Künstlergespräch: Gaylen Gerber mit Konrad Bitterli, in der Galerie Susanna Kulli St. Gallen, engl.
Zu der Ausstellung
Auf Wunsch von Gaylen Gerber fehlt die Tonaufnahme.
KONRAD BITTERLI: Before I would like to talk to you about your work on show in this wonderful exhibition at the Susanna Kulli Gallery, let me first turn to the grey monochrome paintings that in the past have been shown in major exhibitions among them for instance the documenta IX. I wonder how these paintings developed? How did you arrive at monochrome painting at all?
GAYLEN GERBER: The grey paintings, and I think these new works really have the same content, the grey paintings were a long time in coming. As a young artist I didn’t have a specific idea. I was making larger kind of minimal, abstract works, and it wasn’t right. So I started over and kind of planted myself. I just thought I’ll add all the things that I had taken out, meaning, color, representation, kind of phenomenal observation, scale. I marked my location. I took a big felt pen and made a line around my feet. I ended up with a table in front of me with all this stuff, standing there for a dozen years. I was painting a foot or two away so the phenomenal experience would almost be corresponding to the viewing, making as little discrepancy as possible. After a while it became apparent that I became very interested in this small shifting. One of the things that was problematic was the color. Because the color was so constantly in flux, so fugitive that I was spending all my time reorchestrating it. I was using the color in a way that had to do with an effort to make color really work. I was not using it symbolically. I would work on these paintings for maybe 6 or 9 months and at a certain point either abandon them or just go on. At one point I showed these paintings.
KONRAD BITTERLI: What were the reactions like?
GAYLEN GERBER: I wanted an intimacy. But what happened was people walked in, saw this big painting and immediately went to the other end of the room, so they could take it all in, and I was disheartened. Well, I had to figure out a different way. I decided to use one color. I took all my colors and collapsed them into one grey color. But it wasn’t a black and white grey, it was a grey that represented all the colors and black and white. It was broken down into three values. I closed the values as close as possible. And I started still painting fairly large but the paintings started little by little to get smaller because I was painting all wet into wet. I’d start a painting and would not finish it and I’d work like a dog. They were still 5‘ by 6‘. I would just drink a lot of coffee and work on them maybe four days, five days, however long it took until the paintings were tacky enough that I couldn’t work on them any more. They didn’t need to be this big. If I’m really dealing with intimacy I can make it as big as a kind of body orientation. At the same time the tones became closer because I was getting more accustomed to learning how to differentiate between small variances. After a few years they arrived at this certain size. But I really avoided making them monochrome, I really avoided making them grey. It was all the things I didn’t want except for me they had a meaning, and the meaning was something that was so ordinary, something that we had in common that was not personally derived but socially derived to set the foundation for an intimate experience. It opened the door for lots of other things when I started thinking about conventions.
KONRAD BITTERLI: What do you mean by „conventions“?
GAYLEN GERBER: It had to do with language, architecture, and with all these things that are somehow there but not always visible. Once I had figured out that I could formalize them, I mean in a rigorous way, not in an aesthetic way, it set up these parameters that really freed me. What I had to do was go in and really pay attention and open myself up. I found I had more freedom personally within this very small framework. Making a painting – something that initially started with a kind of discipline and then took on an absurdity ended up being really liberating and fun. This gave me something. I was really organized. I had this way to liberate myself that I thought like, I’ve done my work and now I can really play, see my friends. So I think it was a way to organize myself, my time, my view of the world. It was extremely hermetic. When I would make my work I would close the door, turn off the telephone; and when I didn’t I became way more social than I ever was before. And then one day I went in to make a painting, this was after 12 years of making the same painting in the same spot. So I go in and I start making this painting, and for the first time in a dozen years I can’t make a painting. Nothing’s there. I’d paint for a whole day and I’d just think, sometimes you just have to say what it is, this is a lie. So I call my friend Hershel Roman who’s also an artist, and I think he’s going to be really sympathetic, and I say, „will you come to pick me up for dinner“. And he says, „I’ll be there in an hour“. He comes, and we go out, and I say, „God, you know for the first time today I started this painting and I can’t finish it“. And I’m thinking I’ll get like a good hour of sympathy and I’ll be out of this. And he looks at me and he just says, „so you’ll do something else“. I was crushed. But in retrospect I thought he’s really right. My work was never intended to be some sort of monument. It was a way to make my world have meaning, and if it didn’t have meaning that way, I should figure out how it did. It took me a year. I thought about making big work, small work. I thought I’d make them really tremendously differentiated in terms of value black and white with lots of color, and representation, and everything that I had kind of wanted to do one day. And so I tried all these different things. After a years time I ended up with these paintings that were square, and grey, and the same color as before – except the representation now didn’t have a value differentiation but it was a relief that was on the surface. So it carried another representation in hindsight. I was in the same spot but instead of looking in I was looking out. But it took me this big circle round to realize that something fundamental had changed. My view of the world was not about how to organize my time but how organize our time.
KONRAD BITTERLI: Let me come back to the issue of painting one again. The American critic Clement Greenberg insisted on two aspects in the perception of a work of art: first the „unity of the object“, that is the purity of form, and second the „singularity of experience“. These two aspects do not apply at all to your work. On the contrary your work seems to radically questions these two categories?
GAYLEN GERBER: I think in the grey paintings I slowed down sense of drawing conclusions. So from one point to another and from one painting to another it became apparent that a lot of the conclusions we were drawing and the way we were making meaning was precarious. These new works here at the gallery literally overlay different frames of reference – one over the other. So that they coalesce, and at the same time you realize that the clear skies are this kind of images of undifferentiated „purity“. These images of difference, these colloquial – vernacular images are laid on top of them. The frames all carry different frames of reference depending on where you put your focus. One of the things I’m interested in, and this is one of the reasons why we included these flowering trees in this exhibition, is the idea of using a different model, a model of plenty as oposed to a critical model, a model that is built on opposition and adversarial relationship. If all these things are in the world and interesting and legitimate and I think they are, these different ways of approaching of seeing and being, all these boundaries between them, these seams between ideological representations start to break down, and I like it because what it does for me on a personal level is it changes the way I respond to the world. What I really like is for these objects to work in a way that they make you think and make you talk, and if nothing else they lessen the sense of certainty and dogma and rigidity. The paradox is that often I’m using convention, dogma to make this apparent, and I realize that so much of what I deal with is dogmatic. I’m using the vernacular of a number of critical investigations in my work, and the fact that they bring in monochrome and they’re square and they’re regular, you know for a lot of people it hits the off button. All these things have to come together.
KONRAD BITTERLI: There seems to be a conceptual attitude in your work that is combined with the idea of painting as a convention. Your grey paintings, produced in series of the same size, of course, brings up the fundamental question of artistic creation and the artist as author. Although your paintings insist on being so to speak „handmade“, there is a very limited number of decisions that you as an artist can take. For you on the other hand this limitation is a kind of freedom too. What is a stake here is the author as well as the notion of the original. These two categories however, are crucial to the convention of painting; they seem to belong to the realm of painting, of the history of painting. I suppose you would therefore not regard yourself primarly as a painter?
GAYLEN GERBER: I really like painting and I don’t want to be embarrassed about it. Am I a painter? Yeah. I think that is my tradition, the tradition that has informed the way I’ve thought about things. Am I limited to making things with a paint brush? No. I think these works in the show at Susanna’s are a good example. People keep calling them paintings but really they’re charcoal or graphite ilfachrome with photographic images. They use a number of disciplines wrongly. It‘s another one of those categorical positions I don’t need to take. As far as drawing attention to the artist, I think I‘m in part a product of the times I came out of, and I really came to maturity as an artist in the eighties and the sense of originality was not an issue. It was almost rhetorical. It was and it wasn’t at the same time original, and the idea of having to make a claim for your originality wasn’t necessary. So there is a kind of a freedom in that. I didn’t feel compelled to claim that my works were unique or not. What was interesting is that they were obviously repetitive, practice orientated. I made a number of issues fairly rhetorical. For me that was the accomplishment and the fun of it. At the time I was also doing shows that were repetition; the exact show again. There was a kind of pleasure there, it was like a house of cards or a house of mirrors.
KONRAD BITTERLI: With reference to your grey paintings the American critic, Kathrin Hixon used the term „cynical endgame strategy“. The material side of your work however seems to be a new basis, a starting point for perception rather than an end in itself.
GAYLEN GERBER: It gets floated every now and then that painting is dead or this could be the last painting. I think my background was personally apathetic, and so I fit into this discourse extremely well. I liked the rhetorical. I liked things that were non-heroic. I really had an affection for banal and the idea that there was a discourse about things being dead but not really, or things being dead but still functioning. I don’t have a problem with that. It was always framed in really simplistic terms or it was one of those issues that was put into the world and then fizzled away. At the time artists like Jeff Koons were seen as part of this kind of endgame. Everybody was included at one time or another, Sherri Levine and a lot of other people, really good artists – but do they all have something in common that didn’t make an end to something? It just seemed wrong headed. I think there’s an underlying question here and that is an alternative to a progressive model where things actually are linearly developed. And this obviously is not linear nor is it going anywhere. It is presently orientated and it’s circular. I made paintings because I thought it was an interesting language and I was attracted to it. Not because I had an ideological edge to push, and I still think I avoid it because so often I’ll end up being in the company of people who want to save painting or to protect it, and I just cringe. Anyway... a little bit of me got in there at the edge.
KONRAD BITTERLI: Conventional painters, if I may use this term, seem to try and define a primary place for their medium. They seem to try and redefine it in the context of contemporary art. What is your understanding of painting?
GAYLEN GERBER: What is interesting for me about painting is it does seem viable. I was attracted to painting because it was seen as dead, as conventional. So my interest in it is in its institutional nature. I’m interested in it as being an innovator or an innovator in a traditional sense but in its ability to be a kind of conventional backdrop, a screen against which things can be measured. The painting itself is not a focal point around which everything generates, but the thing that somehow gives us scaled measure and embellishes or supports our daily activity. My larger paintings really function literally as a backdrop, and the smaller paintings act as a prop or a support. They really are meant to be ancillary objects.
KONRAD BITTERLI: Looking at your installations I realize you have quite often collaborated with artists involved in other disciplines. You’ve also been exhibiting regularly with photographers with some quite extreme juxtapositions that are extraordinary within this context. I remember for example the exhibition at Galerie Nächst St. Stephan in 1994 where in one room your paintings were right next to James Welling’s photographs and in the second room a silverprint of his was juxtaposed with a number of your empty photographs of clear skies. Later that same year in New York you juxtaposed a large monochromatic canvas the exact size of the wall, it was hanging on with Joe Scanlan’s eccentric objects. Is this something you want to push forward and what interest do you take in such juxtapositions?
GAYLEN GERBER: I think it’s a way of addressing something I don’t know; it recontextualizes things so that they can be seen in another way. Whether I’m organizing my work with someone elses or not, my basic motivation is the same. It’s an occasion for entertaining uncertainty, especially about the artifice of exhibition situations. The exhibition you mentioned with James Welling is a good example. Both of us employ a neutral style in which there is a systematic observation of subjects set against a uniform grey background. The part of the exhibition that I found most intriguing was the one you were talking about with of a number of my untitled photographs of clear skies along with one of Jim Welling’s photographs of a landscape. My pieces were nearly identical gelatin silverprints of a perfectly clear sky on a bright day. The prints were flat, without differentiation and because it’s a black and white process they’re a very uniform grey. Jim’s photograph was of a typical western landscape, also a silverprint. It consisted of a spare foreground with a rocky hill and a grey sky behind. What was interesting in this juxtaposition was that the value of the sky in this photograph was within the same very small value range as the skies in my photographs. When the viewers read Jim’s photograph they were compelled to also recognize my images as skies. As a result they subsequently imposed a time, place and narrative on them based on his image. One of the reasons I’m interested in engaging with other artists is that it’s a way of attempting to break down categorical parameters without losing individuality. My use of the live trees in this exhibition is similar; they bring in an unavoidable immediacy as well as a rhetorical element.
KONRAD BITTERLI: Your photographs seem to show similar perceptual qualities as your grey paintings. Did they develop alongside the paintings or follow them?
GAYLEN GERBER: They both went simultaneously. I’ve been doing different bodies of work. I can never quite see where it’s going. It’s a little like walking in the dark. It’s like travelling without a road map. I think I used other artists I was interested in and friends as much as they used me. Part of it also I was learning to let go and trust your instincts and intuition. I may in two years go in a different direction and try to rewrite my whole thinking about it, which I’ve done before. When I did the sky photographs they were this beautiful object, image that was right on the fence. It could be full, it could be empty, it could be all these things. It could be completely rhetorical, and it was so phenomenal. Then I ended up making another body of work identical to it and working on top of it. So that changes that whole body of work. I’ll give you a good example. This was a big change, and it was in 1994, only a few years after the grey still life paintings. I was asked to do a show in New York and I wanted to do a backdrop and asked Joe Scanlan if he wanted to do it with me. So he brought all his work and started doing a number of things. One of the things Joe had made that I really liked was that he made dirt, on a piece of plastic. At a certain point he was putting stuff up and we were not saying anything just walking around the gallery. My painting can’t move, it’s the same size as the wall. So I walked over with this piece of plastic and poured the dirt on the floor, and he looked at it. He didn’t say anything. He walked over and stood in the the dirt, and I thought that’s great. So I walked over and stood in the dirt too. Then we started moving the dirt around. I thought this is interesting, it’s something that’s really flexible and it always has this metaphor of dirtying, of qualifying, and then something that is really a backdrop, very pure, very representational, representational of the architecture. If you think about these two elements they are exactly the elements that I’m using here. It wasn’t until later that we realized that this was really important. It was completely nonverbal. But we were tuned in and trusting each other enough to think it’s right. More often then not it’s been to me like that.
KONRAD BITTERLI: Even if you look closely at your photographs here in the exhibition it is extremely difficult to find out how they are made technically. Could you tell us something about that?
GAYLEN GERBER: It starts with this ilfachrome which is a photograph of a clear sky on a perfect day. It is completely undifferentiated. I actually pointed the camera closer to the horizon so there’s a slight modulation on them. Basically I wanted a perfect blue and I really worked hard to get a blue that wasn’t a deep cibachrome blue. Over the blue there’s an image. I take a number of photographs, and they fall within certain kind of categories but they have a vernacular to them, so there’s always a kind of recognition, something in transition. Often these images are entropic. They are made with a stencil. The image is just dusted on to the photograph so the stencil never quite touches the photograph. There is a slight discrepancy. It destroys the kind of focus that a photograph has. It gives it a material quality, also a sense of being dusty, dirty. There are so many different disciplines which go into making these works, from photography to printmaking, to painting, to architecture, frame making. Each one is not tremendously difficult. Trying to make them all come together is usually a matter of fair difficulty. But it’s not a matter of technical virtuosity.
KONRAD BITTERLI: What about the frame? The plexiglass frame seems to be rather important to the visual effect too. It also departs from the conventions of both photography and painting.
GAYLEN GERBER: They are really co-opted from the 60‘s and 70‘s, from people like Agnes Martin and Robert Ryman, artists who were dealing with this present discourse. How to keep the work in the room, how to bring in a number of things. All of painting relates to architecture but these really feel like boxes. This new work has the quality of bringing in reflection, distance, metaphors about modern architecture. The relationship here is one that I’d like to make to process and practice oriented work but now bringing in other elements. So I did not want to put them in a frame, in a window. You can see all the references to windows here but when they’re on the wall they feel like objects in a room rather than a window through the wall. Much more like the grey paintings they really aren’t about something being pure but about something being put into the world representing a number of positions. It is absolutely infinite. These vernaculars are meant to be almost everywhere. These cones that represent barrier could be here, they could be in New York, they could be in LA, they could be in Tokyo. This image that is such a rhetorical barrier to the image underneath it that they’re meant to both: situate themselves in time and make that a question. A proposition rather than a statement. I’ve used very conventional elements like graphite charcoal, photography, painting, plexiglass. Each represents something different, historically and in terms of time. I put them all together so they make an object that at first glance appears to be easily knowable, meaning like you think it‘s a picture of... But then the more you look the more its qualities are drawn into question.
PUBLIC: How did you arrive at those images? Are they images that you take?
GAYLEN GERBER: Yeah, they’re all images that I’ve taken. Often they allude to certain discourses but they are meant to be so common, so vernacular, almost ordinary, nonsensical, banal. This one with the film dolly for example is a film location but it’s so much about the materials that go into making it that it could be anywhere, anytime. It simply is about defining itself in a conventional, general way that gives you information but not enough to really be informative in terms of locating yourself. And that’s what I like, that sense of dislocation.
PUBLIC: Do these photographs, these paintings still refer to that kind of tradition you were referring to at Zurich in Adrian Schiess’s <<still life>> show regarding that sense of dislocation?
GAYLEN GERBER: Absolutely. That’s a big part of it. I think it’s both, an attribute, something that’s really good and connecting with everything, and also something not being connected to the world which is a kind of great defense. If I’m nowhere you can’t pin me down. I realized that there is as much camouflage in these works, as there is opening up to the world. It’s why I understand when people come to them and feel very ambivalent. I’ve just accepted this as the content, as the way I understand the world. Both of these really diametrically opposed things are there. They’re not in conflict but there’s some kind of resolution in thinking it’s just like how we are. We’re fairly complicated.
KONRAD BITTERLI: In your work and your exhibitions the boundaries of the media are constantly shifted. You show something that looks like a painting but that is in fact a photograph and is finally transformed into an object on the wall. Furthermore the media are often used against their inherent qualities. Photography, a medium to depict the outside world, is used as monochrome ground. On the other hand painting and drawing that have the potential of formal autonomy is used to depict this very same outside world. Your work seems to establish a discourse on media.
GAYLEN GERBER: Yes. Absolutely. Everything is acknowledged, and in some way it’s misapplied. It’s a little from my ineptness. Photographers probably think these are tremendously messy and painters probably think these are much more cool and objective like photography. The qualities in each don’t necessarily correspond to their commercial use. I think it says something about not only the history of each discipline but their application as well.
KONRAD BITTERLI: In your installation at the Renaissance Society in Chicago you blocked off one third of the space and you showed one row of paintings along the wall, keeping the rest of the space empty. And in this exhibition too, you show one work on each wall, keeping them strictly separate as if to underline the aura of each one of them. Furthermore you have included those three plants. How do you approach space. What is you idea of installation, especially in this exhibition here?
GAYLEN GERBER: Often I’ve been using the architecture. In hindsight I’m thinking of these works as windows or literal objects in that way. And I think the idea of spreading them out seems appropriate because in a way they are much more condensed and pivotal. Especially since they use reflection they are bringing so much of the room into these little points, that it doesn’t take very many of them. At the Renaissance Society I would use these kind of structural elements in place of rhetorical elements. I’d block off the space, and it would act as something that if you were able to read the work you would think this isn’t division, this is simply an illusion. One of the things that was interesting to me here at Susanna’s gallery are these walls built in by Gerwald Rockenschaub. Especially with this three quarter wall here I really did think the relationship between the flowering trees on one side, the photo work on the other, and this wall was the metaphor I was after. It let the room play a part; it let the trees affect the work, and both of them affected the room in a way. I used my intuition as much as anything, and I don’t have a rationalization except that it felt the way I needed it to feel. If you think back the other work that I made and the sense of cooperation that happens in so many of these pieces, I was really thinking of this wall as not only the gallery’s but as Gerwald Rockenschaub’s wall. It was almost like putting a frame on a drawing, on a photograph, on a work of art in front of these flowering trees; so it just had this cascading effect. When Susanna originally asked me to do this I thought maybe I’d have to send 20 works and I thought, 20 works, I’m going to be so busy. When I came it was just apparent that it wasn’t going to take 20 works, it was going to take a handful. Why that is I can’t quite say. This work is still quite new to me but I have not installed it edge to edge. Right now I’m thinking of them as a coalescence of all of these ideas; the installation, the cooperative projects, even the discreet objects. Yet they take their own space. This is the first time that they’ve been in color and that they’ve had such a feeling about them. This is the biggest departure from a kind of cool aesthetic that I’ve made, and that’s what I really want. I want them to be way more challenging for me to do, unknowable. And also for the viewer. I think there’s also a sense of maleness in all these.
PUBLIC: Combining these paintings with other dimensions like architecture and photography seems to deconstruct the aureate meaning of a painting.
GAYLEN GERBER: They end up being rhetorical or empty containers, backdrops to our behavior. They are a way of seeing, a way of observing. The content of the work is the viewer‘s, including me, and our behavior. It isn’t in the work, there is almost a disinterest in the actual object after their installation, they really function differently.
KONRAD BITTERLI: Yeah, I wouldn’t see them as aureate works simply because they are far too evasive as images and as objects. The works are small, very fragile, they don’t push into space. They are kind of still playing with the idea of painting but insisting on not being a painting at the same time. They are paintings, photographs and plexiglass objects...
GAYLEN GERBER: All of that. If I think about painting as it relates to architecture and then becoming a representation with its flat surface parallel to this other surface, it then becomes portable, and I’m thinking about that portability, that movability, and I transfer it to the viewer. For the last century we’ve really dealt with architecture that has reinforced the sense of flat plains, perpendiculars, and as architecture moves away – I‘m thinking about Eisenman or Gherry –, as it moves away from perpendiculars and flat plains, necessarily this convention can adopt that. I think about someone like Elsworth Kelly and the way he’s dealt with bringing in illusion into something that’s flat and parallel. I actually started looking for opportunities to work in a Gherry building, and one of the big disappointements was in Gherry buildings often the outside is extremely biomorphic and the inside is rectilinear. There was this little museum close to where I lived in Glasgow in which the outside is absolutely indefinable and the inside is very conventional. It’s set up to accommodate these paintings that had been made looking back, and the idea is that this is a language and one of the possibilities is as the thing that it represents changes, it changes too. That would really be fantastic.
PUBLIC: The time of the photograph, the time of the painting, the time of the viewer, and there is the time of the plants. They are changing during the exhibition. They flower, they dry out, their leaves are falling down...
GAYLEN GERBER: They actually have a life span that is in a way much shorter and defined by the seasonal involvement. They feel inverted. What I’ve done with other exhibitions is that at the time of the show it’s late fall and these are really in the time of their life which is high spring. They come out of a greenhouse, they have this artificial plenty-perfect wonderful outlock. Where do you draw the line between real and unreal, between natural and unnatural? But all of this is natural; there isn’t a division to be made. What’s destructed and what’s constructed is semantic, and that is basically all natural. It doesn’t mean that we don’t have hard decisions to make and lines to draw but it makes a proposition, a question, instead of a kind of statement.
KONRAD BITTERLI: You have already mentionned the walls in the gallery that have been built in by Gerwald Rockenschaub. Susanna Kulli also represents artists such as John Armleder, Olivier Mosset or Adrian Schiess. I suppose you must feel a certain relation to their work.
GAYLEN GERBER: Yeah. This is what I think the discourse is going towards, what’s happening. I take a lot of support and comfort from their work because I think I actually understand it, and I’m not alone in this. There should be this cross over.
Im Rahmen der Ausstellung Gaylen Gerber ein Künstlergespräch mit Konrad Bitterli am 17. Januar 1998. Die Ausstellung dauerte vom 13. September bis 31. Oktober 1997.
Gaylen Gerber, geboren 1955 in McAllen, Texas, lebt und arbeitet in Chicago.
Konrad Bitterli, geboren 1960, lic. phil., Kurator, stellvertretender Direktor, Kunstmuseum St.Gallen, St. Gallen.
Transkript, Lektorat: Galerie Susanna Kulli, St. Gallen, 1998.