Press Release
DAS INSTITUT
3 March – 15 May 2016
Serpentine Sackler Gallery
The Serpentine presents the first major exhibition of work by Kerstin
Brätsch (born 1979, Hamburg) and Adele Röder (born 1980, Dresden) in a UK
public institution.
Brätsch and Röder are based in New York and London. While each has her
own practice, the artists have worked collaboratively as DAS INSTITUT since
2007. The exhibition at the Serpentine Sackler Gallery present works
resulting from their collaboration as well as pieces from their individual
practices.
In her work, Brätsch uses painting to question the ways in which the body
can be expressed – psychologically, physically and socially – while Röder
searches for basic symbolic forms to create a non-verbal language utilising
clothing, posture and light. As DAS INSTITUT the artists attempt to
communicate the inexpressible – the intuitive, irrational element of human
experience and relationships.
DAS INSTITUT focuses on the kinds of communication that occur between
individuals, and this has led them to collaborate with other artists. Featured
within the show are a number of additional contributions: a film by historian
and filmmaker Alexander Kluge, a site-specific sound work by Sergei
Tcherepnin, a series of traditional Hawaiian Hula dances organised by Ei
Arakawa, and a fragmented portrait of Brätsch and Röder by Allison Katz.
The exhibition DAS INSTITUT focuses on the transformative properties and
effects of light on bodies and spaces. The skylights of the gallery is covered
with coloured gels and the key sources of light will be the artworks
themselves, as projected images, as stained glass and as neon shapes.
Traces of Brätsch and Röder’s own physical presence will also be made
visible: silhouettes and photographs of their bodies are incorporated into a
number of works, such as the Am Sonntag Series (2014), while their faces and
figures emerge through the surfaces of pieces, such as Dark Codex (2015).
Julia Peyton-Jones, Director, and Hans Ulrich Obrist, Co-Director,
Serpentine Galleries, said: “DAS INSTITUT’s careful layering of images and
artworks brings together their two separate practices to create a third, fluid
group of images and shapes that exist only for the duration of the
exhibition and which find new forms each time they are presented. In doing
so, the intentions of each artist is blurred, encouraging new understandings
and interpretations of their work.”
For press information contact:
Miles Evans, [email protected], +44 (0)20 7298 1544
V Ramful, [email protected], +44 (0)20 7298 1519
Press images at serpentinegalleries.org/press
Serpentine Gallery, Kensington Gardens, London W2 3XA
Serpentine Sackler Gallery, West Carriage Drive, Kensington Gardens, London
W2 2AR
Image Credit:
Dark Codex (from “Almanach, Eclipses and Venus Cycles” Series) DAS INSTITUT, 2015
Medium format slide projection
Size variable
PELE’S Tears ...is Hot Stone Red Eyes Red Stone
Kerstin Brätsch, 2014/2015
Rose window shards, antique glass shards, agates, lead, luster, enamel on baked antique glass
97.7 x 62 cm
Photo Credit: Thomas Mueller
Directors’ Foreword
It’s the collective that creates the platform on which I can actually
operate as a human being … I attach importance to one thing,
someone else attaches importance to another thing … And that’s
actually a form of human progress—Alexander Kluge
DAS INSTITUT was formed by Kerstin Brätsch (born 1979,
Hamburg) and Adele Röder (born 1980, Dresden) in 2007 as
a collaborative project through which they bring together and
overlay artworks that they have created as individuals. DAS
INSTITUT is characterised by the way in which both artists
have embraced an impressively wide variety of materials as well
as by their unique approach to collaborative production, which
enables them to move from the personal to the collective. Objects
generated individually by each of the artists are presented in
their original form and as components of new artworks, with
images shifting between different scales and media, encompassing painting, neon works, slide projections and installations.
Brätsch uses painting to question the ways in which the body
can be expressed psychologically, physically and socially. Her
paintings are realised in a range of materials such as paper, Mylar
and glass, often using traditional techniques learnt from master
craftsmen. Röder searches for basic symbolic forms to create a
non-verbal language. She utilises the body and light to create her
own runes, exploring rudimentary visual symbols that have
­enabled communication between humans for centuries.
The exhibition at the Serpentine Sackler Gallery is the first
major presentation of work by Brätsch and Röder in a British public institution, and has at its heart a focus on the transformative
properties of light on bodies and spaces. Brätsch’s stained-glass
and Mylar paintings are paired with, or presented in close proximity to Röder’s neon shapes which illuminate them, creating
a visual and conceptual bond. Other works included in the exhibition, such as the slide projections Dark Codex (2016) and Am
Sonntag series (2014), are the result of a careful layering of each
artist’s individual works. The artists’ careful combination of
works, selection of display techniques and manipulation of
the natural properties of the building—coloured gels in the
Gallery’s skylights throw washes of colour across the objects
below—creates a hypnotic and ethereal atmosphere. In devising
this site-specific display that responds to the peculiarities of
the building, Brätsch and Röder have constructed a complex
and mysterious world for their works to inhabit.
The blurring of authorship is evident throughout the exhibition
as it also involves unique contributions from Brätsch and Röder’s
long-term collaborators: artist and composer Sergei Tcherepnin
and multi-disciplinary and performance artist Ei Arakawa, as
well as a new collaboration with renowned German author and
filmmaker Alexander Kluge. An installation of DAS INSTITUT’s
work in one of the Gallery’s historic brick powder rooms has
been combined with a sound and light composition by Tcherepnin,
which was developed in relation to the configuration of works
within the space to produce an immersive, multi-sensory experience. Arakawa has developed a choreographed dance performance in response to Brätsch and Röder’s artworks, as well as
to the architecture of the building. Kluge, whose words appear
throughout this publication, has contributed a video work which
is inspired by the work of DAS INSTITUT. Last but not least,
Brätsch and Röder’s exhibition also presents an artwork created
in collaboration with painter Allison Katz, titled AKA / Scattered
A, Scattered K / Sleep / Exhumed [body parts] (2012–ongoing).
We are indebted to Brätsch and Röder for the dedication and
energy they have devoted to creating this ambitious e­ xhibition
and for agreeing to produce a beautiful Limited ­Edition work.
We also extend our thanks to Alexander Kluge, Sergei Tcherepnin,
Ei Arakawa and Allison Katz for their involvement in and
­support of the exhibition.
This publication is the first monograph on DAS INSTITUT
and has been designed by the artists themselves, in collaboration
with Studio Marie Lusa, and we thank them all for their hard
work. Our sincere thanks go to the authors of the book for their
remarkable contributions. Alejandro Jodorowsky, famed filmmaker and author, kindly agreed to participate in a conversation
with DAS INSTITUT and to conduct a tarot reading for both
artists. Psychologist Professor Friedrich Heubach has written
an insightful response to this tarot reading. The publication
also includes a conversation between Alexander Kluge, Kerstin
Brätsch and Hans Ulrich Obrist which discusses the artists’
individual practices as well as the way in which they have developed their collaborative project. The exhibition’s curator
Rebecca Lewin has provided an introduction to DAS INSTITUT’s work and to the themes of the exhibition. We are enormously grateful to all contributors for the time and enthusiasm
they have committed to this publication.
There are a number of organisations and individuals whose help
and involvement have been essential to this project. Vionnet
have generously supported the exhibition; their global dedication to culture is significant and the Serpentine Galleries are
delighted to be a beneficiary of their support.
We are deeply grateful to the DAS INSTITUT Exhibition
Circle: Ringier Collection, Switzerland, Tony and Elham Salamé,
Aïshti Foundation, Beirut-Lebanon, and to those donors who
wish to remain anonymous. We also thank Gavin Brown’s
enterprise and Gió Marconi Gallery for their generous support
and contributions, without which the exhibition would not
have been possible.
The public funding that the Serpentine receives through Arts
Council England provides an important support towards all
of the Galleries’ work and we remain very appreciative of their
continued commitment.
The continued success of the Galleries is made possible thanks
to the Council of the Serpentine, an extraordinary group that
provides essential ongoing contributions. The Americas Founda­
tion, The Learning Council, Patrons, Future Contemporaries
and Benefactors are also key supporters of the Serpentine’s programme and we thank them.
Finally, we would like to express our gratitude to the remarkable
Serpentine team: Lizzie Carey-Thomas, Head of Programmes;
Rebecca Lewin, Exhibitions Curator; Agnes Gryczkowska, Assistant Curator; Mike Gaughan, Gallery Manager; and Joel Bunn,
Installation and Production Manager. All have worked closely
with the wider Serpentine Galleries staff to realise this project
and we are most grateful for their hard work and dedication.
JULIA PEYTON-JONES
Director, Serpentine Galleries
and Co-Director, Exhibitions
and Programmes
HANS ULRICH OBRIST
Co-Director, Exhibitions
and Programmes and
Director of International Projects
A feeling which is right only once:
DAS INSTITUT at the Serpentine
Sackler Gallery
Rebecca Lewin
The collective DAS INSTITUT is made up of two artists,
­Kerstin Brätsch and Adele Röder, but is not limited to them.
It exists in parallel with their individual practices, and as an
entity it can operate in tandem with other groups and individuals.
For example, DAS INSTITUT with UNITED BROTHERS
and Nhu Dong showed together at the Halle für Kunst in Lüneburg
in 2011, while Kerstin Brätsch and DAS INSTITUT had a
group exhibition at the Kölnischer Kunstverein in the same
year. DAS INSTITUT acts as an ever-mutating form, a field
that can shrink and expand to fit new scenarios, new relationships and other kinds of institutions. It can present images
­originally generated elsewhere but adopted and sublimated by
Brätsch and Röder. It can embrace the actions and interventions
of other artists, the techniques and skills of other professions,
and the limitations of the spaces and structures in which it
finds itself.
DAS INSTITUT is simply not knowing his own name 1
Initiated in 2007, DAS INSTITUT was formed by Brätsch and
Röder out of a desire to explore new ways of working together,
and with others. The idea of an institution that is defined neither
by the individuals who work within it, nor by an immediately
recognisable output, was intentionally subversive. The creation
of a branded identity was a mantle of self-aggrandisement that
the artists intended to work with and behind, much like the
great façade of the Emerald City in L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900), to test the edges of their individual
practices and to question the ways in which cooperative and
corporate production sites, such as (arts) institutions, define
themselves. As they put it, this particular type of codified relationship enabled ‘A massive multiplication—and so creation,
obfuscation, and perpetual annihilation—of the self. Also: a
distribution of responsibility, blame, consequence … In an LLP,
one partner isn’t responsible or liable for another partner’s misconduct or negligence.’ 2
The question of the annihilation of the self through cooperative
rather than corporate action is key to understanding the power
of DAS INSTITUT’s work and the critical position it has
taken towards other institutions that present and distribute contemporary art. Rather than upholding the art market’s dependence on the brand of the individual, DAS INSTITUT pursues
a version of artistic production that instead draws upon the
concept of the dividual.3 This term was proposed by philosopher
Gilles Deleuze in 1990 to describe a person as being made up
of data that can be endlessly subdivided and recombined in order
to be understood. Deleuze understood this to be the negative
outcome of technologies that can track our every move and therefore present a picture of us that is not necessarily representative
of our uniqueness as individuals. Brätsch and Röder, meanwhile, employ a dividuality that allows them to produce work
that is indicative of their individual practices without relying
on the viewer being able—or wanting—to identify the originator.
Simply put, they present us with a question: who and what do
we see when we look at the work of DAS INSTITUT? Even
when the artists provide us with silhouettes of their own bodies
1
Kerstin Brätsch and Adele Röder in conversation with Beatrix Ruf
(http://www.we-find-wildness.com/2012/01/kerstin-bratsch-adele-rodervorahnung-united-brothers-and-sisters / accessed 17.01.16).
2
Francesco Spampanato, Come Together: The Rise of Cooperative Art
and Design (Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press, 2014), p. 60.
3
See Gilles Deleuze, ‘Postscript on the Societies of Control’, originally
published in French in L’Autre journal, no. 1 (May 1990) and in English in
OCTOBER, vol. 59, Winter 1992, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, pp. 3–7.
(http://www.jstor.org/stable/778828?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents
accessed 03.01.16).
(in Röder’s Solar Body Prints, 2013), or are photographed grimacing and partly obscured by costumes outfits and makeup (in the
slide projections titled Am Sonntag series (2014), they maintain
an ambivalence towards their own status as artists: they are not
just originators, they are also subjects and objects.
The human body is possibly the form that recurs the most within
DAS INSTITUT’s multifaceted practice. It appears throughout their work, not just in the clearly figurative forms described
above, but also as a code through which further objects and
constructions can be understood. Their art demands and discards
meaning by alluding to forms for which we are already programmed to search. The phenomenon of pareidolia, finding faces
in random forms, is common to most humans and occurs when
specific cells in the brain are activated by shapes reminiscent of
human-like faces.4 This process allows us to recognise a face
even before we have understood whether we are in fact looking
at a real person, a drawing of a person, or a cloud formation
that resembles a person. Brätsch’s marbled paintings from the
group entitled Unstable Talismanic Rendering/Pele’s Curse
(2014 / 2015) cultivate this experience, both in the way they are
produced and the way in which they are experienced. Using
the traditional technique of dropping paint onto the surface of
a shallow bath of water, Brätsch composes forms out of potential
randomness; the effect is a feeling of perpetual movement that
takes place in the mind rather than on the surface of the paper.
The paintings might be said to resemble Rorschach tests that
resolve and dissolve into faces, body parts or landscapes.
The moment of intuitive understanding that occurs before conscious analysis is perhaps what most fascinates Brätsch and
Röder—this fleeting moment that can only appear in the time
and space between bodies, between words, and between comprehension and articulation. Röder’s slide series O L Y M P I A,
or: Message from the Dark Room (2015) uses a set of runes—the
circle, curve and line—that are shuffled and rearranged to form
increasingly complex images to narrate an entire life cycle.5
Psychoanalyst Carl Gustav Jung wrote in his study of symbols
and the role they play in our imaginative lives that: ‘There are
… unconscious aspects of our perception of reality … [E]ven
when our senses react to real phenomena, sights, and sounds, they
are somehow translated from the realm of reality into that of
the mind. Within the mind they become psychic events whose
ultimate nature is unknowable.’ 6 The slide series Dark Codex
(2016) presents an alphabet of hieroglyphs, overlaying Brätsch’s
marble paintings with Röder’s drawings and symbols. The forms
within both layers might be recognisable, but they refuse to be
decoded. Using the most basic tool to which we all have access,
the body, Brätsch and Röder create symbols that together form
a language that can only be felt, not communicated.
When confronted with words, with the need to name themselves
or add their signatures to their works, Brätsch and Röder have
chosen a third name, creating the entity of DAS INSTITUT,
on which the burden of creative responsibility lies. In applying
words to their objects and installations, their use of language is
slippery. Just as they question the concept of a discrete, indivisible
object (or individual, to return to Deleuze), so a work may be
4
See Nouchine Hadjikhani, Kestutis Kveraga, Paulami Naik and Seppo
P. Ahlfors, ‘Early (N170) activation of face-specific cortex by face-like
objects’, in Neuroreport 2009 Mar.4; 20(4) pp. 403–7 (https://www.ncbi.
nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2713437/ accessed 17.01.16).
5
The relationship between the components of these drawings and Röder’s
understanding of them as a language is evident in the full title:
­COMCORRÖDER Script: A Symbol, A Practice, A Universe, A Map:
­C-Component and Umlaut Drawings.
6
Carl Gustav Jung, Man and His Symbols (New York: Anchor Press,
1988, first published 1964), p. 23.
renamed depending on how and where it is installed. A title
may also provide a rhyme, a play on the content of the work—
Apes and Shapes (2008–11) depicts the artists ‘in drag’ using
their own hair as beards—or on the sounds of their names—
in the image BuyBrätschWörst (2010) Brätsch is photographed
holding up a sausage (in German, Bratwurst) Exhibition titles,
too, are chosen carefully: in 2009 their exhibition at the
Swiss Institute in New York was named ‘D I Why?’ and at the
Kölnischer Kunstverein in 2011, ‘Nichts, nichts!’ (a German
translation of the cry of despair uttered by Balzac’s literary
character Frenhofer, upon realising that he has reduced his
own masterpiece to an incomprehensible mess).7 The mutability
of DAS INSTITUT’s language constantly reminds us of the
slippages that occur between intentions and expressions and
between native and adoptive tongues.
DAS INSTITUT is a gaze with multicoloured shades
The artists’ interest in drawing attention to the intangible and
the ephemeral can be found throughout the exhibition at the
Serpentine Sackler Gallery, with perhaps the two most intangible
substances relevant to exhibition-making—time and light—
forming the basis of the structure of the exhibition. Almost every
object or group of works appears to have brought its own display feature with it into the gallery: a specially constructed plinth
supports neon shapes arranged to resemble a figure at rest; a
group of marbled paintings is installed against temporary walls
that are sized to frame the work rather than built to resemble
a permanent part of the building; the crates in which the neon
shapes arrived are used as support structures.
Time also governs the way in which a number of works in the
show function: the neon breasts that greet the viewer at the
entrance flick on and off, converting the nipples into blinking
eyes; the climax of the sound installation in the centre of the
space occurs at specific intervals; and the clicking through of
slides on each of the numerous projector carousels provides a
metronomic rhythm for the whole. Lastly, time is demanded of
the viewer. The insertion of a long wall across the first space
in the gallery transforms the footprint of the building from a
square into a spiral. The only way to experience the exhibition
fully is to travel in one direction, and then to return along
almost the same path. To paraphrase Heraclitus, it is not possible
to come into contact with a work of DAS INSTITUT in the
same state twice;8 both it and the viewer have been changed
in the process of seeing and being seen.
The second intangible substance, light, is a fundamental aspect
of exhibition-making. LUX levels (which give an indication of
the intensity of light) are traditionally monitored by museums
in order to preserve the works on display from the damaging
effect of UV rays. Essentially, the more we look at artworks, the
faster we destroy them. Lighting an artwork has an important
psychological effect, drawing attention to an object, effectively
providing an additional frame or pedestal. The coloured gels
that DAS INSTITUT have added to the skylights in the gallery
change the ambient light of the building, covering the objects
on display with a new surface layer, temporarily changing their
character and affecting how they are seen, but only for the
duration of the exhibition.
Honoré de Balzac, Le Chef-d’œuvre inconnu (1831)
Plutarch recorded that ‘It is not possible to step twice into the same river
according to Heraclitus, or to come into contact twice with a mortal being
in the same state.’ Graham, Daniel W., ‘Heraclitus’, The Stanford ­Encyclopedia
of Philosophy (Fall 2015 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.)
(http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2015/entries/heraclitus/ accessed
22.01.16).
7
8
Light is integral to a number of works on display. Röder’s Solar
Body Prints are made by adding sunlight-sensitive dye to fabric,
on which she then lies, using her body to block out gestures and
imply movement through double exposures of the cloth, and to
record the sun’s movement through the sky in the quality of the
shadows it casts. Her neon shapes, installed in adapted crates,
illuminate Brätsch’s glass brushstrokes, panels of glass and Mylar
paintings, which are made on clear plastic sheeting. The brushstrokes are made up of several layers of multicoloured glass, which
have been baked, sand-blasted and flame-polished in order to
create a three-dimensional form that closely resembles the brushstrokes visible in the Mylar paintings. The glass panels depend
upon their close physical proximity to the neon shapes to reveal
the intensity of the colours and the details of the composition
while the paintings are hung so that their transparency is
emphasised still further, undoing their physicality even as we
perceive them as objects.
DAS INSTITUT is a character in various roles
The tension between the corporate and the cooperative noted at
the beginning of this essay is brought to the fore by the inclusion
of additional voices in the exhibition at the Serpentine Sackler
Gallery. Several long-standing collaborators, and a new one, have
been invited by Brätsch and Röder to contribute to the show,
with each work responding in a unique way to the installation they
have devised. In this way, DAS INSTITUT is both the prota­
gonist and the host, providing a platform on which other performers can make their entrances and exits.
The bodies of the artists and the corporeality of DAS INSTITUT
have been recorded in the work AKA / Scattered A, Scattered K /
Sleep / Exhumed [body parts] (2012-ongoing), an edible portrait
of Brätsch and Röder painted by artist Allison Katz onto fondant
icing, a surface ‘skin’ that was laid over a body built out of doughnuts. The work has been exhibited, buried and exhumed, and
the gradual disintegration of the two bodies has enabled the artists
to reconfigure the fragments into one body, its specific parts
and organs no longer identifiable as belonging to either of the
original forms.
Filmmaker and author Alexander Kluge, whose voice appears
throughout the pages of this book, responding to the codex of
images collected by the artists, is DAS INSTITUT’s most
recent collaborator. Inspired by his conversation with Brätsch and
Hans Ulrich Obrist, and by the objects and images that are
­layered across the pages of this book, Kluge has contributed his
unique ability to combine his own voice with the voices of others
to the exhibition space. It is impossible to know, at the time of
writing, whether this new combination of things and images will
exist beyond the life of this exhibition; as Kluge himself noted
in a foreword introducing a number of short stories that he had
written several years before, ‘This form is a feeling which is right
only once. And if, theoretically (that is, upon reflection), it is
wrong, then it is wrong, and in being wrong, it is also right.’9
DAS INSTITUT’s approach to exhibition-making is as subversive
as their approach to practising the role of contemporary artist:
they are not the only artists in this show, they make visible the
fleeting qualities of the temporary exhibition and they resist
­single narratives or simple interpretations. They rely upon impalpable elements to activate their work and upon the voices of others
to interpret and respond to it. Given the spiral form of the exhi­
bition space that they have created, it is perhaps appropriate to
end where this essay began, with Jung and his relevance to the
non-verbal symbology explored throughout the exhibition. The
spiral path, along which a number of divided selves are encountered, encourages comparison to the ouroboros, the archaic symbol
of the serpent eating its own tail. Jung understood the ouroboros
to be an archetype, a figure made up of binary opposites that
­balance each other to form a whole; like the ouroboros, DAS
INSTITUT is generative rather than definitive, a system that
exists in a perpetual cycle of rebirth.
Sergei Tcherepnin has been invited to insert a sound and lighting
intervention into one of the gallery’s historic brick spaces, situated at the heart of the building. The intensity of Tcherepnin’s
crescendo of sounds increases gradually over the course of a
number of minutes and then dies away suddenly. Surrounding
and vibrating through an installation of DAS INSTITUT’s
work, it occurs at specific intervals dictated by the circadian
rhythms of human sleep patterns, providing a slow pulse to the
exhibition. This repeated performance adds a further layer
of activation to Brätsch’s Mylar paintings with choreographed
lights that dance across their surfaces for the duration of the
show, revealing eyes and mouths within the profusion of colour
and brushstroke, turning the paintings into creature-like
characters with the potential for autonomous movement and
expression.
Ei Arakawa’s intervention, meanwhile, will take place over the
course of several days. Arakawa has in recent years been working
with traditional Hawaiian dance troupe Hālau Hula O Na Mele
‘Āina O Hawai’i, led by Luana Haraguchi, and will bring them
to London to perform a series of dances that tell the story of
Hawaiian myths and legends. Several of Brätsch’s marble paintings refer to the Hawaiian lava goddess Pele, and Arakawa has
used these works within exhibitions of his own, as well as embedding them within the choreography of the dances.
8
Alexander Kluge, ‘Selections from New Stories, Notebooks 1–18
"The Uncanniness of Time"', October, vol. 46 (Autumn, 1988) pp. 103–15,
(http://www.jstor.org/stable/778681 accessed 24.01.16), p. 103.
1
Alexander Kluge
So, tell me again what exactly DAS INSTITUT does? It’s a kind of crossmapping, isn’t it?
Kerstin Brätsch
Yes. Adele Röder and I—working with visual art rather than language—
are always trying to create a visual memory, to formulate a visual vocabulary, like a kind of cosmology. And that’s why we very much wanted to
talk to you. We’re great admirers of your work and it seems to me that you
embody a vast fund of chronographic knowledge. You make connections
between very different stories: life stories, histories, moments in time.
CONVERSATION BETWEEN
ALEXANDER KLUGE
Hans Ulrich Obrist
We’re doing an exhibition in London at the Serpentine with Kerstin and
her colleague Adele, who together make up DAS INSTITUT. At the
same time there’ll also be an exhibition of work by Hilma af Klint—an
early twentieth-century Swedish painter—who’s been such an important
inspiration for them. The idea to show af Klint’s work came when I asked
Kerstin and Adele who their influences were. Kerstin named Hilma af
Klint as one of her heroes. So, I wanted to ask you too, who your hero is—
is it James Joyce?
HANS ULRICH OBRIST
AND
AK
Joyce, Arno Schmidt … that literary tradition. I can never really distinguish it from film.
KERSTIN BRÄTSCH
KB
Af Klint was a contemporary of Kandinsky. In a way she had a kind of
­second sight—she was actually one of the first people to engage with
­abstraction, as we’d call it these days.
HUO
I’ve got a couple of pictures here that I can show you. They’re really
amazing—from 1907, 1909. They’re inspired by spiritual experiences.
103
KB
KB
Yes—it really does look like a geographical cross-section. Or like a crosssection through your own body, as though there’s a connection between
the microcosm and the macrocosm.
She used to hold séances.
AK
How inventive her work is! Those are absolutely evolutionary forms.
That’s the sort of thing an evolutionary biologist would immediately recognise. For instance, on Bornholm—the Danish island in the Baltic Sea—
you stumble across forms like that, because it’s a piece of Middle Earth,
prehistory. They’re just lying around on the ground. They jump out at you
when you’re walking there—if you’re an archaeologist, that is—we
wouldn’t spot them. When you’re there you can still see what the world
looked like 400 million years ago. That’s to say, you can see what our own
continent looked like before the Atlantic Ocean formed, when the Appalachians were still connected with the Scottish Highlands and with the
Harz Mountains. Then there was a huge fissure, along one coast of ­Norway
and straight down; Bornholm is at the opposite edge of that continental
plate. It wasn’t destroyed when the Atlantic formed, and there were gigantic
shifts. I find it so fascinating that such a small thing, like a fly in a piece of
amber, could have survived. And there are exactly these kind of shell-like
forms, and these spirals. There’s so many of them in the rocks there that
it’s like stepping into a geological yesterday. To think that art can do that,
too!
HUO
We wanted to show you this book, which includes a number of marbling
paintings: Unstable Talismanic Rendering (2014). Kerstin, how did you
come up with the title, Unstable Talismanic?
KB
I wanted to describe what this process of marbling means to me. So I tried
to convey that it’s painting, and painting is rooted in a form of subjectivity.
And this is an attempt to introduce subjectivity into something by means
of a chemical process that relies upon an alchemical transformation. But
at the same time, I also wanted to form creatures or characters.
AK
Like Athena and the owl?
KB
Exactly! Although in this case there’s a tray of water, that’s the place
where it happens—drops on a tray of water—which is both ‘unstable’ and
‘talismanic’. I mean that, for me, each marbling is a kind of totem or talisman. And that’s why I thought the title would work. And if you had
warm hands now [she takes the books and holds it in her hands] you’d see
your own handprint in it—it’s got a heat-sensitive cover, which you can
leave your own handprints on.
KB
These paintings by af Klint also remind me of my marbling paintings. You
could draw a line from one to the other. Look—that’s the most recent
group of works I’ve done: gravitation, cohesion, adhesion. It’s a collaboration with the universe, if you like, which is based on the fact that the
drops of paint all land on a surface of water.
AK
Great idea! It’s pure cinema, isn’t it? There’s more cinema in that cover
than in entire movies that we see in cinemas, don’t you think?
AK
And how much chaos there is on the periphery, and how beautiful and
mysterious it looks, with those circles!
KB
Because the picture changes; it’s a sequence of images.
104
105
the handwriting looks like a fossil. And then there’s the relation to Adele’s
shells—and the way the shells are punched with holes, because these
shells are mother-of-pearl, which can be used to make buttons. Adele saw
button-makers doing this and was interested in the shape of the shell from
which the material was removed, and which looked like a silhouette, like
the evolution of existence. And that relates to what I’m doing with the
glass brushstrokes; Adele and I have a similar approach and interests. It’s
as though we’re both working on making connections and on the way
that suddenly there’s a moment when you can take stock.
AK
Wow! You can really see the sequence. There’s a text by Freud, isn’t there,
that works on the same principle. Freud uses it as an analogy for how
human memory works.
KB
I think he calls it a Wunderblock. Yes—it’s like a magic slate. You write
something, pull the slider out, and suddenly all the writing has disappeared again.
AK
So that’s what the chronicle of inter-connection is about—if we relate it
to Freud, you could say it’s about writing something, leaving a text or an
expression of something, and then being able to erase it again.
AK
That takes us back to the principle of orality—because you’re in dialogue
with each other, aren’t you? And that gets you out of the static situation
of using a brush, in monologue with oneself, to paint a picture, which is
then fixed for all eternity. The question is: how can you turn that back
into a dialogue?
KB
A writing mechanism. And if we then draw a longer line, from the fact
that I’m actually a painter and painting is a form of expression…
HUO
There’s a film I saw yesterday, a television film about you, a polyphonic
portrait with your friends’ voices, and the historian Oskar Negt says some
very interesting things about his collaboration with you.
AK
It’s a form of stamping and fixing.
KB
Exactly. And it’s always an expression of one’s own handwriting, a signature. The brushstroke is the expression of the hand, so what draws me to
marbling and to working with glass is how one can transpose handwriting
into matter, or brushstrokes into glass. It’s actually an impossible experiment—looking for ways to eradicate the hand. As a painter, how can I
question my own handwriting and replace it within a cosmology, within
the universe, through droplets or glass?
AK
Well, I can really only understand my own thoughts when I’ve got someone to talk to. So I very much like it that you find the same thing—that
DAS INSTITUT has the same idea.
HUO
DAS INSTITUT has been going for some time now. It’s more of an alchemists’ lab than an institution, and clearly it has developed its own sustainability. It would be good if you could tell us, Kerstin, how it first started.
[Kluge is looking at Brätsch’s glass brushstrokes juxtaposed with Röder’s
button-shells] These are brushstrokes that I’ve painted by hand, which are
transposed into glass. The glass-worker spent weeks melting them, baking
them in a kiln, sandblasting, flame-polishing, lead-lighting—and s­ uddenly
KB
DAS INSTITUT is the realisation of a desire—it’s an entity within which
Adele and I can co-exist. It’s a field.
106
107
which I can actually operate as a human being. I attach importance to one
thing, someone else attaches importance to another thing. And that’s
actually a form of human progress.
AK
A ship.
KB
Yes, exactly, a ship is a wonderful way to describe it, because a ship moves.
It’s like a thought model, or a place where two artistic positions—two
people—can come together, but it’s also a field with enough room for a lot
of other people.
KB
Exactly, and it’s not about hierarchies—it’s more horizontal.
AK
People become rafts, with no intention of turning into steamships: all
they want is to arrive somewhere. And beautiful structures can be built
from the same wood—that’s to say, the raft is more flexible than a
steamer—but if we take this new world of forms… I could describe modernism as having evolved from modern forms of cooperation, you know?
But cooperation also involves things and objects, doesn’t it? Basically, it’s
about tools and objects and how they connect. That’s how something so
great comes of it—art doesn’t usually reach these heights. The more we
develop new forms, the better we see that an avant garde is possible, and
there could also be an arrière garde: we could take things backwards rather
than forwards.
AK
So, not exactly an academy, not exactly a city, not exactly a people’s commonwealth – but more of a body with cells, would you say? Alchemical
cells?
KB
Yes! I’d say it’s an attempt, or a writing tool, and when we use it our names
are interchangeable. Adele’s second name is Röder, mine is Brätsch—
what if we swapped two letters, giving us Brötsch and Räder? It creates a
new meaning when you take a consonant or a vowel out of a word and
replace it with a different one.
KB
Yes, I think it’s really important that you’re not just in the present, but
that you try to create these leaps by working differently—for instance,
saying I want to work with glass as architecture, as a response to the
way we see the world these days, through touch screens and computer
screens. We’re surrounded by glass in architecture, in our daily trips on
the underground, for example. Suddenly you find yourself in something
pre-modern.
AK
That’s what nature does—it’s the simplest form of mutation, isn’t it?
KB
Yes. It’s like an arena, a platform, a field that we can occupy and where the
works can co-exist and communicate. And it’s important that there’s
movement—like molecules shifting around—where new meanings can
suddenly ensue, and at the moment when I can say ‘Kerstin Brätsch for
DAS INSTITUT’, my painting has a different task, a different agency—
and a different overall meaning.
AK
Fire was invented 800,000 years ago, wasn’t it? Before that, there was
just pitch darkness at night, apart from the stars, a bit of moonlight and
so on; so the entire world was very dark. And then, in a cave, there’s a
little fire. People crowd around it. And it’s not just there for cooking
meat, it’s also good for making cave paintings. And that was also the
AK
If I’m on an island all alone, like Robinson Crusoe, I can feel a bit lost.
But if I work with others, it’s the collective that creates the platform on
108
109
beginning of music, wasn’t it? Singing and dancing. Later on, grammar
was imposed on these things, and even later, ‘meaning’ arrived.
KB
And then there was the person who set a fire on a beach, or sent a signal:
I think that’s where glass was discovered, through the combination of fire
and sand—melting sand to make glass.
Cleopatra you end up with Aïda. And now you’re at the opening of the
Suez Canal. And you could very well say that this slave from Ethiopia,
Aïda, and her death for the sake of love, is the theme. And then if you
imagine someone like the comedian Helge Schneider, and he doesn’t
make a distinction between the two, and it seems to him to be an Egyptian theme—and he makes a complete muddle of things—they’re easily
mixed up—that would already be a wonderful kaleidoscope.
AK
I could imagine commissioning DAS INSTITUT to replicate that, as a
project: the discovery of glass from silica. And then, the story goes on into
the future—it goes into microchips, doesn’t it?
You could take anything in art from the past, or a natural phenomenon,
add a series of overtones and make it modern, couldn’t you? You don’t
transpose something by falsifying it, or by constantly starting anew. Modernity has long been in decline; everyone starts their own new world and…
HUO
It’s interesting this movement through time. As an institution for contemporary art, we’re usually obsessed with the present day. But right from
the outset, for this exhibition with Kerstin and Adele there was this idea
of doing something with a historical figure.
KB
Makes a break with the old world.
HUO
Yes, and that idea you told me about when I first interviewed you twenty
years ago—you said that creating is like having a garden, it’s about the fact
that one doesn’t necessarily invent things, but rather that one discovers
things, collects them, and lets them grow.
KB
Adele and I played with this idea in a series of photographs [they look at the
Am Sonntag series by DAS INSTITUT with Kathrin Sonntag] that take us
back to the cinema, because we used an old cinema trick. You position a
head against a black background and then, using a black pen, you alter the
profile of the head to create all sorts of different characters, or to change its
gender, so it becomes an entirely different person. Then we set about tracking down primeval types—archaic forms—characters like Bruegel's peasant
woman, or maybe even the self-portrait by Marcel Duchamp. There were so
many art-historical references that just popped up that we hadn’t even gone
looking for, but that emerged because we were searching on the right track.
That’s Cleopatra [pointing to one of the profiles].
AK
That’s the poetic word for it—collecting—isn’t it? That’s the underlying
thought, that sense of omnipotence: I can do everything nature doesn’t
do. In a sense, it’s a form of renewal of the network that makes universal
participation possible. If you more or less grasp this amazing invention—
the Internet—then you’d say that art should actually instigate networks of
interconnections. But that doesn’t just work on the basis of links and contacts; basically, it’s as though there’s too much silica in the chips. Think of
it like a desert: a desert has a vast quantity of silica, so then you need an
oasis, and how would an oasis work? The Internet as a whole isn’t the
slightest bit interested in creating oases that last for a lifetime. The masses
of information on the Internet don’t in any way correspond to the life patterns and the nervous make-up of a human being.
AK
If you’re working on Cleopatra, that might take you to Egypt and a Roman
component, but then there could be a little mistake—instead of getting to
110
111
HUO
What was that text you wrote in connection with the architect Peter
Zumthor about gardens—the hortus conclusus, or oasis? Could you say
DAS INSTITUT is a garden of some kind?
AK
Collage, yes. And the reason I emphasise these contrasting elements is
because an invisible image appears in the small gap between two images,
and an epiphany pops out. And that is actually what film is. You can see
this very clearly with Hans Richter, for example. Eisenstein can do it too,
when he isn’t overwhelmed by an obligation to make meaning. And
­Godard does it continually, in all his films. And that principle of film is
what first makes it different from photography: the fact that it actually
deals with invisible images. I think that’s related to the method that you
use: I find it very cinematographic.
AK
It’s definitely a garden. But we keep coming back to the lab, the alchemists’
kitchen. What are these? [Looking at Die Namen_Die Linien (since 2000)]
KB
They’re line drawings, on books. I’ve been doing them forever, even before
I first started to study art. I took one of those books, a notebook, to a glass
specialist and said that I’d like to recreate that book in glass. What you see
here is, so to speak, the glass-artist’s translation of the drawn lines on my
notebooks into glass powder or glass shards, which were then fired in a
kiln and sandblasted.
KB
DAS INSTITUT is actually that ‘invisible picture’, you might say.
AK
And me, newly in love—look at this one [pointing to an image from the
Dark Codex series (2016)]. It doesn’t matter if I see it as an abstract image
or as a light bulb—although that differentiated form does remind me of
something that has nothing to do with the way light bulbs are constructed—whether it’s an elephant’s foot or an abstract structure. And
this—that’s how people drew elephant’s feet in the Middle Ages. And
look here—that’s the heart of a golem, at the very least. On the one hand
it plays into our fantasies, but at the same time, it’s completely free—a
landscape that I don’t know. So you couldn’t call it ‘abstract’, but in a
sense it’s also withdrawn from concrete reality. Oh, and look here, how it’s
running out…
AK
Yes, great! Sometimes works of art also come about when you plunge them
into a different medium. It’s alchemical again, isn’t it?
KB
Yes, it’s like taking a detour, using craft skills or, in Adele’s case, it’s often
to do with clothing and textiles; she also works with light and with neon.
AK
And the friction, the errors and the mistakes are very important. Our
shared taskmaster would be the philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz,
because he said that where two supposedly or actually incompatible elements collide, the result is never a boundary, but an enclave on either
side. That’s to say, there are always innovations.
KB
The wetting agent, ox gall, has pushed the colours together. That’s what
it is, technically. It runs like that because the first drop is the palest drop.
And then, when it’s all pushed together again by the gall, a quite clear
border emerges. This whole group of works is titled Dark Codex, from
‘Almanac, Eclipses and Venus Cycles’ series, like the Maya calendar. Those
are my marblings commingling with Adele’s black transparencies or outlines. Together they enact something like a direct merge. They’ll be shown
KB
Collage.
112
113
as a medium-format slide projection in the exhibition, but they also exist
as the actual, physical work within another iteration; Adele’s drawings on
transparent sheets are laid onto the marbling and are then permanently
merged within a frame. It should be read like an encyclopaedia, with about
200 pictures, and these individually framed Dark Codex works could be
used to formulate whole sentences or questions, with words, semicolons,
question marks and so on.
writing a history of the world. He discovered lifelong learning. I think this
history is great, it’s never been described—neither in music nor in painting.
HUO
That idea of lifelong learning?
AK
Like someone from Africa arriving at the Great Exhibition in 1851 and
viewing its contents as interior decor. So, now I’ve done the literary
version, we both have to do the music! How do we compose for a world’s
fair? There’s something missing. At the same time, though, we come
back to a picture.
AK
Here, in this work, what you’ve created looks to me like a map of the
Earth. But supposing I were to write a story—it wouldn’t even begin to
describe the picture. Instead, taking my lead from the picture, I’d describe
how, completely independently, civilisation emerged twice in the history
of the world: once in Mesopotamia—that’s to say, in the West, through
our forefathers, the Phoenicians, Jews, Calvinists—and then there was a
second entirely independent strand in China—with no outside influences. They didn’t even adopt counting from the West. They invented it
themselves. They did everything themselves at some point and we also
did everything ourselves. In other words, human civilisation was born
twice. That fascinates me. So I could write that. And no-one would confuse it with the picture.
HUO
That’s very interesting and reminds me of something else—in Russia,
in the twentieth century, there was a movement pursuing cosmic
abstraction. In a way you could say that Hilma af Klint’s work is cosmic
abstraction—and that DAS INSTITUT’s work has a relationship to
this idea. But there’s also a connection to the Swiss artist and healer
Emma Kunz—with her divining pendulum and the healing Aion A
powder. She travelled around with her pendulum in the 1930s, and
—you could say—found, discovered and collected amazing cosmic
abstractions.
HUO
Actually the three of you could make an entire book together.
KB
Both these artists connect with some of the fundamental principles of
our world. If you think about it, Kunz asked a question through the pendulum. She created these amazing healing drawings by asking her
patients questions. And the pendulum would move, producing those
geometric drawings, which are not pure formalism. You could describe
them as geometric abstraction, but at the same time you can feel the
energy in them, in the way she handles shapes and colours, so that
these abstract compositions actually seem to depict a burst of ‘internal’
energy.
AK
We could make a codex, and the codices could talk to each other—like in
the early Middle Ages, in Byzantium, for instance, where they had codices. And monasteries and monks spread those codices as far as Ireland.
This was at the same time that the Emperor Charlemagne had a whole
collection of paintings, which developed a minuscule script influenced by
Antiquity. And there we are again—I’m now thinking as a writer. That’s
to say, I can tell you how Barbarossa’s uncle, Otto von Freising, took 200
knights to Reims, where they spent two years learning to read and write
(they could fence but they were illiterate), before studying in Paris and
114
115
AK
You could say that this takes us back to Leibniz. So now it’s a question of
balance and equilibrium. Those are the really big issues. Take Coney
Island, for instance, which no longer exists as such, yet its structures gave
birth to the way buildings are made in New York. And this seems to me
the policy of DAS INSTITUT, not throwing anything away.
AK
Well the principle of repetition has its roots in writing, doesn’t it? When
monks in the early Middle Ages were copying manuscripts, they made
­little mistakes, you know? On the back of one text, there’s a copy of a passage from Ovid. And basically that was the beginning of written poetry.
Little variations, little mistakes, for instance in how poetry is written:
that’s how the eye develops.
KB
For instance, if you take Adele’s body prints, that’s where these transparencies come from [pointing to Röder’s transparencies used within the
Dark Codex]. She made a print of her own body on light-sensitive fabric.
After that she used these fabrics to make screen prints. She took photographs of her solar body prints and drew the outline of her own body to
create these transparencies. She discovered these primal forms by positioning her own body on the fabric, and they’re a sort of archetypal form
of human expression.
HUO
Which Deleuze discussed in terms of repetition and difference.
AK
Yes. And you could even say that iteration is desirable.
HUO
That was exactly the sort of telepathy that happened in Sergei ­Tcherepnin’s
performance, which included your Mylar paintings, Kerstin. Perhaps you
could briefly outline what happened.
AK
And where are the body prints now?
KB
Yes, he did a performance at the Kitchen in New York. He was working
with paintings by Lucy Dodd and myself, which he ‘animated’ with the
help of a lighting designer. He also included actors in the performance.
Then he overlaid the entire scene with his own sound, which transformed everything. It was really amazing to experience, to be fully
absorbed by sound, and to observe the play of light on the paintings,
shifting them into different creatures and characters. As a result, the
paintings appeared to breathe, suddenly turning into Chinese dragons,
and in the next moment, when the light changed, resembling Disney
characters.
KB
They’ll be included in the Serpentine exhibition. There’ll be these archetypal portraits, and we want to juxtapose them with my marbling-paintings, like a warrior or a guard for the marblings—they’re both like cosmic,
bodily expressions.
AK
They would go together perfectly with cave paintings.
HUO
You mentioned this idea of lifelong learning, and Kerstin speaks about
learning in an interview where she mentions Jacques Rancière’s The
Ignorant Schoolmaster (1991), and says that ‘Truly democratic learning
happens by way of repetition.’ I wanted to ask you, Alexander, what you
would say about the importance of repetition?
[Looking at installation images of Röder’s COMCORRÖDER NEON
LIGHTS (2010 / 2015)] Here we see what Adele is currently showing at
Haus der Kunst in Munich. She combines these basic neon elements
that resemble the letters ‘C’, ‘L’ and ‘O’ then builds characters with
116
117
them—a human expression, a body, or a body part. With the breasts,
for example, the light is switched on and off and suddenly you see the
nipples turn into eyes. One neon arrangement is built like a body at
rest, another one like a figure in a tomb, perhaps even a skeleton. The
body at rest will be on view at the Serpentine, placed underneath the
transparent Mylar paintings, shining a light onto the paintings, and
Sergei will be developing a choreography that will bathe the paintings
with sound and light again.
AK
That’s wonderful. You might say that an institute of thought comes out
of my work, and you work with a lot of other people too. It makes me ask
if, for instance, we projected a film onto glass like that, the two would
combine? We at the Development Company for Television Program
(DCTP) often do things like that with Hans Richter’s Rhythmus 21
(c.1921), which we use as the basis for cross-mapping. And if you use
that as a structure without changing it, they just influence each other, in
the same way that you can change the lenses on a camera. You could get
600-hundred year old glass from Holland—it would be extremely interesting to use that kind of stained glass as a prism or a lens. And it’s a surface that’s receptive to music. It would be great to try that, as a follow-up
to our conversation here.
AK
So, as I understand it… or try to understand it… painting has various
rules that prevent it from turning into cinema, but what I like is when
people move and the pictures behind them also move, you know? It’s an
extension of opera and ballet, because movement is basically the opposite
of an image—there’s movement in film. A film has much more to do with
music than with photography or images: the transience of thoughts, the
transience of observations, the vulnerability of what you’ve just seen, and
suddenly you’re transported to a different moment. That’s what film is
about.
KB
That would be great. [Kluge turns pages in the book, looking at the agate
eyes of Brätsch’s antique glasses] What you see here in the glass are agate
stones: the leftovers from Sigmar Polke’s project for the Grossmünster in
Zürich. Polke’s last work before he died was to make a church window for
the Grossmünster. He developed agate-glass windows, which use whole
agates glazed together with strips of lead. Even the little spaces between
the main agates were filled in with other pieces of agate, which he cut to
shape. And the glass painter that I worked with had done this work with
Polke, and he kept the cuttings from those agate stones: they were the
leftovers, Polke’s trash, you could say. He pointed out that the shapes of
Polke’s leftover agate reminded him of my brushstrokes. So that was how
I got the chance to work with Polke’s leftover bits and pieces. The agates
you see there, incorporated into the glasses, are actually the leftover bits
from Polke’s glass windows in the Zürich Grossmünster.
KB
Yes, and of course a slide projection is the stage before that.
AK
It’s our aircraft carrier, which we filmmakers can land on together with
painters.
KB
[Pointing to slide projections of COMCORRÖDER Script: A Symbol, A
Practice, A Universe, A Map: C-Component and Umlaut Drawings (2015)]
These are Adele’s drawings, which are currently on show in Munich, too,
as slide projections. She created the drawings using the same individual
elements as the Neons—always either O, L or C-shapes—and created a
psychographic map of the whole world.
AK
I really like that. I’d use film to fill out this eye—or maybe this bit—like a
knothole. A moving image could come through the knothole. No more
than that: using stained glass as additional lenses, so that you see what-
118
119
ever we want—the picture outside the picture, outside the shot.
[They look at Brätsch’s antique glass masks]
the sixteenth century—I wouldn’t be in the slightest bit surprised. Yet
they’re also part of the avant garde today.
KB
This shows the same piece of glass in different lighting conditions—lit
from behind or lit from the front. That’s the starting point of all painting.
As a painter I’d say light is the most basic form of painting. And painting
always wants to be shown in good light. And glass does in a way work like
a screen: it’s like a membrane between the viewer and the world.
KB
Retrospective forecasting . . .
AK
The chemicals industry is just not up to this kind of alchemy. Roche make
all sorts of things—they’ve got numerous labs and institutes—but they’re
so confined and goal-oriented that they can’t even find a cure for cancer.
I don’t underestimate them, but our algorithm culture never reckons with
the thirteenth fairy from Sleeping Beauty. And the things that have been
edged out—whether made from silicone or Roche products—will always
take their revenge.
In this book [Unstable Talismanic Rendering], there’s a text by my friend
and colleague Allison Katz, written in my voice. It’s based on several conversations between the two of us. At the back an errata page is inserted.
It’s a hand-marbled sheet by the German marbler Dirk Lange—with
whom I made the large marbling paintings. The errata page is printed
with hot-metal typesetting and on unique, marbled paper, making the
book as a whole more valuable.
KB
The thirteenth fairy?
AK
I’ve only known you for twenty-four hours and I’ve really enjoyed this
conversation, and I’d be very happy to continue with it at some point.
But we shouldn’t talk about words, but about actions, along the lines of:
‘Institutes of the great alchemical tradition unite!’ It reminds me of the
Emperor Rudolf II, who had a court alchemist. The Emperor wanted to
live forever—you know the story? So he demands that the alchemist
makes a potion, a glass painting of him, a work of art, so that the Emperor
can become immortal. But when the alchemist produces these things,
the Emperor is suspicious, so he orders the alchemist to try them out on
his own daughter. The Emperor and the alchemist both die, but the
daughter—who drank the potion—has been a singer for the last 300
years. She’s lived through the entire history of opera and is now in
Prague, and is embroiled in a court case involving inheritances, her children and her children’s children, all of whom she has survived. It’s the
story of The Makropulos Case, by Janáček—a wonderful opera. And it’s
in the paintings you make. Looking at them I’d think they were done in
AK
At the christening of the long-wished-for child, the table had been set
for twelve ‘fairies’—twelve wise women. These twelve women came,
but there was another—the thirteenth—who had been excluded. After
eleven women had cast their spell, the thirteenth suddenly appeared
and took revenge by placing a fatal curse on the child. The twelfth wise
woman, who hadn’t yet spoken, couldn’t completely undo the curse,
but she could at least reduce it to a hundred years’ sleep for everyone in
the castle—and stipulate that a prince would bring her back to life.
The twelfth wise woman was able to create this mouse hole for the
girl’s rescuer. So the prince enters the jungle. He manages to find a
way—like a dust mite on the floor—through the hedge of thorns that
now completely hides the castle. Those are the things that these paintings remind me of, and of a little encyclopaedia or a codex, a cabinet of
curiosities—as in the Renaissance. That’s something that should be
reinstated: they combined alchemy, science, some superstition and a
nail from Jesus’ coffin—but also real works of art and real science.
120
121
That’s what it reminds me of—and the phrase ‘alchemist’s kitchen’,
which I really like.
HUO
Yes, and it’s great that this conversation in fact took place in your
kitchen—we should say that: This conversation took place …
KB
In Kluge’s ‘alchemist’s kitchen’ …
HUO
In January 2016. In Alexander Kluge’s kitchen…
AK
Kitchen talk…
122