public alphabet Duisburg

2010

Conversation with the artist

H. B.: Mischa, please outline the work public alphabet, which you are showing at the Museum DKM and the Galerie DKM.

M. K.: The idea for public alphabet goes back to my interventions in public space in the early 1980s. In Megazeichen, for example, I tried to create a light sculpture from existing architecture, using the available light and through conversations with employees of a Düsseldorf-based company. I wanted to examine the urban space for its artistic qualities as well as for existing systems, urban grids, and matrices. This led to an attempt to reduce the presence of advertising messages to their initial letters and to arrange them in alphabetical order. In doing so, I discovered something special: when you link these film sequences, which I recorded with a simple video camera, relatively closely together, the result is a soundtrack reminiscent of guttural sounds. On the one hand, this has to do with the sequential nature of the sequence. On the other hand, these are the original audio files, i.e., the noise of the street. In 1997, the first public alphabet was created in Düsseldorf, in which I made my immediate living space the subject of my investigation. In the same year, Karin Stempel, then curator of the São Paulo Biennial, asked me to propose a work for Brazil, and so I realized public alphabet São Paulo.

At the DKM Museum, you are showing the video works public alphabet Düsseldorf, public alphabet São Paulo, and public alphabet Duisburg side by side. Have you revisited your concept for this exhibition and added a location-specific variant?

The latter was actually created this year as part of an exploration of the city of Duisburg. However, it is not always easy to fully implement the concept. In Brazil, for example, I was confronted with the problem that the alphabet there has only 23 letters, whereas in our culture we have 26. The informal navigation through the city serves as a link to my other projects. I ask my way around, and so the work—unlike with a GPS system—is underpinned by a personal fingerprint, an urban network. Communication with people was particularly important in São Paulo because otherwise I would not have been able to carry out the lamp transfer at all.

You mention the participatory project private light / public light, which you realized in São Paulo parallel to public alphabet and which is documented in a photo series that you are showing here in Duisburg. Can you briefly explain the project?

For private light / public light, I visited 72 families from a wide range of social and educational backgrounds in São Paulo who exchanged a light source from their home for a standard lamp I designed. After the project was completed, the collected lamps were displayed in the exhibition rooms of the Biennale. Similar to public alphabet, the work is based on a form of urban exploration. However, this takes on a completely different dimension in Duisburg or Düsseldorf. It is important to remember that the 72 families I visited for private light / public light in Brazil were spread across a cityscape of 25 million people. To visit 72 families, we drove more than 3,000 km by car. To illustrate the scale of this, we crossed the Federal Republic of Germany three times. These are incredible distances, not only in terms of kilometers. In a favela, where there are no street names, you can only find a family by asking around. Since there are not paved roads everywhere, we sometimes had to carry all the equipment I had brought with me over long distances. The distances traveled and the experiences with the 72 families have created a second matrix for me over the territory of the megalopolis of São Paulo.

At public alphabet São Paulo, there is also the “letter eater,” i.e., a display in which you are observed eating cookies in the shape of letters. Was this also part of the original Düsseldorf version?

No, that is a special feature of São Paulo, which is now particularly evident in the comparison. The content-specific concept of São Paulo referred to the theme of “Anthropofagia” issued by the artistic director, Paulo Herkenhoff, for the 24th Biennial. This cannibalism was to be understood in the sense of “culture eater” and went back to the Manifesto Anthropófago by Brazilian writer Oswald de Andrade from 1928. With his manifesto, de Andrade challenged the Eurocentric conception of art history. The European art scene had attacked Brazilian artists and dismissed them as epigones or plagiarists. De Andrade countered this by saying, “No, we will not copy European culture, we will eat it and digest it.” I tried to incorporate the theme of “anthropophagy” into the context of the German contribution in two ways: On the one hand, by eating letters in alphabetical order. On the other hand, I approached people and made a symbolic exchange. Placing the lamps from private households in the public context of the São Paulo Biennial, thereby making them accessible to around 800,000 people, represented a transformation or, to put it more bluntly, a process of digestion. For me, this was also part of the idea of “anthropophagy,” albeit in a somewhat more cryptic form, which is left out of the works for Düsseldorf and Duisburg. I think it is right to show all three versions side by side today, even in their differences.

Mischa, your work is usually very spatially oriented, and you have already completed a number of projects in the Ruhr region. Are there aspects of urban life in Duisburg, or more broadly in the Ruhr cultural region, that you find particularly interesting?

What makes Duisburg special is that it is the closest of the Ruhr cities to two cultural areas. Duisburg acts as an interface between the Rhine region—Düsseldorf, Cologne, Bonn—and the Ruhr area, but also as an east-west hub. What particularly appeals to me about Duisburg is that the city embodies internationality. This is evident in the presence of banks, shops, restaurants, and, of course, the people on the streets and in the park, or rather how this park is used. I believe that the particularization of interests in public spaces has developed significantly over the past 20 years. In this respect, too, Duisburg certainly has a special status. In line with the trend of the late 1970s and early 1980s, Königstraße was designed as a sculpture boulevard. Many people are unaware that there are subway stations in Duisburg designed by Gerhard Richter. But Duisburg and the visual arts have always had a somewhat difficult relationship. In this respect, I think Raimund Stecker's initiative to place Hans-Peter Feldmann's David at a neuralgic point between the shopping zone and the museum, thereby creating a new “joint” within the city, is excellent. Then there was the repositioning of the Lehmbruck Museum collection, the effort to re-present architecture and show what we actually have. These are all energies that I associate with Duisburg. The development of the inner harbor has also made a significant contribution, of course. I think the Garden of Remembrance, which functions like the invention of modern archaeology and allows visitors to walk through different periods of time in the present, is wonderful. It was therefore particularly appealing to me to be able to exhibit at both the DKM Gallery in the inner harbor and the DKM Museum.

Did working in dialogue with the Garden of Remembrance at the DKM Gallery on Philosophenweg influence your exhibition planning?

I am not engaging in direct dialogue, but of course this particular area of the city has undergone tremendous development. For example, the first new synagogue in Germany was built in Duisburg according to the plans of architect Zvi Hecker. I also think the conversion of an old warehouse into the Küppersmühle Museum is fantastic. I believe that Duisburg is a pioneer in regional development. The DKM model is no less important to me. For me, Dirk Krämer and Klaus Maas are synonymous with how private commitment can be used to get things off the ground without burdening the public purse. Basically, it's about speaking up for a region and showing presence.

How would you relate the works you are showing in Duisburg to your current project New Pott, which will be presented at the art collection of the Ruhr University Bochum starting on October 28?

There is indeed a close connection, but there are also significant differences. For my New Pott project, I visited 100 families from 100 different national backgrounds over a period of more than a year and a half. Back then in São Paulo, on the other hand, I only had a few weeks to visit 72 families. The people take over the navigation; they are, so to speak, the points on an imaginary map on which I navigate between Togo and South Korea and between Thailand and Canada. I am guided and led by these people's stories. The light has only a symbolic character, defining this place and adding attention for a moment and, in the sense of Marshall McLuhan, a concentration of energy.

So this project is again about an exchange process similar to the one in São Paulo back then?

Yes, but I don't swap lamps like in Brazil, I take stories with me. In São Paulo, it always bothered me that I actually left with empty hands, mentally speaking. I heard an incredible amount, but I didn't know how to take it all in. At New Pott, I heard stories from families from Congo, Senegal, and Kyrgyzstan. But this time, the stories were recorded in the form of videos and transcribed as text. A book will be published next year. Now I realize that the works from São Paulo, Duisburg, and New Pott are converging. People from all over the world come to São Paulo too, but at the time I perceived it differently because I was a stranger there myself. Here, however, I see that it is my home that is changing dramatically, becoming increasingly international and at the same time part of a structural change. Unfortunately, this process is being interpreted through a xenophobic debate in which people talk about foreign infiltration and question the existence of a dominant culture. In my opinion, the way of life in the Ruhr region is an interesting model. I often hear people say, “I can only live here because this kind of internationality is only possible here.” Some of these people have lived in Stuttgart, Hamburg, or Munich, but they only feel truly at home here. I have not observed this wave of migration and the shrinking cities that some people talk about, nor the claim that people are leaving the Ruhr region. On the contrary, my impression was that people feel very strongly rooted in this place. We will continue to monitor and observe this among the participants of New Pott in the coming years.

Do you think that you, as an artist, can influence such processes?

In my opinion, one must remain very realistic about the impact of art: if you succeed in directing the viewer's attention for a moment to the questions, needs, and stories of these people, then you have already achieved a great deal. We are a community made up of many different aspects, and for a moment we get to know individual aspects more closely. However, I cannot assess how intense this encounter is for the individual.

Can the fragmentation of language and this background noise of the big city that we hear in public alphabet also be interpreted as a critical examination of urbanity?

Yes, of course. I also used the term “guttural sounds,” which is a kind of precursor to speech. I believe that these guttural sounds represent the idea of language, but a language that is not yet practiced in generally understandable codes. The howling, the machine noises, the sounds of movement—from airplanes, cars, trains, bicycles, and pedestrians—reflect the great, famous idea of the big city symphony, which was already a theme in the 1920s, when electrification and motorization, and thus also the speed of the city, changed dramatically. We can see the acceleration of data streams on the Internet as a parallel development. Today, I can tweet, use Facebook, send emails, and search the data stream all at the same time. The dynamization of data streams also changes the perception of the city and affects the way we navigate it. In contrast, one could cite the artistic practices of Hamish Fulton or Richard Long, who determine the space of experience by their own steps and measure it at their own speed. Two positions that, incidentally, also function wonderfully as a counterpoint or complement to my work at the Museum DKM.

When you mention artists such as Hamish Fulton or Richard Long, who would you describe as your artistic role models?

I find Bruce Nauman's body- and space-related works, which also address the themes of the individual and society, absolutely groundbreaking. He has had a strong influence on me. Then, of course, there is Lawrence Weiner with his combination of language, sculpture, and space. I would name these two as the most important living artists for me. The processes initiated by Joseph Beuys have also had a lasting influence on me, especially since all of this took place here in Düsseldorf. For me, however, it is not only artists who are influential, but also other fields such as medicine. At the moment, for example, I am benefiting from completely new developments in the field of imaging techniques.

Looking back on “Megazeichen,” you yourself once spoke of a sensitization that took place among viewers. This terminology naturally brings to mind the art of Zero, especially since the group was based in Düsseldorf. Would you place yourself in this tradition?

When you work with light and come from Düsseldorf, the connection to Zero is naturally very close. Zero can be understood as a clear break with a visual language program that was misused by politics and dictatorship. As an art form, Zero still interests me today. Looking at it in detail, however, the connection to the Russian Constructivists and Suprematists is much stronger. What has always interested me about these artists is that they had a program with which they wanted to influence the world and shape everyday life. Political reality then overtook them. Unfortunately, society sometimes excludes its own innovators, forcing them into isolation or exile. This gap, this void created by the eradication of Jewish culture, also exists in German history, and I refer to it repeatedly in my work, for example in refraction house or in the context of the Gauleitungsbunker in Lüneburg.

It is striking that you tend to work with rather limited technical means. You are obviously not interested in exploiting the full range of technical possibilities available today. Could this be seen as a return to the origins of video art?

I have been working for many years at two universities—the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design and the Academy of Media Arts Cologne—with students who have greatly facilitated access to the technical world. For me, the focus is on feedback to necessity. If I can express something with pencil on paper, then I express it with pencil on paper. If I need a laser or an interface that does something specific, then I have to work with that technology. But it should always be directly related to the intention or idea behind the work. I also pursue this approach in my teaching.

Peter Weibel once described you as a conceptual artist of light, while also emphasizing the political facet of your work. Would you agree with that?

I can live with this label because I realize that it implies things that are entirely in line with my intentions. However, I wouldn't use this label myself. Such labeling prevents free access and dictates the horizon of meaning. Every project, whether in Duisburg or São Paulo, requires an immediate and individual approach. I take the space as my starting point. In my work for the DKM Museum, I also refer to many of the issues found in the collection. That's why I had the idea of letting the photos from São Paulo “meander” from the outside to the inside. You move through a narrative flow, so to speak. The result is a thread that you can continue to think about: 72 of 720 of 7,200 of seven million. It is an attempt to move forward in very small steps, like Richard Long, leaving traces and then erasing them again. Such a work functions as a link, leading from contemporary art into cultures and thus into the collection spanning 5,000 years.

Heike Baare