http://clemenskrauss.com

DEUTSCH

Artist talk with Shaheen Merali and Clemens Krauss

May 2005 (fragments)

M: What brings us back together, in a way, is the fact that our paths crossed a while ago in London and that crossing was mediated by the co-curator of Documenta11, Sarat Maharaj.

What we would like to have now is a discussion about your work. I would like to throw in some questions - you have asked to stand in front of your work, which has an influence of course on the way we discuss it.

I think talking about art, rather than writing about art or simply hearing about art, is one of the great pleasures one has in thinking about what images mean. Images, in a sense, are saturating our world and living conditions, in a way that we have learned to call post-modernity. This is partly due to the way we look at images and understand images and construct our reality from that.

In that sense an artists’ role has become much more important, because they help us to understand how an image is constructed and why it is constructed and how it comes back to a society which becomes the audience. So, as an opening gambit, what I would like to ask is for you to give me some basic remarks about your work. What is a work?

K: I think if we are talking about work it is important to stress that my work, for example, is more a process than a completed work. The paintings here are only part of my work or, let’s call it, the field I’m working within. You can see an equivalent of the process-related method in the paintings, which are unfinished figures juxtaposed with cuttings from texts.

The texts are from an ongoing collection of my own perceptions, notes and writings. They derive from my experience and exploration and also the notion of the work itself. On the other hand we have the material presence of the paint on the surface, which becomes a very different element.

M:  You talk about the text as text rather as an image and the image as an image. So there is a duality, in that you see the whole image as divided by text and image.

K: It is very important that you mention that. Of course I’m playing with the notion of so called dualism. I have been doing it since the series ‘Teil eines langsamen Selbstportraits (Part of a Slow Self-Portrait)’. I think in the painting it’s rather a formal duality; the flat printed, almost faded text and the thick fleshy visceral paint.

The texts refer to the body as well as this western concept of the division between body and mind. Since I consider not only the content of the text I choose for the image but also the type of fonts and characters as well, the text becomes necessarily an equal visual part of the image.

M:  The images are profoundly about ambiguity and - especially if you consider the facial features – about the ambiguous identity of men. Then there are the texts which also refer to the body. Why this specific selection? What kind of idea does this impose on an image? What are you trying to suggest?

K: The notion of body is referred to here as both the natural- scientific – let’s call it the human body - and the body in a wider sense, for example; as a model for universal phenomena. These texts refer to those notions as well as trying to lead towards the idea of the division we were talking about before. In this context, which I find particularly interesting, I try to rethink human beings as, for example; sexual beings, identities and bodies. This discontinuity is reflected in deciding upon the specific text cuttings as well as in the assembly of unfinished, unstable painted figures. Of course these decisions are sometimes also aesthetic ones. For instance; which parts of the body, which poses, which series of words, which particular letters would fit into the image? This sounds like a banal decision, though it is very important since the text is not a subtitle to the images.

M: I am thinking about the sensuality of the use of paint, the way the flesh is manipulated and how we encounter it. The skin as the largest organ of the body holds the flesh inside but here we have some sort of outer-skin experience, where the flesh is literally coming out. In addition, because the clothes are painted with similar brushstrokes, they also bear resemblance to skin and the stripping of the flesh.

What would you say about this sensuality and about the text, in which it is also represented?

K:  One of the most important reasons to remain with painting is the material quality of the oil paint. It became increasingly necessary to employ the paint with its organic fleshy character. The impasto application can be a reference to the stripping of the skin and flesh you were talking about before. Modelling and operating with the material is a very surgical procedure.

M: How is your surgical background influencing your paintings?

K: Basically I see my medical foundations and my time at the hospital as part of my artistic education so obviously biological-scientific issues do come up in my current work. Some of the paintings – particularly the body parts – can be read as reminiscent of surgical accesses which you see in textbooks and which indicate how one crosses the border and dives into the interior.

M: I think of the figures in the paintings as young men. I find the garments quite interesting; short sleeves, jackets open. There is also something of a sexual predication within the work. There is a sort of cruising-mentality, the ambiguity of a series of bodies waiting to be picked up. There is something to be said here about young masculinity and about the arousal of waiting and finally about the repetitive nature of the way you have done it again and again, as an experience.

K: The paintings are basically about body and perception, about the use of the body as both a model and a place-holder for investigations, and about how society is influenced by visual experience. The way that out of single bodies a situation of many bodies is constructed causes a kind of inherent sexuality. You could call this, of course, the sexuality of waiting. Human beings are sexual beings, after all. Since I - or let’s say- my body functions as a sort of model for the figures, they do seem to be young men. But they are not self portraits and since the paintings are blurred images, the figures remain not always recognizable in terms of sex or age. They are, in a way, anonymous figures, it doesn’t matter who they are. It is more about the situation of constructed groups and positions and how a tension is traced and how they are placed in the work.

M: To me, the pieces bear a specific awareness of how the figures are placed. Since they are you but they are not self-portraits - this is what Cindy Sherman referred to in her photographs as: ‘They are of me but they are not self-portraits’. She becomes a model for the camera and here you are suggesting that you become a model of the paintings. There is also something to say about the use of paint. The paint here is not clean - it is messy. It looks likes it induces some sort of fear. So how do you take yourself as a metaphor for masculinity, availability, sensuality? How does this relate to your self and the self-images and the image on the canvas?

K: First of all, you mentioned availability, it is a quite practical argument; there is nothing more available at any time than one’s own body.

Again, I make use of this availability of the body as a reference point, from which I start my investigation. I think it is inevitable to reflect on one’s own situation when you are making use of your own body in that way. It is telling about the situation of me in my time, there are references to, for example, politics and youth culture and of course reflections on oneself as a sexual being. But the formation of the bodies in the paintings, have much more to do with images from external sources rather than my-self. Of course, I’m posing and juxtaposing myself in to the ideas. But it is not necessarily important that it is me, it could be someone else, too. I think that is different to Cindy Sherman’s work.  

M: Every image is to some extent unfinished. For instance, all of them remain legless. The legs are somehow unimportant or not considered as a part of the body. This repetitive insistence becomes a pattern. What does this pattern say about you?

K: The whole work is an ongoing process. Things are developing and therefore changing. Of course the paintings are also part of this process. You have the cuttings of the text and the unfinished paintings. This is inherent to the work and therefore inherent to the paintings. Hence terms like unfinished or imperfect take on another meaning.

Although the paintings look like they were done in a spontaneous, gestured way they are quite conceptually set up. I already have an image in mind prior to starting to paint.

In this context there is also something to say about the decision of when a painting is finished or complete. This is clearly one of the most difficult questions since you could always continue or you could always stop. This is in fact a space of time, a period rather than a point in time.

M: Do you have a phobia of legs?

K: I don’t know whether I have a phobia of legs. But I know that it wouldn’t make the paintings more complete if they were more ‘elaborate’ in terms of their faces, arms or legs. This is more about the ‘subversion’ of the initial image.

M: I am very interested in the idea of being subversive within a canon. I want a complete picture and you deliver an incomplete picture deliberately. In that it becomes a kind of narrative I have to struggle with. In struggling with that narrative I become interested in it. What is the narrative behind it? There is a formal concern, but what drives that formal decision making beyond the fact that it becomes a different image? What would you say about the reason to come to such a formal decision?

K: I was trying to avoid the word “composition” but if you look to the white field of an empty canvas and the order of figures then you have to take compositional terms into account. On the other hand, it is in a way about the trauma of the body, too. This has to do with the – lets call it – brutal use of the paint and in consequence the open, rough surface which reminds one of the flesh turned inside out.

M: It reminds me of limbless victims of land mines.

K: This is one possible association. I wouldn’t reduce it to limbless-ness. The incompleteness refers more to the open process.

M: How much is an artist reflecting the conditions of his times? How do images constructed consciously or subconsciously also reflect a wider issue?

K: The images and the way they are constructed refer inevitably to my own time and what happens around me. Basically we are moving towards a visual rather than a textual culture. Images are dominating our perception and of course my own perception, too. I’m very much interested in that fact. I usually choose images from the media and when I pick up images from politics, fashion or the like, I start to re-enact those situations. The paintings come out of these re-enacted situations. These are very often images we all know but as a painting you wouldn’t recognize them since I sort of mimicked those images with my body. That’s what I’ve meant with the subversive. They become transformed and recombined or even subverted in the way they went through my perception and reflection. So I cannot withdraw myself from the contemporary.

M: How would the work read outside of a gallery? You also do more performance based and more experimental work and therefore work which is much less available to a buying public. What is the difference of doing work in totally public spaces or inside a commercial gallery? I think contemporary gallery spaces have a certain way of making a market progress, however it is, at the end of the day, a commercial constraint. I would say certain spaces advocate certain kinds of work.

K: I think if you are planning a project you always have to take the environmental context into account in the first place. This does absolutely not mean producing a particular work for a particular audience.

There is work which functions fabulously in a public space but would be doomed to fail documented in the white cube concept and the other way round. Naturally commercial galleries have their constraints which one has to understand. In a similar way museums and institutions also have to keep their number of visitors in order to continue being supported. 

Finally I think it is a crucial condition for contemporary art that beside institutions there are private collectors who are interested in art and artists.