Adrian George & Benjamin Appel
A: I get the sense that the sculptural installations come about much more quickly than the paintings. You've said that the paintings can include as many as 150 layers and you simply keep going with them until they reach a point where you are satisfied with them, or they resolve themselves in your mind. How do you feel about this different approach to your practice? Would you anticipate that the viewer might respond immediately to the installations, but sit and contemplate the paintings... or does the viewer experience not really impose on your art-making at all?
B: That’s right, at least partially. The picture emerges while painting. It is indivisible from the act. I have to paint. It there’s aren’t any sketches, then I can’t paint. You could say that the picture is the sketch of a picture. It’s similar with objects – the piece emerges from the sketch. To that extent, it emerges from thought. The same thing happens with video pieces. The idea is completed. I commission the execution. This is very interesting.
For its part, the textual work emerges from writing. On the other hand, one can also regard the picture as a building block. Just like sculpture, the textual work, and the video. Only through the interaction do they become complete, in space. I can’t know how someone else will view the piece.
A: You can’t know how someone will view the piece but you could, in the curatorial project, or more pragmatically in how you manage the space, encourage or suggest that the viewer slow down in approaching one of your paintings. It’s often the case that in museums seats are placed in front of paintings where curators feel greater contemplation is warranted.
B: I myself don’t consider my pictures so important. At least no more important than the floor. I have to force the floor to carry a bench so that the picture can be viewed. If I were to place a bench in front of a painting then it [the bench] and the floor it stands on would in turn would be implicated in the artwork.
A: It is interesting that your approach to your paintings is very three-dimensional. You treat them as objects in an expanded field. In fact I think that everything in your work, or related to your work conceptually or spatially – be it painting or object (that you chose to work with) or architecture, negative spaces, geography, nature (that you inherit, or are burdened with perhaps) ends up being part of gesamtkunstwerk – a sort of ‘total work of art’.
Madeleine Frey refers to your paintings as triggering a dialogue between the painted image and the space that it occupies, or at least the experience of the two elements by the viewer. It’s clear that no art functions in a vacuum. Every aspect of its presentation – light, volume of space, even the journey that someone takes to see the work – will affect their reception of the work and the 'conversation' that the viewer has with the artworks in the exhibition. I would go one step further with your works and suggest they implicate an entire spectrum of human relations, including an individual's social context. This is what Nicholas Bourriaud refers to in his post-internet writing as relational aesthetics. The experience of your sculptures for instance, that utilise commonplace stools as a material – have a different meaning for someone who uses those stools to the meaning of someone who may recognise the object as an ‘everyday stool’, but has never bought one, or used one. So to some extent these works as well as discussing space, memory and so forth, could also act as socio-political comments. What are your thoughts on this?
B: Can a work of art function in the vacuum? There are possibilities that a piece of art could work in a vacuum if it took everything into account. That means, the space and everything in it, and that’s why it’s a part of the piece of art. In other words, the vacuum would be the space that surrounds our universe.
A: This is interesting. Perhaps we should separate this out and discuss two different aspects of it here.
I think probably that an artwork can exist in an empty volume – particularly if the artist is consciously working with the notion of negative space. The (interior, negative space) casts made by Rachel Whitehead or the household objects filled with concrete by Doris Salcedo both solidify and make real those negative spaces hidden within an object or a place. Those works in turn are placed in the gallery space in a particular way (part of the curatorial project). The relationship between those objects and the space in which they are presented, and anything else in that space, is also therefore charged and becomes, in essence, part of the work.
However, these works are not in seen in a totally sterile environment where everything is accounted for in the making and display. Artists and curators can only account for so much. It’s not possible to entirely determine the subjectivity of every possible viewer. I’ve always strongly held the belief that art is some sort of intangible, dialogical experience (a non-verbal conversation) that manifests somewhere, somehow, between the artwork and the viewer. The variable in this equation is therefore, the viewer.
For visitors to your exhibition, consciously or not, they are likely to experience your sculptures in a kinaesthetic way – relating their body to the work as well as in the space of the gallery. This is encouraged by your use of everyday objects that are easily relatable. The physical response from the viewer is almost intuitive and unconscious… it is our natural ability that allows us to sense objects and people around us without necessarily seeing them.
We spoke very briefly about the idea that the everyday materials in your sculptures and installations undergo some sort of transformation (of meaning but not material) once you combine them and place them in a particular way in a certain environment. As you have mentioned already, even after combining the objects, they are still remain nothing more than a chair, a table, a stool, to you. Do you see both therefore? You see the constituent elements and you recognise the end product as a consummate and complete work of art?
B: If it’s removed from its context, a work of art might not be recognised. Let’s think about whether we would recognize the black square from Kazimir Malevich if it were positioned on the edge of a highway. Let’s consider the concept of the art operating system, coined by Thomas Wulffen in the 1990s. The exception is only conceivable when the work of art would take everything into consideration. The exhibition space, the viewers, the tree outside, the building opposite us, this text, and everything imaginable. Everything is just as important. This is the content of my work.
Yes, that’s exactly the way I see it. Art possesses an immaterial experience. A non-verbal dialogue. That’s why I believe that a piece of art that depicts a certain topic, the expression of what is depicted. That is a main difference. I’m not interested in the depiction of the chair, but rather the chair itself. The space isn’t a topic for me, but rather material.
Yes, there’s a poetics of experience. It doesn’t possess any constants. However, it’s quite similar with verbal language. Even if the word “chair” appears to be objective, we don’t always understand the same thing. A waiter will associate a different experience that a carpenter. A small child has to move the chair in order to experience that there’s a difference between the chair and the floor.
I don’t believe it’s about the finished work of art. If it were about that, then it’d be enough to place the chair in the exhibition space. No, I internalize the chair. What happens with it and with myself when I place a concrete fragment on it. Whether that makes the chair art or not is not initially of interest to me. Unfortunately we’re very prejudiced, we recognise every painted picture as art.
A: Unfortunately yes, this is the predominance of painting… which has died and come back to life so many times it immortal and all-powerful now! So, lets investigate your paintings a bit.
The British artist David Batchelor’s book Chromaphobia suggests that painters especially throughout the 20th centuries have struggled with the use of colour and in fact the use of colour has suffered as a result of (specifically) Western prejudices.
“It all started with a short visit to an inside-out interior of a colourless whiteness where clarity was confusion, simplicity was complication, and art was uniformly grey, then it would be comforting to think that it might also end there. After all, there can’t be many places like this interior which was home only to the very few things that had submitted to its harsh regime. And those few things were, in effect, sealed off from the unwanted and uncertain contingencies of the world outside. No exchange, no seepage, no spillage. Rather isolation, confinement. But this shutting off began to speak more and more about what it excluded than what it contained. What did this great white hollow make me thing about. Not, for long, its whiteness. Rather its colour.
…
“If colour is unimportant, I began to wonder, why is it so important to exclude it…?”
…
“It is, I believe, no exaggeration to say that, in the West, since Antiquity, colour has been systematically marginalised, reviled, diminished and degraded”.
You mention that you work with a relatively small colour palette. Do you find yourself drawn to these colours? Or have you gone through a process of elimination where you have previously worked with more colours / different colours and concluded that they are not right or don’t work for you?
B: On the contrary, I’m trying to expand my palettes of colours. For me, the reduction of the palettes of colours seems like a protective mechanism for painters. If you examine one of pictures, you’ll notice that none of the hues are repeated. One can approach the problem of colours from various perspectives. There’s an interesting relationship between language and colour, which Jacques Le Rider explores in his study Colour and Words. However, I attempt to understand colour as material. This follows a very simple logic, that I wake up in the morning and understand myself as a painter. Then the question of ‘what’ and ‘how’ I can paint something arises.
Notes：
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3. Batchelor, David Chromaphobia, Reaktion Books, 2000
4. Le Rider, Jacques Farben und Wörter (Colour and Words), Böhlau Wien, 2000
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