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Stefanie Kasper “There’s always the danger that it will all slip away from you…” From a conversation with Christian Vetter KASPER: Since you began your career, painting has taken up a lot of room in your work. The involvement with this medium has, however, certainly been called critically in question, above all in the 1990s? VETTER: For me personally, it was actually almost natural to use painting as a medium. I grew into it; I struggled with painting very intensively. But among artists and critics there was a big discussion that I also faced up to. In the 1990s in Zurich, painting was not at all accepted—perhaps with the exception of the niche of reduced abstract painting. While other places in Europe had long begun painting like wild again, here the talk about “the death of painting” lasted a long time. And this unnerved me so much that I sometimes even tried resisting it with almost missionary zeal. […] When I started with painting, I first painted abstract expressionistically in the broadest sense. I then very much got the feeling that it all simply went too smoothly for me. Something was missing; it was somehow too random. Then bit by bit I began to work at thematic content. I went at it almost conceptually, by opening up the picture plane illusionistically, by painting into the picture’s depth perspectively what up to now had lain on the surface. These were at first still simple, abstract, architectural elements, out of which architecture as a motif finally developed for me. […] In this way, little by little, I worked out a vocabulary of motifs. KASPER: In your production, there is a break that stands out between your early work phase and your work today. From their content, the early works were surely important for your artistic development. I’m thinking of the paintings with the swimming pools, the football stadiums or also the Nazi interiors… VETTER: …right, the Nazi interiors were actually a little bit later. My interests were already shifting. At first I tried to get a hold on the showy and the general. E.g., the swimming pool is a motif that, almost without thinking, stands for happiness and freedom. The early paintings are actually new images of yearning, perhaps like the mist-filled landscapes of Romanticism. KASPER: That was followed by a thematic occupation with history or also with the images we have in mind of historical eras. From the football stadiums or the single homes, you turned to National Socialist architecture, which in a quite different and menacing way conveys a certain ideology. VETTER: I tried to understand how the Nazis had exercised such fascination on people, with what formal means they expressed this power and their thoughts of supremacy. I am convinced that you have to get to know your own fascination with power and destructivity if you want to understand the National Socialist system. Which is why I tried at the time to move along the precipice where fascination linked to the abyss becomes visible. […] It was important to me that the Nazi pictures did not reproduce the patina that would show that it’s an event that goes back fifty years, but I wanted to transform the source material like I would a normal photo and therefore in the paintings I coloured in the black-and-white originals. Later with the series on the Brown family, which I showed at the Museum Langmatt in Baden, it was different again. There I likewise referred to historical photos and for the first time consistently did without colour. For the moment I am painting exclusively in black and white. I always try to deploy painting as “economically” as possible. Since my brushstroke has recently very much opened up and become differentiated, I want to regain the necessary sobriety by a rejection of colour. Seriously, I believe that nowadays the last thing painting is about is virtuosity. And it is definitely not about beauty. KASPER: To you it is not about superficial likenesses or a psychological moment, it’s about elements that seem very existential. When I look at the heads, in particular the series “50 works on paper”, what is striking is that you treat the human face very similar, for example, to the wall structures. In the noted series, images of walls and structures stand next to heads, which actually turn into walls. I see here an important theme of your art: a debate between the opposing categories of reserve/openness, inside/outside and the in-between realms and gray zones. The same is true for the installation “Inversion”, where it’s all about reversing inside and outside space, or for certain photographs where, on the one hand, the view is blocked, but nevertheless perspectives are again and again opened up. How do you see this theme in your work? VETTER: I think that by this development, which has gone on for a good ten years, I have tried to get ever closer to myself with painting. From these general moments of longing and my experience with abysses, I have found my way to issues that study the fundamental question: how I as a person stand in this world. What kind of space is it that I occupy? How does my perception function? How does something from this outside world reach my inner world? Where are the transitions? Do these terms “inside” and “outside” still even ring true to me? Or are there not perhaps reversals, so that I feel myself as exterior and the objective world shrunk increasingly to an inner sphere. I consequently believe I reached a turning point where my view—to remain with this terminology—was directed from outwards to inwards. The wall theme, just as much as the body-head-face theme, examines precisely these transitions. KASPER: The issue is then, in addition, a phenomenological and psychological empirical field. […] All these reflections on our perceptive capability are solidly rooted in our cultural history and linked to epistemology: where does perception take place, what does it have to do with our interior and what does it even have to do with the outside world? VETTER: Yes, there’s always the danger that it will all slip away from you…[…] I find the longer and the more exactly something that has not yet been reflected on the most interesting and challenging. For myself in painting I have pushed the boundary a step backwards, where perhaps something has not yet taken on a shape and first forms itself on the canvas. At the moment I find that much more interesting. But it is exactly here, I think, that you are really on vague terrain, where very much slips away from you. It’s sometimes almost unbearable when you think you can hold on tight to something and in the next painting it’s gone again. It’s simply gone, doesn’t work anymore. KASPER: Up to now we have talked mostly about painting. But you also do installations, whereby they are almost not imaginable without painting and also pose similar problems. How are painting and installation linked together during the work process? VETTER: That has to do with the outside givens. I do my painting constantly for myself in the studio. I produce installations specifically for exhibitions. Any other way would simply be impossible for logistic reasons. I naturally collect ideas for installations the whole time. An installation is mostly mounted just a couple of days before the exhibition, so I have to think ahead, long and thoroughly, about the way it should look. To me the installation has the purpose of bringing heterogeneous parts together to a whole. As you said, it is always closely allied to painting, to a painted surface. The installation arose from the need to show this surface from a different angle. Which then provides a spatial component. […] I also try to bring the different media together. There are media-specific peculiarities, things that are depicted in one medium differently than in another. Painting has its limits, just as much as photography or video have theirs. Which is why it is interesting to link the media with each other. KASPER: Certain synergies take place in your work very much as a matter of course. At the beginning you always used photographs as your source material. Recently photographs have increasingly appeared in your work in autonomous series. Do you now see the functional allocation of the medium of photography in your work in a new way? VETTER: There has been a certain distancing insofar as I used to deploy photography purely as a collection, as an archive, actually as transmitted reality. The more I did without these as models, the more photography as a picture that has a different access to reality than painting has become interesting to me. There are qualitative differences between the installation where I walk bodily into a model-like room, the photograph that freezes visible reality, thereby blanking out a lot and condensing all to one moment, and painting that creates its own reality. You have to be aware of the fact that reality can never be taken in absolutely and comprehensively. Perhaps that’s why we experience reality most of all by way of the friction and the shifts in our different perceptive constructs. Freely adapted from Gertrude Stein: a rose is not a rose is not a rose is not a rose. […] There is simply a fascination for certain motifs. And they are often these artificial, manmade landscapes that you see in China. On the other hand, I frequently try to capture empty spaces, that is, something that is really only perceivable if seen in a specific context. As a painted vacuum it would make a completely different statement, like when you see a town somewhere out of the corner of your eye, like from a blind spot, which suddenly moves into your field of vision. If you begin to pay attention, it is really amazing that there are places in a town that have a designated surface, that have an effect outwards, and places that lack this skin and that actually are not supposed to exist at all. They are like two different towns in the same town. KASPER: In 2007 you did a work cycle on St. Jerome. Whereby it treats an art-historical quotation. Can you say something about this religious picture theme and the way you were bold enough to approach these greats in painting. How do you consider your own treatment of the heroes of art history? VETTER: Yes, I’m probably hopelessly naïve, aren’t I? My crash is naturally programmed. […] All the inventive paintings specifically by Bellini and by da Vinci are so fantastic that you as an artist can only stand before them in awe. In this respect I see it as an attestation of respect to the really greats of painting and also as an admission that this greatness is today no longer possible. The theme today, I think, is the winding up, coming to terms with the end. […] This series to me is about the loss of the image. It is once more a holding tight, a remembrance of a magnificent painting before it’s gone. I see the loss of our cultural memory to be today’s big theme. However, what interests me so much in reworking the religious paintings of the Renaissance is the question of knowledge or even salvation. The great thing about these paintings is that these artists always found concrete solutions to how they could portray a religious event in a picture. St. Jerome, for example, is inherently ambivalent; if you so will, he embodies failure. The story goes that Jerome was a scholar who also taught Greek philosophy and the church punished him for this. He does penance, goes to the desert, reads and from then on only translates the Bible. That is actually an admission of failure. And, at the same time, the thirst for knowledge remains. Bellini shows him often seated in quite anthropomorphic landscapes, caves like body shrouds, as if the surrounding space were his incarnation. KASPAR: The theme of transitions is again addressed, since caves are neither closed-off interiors nor exteriors. Taking the example of the cave motif in your work, it is striking that you are more interested in manmade landscapes than in nature per se. I almost suspect that you don’t look for an idyllic ideal in nature, but for pseudo-nature, which is more interesting to man as a projection screen. VETTER: This is a difficult theme for me, a very resonant theme, because as a child I had an incredible longing for nature. I suffered enormously from the fact that nature was going bust. In the meantime I have accepted the fact that destruction is part of human history, that man has replaced nature to a large degree. The perception of what makes up nature has certainly also very much changed in comparison to the past. Today with nature we mean, e.g., the beautiful mountain world where we can unwind – but that really has little enough to do with nature. Real nature stands opposed to humans. It probably doesn’t exist at all anymore, where today every tract of land is developed and tapped. I believe that man has consistently tried to replace nature with something manmade. That is a great loss, but at the same time also the history of civilizational achievements, and I don’t know how we can stand on that in any way other than divided. Naturally there is nothing more horrifying than an artificially designed paradise in the form of a shopping mall. But it’s human. Abridged and edited interview by Stefanie Kasper with Christian Vetter, held on 17 April 08 in the artist’s studio. The interview was carried out within the framework of the research project “Oral Documentation” of the Swiss Institute for Art Research. The full interview can be read at the Institute’s website: www.sik-isea.ch Translated from the German by Jeanne Haunschild |
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