Heinz-Norbert Jocks
Journey to the end of night – A conversation with Jürgen Klauke
"Man thinks of moving away from himself and finds himself again in the vertical line of himself."
(Michel Foucault)
H.-N.J.: If you close your eyes, what do you see before your inner eye? Photos, nothing but photos may be?
J.K.: No. As long as I don't hold it through concentration or my own patterns of imagination, there is just an endless flow of thoughts, fragments of information, images, sounds, short stories, of the past and present through me; that too almost unstoppable and without interruptions. If I am lucky, somewhere down the line I reach a point when, whatever is flowing through me, something is held back as a sensual perception in my mind. Hardly as that happens, this endless collage breaks in over me again, but sadly we can do nothing about it.
H.-N.J.: How would you define your photography? As turning over your inner perceptions, or an answer to life?
J.K.: As a conceptual, staged photography. It is about inner perceptions and imaginations, supported by outward experiences. Transformed into images, they are different and, as I hope, mellowed by photography that presents itself in the same clothing almost always.
H.-N.J.: What is the inner frame of mind out of which an artistic expression emerges? Were there some inner urges? Have they undergone a change over time?
J.K.: They were just classic symptoms. First, it was working with it, and then the abysmal boredom of the boarding school life. The desire to escape the monotony there was coupled with the hope in an exciting and less stupid Bohemian life. It happened somewhat in those lines and went on so nicely and so terribly.
H.-N.J.: Your type of photography looks now very extroverted. My impression is that this extroversion of expression precedes introversion. It seems to me, this aesthetic extroversion was acquired the hard way and, over time, you had given it more and more a shape and a frame?
J.K.: On other occasions, I have admitted myself to be an introvert extrovert individual. But that has hardly anything to do with my photo work. What is so extrovert about it, except that often I am the object of images myself? By the way, that goes to the beginnings and again to the strange accusation of being narcisstic. But, thank God, that is done away with after more than 35 years. If you like it, after all, with my presence I only emphasize the identity of the image. With my constant presence as an art figure I more or less dissolve myself as a person. I become a material that can be interpreted differently, am an image amplifier, bearer of ideas, a proxy and, in the end, just an image.
H.-N.J.: How did you land up at all into art? And, what sort of work impressed you the most at the beginning?
J.K.: Having not grown up in a cultured household, my initial efforts took off during my student days in the secondary school. First, I was fascinated by the old account books written in Sütterlin script by my grandfather; I found them in the attic, and then there was the “most beautiful script of the world” belonging to my uncle, Jakob Goldscheid. Whenever I had to take a letter for him for posting, I could never stop admiring it. Also in the Greek class, more than the subject it was the script itself; and then, very soon the pictures and particularly those that set the sexual element into the scenery in the most natural way. Of course, they always wanted to blow it out of our minds. I was confronted with the modern art here and there in calendars and school books with pictures by Klee, Marc, Feininger, Masarel, Kandinsky or by Picasso. The best dressed teacher, Mr. Blumentritt, my art teacher, encouraged my inborn talent, brought me pictures or small catalogs of Matisse, Monet and others. I was allowed to work alone in the class, or he gave me special assignments. It wasn't long, when he was removed from the school job, denounced as a homosexual. He had made a photo of the school's football team, naked under the shower. Today it is almost unimaginable that somebody would have to pack up his things for such reasons. Somehow, it went with the time of “clean canvas”. Meanwhile, I had decided I wanted to study art which for the sake of my parents was masked as study of applied graphics. For that, I needed an apprenticeship in graphics and I completed a short course as a type-setter and typographer which nonetheless lasted two years. Pretty soon I led the life of a young artist “as a dog” and passed the entrance examination at factory schools in Cologne. I never studied “applied graphics”. This unbiased disposition that I laid bare, and the perceptions associated with it, and also the intensity that is apparently so useless and this wasting of time mark the development of an independent space out of which I started to act as an artist; more or less self-determined, despite all odds that I had to overcome. Even today this reservoir is still important to me.
H.-N.J.: Were there any role models?
J.K.: No, I had none. Because of my rather low level of information I was receptive to everything that I came across at the art school. During the boarding school period, with which I associated emptiness and tardiness, I had possibly created for myself something else, also more substantial, that is to say, an inner world; a sort of wishing machine in readiness. It was the desire to go into action. Also content-based structures were formed in this memory system. Both the art school and the time were manifested by abstract painting as the informal as well as the predominantly conventional objectivity. The lack of objectivity was too vague for my communication with the “civilization”. It excluded whatever was too much. Like any young student I tried out different things. I had, however, always the human being and his shadow in mind and, quite soon I encountered the French avant-garde of the 40's 30's.
H.-N.J.: Are you using the term wishing machine with reference to the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari?
J.K.: By wishing machine I mean simply what one associates with the word. We can call it also deficit machine, because most of my desires resulted from the endless prohibition signs of the spirit of the time and at the same time from the expectant ideas waiting to be implemented. What would it be, if I could do what I wanted! To put in plain language: “fuck the whole world, from the back as from the front, and when it's done, do it all over again.” Gilles Deleuze would have done it surely.
H.-N.J.: What do you mean by messages from the civilization?
J.K.: After the attack of September 11, the term “civilized world” brings us into a new dimension, that is, into a blunt arrogance and defiance.
H.-N.J: What were you particularly dealing with, at first and also later?
J.K.: When exploring the French movement I met some like-minded people. They had pushed something and had broken open and had extended the conventional notion of art. The experimental insanity aimed at the center of the conventional nervous system and at the art in its status of self-love. Philosophy, art, literature, theatre, film, all interconnected, sang together the inharmonious song on mankind and art. We hear the echo even today. Belmer and Moliner, who hardly anyone knew at time, Dalí, Picabia and their attitudes, Duchamp and his much-spoken silence impressed me, but also along with Artaud, Klosowski, Bataille, Bunuel, Huysmans, Genet, Céline, among others.
H.-N.J.: How did you perceive Bataille, Bunuel, Klosowski, Genet or Celine?
J.K.: What I find most exciting till today is their radicality and their artistic strategies which aimed consciously into the endless desert of our existence. As regards Bataille, Klosowski and Genet my focal interest was their argument with the unredeemable element of our impulse structure, the different models of thoughts and the possibilities of existence. Desire and end or, as Georges Batailles says: “the longing will consume us - or its object will stop to excite us.” Some years ago I discovered Batailles “Das Blaue des Himmels”. What a longing and emptying! A great book! At the same time, when deeply engrossed in Michel Houellebecqs “Kampfzonen”, I asked myself, why this book provoked this excitement? My goodness! With Klosowski, beyond the writings, I was particularly interested in his sculptural work. Gachnang had, I believe in the 70's, a large exhibition in Berne, and Klosowski and she, the object of its longing, were present. There were this small man and this huge woman, who appeared in the drawings. That was the first conscious meeting with his art. Naturally, I spontaneously liked his content-based structure and the staged self. Moreover, the tension of the eroticism made the drawings so fascinating. They look so classical and appear so beautifully wrong or clumsy on a second look. All this makes it so authentic particularly in their voyeuristic content. I find this authenticity similarly with Céline and Genet. Célines “Reise ans Ende der Nacht” or “Tod auf Kredit” gave an unforgotten thrust to literature. It is just wonderful, how he operates with language. This staccato of his never ending, roaming lines resound still so strongly in my ears that I hear them when I just think of them. Anyhow, I was struck by them. William Gaddis introduced another principle of speed or reality, namely, a nearly endless dialog with which he met the infinite babbling of the world. Genet, a failure himself, an aesthete on the borders, all in all the ear of the outrageous, introduced, as nobody before him, with such force and poetry the murderers, thieves, male prostitutes, hookers and other marginalized people into literature. His poetic alphabet of the gays, that is to say, the queer aesthetics in its books characterize the incomparable wit and beauty. All these artists have one thing in common: singular appearances and border crossers, ready to penetrate the limits of pain. The experience with them gave me apart from energy also more self-confidence.
H.-N.J.: Which drawings of Bellmer occur to you spontaneously which mean something to you?
J.K.: Naturally his filigree work of “De Sade drawings” and his dolls and the colored photos, too. Of course, I imitated for a while his style during my studies in order to leave my own small obscenities going up and down. With Moliner there are the photo works. The self-manifestations like “Jambes”; the torso series; the Gaude Michets. If you like, his obsessions made public through art and the completely different use of photography. Now I am not a man of obsession, although the criticism of the 70's by the privacy of my diaries or the “I” as an actor of many sexes took a heavy beating. With my work on sexuality both figures spurred me quite, both medially and mentally. In both, the pleasure factor stands in the foreground which liquidates the eternal guilt and atonement program. What is important is the longing and its record in pictures. Uninhibited will of life meets uninhibited will of aesthetics. In the dark, small and thus so intimate looking photos of Moliner it reeks of reality. But in the stylistic often used beam of light illusion and sudden end vibrate along. All that also applies to Bellmer: It is pushed away from itself by media and thoughts. The illusion is associated with the doll, Bellmer is supposed to have done everything with it what he wanted to. In the Torsos it becomes sex. Similarly, but it is different in his drawings. The body, in his case de-individualized, is just a wishful body of lines and holes, sexuality and pleasure, practice and wishful thinking. Everything becomes an opening; saliva, sperm, piss, shit, sweat and tears. Everything flows along pleasurably and painfully to the swarming lines and constructs of his drawing. Besides, for me it was important with both the artists that they did not present themselves like a part of surrealists in dream, sleep and automatic forms. Rather they used themselves in their desires in the most positive sense.
H.-N.J.: Was painting ruled out as a medium, right from the beginning?
J.K.: No. But it was not compelling, and I had the impression that it rather overdid itself. Those eternally same subjects as landscape, nudity, still-life or portraits made me even at their best implementation thoughtful. Since I moved, figuratively speaking, away from the studio, I had to face other questions and challenges.
H.-N.J.: How do you see yourself? Perhaps less as a photographer than a performer?
J.K.: Primarily as an intermediate artist or actionist. The different media names such as photo, performance, language, video or body are made usable in favor of the each underlying intention. Their own language and conditions derived from their history allow me a wider scope of possibilities to formulate my image concepts and conditions of my ideas. I look for its strength in several languages and translate its day-to-day language through playful, experimental, strategic and spiritual dialog into the language of art.
H.-N.J.: Though you are not a photographer, you seem to handle photography all the same.
J.K.: Primarily as an artist, I exploit photography as medium for my ideas or my concepts. I make its inherent, historical, technical and aesthetic characteristics useful for my images. The fact is about the still existing belief in the truth of the photo, about the almost immaterial appearance, its speed, its embodiment of time, death and about its technical capabilities. A photographer does not find my pictures in his viewfinder, because the visible world is does not make it available. I think and produce the invisible, entice the viewer to go to the accustomed illusion so as to wake up before or into something different while observing it. The camera allows me to let my idea to become an image.
H.-N.J.: Have you ever worked on photography intensively?
J.K.: No, not in any special way. Although never my preferred area of interest, I met it at every step and turn nonetheless, in advertisements, magazines or books; as documentation, reporting, nudity or architecture photography; and not least, in family photo albums. It is pervasive since its beginnings. As a man of images I pull out here and there particularly sensational photos for myself. With so much of food for the eye, these stimuli depicted predominantly images of science, eroticism or violence. If it is not that, then they exhibited formal sensations. My giant installation of “faces” shown in the federal arts center in Bonn is one such outcome of where the photo I found emerges directly into the work planned as long-term project. The pervasiveness of the photo allowed me to realize early how I could deal with the medium.
H.-N.J.: What sort of images have you ripped off from somewhere?
J.K.: For example, the exploding Challenger, with its ypsilon-like tail. General Loan shoots down a suspect on an empty road, and we do not know exactly if the bullet is not in the head already. The Stammheim photos. Somewhere in the air colliding soccer players. Crashing winter sportsmen. Turned off models, stars and asterisks. Scientific photos by Schaf Dolly and other porn. Even the most banal was important. My system of collecting is perfect. Some magazines piled up over a long period, I begin on any totally miserable day with the pages and pulling out. Through this relatively rapid perception of most different and even redundant images of our world the whole thing mutates into a giant collage in my head, into a single encyclopedia of insanity. One could also say, the world presents itself as whisked shit in an instant. After some time I throw them away, excepting a few, but which also vanish a little later. They had an effect, and some icons are stored. Many colleagues known to me do that; everyone in his own way. Moreover, I collect words, also terms like “final rescuing shot”, “kola lateral damage”, “indeed”, “interface”, “a little far”, “stocks performance”, “sub-human culture” or “defensive war of attack”, etc.. That is to say, words, appearing sometimes, that are rammed out of the soil to calm somewhat, to palliate or to fill. They are also used in order to make nobody into someone. Sometimes, if it is necessary, such excursions or a part of them appear in my work.
H.-N.J.: I wish to know more about your handling photography on the basis of experience of their omnipresence, please.
J.K.: Its massive and commonplace illusionism has radically changed our awareness and our perception of world, and handling these photos was completely different from that with art portraits. It was and is more a matter of course. I wanted to make use of this matter of course and other specific advantages already mentioned for my concept of art. Reducing the distance from the viewer through the medium of photo, I want to entice him to go normally as accustomed toward the external appearance so as to be confronted with my ideas.
H.-N.J.: How did you land up on the idea of pursuing photography?
J.K.: This psychological and physical expansion over the threshold of a studio went hand in hand with an expansion of sensual perception and practice. The abbreviation for it is “Sex and Drugs and Rock`n roll”. It ran parallel to an actionism against the petrified, disturbed and mendaciously bourgeoisie postwar society and for me as a young artist against a bourgeoisie too narrow definition of art. I needed other means and another “transition” for this in every aspect accelerated quality of life and for my ideas. After all the experiments, which belong to an artistic development, I discovered the diary, the daily drawings and with the first diary also photography through Polaroid. “Ich und Ich, erotografische Tagesberichte” (environments, things, situations) 1969/7, that was the title of a work that became the hotbed of poison of my artistic strategy, applied under conditions of awareness which were different until today.
H.-N.J.: From the viewpoint of today, what does investigation of sexual identity signify?
J.K.: The meaning of my work of the early 70's is most probably in its radicalism, with which it nullified and extended the social convention and coding of the sex. Both with my graphic and photographic image strategies the fixed role codes were questioned, modified and transformed into something new. In contrast to the present debate on sexes, as everything is seen with an open mind and accepted readily, I was attacked during early 1970. The breaking and denunciation of social and scientific rules through images - crossing the limits - were unwanted. Also introduction of my body as a projection surface of multiple identities and sexes into art encountered disapproval. Also I had not expected it. Since it mainly concerned nothing more beautiful than sexuality, I worked and lived at that time on the highest level of desire. The clenched experience potential of sensual perception and necessary reflexes flowed into this symbiosis of art and life and their promising expansions.
H.-N.J.: How do you explain a transformer in the context of a discourse on sexual identity?
J.K.: A transformer. In my early work that had this title among other things, the Transformer means one who breaks open and extends the sexual identity. Out of my/his body long before the plastic surgery everything is shaped and expanded merrily artistically that could go far beyond the real. My “Tageszeichnungen” preceded which had seized of the topic in some other way. I would not limit the transformation to sexuality alone, because it appears in many later works engaged in self argument.
H.-N.J.: How did you see the ambivalence between man and woman in the beginning?
J.K.: For me was rather the man image ambivalent. The “ewig Männliche”. His show of strength. Man as the guardian of the family, the state, the church, the military or the soccer club. The just-don't-give-the-bareness. I had discovered and allowed this other in me early enough, by which the structure of my personality became richer. Sometimes I meet today women who have imbibed the male attitudes for career and success. That blurs my view of the female.
H.-N.J.: But seriously speaking, do you consider yourself actually a feminist?
J.K.: No.
H.-N.J.: But you have been dealing with feminism as such?
J.K.: Naturally I endorsed the socio-political and cultural discussion. Since my mother was a business lady and also raised four children somehow, I did not have to study it. My work was denounced by a section of feminism at the beginning of the 80's as misogynic by picking out, for example, a 15 piece tablet “Das ewig Männliche als ewig Langweiliges”, a photo with a naked woman and by holding placards. A discussion on sexuality and violence in art under participation of Alice Schwarzer gave me the rest. It was so primitive that there was little incentive for further argument. Thank God, at the same time women circles in Göttingen, Marburg and Berlin saw my experiments in a different light.
H.-N.J.: Have you ever dealt with works of Simone de Beauvoir, for example, with her book “Das andere Geschlecht“, or with “Geschichte der Sexualität“ by Michel Foucault?
J.K.: I read much and I like it so as to experience the view of this other art form in the world and also to experience agreements and inspirations. I never read Simone de Beauvoir. One should not be carried away by the belief that I had worked with feminism to approach my project or to compose poetry. That applies also to my reading of Bataille, Foucault and others. My own imaginative power and desire put something in motion. From picture to picture the intention gets intensified to give a shape to the concept. If I exceed it, the inexplicable has happened.
H.-N.J.: Your confrontation with the questions of sexual identity has certainly to do with experiences of uncertainty. What were the stumbling blocks which necessitated reflection of identity? What were your doubts? And what are the doubts even today?
J.K.: When I was working in the early 70's on these topics, I acted out of my inner necessity in a postwar society that was hostile to libido and mentally rigid and inflexible. I did not follow any ideology or sociological instructions. Rather, I acted sensually and subversive in a bigot, bourgeois silence and diktat that decides everything. Before that was the playful appropriation of the female or the other and naturally the questioning of the “ewig Männliche” just like the “ewig Weibliche”. All in all it, it was about breaking the traditional and limited world of ideas. The Transformer as a transformer who breaks the sexual identity open and extends and intervenes and expands as an artist long before the debate on genders. These transformations are, however, not only limited to sexual typologies. Rather, also different social and politico-cultural phenomena are deconstructed. Examples of that are works like “Das menschliche Antlitz im Spiegel nervös-soziologischer Prozesse” or the wrappings put up in 96 in Hamburg station. There masquerades become new identities. Naturally I know Judith Butler or Rosalind Krauss, but the points to this discussion were placed earlier, namely, by subcultures and artists under not so favorable social conditions. That made it naturally so exciting. Today we have an open discussion in which scientists and politicians take the project sociologically, legally, socio-politically and otherwise further. The exhibition in the Museum Ludwig in Cologne “Das Achte Feld” shown at the end of last year, when one might have assumed, was also a contribution to that although topic-related exhibitions are usually a difficult domain. My doubts in “I” continue to exist. Because if I think of “es”, I am with “Mehreren”, of which some populate my previous work in the form of existential messengers. The permission to “Mehreren” or the play with it is perhaps what constitutes a lived person.
H.-N.J.: Once again, going back to the starting point of this complex of questions: How did you actually handle the attacks against you and your art?
J.K.: I was aware of what I was doing and that I had no broad agreement to count on. But the foreseeable negative reactions of every kind did not hold me back from pursuing my track. My concepts were discussed publicly and, also that was the priority for me. With few buyers and prospective customers it was evident at that time that women had an easier approach, that is to day, less fear of contact with my art.
H.-N.J.: At this point, allow me to jump to another chain of thoughts, so I can steer my small play of questions in a different direction: What do you understand by symbiosis of art and life? Are these important you in the context of Oscar Wilde or Andy Warhol?
J.K.: We are talking about the beginning of 1970. The different programs, which you mention, were not a factor there. It developed itself slowly as one dictated by life. I resort to Nietzsche's principle “of the experienced artist”, but not as dogma. My motivation feeds on the constant dialog with the world, where the focus is on man having to get along for a while. The inadequacies, the indissoluble conflicts, hopes, desires, longings and, not least, the actions increasingly becoming absurd are for me something like an art food chain. I cannot detach life from art.
H.-N.J.: Were there any role models in that context?
J.K.: Recently an American curator asked me whether feminism of that time had influenced me. My answer was: It was rather like I had influenced myself, under completely different conditions. My own concept of sexuality, desiring and consuming, the non-negotiable promise of it, they are the real triggers, along with reflexes and the need for action caused by the diktat of this time. The picture of the man, which brought out this diktat, bored me a lot. Under this aspect one could see and discuss my language of images and aesthetizing of the approximations and transformations. We spoke about the influences already, which extended my entire thinking and actions at that time. I found direct impulses and agreement in regard to sculptural argument and content structures with Belmer, Moliner, Beckmann, Bacon, Soutine and Beuys.
H.-N.-J.: Do you see your first performances as investigations of existence?
J.K.: My art aims at an inner experience that is enriched by own sketches and concepts, by life provoking questions and by my own questioning everything again. Till today it concerns the same in all my work, even if its form has changed and also the risk shifted. Existence does not exclude itself there. But a word such as investigation of existence sounds too promising to me, as if something concrete would be there at the end of the investigation. After all, it does not concern a promise of salvation. We spoke elsewhere about the movement from the studio in search of other possibilities of expression which overcome the board image. Everything developed for me logically like fortunately out of my photographic experiments based on concepts. I had already lifted the Body Art from the baptismal font. However, the access to the public was still disassociated. Happening and Fluxus, which were too entertaining and funny to me personally, had also involved the public. The Vienna actionism interested me the most of all the movements. There was, with regard to reduction and body use, a proximity to Brus and Schwarzkogler. Also I hoped for a direct access to the viewer by artistic direct communication. However, this, as in my rest of the works, should deal with the basic tendencies of human and social codes and beyond that attack conventions. The attraction that was before me was in conveying my idea directly. I wanted to allow the recipient experience art more directly. In the center of my performances are the place, time and my own ego as an actor. The temporal frame was always within a reasonable duration of twenty to thirty minutes. The levels of body as acting or as medium of language are crisscrossed with images or sounds and reach up to installable constructs that run toward the basic tone of the performance or synchronize it ironically. At such a live performance that is in direct confrontation, so that artists and author appear as real counterparts, the viewer gets to partake in a direct chance of identification in experiencing an event. Being emotionalized, he is usually irritated owing to my performance supported by minimalism and aggression.
H.-N.J.: How do you interpret the relationship between performance and photography?
J.K.: There is no relationship. Since I act both in my performances and I am present in most photo work as a material, the science of art sometimes confuses the terminology. I must underline the fact that my live performances originate from the desire for direct confrontation, sometimes also after fetching out my own capacities. They result in regard to content predominantly from previous work complexes; they appear to depend on the will of demonstrative, mostly interspersed with the necessary measure of aggressive poetry. More than three times I have performed none and the second and third time as my own corrective. Other performances would dilute the thing in my opinion. If I would become the actor who repeats himself, then that would be almost deadly for what I intended. What remains, if permissible, is a video document and a small photo documentation that shows, for instance, in the time-frame and dramaturgical process. My conceptual and staged photography don't have anything to do with it and have completely different conditions. The important thing here is, by the way much before the performance, before 1970, only the image. I took advantage of photography as a medium in the most varied way. My image systems in this regard try to develop inner images. Incidentally, Bataille speaks of >the inner experience<. Through the visible world I discover in between and behind it areas of experience as well as perceptible conditions, which I translate and freeze through photography into my image concepts. Images, sequences, tablets and spaces come into being thus. At best they whisper and communicate such a thing about the questions of our existence. The world is suspended ever more from itself, and we from it, so that I do not come around at all with my constitution from the melancholic outlook of art. The staged photos, which argue only as images, are the imaginative power and concept that became images; just not an image or document of the only visible world, but besides the one before it, in between and behind it. All in all images of the invisible.
H.-N.J.: Speaking of performances, have you dealt with works by Bruce Nauman, Chris Burden and Mike Kelley? Do you see parallels to what they had done or are still doing?
J.K.: No. Of the Americans I regarded Bruce Nauman and Chris Burden as the more interesting performers. They seemed more of the European kind as against other actors who have not at all come out of the misty circle of the happenings or reflected too much of the “Hollywoodesque” surface. And Mike Kelley, I did not find him so interesting, which was perhaps simply because of the fact that his work was not present as a performer.
H.-N.J.: If someone brings so heavily his own body into play, I get the impression that he is looking for friction with himself so as to get the feeling that he is living. Can you say something about that?
J.K.: For my entire doing I can do something with what you say there. We can also call it “general friction”, which occurs also detached by the body. My decadence data can be read from it at best. Through something I came to think about the unexplainable which led to the creation of always new image moments or image fragments that can be understood as approximations to the fiction of our life. In the long run this is actually a friction on itself like on more or less objective circumstances. As long as that functions halfway, it lives on high level. The relevant congestion is redundant, and the longer it lasts, as it seems so, as if one is non existent any longer. Knowing well that the congestions or blockades emerge over and again, one cannot escape from the associated emptiness, where I would not like to miss the gained realization that is very close to nil.
H.-N.J.: You prefer black & white photography to color photography. Why is it so? Because it is more abstract?
J.K.: The black & white or “colored mono-chrome” takes something back from the naturalism. In the image the image objects are reduced to their essential element. There were also strategies by me, more during the 70's, which bet on color. It served to certain extent as a sound amplifier for the “Transformer”, for “Dr. Mueller's Sexshop” or for photo installations like “Ewig Dein” or “Der Lauf der Dinge” etc.. The use of such means or techniques must always support the image and the idea. Otherwise it may deteriorate into mere decoration.
H.-N.J.: Using art, as you would understand it, are you in search of some coherence? Or does the world, into which you are thrown, crumble into pieces before your inner eye? In such a way that you strive for the totality in the sense of Camus, but simultaneously knowing that there is nothing like it?
J.K.: “Nothing is how it seems, and where it seems, there is nothing.” Everything is possibly nothing else than a mirage; an illusion, virtual. My life is nevertheless an improvisation; easily nervous and shifting from one to another; definitely nothing certain. Questions stuck in the center, of which I assure myself through my work time and again. Sometimes I feel to have come closer to the answers. But surely Camus was right about his principle. I could express it also in the same a way: I move between to be and not to be asking by my doing. At this point, I like to quote Fernando Pessoa who said: “the only one attitude worthy of a higher human is, persistent holding to an activity which he realizes as useless.”
H.-N.J.: Does photography interest you generally? What is art in photography? Or what does it do to be art?
J.K.: We know that photography, film, video, the electronic media and many others are artistic media or they can be that. The viewer makes it into the so-called work of art. Everything that we analyze in a different type of art object, applies also to the photo. It is not enough, with other media too, to be a so-called masterpiece of craft or the beautiful appearance. The sovereign work of art does not give conclusive answers, also does not follow an ideology. It raises questions and questions itself and the artist again and again. It is as useless as free. Of all profitable things it acts at best as a poetic antidote. But that would be the ideal situation. We have a voracious art market, which as our western world characterizes, is subordinated to the diktats of the profit maximization. Not everything that the market devours, in the long run, is art. But if in our aesthetisized world everything goes as art, our idea of art dissolves in a new order. I count nevertheless on its proven resistance.
H.-N.J.: What was your viewpoint about photography then and what is it today?
J.K.: It remained like itself. In the art enterprise, the momentary value of a photo that rarely goes beyond one-to-one of a document, a report or a cultural-anthropological view, is inseparably linked to the American view of the photo as such. For the still recent nation, namely, America and its just as recent history photography was a memory. Since art followed clearly Europe, the documentary photo got something that gave identity, a cultural weight and an appropriate status. The photo was perceived completely differently, collected more purposefully and rated much earlier. If today in the market, and particularly in USA, a certain mainstream of genre photography is celebrated, then it is connected with this view and code, with a cultural agreement. In 1986 I took part in an exhibition in San Francisco in the “Museum of Modern Art” “Behind the eyes”. Participating in that were German intermediate artists like Blume, Gerz, Ecker, Böhmler and others. The trustee was Van Deren Coke. This doyen of American photography spoke in that context about the influence of our photo art, before American sponsors and collectors, about the exceptional status, the innovative thrust, even about the educating artists who would have opened another dimension to the medium of photo. It became glaring. The honorable man, although he was right, was more than just reprimanded for his remarks. Our concepts and image strategies did not appeal to those mindsets accustomed predominantly to documentary or to photo as such. Or the level of interest simply did not allow.
H.-N.J.: Why is photography so enormously important?
J.K.: For a long time it did not have any special importance, and now it has like other media also those that fairly deserve it. In former times one had to differentiate between bad and good painting and today also between good and bad photography. Perhaps your question aims more at the boom of a special photo market where a trend has emerged, which is particularly loved by collectors and museums and auctioneers at present. As we hear, if one investigates, no one knows quite, why. If we look at these photos, we find predominantly well-known subjects of documentary photography; perhaps a little more beautiful and from the outward appearance like the board images. There is no challenge to habits of viewing and thinking, nothing uneasiness or exciting. Not to speak of new or subversive view. At best it is genre photography. We know such trends and phenomena from painting. Why it is like that, you must ask others. Certainly it does play a role, that the image motives are as contemplative as free of problems. The lake lies quietly.
H.-N.J.: I just want to delve on it more: Don't you think that the popularity of photography is also because of its proximity to our perception of it which in turn is influenced by film and TV?
J.K.: Naturally, our everyday life is determined by media images. We are surrounded by magazines, film, TV, computers, mobile phones. Even to the nocturnal stroller is confronted everywhere by these images. That has positively changed both our perception and certain aesthetizing processes. In their hundreds of million times of appearing they produce hardly anything new. Instead the repetition of always the same is celebrated there. This is where the influence begins, which goes so far that a large part of mankind, if it queries the image memory deposited in the brain, it believes to know much. Even if it arrives somewhere, where it never was, the Déjà vu fetches it. It thinks to have been already there. It hallucinates of these surfaces, without ever having recognized, let alone experienced something. With regard to the popularity of the photo, a much more natural or more informal access is present than to other art objects through their pervasive presence. However, that says nothing about the quality or the deeper sense of certain work. The skillful imaging of the real, whether they be places looked for by all and found are still so spectacular, can be boring very soon. The reflex remains always equally low. Motive + ability of a craftsman = brilliant photo. A state of being highly experienced to paint objectively does not also lead inevitably to staggering results. In its mental value addition I classify both as low. Of course, exceptions confirm the rule. But as we know, hypes wear off mercilessly. We can see how even the simplest of photos, which are hung in the art markets, camouflaged as paintings, come back and find roaring sales. Those are the laws of a market becoming independent; it increasingly follows the desired conventions that neoconservative societies want.
H.-N.J.: Putting it crassly, today you are carrying on with your photography to exit from the consensus of photographic perception? Are you doing it consciously or it is happening by itself?
J.K.: Surely there are some proper photos among the false ones of the world. I can gain from the raw one less than the cooked one. I transform my experiences and questions into image spaces which fall under the viewing habits that I talked of so as to come a little closer to the reality at best.
H.-N.J.: If we speak of photographic perception, discussing about its truth can be rather complicated and complex. Today can we really talk about the concept like truth about the image? And if we do, what does it mean? What can that be in a time when the belief in documented perception is dwindling?
J.K.: The fakeness of the documentary goes through the entire history of photography and today it reached its peak due to the possibilities of the electronic media. Since more or less everyone carries a camera, we get to see the most interesting images of firmly installed monitoring cameras, of soldiers and tourists by laymen who happened to be there at the right moment. See September 11; even tsunami or the Iraq war are the examples. Whether there is something like truth and justice at all, the mankind has been breaking its head since its beginnings. Art tries time and again to look beyond and below the surface of the real. It wants to make us happy, irritate us, disturb and question what we do not do for the sake of convenience or for fear.
H.-N.J.: Is there something special about Cindy Sherman as a photographer with whom you were seen together many times?
J.K.: The outward proximity arises from the form of the self-manifestation, through the medium and working on multiple identities. The serious difference between us, which is mostly overlooked, is the mental. I mentioned a while ago in some other context - the double. She argues with the postproduction of the pre-image or with the demonstration of the demonstration. Slipping into roles without moving them, she accepts them. Everything remains a successful, media-related diversionary maneuver. On the other hand, I invent and extend multiple and fictitious identities not only through sexual relationship. Yes, I inject this virus also in other people and world interrelationships. Trusting more my own images, once before I called my images counter proposals to what distorts the view for us, namely, to the innumerable debris of information and massive salad of images.
H.-N.J.: Have you ever studied the theories of photography? With Jean Baudrillard, Susan Sontag or Roland Barthes perhaps?
J.K.: I have, also with others. Without wanting to sound arrogant, I must, however, confess that I was familiar with most of it from my 30 years of practice is imaging.
H.-N.J.: What could be the potential of photography even today?
J.K.: Painting is dead – long live painting. Photography is hardly en vogue, there is already the question about its future and its sudden end. It is a medium like any other, and it has a lot of capabilities there where it leaves the known terrain. Once well established, it can begin with the selection. Its fashionable trend will share the fate of many that were there in the history of painting.
H.-N.J.: You said once, the most important thing in your art is the attitude? What do you mean by that?
J.K.: Since the bourgeois moral limits my liberty, like the phrase “politically correctly” affirms it, I am completely comfortable with that attitude, healthy attitude. Take the attitude. Stiff attitude. Of course, a funny word. I want to express something that means an agreement between my art and my life. Recently an art expert said to me in France, he would see in my art something like a collective mind and in the middle of that would be the “Condition humane”. Perhaps this statement is correct, what I mean.
H.-N.J.: Do you believe in a hierarchy of the media?
J.K.: There is a sequence of its origin and deployment and dominating phases of this or that. The first carvings on the rock speak a clear language even today. I do not see a hierarchy. Each medium has its specific possibilities adequate for itself and corresponding advantages. I can only be concerned with a certain work to use the optimum medium or to take up the same topic again with another medium, because we find through other conditions other solutions and appearances. “Nomadisches Denken” and “Crossover” which mean this inter-medial approach are only fashionable words for experimental thinking and action known to arts for a long time.
H.-N.J.: Speaking of nomadic thinking, what is the significance of traveling in the context of your art?
J.K.: My journeys are like “Reisen ans Ende der Nacht”. It is a journey into the subconscious or into the zones of an extended consciousness. It is concerned with exploration of one's own as the other life. The experiences and perceptions mainly gathered there enrich me and therefore also my art.
H.-N.J.: You not only undertake journeys to your inner self, but also actually traveling into the wide world. Earlier you were going to Indonesia many times. What sort of odysseys were they? What were you searching for or what have you found there? Was it about alienating yourself in the sunny ambience of forgetting yourself?
J.K.: We always look for the other one and the alien. At the same time we create distance which can also lead to a pleasant self-oblivion or self-redemption. I have learned to deepen my existing respect for humans and their culture through experience and realization on the spot.
H.-N.J.: Which other journeys were spectacular, important or meaningful?
J.K.: Every form of movement, also mental, is important to me, but not for the sake of it. This movement happens inevitably where one gets involved with the self. In conscious action and wanting and in the coincidental there is a personal enrichment marvelously extending the horizon. We should not exclude in this context the drug-supported excursions into the subconscious, that is to say, into worlds where no consciousness penetrates, even dream worlds.
H.-N.J.: You spend relatively a lot of time in your home on Lanzerote, where Michel Houellebecq, too, spent some time. Is it your island of withdrawal? What have you found for yourself there?
J..K.: Let's call it a place of retreat, and let's leave it at that; it is nothing else.
H.-N.J.: Just asking: Do you fancy yourself more in a life-style of a static individual or in that of one for whom to be is to be on the move?
J.K.: I have mentioned it a while ago what movement means to me. But a static individual will tell you that. If I were not that, we could not talk about a vast and broad-based work.
H.-N.J.: What does the expression “sense of belonging” mean to you?
J.K.: Nothing much.
H.-N.J.: Did you want to provoke others with your art?
J.K: My appearance in the everyday life was already a provocation for the mindset at that time. Likewise my themes and, how I dealt with them. The sum of it arose from a high measure of desire, liberation and inner need to my endless search movements. Provocation is a legitimate means to disturb the slumbering self-righteous also through art. If my individual sketches in art were flanked by Underground music, Godard, Kenneth meadow or Jack Smith strengthened in the true sense, I had other film languages, and even the literates came out of their hollering cubicles and stepped before the microphone. I see myself with all the fun that went on in that time of upheaval simultaneously, but not as a troublemaker for its own sake. Rather, the will was there in the middle to push as much as possible of these spontaneity and vitality into art. These images have, so it was, retained their strength. They still polarize and inspire a generation of younger artists.
H.-N.J.: Actually, where does your desire to resist come from?
J.K.: I do not know it so exactly. The mouse-grey society, into which I was born, offered sufficient material and surface of friction to do something. That would be a reason for that early not wanting to compromise and resist holding till today. Another reason could be the intervals between being extroverted and introverted, because I am like that. We should let the professionals to explain whether such mestizos develop on an extreme and favorable soil. To bear I need not bear with anything special. It is so and polarized. It is clear to me that not everyone should love me and my art.
H.-N.J.. How do you see the relationship between existence and art?
J.K.: My and our existence in the world is to question; that is the hard core of my art. It is a kind of nuclear research. To that extent both seems to me inseparable. Although not active daily as an artist, these questions murmur in me and through me as lasting basic noise. I go around our existence and the related questions in order to oppose its non-redemption. Their eternity status entices me almost to make sure of me and the world. They are sketches for images and scenarios which enable us to be present; an artistic continuous method in the form of a continuous dialog and a monolog. The outer world raises questions. Beyond that the moments interest me outside of this perception. Something compels me to rethink about the inner relationships, the life's conditions, the structures of the world and society over and again. It is to spell out the world by means of poetry. In the free space of art I act autonomously, obligated to nobody, sometimes contradicting and playful. It is an action to shaping the self that aims at its presence in the image. It is a self always regarding the other one, called the world. While science and philosophy maintain truths, I imagine with my sketches and meta-languages questions which lead to others, and to new interpretations. Thus the useless became a usable project of art liberated from the laws of logic. If successful, this Sisyphus work is transformed into a realization, even comfort perhaps.
H.-N.J.: Do you understand yourself somewhere to be a political artist?
J.K.: Not in the sense of my standpoint to day-to-day political or historical events.
H.-N.J.: That is to say, no involvement for or against?
J.K.: Since my art has been dealing with human and therefore with social phenomena and their fringe areas for more than thirty years, you can certainly call it also political.
H.-N.J.: Now you are also a drawing artist. What has drawing to do with what you do mainly?
J.K.: Drawing seems to me the most autonomous, free and most direct, artistic form of action apart from experimental thinking; far away from necessary organizational procedures of media work; I alone in the room and before me only the paper; power of imagination and conceptualization; blurred fields of perception of the subconscious; residues of memory and desire to let something to develop without a large concept. All that happens with the vague idea to which I would like to lend an expression, when drawing in a casual, free moment. Particularly when warm drawing, as I call it, where I am still on the search for translations and formal sensations and decision makers.
H.-N.J.: It has hardly anything to do with coincidence, right?
J.K.: Yes, it is just no coincidence. The symbols, already in the head, must be only processed or used. The coincidence develops more out of chaos, out of failing and failure. Suddenly it becomes something important that seemed so wrong earlier, and so the accident becomes a sensation. Whoever knows to deal with it, can work with it. Also with the more complex photo work, I work with misadventures. Moving frequently at the outermost border, they bring in the necessary comic effect, which nullifies the darkness without going into the ridiculous. Also with the devices being used such as photo, video, computer and electronic media, it is exciting and artistically valuable to examine them for their slips and their standardized usefulness and to rework them.
H.-N.J.: When one looks at the images of the early period, the impression is that you wanted to draw something out of your soul or free yourself. It appears to be a cry for a true life in the false one, is that so?
J.K.: Aspects of my biography and social conditions of my euphoric time, I have were already mentioned. Losses and uneasiness in the ordered life increased the frequency. They increase the quality of life as well as the artistic sketches. Man moves and realizes in the area of conflict of sexuality, relationships, violence, death, mass, power and loneliness, confronted on the one hand with the many uncertainties and on the other hand with the certainty of its finiteness. Questions about identity stand since long in the center of my doings. If sexuality is brought into the foreground, then that was connected first of all with the desire of the “young artist”. The whole thing was heightened by the innumerable regulations on renouncement of impulses of the time. I suggested other things or small world sketches about my idea of the self. The drawings, symbols and their symbolism speak of the relationship between genders, sex, body and identity, of the contrast of male and female, of the abolition of the male view (power); of the sexualized, transformed, fashioned body and thus of the approximation of the sexes and fiction overlapping the sexes. These drawings are introduced in the diaries of the 70's, which radiate lived and fashioned time. The individual drawings and symbol sequences are the expression of the experienced and the desired, and of making visible the sensual perception and its deformation in the meshwork of relationships and the world. Those notes of the past running simultaneously with the drawings are references to the ordinary and transnational. Sometimes they hold a dialog with the mood level of the drawings and sometimes they remain completely at themselves and their everyday past.
H.-N.J.: Can you please tell me more about your argument with life and death?
J.K.: One is interwoven with the other, and through an elementary, natural interest in it I am motivated in here and now to create new images. We move forward, make progresses and regresses. The technology accelerates us. But the basic tendency of our existence remains. As the experience increases and under changing social, technological or scientific conditions my view falls again on my motive - in fragments. This view has touched moments fictitiously but which emerge clearly only now. When I began in 1982 with the work group “Auf leisen Sohlen”, the first drawings and photos were concerned with the simple symbol of skeleton. Knowing well, how worn out and difficult it will be and how laboriously we go about in a straight course. We carry it with us. I reached images like “verrückt” from a classical initial point, where formally and in terms of image content clichés like the shadow and its causer are displaced or distorted. Later reflexes on a topic previously processed take up these in completely different images.
H.-N.J.: If one speaks about life and death, the question regarding the relationship to time more than just evident. How do you deal with time?
J.K.: In one or the other way it passes through my entire work; time as one of the last real luxury goods. The time that is at our disposal, makes us aware that we are nothing if we notice it. In between are the moments, instants, seconds, fractions or batting of the eyes that lift us out from the flow of time. In these moments it seems not there or stopped. This stopping is the foremost condition of photography, which besides my personal intentions and image formulations vibrates as temporalness; its view of the present exactly at the instant, where it becomes transient; the past of the presence as remembrance and it death. That just now is already has been. Sometimes these photographic conditions reinforce my concepts which anyway deal with the phenomenon. Additionally the technology allows certain things that carry the sculptural reflection over time; sandwich, double and multiple exposures to carry body and space into another temporal condition or expansion. Without major technical statement with “Formalisierung der Langeweile” something of standstill and inert mass, that is to say, of some other perception of time, seems to have become visible. Other works like “Philosophie der Sekunde” or “Ein Moment wie ein Zungenschlag” catch the figurative elements of the in between them through the possibilities of the camera; even the thousandth second which we do not notice with the naked eye.
H.-N.J.: If we reflect on time, it is often an indication that time has become a problem. Can you remember the situations that confirm this?
J.K.: Sometimes it passes to slowly and sometimes too fast. We cannot evade its omnipresence, and no one knows exactly what it is: the time.
H.-N.J.: Today we experience the time in a spell of boredom, somewhat differently in a state of extreme haste. On the subject of boredom there was your photo series “Die Formalisierung der Langeweile”. How did it happen?
J.K.: Even the most grandiose excesses show sometime traces of the repetition. In order to escape from these incidents of wear and tear, I took all flanking measures and rolled off past me and almost away from me, so that I sat alone in the room sometime rather clouded of awareness than being enlightened and listened for days and weeks to the inner and outside noises. Out of this mixture of moods the idea came to me about the notion of boredom to work. In near standstill or condition of running of senseless, nearly not lived, non-communicative time man expands in the space and with it the time. In my graphic diary “Ziemlich” of 1979/80 also mood images increased along with the text, which give an idea of something on the border of the sensual and the insane through their form. With this book the calculation was also to experiment with words in the image which carry the indefinite and flexible in them. Rather, more or less, so to say, perhaps, etc.. The step from here to implementation of the “Formalisierung der Langeweile”, nevertheless with the medium of photo, was not a large one. The complex topic required of a special treatment. For the first time, a project-related sketch or work book came into being. The entire image experience of the 70's flowed into this group. Tablets, sequences, large photos and triptyches were used in order to render serious and comical element of the situation to the image. This moment I can only think of Edward hopper with whom this time experience becomes so significant; naturally, totally different from me.
H.-N.J.: How do you gather ideas on working groups like “Die Formalisierung derLangeweile”?
J.K.: Since using large-scale work groups, like with “Formalisierung der Langeweile” another working process was established. Until I enter in a studio suitable for it, it takes much time. In contrast to mostly very spontaneous one of the 70's, we could call it a planning and organization phase. Initial image concepts, collection of material and thoughts flow into the project books. First everything is collected that could be significant. So, words, objects, scenarios, ordinary and fictitious. Then sketches follow and more concrete scribbles. Objects or constructs are built, actors determined and inducted into the project. Until its realization in the studio a major part of the project is conceptualized. One the entire material is before my mental eye I study my motives from a different view point. I test the other constellations. Inspiring angles of incidence and reflection become apparent. Organized chaos and lucky coincidence come together. They favor the extension of thought out motives and formal structures.
H.-N.J.: Earlier you mentioned about the state of madness. A word that you use so often that I presume, madness is a state about which you want to know more. Why is that?
J.K.: Peter Weibel spoke of “mad images for mad a world”. I like that. I find it to be the most schizophrenic and most violent. The west laughs into the bottomless on technological and scientifically high level; besides that, the rest without a chance. The caravan moves further accelerated, available, informed or totally flooded, and the continuous noise of information hardly allows any communication. With all the positive aspects, which I admit about our progress, the insanity ranks in the foremost place. It is obvious and prompts me to treat it sometimes cheerfully and sometimes seriously.
H.-N.J.: We have started off talking about individual workgroups. I would like to continue on that to make it more concrete. Therefore, my question is: What was your intention behind “Very de Nada” or “Griffe ins Leere”?
J.K.: With “Very de Nada” the primary thing was working out of the black. How far the medium allows it; two, three flashlights, a light-sensitive black & white film – that was it. With regard to content I wanted to actually make questioning itself into a topic. Besides, the viewer and the medium are looked back sneakily in a set of images. Titles like “Spanner” or “Gespannte Spanner” address also the erotic tension of the moment. These addressed conditions were the original motivation to take on this black work. On the periphery of the central motives moments and fragments of “viel Nichts” and a certain element of comic too vibrate. The work group is installed along side the baseboard. In this, our view falls from above on a highly aesthetic, black & white, senseless looking action which tells about the world askance. The “Griffe ins Leere” appears for the first time in 1982 in the form of a graphic Leporello book. Not the individual image of man, but only his shadow and his silhouette become visible; losing its individuality and identity more or less; anticipating its disappearance. So that this human rest does not sink totally into anonymity, I lend predominantly my profile to it and click myself into the picture as the author and a representative, different from the photo work. The shadow gets a face and, therefore, an authenticity. What goes as a body language throughout my entire photo work gets here a new interpretation by the arranged shadow that speaks through the conditions and possibilities of the drawing differently about the same thing.
H.-N.J.: How do you define authenticity in photography?
J.K.: Photography endlessly produces images of the world that resemble each other because the world and its statuses remain comparable. So, here too only a few notional or sculptural benchmarks are set by going beyond or below them. By using the medium so as to get the mental picture of the world into focus, they achieve other, perhaps also more authentic pictures.
H.-N.J.: What do your x-ray images indicate? Do you see them as experimental photography?
J.K.: It was the fascination every time to attend the visualization of the inner life of my baggage in airports and to think repeatedly how wonderful it would have to be to use such a gadget as a camera for own formation processes. The bureaucratic effort I have to face held me back from it for a long time, but sometime it had to be, and I obtained nightly access under police supervision to the Cologne-Bonn airport. Many of these nocturnal sessions led to the work group “Prosecuritas”. Bodies or objects are dissolved in their outward appearance. They lose, mutating to something else, something from their material meaning. We could say, those bodies and objects are de-individualized. Even my identity is lost, and the inner state shows itself in light, shadows, pixels and lines. Because the “Prosecuritas” images show my world and contain many of the objects used by me in other work groups, the question about my identity less prominent. The viewer thinks that I am it who appears to him there as “Totet Fotograf” or “Selbstfindung”. Though absent, I am present there. The being appears in another light. This other medium with all its possibilities, its different image language and aesthetics suggest additionally something of the limits of the visible. In the back and forth of my intermediate doings my graphic concept book “Das Innenleben der Dinge” developed already during 1979/80. These drawings are a prelude to “Prosecuritas”, although with the help of another medium and with a totally different effect.
H.-N.J.: I wish to know more about inclusion of requisites and their symbolic charging. There are those hats, nothing but hats. Tables, containers, buckets, clothes' hangers, black suits. And many more. What do they signify?
J.K.: You mean the penultimate work group “desaströses Ich oder Trost für Arschlöcher”. One could also say “Sonntagsneurosen II”. What spurs me, are the constants of our being and my poetic reflex as well as my view of it. I look for always different points of view under always different conditions. Essentially, the point is often about meshwork of relationships, identity problems, sexuality, death, isolation, man and object worlds, emptiness and other techniques of being. In the center are bodies and objects of the ordinary. The table as world expended in its own range, partly left by itself like the bodies. During the recent years there was much talk about the virtual body and about the disappearance of the same. At the same time, we have been surrounded by a fetishized to standardized body cult the world over. I add to one or the other yet another intention of making sure. The point is to examine if it is still there. The rest trots along in a marching step. Such mass phenomena, which consequently supported by the mass media, are coupled with endless wishful imaginations. We long for endless beauty, for infinite life. After infinitely fulfilled sexuality; and much more. On closer inspection of our doubtful existence and its inadequacies we know that the few of these projections are fulfilled. The failure is inherent. The initial firings feed from such considerations among other things to tackle such a work group and to develop image strategies, which give the viewer no final answers, but open spaces that address or ask it on several levels. This applies precisely to the works by the work group where bodies or things seem in dissolution or lose the grip on the ground increasingly.
H.-N.J.: Every time there is the argument with the tangible that doesn't appear to be so tangible. From a title like “Animalischer Tisch” we may assume that to the tangible world you concede an autonomous sphere which evades our consciousness. I wish to know more about that. Also about the experiences you had and led you to these ideas about things.
J.K.: If you page through the Passau catalog, you will encounter a whole set of concrete images, isolated, everyday objects which become independent to sculptural constructs. In the forefront I collect these objects around me. They are subject to a long view, which results in setting them mentally into an image. I try to accord them my meaning and magic of image. At best, if I have set them into the image and I removed their user instructions, their code from them, their form remains. However, the material stretches into a different one and imagines time and absent presence. Hans-Peter Wipplinger speaks in the catalog about the unusual presence of the emptiness or the cleaned image space which frees the view to the focus of the concrete or human existence. I too speak of image spaces or thinking spaces which represent something timeless - also in the sense of the constant.
H.-N.J.: One more question concerning working with your models. How do they influence your ideas? The presence of the body of another person in the studio, what does it mean to you? Nudity is an expression of what, for you?
J.K.: Nothing. Just as objects and articles inspire me the bodies present in the studio beyond the thought-out and planned. As far as nudity is concerned, the history of art offers the most varied suggestions to us. The point there is about the ideal body of its respective epoch. Whether the body emerges as the beautiful, erotic, sexualized or as maltreated, depends in each case on where the artist's eye falls. In my images like the “Entscheidungsnotstände” (a disastrous I) my eye falls on a standardized, de-individualized body that only signals flesh. Here the approximation of the sexes or the playful attempts of overcoming sexual identities are addressed, like in the images of the 70's. Now they are synchronized and frozen in their longings and in their desires. The formal and equal constructs associate themselves with the nude, partly fragmented bodies into abstract forms, better still, into indications which unclothe them of their individuality. What stays is a heap of flesh, an outer covering. The body becomes a requisite. Moreover, the naked body – in this case only the female – emerges in the work group of “Formalisierung der Langeweile”. Here too rather systematically, symbolically, de-erotized. Elizabeth Bronften wrote in an essay about this work group that this bared female figure would stand for the susceptibility of human existence. In first instance I work here with the nakedness from the control room of the constant male view. A tablet is called also “Das ewig Männliche als ewig Langweiliges”.
H.-N.J.: Changing the subject, what do you dream of a world where art counts more?
J.K.: I hope that art can free itself from the world's esthetic monotony and assert itself without falling into a trap of neo-conservatism, by freeing itself back to self assertion, and thus to a succinct realization that besides it there are wide-ranging and sometimes competitive applied arts.
H.-N.J.: Concluding out conversation, I once again wish to go back to the beginnings. What sort of an idea did you have about art in those days when you started off, and how is that today? Has something changed?
J.K.: In my younger days I believed naturally that with art I would be able to achieve more effect, perhaps even change things. Later I realized, however, that this belief was a mistake. The world cannot be changed by art. But by articulating it anew again and again, I contribute to spelling it out. The world is changed in the most lunatic way by money, military, economy and technology. In the last decade the art some seems to have been misplaced. It is drowning in the aesthetic generalness of fashion, advertising, designing and banal media images. But arts represent a sensual form of realization. They remind, ask, intervene, intervene, disturb also and satisfy rarely. For a moment holding the time, it helps a little in arranging the chaos. I take my inspirations and impacts from everywhere, regardless of whether from theory, science, from the blue sky or from the gutter. But art has a chance only if it insists on sovereignty, self assertion and at the same time on self-influence and so to arrive at other sketches.
H.-N.J.: The 60s and 70's are .......?
J.K.: ...probably besides the 20s and 30s has been the most intensive laboratory of art development. Art extended its language and made the new forms of media accessible. During this period the theory, mainly, and particularly philosophy were rather static. Art was admired at that time, as my discussions with intellectual confirmed this, because of its opening, its meta-languages and interventions and seen also as a minor substitute philosophy. French thinkers, who were always somewhat closer to art, pursued this thinking and action of art. With their “Rhizom”, Deleuze and Guattari introduced the keyword of “open systems” and “Anything goes”. According to Nietzsche artist philosophers developed themselves more but philosopher artists less; but more so assistants and illustrators. As popularity increased, it spread to art scientists and even to curators. The result is a white coffee of art which became a science and didactics, in which art and science rarely become strong, but get diluted and lose the substance. Even in a society of masses my belief in the organized I, the individual, the autonomy and resistance of art remains. And I don't want; I cannot and will not to give up this claim.
H.-N.J.: Is happiness a word that is always present in your consciousness?
J.K.: Of course, not always present, because what exactly it is I don't know; nevertheless, the promise that is contained in it cannot be stopped. There are those many, small and trivial moments when one is slightly touched or even delighted by it. But they vanish as fast as they have happened. May be this vanishing is happiness.