#32 meet up: Marion Ackermann and Olafur Eliasson
We met Marion Ackermann and Olafur Eliasson at their first tour through the exhbitions at K20. The second part of the video shows their talk near to the artworks of Kandinsky, Malevich and Mondrian.
Translation: Marion Ackermann (MA) and Olafur Eliasson (OE)
OE Nice, there's no image here. Nor here.
MA Nice, right? We've really allowed ourselves a lot of white.
OE Look here, that's good. When you stand here, you only see this picture, and this one.
MA You know what I find especially good? You find it in Kandinsky, in Malevich as well, these zones of energy. When an element like this pierces its surroundings. Which means they must have imagined it spatially in some way.
OE Evidently. In any case: the perspective – this here is the foreground, this is a figure, the space behind. Incredible, it's a spatial concert.
MA Personally, I've always believed that here in the middle, a battle is transpiring, this symbol of Kandinsky with St. George, like a Star Wars light saber: the struggle and the combat and the incredible number of colors and the dramatism. The real content, namely the future, spiritual age, it's present here, and it appears more and more. With Kandinsky, it almost always has to be taken literally.
OE (Laughs) maybe we shouldn't say so much about it, not that it's false. It's also great to try to come to terms with it, and then to take this confrontation as a negotiation. And perhaps this negotiation is more important than the goal of the negotiation. Which is perhaps how Kandinsky would've wanted it. That the negotiation bears a certain potential.
MA The processual was incredibly important to him, that you stroll through the picture, becoming absorbed by it.
OE It's interesting that it's so fresh.
MA I think so too. Kandinsky always had enough money, always purchased the highest quality paints. He was also a professor, an intellectual. The quality of the colors and their materiality were very important to him.
OE As a young artist, you can really learn that from him.
It's incredible, this picture. Should I be standing in front of it with such a stupid gadget? Of course, that's not the idea. The exercises are actually little thought experiments aimed toward interrogating the way we traverse this place. There are eleven different proposals, and you can also consider additional exercises yourself. But in principle, each exercise refers to something specific. Sometimes, we make the mistake of believing that the way we pass through an exhibition, the way we perceive the objects around us, is somehow natural. We forget to really come to terms with things, and actually, it's not natural at all, it's cultural, an aspect of culture. Perhaps the potential of this picture lies precisely in the reconsideration of the way it's perceived. Which is why the difference between nature and culture is so important. As 'nature,' you would simply see it like that, it wouldn't be available for negotiation. But as 'culture,' you would say that seeing, the encounter, the confrontation, is a cultural model, which can also change. And perhaps this different way of seeing is precisely the one Kandinsky would have preferred.
MA Mondrian said, and so did Kandinsky, that at some point, there will be a telepathic transfer from artist to beholder, and then perhaps painting will becomes obsolete. But both also thought about how the viewer could be prepared for the new way of seeing. In the 21st century, you are doing it quite differently, in a time when people no longer actually see through this blockbuster mentality. They see Mondrian, which is so striking, it's immediately recognized and ticked off. You're attempting to return people to the capacities that lie behind cultural conditioning, to make them attentive.
OE Yes, but I don't do it alone. I'm glad you see it that way. Basically, my view is that you're working here against the blockbuster: no glass, no roping off, a trust that people won't damage the works. I hope my work here in the Grabbe Halle – and probably among all the works, it's the one Kandinsky would have dared, meaning ideas about space and negotiation and the idea that the dimensionality constantly changes – I hope that a work like mine influences people's perceptual capacities. And afterwards people go over there and think: "It's as though I've passed directly into a painting."
Translation: Ian Pepper
