Kunstsammlung NRW
Installationsansicht: Matthias Wollgast, "The shared Oasis of the Gift Shop", 2014, Ausstellungsdesign in Zusammenarbeit mit Edi Winarni, Foto: Moritz Wegwerth
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"The Idea above Everything": Three Questions for Matthias Wollgast

Matthias Wollgast makes photographs without a camera, paints without any commitment to painting, and works conceptually, but doesn't care to be referred to as a conceptual artist. His work ranges from hand-colored photographs, artist’s books, postcards, and objects to spatial installations. For the Düsseldorf Photo Weekend, he will be presenting his installation “The Shared Oasis of the Gift Shop” from January 30 to February 5, 2015, at the F3 Schmela Haus.

For #32, Arnika Fürgut asked him three questions.

Your installation at the F3 Schmela Haus bears the title “The Shared Oasis of the Gift Shop,” and presents original works alongside postcards and artist’s books. Should we view the work, then, as an actual art shop?

Matthias Wollgast: Actually, the installation is more of a citation of a shop than the shop itself, just as the title is based on a citation from Douglas Couplands. In preparing for this work, I was preoccupied with Boris Groys, who in Über das Neue (1992) describes a culture that valorize the conceptual model of space. I attempted to transfer this bipolar model of an abstract space to the concrete space of the museum: valorized, upvalued space is opposed here by profane space, and to remain with this example: when you enter the museum, you move from the outside world into a valorized context. This means that in the museum context, profane objects become art; just think of the Readymades. What I find interesting about these two spaces is that the exchange between them runs in reciprocal directions: profane objects are valorized, while valorized objects are devalued and trivialized.

Which means I’m interested in the question of the dependence of art on its specific context, and based on this, the constant alternation between contextualization, (de)valuation, and attribution. Here, I believe the space of the gift shop plays a very special role, especially since in a number of museums, it is being shifted geographically closer and closer to the exhibition galleries. In this sense, it actually becomes a membrane or interface between valorized and profane spaces, between the museum’s interior and its exterior. Does this spatial shift proceed in a parallel movement to a convergence of content? In the shop, the works seen in the exhibition are offered as profanized replicas, i.e. as postcards, posters, and catalogs, and hence strongly trivialized. At the end of an exhibition, do we find ourselves standing in front of an indexed rack of postcards – in a way that resembles my installation – filled with signifiers and references to the original work, which we believe we know, even though we may never have seen it in the original?

 

 

Craftsmanship plays a major role in your work – even when this is not noticeable at first glance. Actually, you come from painting; you work with cameraless photography and color your works by hand. What weight do you attach to craftsmanship in your work?

Wollgast: I wouldn't say that craftsmanship plays a major role, it is instead a question of trying to come to terms with the significance of craftsmanship. Although I don't necessarily see myself primarily as a painter or draftsman, I am the most important tool and instrument of my work. With the cameraless photography, I'm working with a medium for which I have developed an independent and highly specific method, here, I constantly have to make aesthetic decisions and implement them. Despite this, the idea of the work always comes before its execution, it holds the individual components together. It may sound paradoxical, but in fact, I expend quite a lot of artistic and artisanal energy in order to remove myself from my work. On my postcards, for example, the only trace of me as an artist and producer is my name printed in small format on the back; through the motif in and of itself, no one would be able to identify my artistic intervention.

Both in terms of content and form, your works are is highly complex, all of them exist on multiple levels, they refer to one another, are densified by you, separated from one another again, and repositioned in perpetually new contexts. Is there an overarching theme that reappears again and again? What are you working on at the moment?

Matthias Wollgast: At the moment, I’m working on the history of art – not in the sense of exemplary works, but instead in relation to the phenomenon of the historiography and construction of art. Just recently, Wael Shawky suggested this theme in his Cabaret Crusades at the K20: history is always also a construction, its individual elements marked by subjective sources and by tradition, without any claim to completeness, perhaps even riddled with manipulation, fakery, and false information. In my view, this is particularly obvious in the case of the history of art: things could have turned out completely differently: that’s why in my book OBMOKhU 79 with THE RECONSTRUCTIVISTS, I constructed an artist’s group, and hence a segment of art history, in the form of a fake that actually could have been a part of reality in 1976 – but never actually was. Do we assess our perceptions of reality differently once we have been deceived by false information, but were able to expose it? That is, for example, a kind of overarching question that I encounter again and again my work.


“The Shared Oasis of the Gift Shop” will be on view from January 30 to February 1, 2015, at the F3 Schmela Haus in the context of the Düsseldorf Photo Weekend; admission is free of charge. 

Matthias Wollgast will speak about his work with Dr. Doris Krystof, a curator at the Kunstsammlung, on February 5 at 7 pm at the F3 Schmela Haus. The installation will be open to the public for this event. Admission is free of charge. Information about the event is available here.

www.matthias-wollgast.de

Fotos: Matthias Wollgast, „The shared Oasis of the Gift Shop“, 2014, Ausstellungsdesign in Zusammenarbeit mit Edi Winarni, Fotograf: Moritz Wegwerth.

Interview: Arnika Fürgut