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A LOOK BEHIND THE SCENES
1. The discussion on formalism and socialist realism reached its climax in the 1950s, i.e. more than 50 years ago. What could be interesting about such a discussion for someone born at the beginning of the 1970s?
Apart from my general interest in political and cultural processes, I also have a personal answer to your question. I am now 34 years old and was 17 when the radical political changes of 1989 reached their climax. So I have spent half my life in a socialist country - the German Democratic Republic - and the other in a capitalist one - the Federal Republic of Germany. My understanding of culture and society has been characterised by both ideologies, and the ideological warfare between formalism and realism is a fruitful metaphor for this.
The untenability of the oversimplified dualism of formalism/West and realism/East will be one of the claims of the exhibition FORMSCHÖN. Instead of these polarities there will be links to the debate on modernism, and the conflict will also be illuminated from the point of view of gender.
The constant fear that the atomic arms race instilled into daily life during the 1980s had a strong influence on me, but despite this I don't really perceive the Cold War as a military conflict. The Roosevelt Study Center in Holland has done some definitive work on re-evaluating the political agenda, economic tactics and forms of cultural expression in post-1945 Europe. It sees the Cold War more in terms of a propaganda battle and a contest of ideas, and this exhibition is concerned with contest of this sort.
2. I would like to elaborate more on these links to the modernist debate. It is sometimes striking to see identical products of late modernism - particularly in architecture and design - which were created in the East and in the West almost simultaneously and yet were designed to serve two antagonist political or ideological systems. Your exhibition is built on the concept of the impossibility of drawing a clear line between the ideology of formalism and that of social realism - both notions seen in a broader sense, of course. In the same way it is impossible to separate the processes of developing content and visual representation in your artworks. You are particularly interested in the problematics of display, but actually it is not only about this ...
The idea of display has to do with an interaction between the area of activity, the presentation and the activation of the relationship between the observer and the observed; it has to do with an interpretative zone of form and content. This zone has close similarities to the idea of the frontier, which describes a constantly changing space without clearly defined boundaries, laws or values that is simultaneously under pressure from various interest groups. In other words, values, ways of seeing things and the actions they give rise to must be constantly redefined. This vitality and insecurity, brought to bear on the relationship between artwork, presentation and observer, contains a huge creative potential, which absolutely doesn't exist without a context.
In terms of the exhibition I am interested in a much more concrete phenomenon. In the Soviet Union as early as the 1920s formalism was accused of separating form and content - although at that time the specific concern was with the mutual relationship between content and form in the production of a text (formalism arose as a new approach of literary criticism in the Soviet Union during the 1920s).
Interestingly, after the 2nd World War Stalinist propaganda was taken up in the West and interpreted positively. A formalist (i.e. here abstract) art is independent and free of ideology because it is form-oriented and "without content".
In this sense you are right that display became a kind of tool for clarifying the interaction between artistic image-production and social processes. For me no aesthetic is free from ideology, and neither can an artwork be presented without a context.
3. The term formalism has a negative connotation in the minds of those who grew up under socialism. This can be seen in their language as well. Later on the term socialist realism also became something negative. How do you perceive the two terms?
I don't want to take a one-sided position. I can watch my favourite western "Shane" (1953) as a fan with a packet of crisps on the sofa, or analyse it to death in political and gender terms. And I sense this ambivalence in relation to formalism too.
It is a split that can't be sustained in detail. The first generation in the 1920s was concerned with the interpretive independence of the text, but also with the simple question of which structures a text could be reduced to so that every worker and every peasant could write a poem. Therefore the beginnings of formalism were very socially motivated. This changed strikingly with the East-West confrontation at the end of the 1940s. You can see the focus of the West on formalism as a clear reaction to the much more efficient cultural politics of the Soviet Union.
But the aspect of taste is important. I have a clear affinity to non-figurative art, to reduced forms in design, but I also can't evade the idea of socially committed art, of social intervention. My individual answer as an artist is a social formalism.
FORMSCHÖN is based on dualism, which I associate with ornament. In the field of art ornament is perhaps the most dualistic element. And since pre-historic times dualism has been based on the opposition of male and female. I remember that in your exhibition "(don't) look back in anger", ornament played a decisive role. What kind of role does ornament play in FORMSCHÖN, and how do gender studies figure in your work?
The exhibition "(don't) look back in anger" was about masculinity and formalism, and my argumentation then drew heavily from the concept of ornament. Central to the discourse was a quote from Susan Faludi in which she talks about an "ornamental imprisonment", which men and women reach by different routes: women as compensation for being excluded from the world of power-striving men, and men as a result of their power-striving. She interestingly describes the society that results from this as one dominated by a competitive individualism, in which ability and usefulness no longer play a role. So here too there is a central conflict between form and content, position and ability, presentation and mediation.
FORMSCHÖN deals less centrally with gender roles, but allows the issue to emerge at different points like a fungal network: the manga-like wall drawings make stylistic reference to the figures of Kiriko Nananan, a female mangaka whose josei mangas generally deal with the everyday lives of young women. The figures in the exhibition, however, are often androgynous and can't be assigned clearly to a particular gender. There is also a subtle function here in the use of sculptural metaphors like walls and curtains, or the confrontation within the exhibition of art and craft. And in the centre of the exhibition there is a presentation of ceramics by the designer Ursula Fesca, whose forms, glazes and decoration set new standards in the field from the 1930s to the 1960s.
5. On the other hand John Osborne's play "Look Back in Anger" (1956) makes a very unsubtle, almost strident, appearance in FORMSCHÖN. Not for the first time in your work. How did you come to this play, and why fall back on it again?
In 1980 Television Personalities brought out the song "Look Back in Anger" as a clear reference to 1960s pop and mod culture. I listened to their records all the time during the early 1990s, and a couple of years ago their singles and LPs reappeared at a party. So from the TV Personalities I came to the mods (...) and the term "angry young men", which emerged as a result of John Osborne's play "Look Back in Anger".
That is more or less how I work. It is always a mixture of research and very free association. In FORMSCHÖN there are also logically comprehensible connections between individual works alongside clear discontinuity, or relationships that only reveal themselves through peripheral details.
"Look Back in Anger" has now taken up a central role in my work because it is a wonderful example of social realism that in its time had an unbelievable explosive force. It questioned social and societal morals in a highly aggressive way and attacked the class system as an antiquated idea. Although gender roles remained pretty unshaken!
6. The curtain you place at the northern glass façade of the GfZK evokes various associations: opaqueness and transparency, home and intimacy, but also stage setting and exposure ... The curtain stands for the borderline between public and private, inside and outside. And in itself it has something theatrical. These oppositions, in one way or another, were also embedded as principles into the architectural concept of the gallery's new building. Could you elaborate on the relationship between your exhibition and the architecture of the space? And I would also like to know more about the character and symbolic meaning of certain elements such as the glass wall, for example, or the curtain of wooden beads.
The curtain you mentioned is an initial reference to the set design of a play, consisting only of a living room, that appears later in the exhibition. At the same time it is a link to the discussion on modernism.
The modernist idea of transparency and standardisation has been perverted, through glass façades to open-plan offices to intimate talk shows, into an element of control and voyeurism. Bourgeois individualism has replied to this in its own way. The Bauhaus estate of Törten in Dessau, for example, has been completely individualised by new windows, doors, porches and curtains.
With the wall of blocks of frosted-glass, I bring the theme of transparency and restricted visibility into the exhibition. The metaphor is highly aestheticised and becomes a sculpture in its own right, but the hint of staging remains. The bricks are made of frosted glass, which means that light can pass through them, but, similarly to the curtain, people behind the sculpture can only be seen indistinctly.
The curtain of wooden beads, on the other hand, is a transitional space from a more cultural-political debate with formalism to the second part of the exhibition, which is about the dispute between art and craft. 65,000 wooden beads make up a curtain with the phrase COLD WAR that gives rise to a space of 4 x 4 m. (13 x 13 ft.) The division is defined as a transition, the boundary as a space with potential, and this is done by the arguable means of aestheticising politics. And the use of space-altering sculptures and installations is a direct reminiscence of the architecture of the GfKZ's new building. The mobility of the walls or the partial views into neighbouring spaces through narrow strip windows are for me the perfect stage upon which to get works that stand on their own and works that relate to the architecture to interact with each other. Here exhibiting and concealing, enablement and prevention, subtlety and stridency are all methods of creating the above mentioned creativity of insecurity and speculation.
7. The whole exhibition (and not only this one) is very well thought out. I can compare your work with that of a film director. There is certain choreography in the way you present your ideas. Aren't you afraid of being accused of theatricality?
Not really. I see it as more of a compliment. I'm interested in a balanced relationship between individual works, exhibition and composition - the fascination with detail as an element of the whole.
I trained as a brown-coal mining maintenance mechanic. A detailed knowledge of the individual parts of a machine was as necessary to its successful functioning as the familiarity with its use in the mine.
A work of art is as complex as a machine, an exhibition as many-facetted as a film, and the artist a director or a mechanic - depending on your viewpoint.
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