I have to correct that. The original material for
Life/Death consisted of 16 mm. color film sequences, in the case of
Maton it was black/white photomat passport photographs, and for
Looking at the Sun at Midnight it was color Polaroids. All this image
material was first reproduced onto ektachromes for site-specific
installations and projects and was usually projected to wall and room
size. The "larger than life" idea resulted out of an interest in using my
own artistic production to investigate the entire complex of mass media
and popular culture, film and optical technology and then to "develop"
them in these "spaces."
Deutschland wird deutscher, 1993
Deutsche Bank Collection
You’ve also
implemented your portraits in public space – including the advertising
billboards bearing your photograph with the caption "Deutschland wird
deutscher" (Germany is getting more German). What interested you in using
advertising strategies for a criticism of the reawakening of nationalism?
Rudi Fuchs had invited me to take part in the 1992 project
Platzverführung in 18 cities in the cultural region surrounding
Stuttgart. I tried to create an up-to-date, enigmatic image for 18 public
urban spaces. The entire project fell through due to censorship, but was
then enthusiastically realized by several art institutions on 500
billboards in and around Berlin. This image construction has to do with
advertising and self-healing: "similia similibus"…
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left: Die Sonne um Mitternacht
schauen,
196 III 73 97 24
A/B (3), 1973/96
Deutsche
Bank Collection
right:
Wärme, 1993
Deutsche
Bank Collection
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The photograph for the campaign was made during the time
you worked at a circus with a knife thrower. How did this cooperation come
about?
In the performative art context of the time, I was
interested in the public interface of acting and circus, its audience, and
their immediate reaction – not the special space of art, but rather the
trivial, the vulgar, entertainment – places where glamour can arise.
Throughout the nineties, it was chiefly the numerous British women artists
that became known for their stagings of self, such as
Tracy Emin,
Sarah Lucas, or
Sam Taylor-Wood. For Emin, it’s chiefly her liberal treatment of sexuality
that plays an important role. Where, for you, is the line to voyeurism and
exhibitionism crossed?
Voyeurism and exhibitionism can be
performative political artistic strategies that critically reveal much
about ideologically established economies.
As with
Cindy Sherman’s art, the viewer remains unclear about the gender
roles in your works. On the other hand, younger women artists are
implementing post-feminism to generate their ironic games: the Japanese
artist Mariko Mori
, for instance, appears in her videos as a geisha. How can a progressive
image of women be created today when women are so often stylized as
nothing more than sex objects in MTV clips and the fashion world?
Create a progressive image of women? Is that what we want? Wouldn’t the
critical artistic research into identity and production wind up in a
pre-modern dead end?
Trauer und Wut, 1981
Deutsche Bank
Collection
You’ve been professor at
the Hochschule der Künste in
Berlin since 1992. Are your own personal experiences with the art
establishment important in the education process? What do you give the
students, and especially the women students, to take with them?
In my publicly accessible teaching practice, the development of students’
work forms the center of all concentration and criticism. It demands a
time-consuming, marathon-like cooperation among all energies involved to
collectively locate and free the cause of art from generation to
generation; in reference to existing immune and market systems, economies,
cultural industries, and on to bio-politics – to scan all that and process
it, to offer a contribution for disposition in the post-postmodern "space."
Translation: Andrea Scrima
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