation developed a completely new approach, which, of course, has its origins in this historical tradition. The pipe has already been passed on. After Actionism came Operationism. Perhaps we are ready for a forgettism of isms. Ginseng to Actionism! Your health!!!

At one time I thought that everything had already been said. (Fortunately
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At the exhibition Superstars, where you took part with a photo booth called Zenita City in the Kunsthalle Wien, you said in an interview: I dont want to stand in the centre of things, and: Perhaps the real goal is to get away from the ego. Good art should have nothing to do with the artist. How do you reconcile this personal attitude on the one hand with your artistic career, which brought you to international art fairs and famous exhibition halls at the age of 27, and, on the other hand, with your private and artistic surroundings such as in Zenita City where famous names walk in and out of the best salons?

Of course my work is meant for an audience and should be seen, be present and have an effect. I think strong work lifts itself out of the accustomed patterns of thought and perception. Cutting the umbilical cord from a work of art is what enables a masterful control of material. From the moment it is nished, the work is autonomous, and my job is then to ensure the best possible administration. And to take responsibility ... and, of course ... to carry on. ... As far as that is concerned, I have to draw a strong dividing line: my work has to stand at the centre of things, not me. I believe in a power much higher than me is a written image that arose in this connection.
Even so, you also seem to stage your appearance in public. To what extent do you work in your role as an artist with your outer appearance as part of your artistic attitude?

Galerie Krinzinger, Vienna 2006: Zenita Komad, ich liebe euch!

The fact that even people who know me reasonably well sometimes dont recognise me because they think I have changed so much has often puzzled me. I suppose my thought processes, moods and conditions become visible very quickly. However, I use myself as material and slip into thoughts as if into roles. And then there is usually the matching dress, the matching shoes, and a hat is usually necessary as well. I like transformation; transformation is something extremely pleasant and refreshing. Disguises are very helpful in releasing playful energies. I think that has something to do with the joy of life and the need for beauty.
What are you working on at present? What are your plans for the immediate future?

MY WORK COMES FROM MY HEART. MY RESOURCE IS INSIDE, THE INSIDE INCLUDES AND DESCRIBES THE OUTSIDE. THE POWER GOING THROUGH ME DOESNT ASK, IT DIAGNOSES, DECIDES AND DETERMINES. (D-D-D) (WE DEFINE THE FUTURE THROUGH OUR THOUGHTS AND ACTIONS. F=T+A) NOW IS THE KEY!

Zenita Komad in conversation with Gerald Matt in August 2007. The artist participated in the exhibitions Living and Working in Vienna II at Kunsthalle Wien in 2005 and Superstars. The Celebrity Factor. From Warhol to Madonna at Kunsthalle Wien and BA-CA Kunstforum in 2005. Zenita Komad, born in Klagenfurt, Austria in 1980, lives and works in Vienna. www.zenita-city.at

At present I am Artist in Residence in the MAK Schindler House in Los Angeles. I am in an exciting development phase, working on an objects, pictures, drawings and formulae.

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So if everything I have done seems so theatrical it is like that because everything around me is a bit theatrical. And to demonstrate that I have decided to be baroque.

Last year at the Berlin Biennial you opened the The Midget Gallery. Was this gallery reserved for vertically challenged visitors? A privilege? A provocation? Or simply cynicism?

Katarzyna Kozyra, Still from Cheerleader, from In Art Dreams Come True, 2006 150

A good question, because it also has answers along with it. When I heard that the Berlin Biennial was to take place along the Auguststrae and that the curators were opening a fake Gagosian Gallery on this street, I understood that the Biennale wants to mix quite frankly with the commercial galleries. I began to look for a site for my own private gallery in the Auguststrae. Why should the Biennial be allowed to do something like that and not an artist? When I was unable to nd a suitable place (German landlords are suspicious of anything that doesnt t conventional patterns), I decided in favour of a little gallery without a site, even more for a nomadic gallery. So my Polish dwarf friends, who helped with my last video lm The Winters Tale came to Berlin for the opening days of the Biennial in order to go along the Auguststrae with a logo, The Midget Gallery, on a sign and a little screen with that particular video lm running on their backs. I tried to persuade German dwarfs to take part in this action, but they didnt want to join the Polish actors clearly they dont like appearing in public. Was my action reserved for the little people? It certainly was, for people of ordinary sizes had to bend down to see the lm and to talk with the little art gallery people. It was a privilege, because I had decided to invite myself to the Biennial, to squat at the event or, in other words, to occupy the Auguststrae. It was a provocation, because I wanted, like the curators at the Biennial, to irt with the commercial art-world, but without an ofcial, institutional invitation. And certainly it was also an act of cynicism. But not directed against the little people but rather against little ideas, which you often encounter in the art world, more interested, as it is, in economics than in culture. And perhaps I have a touch of sadism about me. I enjoy upsetting the art world as well as the public, even though that may not seem to be the case at rst sight. The Midget Gallery later went to the Frieze Art Fair in London, where the midgets were thrown out by the director in person. Then the gallery appeared at Art Basel, to choose and purchase an artwork for an art collector. Now my little friends are trying to make contact with the artist they liked most there. The hope that the artist, to whom they have opened their hearts, will be able to produce something for them so that they can buy it commercially. And if they are not able to buy an entire work they hope to persuade the artist to let them buy at least the feet of one of his duck sculptures. We will see how this fairytale goes on.
Catchword fairytale: One of your projects is titled In Art Dreams Come True. You
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Katarzyna Kozyra, Still from The Winters Tale, 20052006, from In Art Dreams Come True

have taken on quite a lot for the sake of art you changed sex, played war and learned singing or did art rather do something for you? In Art Dreams Come True: also your personal truth? Does art make it possible for you to do things that you would not be allowed to do in normal life? Art as a form of self-discovery?

Katarzyna Kozyra, The Midget Gallery goes to Art Basel to buy an artwork, 2006

changes amazingly if you have to rehearse something like almost every day for three years.
So you practise as an opera singer, but you display flagrant dilettantism. Is that possibly a lost career? In what sense does musical ineptitude serve as a vehicle for a certain meaningful content?

Yes, art makes many things possible for me. For sure, art is also my personal means to salvation. But every action would be meaningless if I couldnt include the public. In the course of my studies I understood that personal experiences and individual inquiry are much more interesting for me than formal research, and that in this way I can not only make my own life a lot more interesting but that I can also create interesting things for other people. My goal was always to involve people emotionally. In Art Dreams Come True, a seemingly shallow title, which could be a good title for a soap opera, actually represents my personal truth. In this project I use art as an object of my experience, rather than processing my personal experience in order to make art (as, for example, in Olympia). And so I tried to transform myself into an opera diva a symbol of the high art of singing. I truly had to do that, with my whole body, my time and my life And I can assure you that it was a really intense experience.Your life
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I think I could have become an opera diva perhaps not the best, but a professional one (as a singer rather than an actor).You heard me when I sang in Vienna Ive made progress since then. The fact is that I was never able to get out on the stage as anyone else than myself I cant remember if I wanted to be an actor when I was a child but I remember that I did a lot of singing and liked doing it and the neighbours apparently thought that it was the radio When I was forced to sing in front of other children at school I paradoxically almost burst into tears when I did it So with the idea of singing I probably found the most absurd way to present myself.
However, you said once that a poor performance is also an embarrassment to you So what is it that makes you do it all the same?
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Perhaps I am not only sadistic but also a bit masochistic ?

What is the status of improvisation and direction or choreography in your performance works?

Playing with gender roles has started with Mens Bathhouse when you disguised yourself as a man to secretely sneek into a bathhouse and record the sceneries with a hidden camera. If I may paraphrase you once more: You dont just slip into roles but try to be that person

Basically, improvisation is the strongest driving force in my performances. But its importance or status also depends on the kind of performance I have thought up in advance. In some performances direction and choreography were in the foreground and pushed improvisation back to the second rank. But since there was never enough time and also never the opportunities to rehearse and entire performance properly, my performances usually had to be driven by improvisation in any case, even though they pursued a certain idea. In any case improvisation was what gave the performances their energy. This special energy disappeared as soon as I put on the same performance for a second time. The difference is like that between a live television programme and one that is recorded in advance.
You let the dream of perfection collapse while you fill in the clichs of the diva and they burst again the clich is practically robbed of all meaning. In the end the various roles embody ugliness, discontent and wretchedness. What is it about this discrepancy that appeals to you?

Im interested in the alienation that happens when I change the sexes of the actors in some actions and projects. When I was little, like any child, I was curious about how a boy might see the world. The most important lm in my childhood was Pippi Langstrumpf. Its about a person who conceals the energy and strength of a boy in the body of a girl. Now I think that was a feminist lm for little girls. And my works are sometimes a little bit feminist too.
Womens Bathhouse as well as Mens Bathhouse is about showing the sexes in their existential truth beyond the force of social roles relaxed men and women in their own company, the raw material. The artist as sociologist. What are the results of your research? Do we really see the aspect of the sexes that comes closer to the truth?

I think the worse my effort is the better the performance, for the public also sees the contrast. Why do I do that? Because I want to make people suffer. They can feel that it is embarrassing for me and add their own perplexity to that. In this way I can also arouse empathy. I also suffer myself when I see someone in a similar situation and that he believes what he is doing is great but in fact he and what he performs is embarrassingly bad ... bad in the traditional meaning of the word. A performance is good for other reasons.
You say you are a woman who has not absorbed the coded charms of womanhood, and that is why roles that embody stereotypes of femininity are so interesting for you. In a contradictory way, in the Art of Seduction you have yourself led in by a drag queen Why was Gloria Viagra in this case the perfect cast?

There is no true femininity. Femininity is a construction.You walk on differently if you have big tits and differently if you have a big arse. My intention was to learn the art of showing oneself off from a drag queen. I understood that femininity and masculinity have been invented ... as aids, so that you know roughly what you have to model yourself on, and I take pleasure in demonstrating that. But I dont think it is really the main theme of my projects.

Yes, I think in these two video installations in a certain way we really do see the raw material. When women are with other women they simply behave less feminine but more naturally. No magazine and no advertising clip would use these women and these poses for a soap ad, even though advertising clips for shampoo like to show such everyday activities as washing or combing ones hair. The bodies of these women wouldnt have been permitted for advertising purposes either: too thin or too fat, too old or to unsymmetrical. And women dont smile when they are soaping themselves sometimes they pull faces. It is also quite hard to reach some parts of the body ... Of course its no easier for men If one were to compare men and women with animals, men are like crocodiles they sit in the water with their eyes above the surface of the water and watch they watch who or what is moving anywhere nearby. Or they walk beside the swimming pool as if they were on a catwalk, to draw attention to themselves. Women, on the other hand, are more like frogs: if they are not disturbed theyre not interested in you. The two installations about Womens Bathhouse and Mens Bathhouses, in their attitude, are like a documentary lm from National Geographic.
Many of your works get under ones skin, for example Olympia. On the one hand you stage yourself using an art-historical reference, on the other hand it shows very intimate situations in your own life. How do these two levels blend together? Does Manets figure make it possible to show yourself in this way? Most people tend to hide when they are in comparable situations, but you expose yourself
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tioned perhaps even new borders can be set. But I dont think that art can change the world. Certainly, art can show that the world has changed, even if people havent noticed it yet. People usually try to think in patterns, because it is comfortable and happens automatically. For example, when the railway was invented people thought about it as they did about the old coaches, sometimes making little columns like the ones in ancient temples. The Futurists had to invent new forms of speed. And after the Futurists these aerodynamic forms were used for motor vehicles. But art only seems provocative as long as we look at it from the old point of view. And if somebody thinks that I am breaking taboos, in reality I am just showing that those taboos do not exist.
To push the theatrical element to the extreme seems to me to be an essential element of youre artistic strategy, to make art a real spectacle; in any case it is not allowed to be boring

Katarzyna Kozyra, Olympia, 1996

and let the viewer suffer with you. Turning the private sphere outward often has some degree of emotional hurt attached to it and often happens involuntarily or in order to generate publicity ...

Excuse me, but I had quite enough publicity at that time ... Perhaps it is true that Olympia was a little bit sadistic. I chose this gure of Manet not because I see Olympia as a body but rather as a person. She is not an object. She looks back at the viewer straight in the eye, if you look at her. I probably chose that point of reference also because this painting was seen as very provocative in its time. And in my rst works after The Pyramid of Animals and the negative reaction of the public, I started to draw quotations from art history into my projects, because in my situation that was easier. It was a kind of defensive attitude and an attempt to protect my new works from the mob Although, in reality, I didnt really care whether what I did was art or not.
Your performances go to the edge of what is generally acceptable, touching taboos, breaking through them. Do you think that art is the realm where social agreements can be re-negotiated and borders re-drawn in both positive and negative ways?

Yes, it is a strategy with which I want to win people over, and apart from that I like pushing things to extremes. So when I work with the theme of the performative and make fun of theatricality and behaviour codes, I am challenging what I see around me. But that doesnt mean that I dont want to show the truth. So if everything I have done seems so theatrical it is like that because everything around me is a bit theatrical. And to demonstrate that I have decided to be baroque. In addition, I want to give my projects everything they need and even a bit more than that Should I stop with a boring documentary lm? Just look and see how theatrically Gloria Viagra puts her femininity on show. Or Maestro, who seems to be unable in his attitude to distinguish between and opera performance and his real life. Look how theatrical Bush or the Kaczynski brothers seem, or how exaggerated the actors in the art world are ... Cattelan seems to have escaped from the cabaret. And as for you: I wouldnt exactly describe you as untheatrical.
also a method to get behind the beautiful appearance of things, which is constituted by the media domination of our times, to damage its effect, to destroy it to unveil the poodles core?

These days art is better equipped to do that than philosophy, because art uses the language of the media. The media produce the beautiful appearance for commercial reasons. Art uses the same language, but the reason behind its origins is, at least supercially, not exclusively commercial. This shiny surface also impresses me, somehow, but I prefer the multiplicity that hides under the surface. I try to destroy it ... and create a new one.
You come from Poland, a country that is still profoundly Catholic, and you live
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My problems are technical ones rather than moral ones. But I think art denitely creates a space where social agreements can be discussed and ques156

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today in Berlin and Italy. Did the social climate in Poland contribute to the fact that you have turned to certain forms of expression, such as performance? How does the situation of the artist in Poland look when viewed from outside?

As far as performance is concerned, the Teatro Sociale in Trento was much more important to me than the fact that Im Polish. In the Teatro Sociale I was forced to do my rst performance as a singer. I spent most of my childhood outside Poland. I grew up rst in Vienna and later in Munich ... My mother lives in New York and I have just been to Mexico, where I was on holiday. I hardly believe that the performative qualities of Kantor or Grotowski formed my childhood or that the social climate in Poland drove me to performance. The personalities who were certainly important for me were Professors Stajuda and Kowalski (not in relation to performance, but in general), and they are both Poles, of course. Its true that at rst, after art school, I had to deal with the specic situation in Poland. And at rst that was a big challenge because of the narrow ways of thinking in art perception and even the complete lack of such perception. The situation of art in Poland seemed to have changed a few years ago. Art had established itself and the situation of artists no longer seemed so bad. Many interesting and internationally recognised artists have grown up mijewski, Althamer, Sosnowska, Sasnal). They were supported, too, and (Z were well promoted by galleries and institutions. The political situation is not exactly stable in Poland, and the grasping kind of Catholicism perverted into a political programme is annoying. But I think a situation of that kind is a good starting place for art and artists. And in Poland it is possible to do projects that would be impossible in other places.

Katarzyna Kozyra in conversation with Gerald Matt in August 2007. The artist participated in the exhibition The Impossible Theater at Kunsthalle Wien in 2005. Katarzyna Kozyra, born in 1963 in Warsaw, Poland, lives and works in Warsaw, Trento and Berlin. www.katarzynakozyra.com German to English translation by Nelson Wattie.

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The documentarist with the surreal eye

You always say: The best speed for a photographer is walking pace. Is slowness an essential part of your artistic strategy?

I think so, yes! Its my attitude. Thats the way I am. One day, the wisdom that comes with age showed me that speed is an illusion and that so-called turbo-capitalism is something ridiculous. Maybe the reason why sport has never really fascinated me is because all that counts is competing against mechanically measured time. The Marschallins philosophizing in Hofmannsthals Der Rosenkavalier; what the quantum physicist Anton Zeilinger said; or Albert Einsteins idea that speed depends on ones own movement or the gravitational eld in which one nds oneself all these aspects of time and its passing have already been discussed elsewhere!* More and more, I am an observer. Contemplation and observation take time. I stand on the periphery as a sceptic. I have to protect myself from the crowd. Im always reminded of herds of sheep. Redeem the time, because the days are evil. (Epistle to the Ephesians). But back to photography and the slowness of time. My motifs in the countryside as in the city are obtained by walking. Often, this also involves physical pain. Pain and patience. Sometimes luck. The luck of chance. I would like to note a passage from the Neue Zrcher Zeitung newspaper from May 19, 2007, on exactly this theme of slowness. I read a sentence by Walter Benjamin: The labyrinth is the home of the hesitant. From which Hartmut Bhme concluded: The aneur does not seek the quickest path from here to there, preferring instead the odysseys of chance. How relevant to me and my working method. Im afraid it also occurs to me to mention that it is becoming increasingly difcult to stroll through city streets. The reason for this is the crazy cyclists on their cycle paths for which the sidewalks have simply been cut in half.
Robert Musil is quoted as having once said: My ear stands on the street like an entrance. Paul Albert Leitner might say, My eye stands on the street like an entrance. Or am I mistaken?

Paul Albert Leitner, Self-portrait, Club Social y Deportivo Austria, San Isidro (Buenos Aires), Argentina 2005

Both statements apply to me, but in the reverse order, and mostly only after a movement, the movement of walking the streets with my eye. When I explore a place that is new to me, my eye is at rst an entrance moving at walking pace, an entrance that only stands still when a situation or constellation presents itself that I want to include in my archive, entry to which is then granted by means of my camera. Sometimes the situation may be connected with sounds that belong with the picture. I record these sounds with a dictaphone. The screeching tires of braking busses on New Yorks Madison Avenue sounds like a piece of avant-garde music. At a moment like that, both my eye and my ear stand on the street like an entrance. Later, I combine the pictures and recordings in slide-sound collages.
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Paul Albert Leitner, Selbstportrt, Persepolis, Iran 2006

Paul Albert Leitner, Esfahan, Iran 2006

In the exhibition at the project space, you have installed several image-andsound collages. What does the visitor hear?

The exhibition consists of three themed groups of slides projected in sets of 80 images, plus a selection of prints hung on the wall. For this particular situation, I specically want to create an atmosphere that comes close to the lm medium. Which is why this time, rather than using dictaphone eld recordings, Ill be putting together a collage of my own using various pieces of music, music I like and listen to often. It will be a mix of world music, jazz, classical, Maria Callas my favorite opera singer Ibrahim Ferrer, Frank Sinatra, and others. This music provides an acoustic carpet for the exhibition space, while a total of 240 slides succeed each other on the walls. I dont make lms, but I love lm and the cinema as an atmospheric space.
Apart from a series of self-portraits taken on your travels, we will also see portraits of other people. These include personalities like John Gossage, Shirin Neshat or Katarzyna Figura, but also anonymous figures. How do these portraits come about?

Art and Life A Novel. Much of my life takes place on journeys. Wherever I happen to be, I see things, situations and moments arise which I then photograph. This is also the way I meet the subjects of my portraits. They may be people I dont know on the street or in a caf who I wish to capture in a photograph, but they can also be internationally renowned artists or musicians, for example, or curators and museum directors. Some of them I already know beforehand, having worked with them on my exhibitions, which are often group shows, others I only know by name. I never hunt down a particular star to get them in my collection; I meet them. So my portraits are not snapshots. A portrait requires the agreement of the subject before work can begin in the photograph. You just mentioned the wellknown Polish actress Katarzyna Figura: I was spending the New Years Eve of the millennium at the Sopot Grand Hotel on Polands Baltic coast. In an overcrowded caf in Sopot, a couple sat down at my table, it was Katarzyna and her friend Kai. Thats how I met her. A year later, we met up again in Warsaw.
Your portraits often appear staged, either because of the sitters posture or because of certain props. How is it possible, on the basis of a chance meeting on your travels, to achieve the necessary peace for a kind of studio shot without a studio?

For many years now, the overall title of my photographic work has been:
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The studio is the setting in the given situation, from which I sometimes borrow a prop, a piece of colored fabric or a spiky chestnut. Objets trouvs, so to speak. As I said, the person has agreed to have their portrait made. So they follow my stage instructions or spontaneously contribute their own ideas. Mostly as with Helmut Newton the rule applies: Dont move! But only at the moment of taking the picture, of pressing the shutter release. The picture comes into being beforehand, in my imagination, and takes shape within its setting before the shot is actually staged. Setting means not necessarily the specic location where I meet the person, but rather the broader ambience of that location. Sometimes there are clichd backgrounds like a terrace with a view or a twilight mood. Lighting is very important for staging, atmosphere and composition, which may result from light and shadow.
What do you consider to be the role played by the tableau vivant here? Do you restage quotations from art history? Your self-portrait in the Forum Romanum inevitably recalls Tischbeins portrait of Goethe. Or the Tyrolean collector Lothar Tirala posing like one of Erwin Wurms One Minute Sculptures

If were talking about the same picture I know a lithography with that title then it shows Beckmann smoking a cigar. The smoking motif occurs frequently in your portraits, too.

In the past, the cigarette was practically a xed attribute of the artist, a symbol of individuality, independence, self-condence. Then almost everyone started smoking, a cigarette was no longer anything special. But today, smokers are being marginalized, smokers cause lasting damage to themselves and those around them, written on every packet of cigarettes. This means that declaring myself a smoker in a portrait now has a special dimension again. This is why Im interested in this motif, although personally I very seldom smoke. But I also collect other motifs, such as gold teeth in a persons laughing mouth or red-painted lips in these cases of course, its also very much about color, about accents.
To me, your pictures also seem to be a collection of fragmentary ideas, brief reports, fragments and essays from a world that we think we know but which we have never seen in this way before. Do you think of yourself as a storyteller?

Yes [laughs], these things sometimes happen of their own accord. Leitner as Goethe in Rome, that was deliberately staged as a quotation, of course. But the portrait of Tirala was taken in 1997, in Istanbul, at a time when I was not yet aware of Erwin Wurms staged situations. But sometimes I have a spontaneous association, and then I paraphrase a picture that comes to mind. For example, I photographed Klemens Ortmeyer in prole so that only one eye is visible, like in Irving Penns 1957 portrait of Pablo Picasso. But in Penns photograph, Picassos eye looks at the viewer, whereas Ortmeyer is wearing sunglasses. So these are not really tableaux vivants that I stage when an existing picture occurs to me, it happens more associatively.
Paul Albert Leitner in hotels: a constantly recurring subject. The hotel room as a studio from New York to Montevideo

The world proposes many fascinating stories: crazy, funny, blood-curdling, excruciating, melancholy. The photographic motifs are little windows onto the world, visual splinters. The fragmentary has a great appeal for me. Fragments of an unfamiliar city, exotic plants, the beauty of a wretched power socket in a hotel room, a strangers vomit on the street, a freshly run-over pigeon in Paris
each with a caption recording the exact time and place the picture was taken. Are your pictures also documentations?

or as a special stage for my self-portraits when traveling. When I travel, I always take my eggshell-colored photo suit with me, and I always take a self-portrait in this suit at the hotel. On the one hand, this captures a momentary state, and on the other, I create a document of my existence. By always appearing in the same suit, I highlight the fact that my work is no so much about the locations where the pictures are taken as about the question of art and life: a character out of novel, I appear here and there, and a hotel room means something like a temporary residence, a short stop on the way. I call these self-portraits Me, myself in a Hotel. There is a quotation here too, incidentally: a picture by Max Beckmann from 1922 entitled Selbst im Hotel (Self in a hotel).

After the wealth of images that we encounter in life and with which I was also confronted in the form of my existing photographs, I have been forced to order, to select, to combine and systematize. This results in many chapters and themed groups. So certain motifs recur constantly, the captions distinguish them in time and space.
You are an untiring collector. Your apartment is overflowing with found objects, newspaper clippings ... What drives you? Collecting mania? A craving for images?

Youre right, I love these useless objects that other people consider totally worthless. This collecting is a passion and its also part of my artistic program. And then there are the memories associated with specic items. Like I said, useless, very cheap souvenirs, but also things found on my travels, things from near and far.
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Besides objects like an umbrella stand found on the street in Brooklyn, a tree root from Death Valley in Nevada, and scraps of cotton from Mississippi, my collection also includes all kinds of sugar cubes and hotel soap bars. There is a attened aluminum drinks can from a road in Senegal and a rusty piece of metal from Vukovar in Croatia. There are stones, shells, postcards, newspapers, condom packets, plastic bags. It really is getting out of hand. And I havent even mentioned my collection of tape recordings, containing sound collages from many journeys with a few good passages like railway sounds, city trafc, radio voices, TV advertising in foreign languages, groups of musicians playing in the New York subway, fragments of conversations, etc. Thats how it is with photography: over time, its natural for motifs to build up. Ones oeuvre grows and grows. One system is to order the motifs typologically. But even that gets more and more difcult. There are so many details and sub-categories. One example: for years now, Ive been photographing the ambience and decor of hotel rooms. Within this hotel room category, a whole series of hotel bathroom shower curtain studies has emerged. At some point, I would like to bring all these pictures together for a Hitchcock theme. One could also say: Everything ows!
In what way do you intervene in the reality that surrounds you? The abolition of familiar frameworks, the experience of incoherence, elements of irritation and surprise, these are characteristics of the surreal. What is surreal about your work?

The way I look at things my surreal eye. An overcrowded beach in a tourist resort, a cemetery for unknown soldiers, a gigantic chicken farm, a McDonalds restaurant in the middle of nowhere the list of such images could go on for ever. Luis Buuels lm An Andalusian Dog allows us to experience what art is capable of. As a lm-maker, I would immediately visit a chicken farm with clucking chickens and shoot footage to go with Chopins Funeral March. The exiled Chinese writer Gao Xing Jian once said on television: Reality itself is often absurd. I can only agree with him.
Apropos art and life. Ive noticed more photographs of corpses, dead animals, gravestones, while sexuality and the erotic hardly feature. Wouldnt it be more appropriate to speak of art and death ?

Paul Albert Leitner, Gerald Matt, St. Petersburg 1996 from the series: Die Reise geht weiter

For my exhibition in 2001 for the project wall at Kunsthalle Wien, I remember that I prefaced my work with a line from the funeral service: In the midst of life we are in death. For the artist, death is an obligatory theme. Its hard to imagine what a strong and ubiquitous presence death is in our culture, all around us. I am also reminded of something the Ugandan
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writer Moses Isegawa said: Where there is beauty, there is also ugliness, but ugliness also presupposes beauty. Here I would refer again to my rst major book Art and Life: A Novel. It was published in 1999 and I tried to deal with all the themes that are important to me in twenty chapters. As well as Chapter 10, simply titled Animals, I also included a selection of dead animals. So I also covered the theme of transience, of decay, of the shock of death. And then there was Chapter 11. Its title was: Death and Eroticism (muerte y erotismo). Multilingually reinforced, one might say. So you see, the erotic is also a
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strong theme. If I might point to Fig. 129! It shows a detail from a painting by Antonio de Bellis (circa 1640) of Saint Sebastian. This photograph was taken in Paris in 1997.
Which contemporary art photographers do you feel close to?

nation, in various constellations, for instance as a traveler. Worth discovering. Do you think you have now been discovered? Has your work achieved the position it merits in the art world?

I have been very inuenced by Arakis work. I have shown work in various group shows with Nan Goldin, Heinz Cibulka, and Valie Export. I concur with the New York street photographer Joel Meyerowitz when he says: Ive felt the weight of the shadow. Shadow and its magic are a key visual element in my photographic work.
As a young man, you made a series of photographs with the title Exorcizing the Homeland and since then you have repeatedly made self-portraits against projections of some exotic travel memory. What role do concepts like home and abroad play for Paul Albert Leitner and his work?

Today I would classify myself as an inside tip. I take part in international group shows and in Austria I feel I am part of the photography scene. But Im not yet being referred to as Paul Albert Gursky.

Paul Albert Leitner in conversation with Gerald Matt on the occasion of the exhibition Paul Albert Leitner. Portraits of Artists and Other People, Self-portraits and Nature at Kunsthalle Wien project space in 2007. Paul Albert Leitner, born in 1957 in Jenbach, Tyrol, Austria, lives and works in Vienna. German to English translation by Nicholas Grindell.

Yes, I gave a seven-piece work from 1986 the title Exorcizing the Homeland. It was in the mountains of Tyrol. That was the exact time and place where this series of photographs was made. It was a spontaneous statement against that sanctimonious setting and much more besides. A malcontent rebelling with the language of art Later, I developed a milder, far more relaxed view of the concept of homeland. Creative people all have the ability to create a homeland of their own. For example, the world of books, the world of art, the world of music can be homelands for me. As I say this, I am astonished to hear myself talking of homelands in the plural. What do I see here: religions, gods, patriotic feelings do not feature. On the theme of abroad, what occurs to me is Schuberts Winter Journey. When we travel, we are constantly confronted with the unfamiliar, the foreign. Sometimes its weird: I often feel at home when Im abroad.
In the exhibition in the project space, apart from the slides, you are also showing a number of prints. You usually hang your pictures according to your own principles do curators have any say in this?

The auteur photographer is responsible for the selection and the arrangement, from start to nish. Just like a writer submits a nished text. Thats how I see it. My hanging, the way my pictures are combined, is based primarily on intuition, which means it is an artistic act.
Ten years ago, Urs Stahel wrote: Paul Albert Leitner is one of the most remarkable figures in the Austrian photography scene. With a trace of masterful naivety, he realizes a diverse, sometimes offbeat (photographic) program of self-exami168

See Gerald Matts interview with Paul Albert Leitner in the exhibition catalogue for Vertigo at the Ursula Blickle Stiftung, Kraichtal, published by Triton, Vienna, 2001.

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The jigsaw picture that I made ... was as if Mary Shelley had landed in Manchester and given Frankenstein a sex change.

You were one of the most important musicians and artist in the British Punk scene of the 1970s. What does Punk mean to you then and now?

In 1976, a small ssure appeared in the fabric of British culture. For a very short period of time, it seemed that the world could be turned upside down by those who were brave enough or bored enough to push through this rip in the membrane of society. I was familiar with the story of Alice in Wonderland, and theres a moment when she nds a bottle that carries the instruction Drink me. She does, and suddenly grows so large that her house imprisons her or did the house around her shrink? I remember the feeling in June 1976 of having outgrown the familiar, the family and the culture that I had grown up in. During the summer of 1976, the label punk was only just being applied to a loose constellation of musicians and social mists that were themselves still searching for a new mode of expression. We all tried to wriggle out from under the punk label, just as earlier in my life I had tried to escape the Womens Lib tag as opposed to being a member of The Womens Liberation Movement. But newspapers and their readers, television and viewers, all love the reductive label, the convenient handle and so we were christened punk. I tend to leave thoughts and enshrinement of punk to others; but the danger then is that the same small group of voices tell the same edited histories. Its really quite a delicate act, communicating the past to a listener, bearing witness once more, giving back to the past all of its not knowingness and anxieties. If I take one aspect of those times with me, its the ability to leap into the unknown, risk ridicule and sometimes take failure as a bedfellow.
You come from Liverpool and have lived in Manchester. Did Manchester have its own Punk scene or did people look to London or even New York? Have you spent time in London yourself? How were the connections perceived between the two British cities or between Britain and the USA at that time with regard to art and music?

Linder, The Paradise Experiments: Boudoir IV, 2006 170

I spent my teenage years between Liverpool and Manchester, living in the small mining town of Wigan. Wigan is a perfect example of the inconsequence of geographic location in relation to pop music. In the early 1970s, Wigan Casino cocooned itself against popular culture and mainlined American music as if Detroit were only ve miles away. Likewise, during early Punk, following the rst Sex Pistols concert in Manchester, a certain independence and rivalry was immediately called into play within the city itself, and between the north and the south of England. I submerged myself into the music emerging from New York in early 1976 maybe its that Wigan Casino drift away from the host culture but more likely, it was a drift into the seemingly more sophisticated and playful use of language
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that Patti Smith, the Ramones and The Modern Lovers seemed to offer. Also, the New York musicians unashamedly made reference to art, poetry, lm, literature in Britain, those worlds were kept quite rmly at arms length. I travelled to London, Liverpool, Shefeld and Leeds often in 1977; each city had its Punk coterie, its own interpretation of what it all meant.
From the seventies, as far as your visual work is concerned, it is mainly your photo montages and collages that are known. In them you develop an ironic iconography of media-focused clichs of femininity, combining porno images with domestic motifs. There you put kitchen appliances of all kinds, such as washing machines, irons etc. onto the bodies of naked women. How did your first collage come about? What triggered this idea?

I spent a lot of my time as a child drawing it seemed like a very natural activity. When I decided to enrol at art school in 1974, I expected to encounter a very exotic and creative world, and I was very open to whatever life was about to present. Britain at that time, especially in the north of England, had very limited academic options. Most of my fellow students were likeable enough, and the syllabus at the new polytechnics was workmanlike and efcient, but it seemed that nightime was the best time. Dressing up, getting ready, dancing, pop music that felt like the one time that something new could happen. I photographed and drew the small audiences at the rst Punk concerts. I wanted to be George Grosz. But neither the photographs or the drawings seemed enough; each lacked the ability to contain the novelty and paradox of the times. I began to experiment and collage my drawings and photographs. One evening I cleared my table, cleaned the glass that I had used for monoprinting, found the scalpel that I normally used to cut picture mounts and sat with two piles of magazines on each side of the table. To my left, popular womens magazines, fashion, furniture and food, to my right, a pile of mens pornographic and glamour mags. Two culturally opposed magnetic elds. I cut out elements from each and played with the possibilities of new arrangements ont the glass plate. It suddenly seemed that Id found a new way of assembling the jigsaw of cultural commodication. The jigsaw picture that I made was not the same as the one on the lid of the box; rather it was as if Mary Shelley had landed in Manchester and given Frankenstein a sex change.
Greil Marcus has presented very graphically how Punk was influenced by Dadaism, Lettrism and Situationism. At the very beginning of the Punk movement, the word dada apparently occurred in articles on Punk: Punk is like Dada. The photo montage also came originally from Dadaism, and the procedures you use in your work sometimes remind one of the collages of Hanna Hch. What connections do you see between Punk and Dada? Were particular Dada
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Linder, Pretty Girl Series, 1977

artists important at that time? Were people concerned with Dadaism or is that a relationship that, from your position as an artist, seems to have come about unconsciously?

The Situationist fans during the late 1970s seemed to be always male. The Situationists didnt particularly excite me, but the Dadaists denitely did. I dont remember seeing the dada word in the NME. [New Musical Express the UKs most inuential music paper during the late 1970s.] Maybe Ian Penman would have dared, but I dont recall many discussions about that movement - its use seems almost retrospectively applied. I knew a little about Hannah Hch almost tantalisingly little. It was so difcult to nd out about anything in Manchester in 1976, because the libraries were so poorly supplied. The rst generation of feminist art scholars had not yet been published, so very little was available about artists such as Hannah Hch. Still, the idea of Hch, Grosz, Hearteld, Hausmann et al, stirred my imagination and I tried to ll in the gaps of art history myself. The performative aspect of Dada particularly intrigued. Historically, they shared as did Dadaist print media several features of early Punk: rst Dada performances in Zurich were attended by very few people. Ditto, Punk groups at the Electric Circus in 1977. Likewise, rather than stand aloof from
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commercial tactics, the Dadaists hijacked commercial media and signage to spread their own message this was fundamental to my own work during the late Seventies
For a Ludus performance in 1982 you wore a dress made of chicken meat and a black dildo under it. You had decorated the tables with bloody tampons, the guests were served raw meat wrapped in paper from porno magazines and at the end you let your dress fall off, and the audience was really shocked, even though the porno-provocation strategies of Punk were not a novelty by then. Did you have an unexpected surprise on that occasion?

In 1982, the Hacienda Club in Manchester was receiving a lot of attention, locally and nationally. It was one of the few havens in Manchester besides the gay clubs where the immediate post Punk generation would be safe and welcomed. The design values were high at Factory Records both within the interior of the Hacienda and also its graphic representation. Each side of the stage had a large screen for the projection of images and lms. Disappointedly, I spent too many wet dreary Tuesday evenings at the Hacienda, staring out over a half empty dance oor and at loops of projected porn lms. The choice of footage seemed more lazy than ironic With Ludus I wanted to make a performance that addressed the chthonic aspect of the female body its unacknowledged bloodiness and in doing so reveal the Shadow of Factorys anima. So, blood, meat, pornography and screams became my arsenal. I remember that as I removed my skirt to reveal the previously concealed dildo at the end of the concert, that the audience moved back as one about two metres from the stage. It felt like a very solitary act, and few people in the audience seemed to know what to make of it all. It was a gesture that has grown in strength with the passing of time; the equation female plus meat plus dildo - seems to continue to fascinate. As Alanna Heiss at P.S.1 recently said, Isnt that what every woman thinks about in the kitchen?
Your sexual politics, and also your musical style, which mixed Punk with jazz elements and with slogans like Anatomy is not Destiny and My Cherry is in Sherry became the very icon of feminist Punk. At that time women were increasingly becoming bandleaders and managers. How did the emancipation idea of that time differ from that of the previous generation of 1968? How would you describe the atmosphere of that time? Was the womens emancipation a matter of rekindled urgency or something that simply happened in the context of revolt and counterculture?

and Betty Friedan were not high on the reading list of 1977 either. Morrissey with whom I became close friends during the rst Punk explosion of 1976, and who would later nd international superstardom as a singer and myself were alone in this. Sexual politics in Britain in 1977 were being changed by necessity by some young women and gay men. A key text of Punk was Quentin Crisps autobiography of queerdom, The Naked Civil Servant. Like England itself, the raising of awareness was all a little ramshackle, disorganised, confused, but change did happen. I pounced on Freuds declaration that anatomy is destiny and made it into a song. There was an urgency to communicate maybe at some level we knew that this was a temporary softening of culture. Even looking back at the generation of 1968 with barely a decades hindsight gave warning that every advance is inevitably followed by a backlash of conformism.
Music, design and the fine arts were combined in Punk into a fruitful synthesis, which brought about a very diverse visual range with enormous creativity and productivity. Like many other artists you also sang, designed record covers and created graphic images. Did most of the impulses come from music? How did the interacting influences express themselves?

There was a lot of free oating creativity as well as anxiety at that time which led to an intensely fertile period that created an even more fertile period post-Punk. The earlier generation of the 1960s had used mind altering drugs, meditation and social experimentation to achieve altered states of consciousness that produced a more reective and exploratory culture. Punks lived on amphetamines, cough syrup, cheap cigarettes and bad nerves. It was a jittery time, people moved very fast (did we all know that it wasnt going to last?) and so within this temporary nervous acceleration of culture, the spaces between different worlds became smaller too. Sexual politics were high on the agenda for some, and others applied their attention to playing three chords badly (the best people did both). Somehow there was room for all, and the frustration that we experienced with each other, as well as with the outside world, made for a very fertile creative time. Punk championed all the underdogs, and in Britain in 1976, women were still discriminated against on many levels and so fell into that class. We had all had enough. I never refused any invitation then, whether to make a photomontage, sing a song, or march in protest at the proposed antiabortion laws.
With the word creation Linderland you name the entire corpus of your multimedia artistic creations. What idea is embodied in Linderland?

Id cut my teeth on the rst wave of feminist writers in the late 1960s, but that had been quite a solitary conversion. No one else that I knew as a teenager read the same books or thought the same thoughts. Kate Millet
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With The Return of Linderland I again visited Freud and examined his phrase The repressed always returns. I liked the idea of
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an estate, a ghost country that would never quite disappear. In the late 1990s, I felt culturally exiled, almost invisible and I wasnt sure if the exile had been a voluntary act or in some way enforced. With hindsight, the term The Secret Public seemed most pertinent then. In 2000, with The Return of Linderland, I became very interested in the construction of masculinity, having spent so many years looking at the distaff side within media. I lmed and photographed male gangs in north Manchester and immersed myself in the lms of Sergio Leone. The Man with No Name Clint Eastwood seemed a perfect body to inhabit, a desired shape shift, and the malign all masculine world that he inhabited (to borrow a phrase from Leones biographer Sir Christopher John Frayling), was somehow archetypal enough to allow the mirroring of contemporary violence and nihilism in parts of north Manchester. I then made a parallel investigation into the biography of the founder of the Shaker movement, Ann Lee, who was born in Manchester in 1736. As I read about Lees life and traced her steps throughout the city of Manchester her path there is also invisible I became fascinated with how her host city had received her. The eye witness reports of early Shaker gatherings could almost have been exchanged with the media coverage of the early Punk concerts in England, both were met with intense hostility, verging on hatred, from the wider world. I worked in photography, print, lm, drawing and performance in my exploration of Linderland. A four hour performance which I created, The Working Class Goes to Paradise described the psychic container in which to montage all of the above, using time as glue, and my body instead of a sheet of glass.
Is Punk a failed revolution? What would you understand as the achievements or performances of Punk, whether they be in social politics, art or intellectual history?

The right to fail was always very important in Britain up until the Thatcher administration. Maybe Punk, by its nature, had to fail to be successful. One of the achievements of Punk is that we are still discussing it so many years later and still trying to make sense of it and evaluate it on a personal as well as a collective level. The fall out continues. New debates arise as Punk enters the art gallery. Ironically, its best known slogan was No Future.
After Ludus broke up your work vanished from public awareness. In recent years, however, it has experienced a kind of revival. You have had solo exhibitions in the P.S.1 in New York, in London, Manchester and Paris and you could be seen in Punk exhibitions in recent years in London, Munich and Grenoble. How do you explain that phenomenon?
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There is a feeling of having come full circle. I am reminded of Janus, look177

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ing both forward and back at the same time, standing on the threshold of now. Sometimes work is forced to take its time, and wait to be rediscovered and appreciated. The dangers of working outside of the mainstream gallery systems were that archives were neglected and some of the artists themselves became invisible. We were never funded. We worked outside of the institutions and we were all poor. Within such constraints, I was one of the few artists working with equal ease across the worlds of music and art. I didnt impose hierarchies upon my practice and gave equal import to a photomontage as to an improvisation as to a dress. I was also, and remain, a dedicated self archivist. Its an important part of my work.
Has your artistic strategy changed today? What distinguishes your recent work from your earlier work?

I work less in opposition now. Rather, I work almost forensically: going back to the scene of the crime. I still work with found images of the female body from the 1960s and 1970s the formative years of my sexuality. But now it feels more autobiographical studying the zone within which my conceptions of sexuality were developed. Freeing myself from the position of opposition is liberating its a psychic cutting loose. Im now working with negatives from glamour sessions of that time they are gradually becoming available. Often having gathered dust for over thirty years in various photographic studios. These negatives were intended to be printed within magazines at a certain portable, covert scale. Now there is something as epic and melancholy about them as a war memorial. As one writer said of my work, I make the explicit implicit. To achieve such an effect, I print these found images larger than life, release the energy stored in the silver halide crystals, and re-present these women who seem at once ghostly, and all too corporeal as towering over the viewer. Its Alice in her Wonderland again, outgrowing the home and setting off on her adventures until at the end of her tether she rounds on the gathered authority, as she always must, and reminds them that theyre just a pack of cards.Very punk, nest-ce pas?

Linder in converstaion with Gerald Matt and Synne Genzmer in August 2007 prior to the exhibition Punk. Style Rebellion, Art Attack and Social Subversion at Kunsthalle Wien in 2008. Linder, born in 1954 in Liverpool, lives and works in Heysham, Great Britain.

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to explore the creation of imaginary and extraordinary

In China, there existed, for a long time, neither the political nor the social opportunities and preconditions necessary for timely and contemporary art. How do you perceive the art scene and the self-image of Chinese artists today?

Chinese contemporary art emerged in the latter period during the Cultural Revolution under a centralized state power. Both during the intellectual liberation in the 1980s or in the midst of the economic reform in the 1990s, the residue of collectivism and metaphysical ideology from the Cultural Revolution continued to exert a subtle inuence on the art world. Every artistic movement has appeared in a collective manner and disappeared quickly. Art and artists have both become the cannon fodder in the historical evolution. The late 1990s saw the relaxation of Chinas political environment and the beginning of organized economic development. Social resources started to be redistributed among individuals. The emergence of consumerism, individual heroism and the redenition of personal value enabled a new generation of artists to begin creating works inspired by their personal experience. Without distinct divisions of historical periods in a historical context, history would always be chaotic and blurry. This kind of chaos and ambiguity may best describe the current state of Chinese contemporary art world and artists.
In Austria this year there have been eight exhibitions of Chinese art. How do you react to the boom in contemporary Chinese art that has been occurring in the West for some time now?

This kind of large-scale surveys of Chinese art usually has a certain political or strategic purpose. Art itself is not so important any more. Art exhibitions have become a face for Chinese-ness or the Chinese front. This situation is a double-edged sword. The key is whether Chinese researchers or artists can gain experiences from such events that can be useful for their research or practice. If one day people from the outside world have lost their interest or attention towards Chinese art and it could still go back to its normal state and continue to develop, that is more important and meaningful for any kind of culture.
To what extent does the hype of the art market actually help artists, and what does this mean for the quality of the artworks produced? To what extent does this hype confuse quality judgements?

Liu Ding, Tiger, 2007

The boom of the market certainly offers a more positive prospect for the development of art. In China, the sudden prosperity of the Chinese art market has allowed works of average quality to be able to have their space. These unusual phenomena have misled a lot of artists and collectors and, to a certain extent, have shaped the development of art in China. To change
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the situation, there is a need to establish a system of multiple possibilities, to improve the understanding of art by artists and art consumers, in order to develop a dynamic and vibrant art scene.
The commodification of cultural goods, particularly in China a country where capitalism appears to have made such an overly hurried entry might this not constitute an explosive topic for the arts? What role, in your opinion, can a critical approach to this staged performance of an aesthetic of the product really play in contemporary Chinese art?

Generally speaking, the aesthetics of products is a popular topic for the public in a developing country such as China. The ownership of a certain product is the fastest way to quantify a life style and is a direct indication of taste. It is also part of life. The aesthetics of products provides subjects of discussion and opportunities for every industry. In the art world in China, average artworks dont really have the basic quality of a regular product so they can barely bring any excitement for the audience. However, the commercialization of art far exceeds our standard for artistic quality. Arts immediate cash price shape its value and recognition. Rapid realization of value and reorganization further confuse our perception of the value and quality of a work. Meanwhile, this current state of confusion in the Chinese art world is precisely what makes it stimulating.
Can you tell us something about your origins and education? How did you come to be an artist?

Liu Ding, Samples from the Transition Products, Part 1, 2005

My education has mainly come from my family. My family was ruined during the Cultural Revolution. My father was aspiring to study literature but he never had the chance. He then switched to Chinese medicine. Until today, he has maintained the habit of writing, in the classical style, his diagnosis prior to making a prescription. Because of the political oppression he and my grandfather suffered, they didnt want me to go into politics or business. I had hoped to go into a profession where I can be in control of my own work. As early as my primary school, my father found a private tutor to help me study traditional painting and calligraphy, until my high school. My cousin studied architecture. When we were small, we hung out together a lot. He was very good at drawing caricatures. I admired him for being able to draw all kinds of images easily with a pen. This kind of admiration was the initial incentive for me to become an artist.
How does the institutional process run in academies and art colleges? How open are they to new media, art theory and international exchange? Are there any professors, well-known artists from the West, who teach there? How modern are the techniques that students are taught?
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In China, there is no longer a lack of hardware.You can see that by noting how many new styles of mobile phones are produced. There is no lack of new media, international exchange or internationally recognized professors in Chinese educational system either. The key issue here is that there is the absence of a tting system or methodology which helps students digest what is being taught. The teachers incomplete knowledge system and the narrowness of concepts turn these hardware or software advantages into nothing more than a decorative item. The real problem is that people mentally shut themselves off towards the outside world.
What significance have artistic role models had for you personally (both inside China, and out)? Has the exchange of information between China and the Western art world undergone, do you think, any significant changes? And if so, in which way?

In terms of my individual practice, my own thinking and feeling are the main factor. I have different role models at different points of my life. These role models can provide me with certain motivations and hope when I feel lonely. Artistic expressions are dependent on their contexts. There are more and more exchanges between Chinas art world and the West and more opportunities for Chinese artists to exhibit outside of China. But in spite of increasing exchanges and opportunities, we are still facing the same issue as when we were closed off. That is, for most people, making choices is still a difcult thing.

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At the project space of Kunsthalle Wien we exhibit your sculpture Power, which sets up a scene involving the concept that all life is vanity with a good many gilded skulls grouped into a very beautiful sculpture. During the development of the project, you had the idea that it might be exciting to present the work as though it were in a shop window. Do you view art as a commodity and a fetish?

In Power I used light, a large amount of gold color and fragile porcelain to stage a spectacle that is not massive, but extremely gallant and luxurious, so that skulls, life and the air of vanity all become important details of this work.
In Products, one of your works from the Samples series, which you exhibited at the second Triennial of Guangzhou, you were cooperating with the painters from the city Dafencun, who daily produce thousands of pictures for export. You restaged their working situation in the shape of a pyramid, and persiflaged a painting done on the assembly line. In so doing, are you concerned with a distinction between traditional and contemporary art techniques or are you rather more doubtful of the potency of the economics of the export market?

This work samples Dafencuns economic ecosystem and moves one piece of this economic system into the museum. I thus invited the audience to closely observe, analyse and study this assembly line style of low-cost massreproducing high and elegant artworks. This type of production is seemingly controversial while, in essence, a normal manufacturing procedure and a way of economic ow in the market economy. Products is a work that transforms the act of public manufacturing into an artists production. It is an art project that imitates and demonstrates the assembly line of making, producing and displaying artworks in a concentrated way within a museums setup. I brought into a museum space the painting masters from Dafencun, a village in South China whose main industry and reputation is based on mass-producing and exporting classic oil paintings to the West and invited them to repeat the act of artistic creation, their actual means of production and living in a museum, which functions in this case both as a regular exhibiting space and as an unconventional production space. As the result of my planning and design, the dual roles of Dafencuns painting masters as components of the artists work through participating in the artists actual art practice and as manufacturers of artworks through their own act of making effectively collide with the dualism of the museum as both a space for exhibiting and a space for manufacturing.
The techniques of old masters that refer back to the Western tradition are gladly used by artists like Yan Lei and Wang Xingwie. How intensely does Chinese art adapt to Western, or perhaps globalised artistic practices and how does it take up its own traditions of art techniques and aesthetic styles?
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Installation view, Kunsthalle Wien project space 2007: Liu Ding, Power, 20062007

It was not until the early 1990s that Chinese contemporary art began to enter the global arena but its entry was at a very low level. At that time, Chinese contemporary art was introduced to the world through foreign diplomats, tourists and those Westerners who studied traditional Chinese culture. Through the taste and choice of these people, a lot of thinking that was not about art which included a good deal of supercial phenomena, were presented to the West as examples of Chinese contemporary art. As a result, artists working along those lines were given opportunities and benets. Such gains and opportunities have inuenced many artists, and gave rise to a certain type of art practice. Many artists with interesting thinking were excluded outside the mainstream. About a week ago, I spoke with Wang Luyan, an artist of the New Measurement Group (1989-1995). He has recently had a major solo exhibition in Beijing after more than one decade of withdrawal from the art world. He said that he pretty much gave up exhibiting his works after the mid 1990s because there was no environment for the practice and thinking of art. Exhibiting works without their context would have been meaningless. During the entire 1990s, the art industry was still in a state of being castrated and lacked in condence. Only until after 2000 did a multiplicity of opportunities arise. The economy picked up, artists began to grow condent and make independent choices. The autonomy in decision-making made possible a better understanding of the self and an independent understanding of our own culture. This kind of independence would in turn affect the global perspective on art practice. The understanding and reinterpretation of traditions should be built on
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a sense of condence and an objective perspective about oneself and ones nationality. Adopting certain traditional methods and elements doesnt necessarily link ones practice to the traditional. The connection to the traditional takes place more on a spiritual level, but it also requires the viewer and the reader to have done some study about it in order to understand such a link. Otherwise, the understanding can never take place on a deeper level. In the present Chinese context, there are still many fundamental issues we need to resolve concerning art and culture. We havent really turned the real understanding of tradition into a natural process that can be integrated into contemporary cultural practice.
You have participated in many international exhibitions and lived abroad for an extended period of time. How important for your art is a regional orientation of a thematic or stylistic kind?

I will further develop and expand some of the thoughts I have started to work with from last year. On one hand, I will continue to explore the creation of imaginary and extraordinary spectacles in my work. In my solo exhibition in Beijing in June, I will be presenting an ambitious project along this trend of thoughts. On the other hand, I will carry on making works that convey a mechanical longing for the future and refer to the classical sculptural language for creating human gures.

Liu Ding in conversation with Gerald Matt on the occasion of the exhibition Foreign Objects at Kunsthalle Wien project space in 2007. Liu Ding, born in 1976 in Changzhou, Jiangsu Province, China, lives and works in Peking. Chinese to English translation by Carol (Yinghua) Lu.

International travel is extremely helpful to my personal experience. Having a certain regional and specic direction, avour and style is not important to my work. These things are already taken care of by my background, environment and art history. The words that interest me are exploring and abandoning.
What does censorship imply in China and to what extent does it affect or hinder your artistic practice? How political can your art be? Is contemporary Chinese art political?

The censoring mechanism in China has always been erratic and unpredictable. Usually when nothing happens, which is normally the case, the atmosphere feels relaxed and easy. Then again there would be an incident of censorship. But historical memory is fragmented, and besides, economic development encourages pragmatic thinking. Being in this kind of environment is like living in an isolated desert, and everything becomes aimless. Political issues are subsequently replaced by social issues. Most works become a simple illustration or comment on social phenomena. Political positions are soon pushed to the margin of the society.
How do you manage to make a living in China, as an artist? Do you continue to have to take on other jobs, the way your colleague Yang Fudong was obliged to do, in order to be able to produce your own work?

People have different expectations and make different choices in life. I have been lucky that I can live and work through art.
Which projects have you been planning for the future?

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Only in art can you live and think radically and without compromise.

The Kunsthalle show Superstars greeted visitors with your work Art is the better life, which shows you at its centre. Have you ever felt like a star?

Not really, as a visual artist you are not popular. These days, only people from television or lm are really stars.
You once said about yourself that you register the aesthetic sins of the world, go home and makes something beautiful out of it, so that people dont always have to suffer from it. Is beauty a central element in your life? Is aesthetics a central element in your art?

Yes of course, but not in the sense of decoration, but rather as a fundamental attitude to life. I believe that through aesthetics one can become a more spiritual being. This is almost a moral position. I dont want to put even more rubbish into this world and for that reason in the course of my work it has become more and more important that my work has no expiry date in any regard.
For you, art was always an elementary need. You left your parents house early and you decided to practice this profession as a calling, without creating a safety net for yourself.

I was totally obsessed with art from the earliest years and by the time I was about ten, I knew perfectly well that I only wanted to be and can be an artist. So I had no other choice.
From the beginning of your artistic career you put your own image at the center of your presentations. As a representative of the transformers in the 1970s you changed your own body with the intention of casting light on social and genderspecific stereotypical roles. The tension between the individual and society was a central theme in the 1970s. Is that still the case?

I see the theme of my work as something more universal. I am simply concerned with the nature of mankind: how people try to orientate themselves in this world and how they sometimes achieve something and how they are basically doomed to fail. However, it is impossible not to see a certain comedy in that.
In 1970 you offered to provide a service to viewers in a large-scale photographic self-portrait as a man weeping: Lthi weint auch fr Sie (Lthi also weeps for you). The title of one work from 1972 is Ill be your Mirror. Does this sentence represent the task of art for you?
Urs Lthi, Ill be your mirror, 1972 188

I have always wanted to make a kind of art that is direct, sometimes blunt
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or poster-like, but always radically ambivalent as well. Today I still try again and again to touch the viewer, not only on the artistic level, but also on a directly emotional one. Even so, in the end all these aspects are just excuses to lead to a good, which is to say autonomous, work.
You represent yourself ironically, with subtle visual wit and enigmatic, multilayered picture titles. How distanced are you from the images of yourself?

Totally distanced. This gure is a pure gure of art, but it is also the connecting link throughout my work. However, it is certainly the case that I always derive the decisions that have to be made for a work directly out of my own life story. Back then I began to bring myself into my work as a representative gure because I became convinced that we can only try to experience our world through our own consciousness. This means, I think, that there is no such thing as objectivity; there are only agreements for the sake of an apparent order. Since I believe that we human beings are all the same in our basic nature and are moved by the same feelings, the most personal level is perhaps also the most general one.
In what is now a good four decades of artistic work you have constantly expanded the framework of your expressive possibilities. Your stylistic resources also include the juxtaposition of works of various dates and in various media. This arrangement often makes processes visible; in details and formal analogies multilayered dimensions of meaning are developed. What is your relationship to your own work? Does Urs Lthi of the 1970s have the same intention as the Urs Lthi of the 21st century? (Art for a better Life?)

Urs Lthi, Art is the better Life (The Revenge), 2003

I am always concerned with the same thing, but I try to tell the story again and again from another angle of vision, and through the continuity of my work an epic about being itself should come about. In other words, it is ultimately a story of vanishing, dissolution and metamorphosis.
Since the 1990s you have devoted yourself to the theme of advertising and its aesthetic strategies. In your series Placebos and Surrogates you generously supply your fellow creatures with pledges of serially produced feelings of happiness, sweet-colored coffee cups or frisbees with declarations as Im beautiful or Im a Sexmachine self-hypnotic slogans of the fun society. Run for your Life shows Urs Lthi on the treadmill. Who is running for his life here?

Artists dont feel much solidarity for each other. Even among friends there is not very much discussion. I nd a lot more with my students, and I also think that you have to keep on questioning your own work and not believe that when a thing has been formulated once, that it is enough and only needs to be varied. It helps me not to grow lonely in my studio and become a stranger to the world, something I could never bear.
In 2001 you represented Switzerland at the Venice Biennial. What is your relationship to the art industry today?

Extremely ambivalent. In the seventies I already decided not to be a trademark artist of the American kind. After the art market had already almost stamped me as that. Of course that didnt really help my branding career. But today its no longer as bad as it was, because I am increasingly seen as an artist personality even though a classic by now who goes his own way and has always done so.
In The Revenge you broke up a simple chest of drawers, a dull but worthy piece of humble furniture for keeping scarves and shoes or postcards and Christmas decorations, or video tapes and photo albums. In the three-dimensional version of the work, an Urs Lthi sculpture stands victoriously on the ruins of the shat191

We are.
You never wanted to teach. But you have been a professor at the art university in Kassel since 1994. How do you find the discourse with your students?

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tered piece of furniture, gazing into the distance and supported on a sledgehammer like Wotan the Wanderer over the Sea of Mist. What does art have to take revenge for?

The artist must always stir up (destroy) conventions in the hope that a little bit of truth or beauty can be found in the ruins of the civil system of order. That he is not especially successful can be seen in the empty, distant gaze of the exhausted avenger.
Art is the better Life. Is art the better life?

I think so. Through art our lives become richer and more spiritual. Real life is usually boring and meaningless in fact and truth. If I were to live my life as radically as I make my art, I would be very lonely and sad. Only in art can you live and think radically and without compromise. And you can do it without having to be offensive. On the contrary.

Urs Lthi in conversation with Gerald Matt and Sigrid Mittersteiner in August 2007. The artist participated in the exhibition Superstars. The Celebrity Factor. From Warhol to Madonna at Kunsthalle Wien and BA-CA Kunstforum in 2005. Urs Lthi, born in 1947 in Luzern, Switzerland, lives and works in Munich and Kassel, Germany. German to English translation by Nelson Wattie.

Urs Lthi, from the series Art is the better Life, 2007 192 193

Ryan McGinley
take the everyday things people do in nudism, think of the way models looked in 1960s and 1970s vintage pornography and mix that with the suspended action of sports photography

In your photography you take up Nan Goldins idea of a visual diary, making portraits of your friends and your own generation. How do you feel about being seen as a successor to her? Or do you rather try to distinguish yourself from her?

When I started making photos in the late nineties I was very inuenced by Nan. I remember looking at her book The Ballad of Sexual Dependency in 1997 and thinking, who are these people? Where are these places and where can I signup? The world she created through her photographsmesmerized me and inspired me to make photographs of my own friends. After I was photographing intensely for about a year or so, I realized that I was actually creating my own world. I was a y on the wall shooting what was going on in my life, which was very spontaneous and exciting. We were all on drugs, having sex, writing grafti, hanging out at parties and having a great time. It was all so fun and I was having fun documenting it. I would never not have my camera and I was never not working. All of my subjects were willing collaborators and they were excited about being photographed. They were all artists in their own right and understood what I was trying to do. I wasnt trying to imitate Nan. When you live in downtown Manhattan each generation of kids that are involved in that culture seem to be all doing the same thing. After about two years I couldnt wait for things to happen any longer. I took a new direction in my work and started setting up situations to be photographed. They still were in the same vein as my older work 35mm, grainy, spontaneous shots. The only difference was that they were more thought out. I would choose locations and people and had more of an idea of what I wanted to accomplish with the photographs I was making. It was a departure from documentary photography, and I guess thats when I started to distinguish myself from photographers like Nan Goldin. I suppose I started to develop my own style and nd my own voice.
Over a period of three years you photographed close to 100 Morrissey concerts. Your images are mainly of groups of people, the audience and individuals involved in the event. The image of the mass and of the individual results in a mood portrait of the musical event, recording ecstatic moments, feelings of belonging and collective emotions.What is interesting for the photographic eye in such relationships of tension?

Ryan McGinley, Tree # 1, 2003 194

I started shooting the Morrissey concerts because Ive been a fan of his music from a very young age. His lyrics spoke to me; they were so close to the things happening in my life. When I started taking pictures I would go to the shows and sneak rolls of lm in my socks and hide my camera in my underwear. Id be in the crowd shooting Morrissey and my friends that I attended the concerts with. When I started getting the photos back over time I decided it had to become a project. The concerts tied into what I was trying to accomplish in my nude work. People losing themselves in
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the moment, acting out, bathed in light. It was about a subculture that I felt an afnitywith. I put a book together of the photos I had made so far and brought it over to Morrisseys record label. Strangelyenough, Morrisseys manager was also the manager of Elton John who, from the beginning, had always been a collector of my work. I got granted permission from his manager and the man himself to shootwherever I wanted throughout the concert. Shooting the shows required a different approach than my other work: I had limited time to make the photographs and was shooting people that I didnt know. I would always start out between thebarricade and the stage for the rst three songs and make photos of the fans that go to every show and follow him around the world. The beyond-dedicated fans. The fans that wait 24 hours in the freezing cold to secure their spot up front. When Im shooting, Im looking for the person that is really getting off. The fan that is either in hysterics, screaming the lyrics at the top of their lungs, or hypnotized by Morrissey on stage. Im always trying to preoccupy people and distract them so they are unaware of the camera. The concerts were perfect for that reason. The loud music isdisorientating. Everyone there is xated on Morrissey. I had the freedom to investigate people without them being aware of my presence. After shooting up front, I would either shoot the sea of people from above or navigate my way back into the heart of the audience where the most action was happening. Fans jumping around, being pushed and pulled, drinks ying in the air. This was the spot that was by far my favourite place to make photographs. It was always so difcult shooting under these circumstances but thats what was so appealing to me. Reloading my camera in the most difcult situation possible was a challenge. I had to be like a hunter in the crowd to seek out fans who were loosing their heads in the moment. The ones transxed and the ones in action. The stage lighting played a large part in that series. After attending so many shows I knew how the songs would dictate the light and when the bright lights would bathe the fans in every color of the rainbow. In the early stages of the project I would be constantly dropping my camera jumping around in the audience. The back would pop open often and the lm would get exposed. I was very interested in the result of this and decided to start experimenting with my lm before the concerts. I would expose it to all different kinds of lights. Sunrises, sunsets, TVs, house lighting, colored bulbs, etc. I began a journal about what would happen to the lm for each exposure. I would thenreshoot the exposed roll at the concerts and mixed with the stage lighting it would give me a new and exciting color palette. Thats why the colors are so rich and saturated or very muted and pastel. I shot close to 100 concerts all over the world. The greatest part of the project was that I got to listen to Morrissey, my hero, when I was taking the pictures.
Your photographs sometimes show the subject either forgetting themselves in
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a particular moment or looking self-consciously into the camera. To be photographed has become so much a part of everyday life that it is either not noticed or is taken for granted, an oscillation between self-forgetfulness and self-presentation. Do you look for these particular moments? Do you also stage them?

I dont stage my photographs but at the same time they are not documentaries. I make these moments happen by putting certain people in certain situations. My subjects are usually friends or someone that I might have met at a club or walking down the street. I seek out interesting people that I know will perform for my camera, people with dynamicpersonalities, in much the same way that a director nds an actor they like to work with. I like to think of my photographs as happenings. Like the happening of the 1960s and 1970s. I nd a beautiful location that functions as a backdrop. I use inspirational photographs to gure out what direction I want the shoot to go in. They range anywhere from amateur photographs from the internet,screen-grabs from movies andTV shows to naturist documentaries, photographs from vintage pornography, nudist publications, camera periodicals, and artists Im inspired by. We start off by looking at a lot of imagery and ideas and then narrow them down to a few that feel right and work that day. Then I let them run free and direct them with a very loose hand. If I want something to happen Ill make it happen or if something I didnt expect happens and I like itIll go with it. Its usually a waiting game. You can only direct someone so much before their personality takes over and they offer me something I would never have expected. I shoot a lot of photos and when editing nd that one image that is perfect from that one shoot. If I make a successful image it will get across my idea, the gestures of the subjects will be casual, the light will be perfect, the composition will work, and the feeling will be real. I like to be surprised when I get back my lm. Thats the exciting part of making photographs: you never have full control and you never know what might happen. Each roll of lm is like a little gift under the Christmas tree.
You had your artistic breakthrough with pictures of urban youth culture, documentary images of a sub-culture, the world of the skateboard, graffiti and music. A few years ago you shifted your settings to the natural world outside New York. Has the treasury of urban motifs exhausted itself?

When I rst moved to New York I never wanted to leave. I think I might have left the city once over a period of seven years. All I wanted to do was stay out late and roam the streets of New York. Ride my bike around and end up anywhere. Being a young teenager coming into the city from the suburbs also had a big impact. Skateboarding around the city was inspiring. I was exposed to all different kinds of worlds. Being uptown observing the businessmen and cruising downtown to the vagrants underneath the Brook197

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lyn Bridge. Hanging out with kids of all races and economic backgrounds. Utilizing the urban landscape to have fun and do tricks. I guess the way I got into making photographs was making skateboard videos in high school. I realized I was more interested in the in-between moments that happened and peoples characters on the videos rather than the skating itself. Looking back, I see that making those skateboard videos is verysimilar to the way I work now. Back then it was all about the trick and doing it over and over again until you landed it. In myphoto-shoots nowadays I might have someone do the same action numerous times. Running back and forth, jumping around, falling until the person cant do it anymore. I like to push my subjects as far as they can go. I often nd the best results happen when someone is so physically drained they are in a state of exhausted bliss. I loved photographing grafti writers because I identied with their insanity. These crazy kids that wrote their name tens of thousands of times all over the city. Hanging off rooftops 15 stories up to make their art. I felt the same making photos all day and night everyday and night. I was sofascinated by that lifestyle. I was always up for an adventure and never afraid to get in trouble. All of these subcultures tie into one another. Skating, grafti, music: there are so many crossovers. Music has always been a large part of my life, dening the way I dressed, my attitude, my beliefs. All of these elements play a large roll in my photographs.
The natural environment is associated with representative ideas conveying freedom, relaxation, vigour, youth and a kind of freshness. Is that a matter of construction or chance?

Ryan McGinley, Lizzy, 2002 198

Whenever someone, who isnt familiar with my work, asks me what kind of photos I take, I tell them if you take the everyday things people do in nudism, think of the way models looked in 1960s and 1970s vintage pornography and mix that with the suspended action of sports photography, then you can get an idea of what my work looks like. I left New York for a weekend in 2002 to go to upstate New York, and brought a group of friends with me to make some photographs. I realized that taking these city kids off the streets of New York into the woods let them leave something behind. It lifted a weight off their shoulders and off mine. The city often puts a haze around you, a shell.Youre always thinking about that day and whats happening next. Removing them from that shell, I noticed they felt free and were acting very childish. It was interesting to observe and I liked the way the photos felt and looked when I got them back. After my exhibition at The Whitney Museum in 2003, I wanted to change the way my photos looked. I felt like it was time to do something new. I was ready to leave the city. At around the same time,travelling around the world for other exhibitions and doing assignments for the New York Times magazine had opened up new ways of thinking for me and new ways of shooting.
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I decided to starttravelling for myphoto-shoots and bringing my friends along for the ride.
Your images often also show compositions of elementary phenomena like water, light, fire, earth/plants and wind along with motifs of the body; the elementary seems to enclose the (naked) body in a certain atmosphere

antithesis of Larry Clarks Kids? Or does the camera present a reality only wished for? How does the principle of youth work for you?

I like using nondescript backdrops. I think thats the rst thing that really attracted me to natural landscapes. I want my photos to appear timeless. To exist nowhere. For someone to look at them and to remember a place they might have been that looked similar. I like the viewer to come to their own conclusion as to whats going on and what might be happening, to nish the narrative themselves. If its too specic then the story is already told, and Im not interested in that. I would like to think that someone might look at one of my photos and not know when to place it in the history of color photography.
You have also made a series of pictures with Kate Moss. Normally your models are your friends, laypeople. Did working with a professional model change your artistic process? Was it a specially designed project that you matched with the person of Kate Moss or did she embody something that was especially important for you inrealizing your idea?

I dont think of my work in terms of youth. Im just me and thats what Im taking pictures of, the things Im interested in and the people that inspire me my friends and friends of my friends. The world that I createthrough my photographs isdenitely a kind of utopia. Its a world that does not exist, yet its made to look very real. The pictures are shot on a 35mm camera and are grainy. They did actually happen but they were made to happen. They are accessible to anyone. I like when someone looks at one of my photos and says, I could have taken that. I like to think of my photographs as movies of my life. Its an escape from reality. I love to watch movies and lose myself in them. If someone can pick up one of my books or go to one of my exhibitions and lose themselves in my photos for ten minutes I feel like Ive done my job.
You began by training as a graphic designer. To what extent is that reflected in your photographic work? Tell me about the handmade books you distributed.

Ive been attracted to KateMoss since I was a teenager. Those CK One advertisements where she was topless were very controversial in the United States. I remember tearing those pictures out of magazines and taping them to my wall above my bed. They inspired me and they still do. She has always inspired me. The girls that I shoot in my photographs very much embrace her sensibility. Sort of like the girl next door, a little bit punk, uninhibited, androgynous, not typically beautiful. A good friend of mine had been asking me to shoot for her magazine and she said, who do you want to photograph? Kate was rst on my list. It was a fun assignment. You learn something new from eachphoto-shoot you do and especially from shooting someone like Kate Moss. I had to be quick on my toes and make the photographs happen very fast, jumping from location to location. Its not the way I normally work. It was an experience and Kate was great. I realized why she was such a superstar. She worked harder than any model Ive ever made photographs of. Throughout the few days we shot I was always yelling at her, Kate, stop modelling! She had those poses down and I was trying to break her to get her to a place where she was herself.
Your pictures show a happy generation of youth, radiating a living feeling of energy and optimism. The title of your artist book is The Kids Are Alright the

Making zines had always been a big part of growing up for me. It was part of punk culture. Using black and white photocopiers to get across my interests and distributing them within circles of friends. This is what led me to study graphic design in college. I was exposed to computers and to desktop publishing. Since I didnt study photography I never learned how to use a color darkroom. Studying graphic design I wasaware of technology and learned to use negative scanners when they rst came out. It was like a darkroom on my desktop. I would just shoot lm and then scan in the negatives and print out the pictures. It all took place in my bedroom. I decided to make high quality handmade books of all the photographs I had been taking up until that point and give them to friends that were in the photographs. Eventually I did a do-it-yourself exhibition and made 100 books. Those handmade books got my name out there. People responded to them. From the start I think my photographs have had a very graphic feel when I started taking them I was studying graphic design, which is about balance on the page and balance is composition. Part of making asuccessful photograph is having good composition. Ive always been drawn to having my photographs be very graphic. I will often shoot a photograph of someone or something very casually and then go back and remake it so it has a much more simplied composition. An example would be a photograph I took called BMX (2000). I was riding on the back of my friends bike one day and I took a photo from up above his head down to the ground. It was a very interesting image but it was too cluttered. There was a pothole in the image, the pavement wasnt the right color, and there was garbage on the
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street. My friend was wearing a long sleeved shirt and the photo showed too much of his head. I realized I was interested in his arms. I decided to remake that photograph so it worked graphically, was rich in color and incorporated some elements I felt represented my sensibility. I had him wear blue jeans, converse shoes, and show off his tattoos on his arm. We shot for a few hours and I investigated him riding his bicycle. Its one of my favourite photographs that Ive taken to this day.

Ryan McGinley in conversation with Gerald Matt and Synne Genzmer in September 2007. Kunsthalle Wien presented the exhibition Ryan McGinley at the showcase public space. The artist participated in the exhibition Americans. Masterpieces of American Photography from 1940 until now at Kunsthalle Wien in 2006. Ryan McGinley, born in 1977 in Ramsey, NY, lives and works in New York. www.ryanmcginley.com

Ryan McGinley, BMX, 2000

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Olaf Metzel
culture unies, art divides, get rid of culture and make more art.

You have again and again concerned yourself with the matter of the public sphere. In autumn your sculpture, Turkish Delight, will be set up at the public space of Kunsthalle Wien, in the outdoor area: a bronze of a naked woman with an Muslim veil, which has already been seen in the Staatsgalerie of Stuttgart and in Belgrade on the occasion of the Autumn Salon. It will be placed at a traffic junction which is perceived as relatively detached from a (protective) museum context. In a newspaper interview you said that might represent too much potential for conflict if it were in Berlin Kreuzberg. What reactions do you expect in Vienna? What significance is there in it being presented in the public sphere?

Anyone who takes his work into the public arena should have no fear of contact. There will always be a wide range of reactions; that is part of the media world and the context of the museum is not excluded from that. The question is rather where does art begin and where does it stop? More precisely, where does freedom of expression end and where does freedom of art t in? In our culture one is allowed to make pictures; I am an artist so thats what I do. But that doesnt mean at all that I set up a sculpture on a dirty childrens playground in Berlin Kreuzberg or screw it to the elevated railway at the Kottbusser Tor in Kreuzberg. It is more pleasing to know that the rst bronze case of Turkish Delight was sold to Istanbul. What should I expect in Vienna? I am really curious, in particular because of the historical background and the inuence of Turkish culture. What would this city be without its coffee houses? The fact that the sculpture is being set up near the open-air market, the Naschmarkt, is rather a nice detail. All the same, it is true, paraphrasing Baudrillard, culture unies, art divides, get rid of culture and make more art.
Turkish Delight has been translated into German to refer to the sweet rather than any other kind of delight delight on a purely sensual level thoroughly including art historic references like Delacroix and Ingres. To what extent did the sculpture come from the role of women in Islam? To what extent does it reflect Western stereotypes in relation to this role?

One stimulus for me was Edouard Manets picture, The Sultana, and of course The Turkish Bath by Ingres as well as the Moroccan Sketches of Delacroix or Venice, which traded with the orient for centuries and profited from doing so. The sensuality and exoticism of this very different world goes through the entire history of European art. If you go through the streets today, you will see Turkish women walking three meters behind their husbands and others who behave in a very condent way, with or without headscarves. You might want to think it is just a matter of fashion. The headscarf covers my head, not my brain, said Hayrnnisa Gl. It is a topic for conict here as well as in Turkey identity
Olaf Metzel, Turkish Delight, 2006 204 205

Olaf Metzel

Earlier works of yours in the public sphere, such as the Randale-Denkmal [13.4.1981] in Berlin, provoked considerable protest. In this case it was an apparently harmless pile of old and used security barriers, making a kind of constructivist junk-heap. Turkish Delight as a figurative bronze sculpture on a pedestal takes up criteria of a traditional monument. Is this a radical break with your previous artistic practice?

No. In 1994 when Lisbon was a cultural capital I placed an additional bronze sculpture on the Arco da Rua Agosta in the old part of town. It is still there today, and the street painters immortalise it, as if that work had always been there. Traditional yes, in the sense of the 19th century, a time that is still constantly misunderstood. World domination could be had in those days free of charge, and speculation was politely called the Founding Epoch (Grnderzeit). The foundations were being laid for the catastrophes, and what is left is a timeless contemporary and radical quality that can, perhaps, be fully grasped only in art. Just nothing persistent, nothing lasting, nothing that stays the same. Every new thing is better than the old, simply because it is younger. This is a quotation from the collector Herrmann Bahr from 1868, and it was pointed out to me by Harald Falckenberg another collector.
Other sculptural installations of yours also consist of objects that are part of the public sphere in any case respectively connotated with public, such as a supermarket trolley, plastic chairs, rubbish containers, bicycle stands etc. You exhibit these works in museums and galleries all the same. How are their effects changed by their different contexts museum or public space?

Installation view Kurfrstendamm Berlin, 1987: Olaf Metzel, 13.04.1981

and identication. Aysegl Snmez, a journalist from Istanbul, described the situation in some detail in my last catalogue.
It seems to me that you talk quite consciously of cultural difference. Is that a reality you have experienced yourself ?

Yes, I grew up in Berlin Kreuzberg and can still clearly remember when the rst Turkish shops were opened there. There was something exotic about them, but there was also an invisible line between the two cultures. Migration is a theme that has preoccupied me from the early eighties until today. One of the things I am exhibiting at present is a cycle of works in the Von der Heydt Museum in Wuppertal: The documentation and video of Trkenwohnung Abstand 12.000 DM VB of 1982, Besiktas Jimnastik Klb, a joint work with Christoph Daum was made in Istanbul in 1996 for the Biennale there and is now in Museum Ludwig in Cologne. There is Turkish Delight, of course, and the Kebap Monument from this year.
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All right, if you talk about a supermarket trolley actually the trolley was roughly the same size as a Smart. If you saw a normal trolley 12 metres high you would no longer recognise it. The safety barriers were also different in their proportions, because otherwise the work would have been impossible to realise in terms of statics. So much for the articiality of art and the theme of manipulation exemplied by what the press called the Randale Denkmal. Of course I like to put everyday aesthetics into my cart, and materials are always of primary importance for radical positions. In the past I used to call that the living context, in case an aura developed appropriate to the spatial conditions, but perhaps it is no more than the effective power of the banal.
Your work shows a preference for materials that are thought to be waste, from construction sites or hazardous waste, which you use in the form of demolished objects or as sculptural raw materials including concrete, plastic, polyethylene foam etc. You seem to use the expressive qualities of these materials deliber207

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it sends out a few waves, and I dont know what has to be changed about that.
Does Olaf Metzel make political art? What do you think of such categories?

Not much. Even though people are always trying, art refuses to be categorised. The term political art is too one-dimensional for me. Just because one takes up themes that are interesting for oneself and for some others, it doesnt have to be immediately or only political. If you look at participation in elections, the biggest party in proportional terms is the non-voter. Apart from the fact that no attitude is also an attitude, this question should really be addressed to Mr Buergel or Andr Heller.
Olaf Metzel, Turbokapitalismus, 1999

ately as subversive instruments, a politicised materiality. What value do these materials have for your work as a sculptor, quite apart from their connotations and symbolic significance?

In 1996 there was the Freizeitpark exhibition. At that time you spoke of the commercial assimilation of the new leisure-time situation of postmodern society, which goes along with the increasing entanglement of all spheres of art, fine arts, music, theatre into one big entertainment industry as a contemporary phenomenon that would soon wear itself out What do you say about that ten years later?

None really most of all, destroying things is fun, over and over again. In the end it is a creative activity, as Bakunin suggested.
Works like the Randale-Denkmal play with contradictory impressions: construction is played out against instability; it allures one to climb, but it looks as if it might break at any moment. What does the word monument mean to you?

The word monument and the aesthetic helplessness that is usually associated with it dont suit me at all. Whether for Jews, homosexuals or Roma they are usually no more than a place to put down wreaths. In a Spiegel interview I called the holocaust monument in Berlin dust cloth for a guilty conscience. The letters to the editor were nearly all positive.
Your early works triggered a politicisation of public awareness. With Turkish Delight the opposite seems to be the case: it takes up a theme already often discussed. Has your earlier strategy lost the potential of its political force? What status does the anticipated reception have in that?

Erst links, dann rechts, dann immer geradeaus (First right, then left, then just straight ahead) was the title of a work for Freizeitpark. Crash barriers were the material, and what was meant was a roundabout on the road. I thought that cant be improved on. I didnt even think of turbo-capitalism as a contemporary formulation of the power question and all the neoliberal globalisation rhetoric. William Copley once said, it is only when you know what art is that the whole world is opened up to you. Otherwise there is only the peanut effect: one after another and another and another.
What are you planning for the near future?

At the moment Im preparing a publication that brings together my public works and projects from the last 25 years and will be published by Hatje Cantz next spring.

If a new lm, a new CD or a new book comes out or is presented, there is a corresponding echo in the media depending on the PR effort, i.e. depending on nancial expenditure. The public arena still seems to me the most appropriate space for any kind of reception even if it is occupied by private commerce and politics but art is still the expressive form and podium of this ctitious quantity. Its like a stone you throw into the water:
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Olaf Metzel in conversation with Gerald Matt in August 2007 on the occasion of the launching of the sculpture Turkish Delight by Olaf Metzel at public space Karlsplatz Kunsthalle Wien in 2007. Olaf Metzel, born in 1952 in Berlin, lives and works in Munich. German to English translation by Nelson Wattie.

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Olga Neuwirth
A Sphinx without Mystery

Ms Neuwirth, as a composer of contemporary music, what is it about Don Giovanni that you find so intriguing? Is it the story, the myth? Or is it perhaps the music by Mozart in itself, which really gives you something to sink your teeth into?

I consider Don Juan to be one of the most signicant gures in cultural history because it remains unresolved. It has been that way for centuries, despite the many changes and variations. Ultimately, its about sexuality, and thats an issue that affects everyone. For me, Don Giovanni is a gigantic projection surface for peoples longings and desires, an articial gure everyone can relate to because they can project their own amorosities onto it.
Is that equally valid for both men and women?

I think so although, for me, Don Juan is phallus-oriented. But I can denitely imagine a woman as a female Casanova. As casa nova, Casan-ov Don Juan is more of a role model for men: their desire to be a master in bed. One of the other fascinating things for me is that in Mozarts day there was a tension between the good Enlightenment, which was advocated by the bureaucratic realists, and the rebellious enlightenment. Embedded within this social reality, Mozart created these over-the-top, individualistic characters in a totally untamed, overtaxing and exuberant manner, in a nal burst of playful desire for excitement characters which seem like enormous puppets, like cut-outs in order to express obsessions and desires. This principle of overdrawing, of excessiveness with a view to underscoring the desire for freedom, individualism and parallel worlds, is something that really fascinates me. For both Elfriede Jelinek, who wrote the libretto, and me, the classical Giovanni motif of the serial seducer was uninteresting that encompasses all social strata. Its not a taboo anymore.
Then what do you find exciting, or contemporary, about the Giovanni figure?

Installation view, documenta 12, Kassel 2007: Olga Neuwirth, miramondo multiplo, 2007 Installation view, Galerie Charim, Wien 2007: Olga Neuwirth, miramondo multiplo, 2007 210

The gure of Don Juan, as it is has been handed down through time, holds no relevance for me, but the broader theme, whereby the seduced person becomes the seducer, does. Thats why we chose to interweave certain Giovanni motifs with a true Austrian crime story. What is also personally important to me is the theme of linguistic confusion between the child and the adults echoing a thesis of the psychoanalyst Sandor Ferenczi.
Of course, Don Giovanni, or originally Don Juan, is also a crime story. He is responsible for the manslaughter of his father, or Ottavio, depending on which version youre looking at.

Personally, I nd the version with the manslaughter of the father more

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exciting. Patricide is always necessary in order to be able to analyse things, to detach and liberate oneself. But I am also interested in the difference between Don Giovanni and Casanova, whom I personally nd more impressive, all the more because he was a real person. For me, Casanova is the archetypal gure of 18th century libertinage. Don Giovanni, on the other hand, has a wild grandezza but he is out of reach. He challenges people and because he is incapable of loving and always just disappears, he leaves a trail of victims in his wake. It begins with tears and can occasionally go as far as spilling blood. By comparison, Casanova is much more complex and, in my opinion, he has a social conscience. Indeed, he tries in one way or another to integrate those he has conquered. But Don Giovanni is more like a cold wall against which everyone is dashed to pieces.
One could call his behaviour euphemistic, but also a secret; or one could interpret Don Giovanni as an empty space.

Empty spaces are always just waiting to be lled. But Don Giovanni cant ll any empty spaces himself because theres nothing more to him hes a sphinx without a riddle.
Is he a mirror?

Quite right, because otherwise his unhesitating, direct action wouldnt be noticed, wouldnt work. Indeed, that is the basis on which he attacks the ossied system at its heart, which is presided over by the gure of the father, as a symbol for the inviolable status quo and security. His appearance and disappearance like the angel in Pasolinis Teorema leads to a rupturing of predictable existence. And insofar as Don Giovanni always disappears, he abandons the women he seduces to nothingness or, to be more precise, to a social and personal no-mans-land, since all that remains is a longing for a different way of life and sexuality. For me, the whole Giovanni topos is about a fundamental existential dimension: How do human beings deal with their Janus-face: with the well-behaved, conformist, moral side and, on the other hand, its urge towards all that is wild, unconventional and excessive. Don Juan, as a frivolous, coarse challenger of rmly established social codes of behaviour and patterns of thought, will thus forever remain a myth. Yet the seduced women will never be able to rid themselves of this sense of breathtaking inspired by him: the experience of rupture as a result of the seduction condemns them to the eternal quest for the repetition of this unique experience. Most people do not dare to live the other life, made visible by Don Juan, and will merely continue to dream of doing so. Thats why he remains so rmly imprinted in the brain of those seduced. In my mind, that is an interesting question with regard to the Don Giovanni story. What do people do after having experienced something like that?
Although that is not something that is played out in the numerous literary versions of the Don Juan myth.

Because he isnt anything himself, because he isnt a complex human being, he is a mirror for the desires of other people and nothing more. He is hollow and empty and that is the condition of his existence. If he were to possess an existential profundity, the whole Don Juan magic, the myth, wouldnt work at all.
Don Giovanni is someone who is constantly on the run.

Exactly. Thats something that everyone has to decide for her/himself.

A moment ago you mentioned rebellious Enlightenment as a figure of thought. But even that seems to me to be a historical position. Where exactly do you see the contemporary aspects of Don Giovanni? There is, for example, in a 1973 film by Roger Vadim, a female Don Giovanni, a Donna Giovanna, played by Brigitte Bardot. Does this attempt to transport the myth beyond the boundaries of gender have something contemporary about it, the keywords being gender debate?

Exactly, but on the run from himself. Thats the challenging thing about this gure, because it makes other people dependent, or even addicted. Someone who always leaves and never stays. Don Giovanni shows people something for a very short time, something like another existential possibility. He triggers a vision, a dream and mostly we mustnt forget his erotic anarchy is enacted in living conditions that very much correspond to the norm, where the life of the seduced person is thoroughly organised according to certain rules and standardised procedures and then all of a sudden he provokes a wild desire that wrests the woman out of her routine.
It is often the case that he seduces women who are about to make important decisions which stand to regiment their lives even further engagements, weddings. He is far more interested in that than deflowering a nave country girl.

It brings a certain androgyny into play, which I nd very interesting because it creates considerable confusion. But BB could never be a Donna Giovanna in my eyes. That just doesnt work.
Its an interesting tension: Its played out between both male and female variations of the seducer and the seduced.

That is exactly where we were trying to get to the fundamental question of who is the seduced person? Our libretto is all about the idea that the
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confusion over who is actually seduced and who does the seducing, or how the roles can change, or gives rise to agressive potential. And that makes the situation even more interesting in respect to a criminal case.
Is the motif of confusion one could also call it erotic confusion part of the Don Juan story from the very beginning, or did that develop later, following the numerous transformations that the character has undergone over time?

about Don Giovanni is that through his pure, unreected existence (also because he is a Cavaliere) he renders social contradictions visible.
Do you think that things like that were also explicit to Mozart in his day?

I think that it wasnt an issue in the 18th century thats what I would say off the top of my head, at least. I cant nd it in Mozarts and da Pontes work. There the seducer is just a seducer, a pure womanizer seeking afrmation for his non-existent identity. As I said before, hes a grotesquely overdrawn and oversized gure who is introduced in order to make a socio-political statement. Possible social and erotic ambivalences, also with regard to identity, are not something that I see in this articial historical gure.
The split, multiple or indeed schizophrenic Don Giovanni seems thus to be an invention of the 19th century, the dawn of the Industrial Age.

Of course, it was also the time when gender differences became a topic of social discussion. Hence, the emerging confusion of roles, which didnt have a function at all during the Age of Enlightenment, and, if it did, it was only very marginal in the so-called breeches part perhaps what I nd particularly interesting about the rejection of Elfriede Jelineks libretto now that I can view everything more calmly, if only out of self-protection is the widespread pseudo-enlightening and pseudo-liberal air in the art scene too, but especially in the music business. Through the eloquent employment of language, you can, to a large extent, conceal the authoritarian thinking lurking in the background. Maurice Joly once delivered a strong invective on Napoleon III in the form of a ctitious interview between Machiavelli and Montesquieu. One of the many wonderful sentences spoken by Montesquieu to Machiavelli reads as follows: Vous avez la fatale loquence qui fait perdre la trace de la vrit Inherent in this sentence is the essence of despotism, for the despot either refrains from speaking or talks over the top of everyone in a supercilious, bureaucratically enlightened manner in order to cover up the truth (and naturally there is no absolute truth, only a particular truth). Every action is authoritarian. Lead-lled artistic directors, who think they must, and must be able to, determine artistic taste, tend to steer clear of libretti with critical, analytical themes. They are well aware of the fact that they cant get involved without also getting hit by the blast thats why you get turned down. that also says something about art and politics in our neoconservative age in which there are once again many norms. But for me, art is always about questioning and attitude. And speaking might be one way of living something, but it is a different one. And the exciting thing
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Yes, most certainly. Mozart was integrated into a courtly, absolutist, aristocratic society in which the artistic, enlightening penetration (in Mozarts case together with da Ponte) into taboo areas might even have been more possible than it is now. In those days people just didnt pay as much heed to their inner worlds. In middle class society, by comparison, Mozart, with his gifts and talents, would simply have been branded an idiot savant, a nutcase who goes too far. I view him as a boisterous person, as a challenger, questioner of structures and the people who just want to be left in peace, who dont want to be bothered in their ossied state of being peace, mind you, as the symbolic representation of the afrmative, repetitive system of the father; the peace inherent in the experience of not wanting to be disturbed in order to afrm the eversameness, unchangeability, security.You might say: the well-tempered existence offered by the peace of the grave. And Mozart afrms himself through the gure of Don Juan who is a disruptive force. Holding on to private, personal and political norms also bears the signature of power relationships, which is called into question by the projection surface of Don Juan.
Might I ask how the creative process is manifested in your work? In this case, the story was there first and the music was or is still being produced much later due to a series of unforeseen delays. Does it also work the other way around: that you have a score first which then has to find its theme?

Composition is an absolutely lonely affair. It takes a lot of time to understand what all this writing down of imagined sounds actually means. In terms of my choice of themes and the approach I take to music theatre, Im rather old-fashioned: with a piece of music theatre I always need to know the theme Im going to be dealing with in advance and what it means for me personally. So I always choose the text rst and construct a dramaturgical plan for myself. The question of the contemporary human condition invariably provides my point of departure. And then I make up the music. If Im writing an aesthetic opera about the duration of a sunrise with people strolling along the beach, its a different thing from writing about a subject that opens up profound existential depths and questions. What that means in musical terms is another thing altogether.
The story of your collaborative Don Giovanni-project with Elfriede Jelinek is long and fraught.

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Yes, you can say that again. The libretto dates back to 2002. Following the rst rejection, it wandered from artistic director to artistic director and kept getting rejected. Mind you, the gentlemen were invariably the ones who had approached us, and not the other way around! A never-ending story. A game of cat and mouse, an undignied process of being taken up and dropped again that goes back as far as the year 2000.
What do you think was the cause?

issue of paedophilia, which plays an important role in our times, is still a topic where people think theyre going to burn their ngers. So it has to be repressed and pushed away, even if its being addressed in an artistic form. Its about a young man who was seduced as a child and who, in turn, becomes the seducer of the person who once seduced him. This complicated erotic entanglement, this crossre of desires, is evidently too dangerous for the gentlemen presiding over the opera houses. But, as I said before, the story goes back to a true crime case
For documenta 12 this year, you made an installation that processed sections of your trumpet concerto miramondo multiplo reassembling new acoustic formations them from several sound sources. How was the piece conceived?

We obviously sparked off some fear fantasies

Fear of your music and the text?

Of the content, Id say. The music doesnt even exist yet. Thats an interesting phenomenon too: sun kings in music institutions commission a piece. They, of all people, should believe in the music, although they dont, because they, themselves, have no faith, and denitely no love for this kind of contemporary music. And then they are presented with a fascinating draft of a libretto by a living author upon their request and they get scared before theyve even heard a single note of the music. But music transforms a text into something else. Who, for example, knows the libretto of a Monteverdi opera? In music theater you listen to the music rst. With Mozart its different insofar as he was the rst one to take up relevant issues of the day. By doing that, he demonstrated more critical awareness than many other opera composers before and since. Thats what has always made me so interested in living authors and why I prefer to fall back on the controversial issues of our times, because they inspire and challenge me.
But if we look at the libretto by da Ponte, it is actually relatively conventional, even from a historical perspective. Its even more traditional than the music, because it lacks everything that makes the character exciting and ambiguous the ambivalences and the cynicism highlighted by Molire and Grabbe for example. Lorenzo da Ponte rubs up against the social taboos of his day, and Elfriede Jelinek is doing it again now with the same subject matter. Where is the scandalous potential for todays society? What are the artistic directors afraid of?

The explosiveness of the topic. The classical music world is the most conservative there is not a trace of contemporaneity at all. The traditional operat stages represent a rened middle class milieu, and the audience (which is always being underestimated, being denied the capacity of independent hearing) is supposed from the point of view of the artistic directors and many concert organisers too to be entertained nicely, but not confronted with their own dark abyss. On the other hand, I think that the
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Apparently, a composer at documenta is a transgression. Which is probably why I kept thinking of the palindrome In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni * and thinking what an astonishing labyrinth the world is. Which is why the installation has the same title as my trumpet concerto miramondo multiplo It works on several levels that overlap and even cancel each other out. I wanted to allow myself the self-reexive freedom to think about the conditions of my composing, this world that is so strongly marginalized by society. And thus also about the creative-existential dimension of this art form. So the installation is the chronicle of an extinction because pure composing, which has a strong craft element and which is very time-consuming in the writing phase, is a branch of art which I think is in the process of dying out. It takes place inside the head and it is more complicated to communicate than all other types of art. The difference is that the composer searches for something spontaneous, but unfortunately its something no one else can hear because its only audible in the composers brain; on the other hand, the composer is totally dependent, relying on other people to put his ideas into practice, otherwise the music is not transformed into sound. The misfortune of composing is this huge intellectual labour of transferral. It cannot be achieved in a trance. Its murderously hard work. You can have your head in the clouds when youre gathering ideas, but not when youre writing them down, its an awful, painstaking procedure. Composing to me means an abstract, codied love of the human tone that lies deep within us. For me, composing is like Lewis Carrolls Snark: I engage with the Snark / Every night after dark / In a dreamy, delirious ght I, too, have tried, with my own means, to trace the essence of the open and to transform real settings into imaginary mental spaces. Hence the inclusion, among others, of the voice of Hannah Arendt, who I hold in very high esteem, and texts from Berlin Childhood by Walter Benjamin, who was so passionately enthusiastic about the magical colors in childrens books. Like delicate childrens bodies, these texts are clad in fragile, quiet, ephemeral glass sounds, a reference to the fragility of thought. The multi-voiced instal217

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lation is meant to generate unreal sound tableaux and little scenes acoustic magic worlds for the ears beyond time and space, a whole range of world fragments, a tightly wrought network of texts and sounds a labyrinth. But this fragile magic atlas is also constantly under threat of destruction by a hostile outside. In the installation, this is underlined by the low-frequency interference triggered at random by a computer. After the pen has got lost in utopian worlds, all that remains at the end, as a nal gesture, is a trumpet, this instrument for extending human breath which is why all ve movements of the trumpet concerto are labeled aria ...
The installation also includes a film of yours. What is your aim in juxtaposing the visual aspects of a score, a kind of writing of music, with the sound itself? Whats the link between the visual and the acoustical?

As I said, I see it as the chronicle of an extinction, because the real challenge for me was not to invent a story about composing that matches reality, but to show the reality of the composition process as if it were a story that I need to capture. And like the invisible tennis match in Antonionis Blow-Up, I was interested in creating an acoustic vision of an activity, in my case that of composing. All that remains is the absence of the actual activity, since the composition procedure cannot be depicted. If I had retained the original duration of writing out the score, it would be terribly boring to watch, so I accelerated the lm by a specic calculated factor and focused on just seven bars which are actually heard for just ten seconds. What you see are just afterimages, since this process cannot be visualized or captured live, which means its something quite different to making the act of painting visible like in the case of Picasso or Jackson Pollock because the act of composing cannot be depicted one-to-one, neither visually nor in terms of time. But it certainly is something like a picture in sound. I wanted to take something that happens in my head during the composition process and render it seemingly visible and audible. This is also why all the sounds are stretched, because that resembles what it sounds like in my head, whereas separate from this, at a remove in time, I then have to spend hours, weeks and months meticulously squeezing notes into a framework that has absolutely nothing to do with the time of what I hear inside my head. What remains in visual terms is a calligraphy of the pencil on the paper, maybe something like a small ballet of an invisible hand. The image tries to show the laborious act of writing and, at the same time, the sounds in the brain. Composing moves between full and empty, between sound and silence, between numbers and pauses, and in the combination of all these elements, and in this time-based art, time itself writes its own number, the total. The time of the composition is the sum of all the numbers and pauses. Composing is space, the space in-between, also in mental terms, between a number or event and the next number or event perceptible counterpoints
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in the visible passing of time. The whole installation runs in a loop, that is to say a continuum in time, but one that is always different because I have given a different duration to each layer of sound. I originally wanted to have the whole installation placed within a blue, oating space, this is also why you cant see the loudspeakers, to avoid an eye-catching display that says, Hello, look at us, this is where the sound information is coming from. The seashore is like the edge of the world, a frame. With the video image, I impose a frame on the free-oating hearing of sounds in the brain and sound spreading out in all directions, creating a margin for the illusory portrayal of sounds coming into existence or partial views before extinction and perhaps this makes clear that the piece is also about the articiality of music in general. I was also thinking of Melville and his wonderful words: The sea is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all! Which is why I would have liked to plunge the entire space in a deep indigo blue, like the deep blue of the sea in stormy weather, to show that music is essentially free-oating and without a frame. Unfortunately, I wasnt allowed to realize this

Olga Neuwirth in conversation with Gerald Matt about the legend of the great seducer and her failed Don Giovanni-project on the occasion of the exhibition Don Juan alias Don Giovanni or two and two equals four or lust is the only swindle I wish permanence in 2006 at Kunsthalle Wien and in August 2007 on the occasion of the installation miramondo multiplo at documenta 12, Kassel in 2007. Olga Neuwirth, born 1968 in Graz, Austria, lives and works in Vienna. www.olganeuwirth.com German to English translation by Nicholas Grindell.

We wander through the night in circles while the fire devours us.

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Tim Noble & Sue Webster

to probe and prod at a festering creation and to add their individual touch of magic

In your private lives as well as your artistic ones you seem to live in a symbiotic association. How does it work, being a couple both as artists and in life? How does your joint creativity converge, which is traded under the Noble/Webster label?

Tim Noble & Sue Webster, Dirty House, 24 Chance Street, 2002

Symbiotic, yes thats a great word, a preferable word to collaboration, partnership or husband and wife team. A perfect example of a symbiotic relationship is when a wild plant in the jungle chooses to house a colony of ants in the hollow of its stem in return for these same ants aggressively patrolling its leaves for food whilst vigorously destroying any insects that may like to visit and eat the leaves of the plant. This analogy represents a mutually advantageous association or relationship, a true interaction between two totally different organisms living in close association to the advantage of both. That best describes our practice as artists. When we worked with the architect David Adjaye on Dirty House, our home and studio in the East End of London evolved into a super-duper-like black structure. Previously our situation consisted of an old ofce, dedicating two oors to studio, the third to an almost non-existent living area. Our new building has incorporated two airy studio spaces with a substantial living area above. As you enter through the main door you are given the chance to stand in a narrow but double height space which acts as the psychological pause, a separation between work space and living area. Our requirements to the architect were to build two adjoining studio spaces; these now exist and serve two separate and quite individual personalities. The intention was never to be entirely separate but to at least give one another a chance to indulge in their own nicky processes whether these are specialised, experimental or even annoying to the other person. The nature of the spaces allows two opposing conditions to live side by side. For example one studio is bright, regularly cleansed and controlled, whilst the other is very dark, abundant in mess and more chaotic. The emphasis is not on one being more important than the other, but at any given time one may be more crucial at a specic moment. The uidity between spaces encourages dialogue and material investigations with physical interaction. More appropriately there is the chance for things to both stagnate for a while and to breed. There is enough space to cultivate something in a corner without the other really being aware at rst, whereas the instinctive reaction of the other may well have been to mistrust the idea and try to stamp it out before it had a chance to breathe. The beautiful arrangement of these studios encourages a cross-over into the others area to probe and prod at a festering creation and to add their individual touch of magic, thus taking the emphasis off of one kind of work being characteristic to one personality; authorship is diffused therefore joint authorship prevails once the art work comes into fruition. A major stipulation of the whole building was to retain a feeling of
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being slightly removed from the outside world. The personal space inside is reective of the studios mirrored windows; we cant see out and the outside world cant see in. The light, when we refrain from darkening the spaces, pours in. The arrangement we have is symbiotic when it works but the system has the ability to dysfunction in the sense that a self-perpetual environment begins to feed off its own insanity. When personalities clash, which they invariably do, it may force one to creep back deeper into their own corner to examine the recesses of their lost mind. This structure has the ability to self-destruct the very things it has created. In a sense its a perpetual building up over time and kicking away the legs. Along the way we leave behind deposits that are hauled out and exhibited as works of art.
One of you was born in Stroud, the other in Leicester, which means you both have provincial origins. When did you start to live and work in London? What role did places play in the development of your career?

What struck us about your questions is a longing to understand how we tick. In reading the answers of many of the other artists there seems to be a great desire for them to tell their story. The I, I, I, or me, me, me. We have told our story many times; its documented well in Jeffrey Deitchs essay in our book Wasted Youth.
You have often annoyed a conservative art public with punky pop-star appearances. At a time when artists became celebrities, you presented yourselves as underprivileged and unpretentious. Is this a matter of living according to the principles of a counterculture as an artistic strategy?

Tim Noble & Sue Webster, Black Narcissus, 2006

Perhaps originally, early on, we could relate more to being like a band and any band has its own methods of self-promotion a way of creating a persona that in some way keeps the individual a mystery.
A large proportion of your works are self-portraits of yourselves as a pair of artists and lovers, often in the form of a shadow on the wall. In traditional silhouette art the outlines of the shadow copy the silhouette of the actual person. Scissor-cut silhouettes made the art of portraiture democratic, though in its heyday in the 19th century it was regarded as a handicraft, often performed for purposes of entertainment. Inventio was denied to it, and thus the status of high art. Silhouettes and authorship are characterised historically by an ambivalent relationship to each other. In your works the shadow might point to a pile of rubbish, an arrangement of plastic fruit or, as in Black Narcissus a sculptural silicon arrangement from a large number of casts of your own finger or your own penis. The sculptural formations hardly permit the form of the shadow on the wall to be guessed
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at, and they make it a variant of the self-portrait that turns the shift in authorship into a central theme. How did you come upon this kind of representation?

In Black Narcissus, the shadow rather than the object came from the splicing together of both our proles into a shadow form perhaps reminiscent of a butt plug or something other than an obvious self-portrait. The original shadow follows a natural progression of ideas where our own self-image became repugnant to us. This was a deliberate need to reduce the ego or persona of its importance. The shadows or human forms became only recognisable in the negative. We were effectively attempting to kill ourselves off, or at least the reection. Gradually the belief that these works were not over yet redeemed itself in the form of the sculpture Black Narcissus. Whether we like to admit it or not, this piece was really a labour of love. It took many hours of physical arousal to take the casts in the rst place.

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The piece breathes. It goes beyond our usual self-portraits because you are allowed to study the shapes. Like some slug-like form, the individual casts of the male penis were on rst attempt as much to do with extreme reduction as they were to do with full erection. Debasement in any form is a form of understanding yourself beyond other peoples expectations.You try to kill yourself to dene yourself.
You prefer to make use of the form codes of kitsch, trash, glamour and pop. What concept is concealed behind this easily accessible and entertaining surface of your work?

The fairground lights were a simple form of producing something immediately self-gratifying, they emulate beyond just a at dimension and were indeed quite unsociable in terms of showing with other artists who didnt want light reecting onto the surface of their paintings. Many light sequences were far too trippy to be studied that long without the viewer sliding into a catatonic state. In short, they evolved from a fascination of moving light being an extreme form of seduction and corruption of the space they existed in.
In our exhibition True Romance we will be showing Toxic Shock, a work from your series of light objects. Does light function here as a metaphor for emotion? Generally speaking, your artistic interest seems to focus to a certain extent on light as material the vanishing, the expanding, the mirage

Tim Noble & Sue Webster, Drawing for a Future Project, 2007

What project are you planning for the immediate future?

Much of our work relies on the aspect of light to make it complete. For instance, in our series of shadow-sculptures, we have in effect produced three works in one. First of all there is the object, whether it be beautifully abstract or embarrassingly ugly, it has developed over the years into a standalone sculpture in its own right. Next you have the shadow that the object creates which manages to transform the seemingly abstract into guration. The third element is the concept between that relationship, therefore the object relies on the light source in order to make it complete. Thinking about it now, its pretty similar to our own working relationship. In a similar way, our light sculptures need to be exhibited in a darkened room. The sequences of many in particular thinking of the light sequence of Toxic Shock tell a story in perpetual motion. The room is pitch black and slowly comes to life with light as the heart lls with blood. The light pulsates like a heart beat as the owers open up and the scroll draws on. The moment the sword stabs the heart, the pulsating light ends as the heart slowly bleeds to death lights go out and the viewer is left standing alone in total darkness waiting for the routine to run again.

We are planning to dig a secret hole underground, a sizeable tomb with a shadow work for the future. It will be made from intricate gold pieces and lit by an army of glow-worms. The whole tomb will be hermetically sealed with concrete.

Tim Noble & Sue Webster in conversation with Gerald Matt on the occasion of the exhibitions Dream & Trauma. Works from the Dakis Joannou Collection and True Romance. Allegories of Love from the Renaissance to the Present at Kunsthalle Wien in 2007. Tim Noble, born in 1966 in Stroud, Great Britain and Sue Webster, born in 1967 in Leicester, Great Britain, live and work in London.

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Ulrike Ottinger
Its only in the complementary references to one another that it becomes clear that beauty, too, is an articial attitude and ugliness derives from it dynamically.

You started out as a painter and later became famous as a filmmaker. Youve continued to photograph, too. How do you see the relationship in your work between painting, photography, and film?

I not only painted before starting to make lms, I was also active in performance. For the paintings from the early 1960s in Paris, I staged Living Pictures with friends, which I photographed and then transferred to canvas. My big triptychs with bande dessine-type stories,* as well as other paintings, were made like this. I also showed the books I was reading at the time in my Paris and Fontainebleau exhibitions, as well as a gramophone that produced sound collages while playing music from my old record collection. I pursued the collage and montage principle on the level of pictures, texts, and sounds. My photographic work, then just in black-and-white, was also involved with sketching and the documentation of reality. I collected a lot of everyday stuff from the Parisian streets to put in my pictures, sometimes as sketches but mainly photographed. My photos always had a double life: as autonomous images and as components integrated into my paintings. This continued when I began to make lms. For instance, there are staged photographs made with Tabea Blumenschein that date from ten years before Ticket of No Return which show an elegant lady experiencing various drunken adventures. Or, there are photographs of certain sites and structures in Berlin that I made years before Freak Orlando, which create a parallel world in the background of the story, telling the history of industrial architecture in Berlin. Then there are photographs made during a lm shoot and which relate to the genre of the lm still. And then there is my big collection of travel photographs, sometimes made totally independently of my lm work, sometimes as preparation for it. So photography has various uses for me. The photos made in connection with lms I still see as self-sufcient objects, even though theyre part of the total concept. Photography is a medium that I rely on a lot, like a painter relies on sketches. For example, Ill use it when traveling to make visual notes for screenplays or to conceive of complex compositions or small details. I try to nd an appropriate form to express each theme and situation.
The striking diversity of your pictorial archive is also characteristic of this book, which provides a survey view of thirty years of your photographic work. The at once open and complex arrangement of the pictures attests to your great love of storytelling. Whats the basis of your desire to present the world in constantly new forms, to create new images of it, and to tell the (same) stories in renewed, surprising ways?

Ulrike Ottinger, Still from Suburbia, 1986

I follow one of the oldest models of illustration and narration, which has always fascinated me: dramaturgical stations. This form has a deep connection to mankinds early experiences. All the epics adopt it. It follows very
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clearly thought-out and amazingly simple dramaturgical rules. There is a skeletal structure that can be lled out with the past (what members of the group know in common of their history); with the future (their desires, hopes, fears); and with the present. All current events, whether joyous or disquieting, are thus worked through and nd their appropriate form. This scaffolding is used to tell stories in all cultures. Its deeply involved with mnemonic devices. The early memory boards were simultaneously earthly and cosmic models. They served to orient and give the performance a highly condensed and abstract form. The differentiation between reality and the procedures used to give form to it that is, to make reality into art are totally conscious. In my artistic work including the book and the exhibition Bild Archive I employ and update this dramaturgy. Today we have to cover the basic structure of this scaffolding with new images and situations. It presents a great challenge that also exposes a division within humanity between those who are nomadic refugees or migrant workers, who have to endure incredible hardships to come to terms with the constantly changing demands and dangers they face and the settled and established, who are in the advantageous position of having less demands placed on their abilities to react mentally or physically. The skeletal dramaturgical structure needs to have both dynamic and static components, elements of the nomadic and the settled. This not only creates aesthetic tension, but also exposes a world of extreme oppositions, as well as what lies between them. By also choosing this form for my book of photographs I was able to alternate between tableaus and narratives, while reecting the structural relationship between what I see and how I present it. Its a model that allows for the most complex retrospection and foresight and that allows pictures to be both ordered and anarchic. The division into chapters, such as Theatrum Sacrum, Frames, Color, Market, Food, Landscape, offers a sequence of themes that Ive been working on in my photography and lms for decades. So the borders between the chapters are porous. Its rather like osmosis. The photo of a department store with its everyday rituals could just as well be placed in the chapter Theatrum Sacrum. The street library with comic books in a provincial Chinese city could be moved from the chapter En Face to Daily Life. The processional motif that moves through my lms and photos in the basic forms of victory parades and dances of death appears in various chapters.
The title of the most extensive chapter in the book and exhibition it accompanies suggests more by the term En Face than portrait. En face, in French, means face to face, someone or something across from us, one thing or another encountering the camera, the photographer, and, above all, the individual, Ulrike Ottinger. The people you photograph can be close friends or strangers. You let them slip in and out of various roles, different genders, or to present themselves

Still from Freak Orlando, 1981, cited in: Ulrike Ottinger, Usinimage, 1987

in an everyday manner. For you, what is special about and what is common to faces and individuals?

What is specic to me about photography, as well as lm, is that as analog media they create possibilities to reect relationships between reality and ction, between nature and art. This also determines the way I encounter people photographically. For example, I like to work with photographs that show the relationship of people to their environments. This is what I generally like to establish initially. Sometimes I go at it in the opposite way, beginning with details, but usually I start from the general. Its like in classical opera: when a character comes on stage to sing an aria, the rst thing she sings is who she is, where she comes from, and why shes here. One establishes a character in relation to the surroundings and other people. Tense relational situations result. In my pictures, people are presented as individuals with all their particular qualities and traits, while also being gures in a broader play in which they all look at each other and present (them)selves. Every face, every person, is therefore unique in my photography because each picture develops out of something new that she and I bring to it.
The people youve worked with most extensively and intensively, such as Tabea Blumenschein or Veruschka von Lehndorff, are generally very beautiful. What does beauty mean to you and what roles do the grotesque, the other, the absurd, and the strange play in your work, especially your portraiture?
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For me the two are connected inseparably. Thats why I like to juxtapose or combine them in pictures. This reveals that the beautiful, as Karl Rosenkranz has described it, derives from the ugly, as the result of a process that strips the everyday of its aws. Beauty is primarily an ideal, and so an artice which occasionally appears in reality, where we have searched for and found it. Conversely, the ugly only appears in contrast to the beautiful as difference and differentiation. If beautiful faces and forms tend toward the static, then these other, unsettling bodies derive their amazing complexity and liveliness from the friction they generate rubbing up against the beautiful. Im interested in both extremes, but even more so in transitions between and contaminations of them. Tabea Blumenschein behind glass on the cover of this book is compressed into a pretty picture. In the photo sequence, The Scream, this icon is successively transformed. The face moves in mime-like expressions that border on grimaces. Its only in the complementary references to one another that it becomes clear that beauty, too, is an articial attitude and ugliness derives from it dynamically. Deformation is a suggestive commentary on ideal form, and vice versa. In my lm Freak Orlando, and the photos that go with it, this relationship is a central narrative theme. Dwarves and giants, two-headed people, and women without abdomens are the main protagonists of a cosmos inhabited by real and imaginary beings equally. Like the title character, they are sent through historical metamorphoses until they reach their destination, a festival of the ugly in northern Italy. Where the ugly rule, the beautiful become outsiders, curiosities. And so that icon of the French cinema, Delphine Seyrig, dressed in a Playboy Bunny costume, wins the grand prize: in an ugliness competition, the beauty is the real freak. What the nal episode thematizes narratively, also interests me as an aesthetic question. So I made many photographic studies of the lead actress in Freak Orlando, Magdalena Montezuma, in which she is transformed by leather or metal prostheses into a monstrous being. Or, her regular, clearly made-up features undergo metamorphosis in a funhouse mirror into an abstract schema. Form and deformation for me are central because they often only become visible in their interaction, through artistic work with beautiful women.
In a sense, the chapter headings in the book also alternate between content-oriented themes and categories such as color and frames. What importance do these formal aspects have, particularly for your camera work?

Ulrike Ottinger, Still from Das Exemplar, 2002

Colors are very important for my lms and photographs because they convey moods that can be independent of or supplementary to the people, things, or landscapes represented. This pertains not only to individual colors but also to how they are juxtaposed to one another, such as the extreme differentiation of colors in Kabuki, where they appear very clearly, placed
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next to each other, without blending. Or sometimes I make them variable, dissolving ecks of light and color in an almost impressionistic way. In the pictorial sequence in the chapter Color, I worked out a gradual diminution of the colors similar to that in my lm Ticket of No Return which moves from red to yellow to blue to silver. The lm opens with the entire frame lled with red. Then the red detaches from the camera and becomes evident as the protagonists coat and hat, just as she embarks upon her great adventure under the sign of Aller Jamais Retour (Go Do Not Return). The elegant drunkard emerges from the stations of her journey bathed in ever new and contrasting moods, which materialize optically as dye-baths. Tabea Blumenscheins costumes fade from glaring red and yellow to mundane black and nally to a translucent, shimmering silver. The silver prevents the gure from taking on any more color but it reects her surroundings all the more powerfully. The theme of mirroring is therefore contained within that of color. I like to work with reective surfaces like glass, water, mirrors, foil, and uids. They make it possible to create images that stand for anything that is doubled, owing, and dissolving. Frames have a similar role in my images. I regularly visit collections and museums. When I lived in Paris for eight years, I went to the Louvre once a week, sometimes just to see a single painting. I was very involved with pictorial composition. The photo on the cover of this books dust jacket shows Tabea Blumenschein behind the glass door of an airport that looks like a glass cell. I work a lot with this kind of framing and demonstrate that
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its always a matter of picture making. The clearest example is the theater frame in my lm Dorian Gray in the Mirror of the Yellow Press. The illustrations painted on it, in the style of the n-de-sicle painter Gustave Moreau, attest to the exoticism of the colonial opera. Scenes of an opera performed within the frame are set in the early stages of the Spanish Inquisition and deal with the conquest of the Isle of Bliss. Its a multi-faceted construction: outside the frame theres the story of Frau Dr. Mabuse, the boss of an international media concern, and Dorian Gray, her student, victim, and rival. I placed the markedly articial theatrical framework in a natural landscape. The curtain opens and nature becomes an operatic stage. Another shot shows a wall of rock with a cavity that with the addition of drapery becomes a theater box. From there, Frau Dr. Mabuse and Dorian Gray watch themselves in the opera, in their roles on stage as Grand Inquisitor of Seville and the young Spanish Infant. Theres a view into the frame but also out from it. And there are the characters own views of themselves. Art frames nature: the sea in the background is real but the clouds and sky are painted parts of the frame. I like to work with these kinds of trompe-loeil effects. It creates the possibility to reect the relationship between art and nature.
In conclusion, what would you say characterizes you as an artist?

I think its the ability to condense artistically those things one sees and experiences and make the essential visible. Or, to rearrange things in reality playfully, creating new worlds, so a more focused view becomes possible.

Ulrike Ottinger in conversation with Gerald Matt on the occasion of the exhibition En Face. The Portrait in the Films and Photopraphs of Ulrike Ottinger at Ursula Blickle Stiftung, Kraichtal, Germany in 2005. Ulrike Ottinger, born in 1942 in Konstanz, Germany, lives and works in Berlin. German to English translation by Peter Chametzky and Susan Felleman.

comic strip

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Here is my head for you to have

Poka-Yio, you are citing Goya by speaking of the disorder of reason, which is after all capable to produce monsters* in reference to your artistic practice. In his pictures, Goya also represented the horrors of war. What horrors are you processing in your works? Is Goya a model for you as an artist?

A body of drawings and a performance (Return From A-B Grave) were inspired by the Abu-Ghraib atrocities, but Goya was also interested in the hypocrisy of the socialites, which is a major kick for me too as I displayed in F*ART, my theatrical play. By the way, when major American and European newspapers have EVIL (Saddam) on their covers, which means that words like Good and Evil are not only back in our daily vocabulary but excuses to support a war, then this is what I call Sleep of Reason.
Is this a criticism of rationalism attacking western cultures self image in order to confront European-American models of identity with their artificial structuredness?

If, after so many years of enlightenment, we are returning to the point in which we launch a war with the main reasoning that this is a war against evil, then I dont understand where are we heading
Last year you had an exhibition in the Gallery Gazonrouge in Athens, with the title Kaka. You said that your source of inspiration was the dog shit on the sidewalk, which grows anarchically. Swastikas are found in your work; you represent yourself decapitated. What are you trying to provoke your public to do? What role do materials such as chocolate and media such as video animation play? Could you say something about the politics of your art?

In Athens, it is easy to see swastika grafti on the walls of primary schools where immigrants are the majority of the pupils. Athens is a nice n dirty city; dog shit is somehow pretty in their unexpected appearances, and in my vocabulary they represent urban owers. My work is all about repulsion and attraction, shit and chocolate are the two extremes whose ends meet. I use easily perceived codes and narrative elements that make my work easier to communicate (surprisingly not to digest though), so I guess it reveals my agenda to make a work appealing to a larger audience. Isnt that something of a political gesture? An art that is full of rhetoric, but no aim.
Repulsion and attraction what makes this such a fascinating subject for you? Dumbo-Ectoplasm from my Childhood is presumably to be understood in this context as well. To make it, you made a 1:1 copy of a genuine city rubbish truck in Athens and covered it with chocolate. Would you like to comment on this interesting project a little?
Poka-Yio, About to Get Dirty, 2006 234 235

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I can say that I recall my childhood, as distant as it seems, as a sticky, sweet mass in which I was stuck in limbo. According to Buddhism, one of the human typologies is the Bad Kan or the elephant (Dumbo). The Bad-Kanpeople are slow, sleepy, heavy and ignorant. My childhood dream world was so sweet and sticky I couldnt escape. Chocolate praline in my work, what I call libidinal pulp, is a substance coming from our subconscious only to tie us tightly to our dreams, a stuff that doesnt let me go.
To return to the questions of symbols you use: In German-speaking countries you would be seen as very provocative because of your frequent use of National Socialist symbols. You paint swastikas on the wall monumentally in chocolate. What do the swastikas in your work mean? In your video animation Farthenon Rising: Athens Swastikas on Parade, the Hitler salute and the swastika are used in the framework of comic aesthetics. How do your Greek viewers react to that?

Greeks get unsettled when they see it, but the German speaking audience feels immediate repulsion to my use of swastikas. I can tell you how it started though. A few years ago I spent two years teaching art to six and seven year olds at a primary school. One morning during the break I saw a piece of grafti ten metres in size, saying The Good Albanian is the Dead Albanian written in the middle of the schoolyard. By the way, the majority of children in this primary school come from immigrant families of which the biggest percentage is of Albanian origin. I wondered how the hell someone could explain this grafti to a seven year old kid, who has just started reading. I couldnt get this out of my mind and after a year it was transformed into this body of work. The Athens Swastikas video is the worst nightmare come true; a fascist parade in Athens but with cartoon characters saluting. The Chocolate Swastika Mural (all works in private collections now) is a memorial to political numbness. A blond chick (my gallerist) creates the mural in the accompanying video. She is as blond and slim as Vogue would dictate but through her slick movements a hated symbol is created.You see, if someone is to blame for fascism it is not some right wing politicians but its us in our brain-dead bourgeois numbness.
The term trauma comes from the Greek word , which means something like wound. In her photograph Untitled # 315 of 1995, Cindy Sherman vividly stages human vulnerability. To what extent can your contribution to the exhibition be called traumatic? Or, do your feel closer to the dream?

Poka-Yio, Self-Decapitated, 2005

dents fall into oblivion because our state of welfare is built on that ground. By self-decapitating, I offer myself to the public before the public devours me. I wish I worked in the realm of dreams, but reality is more of a nightmare than dreams are.
By exhibiting the collection of Dakis Joannou we are trying to approach the aesthetics of the trauma in a variety of ways aesthetics which reveal things like traumas, for example, on the level of shock, decay, repetition, destruction of perceptions and psychic injury. Could you describe your artistic position in relation to the themes of the show?

The piece Self-Decapitated has its iconic roots in post-World War II Greek history, during the Greek civil war that split Greece into pro-communists and anti-communists, when both militia and the army used to decapitate many of their opponents. So during the boom of modernism, we also had chopped heads on poles. It is bourgeois hypocrisy that lets such recent inci236

Some of Dakis Joannous choices had captured my very early artistic imagery; for example, Robert Gobers works, amongst others. He still remains one of my favourite artists. In my case, trauma or the non-healing wound is the battery that charges my work. Aesthetisize it as much as you like, lick the wound, merchandize it, it still remains unhealed.
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Self-Decapitated is a work with explicitly political contents and, at the same time, a copy of your own head, a kind of politicised self-portrait. So are you speaking here of personal or collective traumata?

I could try to speak of my personal traumata but who cares about a wellbred middle class guy like me? I have to keep my traumata to myself, as they are the spark plugs and the batteries behind my drives. I dont know whether psychoanalysis would resolve them but Id rather keep them alive and hidden under my mattress so I wont ever totally rest. About the political content; again as an artist I feel somehow Im lacking the moral excuses to try and directly address truly important political issues. Decapitation is indeed a part of Modern Greek history. In post-World War II Greece, both communist and right wing militia in the civil war decapitated distinguished arrested opponents. So the references are still there but I feel more secure to resort to self-mockery regarding the expectations my audience has for me. Its like an inside joke between me and those who either love my work or those who hate it: Here is my head for you to have
You are also a performance artist. The torture scandal of Abu-Ghraib in 2004 is the political background to your performance Returning from A-B Grave. Here you climb out of a bathtub filled with chocolate. Your performances are completely unknown in this country. As far as I know, we are your first exhibition venue in Austria or in a German-speaking country. What happens in this piece and what is the meaning of the title? To what extent is your body your medium?

Nothing historical or mythological about Athens has slipped in my work so far. I am grounded in here and now. Mythology is great for its narrative power. In my work, I often use somewhat dramatic gestures; therefore, I assume that makes me look Greek enough as an artist As for Destroy Athens, we dont literarily refer to the existing city of Athens. We are talking about a complex structure which is more psychological than physical, more personal than social, one that restrains everyones attempts at self-determination on whether they are Greek or not.
I would have thought Farthenon comes from Parthenon ...?

Farthenon Rising, the title of my rst artist book comes from Parthenon and fart.
But isnt the Parthenon something that has a great deal to do with mythology and history?

Yes, it has, but like all great symbols their true historical origin has been blurred into oblivion and has been replaced by plastic Chinese replicas or T-shirts or digital snapshots. So what is the Parthenon, The Great Pyramid and Mona Lisa but semions?
Why does Athens need a Biennial? What will its Biennial have that others dont have?

As I said before, the war against Iraq symbolizes for me a return to a preEnlightenment era. A-B stands for alphabet or for Reason. Return from the Grave of Reason. By staying in that chocolate tub for a couple of hours like a foetus in a sweet womb, I am re-baptized in the libidinal pulp I talked about previously. The white uniformed marines wipe me clean as if I was a newborn. Thats about it. My body is not important and to be totally honest although I often resort to performances, I dont actually like live events. They make me feel restless when I am in the audience. But I have to admit that they certainly have an effect on people. This year I wrote and directed my rst theatrical play. I liked it a lot for the adrenaline kick and the interaction with my actors, but still I consider myself a painter, or to be more precise, a creator of images.
You are one of the founders of the Athens Biennial, which is to take place for the first time in September this year, under the title Destroy Athens. The participating artists are asked to deconstruct their own stereotypes of the city in their works. To what extent do ideas about the history and mythology of Athens also play a role in your own work?

Athens has recently become a hot spot; its about time this has happened. This Biennial is a sign of the times. I hope that as an independent initiative we are about to present something courser and possibly different enough, but this remains to be seen. We are also rookies and have been unaware of the difculties. The ultimate solutions we have provided will most probably be positively visible in the outcome.
Lets talk about merchandizing. Does provocative iconography serve marketing strategies well: symbols such as swastikas or the game with feces and its connotations?

Merchandizing? I dont believe I have truly started selling my shitty artworks. In fact, only a few true acionados of my work like them. By the way, when the majority of people say they hate them, I agree, that no one is expected to see a shitty work of art and like it. Everyone expected me to indulge them once more, but no. There has been time for attraction and time for repulsion. The attraction show sold well, whereas the repulsion show has sold poorly so far. As for marketing strategies, I have to admit that I am not a purist or dare to say I am a reversed purist, meaning that I believe
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means as this is the true hardball. I am always working on new scripts and it remains to be seen whether this will end in a new lm or play.
Thank you for talking with us.

Thank you for stealing softly my time.

Poka-Yio in conversation with Gerald Matt and Synne Genzmer on the occasion of the exhibition Dream & Trauma. Works from the Dakis Joannou Collection, Athens at Kunsthalle Wien in 2007. Poka-Yio, born in 1970 in Athens, lives and works in Athens. www.poka-yio.com

Poka-Yio, Flower 1, 2005

that there is not a single successful artist whose work hasnt been marketed accordingly either by him, by others or by pure chance. Some people believe that Lucian Freud is less marketing oriented than, say, Jeff Koons, but I can argue that Koons whose work I love to hate or hate to love is less of a market product than Lucian Freud, not to mention the old Britannia back up of his work and the Freud name legacy, that ultimately add enormously to the actual, by all means great, paintings of his.
Is Poka-Yio a pseudonym?

Yes, its the name I have been using for some years now.
What is your next project?

Alongside my 2D and 3D works I am about to explore more my narrative

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The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters is the title of a graphic from Goyas Caprichos.

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a mirror image of the eeting, the momentary, the obsessive, continuous search for orientation in a changing world.

For the Kunsthalle Wien you have conceived of your work bit.fall for the first time as an installation in a public space. What seems, at first sight, to be a sculpture accessible to the senses turns out to be a highly complex, technologically sophisticated test array. bit.fall is a waterfall of words, where a computer program translates the current headlines from various Internet news websites into sequences of water drops. The visual information can be perceived as an image just for a short moment before it breaks up into individual drops, which again go through the cycle and generate word pictures. I would call bit.fall a successful Memento mori, which evidently traces the complexity and interdependence of the constant flood of information on the pulse of the times. What does the work mean to you? Could you briefly sketch your ideas and, in particular, explain more clearly the processional character of the work?

Julius Popp, bit.fall, 2006/07

For me, bit.fall is a symbol where two cycles come together: that of culture and that of nature. The words presented through water carry the contents which are moving us in thought. The waterfall shows symbolically how these contents come about, become visible and then again dissolve into an original condition. The cycle of water corresponds to the cycle of nature, while the represented words correspond to the cycle of culture-forming communications. The cultural process of creation, where humanity shapes its own environment, is subject to the natural course of events; it is a process of change, inuence, decay and re-ordering. As soon as the water leaves the machine it is changed by its surroundings gravity pulls it to the ground, wind diverts the drops, light inuences visibility, etc. The information interacts with its surroundings and changes them. And: I can perceive this information but not really grasp it. When I reach out for the information my hands just become wet ... the ow is not to be stopped. Information is an unstoppable stream. Alluding back to a phrase you used, I would describe bit.fall as a process rather than as a test array. The processional character of the work is due to the fact that the associated values are not static but dynamically adjusted. bit.fall shows only current contents, which are constantly changing, and for me that is a mirror image of the eeting, the momentary, the obsessive search for orientation in a changing world. Our mental focus is constantly hot for changing conditions of life. Life is a dynamic system, which constantly re-invents itself; bit.fall takes that up.
Our works normally need long development phases. bit.fall, for example, took four years of continuous work together with a team of scientists and technicians. How are production times of this kind organised? Do you always work with the same team?

Until now I have had a permanent team of freelance assistants, who have mainly helped out of a sense of conviction in the ideas behind the works.
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Sometimes it is a synergetic process, but other times a frustrating, irritating, bureaucratic or emotional nightmare. Most of the time is spent organizing money to pay for the development or, as in the case of bit.fall, to prove that the system will function the way I devised it. There was a long process when I had to make clear to people that what I think is actually realisable as well. Both the funding model for my work and my credibility are undergoing change at last I have managed to get out of debt into a position of independence and no longer have to prove my ideas. The coming year will show whether the long periods of development really were necessary because it was not possible to solve technical problems as long as there was no money for alternatives, or whether the problem stemmed from my way of thinking. bit.fall is not a scientic work. For me it is merely a symbol. And I think it is a misunderstanding that can be found over and over in the press that scientists work with some of my works, and they are practising science when they. In fact, it is quite seldom that I ask a scientist about a technical solution of some kind; when I make a work I usually know beforehand how it functions. Saying that it has the character of an experiment is also misleading for the same reason: there are precise ways to put questions that are formulated in sculptural terms in my works.
bit.fall was not originally conceived as a sculpture in a public space. In Vienna it has become clear that works in public spaces are always bound to conditions and rules specific to the place the artwork had to be adapted and did not correspond to the aesthetic qualities of the museum installation. What is the status of aesthetic perception when you conceive a work? Museum or public space how do you view the different forms of presentation? Are you thinking of future works for the public arena?

Unlike the ephemeral curtain of water in bit.fall, two people communicate, exchange views and generate full, autonomous images as they do so. Here the artist and the viewer fall silent and see how various fluids are pumped through a tangle of hoses to finally appear through a screen on the wall as a pulsing, threedimensional picture. Even if the work conveys the impression of a test laboratory, beyond all technology there is a breath of living corporality the circulation of the blood-red fluids in the hose takes possession of body-like associations. You said the machine is supposed to imitate a body that you are concerned with visualising communications between people. The idea for bit.flow gives rise to the suspicion that the fundamental social questions you are putting out there are striving to reach a broader public. But what is the explanation of such a complex system for the viewer?

I learn something new from every project. Gradually I am coming to understand what political and bureaucratic effort there is behind every work in a public space. An artwork really tolerates no compromises as a symbol it has to function 100% in its own right or it will be simply falsied by all the little adjustments and thus rendered meaningless in the truest sense of the word. As an artist, one has to weigh out very precisely the narrow path between public safety and aesthetic content. In the case of bit.fall in Vienna, however, I have also noticed that the work has a certain autonomy, which seems untouchable. Even the imperfect presentation generated an enormous amount of feedback. Many people took note of the work who might normally never go into a museum. That is a very pure and direct debate, and for me it is almost more important that the man on the street should confront my work.
The attempt to present a flowing picture is in fact a central theme of bit.flow.
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bit.ow is a key work for me. It combines the scientic element, my search for understanding, and a purely aesthetic expression. It combines the fundamental principles of communication with the aesthetics of calligraphy and biology. The signs that come about are graphic in nature but also relate to our actual biology: the blood that ows in our arteries conveys information precisely in the manner of a written sign. From a scientic point of view, bit.ow carries the matter of a question that, greatly simplied, denes the problem of the senso-motoric loop on several levels. This question how can an intrinsic machine understand its own actions? is very much like the question, what happens in our head when we agree to signs or symbols in communication? It is clear that a sign always has a representation in the senders mind and in the recipients mind. The agreed signs have a particular representation in each mind, or, in other words, a history ... bit.ow deals with this generative history of signs that have a bodily representation. The whole problem of communication can be declined or inclined up and down in bit.ow, in a very simple and beautiful and yet complex picture. That the machine creates biological associations has been consciously selected I believe that one day we will understand communication and the resulting emergence of culture. If bit.ow really begins one day to develop its own vocabulary of graphic signs, then I will no longer have to explain this work because it will explain itself almost of itself. It is in fact quite simple: a machine that observes itself and tries to develop a sign language with its body. We will recognise that simply by looking at it. The aesthetics should lead one to think more deeply about the interconnections between these matters. I have deliberately not yet nished the work because otherwise the effect of the image that comes about in the tangle of hoses would drive out the search for understanding. In a work of this kind one has to decide between a fake, which can produce patterns and images, and the genuinely autono245

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Julius Popp, bit.flow, detail, 2005

Julius Popp, bit.flow, detail, 2005

mous solution which satises scientic criteria.If the latter variant starts to function in reality, Ill be scared.
At documenta 1977, Joseph Beuys pumped honey through the staircase of the exhibition building for 100 days. A honey pump at the workplace should represent the circulation as a metaphor of the living and the social. What the honey pump suggests seems to really work in the case of bit.flow: a machine that reacts autonomously and generates the image of social processes. Did Beuyss ideas play a role in the conception of bit.flow? If we talk of predecessors, would you call the artistic work of Joseph Beuys a point of reference?

same time, totally reject what you are saying. It is an unfocused eld where I work, a eld where utopia and reality are contained sometimes I nd it difcult myself to distinguish between the two. I work consistently at positioning my works between disciplines and between categories, not so much with an interdisciplinary approach, or with bridges, but more in the sense of creating autonomous, oating bodies of orientation which should function as if they were real. Of course these works are still concerned with Utopias, but I believe that the big challenge is to use these bodies to create a new, functioning system. In our times we are not only short on Utopias but lack the courage to express them.
Your first works were directly coupled with the human body. For Herzton, your undergraduate exercise at the Academy of Visual Arts in Leipzig, you connected seven people to a cardiac microphone and transmitted the sound live. Hearing the inner machine externally cannot but touch on existential questions. You are looking for artistic forms of expressions for the process of perceiving, understanding and interpreting human behaviour. To what extent does this specific concern have something to do with your own life story? In an interview once you spoke of a virus in your brain that resulted in a temporary loss of memory shortly before your final academic examination.

No, I have no previous models, I only have an idea. I try to develop my works autonomously and to free myself from all inuences that might color a thought process in some way, either emotionally or personally. In my thoughts I often act in opposition to accepted ways of thinking or protect myself from art history in order to develop my own position. I am concerned with structural interconnections. There are sure to be parallels in themes but I believe that the way they are handled, the expression and the result, are quite different. I am rmly convinced that we are in a position today not only to create symbols but to generate real functioning examples for social processes.
Joseph Beuyss radical attempt to make art serve society was utopian and has certainly not remained without effect. Beuyss works cannot be understood rationally, said the artist Marina Abramovic, they work like stores of understanding, which stimulate us to see the world differently. Your works act at the interface between art and science and are, therefore, definitely capable of being understood both rationally and cognitively. Yet I would also describe your artistic activity as a consistent work on a Utopia.

That very illness taught me that what I think and feel is unavoidably related to my body and my surroundings. In the case of my illness, I lost my memory for some time my consciousness was consequently turned off in a waking, living condition. When I try to recall those empty moments I am still always lled with horror. It was a condition of total absence of perspective. The experience brought me to the path of researching our consciousness. In the meantime, however, I have realised that it seems to be a limitless eld I merely hope with each new work to understand a little bit more of it.

I cant respond to that in a simple way. I can agree with you and, at the
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You only decided to study in Leipzig when you were 25, and before that you spent years as an advertising photographer. How did this late decision come about?

Once begun, an unstoppable process is put into motion. How intensively do you concern yourself today with the development process of the two robots Adam and Eve?

I dropped out of advertising because of a variety of factors. The most important was probably that I could no longer cope with the constant view behind the stage set. Every photo, every poster, every advertising spot, basically everything that brings color into TV is designed by advertising people ... and they often have no idea that they are defacing their own surroundings and culture by what they do. I am not thinking of aesthetics here but only of understanding the system, the culture-building process. Advertising is a culture-building factor. I would now have to take a long view and go on about the interconnections between the economy, globalisation, opinion-formation, advertising and the self-preservation drive of living systems. But that would burst the bounds of this interview. Today I am again working for advertising agencies and making concepts that build on my artistic research. But what comes out of this is a completely different form, a different direction for advertising. They are synergetic Trojan horses. The design of our society functions quite differently today from thirty or even fteen years ago, even though the fundamental principles remain the same we need to nd a new way to deal with that ... studying art offered me a suitable free space to begin a new way. It was not art but domesticated freedom that made me change my path so drastically. I dont know where the path will lead, I have only noticed that for me it begins here.
What was still being tested on the human body in the work Herzton, you went on developing with machines: in micro.adam and micro.eva you created two robots that were to develop a personal consciousness of body. This work is explicitly addressed to the representation of learning processes. Highly reputable research institutes such as the Fraunhofer Institut in St. Augustin and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston use micro.adam and micro.eva for experiments with artificial intelligence. What do the two robots mean to you? Objects for research or works of art? How do you assess the categorisation or the different value systems of art and science? Which criteria apply to your works? Does the thesis Art as Science Science as Art have any relevance for you at all?

The two robots are my most original and probably most important formulation. I think the two machines contain all the questions that I express in my work. With every new work I go back in thought to those two and try to compare new thought processes with those of Adam and Eve I see whether new aspects and thoughts have been added or how the expression has changed since then. Immediately after the robots had been built, I thought, Thats it, le closed. Start a new project and move on. Today I know that I will still be working with those two in thirty years time. They form the centre from which I express myself with new works using different angles, points of views and directions.

What is obvious in the case of micro.adam and micro.eva really applies to all your works: they are technical creations in an on-going process which lets you, their inventor, become a viewer of your own invention. A final, completed work doesnt exist and this gives rise to the question: how do you begin a work? Perhaps you could sketch the first steps for us using micro.sphere, a work we havent discussed yet, as an example.

I make no distinction between art and science; that categorisation no longer applies to me. The only criterion that I apply to my work is the sensual perceptions of people and rational experience. It is a question of self-knowledge. I investigate the insufciencies of clarity in being human I dont know which category that belongs to.
The spirits I called up / I now cant get rid of is the cry in Goethes Magicians Apprentice. Even the names of the two robots make reference to the Creation.
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micro.spheres are spherical robots which roll into the centre of their next environment. It is an installation with perhaps twenty of these spheres, which are undergoing a constant process of adaptation. This will express itself in aesthetic and geometric patterns. The work wanders, searching between order and chaos. As a visitor, you rst come in as a disturbing element but later as part of the work. It developed from questions of home. I have had no home for years now I do not see my place of birth as a localisation of my home (even though I usually feel at ease there). For a long time I have had no xed place to live; now I have one again but these days I am constantly travelling. My home arises, therefore, out of relations somehow with my fellow humans. That is the point of origin of micro.spheres. Over a period of several years it then became clear to me why micro. spheres is much more than the search for a home. From my point of view it is an image of the liquefaction of our society. Our entire life is becoming faster and more exible and as humans we are much more preoccupied with nding orientation and something to hold on to. But we navigate quite differently in a mobile world than in a static one. For me, micro.spheres is a symbol of this new order, or this social paradigm change.
micro.sphere draws a highly poetic picture of the complex interactions between living bodies and their environment. In the NY ART Magazine, for example, the
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Julius Popp

this point of view, metaphors of the human spirit. We are living in a time in which the way man deals with nature and with his culture is shifting closer and closer to the centre of his own attention.

Julius Popp in conversation with Gerald Matt and Ilse Lafer in September 2007 on the occasion of the installation bit.fall in the public space of the Kunsthalle Wien 2007. Julius Popp, born in Nuremberg in 1973, lives and works in Leipzig, Germany. German to English translation by Nelson Wattie.

Julius Popp, micro.sphere, 20022005

installation was called a social reformation with spherical objects. Your works have expanded and continuously advanced the concept of social utopia. Is that also true of your future projects? What are you working on at present?

In my work, the human being and the origins of his consciousness are always at the centre. While dealing with a complex environment in various ways is a theme in micro.spheres, my most recent work, bit.reektion, is about humanitys dealings with energy. bit.reektion uses sunlight not only as a source of energy but also as a signing method. The work diverts the energy of the sun in such a way that light images are formed in the bright light of day. For me it is a symbol of the human ability to store and form the energy of nature for our own needs. The sunlight and the mirror are, from
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Nedko Solakov
Yes, the World is at. Believe it!

In your exhibitions you quite often make reference to the surrounding environment, always doing so with your characteristic mixture of seriousness and wit, precision and poetry. For example, in 2005 at the Zurich Kunsthaus, in other words in a city where art and finance are closely allied, you exhibited 99 works that had not been noticed previously by the art market so that you were presenting leftovers, or non-sellers one might say. At documenta 12 you deal with the topic of fear in (yet again!) 99 drawings with textual commentaries, and when we view and read them we tend to smile rather than be afraid. In the next room we find Top Secret, an index-chest with drawings, handwritten texts, objects, photos, recording your life during socialism and specifically pointing out your connections, as an informant, with the Bulgarian Secret Service. That is where one might be afraid! Did you especially choose the topic of fear for the documenta, and therefore in the context of an institution that can be of decisive importance for the life of an artist? Or is Top Secret from 1989 so important to you that you had to show it here? We can find more details about that on your homepage, but would you tell us something, all the same, about this work and its importance to your oeuvre?

Nedko Solakov, Fears #63, 2006-2007

Yes, the work is very important for me but to show it in Kassel was the curators decision. They consider it to be very signicant in the post-socialist context. I created it between December 1989 and February 1990, immediately after the changes. I wanted to get this burden off my chest much sooner, but for obvious reasons this was not possible I would have been sent to jail. When I was accumulating all these slips (179 pieces) in the two compartments of the index chest, I had the strong feeling that I was trying to nish an enormous chapter of my life I said bye-bye to my Socialist past. When I was writing the Secret Service story (how I was recruited when I was 18 years old and truly believed in socialism, convinced that I was fullling my duty as a proper citizen; how during almost seven years of collaboration I slowly started to realize that it was not really my duty, but still believed in socialism; how in the summer of 1983, I left the army and rmly refused to be used any longer just before a military Secret Service Ofcer wanted to transfer me to the one responsible for the intelligentsia in my home town) on these small whitish cards, I literally got cold feet foreseeing in a way the scandal the piece was to cause two months after it was publicly exhibited at the April 1990 exhibition, The End of Quotation. I am not proud of what I did as a nave student and a soldier but I am denitely proud of my Top Secret. After completing it, I had the feeling that from that moment on, I could do whatever I wanted, it liberated me. By the way, 18 years after the changes, the les in Bulgaria are still closed (only the les of high ranking politicians were checked). There are still no public documents about my collaboration only my art work. I was not threatened with being disclosed back in 1990, I did it because my conscience couldnt bear the burden any longer. The piece was done 18 years ago and it seems that
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of some fellow artists in Bulgaria. In my CV the work is described as Top Secret action with colleagues and by colleagues I not only mean artist-artists but mainly the artists-that-are-really-secret-service-guys. By the end of the day it was clear that the campaign against me back in the summer of 1990 was organized by the real guys using me as a scapegoat. To what extent can one assert oneself as an artist in this game? I dont know, but I think with that work, I pushed the limit further, set a standard so to speak. I cant really judge the role of the artist in both systems but it may be worthwhile to speculate how many Western artists would reveal their connections with their own secret services regarding, for example, terrorism.
In an installation sketch from 1994 you collected evidence for the fact that the world is flat: The Truth (the Earth is a plane, the World is flat) is its title. Did you ever create that installation? And do you believe it is actually possible that, alongside the proven spherical form of the earth, it could also be viewed as a disk when seen from its surface? Or is this about the actual instability of major truths? Heinz von Foerster once said: Truth is a liars invention.

Installation view, documenta 12, Kassel 2007: Nedko Solakov, Fears, 20062007

the subject overwhelmed me with guilt. What do I mean? If I had harmed anybody (by reporting those who I heard had contacts with religious sects or who liked or didnt like the exhibition of Yugoslavian art). These people would have nailed me in all these 18 years. Nothing has happened, which doesnt mean that I am not still guilt-ridden. In all previous installations the content of the index-chest under Plexiglas was displayed in a casual folder, chained next to it, so the visitors were able to read the texts on the 179 slips of paper in English. We decided to look/list/read the work for documenta, and so a 40-minute video was created in the spring of 2007. It seems like this was a good move because the video, including my comments 18 years after the fact, wrapped up the whole story.

Does Top Secret sketch a fictitious role of the artist caught in the networks of power structures between recognition of power, adaptation, denunciation in the sense playing with this power, undermining it subtly or does it show something autobiographical? To what extent can one assert oneself as an artist in this game? Are there, in your opinion, differences to the role of the artist in a Western democratic system?

Yes, the work was realised in 19931994. I wanted to show that it is alright to live and die at the edge of the (at) world (Bulgaria). It tells the story of seven witnesses who are all related to Bulgaria in some way: What do the 72-year-old Nobel Prize Winner physicist Dr. Haraldar Gusstalsan, the obscure Bulgarian artist Sundy Levakov, the sailor Rodald Berikow, the astronaut Vitali R., the skillful politician Philip Mason, a bum named Goro, and a seven-year-old girl have in common? You dont know, do you? Well, all seven (and a lot more people as well) have recently experienced the sudden revelation that the Earth is actually at. Since that moment, they have begun living their lives in incredible spiritual harmony all their torments, the endless questions which have clouded their existence are gone The strange thing is that, in one way or another, this story is related to Bulgaria. Yes, the World is at. Believe it!
To return to the theme of Fear: What we have in common is the fear of flying. In Albisola you exhibited small terracotta sculptures that came from your nervous kneading of clay in an aeroplane. A drawing is also devoted to this topic at the documenta: Drawing No. 20 shows a small aircraft you had to get onto on which you wrote: If there is a No. 21, I will still be afraid. No. 21 exists, Im happy to say. Fear or respect for authority is something you clearly dont have, or no longer have. In your video Destroyed Public Sculpture you use a sledgehammer to destroy a statue in front of a public building (is it the police station?) and then,
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Yes, it is autobiographical, but there are no genuine documents, neither in the Bulgarian public space nor in the private index-chest space; so the story is mainly an art work which also includes the hysterical reactions
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after awhile, you walk away as cool as a cucumber. Was that a statement directed against state-sanctioned art or a suggestion for greater courage when dealing with authorities?

I am really afraid of ying. But lets move on to the other subject, which is less frightening: me and the authorities. Actually the guy who destroyed the sculpture is not me it was a young artist from Arnhem who was commissioned to make a replica of a public sculpture situated in front of the police headquarters. We obtained every permission possible for this act from the widow of the sculptor who made the work back in the 1970s, from the architectural councils, from the police of course. So the guy replaced the original with the replica and then destroyed the replica, although the passers-by didnt know that it was not the original. So I was kind of mocking myself as a very brave artist who got permission from everywhere to do an anarchist act.
In a series of oil paintings called Romantic Landscapes with Missing Parts from 2002, you used a particular kind of wit by making fun of the (nowadays) philistine concept of romanticism with opulent paintings: the imitative pictures, freely after Caspar David Friedrich & co., always had important iconographic components missing compared to the originals, so that the theoretic infrastructure could not be deciphered and all that was left was the superficial or clich-style ideal of the beautiful. But you also wrote notes on the walls, where you listed the missing parts. Doesnt that invert the effect of the trap again? Or is it just that the public has to have everything explained to them?
Installation view, documenta 12, Kassel 2007: Nedko Solakov, Top Secret, 1989-1990

The small texts and drawings on the walls do not explain things to the public: Romantic Landscapes with Missing Parts were executed in the murky winter of 2001-2002, up north in Stockholm in a nice studio at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts. That was a very hard, horrible time for me, the conceptual artist who pretends that being classically educated in mural painting 20 years ago gives him some kind of advantage. Most of the time during these three months I was really pissed off by my inability to achieve in paint what I wanted (not to mention the bitter feeling that I was not quite sure what I actually did want). In such moments I had an enormous desire to close my eyes and have all these canvases, oil paints, brushes, easels, and palettes disappear so that I could start dealing with ideas (mainly) again a relatively easy (at least for me) way of working. But I kept doing the paintings, day by day, night after night, ercely trying to accomplish them in an acceptable way for an audience like you. Why am I doing this?! I had been asking myself this constantly, when
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one day I realized that perhaps the reason for me to keep going was that I had the little hope that all the parts missing from these romantic landscapes the moon itself; the mountains reection on the tranquil surface of the lake; the light in general; the sailors boat; all the profound thoughts in the philosophers head; the ock of anxious birds; the exhausted pilgrims tracks over the deep snow; Europa; the castle on the top of the mountain; the rainbows violet band; the purse of the wanderer (not the obviously unnished painting); the artists concentration (a substantial part of the horizon unexpectedly goes down) ... would have a better and more interesting life when left outside the paintings.* The visitors read all this, then they looked at these beautiful paintings; or they looked at the paintings and read later; or they didnt examine anything at all, not even the doodles around just looked at the paintings. Some were staring from a distance at an obviously empty wall, others were squatting in the corners, or almost turning their heads up-side down in order to follow the tiny stories around the paintings. The content of the comments on the walls varied from little stories dedicated to the adventures of the Missing Parts up to comments on the present, the political situation at the time or

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simple announcements that I was hungry or I had to go to the toilet. The people completed the work while seeing it.
In the Autumn Salon in Belgrade I saw a work of yours that revolved around an old villa from the time before the Second World War that once belonged to rich citizens but was then taken over by the state and, after the collapse of communism, became a restaurant for the nouveau riche. After some violent turmoil, the building remained empty for some time and was made available to the Academy of Fine Arts. You added small drawings to the villa. To what extent did you take the history of the house into account for your interventions and to what extent did you add your personal story? Does the house also become liberated from its history by having attention focused on its corners and edges?

At the end when a series of drawings is nished (they usually contain 7, 9, 12, 15, or 18; the biggest is the documenta Fears with 99 pieces) I call my editor and he sits in front of the drawings and tells me how to correct my English. Sometimes we have serious discussions about which word to use or to substitute it with, what to omit, what to add. And then I do the corrections of the drawings. The wrong words get covered with white or black and then I write with the correct words over them. In more elaborate narrative installations, like Discussion (Property) from this years Venice Biennale, all the stories get a lot of proper editing in advance. I would never write a main story directly on the wall without having it checked; only minor sub stories could be invented on the wall without being edited in advance.
It is possible to browse your homepage for hours, going through the rooms of this empty and fairly dilapidated old vila mentioned above while reading your drawings (in English!) on the walls, looking at videos, leafing through folders of drawings etc. The universe of Nedko Solakov is revealed there in a perfectly unpretentious manner, and without the otherwise often displayed notices from prominent writers. You hardly seem to take into account of the rules of the art distribution system, which all young artists would really like to know by heart; you simply follow your nose. And you do it, as one can see, with great success. How did you manage to leap from a peripheral region of Europe into the centre of the art world? And in spite of that, is Bulgaria still the centre of your life and work?

It was great fun and a pleasure to work in an entire house. I had the chance to orchestrate a variety of levels of perception intuitively, of course. I never think in advance about what and where and how I am supposed to write on the walls, radiators, furniture, etc. I force myself not to think about it until I have my felt-tip in my hand entered the space. To tell a story in a space while knowing that the people will move here or there and to subconsciously nd out how to catch their attention is an enormous pleasure. Especially in that villa it was great to fool around because I, as a Bulgarian, could feel the post-socialist trauma of Serbia, their healthy cynicism, which is as good as ours, and to respond to this. Maybe the house was liberated a bit, but I am not entirely sure.
Most of your drawings are picture stories, combinations of drawings and text. How do these stories come about? Do you have them in your head before you begin to work?

The stories very rarely appear in my head before I start to draw. Usually I start with a pen (a very ordinary Conte with a plastic handle and an ordinary tiny tip) and sepia ink (I always use Pelikan, small bottles with sepia, black and white ink) poised over the paper somewhere above the centre of the sheet, slightly on the left. I just move my hand and make strokes. At that very moment my mind starts searching for the subject and almost immediately something comes up and the hand continues to render something which is more or less shaped in my mind. The actual story appears a bit later when I start writing it at the bottom.Very rarely do I know what the story will be about. My personal suspense when writing the story is to try to nish it within the remaining centimeters/millimeters of space at the bottom of the drawing. How can I nish the story? It is a very thrilling moment. I never write the drawing-stories separately, but always directly over the paper. After the story is nished, I continue to work on the image above. Sometimes it takes a lot of time to achieve the quality of wash-layers I want. Sometimes I become really pissed off with myself, calling myself names.
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There was no strategy, not even a conscious tactic. I turned entirely to the West in 1990 after the scandal with Top Secret I just wanted to have my projects realised. But in some ways it was really difcult to enter the Western art system. I made so many mistakes at the beginning, but I was quite stubborn and kept hitting my head on that Western wall without even being sure that I was aiming at the right place. In the early nineties it was pretty hard to get somebody from the West interested in an artist who came from nowhere. I still remember the but-where-do-you-come-from look in the eyes of curators and gallery owners while showing them my work. Then step by step, show by show, things started to turn in the right direction. The breaking point was the Istanbul Biennale in 1992 where my New Noahs Ark received very good responses. Then, even though my CV was growing, there was this problem the visual diversity in my work. A lot of Westerners couldnt comprehend how it was possible for one artist to create so many different kinds of art. Now it is okay visually I can do whatever I want, people recognise my sense of the absurd under any disguise. And one very important thing one has to be extremely focused and learn what is important and what is not. I personally achieved a status in my mind some years ago that whatever I did, I couldnt make a mistake. This helps a lot. Its not that I do not have doubts about this or that, no I am talking about

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totally trusting your own instinct. The second instinct I trust is my wifes. Sometimes hers is sharper. Still being based in Bulgaria is a fact which surprises a lot of people. Maybe I also love the country and (part of) its people, although all of them are still quite chaotic. So, I am kind of a split-personality. My bulky body exists in Bulgaria (half of the time, the rest of the time I travel), but in my mind I have no borders. All the time I tell very personal stories that happen to be very personal for people from all over the world as well.Very often my viewers (and collectors) identify themselves with these stories.
Does your share of humour and irony in your work come from the experiences with a totalitarian regime and its dumbing-down propaganda? In the sense, for example, that it is impossible to take anything seriously that is packaged with a lot of noise?

In a way yes. But there is a lot of food for my sense of sarcasm and absurdity in present Bulgaria too a country enormously corrupt, ruled by cynical politicians who are thinking about their own pockets only.
Quite apart from options on the art market, is there a difference, in your opinion, between the life story of an artist who spent large parts of his life in a communist system and experienced its collapse and that of a purely Western biography?

There is for sure, but is this for good or bad I cant say. It is a unique time we live in but perhaps this is not the most important part of our lives

Nedko Solakov in conversation with Gerald Matt in August 2007. The artist participated in the exhibitions Attack! Art and War in the Media Age in 2003 and Dream & Trauma. Works from the Dakis Joannou Collection, Athens in 2007 at Kunsthalle Wien. Nedko Solakov, born in 1957 in Cherven Briag, Bulgaria, lives and works in Sofia. www.nedkosolakov.com

This text is part of the installation Romantic Landscapes with Missing Parts. By Nedko Solakov, Stockholm, January 2002.

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Doron Solomons
... usually, the main distortion is not how or what is shown, but rather what is not.

You work for an Israeli TV channel and as an artist. Were you first a TV person, who then became an artist, or was it the other way around?

I started working in television during my last year of studies at art college, although my love for cinema and TV has always been there.
When you edit the daily news, you probably know more about the truth of reports than the average citizen. Has art therefore become for you a field where you have more of a politically free zone in public?

Yes, art has become a sort of moral oasis and compensation for the self inicted censorship television has.
In a country that is permanently in a state of war and where the military is present everywhere, can art that takes war as its theme still arouse interest or draw attention to itself?

Doron Solomons, Still from Brothers in Arms, 2004

I dont think war is my theme. If anything, I believe MEDIA is my theme, which should and does draw attention.
My Collected Silences shows people who were interviewed for a TV programme. But the viewer does not get to see the interview, but rather the pause before it begins, where quite different patterns of behaviour are revealed: tension, nervousness, excitement or indifference. Is it there that the true reality is revealed? In the gaps, the pauses during events?

As an editor, one is asked to take an interview and leave only the sound byte, hence, the pure TEXT. In this work (inspired by Heinrich Blls The Collected Silences of Dr Murke) I tried to make a cheese using only the holes to capture pure expression without the expressed.
In your video work Lullaby you imitate the media policy of image transmission. Nine separate scenes show news about violent acts from all over the world, but each event is visible only for a short time. As snapshots of human violence the principle of reporting for TV channels is raised to the extreme and carried ad absurdum, because the information conveyed is practically zero. Lullaby is that a simile for the soporific stream of daily (horror) news?

Indeed, the mass media attack of violence is something that attracted me from the start. I tried using the multi-channel choice screen from cable TV, and adding the time format of an average MTV clip to create a music clip, which is only slightly more intense than what we see on TV the usual stuff that makes us numb.

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Wonder Woman. As mentioned above, her work was the rst revelation of what I call turning the gun on itself taking the original material and cooking it to emphasise (hidden) truths that lay beneath. When criticised, one can always point back to the text and say it was always there to start with.
A special stylistic device of political commentary is black humour, as seen in political cabaret or in comics, or also going back in art history to Daumier and Callot. One example that I like very much is the South African comic Madame & Eve, a satire on racist society in the form of anecdotes from the life of a white mistress and her black maid ... can that be found in your work as well? For example, in your video Brothers in Arms (not a political film), a compilation from documentary films plays with toys and virtual computer worlds; do you see on this level new possibilities for opening up a political discourse or is it rather an expression of fatalism and resignation?

Doron Solomons, Stills from Lullaby, 1998

In Father, the comic, clowning element, serves as a metaphoric representation of a way of life dominated by war. You yourself play the father, who describes the daily inevitability of death with magic tricks, while his daughter plays nearby. Meanwhile you blend in narrative film fragments that report the fate of a Palestinian who is grieving over the death of his child or a Palestinian suicide, who escapes death because his bomb was defused. Is this a mirror image of IsraeliPalestinian reality?

Perhaps a bit of both, being the pessimist fatalist I am, there is no end to a political discourse. On the other hand, what is left from different aspects of the media is worth tossing into a fresh salad of discontent.
By focusing on central moments of transformation, Dara Birnbaum creates the action of a kind of comic layout. What is left is the bare core of the programme. Where do you see parallels and differences in your own artistic work?

I am afraid that at the moment, this is the reality. The main issue I was exploring, being a young father, was the possibility of raising children in this reality. Once, a long time ago, I naively thought that perhaps more parents on both sides would put a stop to the conict since they have something to lose.
Constructions of this kind, alternating between seriousness and wit, comedy and tragedy remind one also of cinematic films like Begninis Life is Beautiful, where the comic is used as a strategy for coping with life-threatening circumstances, with the effect that the viewer chokes on his own laughter. Your works, however, seem to be aimed less at the evocation of great emotions. What psychological trick do you want to use to grab the recipient?

Wonder Woman is an iconic phenomenon in American pop culture and Birn-

One of the most dominant tricks I use is manipulating ready-made material and turning it inside out, or rather against itself. In other instances, conjoining odd materials that produce, as in an alchemy, a third, new substance.
You once called Dara Birnbaums Wonder Woman one of the most influential works for you. Who takes the role of the hero or heroine for you?

Culture itself takes the role of hero for me, as does Birnbaums powerful
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Doron Solomons

baum stripped it bare naked to its core. In some works I strived to manipulate the program lm or news materials into telling a different story, usually a story that it tries not to tell. I must admit that the less I have to use effects or massive editing, the more I nd the work powerful. That is one of the main reasons I was so inuenced by Wonder Woman, it is minimalist and effortless and still guts the oppression the program contains.
Father is also the figure of the magician. Is magic a metaphor for the creation of information in the media? The impossibility of objectivity in documentary? A blend of fact and fiction?

Absolutely. The editor is the nal and crucial vessel that information streams through and I do not take my responsibility lightly. The (cheap) tricks I perform for my daughter, and to the world are the subjective truths of a reporter, TV station or a nation. And usually, the main distortion is not how or what is shown, but rather what is not.
Paul Virilio called the TV war, the battle for images in the media, for transmitting the events of war in real time, according to specific interests, the fourth front of information. Could one call your art another front?

I do believe video, in the broad sense, is indeed a war front. And by and by it is taking a higher priority in warfare and does take, or save human lives. My work, among many others, is maybe as of yet, not a front, but maybe only guerrilla in the woods. However, history has proven more than once, that sometimes even they can win.
You work for television, but you dont want to appear in it yourself, as you once said, although you would sacrifice yourself if one of your works could be broadcast. Should television show more art?

Doron Solomons, Still from Shopping Day, 2006

Television is the real future of video-art, and perhaps of art itself.You mentioned war fronts earlier and the way I see it, since television is the nearly absolute cultural sphere these days, that is where we should be out ghting. In many ways then, art should show more television, or rather be more television.

Doron Solomons in conversation with Gerald Matt and Synne Genzmer in September 2007. The artist participated in the exhibitions Attack! Art and War in the Media Agen in 2003 and Don Juan alias Don Giovanni or two and two equals four or lust is the only swindle I wish permanence in 2006 at Kunsthalle Wien. Doron Solomons, born in 1969 in London, lives and works in Tel Aviv.

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Ricky Swallow
When something ends, it becomes sculpture, a commemoration of a prior life or energy, xing it against a perishing time.

I first saw your work in the Australian pavilion at the Venice Biennial in 2005. It fascinated me, not least because it seemed quite different from anything else I saw at that Biennale. Is different a category you are often confronted with?

I guess the work did strike people as unexpected in the context of Venice, where a lot of large installation and video work is shown. Its strange because when Im in Venice I feel like Im surrounded even followed by sculptures protruding from architecture and keeping watch over Palazzos. And I wanted to extend that feeling into the context of my show in the pavilion. I had in mind to slow the audience down, to allow for an encounter with tactile objects, which also relates directly to how the works are made. I think different is ok, provided its a category that can be integrated and approached critically like anything else. To be different in form indicates taking a different approach to the idea of the problem, sculpture being the problem.
You work with the classical techniques of sculpture, carving objects from wood and recently you have discovered bronze for yourself. Traditional skills, your hands-on production these seem to have a special value to you. One of your watercolors shows a genuinely conservative understanding of yourself as an artist, a sculptor with hammer and chisel.

The traditional skills I employ are tactics to keep myself from becoming an obsolescent medium within my own practice. Its funny how scandalous the idea of the artist as someone who spends time making things with their hands in the studio can seem now. Ive always liked images of artists working. Its a romantic deception, but a successful image conveys something of the transfer of gesture or action into form, the kind of hidden performance behind an artwork. There is a really beautiful photograph of Paul Thek with hammer and chisel in hand, working on a plaster cast of his own foot which I love, and a photo of Guiseppe Penone carving one of his log works has been on my studio wall for years. Im attracted to these images because they remind me that sculpture solicits some kind of exchange with materials. Traditional skills denitely have a value for me, and I always nd it hard to dene exactly why: It could be as simple as maintaining a closeness to the work through the participation in its making, literally being responsible for a form from its conception to its completion. And once its completed, theres this relief of not being connected to it anymore, its resolution or autonomy nally announcing itself.
Playing with established hierarchies of genre aesthetics clearly has a special charm for you. You produce in a certain sense hyper-realistic, incredibly finely worked objects combining them with Pop Art-motifs; but the realism is disturbed by the visibility of the materials. In exhibition situations you present your every269

Ricky Swallow, Private Dancer, 2002

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day objects, such as a BMX bike, a PC or a cyclists helmet, in darkened rooms with dramatic lighting effects, and often in glass cases, too. The banal and trivial is staged in an auratic way. In contrast to that you place your sculptures on the floor without a pedestal. In an earlier phase, you used to make objects from plastic or cardboard, mostly framed in color. How did this contrast come about?

becomes a medium. I am conscious within my practice of creating this archive of works to draw from different contexts/shows, and while they are indexes with broader references, the sculptures often reference other works within this archive an ongoing circulation, if you like.
In terms of motifs, you also resort to presentation types of the European art tradition, with the frequent use of vanitas symbols, which are concerned with the transitory quality of being and time just like skeleton and skull are the classical Memento Mori-images of art history.

I get nervous about the term pop motifs because I think it suggests something other than what Im interested in. Most of the everyday objects Ive used in my sculptures have a very used quality, and often hold some kind of promise, such as the replica of my family telescope or even the BMX bike, in how it offers mobility/independence to the homebound teenager. The purity of my materials or nish is something that links all my works; mediums denitely carry messages (isnt that what people got the mediums for?). This becomes obvious when you think about how a work would fail in a different medium, even the weight of something changes its nature conceptually. Ive always thought of my sculptures as propositions, as prototypes of preserved static form. They have a distilled quality, just south of functionality, and the pure materials Ive chosen, usually monotone with matt surfaces, are appropriate. The mediums have partially led to specic objects and vice versa, which explains how the subjects changed when I started working in wood and more recently, in bronze. Installing a show is setting this trap, and the best bait to draw an audience seems to be to remove any distraction. The pedestals and display devices have been jettisoned to encourage a more intimate encounter than one is afforded in a museum. A big part of the sculptures is the gravity and relationship they have to the ground and I dont like to tamper with that how strange would it be to come across shells placed on plinths whilst beachcombing. I also think the lighting is crucial and has the function of bringing out the form in the sculptures; it comes from the lighting often employed in still life paintings, which plays on both the painted surface and material surface of the subject.
You had a look at the exhibition space in Vienna in advance. Afterward the idea was born to conceive the exhibition as an enormous glass case. Due to the glass walls and the visibility from outside, the project space has a special quality. The glass case is also a way of presenting ethnographic objects or historical documents, and has connotations such as archive, cultural memory and historic past, but also intimacy and seclusion.

Things inevitably get back here, and its a question I always have a hard time answering. This is because death implies a darkness or nality, and I see the works as possessing more exible properties than that. When something ends, it becomes sculpture, a commemoration of a prior life or energy, xing it against a perishing time. There is both a sustained time period within the narrative of my sculptures and the sustained time period through how theyre produced as carvings in the studio. It seems time is still the main thing looming over the works. The skull is this tactile full stop, the most universal of deaths symbols, yet it walks and talks in every historic incarnation, from the dance of death to The Grateful Dead illustrations. Ive made skulls as a way to imply the premature death of previous sculptures. Other times Ive carved skeletons/bones and theres activity or circulation occurring. Ive looked for skulls in other objects also, a skull-sized conch shell and a cycling helmet, which both projects and resembles the skull. Theres empathy in death and to monuments specically, that Im trying to reach, something beautiful beyond decay, within a structure both poetic and formal. The contradiction within the Memento Mori-tradition interests me. Because, whilst the context is to admonish the vanity within the material and earthly belongings, its illustrated so lavishly and to such obsessive detail as if to celebrate both the subject and the skill involved in its creative representation.
Some of your sculptures in wood are Dutch still life paintings translated into the third dimension. Killing Time depicts the classical image of the lemon that has been peeled and is hanging over the edge of the table, with fish and lobster next to it. In Australia the European art tradition is not as immediate as it is here. How did this reference develop with you? Did you have specific Dutch paintings in mind?

I like the idea of the space as a type of contemporary tomb, a display case unto itself that will work with the purity of the sculptures somehow. It also strikes me as a space you navigate differently in its passage-like layout, with the lower ceiling creating a concentration towards the works, most of which are oor-based. I always install shows in an austere fashion in which the economy of pieces or more specically, the space between works, itself
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The reference to the Dutch still life tradition came out of just seeing those paintings in a larger number when travelling in Holland. They had a hold on me, rstly because of the delity and their detail and also this silence looming in every composition. The Killing Time piece and the Salad Days are cover versions within my practice, literally attempts to specically reference
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The structure of the works (in some instances the seams of the laminated blocks are visible, for example) seems like a natural trace of production, a subtle interruption to the continuous illusion of the surface. The lighting of the works is really important to me, because it kind of awakens the rendering and surface to enhance both the form and the carving process itself. They can be too dead without specic lighting, too homogenised into their surroundings. Ive never thought about my sculptures as illusionist or hyper realistic. It has a lot to do with translation, even transcription, of motifs, more recently into an almost diagrammatic form, but theres a tactility that separates them from a casting or digital rendering. Its this very inconsistency with the hyper real that Im into, the decisions and abbreviations enacted during the making.
Your success as an artist followed a path through the USA. Is that the usual course of an Australian artists career? How does one establish oneself, on the international art market as an Australian artist?

Im sure there is not a usual course of an Australian artists career internationally. Its frustrating that Australia is isolated geographically, because I think its a hurdle in terms of work affecting an audience outside of its immediate one. I feel fortunate for having interesting contexts and opportunities, and for having had supportive people behind the work from an early point, which has enabled me to exhibit the work here and in Europe, Japan, etc.
Ricky Swallow, Younger than Yesterday, 2006

the still life tradition with certain arrangements and motifs. I was thinking, what subjects could constitute my own still life arrangement, so I created this sculptural inventory of all the animals fallen and found from my youth. Its interesting that youre referring to the falling lemon rind, because its an image that Ive used in a recently completed work for this show. Its one element of a group of carvings collectively titled, History of Holding. Negotiating sculpture is about what reference you hold onto and what you let go. This sculpture is based on a plaster cast of my hand clutching/presenting the peeling lemon, which becomes this natural bracelet winding around my wrist. I acquired these boxwood logs which resemble giant bones or preserved limbs, and in the nished work, part of the log is left exposed to become a natural plinth for the object. Its always strange to describe a sculpture, because the work itself does something both formal and unpredictable when you see it in person.
The Baroque idea can also be detected in your work in the fact that you achieve moments of tension with certain light effects, stage elements really, which were used to intensify the illusionist aspect. But you dont paint your works, so that the surface structure opposes their naturalism.

You work on your objects for a very long time: the production process often takes months. In the past five years your career has almost sky-rocketed; you have been described as a Wunderkind of the Australian art scene and most of your works sell very quickly. How do you deal, as an artist, with the need to work extremely long and to simultaneously satisfy the demand of the market? Or the need for exhibition pieces, for that matter for Vienna you started to work more than half a year in advance.

My main objective is to make work that hopefully sustains itself soundly beyond any market curiosity. Ive returned to working by myself in the studio. Feeling my need to maintain an intimacy within the work is more important in the long term than making more pieces available. As to how I deal with it, Im not sure, it certainly isnt always great fun, but its always engaging in the studio, weak obstacles impoverish us. I think things take the time they need to take. You know, I have a quote on my wall from DJ Shadow that says I need to explore my passions on my own schedule, and whilst theres music that moves me more, I think the sentiment is admirable here. Again Ive been lucky to work with galleries who see a quality in the

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work specically because of its production values and how this relates conceptually to my project.
In addition to your sculptures you also devote yourself to watercolors. These tend to be rather small, very fine and atmospheric presentations, often portraits. Here again, an academic technique can be seen. The title of one of your series makes me prick up my ears: The Hangmans Beautiful Portraits. You seem, once more, to manipulate the viewer, setting a visual trap that plays with a certain expectation on the part of the recipient.

The watercolors are important in that they are a respite from the duration of making a sculpture. They are much looser. I like the term atmospheric presentations as a way to describe them, because I see paint as this malleable medium. They dream of becoming paintings, but remain moored to the paper surface. I studied drawing as my major in art school and I see it as a nucleus for everything else. The drawings often form pairs or a larger group to become a set of related images, a family of sorts. They are sourced from existing images or cover versions of existing paintings. In terms of The Hangmans Beautiful Portraits, they are isolated faces from The Incredible String Bands record sleeve titled The Hangmans Beautiful Daughter, their sombre faces amplied to a faded Fragonard palette. I want to incorporate the drawings in exhibitions alongside the sculpture more and thats the plan for Vienna also. The exchange they have with the wooden sculptures and now also the bronze works create a more representative view of my artistic process.
Your titles are often poetic and metaphoric. Does poetry have a special status for you, personally, and also in relation to your artistic work?

I think Im always aware of maintaining a level of poetry or suggestions in the works. Theres a contemplative nature to how theyre made and, hopefully, received, that is important, which is why its hard to talk about individual works specically, because sometimes dening too much dilutes any poetic interpretations. Duchamps line about titles being the artworks invisible colors is perfect, because I think in assigning a title you have this opportunity to extend the work. I have a wall cluttered with title suggestions, song titles and lines I hear from the radio; studio notes become titles later, and sometimes words give rise to a new sculpture.
In your upcoming exhibition in Vienna, there will be beautiful examples of your sculptures which reveal in a very characteristic, but also in a very particular way, the essential elements and iconography of your work that we have been discussing Younger than Yesterday, for example, or The Bricoleur. Similarly to other

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pieces, they appear like leftovers from a complex narrative, indicating an effect like somebody was here, but now this someone has vanished.

I do think of the sculptures as traces, or physical clues laid out and positioned purposefully. Ive always been interested and inspired by narrative, in song and story, where description resonates with more emotive possibilities. And damaged goods make for a good description, Im thinking of how Scott Walker can croon a room into existence. I try to leave these narrative possibilities open, in an attempt to multiply an objects usual reading or function. The someone is naturally me and at time the sculptures have started from stubborn memories or associations to different forms. Barnacles, for example, return in various works, and they have always interested me. In attaching to an object they redene it as a plinth/support structure, a dormant form to be dated by their growth. Sculpture is essentially remains a domestic archaeology. I always feel with the carvings Im digging/removing information in order to fabricate new information. I mention this because this information is so xed, as if to appear fused or preserved by time, which is another important part of their story. At times, I guess, Ive wanted it to feel like the water level has dropped in the gallery and the sculptures have been revealed, their compositions produced by both natural and unnatural acts.

Ricky Swallow in conversation with Gerald Matt on the occasion of the exhibition Ricky Swallow. Younger than Yesterday at Kunsthalle Wien project space in 2007. Ricky Swallow, born in 1974 in San Remo, Victoria, Australia, lives and works in Los Angeles.

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As a sculptor myself, Id be interested in recreating the mental processes of thinking in creating a mental sculpture. To recycle peoples memories, the interior of peoples minds

Ill start off with an anecdote. At the Dakar Biennial there was a discussion between the two factions: the English-Africans and the French-Africans, and on that occasion Simon Njami told me, Enwezor cannot speak for Africa, because he has lived and studied in the United States for a long time, and following this discussion I spoke with Enwezor, who said to me, You know, Simon Njami has always lived in Europe So, who, in your opinion, is a genuine African?

I dont know what constitutes a genuine African. We are all Africans, a bit even if were Austrians, Frenchmen or Cameroonians; because history tells us that the History of the World emerged from Africa. So there are no genuine Africans. But within very specic contexts there can be genuine Africans where certain interests are at stake. This is where you could say, its more African or less so, depending on how one kind of interest or another is formulated. But to get back to your question, you are not an African just because you live in Africa or were born in Africa. You can be African in a multiplicity of ways. I think that Simon and Okwui are both of them, Africans. And at the same time the two of them are not Africans. It depends on the angle from which you view things.
Does that have anything to do with your own personal history? You are an artist, born in Cameroon. You have worked and sometimes still work in Cameroon. But you have lived in Ghent, in Belgium, and you work all over the place. You have travelled around the world to Paris, Belgium, Milan, and now Vienna. Where do you, in the final analysis, feel at home? Does being-at-home mean anything to you at all? Or do you feel that you are an homme international?

Pascale Marthine Tayou, Conseil des 9, 2007

No, I dont necessarily see being-at-home in relation to boundaries and borderlines. For me home is where I feel happiest, and from the moment where, in my own head, the borders no longer have any relevance, its only the institutions that remind me of the existence of borders. That is to say, when I am in this ofce, I am like in my own ofce, and I have the option of being either interviewed or invited and to participate in certain issues, certain moments, which is something that many other people here or elsewhere, or also people in Africa, cannot do. To me, home is the idea of a place where I can be at peace with myself. And I have been at peace, in a certain manner of speaking, since I learned how to travel. When I was invited, when I was given a ight ticket, since I dont buy ight tickets myself, I felt that from that day on anybodys room could be my home. So I feel as happy here as I do anywhere else, and that never puts my origins in question. I come from Africa, because thats where I was born. Africa, to me, is a large quarter among all the other sections on earth, with its joys, its fears, its tears, its pains, just like you would nd them anywhere else in the world. When I talk like this, of course, its because I have my own little experiences
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Youve never attended any art school, youre self-taught. Does that have anything to do with the conditions and the infrastructure of art in Cameroon? Ive known Biennials in Africa, and Ive known art schools, but the situations cannot be compared to those in Europe or the United States.

I wouldnt view things from that angle; I tell myself I happen to be in this racket by chance. I often put the question to myself, whether or not I am actually an artist. But the fact that I ask myself this question depends on how I see myself, because theres an institutional approach to the denition of what is art, what is the metier of the artist. I started making things, because I found myself faced with a situation of non-understanding, a situation, where my own survival was at stake. From that point on, it became necessary that I express myself, and that I bring something forth from myself in order to be able to exist in terms of my own renewal, not in the sense of some kind of denition.
I also read something somewhere about the history of your name: you had changed your first name from the masculine Pascal to the feminine Pascale with a final e and the masculine Martin to a feminine Marthine with an e at the end. We talked about identities, the geographical issues, the national ones, and so on. But it may perhaps be a question of identity, one which is behind the concept of masculinity and femininity: male first names changed to female ones? People who dont know you, who dont know that youre a man, might think you are a woman.

they dont necessarily do it because they think of themselves as artists; they do it because its a matter of their survival. They create objects in order to sell them and to make a living from them. So they dont need to reect on whether and how these objects are used to change peoples personalities or lives. I have engaged in plastic several times. The two most important occasions when I did so being, rst, in Gimigniano, in Venice, and then again this installation, which I did for Kunsthalle Wien at the public space Karlsplatz.
What, in your opinion, is the political dimension of your work?

You would need to rephrase that and dene it another way. To me, geopolitics is something physical. I colonise my own self and I hope to be able to introduce my bodys geography to someone elses. So initially I attempt to understand what it is that interests me, and I would then also try to view it politically, in an honourable sense of the word; and not in the contemporary sense, where politics are discredited as a morass of corruption. I get interested in politics the minute there is a human interest somewhere around me, because I am a human being and there is a social interest, and because I am also a social being. Now I tell myself that I feel a desire to amuse myself, but it would be good if my game or my playfulness could also open up an escape route for other people, in whatever way. It sounds magnanimous, but it is also an egotistical magnanimity.
You also worked with flags, and we have spoken about a project involving the various flags of the African countries. To me, that sounds like a dream of African unity, but I may be mistaken. This work about the flags of the different nations of Africa and the desire to create a common currency based on the model of the Euro, are part of an idea regarding African unity, arent they? Is that one of your dreams?

Yes, I love causing a bit of confusion

When I was a member of the jury on the Dakar Biennial committee, I observed a tendency among African artists to work in certain ways with societys refuse. It was like a recycling process. Your work Plastic Bags seems to be a form of recycling, of rehashing things that society has brought forth and now no longer needs and which are then used for some other purpose.

People have spoken about recycling in connection with my art, and as far as I am concerned, personally, I dont feel I belong in that category. As for the utility that I see in my actions, its a mental usefulness, not a material one. I dont take an object and transform it into a pot or anything else. It is the mental usefulness that interests me. As a sculptor myself, Id be interested in recreating the mental processes of thinking, above all, my own thinking creating a mental sculpture. To recycle peoples memories, the interior of peoples minds, interests me more than the material process of recycling. I think that in Africa, too, there exists a category or a set of people, who do this because they want to experiment with different materials, but then again there are also those who do not have anything else to work with. But
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As far as I am concerned, its all a matter of power. We live in a world where some people think that because they are in possession of an institutionalised might, they also have the right to exert control over others. This power that they have, they do not use to serve. And so I ask myself as a plain citizen, how can I explain to people that everybody has power, or shares a part of the power. When were dealing with the Austrian ag, and I go, Austria, Austria can I be sure that the institution is taking me seriously? Or am I just being remote-controlled by the institution? Thats roughly how it is. Well, Africa has also adopted such symbols, these ags, and the scarves. If you like, we could also refer to the ties, or underpants. Theyre all tokens of recognition, and now its all been incorporated into one unit, and I ask myself whether or not theyre just aping other people dont these institutions act like little monkeys in the bush? Do they really want to resemble those people that they mimic? Or do they actually understand the concepts
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Installation view, public space Karlsplatz Kunsthalle Wien 2006: Pascale Marthine Tayou, Plastic Bags

behind those institutions? Why do people speak of African unity? Does that really mean anything, as such? Isnt it just a means for being able to show that there is one category of people that rules over another? To me, working with these ags means inquiring into why we are talking about unity. Are we doing it just because weve been hearing that those people who colonised us in the past are now talking about unity? Is it not really just a phenomenon of imitation? And the same goes for the concept of a unied currency.You see, in all of the African nations, in almost all of the countries of Africa, there exists a currency, and every coin or bill carries a likeness of a president. If that is whats involved in being a president, then I, too, can have my own currency and get my face on a coin. Its one way of saying, why do it? Maybe its a utopian view, but theres one thing I know for certain. If the world is the way it is, then it is so because it emerged from a utopia.
You also produced a work entitled Import-Export. Would you like to comment on that?

when I leave home, then I do so because I have a need. Im trying to show that everywhere else they also have things like schools and work, that you can do things there, that they spend normal lives. The idea of the border causes people to think that the things we have are more important and more interesting than what the other people have. The value of wealth has been dened in a certain way and so people believe that being rich means having lots of money, many banks and houses and cars. And the other people are left to believe that if they have neither cars nor money, then they have nothing. And so they, too, believe that they have nothing, and they leave home. I myself am here because I was made to believe that I had nothing, and for that reason I go where there are many banks and so forth, and then I say, look, over there, in those countries, they have things that they make, societies, and the streets look kind of similar so I have been attempting to record and to rework those societies and to adapt them for this world here. I created a wall there and I called it Wall Street, in order to say that in these so-called poor countries they also have those so-called World Trade Centers. And you can then exhibit what you nd on the ground in these countries.You just need to look, and take in whats actually scattered on the oor. What you see is packages, empty Benson & Hedges cigarette packs, shoe polish tins, packaging of industrial products from around the world. It proves that all of these products actually get to these countries and thats what you see lying on the roadside. The earth becomes a kind of tapisserie of imported goods from Europe, and Asia and so forth, and Im talking here specically about the African soil. Here, where we are now, you nd nothing of the sort, because the streets are always being swept clean again. In reality, of course, we are already talking about the concept of exchange, of goods, of entities, of people. Ive only held it up to the light. Even if its lying in the dirt, these connections do exist. To me, theyre just materials for my work.You develop the hatred even though the love is already there, even as regards the economy. In the case of Import-Export, this is a little of what it is all about.
Merci, Pascale.

Well, Import-Export, thats really quite simple. We live in a world where the concept of immigration rules the world as the axis of evil this axis of evil is one where the immigrants are like viruses that will destroy us, and take everything away from us. I tried to point something out by saying: you know, people who leave their homes, they leave their home countries because they have needs, but we also have needs Im a European, and
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Pascale Marthine Tayou in conversation with Gerald Matt on the occasion of the installation of Pascale Marthine Tayous Plastic Bags at Kunsthalle Wien public space Karlsplatz in November 2006. Pascale Marthine Tayou, born in 1967 in Yaound, Cameroon, lives and works in Ghent, Belgium.

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Spencer Tunick
The naked body en masse in some places can be like an explosion. An explosion of life.

Mr Tunick, since 1992 you have been taking photographs of naked people in public areas, arranged into biomorph meta-ensembles. Where do you place your art in the contemporary artistic spectrum? Do you have any models, for example, from the field of Land Art or Performance Art?

My work combines performance, sculpture and land art. The documentation of these temporary site-specic installations that I orchestrate can easily cross over into performative art. Some of my work now follows in the tradition of Land Art and Installation Art such as Robert Smithson and Richard Long. And then there is some Ren Magritte and Diane Arbus thrown into the mix when my work moves closer to portraiture
The nude has a long artistic tradition. Where do you see your position in that context? Do you actually feel comfortable in an exhibition with nude pictures?

My art allows people to know human form differently as sort of a coloreld painting of pinks, tans, blacks and browns. Sometimes I feel a close association to painters such as Ellsworth Kelly. I love my exhibits where I am showing photographs and video from one location a few months after the live installation. Often my exhibits are visited by the participants who helped make up the pieces so the personal experience which they bring provides great strength to the exhibit.
Your actions are always well attended; in Barcelona, for example, you had a record number of 7,000 participants, in Mexico City even almost 20,000. Is there a social tendency towards exhibitionism that comes to your aid?

My work does not draw out exhibitionists because my work is about letting go of your individuality and connecting more with each others common humanity. It is not about standing out, but connecting to what is mutual between us. Socially I believe there is such a pressure on people to externally dene themselves. Whether through fashion, their profession and ultimately through consumerism, that individuality ends up being wrapped up in someone elses concepts anyway. So the opportunity to shed the layers of faux identity comes as a moment of liberation and comfort. Not spectacle or exhibitionism. Ultimately it is uplifting of the spirit and humbling of the ego at thesame time. The opposite of what everyday requires of us.
You have been arrested several times because of your performance actions. Especially in New York people seem to have big problems with your idea of art. Is it for you a matter of illuminating social taboos and showing where moral rigorism creates boundaries that limit the freedom of the individual?
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edent in the courts with my work. Eventually all the charges against me were dropped once the courts determined I was not breaking the law and was protected within my First Amendment rights. The external effect of my work may have some social and political ramications but it is not the impetus for ideas.
You describe your works as living sculptures or body landscapes, and once you said, I am attracted by the contrast between the vulnerability of the naked body and the cold anonymity of public places. Isnt that a rather one-sided idea of public space? One might also call such places agora, zones of communication, where social togetherness is practised and tested.

The body warms up all anonymous public spaces. So I dont think of spaces as anonymous, until people move through them. Poor design or over-commercialism can make public spaces just a space people pass through without any connection. I hope my work creates a new way for people to experience public spaces.
What does the naked human body mainly symbolise for you? Is it a matter of Eros, of the poetry of the transitory, or of the freedom of self expression?

It should not be seen as threatening. Much of culture today makes us afraid of the body.Violence and sex are the only way many people see the naked body. This is unfortunate because it removes us from the essence of our existence
Why can nakedness still be provocative if the entire public arena is contaminated with sexualised images and commerce is conducted according to the principle of sex sells?

Spencer Tunick, Mexico City (Museo Frida Kahlo), 2007

Your works are temporary. They can only be experienced by a limited number of people in real time. The photos and videos that you make, or have made, are ultimately imperfect documentations of an epiphanic moment. When do you believe that the artistic impulse sets in: at the moment of the action or later, when the material substrates of the performance are released for an a posteriori examination?

The naked body en masse in some places can be like an explosion. An explosion of life. It effects the public and the politicians in a profound way. It is also a guttural response to what we know to be. It is a good thing when used in the right ways. And in reference to sex, we all want to increase our sensual experiences ... it drives us all.
Is there, in your mass choreographies, a moment of subjective dispossession, when people become links in a chain of some higher-order structure? Or is it, on the contrary, a moment of collectivism, where the biological meta-body develops a power that can be read as a symbol of socialisation?

The installation emanates through a city and the people of a city for a long time. From the moment my projects are announced, to the day of the installation, and the feeling the participants take away with them. I like to think my work is acontinuum of experiences that ask people to think differently about themselves, and the world they live in; about how they move through each day. The nal works are quasi-documentary and quasi-conceptual.
Three hundred nudes today, 20,000 tomorrow. Where is Spencer Tunick heading? Arent you afraid of repeating yourself?

For me the work has always been about abstraction and even sometimes reaction. The human form as an abstract narrative.

I do other works as an artist and obviously these large scale projects gather the most attention. But no, I do not fear repeating myself. No one ever told Picasso to stop painting,

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This year you made a photo installation of 105 Frida Kahlo look-alikes, whom you picked out in advance from participants in the action on the Zcalo in Mexico City. Thats a relatively small number of naked people by your measure. What is special about this work? The photograph gives the impression of an interior rather than a public place; it seems almost intimate in comparison to the masses on the Zlaco.

As I said above, I do work in different ways with the human gure. Abstractly, portraits and these smaller groupings, which allow a closer connection with the people in the images. I do not feel that I am repeating myself because some of my favorite artists remain constant in their works. I am not the sort of artist that runs from one idea to the next. I have different series working with the nude and I hope to work with the unclothed naked gure for a lifetime. I am a very big fan of artists whose works remain constant and change only slightly in their lives or at least later on in their lives: Ellsworth Kelly, Rothko, and Barnett Newman, Coloreld painters, whose works change slightly, even Richard Prince.
You work with painting, photography and installation. Would you also be interested in the film medium?
Spencer Tunick, Mexico-City 4 (Zcalo), 2007

I work with video to document all my installations but the works have a more documentary feeling to them, not a solid video artwork. I made my rst installation set-up devoted mainly to video recently in Dsseldorf. It was a piece commissioned by the museum kunst palast and was organized by Mattijs Visser. I made a mountain out of people and shot a fountain of water out of the top of it. This work gave me the condence to propose some of my other video ideas to museums when they want to commission me for a project.
What is your artistic dream? 100,000 undressed people or more?

I just worked with over 18,000 people in Mexico City. I do not need to go bigger. I can not imagine where I could go bigger. Maybe China? Maybe Russia? Who knows? But I am very lucky to have got that number of participants. Maybe my dream would be to take the human form vertical ... building structures to place people on and sometimes these structures holding the people would be invisible, blocked from view by the bodies themselves. Working in a more choreographed way for video ... allowing to create large abstract moving installations.

Spencer Tunick in conversation with Gerald Matt in August 2007. The artists action Outside Art: Spencer Tunick New Vienna took place at Kunsthalle Wien MuseumsQuartier in 1999. Spencer Tunick, born in 1967 in Middleton, New York, lives and works in New York.

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Paloma Varga Weisz

Perhaps it is also somehow political when I say I comfort people with a mood or show something beautiful because it is an illusion in this form.

I was very impressed at the Berlin Biennale by your work, which was exhibited in an old school. Your heads made me think of the figures on Naumburg Cathedral. It was interesting to see the break that these works represented within the exhibition, because there was something very classical about them, taking up an almost traditional technique and a medieval iconography. Where does your interest in these traditions come from? I know that you also had a classical education. And then you studied with Tony Cragg and Gerhard Merz in Dsseldorf. How did you maintain your own attitude and way of working there? Your teachers are known for something quite different.

I think this is not interpreted properly. I experienced by my education in Bavaria something quite different. It was an accident really, because I was not accepted at art schools. I didnt really absorb myself in the tradition. I did learn techniques there, but that was only a small part of the whole. We had a very good teacher, who taught us all the techniques of casting, modelling and wood carving but left us to ourselves a great deal. He was himself at the Munich Academy and was really a classical sculptor. He gave us a great deal of freedom, simply to experiment. Learning the art of copying, Copying Madonnas, was a very small part of the whole. I never felt that this training was traditional: we developed our own ideas. To deal with a material that offers so much resistance and demands so much concentration was a good beginning for me. But during my training I wanted to experiment with the chainsaw rather than bother with copying and cutting patterns. In Bavaria I really lived with blinkers on; otherwise I couldnt have stood it there in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, where you are surrounded by so much kitsch.
You werent interested in the techniques of Baroque Bavarian church sculpture at that time?

No. Of course I learned about that and looked at it, but there were no points of contact. I became interested in Baroque Bavarian church sculpture much later, in fact only at the end of my studies. Then I began for the rst time to adopt these techniques again. I havent really mastered them properly anyway, I think of it more as approaching a form.
What is it about wood that fascinates you? Why do you like to work with it so?

Paloma Varga Weisz, Schafsmann, 2007 290

I developed a love for it because I nd it a very beautiful material, even in the sense that I like the colors and the smell, and I can enjoy spending the day with it much more than with polyester or polystyrene, for example. And yet I have to say that clay suits me better, actually Im much better at using clay, where you can dig your hands right into the material, using your hands more or less as tools. Wood has resistance, it is a hard material and the energy you need to end up with a form is quite different than when you
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work with clay. Plaster is something different again. Plaster draws the liquid out of your hands, it is dusty. Clay is best for me, even though I know that clay cant be the nal product.
In the beginning at the Academy in Dsseldorf, your professor was Tony Cragg; later you were in the class of Gerhard Merz. He is a person with a powerful historical awareness and can deal with space very well. Why did you go to Gerhard Merz?

You said you once visited Louise Bourgeois. What interested you about her? Did it have something to do with her attitude, her work, or was it simply curiosity about getting to know a great artist by coming close to her?

At the time of my studies, when there was a sort of emptiness ruling the academy, it was astonishing how much attention was paid to the class of Gerhard Merz because he brought a circle of young people together every Monday, who read aloud from books that he brought with him, such as texts on De Chirico, in fact all the artists that he saw as his great predecessors. Looking back, I would say that it was a kind of test eld for him, where he could reinforce his position again and again, assert himself and go through the arguments with his students, that he more or less created for himself. And so we were being used to some extent, but I got a lot out of it because I was very quickly confronted with many positions.
Do you remember certain positions that were important for you at that time?

At that time I had just read the book about her, Destruction of the Father, Reconstruction of the Father, where there are reports on her childhood. A lovely book. Of course her work was important for me as well: the way she works with materials and how she presents them. But I think I simply felt a need to show her my own things. I wanted to hear from someone what they thought about my work.
But someone you see as an authority?

Yes. Of course I was very young and naive to have this thought in this way.
So you visited her at teatime. How would you describe your impressions of this meeting?

For example, I came to know Piero della Francesca. The faces in his pictures have always moved me greatly, the stylisation. If I want to name something I used as an orientation at rst, it was a certain expression in these faces, a reduction, it was always the same type, whether man or woman, that moved me. That was a kind of starting position. Of course, De Chirico as well and the way that space is presented in his pictures.
Spatial flight, shadows the manichini (puppets) perhaps? They also have an artificial aspect and a stylised one.

The moment in front of the house, when I stood at her door, was really terrifying. I had the feeling that I had landed in Hitchcocks Psycho, and the mummy of Louise Bourgeois was sitting at the window in a rocking chair, staring at me. I think, actually, looking back, it was a kind of liberation from someone I had had as a model, an emergence, even though I had constructed it myself. After all, nobody had urged me to show my work to Louise Bourgeois. I went in, unpacked my little gure I had brought with me, wrapped up in dish towel. So there stood a little hairy woman. She really did look very closely at my work. Later I showed her copies of other works and installations and she asked very detailed questions about them. I had the feeling she was pulling something out of it for herself, after she had sanctioned it, more or less given it a tick.
Perhaps we could go back to the echoes of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance in your works: what interests you about them?

Yes, in fact the theatrical element in his pictures, which I also nd in Gerhard Merz himself.
How important are positions of other artists on the contemporary scene, where you perhaps find a certain accord?

Really, not a great deal, it is more imposed from the outside rather than me piecing things painstakingly together along the course of art history. I think it comes to me rather quite unconsciously.
But typecasting is something that attracts you and was an important aspect in Medieval and Renaissance art, although it did not come from inability it was intentional. So did you want that too? You dont try to feel the image of a particular person, or do you sometimes?

Yes, strangely enough I nd this again and again in many painters. For example, I like the lightness and navet of Laura Owens very much, I like a certain temperature in Wilhelm Sasnal. Artists like Schtte are very close to me, of course, as is the graphic work of Rosemarie Trockel and her sculptures.

My older works were repeatedly reduced to a particular type. But that

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always came up in my own mind, the same face kept coming back. It is as if you cant get away from bringing it again and again into the same stylisation.
Are the figures women or men?

Mainly of women. I nd it difcult to immerse myself in the male face, but not because I consciously reject it. It is mainly the earlier works that were based on certain pre-images, such as a dead man I carved after the painting Der tote Christus im Grabe (The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb) by Holbein. And yet people always think it is a dead woman. Strangely, the aura of my gures is always female.
Do you have the feeling that the figures resemble you?

Many people say they do, yes. Basically they are almost like self portraits but without being self portraits directly. I think my work somehow always keeps going back to my life story. It is as if the ego were to be reected in the historical image and to nd its own image through the mirror.
To what extent do emotions play a role? Is it still possible to transport emotion if one has standardised oneself to such an extent?

Many people talk to me about the sensitivity of the work and say that they feel touched by it. Bu I think that is something beyond my control.
But dont you think that this sense of being touched comes from the elevation of the figures, or of their expression? Figures that are somehow distant from everyday life? And also distant from any everyday feeling?
Paloma Varga Weisz, Waldfrau, 2001

Probably, yes.
Do you still concern yourself with this world? To what extent do you take up political and social themes or whatever it is that, so to speak, makes up our temporally limited horizon? Does it even matter? Or is art what raises itself above all that? How do your works originate?

Often the emergence of a work, such as, for example, the one at the Venice Biennale, is such a long process that it is like a journey. The point of departure for this installation was a very small etching that I saw in London at a Rembrandt exhibition in the Royal Academy. It shows how a maid is tortured on a gallows eld after she has accidentally pushed her landlady down some stairs. The circumstance remained unexplained and so she was tortured by having her head jammed between two blocks of wood and lay294

ing her out on a gallows. At some time, I created this gure with her head covered by a sack. Some time later the image from the Iraq War came into the newspapers, showing the prisoners being tortured with a black sack over their heads. It was terrible to feel that the reality came afterwards. And for me the question also arises of how far one can go with such an image, how much realism is tolerable? In this work I reached my limit in reference to packing such gures into a scene of this kind. Today I would no longer want to go so far, to stylise people so much that you get the feeling you are in a puppet theatre. Of course I also accept my own criticism, otherwise I could not go on developing. For me it was shocking to see what art can bring about when you show these things. What is its point compared with what happens in reality? And you see that art is really nothing, that an artwork can change nothing, that one, with its methods, always remains in this art world. But you can also see that, of course, I can give something expression with my emotions, which is perhaps a comfort. Perhaps it is also somehow political when I say I comfort people with a mood or when showing something beautiful because it is an illusion in this form.

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Among your figures there are many hermaphrodites, hybrid creatures with (in)human features, which are sometimes reminiscent of a world of fairytales or fantasy films. They include, for example, the Beulenmann (Boil Man) and the Schuppenkind (Scale Child). This is not actually a matter of deformations or distortions but rather of metamorphosed forms derived from the human body and the animal body. What inspires you to make this kind of image? Where do you get your images from?

I think a lot of my works are triggered by an image, perhaps from art history or perhaps from the media, which then develop to become a story and, while they develop also undergo change. While I work I am often confronted by chance with things, which then t in. In the case of Beulenmann (Boil Man), for example, I started with an encounter with a man I saw on the street, who was covered with boils. Parallel to that, there was the image from Grunewalds Isenheimer Altar, where a man with plague boils is shown. That is how I began with the boil carvings. I had the feeling the gure was opening up again. I dont transfer an image 1:1, but there is a period of time spent with the work and during that time encounters occur that charge the work. In the case of Die Waldfrau (The Forest Woman), the starting point was a picture by Otto Modersohn, which was called Die Waldfrau and referred to the love between the artist and Paula Modersohn Becker, which at that time was still clandestine. He expressed his love in it and stylised himself as a gnome on her knees. At that time she was greatly desired in Worpswede, gures like Rilke surrounded her like little gnomes. Really, it was a totally kitschy image: she sits in a white shirt, leaning on a tree in a forest clearing. That was the starting point for an entire ensemble, which later became the Waldfrau, where the gures are stylised with a head-slice, hands and feet. The surroundings were a mountain of textiles. During the development phase of this work it soon became clear that the white material would not have worked, because it would have been too much like a ghost. And so I came upon the opposite and chose black.
Even so, although you use no white material, there is something ghostly about your figures, especially the hovering figures.

Paloma Varga Weisz, Lila Frau, 2006

Yes. I think it would be a development for me to use specic clothing, jeans perhaps, or a pair of shoes. I havent taken that step yet, tting something like that into the work, perhaps that could be the next work, who knows?
But under the material there is no wooden body it is only formed by the way the cloth hangs?

was the folklore museum in Innsbruck. There was also the question of how to make a human body with few resources? Head, hands, feet and the rest a matter of volume. Material was one way partly because the folds interested me, the roughing up of the surfaces. In the folklore museum all the costumes were displayed on dolls, which were similarly conceived. They had a carved face, hands and feet, sometimes they wore folk shoes as well. But I can also see a danger in that. The human gure 1:1 in lifesize narrows the space down greatly. I nd it difcult to talk about my own works, it feels like having to give away a cooking recipe. What good does it do to know what is behind it? The important thing is what response it creates in the viewer. It is also unimportant to know the artists life story. In my case the work process is a personal struggle, which I could describe in detail, or else I could put together a catalogue. But does that add any value? I think if I could add any value to my sculptures it would be with my own drawings. There I permit a lightness and sense of humour to come through, which, in turn, gives the heaviness of my sculptures a different weight.
When you speak of drawings, do you also mean water-colors?

Yes, as in the work for Venice. I had various sources for that, one of which
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Yes, for me its all one thing. Water colors are like drawings for me because I
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choose to use water colors in a very graphic way. I dont take any time waiting until the color is dry before I put on the next layer. What I am forced to do when working with wood, the slow and boring process, is something I cant tolerate when Im drawing. That is sketchy for me, rapid. If it doesnt work I throw it away. Or else I begin by producing a whole mountain that I scufe through later, looking for something that has substance.
I have noticed in your water colors that there is especially a liquefaction of realism, which perhaps has something to do with the technique. The type-casting is more relative there. But in some sculptures, as well, the figurative begins to dissolve in part. Glenn Brown, for example, comes to mind, where the forms begin to flow even though they also preserve a certain degree of realism.

Water colors have another speed, a lightness. The restriction I feel when working on my installations is not present then. The space of the paper is more limited, which makes it freer for me. The rapid pictures that arise in ones head need to be given space, in a sketchy way. The more one tries to make a good drawing, the more they stop working, at least thats my experience. To outsmart ones own controls and give these fantasies space, its best to work with clay, a material that I can change again and again. With wood I am forced by the tool to be fully concentrated; it demands many more conscious decisions and plans. What distinguishes the individuality of the faces is hard to represent in wood. What can be seen as a kind of self-portrait in my sculptures softens in the drawings: it is freer. There are more varied characters and I think there is greater distance from my own person.

Paloma Varga Weisz in conversation with Gerald Matt in October 2007 prior to the artists exhibition at Kunsthalle Wien project space in 2008. Paloma Varga Weisz, born in 1966 in Mannheim, Germany, lives and works in Dsseldorf. German to English translation by Nelson Wattie.

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Wang Wei
Space represents peoples desires. There is never enough space, and everyone always wants more.

The history of contemporary art in China is still quite young; it began more or less in the 1970s, after the Cultural Revolution. Could you explain how this artistic development began? What are the origins of contemporary Chinese art?

During the Cultural Revolution there was only Socialist Realist Art. Art in this society was used only for propaganda. After the Cultural Revolution ended in the late 1970s, Chinas opening and reform period started. It was at that time that a lot of books about Western philosophy were translated into Chinese. This had a huge effect on Chinas intellectuals and artists. Artists ideas were heavily controlled up until this point, and suddenly everything opened up. It was a very exciting time. Through studying and borrowing forms from Western contemporary arts, some artists could openly express their social criticism and personal feelings about living in such a repressive society. Thus, from the start of Chinas experimental art history, it has always had a strong sentiment of social critique.
What influence did European or Western movements in art have on the development of Chinese art? To what extent did Chinese contemporary art accept Western avant-garde movements at the beginning of the century, such as Dadaism, Surrealism, Futurism or those after the middle of the century, like Minimalism, Concept Art, Pop, etc.?

The inuence of European avant-garde and Western Modernist movements on Chinese contemporary art was not felt through the art education system. For a long time Chinese avant-garde art had the sense of being an underground movement. Information about Western contemporary art was limited, so an artist had to actively seek out different ways of expression by themselves. When they saw something that could appropriately capture their concepts, they readily borrowed these forms to express their ideas in the most direct and pointed manner possible.
How is Chinas relationship to its history, philosophy and identity? It is said that history exists only in a very fragmentary way in the awareness of the population and is hard to access. Isnt that a great disadvantage for a profound engagement with artistic themes such as memory or identity?

Wang Wei, Hypocritical Room, 2003

Traditional Chinese culture was early to mature. Over the course of its development, it absorbed many outside inuences and created a unique world view. In the last 100 years, social changes and upheavals have caused much pain and suffering. Its made intellectuals re-examine this culture and look for other ways of developing this culture. Fragmentation always exists. This is not really a problem. Issues of identity and memory are common issues for all of humanity. Expressing these ideas and creating a dialog

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through art is very appropriate. As long as the sentiment is honest, it is possible to affect viewers.
What is the relationship of contemporary Chinese art in relation to its own traditional art techniques and aesthetic styles?

Chinese contemporary art has an internal connection to traditional arts. Chinese traditional arts have a unique aesthetic and sense of time and space. These ideas have an active role in inuencing the development of contemporary arts.
How is Chinese contemporary art seen in China itself today? In the past few years we have witnessed an international Chinese art boom there have been countless exhibitions of Chinese art, under titles such as Alors, la Chine?, Mahjong, The Real Thing and many more how is this art perceived by the general public at home?
Wang Wei, Temporary Space, 2003 Wang Wei, Trap, 2005

It deals with time and space. I was interested in time and issues of speed in this piece the normal process of building and demolishing is compressed into a 17-day period. Space represents peoples desires. There is never enough space, and everyone always wants more. These themes have surfaced in all of my subsequent works in the last few years.
Which socially critical aspects do you pursue in works like What Does Not Stand Up Cannot Fall? Have there been any reactions to your work, for example, from official quarters?

Contemporary art is a reection of the world around it, regardless of where it comes from. It will exhibit the state of a society as well as its problems and issues. Chinese contemporary art has the same characteristics. The issues that we are facing in Chinese contemporary art are the same as those in this society. China is in the midst of high-speed economic development and the societal transition related to that development. Chinese experimental arts transition from underground to above ground has been a very short veyear period. To me, Chinese audiences are very open to the changes around them, and this includes contemporary art. As for the China-themed exhibitions that are happening in the west, they are helpful in that they allow western audiences to see and directly experience new art from China. However, because these large shows dont happen in China, some of the works are not seen in context of the society that created them. If audiences dont know that much about China in the rst place, the exhibition becomes one of the only ways that people get impressions of China. Sometimes that can be misleading. The current situation is inuenced by the international art market, which dictates taste. There is a portion of works that are made to satisfy the markets taste for the exotic.
You are known, in particular, for your temporary spaces made of brick, which you set up inside exhibition spaces and gallery halls. A room that is built up only to be destroyed again, actions marked by irony and their very absurdity; which symbolic significance and which conceptual deliberations lie at the bottom of such works?

In What Does Not Stand Up Cannot Fall and my other recent spatial installations and performance works, I am trying to examine the impact of the fast-changing living space on human beings and to reveal the social motives behind this kind of over-rapid development. Responses to this work have mainly come from the art circle in China and the Western art system. The video documentation of this project is being exhibited, at the moment, in the Tate Liverpool gallery.
Is censorship still a problem for artists in China today? How does the art system operates, in terms of being a communications system, or a marketing system or simply a system representing the interests of the artists, and museums, collectors, gallerists, the state, the sponsors and the general public?

My process in the last few years has been to build, change and affect existing spaces. Temporary Space was an early manifestation of that type of work.
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There is not a single place in the world that has absolute freedom. We simply go by a different set of rules. Sometimes certain restrictions can inspire the artists more and bring out more challenges from artworks. The present art system in China is in the midst of constant development and change, as is her social system. There is an upper structure the ofcial art institutions and museums; there is also a lower level structure the very active nonofcial galleries and art spaces. But the middle level that connects these two is missing the collectors and art foundations. This is due to the fact that in the current social system in China there is not yet, in its real sense, a general
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public. There is only the division between the ofcial and the non-ofcial. Thats why, right now, Chinas experimental art can only work closely with non-ofcial capital in China and the Western art system.
Your projects frequently have a performance-like character. You document them with a video- and a photographic camera. Which roles do the documentations of the performances play? Is the art just to be found in the action itself or is the documentation also a part of the art?

You seem particularly interested in achieving spatial experiences of various kinds. You create claustrophobic effects, destabilisation and insecurity about space, spatial illusions. In Pillars you have pillars hanging from the ceiling, Ever Widening, Ever Narrowing acts as a kind of labyrinth, Hypocritical Room shows a room that is justified by the reflection of the surrounding space on its outside walls. What is the binding element between these works?

This is one aspect of my work, I like that the work is changeable and uid, the audiences reaction and emotional state are important to me. At a certain point, I also become an audience member to my own works. I use photo and video to record the changes, so while these are documents, they are also a way of expressing concepts.
At the project space of the Kunsthalle Wien, you erect a Panda Bear enclosure, but without any animals. Again, this is a space that is not traversable, not accessible to visitors wishing to enter, and which I see to great extend as a comment on the urban situation and the infrastructural nodal point of the Karlsplatz setting in Vienna. How site-specific are your works?

There is a common idea of borrowing amongst all these works. They use specic everyday actions, relationships and situations that are transported into a gallery setting. They use a dramatic form of visual expression to create feelings of absurdity and misinterpretation in the space and in the viewers minds. The work lures viewers into a psychological state and experience. This mental and physical state becomes part of the completed work.
How do you live as an artist in todays China? Can you make a living from your art?

The space in Vienna looks like a glass box to me. Its location in the center of the city seems to be a sharp contrast to the classical buildings around it. When I began to think about this work, I was interested in having visitors view the space from the outside of the building. The work is an articial environment that people are barred from entering.
Could you comment on your exhibition project for the Kunsthalle Wien?

I work and live like artists from other places. I began my artistic practice eight years ago and I also worked as a news photographer for eight years. The income from that job allowed me to live and produce work. It also gave me a chance to examine society from a close distance. I have only resigned from my job and become a freelancer recently. This might be a bit risky, but I enjoy the sense of freedom.

Wang Wei in conversation with Gerald Matt and Angela Stief on the occasion of the exhibition Foreign Objects at Kunsthalle Wien project space in 2007. Wang Wei, born in 1972 in Beijing, lives and works in Bejing. Chinese to English translation by Rania Ho.

The main theme of this piece is zoo without animals. Ive moved an abandoned animal cage into an art space. Its an articially created space that no one can enter. The space is based on a specic description of an environment somewhere in the world. Its meant to be relatively dislocating and disassociating for the audience, and kind of existential.
Can your work Trap be interpreted similarly as There Are No Pandas Here which you installed at the Kunsthalle Wien: a cage without animals a trap without a bird?

Yes, in this work the existence or non-existence of animals serves to have the audience question their own position in the environment. Its just that in Trap the forms were a little more abstract, while in There Are No Pandas Here, the forms were a bit more specic.

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Nari Ward
Place is essential because to load a work with meaning is a delicate choreography of the site, craft and faith.

Mr Ward, what made you become an artist?

I realized early in my life that I had to be a very good liar so that people would think that I am not a threat [laughs].
You have just installed two of your big, room-filling works for our exhibition Dream & Trauma. Both works are very complex: Hunger Cradle is positioned at the entrance to hall 2 of the Kunsthalle, a network structure of thousands of woollen threads drawn over the entire entrance, while Amazing Graze takes up an entire room in the court stables of MUMOK. It consists of a large number of prams assembled into something like a boat. Do you always install your works yourself? How important is that for you?

I wish I had someone to install the work for me but I cant nd someone to do the job better than I can. I used to think it was important for the process but now I realize that the work is also an excuse to meet and labour with individuals from other cultures.
In part, Hunger Cradle is always in part a site-specific work. As far as I know, Vienna is the third station. You integrate things you find in the exhibition venue or things you buy, so that it is an installation that changes for each new exhibition, not only with regard to the spatial conditions. What objects were added in Vienna?

Vienna is actually the fourth manifestation of the Hunger Cradle and in each space I have adapted the work according to the room so that the work functions at its experiential peak. In Vienna, like in the other venues, it was crucial to incorporate an element which was symbolic of the space in terms of its history and or purpose. I was blessed with the fact that the artist Chen Zhen was also having an exhibition at the Kunsthalle. It was a powerful survey exhibition, but it way very melancholic for me to see the show because Chen and I were good friends and I sourly miss his camaraderie. When I did a tour of the Kunsthalles facilities in order to see which elements I wanted to include into the work, I saw an installation design model of Chens show in your ofce and immediately sought to have it for the Hunger Cradle. Bringing in the design model of Chens show gave my work renewed meaning in the space and a powerful sentiment in my heart.
Do the specifics of place play a significant role in all your work? Does it always construct itself in relation to objets trouvs materials in the exhibition venue and what you call the history of objects?
Installation view, Kunsthalle Wien 2007: Nari Ward, Hunger Cradle, 19962007 306

I do not always rely on the history of the objects as much as the lack of regard consumer society has for objects. I am interested in things that are at
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Would you like to comment on the titles of the two works Hunger Cradle and Amazing Grace?

Titles are very important for me because they are a means to use language as a layer of reference which can connect to the experiences of the viewer. Hunger Cradle conates issues of yearning, and consumption, with issues of protection, and nurture. I chose the title of Amazing Grace because of a personal association I had with the gospel hymn of the same title. It was one of my fathers favourite songs and I heard it often in my home. I later learned that it was a song written by a slave trader who wrote it after repenting to god and asking for forgiveness. It was a powerful testimony of transformation and compassion and I wanted the song to play for the over three hundred discarded baby strollers I collected from the streets.
You grew up in Jamaica and came to New York when you were twelve. Now you live in Harlem. How important was your childhood in Jamaica for you? Do you feel completely like a New Yorker today?

Nari Ward, Amazing Grace, 1995

the end of their use cycle, so that they can aspire to hold meanings and ask questions about our own mortality, since ultimately, all works of art have this very inquiry at its core. The issue then becomes how to start with that question and use a visual language that when perceived can be understood and misrepresented with balanced intensity. Place is essential because to load a work with meaning is a delicate choreography of the site, craft and faith.
To install Hunger Cradle you had innumerable fist-sized wool balls rolled. Was there any special reason for that?

I often get frustrated with this question but it is an important one because it presupposes that one should belong to a geographic place and that that place is important in forming that individual. Perhaps that reasoning maybe correct, but I also resist such easy assumptions. I have no romantic connection to Jamaica, but rather to memories of my young impressionable self. And I have no intense connection to New York, but rather to those professional and personal responsibilities that keep me there. The struggle for me is to stay distant while maintaining a sense of intimacy and to stay intimate while maintaining a sense of distance.
Your installation Happy Smilers: Duty Free Shopping at Deitch Projects in New York 1996 refers directly to stereotypical fantasies about the West Indies. The Happy Smilers were a Jamaican band, in which your uncle was a vocalist. Is the biographical reference an element that goes through all your work?

All wool yarn is manufactured and packaged for a specic purpose which is not congruent with my needs. I had to re-roll the yarn so that it would satisfy my process in making the piece. The st-sized wool balls allowed us to literally draw in space and move our hands and body more efciently.
Spinning the web took several days, during which you had music playing all the time it created the impression that something meditative was going on.

Yes.
In our exhibition plan, your work Hunger Cradle is read as a metaphor of the unconscious, a symbol of cerebral twists and turns that conceal themselves from conscious perception. What do you think of this interpretation?

Yes [laughs] in some way the music was essential because it added the involvement of the body and allowed the numerous individuals working on the piece to enter a similar rhythmic time space even if they had their own relationship to the spinning activity.

I nd this analysis very intriguing; however, I do not want to agree or disagree with one reading of the work.
Do you like the comparison with Duchamps installation Sixteen Miles of String from 1942, which suggests a surrealistic approach?
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I know the work and I understand the comparison, however there are important differences. I am interested in the space being like a cellular structure, in which every element is part of the whole. The yarn and rope membrane conguration is situated so that it is suspended and held aoat to form a canopy of tension. It is the corporeal mass of the objects that energizes the cradle and triggers an emotive response from the viewer.

Nari Ward in conversation with Gerald Matt on the occasion of the exhibition Dream & Trauma. Works from the Dakis Joannou Collection, Athens at Kunsthalle Wien and MUMOK in 2007. Nari Ward, born in 1963 in St. Andrews, Jamaica, lives and works in New York.

Nari Ward, Happy Smilers: Duty Free Shopping, 1996 310 311

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We laugh about the relevance of our own signicance in relation to the size of the world, which itself is so ridiculous and mediocre that one can basically only laugh about ones own existence.

Id like to begin this interview with a look back at your early work and what led up to it. You began by first studying art history in Graz, then artistic education at the Mozarteum. In 1979 you came to the Academy in Vienna with the intention of entering the painting class. Finally you studied sculpture, as well as taking classes with Bazon Brock at the University of Applied Arts. It was the period when, on the one hand, Conceptual and Minimalist currents were heralding the end of easel painting and classical sculpture and, on the other hand, the transavantguardia in Italy and the first Neue Wilde painters in Germany were proclaiming a new hunger for pictures that was satisfied not only by reaching for tins of paint but also by quoting from the wealth of international art history. What prospects for art and for your own artistic development did you bring with you to Vienna at that time?

Erwin Wurm, Staubskulptur, 1990

I came to Vienna in 1979 to study with Bazon Brock. I knew of him from his exhibitions, from his writings, and from literature. I knew he was associated with Fluxus and that he was quite an important initiator. That was one reason I came to Vienna, but at the same time living anywhere else in Austria was out of the question for me. Of course it was an extremely interesting time: on the one hand there were these highly established forms such as Conceptual and Minimalist art, and on the other hand there was an extreme sense of uncertainty due to the breaking of these avant-garde lines with a resurgence of interest in painting, in so-called New Painting and later New Sculpture. But we were very close to what was happening, I would even say too close, so that it was unfocussed and this lack of distance, which makes things relevant, made it impossible to observe. We were at the centre of things so that reecting on and analysing these individual positions or ones own position was only possible with hindsight. This paradigmatic shift caused an incredible destabilization, but it was also very enriching. Suddenly, many things were possible beyond the acknowledged and codied denition of art, and that had huge explosive potential as well as an extremely creative energy. Suddenly, instead of having to work according to a specic vision, everything was open, everything was possible. It was like discovering uncharted territory and that was very infectious and inspiring.
In your early objects and sculptural works in metal and wood, color and of course material still play a decisive role. Zurck zur Farbe (Back to Color) was the title of a 1986 group exhibition at the Mzeum Mcsarnok in Budapest in which you took part. But as painting really began to come back with a vengeance in Austria too you steadily turned away from any form of stable materiality and from color. Largely monochrome items of clothing pullovers and then even dust as the debris around the edges of an object that had obviously been removed now denoted something akin to the shell of material or physical substance. A

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return to Conceptual art? Peter Weibel once made the following distinction: In contrast to Conceptual art, the dematerialization of sculpture did not lead just to texts and theorems. In spite of this, Wurm upheld the fundamental claim of Conceptual art, i.e., its insight into the linguistic nature of all art statements, regardless of the elements used to produce them. The elements he uses are objects, bodies, and the media, but the way he links these elements and the way he actualises them is linguistic in nature. How would you describe your work on sculpture during this period between the poles of material/color and concept/ language?

continued in the clothing sculptures that soon followed, my pieces with garments where the human body is absent. As the clothing sculptures are about the absence of people, the dust series is about the absence of objects.
Lets stick with your dust sculptures for a minute. In some cases, you worked with dust out of doors, spreading it out on streets and public squares, although the dust was sometimes only painted. In this context, the literature on your work often mentions Duchamp, who is supposed to have said that dust looks like paint. Many writers also cite a photograph from 1920 showing Duchamps Large Glass covered with a thick, relief-like layer of dust a photograph actually taken by Man Ray, which Duchamp titled Dust Breeding (levage de poussire). But whereas here the dust not only appears as a structure but also covers something up, in your works this aspect of something being masked is entirely absent your dust only marks the place where something visible or touchable has probably been. In your view, does dust have something sculptural about it per se or were you more interested in questions of absence, of transience, and thus also of time? And did Duchamp play an important part in your thinking?

I began quite quickly with the rst of the works you mention, as soon as I got to Vienna really, and I had a certain amount of success with them relatively soon, at least locally. I was immediately taken on by galleries and invited to exhibitions, art critics wrote about me and collectors bought my works. An automatic procedure had been set in motion, and of course there was something hugely seductive about that. But after a few years, I realized that this was not my true interest or my intention, and that it was more the result of a reaction against academic positions, and so I tried to reorient myself, to reect and look for what interested me in art. It was not a return to Conceptual art but a turn towards an art which, like the works that preceded it, dealt with intellectuality, but which tried to do so on a different level. Through these works in this period of transition, there was a very direct relationship between material, color, concept, and language. I tried to reect my own short history in my artistic work and to use this reection as a source of energy for new ideas and as a way of conceptually sidestepping the painterly tendency that was always important in my work originally I wanted to be a painter or of conceptually combining it with sculpture. This produced works that reect the two things, like the color balls, lumps, globs, clumps which stuck the oil paint material together like a snowball, and that were literally both: they were paintings, because they consisted of pure paint and I didnt choose one single color but mixed up the palette, and they were also sculptures. This, one might say, was the end of the previous phase and the start of a search for new possibilities. Next, I began with the dust sculptures that dealt with the disappearance of form. Such a disappearance of form really did take place in my oeuvre. First there were sculptures in the classical sense, which of course had its pitfalls. There were gures walking, striding etc., nailed together out of waste materials and wooden debris. First it was twodimensionality, which became three-dimensionality through this action, and later I arrived at works that negate actual, practical three-dimensional form. These were the dust pieces sprinkled dust on a surface where an object may have been, which evokes three-dimensionality, but sometimes also twodimensionality. Quite a radical reduction, then, and this absence of objects
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Sure, Duchamp was part of the equation. I was aware of this issue and its signicance and that was my starting point. On the other hand there have also been works like those by Joseph Beuys, for example Das Schweigen von Duchamp wird berbewertet (The silence of Duchamp is overrated), that introduced a critical distance to Duchamps oeuvre. That appealed to me, too. To me, rather than being just a new take on Duchamps ideas, it felt far more anarchic. It was an attempt to repair things, to destroy things, to start afresh, and although that applies primarily to my own work, on the other hand I was also thinking about art in general. Unlike Duchamp, I didnt actually let dust gather, to me that felt like Romanticism, like an overly zealous Romantic idea. Something similar happened with Beuyss famous work entitled I like America and America likes me that involved him supposedly spending seven or eight days with a coyote in a New York gallery, but in fact he didnt spend the whole time with the coyote. At night he went back to his hotel and returned to the gallery during the day. Its about a concept, about a picture, and not about a pedantic, literal solution. What interested me was not how a radical idea became bourgeois, but the concept of something being done or of dust collecting, even if it hasnt actually collected. I always made it clear that the dust had not gathered, but it was always received as if it had. At the time I was already interested in this play with reality and ction, and later I developed it much further and made it into one of the main strands in my work.
If we are talking about recent art history, there is also the question of your interest in body-oriented art, in Action-ism and performance, above all concerning the deformation of the body up to and including perhaps photographic works
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such as Arnulf Rainers Face Farces. In this context, Elisabeth von Samsonow speaks of the tendency towards both exclusion and broadening in sculpture since the 1960s (which showed itself in Vienna as a revolt emphasizing the body). Are there concrete links to your work here, either to the items of clothing and your Installations or the later One Minute Sculptures? As I see them, both also have to do with a certain mise-en-scne.

Vienna Actionism was a major presence in Vienna, of course. You couldnt avoid it. But like Surrealism, it didnt really interest me, because Action-ism worked with concepts that didnt concern me. Concepts like drama, death, the theatrical, playing for effect, I was suspicious of all that. I wanted to withdraw and concentrate on the marginal, on the small, the ridiculous, the embarrassing. Rather than grand emotions, grand statements, and grand designs, what interested me was the contrary, the kind of strength that lies in smallness, in the ridiculous, the embarrassing, the awkward. The One Minute Sculptures, where everyday objects meet up with ordinary people, deal directly with this. I also wasnt thinking of the movement to extend the denition of sculpture in the 1960s either. I did engage with art history and I had a good knowledge of it, but my approach was never about setting myself a deliberate goal. It was much more intuitive, I laid down basic lines and explored possibilities, but at the same time it was always important to me to have a relatively broad basic spectrum within which different aspects of the work could be developed. Its not like I sit down and say, Right, now Im going to do a piece about Duchamp or Now Im going to try to move forward with this or that movement. My approach is a direct, intuitive one; I order and analyse later, of course, but thats not where I start from.
The exhibition Sculpture: Precarious Realism between the Melancholy and the Comical at Kunsthalle Wien featured your One Minute Sculptures. The shows theme was precarious sculptural positions between experiment, imperfection and overcoming the notion of perfection. To what extent do you play with the notion of sculpture between three and two-dimensionality, between experiment and perfection, or rather between the transitory and the permanent?

Erwin Wurm, One Minute Sculpture, 1997

This is something Ive been interested in for a long time, even before the One Minute Sculptures. There was the idea of questioning the concept of sculpture and exploring the potential for modern implementation and modern use. Having wanted to become a painter before being put into a sculpture class, that was the point of departure for my work. From the outset, I worked with the notion of three-dimensionality and two-dimensionality, and with the concept of action. I asked myself how long something is an action and at what point it becomes a sculpture. It was about temporality and permanence, but also experiment and comple316

tion. Sometimes I try something out but then allow it to be nished in an incomplete or imperfect form. These things, such as trying and failing, were very important and became an essential part of the One Minute Sculptures. Not only in the photographs, but also in the performative works where the audience can bring about sculptures themselves. Some of the instruction drawings have deliberate mistakes making them absolutely impossible to implement. I thought it was interesting to include this doubt over whether they can be put into practice.

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When I saw your Telekinetically Bent VW-Van at Art Basel, I couldnt stop laughing. What is the role of humor and irony in your work?

Humor and irony can also be used as a weapon. They are a way of dealing with heavy and serious themes without pathos. I have always found the use of pathos in attempts to achieve meaning extremely embarrassing. I wasnt interested in that, but at the same time I also wanted to work with the same focus on content and serious themes as the pathos-mongers, but with lightness, with a cutting edge, irony, and humour and humor always has something malicious about it. We all like to laugh when something unpleasant happens to someone else or even to ourselves. We laugh about the relevance of our own signicance in relation to the size of the world, which itself is so ridiculous and mediocre that one can basically only laugh about ones own existence.
One more question on possible artistic sources and their treatment within your analysis of the sculptural: In Paris in 1957, Guy Debord wrote: A persons life is a succession of fortuitous situations, and even if none of them is exactly the same as another, the immense majority of them are so undifferentiated and so dull that they give a definite impression of sameness. As a result, the rare intensely engaging situations found in life only serve to strictly confine and limit that life. We must try to construct situations, that is to say, collective ambiences, ensembles of impressions determining the quality of a moment. The link between your One Minute Sculptures and Situationism may be obvious, but I would be interested to know whether there is a similar kind of socio-political idea behind your work an intention that goes beyond exploring the phenomenon of sculpture?

Erwin Wurm, Telekinetically bent VWVan, 2006

exist only for the months duration of an exhibition. Over the years, this duration became shorter and shorter until eventually I arrived at the One Minute Sculptures that represent brief situations lasting just a few seconds or minutes.
As a trained art teacher, and of course as a lecturer at the University of Applied Arts, you have been and continue to be confronted with structures of which you are critical, including the way a capacity for criticism is more or less unwelcome, especially in schools. As far as I can tell from encountering your students as a visiting lecturer, you like to include interdisciplinary approaches in your teaching and youre prepared to broaden the university context in terms of location, conducting some of your classes in other places (for instance in the project space at Kunsthalle Wien over several semesters). Do you see your teaching activity as part of your artistic work, and what are your goals in this area?

Guy Debord made this wonderful claim that a persons life is a succession of fortuitous situations. One is born at random into a geographical situation or into a social situation, and I think it does play an important part in a persons life if they are born now here in Vienna, or in England, in America, or in Afghanistan. I think my work is probably the way it is because I grew up here in Austria. It unconsciously reects my surroundings and this vision of art that I grew up with. On the other hand, there is a strong socio-political idea behind the work, namely our throwaway culture which now applies not only to individual objects but to whole architectural styles, and nally even to relationships that concern us directly. We have the will to better ourselves constantly because the status quo is unsatisfactory and we experience it as inadequate. But this constant desire for change also gives rise to discontent that focuses on the resulting short-lived, fast-moving quality. For me, the One Minute Sculptures are certainly also a synonym or an image of these times. With my works of the late 1980s and early 1990s, I began to introduce the concept of time into my art, allowing certain sculptures or works to
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Part of my artistic education was studying design theory with Bazon Brock. I was actually pushed into this course by my father who was of course worried that his son was not going to be able to support himself nancially. Forced into this structure, I soon came to realize that there was a major dilemma between what you actually want, which is to be an artist, and what you actually have to do, which means dealing with the monetary conditions of art teachers. I only stuck with it for a year, then I dropped teaching again, but many colleagues who tried to survive the system longer failed, which is probably due partly to Austrias school system. School has always had negative connotations for me, Ive known many teachers. The positive success of a student has always depended on individual talent and on the personal commitment of teachers. The system itself doesnt create a basis on which to foster the gifts of the individual, something that
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would give young people education or experience of the world as a positive element or as a positive instrument. To answer your question of whether my teaching activity is also part of my work as an artist, I would have to say no. As a teacher, I try to help my students clarify things, to establish their own criteria and nd their way around in the world of art. We try to keep the class as free and open as possible and not to operate with xed opinions. We try to cater to the individual and to allow individual students to work towards their own space within art. That sounds so simple, but its very difcult because it depends on each individual student discovering the possibility of artistic expression. Meaning that the work is not contrived, and that the themes, notions, attitudes etc. are not taken from others but correspond to the individual artists own personality. This is something that is incredibly hard to achieve and where only very few people succeed.

Erwin Wurm in conversation with Gerald Matt in September 2007. The artist participated in the exhibitions Living and working in Vienna, 2000, Sculpture: Precarious Realism between the Melancholy and the Comical, 2004 and Don Juan alias Don Giovanni or two and two equals four or lust is the only swindle I wish permanence, 2006 at Kunsthalle Wien. Erwin Wurm, born in 1954 in Bruck an der Mur, Austria, lives and works in Vienna and New York. German to English translation by Nicholas Grindell.

Erwin Wurm, Kissing Gerald Matt (Dont trust your curator), 2006

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An artist can work magic before the eyes of the viewer, but nally it boils down to the question of whether his work is considered worth looking at, or not.

Mr Zaimoglu, you are a writer and, through your initial involvement in the Islam Conference convened by the German government, an active participant in the discourse of politics. And now you have carried out a public art intervention, draping the facade of two museums with Turkish flags. Do you see a future for yourself in fine art, or were these statements just time and location specific, a chapter that is now closed?

Ill carry on, of course. And on. And on. You opened up this city to me, and thanks to the draped facade I was allowed to be a public nuisance for a few weeks, and the outraged were up in arms, it certainly hit home, they bounced off the screen of enemy banners. I have a tendency to draw heavy re, and it seems Im not cut out for things that lower peoples blood pressure. In art I need allies who are stress-resistant and who dont mind being aggressively denounced for a while. Apropos of which I want to express my gratitude and respect: you always stood by me, in the period when the reactions were the most violent, you stuck it out, although you too were abused and attacked.
The title of your action in Vienna borrowed from the title of one of your books was KanakAttack. It recalls the use of the word nigger by American rappers. Is it about taking a pejorative term used by the silent majority and sharpening it into a combative concept in public debate?

Installation view, Kunsthalle Wien 2005: Feridun Zaimoglu, KanakAttack. The Turks third siege?

I operate not from a position of strength but from a position of weakness. Marking this down as a defect would be a big mistake. In the early days of immigration, Kanake was intended as an insult and a reprimand. People thought: You Italians, who shoot songbirds out of trees and fry them for dinner, youre riff-raff. You Turks, too, with your farmers caps and sacks of onions and your fat womenfolk. You take our jobs and our women, you ruin our outlook. Every foreigner was imagined as a bearer of his culture and lumped together with a collective, and soon there was talk of the community being infected by foreign germs. People actually borrowed (and continue to borrow) terms from invasion biology to push those who had been invited into the country to the periphery. While the center, to stick with this image, was reserved for the bright sparks of the Enlightenment. So its no wonder when those spoken to in this way adopt such belched and barked words and use them as noms de guerre. You were a Kanake because it sounded good because it was a way of rejecting an imposed split identity; because in the strenuous war of public dispute, there only seemed to be identities which the sons and daughters of the rst immigrant generation had shown to be bourgeois notions: you were a Kanake, not because your origin were perceived in relation to a culture but to the underclass.

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Today this war continues unabated, the airhead experts no longer speak of asylum-seekers or foreigners, but of Muslims.
In Kiel, the action with the flags passed without causing much of a stir, whereas in Vienna it triggered intense public debate, with the right-wing camp in particular voicing malicious criticism. How would you describe these two milieus that bring forth such different reactions to the same project?

riage offer from a very striking 55-year-old lady who pictured me her tour guide for her next holiday in Turkey.
It was predictable that the decoration of a sacred temple of art would draw criticism. Do you see yourself as a provocateur who deliberately rubs salt into open socio-political wounds and seeks strong opposition?

In Kiel there was little or no excitement. The people of Kiel think artists are all totally crazy and this Zaimoglu is no exception. That was all I could get out of them. But Vienna is a frontline city, people still believe it wasnt the Turks they repulsed but a mercenary army paid by Satan. And suddenly there are hundreds of Muslim banners ying in the heart of the city. What I found especially amusing was the way Strache the FP leader at the time yapped his protest against this art action as a sweaty pugilist in the name of his Lord. He called me a Turkish nationalist. That amused many people in Germany, this fool has an international reputation, and when people get to see a fool in action they are very grateful. Id like to know if Strache has received any offers from the comedy sector. He would only have to get up on stage and then, with a vacant gaze, bawl, Every inch of earth is Austrias dominion!!! Everyone would love him and pelt him with gold tie pins, white and red striped braces, and powder puffs.
One criticism of the action voiced by the right was the claim that the huge presence of the Turkish flag symbolized the unwillingness of Turks living in Vienna to integrate. How would you yourself describe the metaphorical scope of your work?

Provocation is a trick for bed-wetters. As a latecomer I did, after all, only break into the culture sector at thirty I cant behave like a contented bourgeois. I dont aim for trouble and outrage, I see my work in literature, in the theatre, and also in art as entertainment for the people. Thats it: I want to entertain people. Sooner or later, peripheral partisans like myself get noticed by the industry, and its an iron rule that such chaotic, marginal heroes are always welcomed into the fold. Of course I dont believe in the noble proletarian savage, Ive lived too long in this country in atulent clouds of onion and grilled meat for that. So I wanted to get away from the beginnings of my social origins. Where was that supposed to lead? A former Turkish guy achieves success in the German language and confronts the bourgeois ladies and gentlemen with pretty strange stories sometimes even I rub my eyes in amazement at the way my life has gone. I dont have a tactical relationship with the art of my hands and my heart, I can imagine many things, and most of the time things happen that I could not have predicted or even planned with my housing project wisdom.
Youre an author who wishes to activate the authentically subversive power of language in his texts. What do you see as the differences between writing and fine art in terms of their impact?

Yeah, right. If that were true then the huge presence of kebabs would have to be considered a sign of the withdrawal of the Turks from the public sphere in Vienna. Ive been invited to Vienna on many occasions and when I talked to people of Turkish and Kurdish origin I met, they explicitly described themselves as Austrians. Those on the right dont have a clue, either that, or theyre arguing in bad faith. My ag-draped facade stirred up the kind of people whove always been sure that Turks know nothing but trickery and deceit and have no real morals. I spoke of national wallpaper, a large screen onto which those willing to look can project whatever they want. Those on the right called it a Turkish tent and said the Muslim turban-wearers are besieging us again. And with all due respect, the liberals didnt get it either, saying that I, the Turk, should be allowed to vent my Teutonic spleen. I said, Look here, the temple of culture has fallen, I said it and grinned like a bandit chief. The young people liked it well enough I autographed a great many hands and arms, and I had to turn down a mar324

Im a visual person. What I see rst are pictures and scenes and shots, and then I translate them into written language. I dont write texts, I tell stories. Im a classical storyteller. Im more concerned with the ensemble of gures, the cast, and when I can recognize these men and women, then I start writing. I cant do without an audience. Over the last twelve years Ive given 700 readings, and not once was there an orchestra pit between me and the audience. I loathe writers who stage themselves as alpha males, these Great Writer actors are repugnant to me. When I read, the people listening are rarely left cold. It hits them hard and they curse me. It touches them and theyre happy. I do want to be liked, I dont write in my private journal, I write for the readers. The situation is similar in art: I provide illustrative material, people love it or hate it. No one has ever considered me part of the fraternity of the intellectuals. People call me a gutter poet or a German writer. With regard to my art, Ive been called an idiot in the family of artists or an energetic interventionist.

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You withdrew from the German governments Islam Conference, criticizing the lack of practicing Muslim women (with headscarves) at these events. In a lead article for Die Zeit, you complained about one-sided, negative reporting on the allegedly poor integration of immigrants in Germany. So what is your vision of a modern Islam for our times?

Let me say right away, I can only speak as a private individual. The kind of Islamic reform that some people are demanding is not going to happen. Euro-Islam is a dry intellectual concept. What does modern actually mean? For all religions, one can say that the ardent core of faith is not democratic, and the unauthorized commentators, including know-it-all enlightened reactionaries, should go and interfere somewhere else. A Catholic wont care if you explain to her that Jesus was nailed up to the cross not through his palms but through his wrists shell continue to ask saints bearing the stigmata of Christ to intercede for her with the savior. In the marketplace of possible opinions, I see many fools who inate their own importance at the cost of simple, old men and women who go to places of worship to pray to the god of their hearts. They should be left in peace, they should not be denounced. It is the hour of the rightwing feminists, reformed former Maoists, and neoconservative jack-in-the-boxes, who behave like the saviors of the western world, but theyre just fools obsessed with their own image. Derision of a Catholic pilgrim, mockery of a devout Muslim is cheap. I advise these Stone Age secularists to get professional help. Very few neuroses are immune to therapy.
You once said Violence marginalizes. Knives are for butchers. This year, with the 30th anniversary of the Deutscher Herbst (the Baader-Meinhof gangs 1977 autumn campaign of terror), the question of violence is a hot topic again. Is it really possible, peaceful change within society by means of reasoning and nonviolent resistance?

Feridun Zaimoglu

als who are criminalized because of their reluctance to believe the rulers lies. Ive met many men and women who have lived in open opposition and who have been broken down by the experience, or not. I dont vote anymore. When I go too far, I get a punched in the face.
Does integration mean total identification with the host country for you? Youre quoted as saying, I want to see crowds of Turks waving German flags.

Its right to be skeptical towards the state and its monopoly on the use of physical force. Anyone whos been on the bloody receiving end of a police truncheon attack and then hears hippies talking about holding hands for peace will feel like pulling their hair. What to do? Dont vote if all the people on the ballot are butt-heads. This makes them especially angry and they label the non-voters secret helpers of the Nazis. Were living in times of social erosion, and neo-liberals of all parties would have us believe that were living in a new era where one should no longer speak of left and right. The centre is death, the Conservatives have been left ash-frozen, the Social Democrats are offering their services to the masters and the rulers, and the Greens are wearing suits and giving the go-ahead for wars. If you use violence, the system spits you out half digested. Someone who is criminalized is a criminal. And there are political individu326

Ah yes, that quote. I always say that the Turks and the Germans arent so different by nature. Any kind of ethno-folklore gets on my nerves. Just look at the annual Carnival of Cultures in Berlin, it makes you so sick you need to drink several glasses of bitters. Whats the idea? Ive been living in Germany for 38 years, and, just because it sounds so distinguished, I cant say, Germany is the focal point of my life. Im a German. Period. Thats not a declaration, and its not intended as proof of my assimilation. People should forget this combative types of vocabulary fast, there should be an end to the fraud and self-deception, people should just focus on their own situation and not let anyone else interfere not politicians, not experts on Turks and Turkey, and certainly not me. Most of the young ethnic Turks and Kurds of the second and third generation dont have problems for the sake of it and they dont waste their time on identity crises. They are pragmatists, they see themselves as Germans or Austrians, they want a good job, they want to fall in love, they want to be able to afford nice things.
Youre no friend of multiculturalism and you once said that the differences between ethnic groups should not just be swept aside. But youve also spoken of infiltration through penetration. How are we to understand this?

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Im a great friend of foreignness, and I hate the ecumenical idea. Multiculturalism is the idea of the peaceful coexistence of menus. If we take a look at the everyday life of the immigrants, their now-German children, and their ethnic German neighbors, then among other things we see brusqueness, we see conict and physical collisions. This is one aspect among many, but those on the right elevate it to the status of a protest vote motto. They stage a defensive battle in which the eternal foreigner has a xed role to play. He is imagined as an ideological dildo with an insatiable sexual appetite, as a super-penetrator, and theres no three guesses who gets to play the role of the virgin in jeopardy. In the context of my ag action in Vienna, I made use of this sick fantasy.
Mr Zaimoglu, in the last ten years youve given seven or eight hundred readings and had the experience of two public art actions. Where does art have the greater impact? In intimate contact with the audience or in an anonymous visual space that achieves broader coverage in the form of a media spectacle?

to start preparing for the second volume of the Leyla trilogy. Apart from that, its about time for another large-scale art action. I have no hobbies and almost no private life when Im not being creative, thats poison to me.

Feridun Zaimoglu in conversation with Gerald Matt in July 2007. Feridun Zaimolgu installed KanakAttack. The Turks third siege? on the facade of Kunsthalle Wien in the MuseumsQuartier in 2005. Feridun Zaimoglu, born in 1964 in Bolu, Turkey, lives and works in Kiel, Germany. German to English translation by Nicholas Grindell.

Hard to tell. If I was an art theorist Id say, It depends. But Im not an art theorist, and I say, It depends. The kind of art I envisage thrives on media multiplication. Once youre in the papers and on TV, youre famous. Anyone who resists that is living in the backwoods. In the reading venue Im present, Im open to personal criticism, and I have to deal with that. Reference to the book or the story in the book will not be enough to satisfy people who have paid not only to listen but also to watch. Some authors are uptight, theyre afraid of their audience, and they say, Why should I go on a reading tour? Ive nished my book and honored my half of the bargain, people will ask me the wrong questions. These authors want to rely on the press from the outset. But the inuence of the critics is limited, your book has to impress a great many critics before it starts selling. I love being on stage, I enjoy putting myself on the line physically. An artist can work magic before the eyes of the viewer, but nally it boils down to the question of whether his work is considered worth looking at, or not. In literature and in art, I slip into roles, every role I invent and every picture naturally has something to do with me. In any case, it would be a mistake to think of the audience as fools. The incorrigible ones are more likely to be among the art professionals than among those whove come to gawp. At times, being curious can demand great skill, generally we dont care about the beautiful details.
Mr Zaimoglu, what else are you planning for the near or not-so-near future?

Ive just completed my novel Liebesbrand (Fire of Love). Until its published at the end of February 2008, Ill be giving readings, starting a job as visiting lecturer in Tbingen, and writing a theater play. In December Im going
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trying to understand why the bee ies into the ower

Are you familiar with Eckard Henscheid? He entitled one of his books Die Mtresse des Bischofs (The bishops mistress) and then apologized to the reader for having chosen a title which had nothing to do with the content of the book, but would make it more attractive for distribution. I found that very funny. You have to read quite a while until you notice that the author fooled you. Do you do that too? Sometimes the titles of your works are completely absurd.

My titles have something about them thats not quite schizophrenic, but theyre usually made up of two elements or two words, whereby a syllable or a letter is left out. Take Endeneu*, for example; its also a song by the Einstrzende Neubauten. In the 1920s there were a lot of poems that used this word, and this Endeneu was always written as a compound. I like it because it generates the dissolution of a physical condition within one word. Nonetheless there are still two elements that have a very clear purpose, a clear connotation: ending and beginning.
But when combined they amount to a non-situation: like a departure or new start. Its somewhere in between, almost neutralized.

Sure, but I still take it seriously enough, so things dont dissolve to the point where nothing is left. For me its important to do things that trigger enough resonance in me personally, that something is there, that exists. Then its no longer linguistic, it becomes visual.
But doesnt language play an important role in your work?

It does: language itself, and how its used, the extent to which something builds up or breaks down when people converse, just like with script. In the work Endeneu (Das eidgenssische Unterbewusstsein) I refer directly to the habit of ruminant psychoanalysts who commonly use the word unterbewusst (subconscious), but actually mean unbewusst (unconscious) and with their false choice of words move quite close to the word Untermensch (subhuman). Ive worked intensely with language and how its applied, also how language is used in philosophical texts; from the structuralists to all of the poststructuralists and pragmatists.
You created the sentence: Die Bratschaft will noch ein bisschen Spiegelei kochen und sich dabei die Haare kolorieren.** Somehow its quite amusing and reminds me of the irony of New Objectivity from the 1920s, Kstners, for example. How did you come up with this statement? What does it have to do with your work?

Ralf Ziervogel, Still from Das Erste, 2000

Well, rst of all, the statement emerged from something very regional, from the place where I grew up; it has nothing to do with any particular situa330 331

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tion. At rst I was making radio plays, I still make them, and I always have a Dictaphone with me that I play around with, speaking and repeating sentences into it like in a tunnel. These kinds of things come from that. Its a fairly uninhibited language situation, so while speaking, I notice how different things combine, how they make chains of associations but then wind up again quite soundly. I marked these statements in various reference works lying next to each other and strung them together: a word from a dictionary, a Google page, and a language translator form this sentence.
Drawing is very important to you. Although drawing has become more powerful in recent years, it hasnt been a primary medium in either the art market or exhibitions. What do you find so fascinating about drawing?

I never had a formal education in drawing; at some point it became a form of expression for me with a very direct connection, one that functioned like a plotter. Most important for me was that it could be done quickly and without any apology whatsoever. Thats why Ive never used a pencil, where you can erase. Thats like when you sit in class and are supposed to draw glass, for instance. I nd it much more useful to ing a bottle at the wall there you have glass.
Immediacy, speed, versatility you cant retouch that, cant paint over it. How does that relate to your video works? Ive noticed that the younger generation combines video and drawing. Artists who like to draw are also turning to video. Traditionally drawing was tied with painting.

I had already worked with video before; it interested me because of its direct, immediate character. Ive always considered editing to be something entirely separate from the action. For me, lming is just as immediate as drawing. Anything that looks like a script or a screenplay disturbs my work in this medium. But I also nd the material beautiful, just like drawing, which has something established about it, something beautiful and vivid that mirrors many facets of natural processes: day/night image/negative. An example is Lucino Visconti, his attention to detail in stage design and set construction, generating his feeling for the material (which has an aristocratic base) all the way to underwear. I love this kind of investment, it creates a certain ow.
Similar to exhibition spaces that have recessed lighting, spaces where one is more inclined to be silent; something associated with grandeur and meaning.

Installation view, foyer Kunsthalle Wien 2007: Ralf Ziervogel, Endeneu (Das zeitgenssische Unterbewusstsein), 2000 and Das Erste, 2000

you position things explicitly, something always forms not necessarily a hierarchy that is successive, but a keeping of distance, a caution.
Lets talk about your sculptural drawings, if I may call them that. They transport the drawing from the second to the third dimension. At what point were you no longer satisfied with drawing as such?

And also, most of all, with distance; I really like this distance. My work Endeneu was chosen specically so people can walk over the drawing, that way I dont take it too seriously. On the other hand, in spite of that, whenever
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I have always been interested in the surrounding space as well: that developed from drawing. If the drawing develops in an area that has a maximum size of 670 x 360 cm, I always just roll out as much paper as necessary so I can get an overview. Then I work up to the point where it starts to roll in again, and so on. In this way, Ive already developed the surrounding space in my head. It is interesting to then see how people deal with the surrounding space; how they deal with each other when respect and precisely this distance are involved.You can simply walk over it without registering anything; that happens, too. Yet Ive also noticed that there are a lot of people
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Ralf Ziervogel, Endeneu (Das zeitgenssische Unterbewusstsein), detail, 2000

who wont even venture into this space once theyve gotten close to it. The installation plays with that, of course.
Your drawings are rife with figures and objects; you make good use of art historical references, but also images from popular culture. They are often dreadful scenarios. Still, Id tend to call them amusing apocalypses. Things get pretty rough; figures are missing appendages, theyre tearing out each others body parts, and so on were face to face with a horrific story of insanity, but its impossible to hold back a grin. What is at work here? Is it the fun of fright, the fun of madness, or the beholder taken aback? You are in Vienna; theres Bosch at the Kunsthistorisches Museum and artists like Goya, Kelley or the Chapmans certainly dont leave you cold. What kind of emotional mlange does this work come from? Wheres the fun in horror?

Ralf Ziervogel, Endeneu (Das zeitgenssische Unterbewusstsein), detail, 2000

Meister Mller stuck Max and Moritz in the machine. The same with the choice of words and the way it was drawn Schneider Bck or the creeping beetle in the bed. Of course, that was a different era: Hoffmanns Struwelpeter, too. He wrote horror stories because he didnt want to tell his child the horrible ones that existed at the time; they were too much of a horror show (what irony). The story of the thumb-sucker there are passages in it that I think are great, because there are these brutal emotional acts, when the tailor bursts into the house with huge scissors and just cuts off the thumb.
You also have these emotional stories in your work; when one character rips off the others hand spontaneous outbursts of violence.

I never set out with the intention of wrapping things up art historically. For sure, everything is there, beginning with cave drawings I nd their twodimensionality extremely interesting. There must have been someone who managed to create a portrayal based solely on numbers (example: how many people stand around the mammoth in order to kill it?), which has a teaching purpose, but also that of depicting the story in some way or another. This mixture in the representation of a feeling and reality is what fascinated me. At some point, thats what I tried to do in drawing commensurate with my abilities. The head and the hand produce the size and contextual strands; years ago, I copied comics one to one.
Do you like Willhelm Busch? Despite the gruesomeness and cruelty, its hard not to laugh. Busch deals with different worlds, but the effect is a bit like the one that comes about when beholding your work.

Yes, but because all of the characters are forced into line, they take it and give it back. There is a ow, a current of energy; actually, there is no real position.
So the degree of reality takes a step back; the depiction is brought to a level where the observer gets the feeling this cant be real.

Yes, but then you start to ask why theyre all wearing such up-to-date clothes for me, in any case, it all revolves around the simulation of violence, like in action lms such as David Finchers Fight Club. Those are anticipated feelings that are incited in the masses as revolutionary, but instead theyre commercialized, similar to the way that love is sold by Walt Disney completed as clich.
Do you have any specific motifs that you would say were important at a certain point in your socialization? Id like to know where particular motifs come from, for example, the submarines and airplanes. You might think that the artist once liked to play with war toys.
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In my work, the interaction of the characters isnt so consciously arranged; when I was a child that really frightened me. It was quite formidable when
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Actually, I did. My uncle was an architect. He made the effort of painting these model constructions, right down to the tiniest detail. He gave my brother and me a couple of models we went out in front of the house and played war for a little while and trashed them almost instantly. I also had my own collection that I then threw away. The same thing with manga for a time I was interested in it and the variability of the characters. It is very interesting to see the iconography used in Japans huge manga studios. As a child, I didnt realize that everything, even Biene Maja, comes from Japan. Strangely, manga characters dont have small eyes, but rather huge ones, along the lines of the little kid scheme. Manga incorporates detective stories, thrillers, etc. The protagonists are almost void of character. Tom Cruise i.e., who is considered a male hero, were used as model for a long time; thats why all of the gures look more or less alike.
Horror and fright are literary themes as well; theyre also worldwide phenomena

and seriousness, so that this precise expression can be detached. Nevertheless, that still doesnt actually explain why I do it: The mechanism determining why this depiction and not a different one. I have always processed and categorized the things I experienced through my body; this is why I chose the form of the body and its declinations as a form of expression, for it represents an extreme, almost illustrative climax of a life, in its omnipotence.
I noticed your urge to fill the page, a kind of horror vacui. What drives you to do that?

The idea is also to develop ones own models as quickly as possible. I was never really interested in all of that in canonized literature thats centered on murder and thats considered exciting the character of the mass murderer, for example. What interests me is how its dealt with. A few murders happen; the victims are forgotten by the reader; theres a thread of the plot that continues. I borrowed a construct from that. Concrete images dont stay in my head, but anyway, I attempted to do the same thing based on a variable, namely, the gure men, women, children, animals, and also constructions, etcetera. The gures all look the same and always have the same impetus, like a chip that is designed to make everything happen simultaneously, make everything happen NOW and then the very next moment it can all fall apart. That is the portrayal. I am interested in the concrete here and now, not mystication at least in my work. Personally, I am quite prone to it. I want things to be recognizable, so that everyone can see them one to one; so it isnt some kind of code, although it functions as a variable for me. In this case, the thread of concentration was crucial. When I draw, I know what Im working with from what comes before; there is a main thread that guides me further.
So theres something automatic in your working mode: you dont plan out everything in your head before you start drawing, do you?

Its like the courtship of nature trying to understand why the bee ies into the ower, or something elemental about the courtship itself. When something so intricate takes place on a two-dimensional surface, such as an ornament, then I take it as a clich, like painting, too, which develops in many layers from inside to outside and has an attraction because of these layers. For me, it is juxtaposition. Its what I use at rst to create a basic attraction and thats for my sake, too, because then I dive into the thought process that I have for it a lot faster. My pages are so full because in terms of feeling, the drawing wasnt nished yet, but it was so strong that it drew me in to just look at it.
When viewed from a certain distance your works display network structures. What do you find so interesting about this web-like interweaving?

The rhythm, set or changing, like in music. To borrow from music, I dont try to establish new measures, but I have a rhythm that is visible in the drawing as a network.
Are there any artists that you focus on in particular?

Well, it is a mixture; almost equal, a mutual replacement. Of course there are mistakes in the drawings, too, which I accept, because the process continues. If I couldnt laugh about it, then Id be serious about precisely this spiral of violence. For me, there should always be a balancing act between humor
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Yes, Sol LeWitt. I think Sol LeWitts early works are really interesting. The rst truly common statement that he activated in America was We are all metaphysicians. These utterly conceptual works in the 1960s were much simpler and more direct. When Carl Andr did his ground piece, he used slabs from the sidewalks of New York. When this is placed in a historically grounded, European metaphysical sense, it is mystied in an entirely different way. A lot turned into deco-trash later on, but it makes a pretty picture book. In the beginning these structures were still black, but because it was too expressive they were changed to white. Its possible to go through every possible form with the wall drawings and structures, to decline them using entirely logical, mathematical principles But nonetheless, it still went beyond that people simply continued separating, separating relationships, and the next art movement was formed and then the next and so on.

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With Sol LeWitt, the spatial element is very strong, as it is with you. When you mention Sol LeWitt, and not Kelley or the Chapmans, then you value certain components that are present in his work. Its obviously not the narrative or the historical elements. What is so important to you about the abstraction, about something that on the surface has an excess of narration? And how important is space?

I think that with Sol LeWitt the level of abstraction was so strongly substantiated in the space that it really is what it is. For me, it is precisely this condition that comprises the quality of his work: that it is what I see there, i.e., I can activate myself entirely and absorb precisely that. That is what makes me believe in the thing most strongly.
With video you dont focus on the same theme, the same imagery. It has its own individual quality, not only medially, but also in terms of content. What does video allow you to say that is more or different?

surface. For me that is an extension, a physical extension of this very architecture, this arbitration between Blob and Bauhaus. The urban planning aspects are interesting in terms of the issue of how cities establish themselves, a huge business topic nowadays. But also questions such as: What is architecture? How is architecture used? Think of Le Corbusier, for example, thats key in Berlin: The high rises were meant to stir social aspects, connection or bonding, but essentially theyve always had the opposite effect that can be sensed in the outer district of Berlin Marzahn. Im interested in the pragmatic aspects of this; also the extension of borders, the fact that there has never been a free-hanging roof in a eld.

Ralf Ziervogel in conversation with Gerald Matt on the occasion of the exhibition Dream & Trauma. Works from the Dakis Joannou Collection, Athens at Kunsthalle Wien and MUMOK 2007. Ralf Ziervogel, born in 1975 in Clausthal-Zellerfeld, Germany, lives and works in Berlin. German to English translation by Lisa Rosenblatt.

I think the directness of the act has always been essential. I compiled my video works into an album; it is also a kind of series. The PROTO-Album consists of eight videos that are arranged similarly to the strobe lights in a disco, always in high speed sequence. These are very short works. When I portray a stereotype in a declamatory way, or try to push it in a certain direction, then I attempt to deal with it, to portray this performative, direct interaction, just like that which is played out, or discarded, where all the possible forms have already been declined, but to still feel it at the moment. To put it simply: to make it fun. Video is a very communicable medium. Marcel Odenbacher made videos because it was important for him to distribute them everywhere as quickly as possible. It was also just merely the act; in the beginning, there was none of the hierarchy of the art market. Of course that was reduced again with editioning; suddenly video became a jewel or something that was elaborately produced.
What are you planning to do next?

At the moment I am planning a project with Roger Buntschuh, the architect who designed the pavilion in Venice for Isa Genzken. Its a 100 x 100 x 100 meter cube for the Tempelhof airport, an impossible architecture. It evokes Bauhaus elements and plays with these, and the casting of impossible architecture, this bombastic, this political cast. Tempelhof is, of course, an important site in this context. The cube is a play on a ying object. It is hollow and situated on the aireld; theres no door, the entrance is underground, like a subway station, leading upstairs directly into the cube. The construction is completely simple with four pillars held by wire cables. Hanging from all this are gauze sheets that are permeable, but still create a
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* **

This is a word creation from the German words Ende (end) and neu (new). Translates roughly as The Bratschaft wants to fry a few more eggs while coloring its hair, whereby Bratschaft is a word creation, it could mean frying-ness.

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Philosphy in Action

You often cause public outrage with your work. Your artistic strategy indeed has a disturbing effect sometimes. In works such as Out for a Walk you use human disabilities and humans with disabilities as your theme by emphasizing the difference between normal and disabled to the verge of the intolerable. Once you said that your film Out for a Walk is about failure. How is this to be understood?

I dont deliberately torment the viewers its rather that my perception of the world is unbearable for others. I speak in a language that doesnt shock me, but sometimes proves problematic for the viewer. Not only bodies are disabled. There is also economic or educational disability. Within society a mixture of disabilities exist that often functions imperceptibly for instance, ethnic difference can have the effect of a mental disability. Linguistic disability also exists broken English spoken perfectly. I speak pidgin English, which has become a trans-national dialect. This mixture of disabilities creates a map of silence alienating people within the given community and making it impossible for them to articulate their needs. Society forms a network of disability that allows some to occupy certain positions in the social structure, while preventing others from doing so. The category of disability is a category of power the disability status is awarded arbitrarily and serves to exercise control over the body, over the places occupied in social structure and over bare life: this baby is so disabled, we should let it die. The difference between disability and norm look how fragile the status quo is between community members: a minor transgression beyond the contract, beyond the allowed communication modes, and the relationship is disturbed, loses its effectiveness, nds itself on the verge of collapse. A small deviation already becomes a transgression, an offence. Artistic activity negotiates these limits of deviation, difference, strangeness. And it succeeds in pushing them. Out for a Walk is the model of an utopia, which is why I called it a failure. Still, as a voice in support of instituting radical human solidarity, as the proposition of replacing the barter economy with a gift economy, it is a success because the postulates it carries continue to be distributed. The failure this lm talks about can be understood in existential terms it is a confrontation with the constraints of bare life, the organic vehicle of the human body. The picture offers no medical consolations or hopes. The viewer is confronted face to face with the cruelty of physical existence with the results of a disease or accident. And no consolation discourse obscures the fact and its social consequences.
mijewski, Still from Artur Z Singing Lesson 2, 2000

The discussion of these subjects is also brought up in other works such as i.e. Singing Lesson. Deaf-mute children try to imitate the melody of a Bach cantata, sounds they have never heard, with alienating results. Their song turns out as a mixture of screaming, howling, yelling or odd outbursts of noise. Is the viewer

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trying to stitch it all back together. The deaf are indeed resurrected in this little lm as others intransgressibly different. And they ask, with deadly seriousness, whether it is possible to unconditionally accept their state of being different. the question about the possibility of unconditional acceptance of their difference.
Eye for an Eye also shows pleasure in ones own physicality, enjoying ones own existence. Bodily defects are displayed proudly and openly, difference is made relevant and loses its dramatic quality. It is not a matter of suffering or sympathising with suffering. What kind of thinking model builds the background here?

mijewski, Still Artur Z from Out for a Walk, 2001

intended to learn something about the beauty of what is generally thought of as deficient? Could you explain the politics of this piece in particular?

The lm teaches that beauty is an ideological category and can be used to remove individuals from the eld of exchange, the eld of vision. The category of beauty serves to exercise control over the body. These kids were taught that their voices are ugly which lled them with shame. And shame is obviously an instrument of controlling our behaviour, taming our temperament. So, as Rancire would say, these deaf children make sounds but dont speak. Singing Lesson 1 and Singing Lesson 2 turn these sounds into speech. In one interview about Singing Lesson I said, These deaf children sing. For many of them, the concept of sound means nothing it has no designation. They experience it, at best, as a vibration. And now its their turn to create music to sing. I think that deaf people create a parallel aesthetic, linguistic reality they produce a different grammar of sound. Singing, they show theyre really different. And this is something you cant falsify, cant obscure with awareness campaigns about respecting differences. Theyre different, and those who can hear try to exercise control over them, teaching them to articulate words. Their deaf words are, obviously, sloppy and lopsided, so theyre instantly forbidden to use them, because they sound bad. This double message effectively removes them from our the hearing-able populations eld of vision, and infects them with shame. This is how the social body has been fragmented weve been divided into the hearing and the deaf, the homo and the hetero, the Jews and the Aryans, the well-paid and the poorly-paid, the well-educated and poorly- educated its a tough job
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You can say these amputees start using the able-bodied using them for their own benet. This cynical action is afrmed in Eye for an Eye. So much for being a victim, so much for the mimicry of the disabled. In a contemptuous act, they turn the able-bodied literally into their footrests. Film precisely is the realm of fantasy the place where we dont have to play the good and helpful because thats the custom. In the space of lm we can show our disability, laugh at it, and turn an able-bodied person into our own prosthesis. Film is a space of freedom you can behave cynically, or even cruelly, and the viewers will think its just acting anyway, so you have an alibi. Eye for an Eye can be viewed as a model of relativization, functioning as a social performative serving to challenge the models, producing tragic effects of rejection of the other, the freak. Compassion is a concept invented for the purpose of the onlookers its their alibi. I look because I sympathise, not because Im fascinated by physical deformity such as the sight of a legless man. And yet its also a road show of forms, a theater of strange visual combinations, of unexpected shapes. I go to the hospital to visit the patients, not because its an extreme experience, a glimpse of the between, between life and death, between suffering and the comfort of a healthy body a sight that hypnotises, fascinates, I go because it also pertains to us. Art is a very effective instrument of pursuing cultural interests. Its a cultural battleeld, a eld of struggles that goes far beyond the purely artistic dimension. These struggles for the change of the status quo in politics, science, religion, customs, technology, and so on share a common ground with art. I think what were having to do here is to create a uid exchange of arguments and ghting strategies. And so, for instance, the induced eld strategy is often present in art. Its a strategy from the eld of politics a daring action induces the eld, causing a stir among those who have been passive players until now, a turmoil, making it possible to pursue various scenarios depending on how things develop. The strategy activates and visualizes the force eld of power and makes it susceptible to change. In art, it is rather the map of views that is aroused and becomes susceptible to
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change. Art, including literature, lm, theatre , the visual arts, also has the ability to establish various lines of conict within the eld it controls. It can also sell conict initiate it, and then hand it over to the media to manage it. The Polish artist Joanna Rajkowska proposes the strategy of changing the context in the eld of conict when the context is changed, conict loses its reason to exist, runs out of fuel. Oskar Hansen spoke in similar terms about architecture, They built these residential blocks near Bergen [], nearby stood some villas. And, of course, those in the blocks felt bad, because here they were, the lower class, in the apartment blocks, and there were those posh villas. And he [Svein Hatly] changed the situation without demolishing those blocks. [] He simply organised an outside space so rich those from the villas were attracted to it. * In any case, artistic activity can induce the activity of the given eld and cause its elements to be signicantly reorganised. A good word to denote an attack on the theoretical organisation of the elds structure is rethinking though redoing or re-visualizing would also be useful in art. Art is the place of a similar division as in politics a partisan division there are protest parties, and there are passive parties that believe its better not to stick your head out. There are the conservatives who praise the neo-liberal order, there are prot parties, and there are the revolutionaries. There are social activists and there are the ultra-conservatives. There are Catholics, women and the nationalists. But the division is tacit it is a division that occurs before our very eyes but then goes into hiding and remains, unspoken, in the background. Art is a mouthpiece, but, and this is what I like the best, it is also a philosophy in action, a social practise that produces lasting, though usually the results are hardly perceptible.
Again and again you strike against the limits of social consensus. Is political correctness a term of any relevance to you?

mijewski, Artur Z Auge um Auge, 1998

Indeed, social limits are being tested. These limits are very tight transgression or deviation are within hands reach. Still, Im not against social limits as such after all, they provide security to us all, me included. I read somewhere that tumours are dead ends of evolution. That evolution, which, how else, goes on, experiments on our bodies and makes mistakes. Art, to me, is something like a blind force of social evolution. It produces mistakes, behavioural procedures, contexts, fantasies, scenarios that at rst you dont know what to do with. They are the disorders that the social body experiences. Sometimes a proposition made by art is accepted and the given way of conduct is naturalised. The art world has become a global corporation one of the biggest and most successful ones in monopolizing and controlling cultural practices and in turning them into products that can be sold at prot.You can guess such invisible practices, invented by art, infect the social body. They inhabit
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it and become naturalized. The dominant view is that art critizises capitalism. However, it can also be that capitalism learns transgressive and ruthless behaviour from art, but also soft strategies of seduction and attraction. Perhaps it is the ne arts that have taught capitalism that the physical attractiveness of an object, its sex appeal, are a necessary condition for that object to be coveted to become a product. Perhaps it is sacral art that has taught capitalism to fetishize the product through sacral images and sculptures that are cult objects. Perhaps art is partly responsible for promoting helplessness discourses? For a model of social activity, the effects of which are nowhere to be seen, which is so diluted that it alienates people from the result and legitimises ineffectiveness? Perhaps art produces cultural models of ineffectiveness and helps to shift the entire responsibility for social problems on politics? Such hypotheses are of anthropological nature. You cant put the ngerprint-covered gun on the table and say, This is the weapon.
For your projects you usually cast lay-people as actors. Do the characters act according to some kind of script or is the performance largely based on improvisation?

I never have a script; its always an improvisation following the course of events; the unpredictable occurs and is documented. The event tells itself and you have to identify the main lines of narration, the turning points, and show them when you edit. Do the participants of my lms act? Film, as iek tells us, is a space of fantasy where people can be themselves. What is forbidden in the ordinary human relationship is not censored here and people can be true to their subjective truth, their own nature. To the viewer, this can look like acting, like something unnatural.
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In many works you touch on collective traumata, such as the Europes National Socialist past. In Favourite Theory of Art you speak of niches of inattention and intimacy, through which the artist can use his work to find the permeable brain channel through which he can pass into the mental space. Is that one of your artistic pickpocket tricks for arousing national phobias and neuroses?

This isnt my trick, these are, in my opinion, common artistic strategies. The niches of inattention are places where the social body has undergone anaesthesia it doesnt react to stimuli. You can say artists are masters of reverse perception they see what cant be seen. They know the unknown. Or they know, semi-consciously, what we dont know we know. I believe its part of artistic know-how and could be used as expert knowledge, as a cognitive method, in other elds.
In which sense could the human body be understood as a subject matter within your artistic strategy?

You studied with Pawe Althamer and Katarzyna Kozyra, and sometimes you exhibit with them and carry out joint projects. Your works show many points of contact, such as the concern with physicality, marginal social groups, provocation strategies, etc. What parallels and what differences do you see in your artistic positions? Is there anything you would call a common tradition, from which you create? A figure of historical reference or a certain discourse that was topical when you were students?

If the body is the focus of my interest, its as part of the social body. The nationalised, not-your-own, conforming body. The body is our construction the image we offer on the markets of social exchange. Im interested in what Grzegorz Klaman called the political economy of the body. Like the product, the body is a cluster of relationships, the point where various opinions and discourses meet: medical, political, artistic. Art too provokes the body to exist, appropriates it, imposes its own denitions on it, pulls it into emancipation discourses, but also imprisons it in its narratives by, for instance, reproducing its liberal obligations. Art is slowly becoming a parallel discourse detaching reality from itself and equipping it with autonomous rights. It is partly like science, which serves as the power base for the operationalisation and technologisation of human life. The seemingly local art strategies proliferate, becoming part of politics, part of media language, part of the capitalistic denition of the product the art market has in fact helped expand the notion of the product. It equipped it with a bunch of irrational qualities that codetermine commercial success. You can say that science is the background discourse for technology, just like political philosophy is the background discourse for politics. Are the visual arts, as well as literature, theatre, cinema, also a background discourse? Or perhaps it is the human passions, desires, and existential anxieties that are the background discourse for art? Perhaps art itself is a kind of humanistic technology a device generating experiences, emotions, reections? Its worth adding that the gure known as the artist is also a cluster of relationships; the place where social fantasies, anarchic yearnings, and compulsive satisfactions of the sense of strangeness conjoin; where the consecutive codes of freedom are tested, and where the absurd becomes the duty.

What we have in common is the assumption that social realization is sensitive to artistic activity and can be transformed by it. That the symbolic tissue entwining society is alive and volatile, and artistic activity usually takes place on a symbolic level. Today the notion is already emerging that the artistviewer division has been reversed that the artist is now the viewer, and society is the artist.You dont try to modernize society, you listen to it.You dont accuse it of being narrow-minded and bigoted, but treat it like a partner its not the artist who speaks, its the people. Its not the artist whos the wise guy here, but the community in which he lives. Consequently, art gives up its rank and importance, lays open its mysteries, and becomes egalitarian by being one of the goods available on the market of ideas. The work of art becomes an argument in the debate, can encounter a more powerful argument and then it loses.
For the polish pavillon at the Venice Biennial 2005, you conceived the installation Repetition, which refers to the experiment of professor Philip Zimbardo at the Stanford Prison of 1971. For 14 days, volunteers played roles of prisoners and jailors. What was exciting about this project?

The exciting thing was to repeat a canonic psychological experiment that reinforces a certain opinion about human behavior. It was an attempt to enter a territory claimed by science, a place where arbitrary judgements on the human reality are pronounced judgements impossible to verify for a layman. I was interested in potentially challenging, undermining the reliability of the results of Zimbardos experiment, which are considered indisputable. This is the purpose of the black legend However there is a legend of unethicality surrounding the experiment, which results in a de facto ban on repeating it. Thus the results cant be veried. At the same time, this unethical experiment and the knowledge it generated are something every psychology student learns about. Science has no ethical second thoughts about using knowledge obtained through human suffering. In fact, Zimbardos attitude towards the results of his experiment has changed he no longer speaks only of banally evil people, but also of the banally good ones, who are able to stop the violence. It was exciting to use the mandate of art to enter unethical territory the artist can still be evil, can cause suffering, act at the periphery of the law or beyond it and has societys informal per347

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mission to do that. However, he pays a tall price for it. The ruler no longer says, You must think as I do or die. He says, You are free not to think as I do; your life, your property, everything shall remain yours, but from this day on you are a stranger among us. ** So this is the price: art no longer participates in the play of forces that shapes the world. Unless we think like Rancire, for whom art is a passive device of the division of the sensible. It can cause certain groups or individuals to be seen and heard. It can also help to turn the animal voice into clear and politically signicant language.
For your joint project with Pawe Althamer So Called Waves and Other Phenomena of the Mind, you experimented with consciousness-altering substances Would you like to comment on that?

We used peyote, hashish, psilocybin, LSD, and thiopental, or truth serum. Pawe also had himself hypnotized twice. We treated a walk with his seven year-old daughter as a drug, as well. Powerful means were used to talk about ordinary things like that Pawe thinks that he was a bird in a past life, that trees are nerve endings sticking out of the ground. Pawe is doubtlessly a prophet and a medicine man, for whom theres no place in ofcial religion and ofcial medicine. We also tested our artistic privileges that allow us to make documentary lms about taking drugs, even though drugs are illegal. We used lm to do the same as Aldous Huxley did when he was writing The Doors of Perception. We tried to say that the world is interesting not only when it is commoditized and can be valued.
What projects are you planning for the near future?

Further lms, of course, and travelling.

mijewski in conversation with Gerald Matt in August 2007. The artist participated in the exhibiArtur Z tion The Impossible Theatre at Kunsthalle Wien in 2005. mijewski, born in 1966 in Warsaw, Poland, lives and works in Warsaw. Artur Z Polish to English translation by Maricn Wawrzynczak.

* **

Oskar Hansen, Towards open Form / Ku formie otwartej, Fundacja Galerii Foksal, Revolver, Muzeum ASP w Warszawie, Warsaw, 2005, p. 90. Max Horkheimer, Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, Continuum, New York 1993.

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Credits If not otherwise mentioned: the artist By courtesy of the artist p. 12: Lida Abdul, Still from Brick Sellers of Kabul, 2006, Courtesy the artist and Galleria Giorgio Persano, Turin p. 14: Lida Abdul, Still from Upon awakening, 2006, Courtesy the artist and Galleria Giorgio Persano, Turin p. 16: Lida Abdul, Still from War Games, 2006, Courtesy the artist and Galleria Giorgio Persano, Turin p. 18: Sergei Bugeav Afrika, Rebus (black on white) 4, 1991, Courtesy I-20 Gallery, New York p. 21: Sergei Bugeav Afrika, Rebus #30, 19951996, Courtesy I-20 Gallery, New York p. 25: Sergei Bugeav Afrika, Still from Stalker 3, 1996, 2002, Courtesy I-20 Gallery, New York Sergei Bugeav Afrika, Still from Stalker 3, 1996, 2002, Courtesy I-20 Gallery, New York p. 28: Pawe Althamer, Brdno, 2000, Courtesy Foksal Gallery Foundation, Warsaw p. 31: Pawe Althamer, Staff en plein air, exhibition staff of Kunsthalle Wien, Photo: Christoph Dirnbacher, Kunsthalle Wien 2005, project in relation to the exhibition The Impossible Theater at Kunsthalle Wien, 2005 Pawe Althamer, Staff en plein air, exhibition staff of Zacheta National Gallery of Art, Photo: Christoph Dirnbacher, Kunsthalle Wien 2005, project in relation to the exhibition The Impossible Theater at Kunsthalle Wien, 2005 p. 34: Lara Baladi, Roba Vecchia. The Wheel of Fortune, 2006, Installation view, Courtesy the artist and Townhouse, Gallery of contemporary art, Cairo p. 37: Lara Baladi, Roba Vecchia. The Wheel of Fortune, 2006, Courtesy the artist and Townhouse, Gallery of contemporary art, Cairo p. 39: Lara Baladi, Oum El Dounia, 2000, Collection Fondation Cartier pour lart contemporain, Paris, Courtesy the artist p. 40: Lara Baladi, Perfumes & Bazaar, 2005, ICP International Center of Photography, New York, Courtesy the artist p. 42: Matthew Barney, DRAWING RESTRAINT 9, 2005, Production Still, 2005 Matthew Barney, Photo: Chris Winget, Courtesy Gladstone Gallery, New York p. 47: Matthew Barney, DRAWING RESTRAINT 9, 2005, Production Still, 2005 Matthew Barney, Photo: Chris Winget, Courtesy Gladstone Gallery, New York p. 49: Matthew Barney, DRAWING RESTRAINT 9, 2005, Production Still, 2005 Matthew Barney, Photo: Chris Winget, Courtesy Gladstone Gallery, New York p. 51: Matthew Barney and Gerald Matt, Kunsthalle Wien, 2007, Kunsthalle Wien 2007, Photo: Synne Genzmer p. 54: Louise Bourgeois, WHO WHERE WHEN WHY WHAT, 1999, Collection Wendy Williams, New York, Photo: Christopher Burke, VBK Wien 2008 p. 57: Louise Bourgeois, UNTITLED (double sided), 2003, Courtesy Cheim & Read, Galerie Karsten and Greve and Galerie Hauser & Wirth, Photo: Christopher Burke, VBK Wien 2008 p. 58: Wolfgang Capellari, o.T., 2000, Courtesy the artist p. 60: Wolfgang Capellari, Meer, 2005, Sammlung RAIBA Kitzbhel, Courtesy the artist p. 63: Wolfgang Capellari, o.T., 2005, Courtesy the artist p. 66: Maurizio Cattelan, Untitled, 2007, Installation view, Museum Moderner Kunst, Frankfurt a. Main, Photo: Alex Schneider, Courtesy the artist p. 69: Maurizio Cattelan, Him, 2001, Installation view, Courtesy the artist p. 70: Maurizio Cattelan, Frau C., 2007, Installation view, Portikus, Frankfurt a. Main, Courtesy the artist p. 71: Maurizio Cattelan, Untitled, 2004, Courtesy Fondazione Nicola Trussardi, Milan, Photo: Attilio Maranzano p. 74: Nathalie Djurberg, Still from Viola, 2005, Courtesy the artist and Go Marconi, Milano p. 77: Nathalie Djurberg, Still from There aint no pill, 2005, Courtesy the artist and Go Marconi, Milano

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 p. 80: A K Dolven, Still from Stairs, 2002, Courtesy carlier | gebauer, Berlin, Wilkinson Gallery, London, VBK Wien 2008 A K Dolven, Still from Stairs, 2002, Courtesy carlier | gebauer, Berlin, Wilkinson Gallery, London, VBK Wien 2008 p. 83: A K Dolven, Madonna with Man and Fig, 2005, Courtesy carlier | gebauer, Berlin, Wilkinson Gallery, London, VBK Wien 2008 A K Dolven, Madonna with Man and Fruit, 2006, Courtesy carlier | gebauer, Berlin, Wilkinson Gallery, London, VBK Wien 2008 p. 85: A K Dolven, Between two Mornings, 2004, Courtesy carlier | gebauer, Berlin, Wilkinson Gallery, London, VBK Wien 2008 p. 88: Marcel Dzama, Untitled, 2005, Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner, New York p. 90: Marcel Dzama, Untitled, 2007, Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner, New York p. 92: Marcel Dzama, 6 Pinocchios, 2007, Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner, New York p. 94: Tim Eitel, o.T. (Gepck), 2005, Private Collection, Berlin, Courtesy Galerie EIGEN + ART Leipzig/Berlin and PaceWildenstein, Photo: Uwe Walter, VBK Wien 2008 p. 99: Tim Eitel, Wagen, 2005, Museum Frieder Burda, Courtesy Galerie EIGEN + ART Leipzig/ Berlin and PaceWildenstein, Photo: Uwe Walter, VBK Wien 2008 p. 102: Tim Eitel, Asphalt, 2007, Courtesy Galerie EIGEN + ART Leipzig/Berlin and PaceWildenstein, Photo: Uwe Walter, VBK Wien 2008 p. 104: Barnaby Furnas, Rock Concert (Slayer), 2007, Courtesy the Artist and Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York p. 107: Barnaby Furnas, Before the Cross V, 2006, Courtesy the Artist and Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York Barnaby Furnas, Bad Back (Night), 2006, Courtesy the Artist and Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York p. 110: Don Giovanni, mise en scne Michael Haneke, Opra Bastille, Paris, 2005, David Bizic (Masetto), Aleksandra Zamojska (Zerlina), Peter Mattei (Don Giovanni), Photo: Eric Mahoudeau p. 115: Don Giovanni, mise en scne Michael Haneke, Opra Bastille, Paris, 2005, Shawn Mathey (Don Ottavio), Peter Mattei (Don Giovanni), David Bizic (Masetto), Aleksandra Zamojska (Zerlina), Photo: Eric Mahoudeau p. 116: Glsn Karamustafa, Installation view, Galerie im Taxispalais, Innsbruck, 1999: Courier, 1994, Collection Ren Block, Courtesy the artist p. 120: Glsn Karamustafa, Installation view, Nassauischer Kunstverein Wiesbaden 2000: Mystic Transport, 1992, Collection Ren Block, Courtesy the artist p. 122: Glsn Karamustafa, Installation view, Historisches Museum Hannover 2000: Folding, 2000, Courtesy the artist p. 126: Zilvinas Kempinas, Columns, 2006, Courtesy the artist and Spencer Brownstone Gallery, New York, VBK Wien 2008 p. 128: Zilvinas Kempinas, Flying Tape, 2004, Installation view, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, 2006, Courtesy the artist and Spencer Brownstone Gallery, New York, VBK Wien 2008 p. 132: Zilvinas Kempinas, Moon Sketch, 2005, Courtesy the artist and Spencer Brownstone Gallery, New York, VBK Wien 2008 p. 134: Amal Kenawy, Still from You Will Be Killed, 2006, Courtesy the artist p. 137: Amal Kenawy, The Room, Video performance, 2004, Courtesy the artist p. 141: Amal Kenawy, Non Stop Conversation, Performance 8. Sharjah Biennial 2007, Courtesy the artist, Photo: Abdel Kenawy Amal Kenawy, Non Stop Conversation, Performance 8. Sharjah Biennial 2007, Courtesy the artist, Photo: Abdel Kenawy Amal Kenawy, Non Stop Conversation, Performance 8. Sharjah Biennial 2007, Courtesy the artist, Photo: Abdel Kenawy p. 142: Zenita Komad, Operation Casablanca, 2005, Courtesy the artist and Galerie Krinzinger, Vienna, VBK Wien 2008 p. 145: Zenita Komad, Alle Tassen im Schrank, 2006, Courtesy the artist and Galerie Krinzinger, Vienna, VBK Wien 2008 p. 147: Zenita Komad, Omphallus Der Nabel der Welt, 2007, Courtesy the artist and Galerie Krinzinger, Vienna, Photo: Zen Zekizava, VBK Wien 2008

p. 149: Zenita Komad, ich liebe euch!, Installation view, Galerie Krinzinger, Vienna, 2006, Courtesy the artist and Galerie Krinzinger, Vienna, VBK Wien 2008 p. 150: Katarzyna Kozyra, Still from Cheerleader, 2006, from In Art Dreams Come True, Zacheta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw, Courtesy the artist, Still/Photo: Marcin Olivia Soto p. 152: Katarzyna Kozyra, Still from The Winters Tale, 20052006, from In Art Dreams Come True, Courtesy the artist and Galerie Steinek, Vienna, Photo: Thomas Mielech p. 153: Katarzyna Kozyra, The Midget Gallery goes to Art Basel to buy an artwork, 2007, Courtesy the artist and The Midget Gallery, Photo: Marcin Oliva Soto p. 156: Katarzyna Kozyra, Oympia, 1996, Private Collection, Courtesy the artist p. 160: Paul Albert Leitner, Self-portrait, Club Social y Deportivo Austria, San Isidro (Buenos Aires) Argentina 2005, Courtesy the artist and Fotohof Salzburg p. 162: Paul Albert Leitner, Selbstportrt, Persepolis, Iran 2006, Courtesy the artist and Fotohof Salzburg p. 163: Paul Albert Leitner, Esfahan, Iran 20065, Courtesy the artist and Fotohof Salzburg p. 167: Paul Albert Leitner, Gerald Matt, St. Petersburg 1996, from the series Die Reise geht weiter, Courtesy the artist and Fotohof Salzburg p. 170: Linder, The Paradise Experiments: Boudoir IV, 2006, Courtesy Stuart Shave/Modern Art, London p. 173: Linder, from Pretty Girl Series, 1977, Courtesy Stuart Shave/Modern Art, London Linder, from Pretty Girl Series, 1977, Courtesy Stuart Shave/Modern Art, London p. 177: Linder, SheShe, 1981, Courtesy Stuart Shave/Modern Art, London p. 180: Liu Ding, Tiger, 2007, Courtesy the artist p. 183: Liu Ding, Samples from the Transition Products, Part 1, 2005, Courtesy the artist p. 185: Liu Ding, Power, 20062007, Installation view, Kunsthalle Wien project space, 2007, Courtesy the artist p. 188: Urs Lthi, Ill be your mirror, 1972, Courtesy the artist and Galerie Hubert Winter, Vienna p. 191: Urs Lthi, Art is the better Life (The Revenge), 2003, Courtesy the artist and Galerie Lelong, Zurich, Paris p. 193: Urs Lthi, from the series Art is the better Life, 2007, Courtesy Galerie Lelong Zurich, Paris p. 194: Ryan McGinley, Tree # 1, 2003, Courtesy Team Gallery, New York p. 199: Ryan McGinley, Lizzy, 2002, Courtesy Team Gallery, New York p. 203: Ryan McGinley, BMX, 2000, Courtesy Team Gallery, New York p. 204: Olaf Metzel, Turkish Delight, 2006, Courtesy the artist, Photo: Fritz Barth, Fellbach, VBK Wien 2008 p. 206: Olaf Metzel, 13.04.1981, Installation view, Kurfrstendamm, Berlin, 1987, Courtesy the artist, Photo: Olaf Metzel, Munich, VBK Wien 2008 p. 208: Olaf Metzel, Turbokapitalismus, 1999, Installation view, Haus am Waldsee, Berlin, 1999, Courtesy the artist, Photo: Jens Ziehe, Berlin, VBK Wien 2008 p. 210: Olga Neuwirth, miramondo multiplo, 2007, Installation view, documenta 12, Kassel, 2007, Courtesy the artist and Galerie Charim, Vienna Olga Neuwirth, miramondo multiplo , 2007, Installation view, Galerie Charim, Vienna, 2007, Courtesy the artist and Galerie Charim, Vienna p. 220: Tim Noble & Sue Webster, Dirty House, 24 Street, 2002, Courtesy the artists, Photo: Norbert Schoener p. 223: Tim Noble & Sue Webster, Black Narcissus, 2006, Courtesy the artists p. 225: Tim Noble & Sue Webster, Drawing for a Future Project, 2007, Courtesy the artists p. 226: Ulrike Ottinger, Still from Das Exemplar, 2002 Courtesy the artist p. 229: Ulrike Ottinger, Still from Superbia, 1986, Courtesy the artist p. 231: Ulrike Ottinger, Still from Freak Orlando, 1981, cited in: Usinimage, 1987, Courtesy the artist p. 234: Poka-Yio, About to Get Dirty, 2006, Courtesy Loraini Alimantiri / gazonrouge, Athens, Photo: Fotis Traganoudakis p. 237: Poka-Yio, Self-Decapitad, 2005, Courtesy Loraini Alimantiri / gazonrouge, Athens p. 240: Poka-Yio, Flower 1, 2006, Courtesy Loraini Alimantiri / gazonrouge, Athens, Photo: Fotis Traganoudakis p. 242: Julius Popp, bit.fall, 2006, Courtesy the artist and Galerie nchst St. Stephan, Vienna and Galerie Jocelyn Wolff, Paris, Photo: Francois Doury p. 245: Julius Popp, bit.flow, 2005, detail, Courtesy the artist and Galerie nchst St. Stephan, Vienna

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 . 246: Julius Popp, bit.flow, 2005, detail, Courtesy the artist and Galerie nchst St. Stephan, Vienna p p. 256: Julius Popp, micro.spheres, 20022005, Courtesy the artist, Photo: Julius Popp p. 252: Nedko Solakov, Fears # 63, 20062007, Courtesy Arndt & Partner, Berlin/Zurich, Photo: Angel Tzvetanov p. 254: Nedko Solakov, Fears, 20062007, Installation view, documenta 12, Kassel, 2007, Courtesy Arndt & Partner, Berlin/Zurich, Photo: Werner Maschmann p. 257: Nedko Solakov, Top Secret, 19891990, Installation view, documenta 12, Kassel, 2007, Courtesy Arndt & Partner, Berlin/Zurich, Photo: Werner Maschmann Nedko Solakov, Top Secret, 19891990, Installation view documenta 12, Kassel, 2007, Courtesy Arndt & Partner, Berlin/Zurich, Photo: Werner Maschmann p. 262: Doron Solomons, Still from Brothers in Arms, 2004, Courtesy Sommer Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv p. 264: Doron Solomons, Stills from Lullaby, 1998, Courtesy Sommer Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv p. 265: Doron Solomons, Still from Father, 2002, Courtesy Sommer Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv p. 267: Doron Solomons, Still from Shopping Day, 2006, Courtesy Sommer Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv p. 268: Ricky Swallow, Private Dancer, 2002, Courtesy Stuart Shave/Modern Art, London p. 272: Ricky Swallow, Younger Than Yesterday, 2006, Courtesy Stuart Shave/Modern Art, London, Photo: Frederik Nilsen and Andy Keate p. 275: Ricky Swallow, The Bricoleur, 2006, Courtesy Stuart Shave/Modern Art, London, Photo: Frederik Nilsen and Andy Keate p. 278: Pascale Marthine Tayou, Conseil des 9, 2007, Courtesy Galleria Continua, San Gimignano, Beijing p. 282: Pascale Marthine Tayou, Plastic Bags, Installation view, public space Karlsplatz, Kunsthalle Wien 2006, Photo: Stefan Wyckoff, Kunsthalle Wien p. 284: Spencer Tunick, Action New Vienna by Spencer Tunick in front of MuseumsQuartier, Vienna, 1999, Photo: Spencer Tunick p. 287: Spencer Tunick, Mexico-City (Museo Frida Kahlo), 2007, Courtesy I-20 Gallery, New York p. 289: Spencer Tunick, Mexico-City 4 (Zcalo), 2007, Courtesy I-20 Gallery, New York p. 290: Paloma Varga Weisz, Schafsmann, 2007, Photo: Stefan Hostettler, Courtesy Sadie Coles HQ, London, VBK Wien 2008 p. 295: Paloma Varga Weisz, Waldfrau, 2001, Photo: Daniela Steinfeld, Courtesy Konrad Fischer Galerie, Dsseldorf, VBK Wien 2008 p. 297: Paloma Varga Weisz, Lila Frau, 2006, Courtesy Gladstone Gallery, New York, VBK Wien 2008 p. 300: Wang Wei, Hypocritical Room, 2003, Courtesy the artist p. 303: Wang Wei, Temporary Space, 2003, Courtesy the artist Wang Wei, Trap, 2005, Courtesy the artist p. 306: Nari Ward, Hunger Cradle, 19962007, Installation view, Kunsthalle Wien, exhibition Dream & Trauma. Works from the Dakis Joannou Collection, Athens, 2007, Photo: Lena Deinhardstein, Kunsthalle Wien p. 308: Nari Ward, Amazing Graze, 1993, Courtesy Deitch Projects, New York p. 311: Nari Ward, Happy Smilers Duty Free Shop, 1996, Courtesy Deitch Projects, New York Nari Ward, Happy Smilers Duty Free Shop, 1996, Courtesy Deitch Projects, New York p. 313: Erwin Wurm, Staubskulptur, Installation view Aperto, Biennale Venedig, 1990, Courtesy Galerie Krinzinger, Vienna, VBK Wien 2008 p. 317: Erwin Wurm, One Minute Sculpture, 1997, Collection Centre Pompidou, Paris, Courtesy Galerie Krinzinger, Vienna, VBK Wien 2008 p. 319: Erwin Wurm, Telekinetically bent VW-Van, 2006, Installation view, Art Unlimited Basel, 2006, Courtesy Galerie Krinzinger, Vienna, VBK Wien 2008 p. 321: Erwin Wurm, Kissing Gerald Matt (Dont trust your curator), 2006, Courtesy Galerie Krinzinger, Vienna, VBK Wien 2008 p. 322: Feridun Zaimoglu, KanakAttack. The Turks third siege? Flag-installation from Feridun Zaimoglu on the facade of Kunsthalle Wien (07 March 28 March 2005), Photo: Stefan Wyckoff, Kunsthalle Wien p. 327: Feridun Zaimoglu, Kunsthalle Wien, 2005, Photo: Rdiger Ettl, Kunsthalle Wien

p. 330: Ralf Ziervogel, Still from Das Erste, 2000, from PROTO | Videoalbum, 20002003, Courtesy the artist and Andr Schlechtriem Temporary, New York, VBK Wien 2007 p. 333: Ralf Ziervogel, Endeneu (Das zeitgenssische Unterbewusstsein), 2000 and Das Erste, 2000, from PROTO | Videoalbum, 20002003, Installation view, foyer Kunsthalle Wien, part of the exhibition Dream & Trauma. Works from the Dakis Joannou Collection, Athens, 2007, Courtesy the artist and Andr Schlechtriem Temporary, New York, Photo: Stefan Wyckoff p. 334: Ralf Ziervogel, Endeneu (Das zeitgenssische Unterbewusstsein), detail, 2000, Courtesy the artist and Andr Schlechtriem Temporary, New York p. 335: Ralf Ziervogel, Endeneu (Das zeitgenssische Unterbewusstsein), detail, 2000, Courtesy the artist and Andr Schlechtriem Temporary, New York mijewski, Still from Singing Lesson 2, 2000, Courtesy Foksal Gallery Foundation, p. 340: Artur Z Warsaw mijewski, Still from Out for a Walk, 2001, Courtesy Foksal Gallery Foundation, Warsaw p. 342: Artur Z mijewski, Still from An Eye for an Eye, 1998, Courtesy Foksal Gallery Foundation, p. 345: Artur Z Warsaw

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Mag. Dr. Gerald Matt Director of Kunsthalle Wien Guest Professor at the University of Applied Arts Vienna 1958 Since 1996 19992005 20012006 Since 2002 Since 2007 Since 2007 Since 2007 Born in Hard / Vorarlberg Studied law, business management and art history Director of Kunsthalle Wien Member of the academic council for the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Bolzano, Italy Member of the academic council of the Galleria dArte Moderna, Bologna, Italy Lecturer at the Institute for Cultural Management (IKM) at the Universitt fr Musik und darstellende Kunst (University for Music and Dramatic Arts) Vienna Member of the academic council and curator of Kunsthalle Berlin Guest Professor at the University of Applied Arts, Vienna Lecturer at CIAM Center of International Art Management, Cologne

Exhibitions and accompanying publications (selection) Assolutismo ed Eccentricit, Vicenza, Bari, 1992 (together with Wolfgang Fetz) Frontiera (Austrian contribution together with Wolfgang Fetz), Bolzano, 1994 Magazin im Magazin (together with Wolfgang Fetz), Architekturzentrum Wien, Vienna, 1994 Matthew Barney. Cremaster 1, Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna, 1997 Tracey Moffatt. A view from Australia, Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna, 1998 Cuba Maps of Desire (together with Eugenio Figueroa), Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna, 1999 Shirin Neshat, Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna, 2000 Vertigo, Ursula Blickle Stiftung, Kraichtal, 2001 Steve McQueen (together with Doris Krystof), Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna, 2001 Ugo Rondinone NO HOW ON, Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna, 2002 Anri Sala, Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna, 2003 Saint Sebastian. A Splendid Readiness for Death (together with Wolfgang Fetz), Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna, 2003 Artavazd Peleschjan, Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna, 2004 Superstars. The Celebrity Factor. From Warhol to Madonna, Kunsthalle Wien, BA-CA Kunstforum Wien (together with Ingried Brugger, Thomas Miessgang) Vienna, 2005 Don Juan alias Don Giovanni or two and two equals four or lust is the only swindle I wish permanence, Kunsthalle Wien, Ursula Blickle Stiftung, Kraichtal, Vienna 2006 Chen Zhen. The Body as Landscape, Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna, 2007 Dream & Trauma. Works from the Dakis Joannou Collection, Athens (together with Edelbert Kb, Angela Stief) Kunsthalle Wien, MUMOK, Vienna 2007

Publications (selection) 2001 2003 2006 2006 Kultur und Geld. Das Museum ein Unternehmen (Culture and money. The museum an enterprise. A practice-oriented guide) Knstler im Gesprch, (Artist interviews), 10 years Kunsthalle Wien Kommentare zu Kunst, Kultur und Politik (Comments on art, culture and politics) Interviews, Conversation with 40 artists from Shirin Neshat to Anri Sala

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Colophon Interviews 2 Editor: Gerald Matt / Kunsthalle Wien Project Manager: Gerald Matt, Synne Genzmer Editing: Synne Genzmer Proof-reading: Hillary Keel, Margarethe Clausen Translations: Peter Chametzky, Margarethe Clausen, Susan Felleman, Aneta Uszynska-Graham, Nicholas Grindell, Carol (Yingua) Lu, Catherine Nichols, Rania Ho, Olga Serebryanaya, Nelson Wattie, Maricn Wawrzynczak Research and editorial assistance: Lucas Gehrmann, Gaby Hartel, Ilse Lafer, Sigrid Mittersteiner, Angela Stief, Thomas Miegang, Jrgen Weishupl Design: Dieter Auracher Print: Holzhausen for the texts with the authors for the images see credits, VBK Wien 2008 for the book KUNSTHALLE WIEN, 2008 Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther Knig, Kln Ehrenstr. 4, 50672 Kln Tel. +49 (0) 221 / 20 59 6 53 Fax +49 (0) 221 / 20 59 6 60 Email: verlag@buchhandlung-walther-koenig.de Die Deutsche Bibliothek CIP-Einheitsaufnahme Ein Titelsatz fr diese Publikation ist bei Der Deutschen Bibliothek erhltlich Printed in Austria

Distribution: Switzerland Buch 2000 c/o AVA Verlagsauslieferungen AG Centralweg 16 CH8910 Affoltern a.A. Tel. +41 (0) 1 762 42 00 Fax +41 (0) 1 762 42 10 a.koll@ava.ch UK & Eire Cornerhouse Publications 70 Oxford Street GBManchester M1 5NH Tel. +44 (0) 161 200 15 03 Fax +44 (0) 161 200 15 04 publications@cornerhouse.org Outside Europe D.A.P. / Distributed Art Publishers, Inc. 155 6th Avenue, 2nd Floor New York, NY 10013 Tel: +1 212 627 1999 Fax: +1 212 627 9484 eleshowitz@dapinc.com ISBN 978-3-86560-365-4 In case that the Kunsthalle Wien has not been able to contact all copyright holders despite strenous efforts to do so, claims will be happily settled upon request. Kunsthalle Wien is the institution of the City of Vienna devoted to modern and contemporary art and is supported by the Departement for Cultural Affairs MA7.

Director: Gerald Matt General Manager: Bettina Leidl Head of Exhibitions: Sabine Folie Head of Publications: Thomas Miegang

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