An ongoing
dialogue between Henry Tietzsch-Tyler and Stuart Taberner
Henry Tietzsch-Tyler, 27 February 2009
I have attempted over the past twenty years to track a sense of the
contemporary moment as exemplified by the idea or image of a kind of threshold zone
whose character is one of interminableness – the threshold not as a location
for the stepping over from one state or condition to another, but as a place or
condition in itself, an endless waiting towards, a becoming nothing. For
me this has not been the expression of a vague feeling of ‘nowness’ but
has, I believe, its roots in the concrete experience of growing up in and
living through particular conditions at particular times. Certain kinds
of childhood landscapes still appeal to me very strongly – the rubble strewn
and weed overgrown demolition sites of the 1950s and early 1960s (that one
still finds in Berlin), and the rocky, brush wastes of Western films of that
same era. The feeling of a place where there once was something and will be
again, if not just yet (even in the space of the painting). To paint that
moment when you try to start again – it is not surprising to me that my
thinking so often settles on those two periods of German history, the immediate
post-war and the post-Wende years.
Not only have I tried to visualise this attempt since the beginning of the
1990s in a series of painted images, but I have also tended to speculate on the
ground from which these images spring, in particular reading extensively over
the years the testimonies of those who lived through the Nazi period in
Stuart Taberner, 4 March 2009
What strikes me reading what you have written, and also in the course of our
conversations, is the locatedness of your work, or at least your way of
thinking about your work, in a concrete historical
reality – I really hadn’t expected that when I first encountered
your work, since, as we’ve discussed, I took your work to be a rejection of
representation, or the mimetic, in favour of an extreme abstraction. But,
above, and in our conversations, you come back time and again to your family
history, and specifically to the stories your mother told of her life in
Germany and her move to England; I’m particularly fascinated by the way you
link this personal narrative to the ‘larger’ narrative of German, European and
world history, and, I guess, to the history of modernity, which now appears, to
us in the present, to be overwhelmed by the ruins of its own hubris and
deformation. But looking at your work again, I now see the link: to Anselm
Kiefer, perhaps, but also to Walter Benjamin and his thoughts on Paul Klee’s
painting Angelus Novus:
‘There is a painting by Klee called Angelus Novus. It shows an angel who seems
about to move away from something he stares at. His eyes are wide, his mouth is
open, his wings are spread. This is how the angel of
history must look. His face is turned toward the past. Where a chain of events
appears before us, he sees one single catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage
upon wreckage and hurls it at his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken
the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from
Walter Benjamin, 1940, "On the Concept of History," Gesammelte
Schriften I, 691-704. SuhrkampVerlag. Frankfurt am
I see the link,
then, between the concrete history of the disasters of the twentieth century,
to a large extent centered on Germany and your mother’s connection to Germany,
and your work in which a solid sense of rootedness in particular historical
circumstances, ‘living through particular conditions at particular times’, is
abstracted into a more ephemeral experiencing of dislocation, rootedlessness,
and disorientation, the results, universally, but also particularly for
individuals, of world history, and of German history especially, in the recent
past. I’d like to explore this connection more with you, in conversation, but
also through ‘reading’ your work – though we have also talked about the
question of intelligibility, and of the tension between my drive, as an
academic, to ‘interpret’ and your tendency as an artist to simply ‘work’.
I’d like to know more about the role of testimonies in your work – what is the
relationship between the testimonies of Holocaust survivors and your work, with
its focus on the history of Germans and their dislocation? Do you see an
ethical issue here? Or, is it rather German (non-Jewish or other persecuted)
testimonies to which you are drawn, such as the stories elaborated by your
German mother? We’ve already discussed the ethical issues here of obfuscation
and repression of the ‘deeper’ German history of which your mother, along with
other Germans, was a part. How do you address these?
I have lots of other questions, too. About the relationship
between endings and new beginnings, for example. But we can discuss
those another time!
Henry, 15 March 2009
I want to comment on one or two things that you wrote because they point
towards motivations, starting-points, references, influences, which are perhaps
what one usually looks for in trying to figure out the work of an unfamiliar
artist. I am thinking of your mention of Kiefer and of Benjamin and Klee.
I tend to reject the idea of ‘influences’ because, to me at least, it seems to
suggest being propelled forwards, even moulded, by earlier examples from the
field in which one works. On a conscious level at least, most of the
connections I make to my own practice are retrospective and are suggested by
the work I am doing at any particular moment, or by reflection on past work.
I am not trying to suggest that my own work is disconnected from the
larger context of art, only that the connections are complex ones. So I rather
see my work as thinking backwards or as allowing the past to come forwards, and
maybe you notice this when you refer to Benjamin’s ‘thoughts on Paul Klee’s
painting Angelus Novus’. In fact in 1996 I included in an exhibition in Prague
a copy of the well-known photograph of a stone statue, probably on the top of a
church or a municipal building, seeming to look out and to gesture, from the
right-hand edge of the (cropped) photograph, over a wasteland of ruined
buildings, presumably somewhere in Germany at the end of the Second World War.
I showed it together with a number of paintings all of which were devoid of any
recognisable figurative content, similar to the one’s you are familiar with,
and pinned to a blanket that covered a stack of ‘hidden’ canvases awaiting
their turn to be displayed in a periodic rotation of images. For me, that
photograph had already come to stand in for the Benjamin piece you mention, and
I used it, among other things, as a point of departure for conversation with
visitors to the exhibition (see Tereza Bruthansova, Atelier Prague
20/26.9.1996).
There are of
course reference points in what I am doing. In the 1970s and 80s one could
hardly not be aware of the work of German artists like Joseph Beuys, Anselm
Kiefer, Georg Baselitz, Gerhard Richter and the Neue Wilden. I also had
an interest in some East German painters at that time, like Hartwig Ebersbach,
who I met in
A
starting-point for the paintings of the past almost two decades can be found in
my painterly working of the in-between-spaces in the figurative canvases I
painted between 1986 and 1990. I became preoccupied with the painting of these
Zwischenraűme, or with these Zwischenraűme as paintings (for me
perhaps themselves a pointer to Modernism), at the same time that I began, more
directly than before, to explore the recent history of my family in relation to
Germany and to consider the possibility of related ethical questions. You
mention ‘a rejection of representation, or the mimetic, in favour of an extreme
abstraction’. I have thought more in terms of pushing out of the field of
vision the representational or figurative elements in an image in favour of a
pervasiveness of the space between things. In that case it is probably not
quite right to think of the paintings as abstract. If one keeps things more
‘concrete’ however, could this be construed as a kind of ‘looking away’? Or
alternatively, could it be taken as an instinctive rejection of the
appropriateness of representation, or an admission of its inadequacy, in the
context of the background to the work insofar as it comes into contact with the
German and Nazi crimes of the period? And perhaps this is where a link to
testimonies can be found. My readings of both Jewish and non-Jewish testimonies
began out of a desire or need to expand on the one personal narrative that I
was familiar with and which had, from an early age, formed much of my mental
picture of
Stuart, 18
March 2009
I’m interested in the idea of Zwischenraűme which you mention above and
which we talked about a lot when I visited your studio last weekend in
Űbermalungen
and Zwischenraűme: we talked a lot at the weekend about your working
methods and I was fascinated to hear just how long a painting can take – or
just how quick it can be. I was fascinated by your incorporation of ‘chance’
events into your paintings, by your unwillingness to ‘work out’ the ‘accidents’
caused by a brush nicking against the canvas or by paint splatter or running.
Is there a sense that there is in fact no such thing as chance – that you are not in control of what you paint but that it
will be what it will be? Or, is rather your concern
with chance a further example of the existential edge to your work: an
acceptance of the arbitrary? And is this related, again, to the history that we
have discussed, to the collapse of narratives of reason and designability
following the failure of modernity in
But, then, other paintings, more recent, do have ‘something’: these gaps,
Zwischenraűme, where it might be possible to glimpse a history, a
structure, a shape…
I’m going to keep thinking about this…
Henry, 29 March 2009
I certainly don’t think you are over-reading, neither in your suggestion of the
significance of the arbitrary, nor in the reference to the failure of
modernity, and I think both readings are applicable here. The question of that
particular period in German history, from which Auschwitz remains, often to
confound thought and feeling, and of the responsibility of the Germans who were
there, or of those who have inherited a legacy of its memory, is something that
is always shadowing my attempts to make sense of my own locatedness through
work. My use of the calligraphic, whether a single phrase or a few words in
charcoal on long strips of paper as a reminder of thought on the studio floor
whilst painting, or in pen or pencil in a notebook, does indeed display a
willed adoption over many years of German letter forms, which in fact I use
whether I write in German or in English. As a child, my mother’s handwriting
was always a mystery to me, and I have tried to ‘open myself up’ to that
mystery. This calligraphic element, along with photographs and the use of
significant dates, though still important within the framing of the work, have
long been excised from the paintings, existing, rather, externally to them, as
though that which is removed always remains waiting somewhere close by. Over
the years they have been added to with books and objects that the paintings
would have struggled physically to contain. I prefer in any case to insinuate
that struggle. But there is another way to understand the removal of those
elements, as well as the removal of the painterly figurative. My question (or
one question for me) is not how much ‘extraneous’ material a painting can hold,
or to what extent it can try to become ‘complete’, but is rather one which
tries to consider incompleteness and a lack of totality. All the different
elements in my work now stand in an uncertain
proximity, where they may or may not have a bearing on one another. After all,
can a painting really face history?
In an attempt at facing, the painting facing history perhaps, does the painting
stand in for the artist, the act of painting for the grappling with conscience
and consciousness? Is it also an attempt at distancing, or at displacement - a
need to gain a remove, a vantage point, or a psychological escape?
But... back to the Zwischenräume: I am not really interested in a painting that
depicts an example of an in-between-space, or a painting in which one can
identify gaps and spaces, though such spaces may exist as a result of the
painting process (where they may indicate other necessary, perhaps
psychological, aspects of the working process). I remain much more interested
in a painting which wants to be an embodiment of the Zwischenraum, a painting
that stands, in relation to its making and the motivations acting on it, as a
Zwischenraum (which I understand to be a space or place that has no meaning in
itself, but rather gathers up the meanings of those things that press against
it), a painting that doesn’t close off thought but allows for thinking. Perhaps
this is more what I mean by its ‘incompleteness’ than that the painting itself
is unfinished.
You also
mention that I spoke of
Stuart, 1 April
2009
Starting with the idea of a historical legacy which can be inherited by
subsequent generations, I know that you’ll be familiar with the work of
theorists such as Marianne Hirsch who argue, in relation to the Holocaust, that
such legacies can be framed as a kind of postmemory: ‘Postmemory characterises
the experience of those who grow up dominated by narratives that preceded their
birth, whose own belated stories are evacuated by the stories of the previous
generation shaped by traumatic events that can be neither understood nor
recreated’. Hirsch further argues, and I think this is important in relation to
what you say about your own processing of the stories told you by your mother
of her experiences of the war and its aftermath, that postmemory is not 'absent
memory', or the 'gaping black hole of the unmentionable years' but that it is
'as full or as empty, certainly as constructed, as memory itself'. [1] I’m interested here in several aspects. First, the ethical
problem, as we’ve discussed before, related to the question of ‘trauma’:
postmemory evidently always assumes a traumatic core or event but there is the
risk that ‘traumas’ become interchangeable, and undifferentiated, and also
extremely hard for people ‘outside’ of the trauma to engage with other than via
a ‘helpless’ empathy; your mother’s experience of the war, as a German, was no
doubt traumatic for her, and your engagement with that trauma is certainly a
form of postmemory, but how do you (as I know you struggle to do) situate your
engagement with her stories, their obsessive intrusion, it seems to me, into
your attempts to tell your own belated stories, in relation to the stories told
by Holocaust survivors and the postmemory of these stories endured by their
descendents. This is probably an impossible question to answer, not least
because, as you have hinted before, a strictly ethical approach, an approach
that you perhaps tend towards in the brutal reductionism of your work (i.e. the
elimination of content, and thereby of experience, stories, gestures,
memories), would demand that you remain silent, and this is clearly also
unreasonable, even unjust. Second, I am more and more interested in the way in
which, to return to Hirsch, you consciously, even enthusiastically, foreground
the reality that your postmemory, your working through of the stories told you
by your mother, is 'as full or as empty, certainly as constructed, as memory
itself'. I am interested in this element of constructedness; in the stories
that you tell me of how you work, and why you work, you appear to me to be
consciously shaping a narrative – a plausible explanation of why it is that you
work in the way you do, and of how this might be connected to your family story
– but then you undercut this, often quite abruptly, declaring that this is
'only’ your subjective perspective, that other family members remember your
mother quite differently, and that your work might actually have other sources.
I’m interested here particularly in the way in which this consciously
constructed narrative relates to other discourses, some prosaic – the drive to
explain your work in ways which tie into contemporary academic and artworld
obsessions (memory, trauma, subjectivity, etc.) - some more existential: the
need to make sense of your work to yourself. Perhaps there is nothing to be
said here?
I think what I am getting at above might be related to your thoughts on 'facing
history’ and whether a painting might 'stand’ in for the artist, grappling with
conscience and consciousness, whilst also perhaps enacting a distancing from
that which provokes the need to grapple with conscience and consciousness? It
might also be related to the issues you raise about the uncertain proximity
between different elements within (and without) the particular painting, to the
extent that, as you’ve mentioned before, whatever 'appears’ on the canvas is a
displacement (to some other place 'off’ canvas, in proximity, perhaps even
physical proximity in your studio, in books, newspapers, pieces of text, the
memories and thoughts associated with them) of something else, of someone
else’s history, or of the 'archival’ facts (of the Holocaust, for example, in
books, memoirs and newspapers) not featured in the stories passed down to you
by your mother. I’m not sure here.
________________________________
[1] Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and
Postmemory (Cambridge: Harvard University Press), p.22.
Henry 4 April 2009
My knowledge of theories of postmemory is scant, but a couple of years ago I did read a short piece on “projected memory” by Marianne Hirsch, and the idea of “one’s own belated stories” being “evacuated by the stories of the previous generation” does strike a chord with me. I have often described my mother’s stories as a kind of ‘unconscious’, or as a template against which I measured my own experiences whose apparent insignificance, their benignness, (the displacement that Hirsch describes), or so it seemed to me, drove me to find an arena in which I could create my own equivalence of ‘catastrophe’, a kind of ‘living in crisis’, in an attempt to bridge the gap. Art, first performance art, then painting as an extension of the kind of performance I was doing in the 1970s, was the space I chose for that, though by choice I don’t mean something sudden, but a position developed gradually over a number of years. In making that ‘choice’, developing that position, I have constructed a life, an artist’s life, coterminous with the experience of postmemory, and tried, by employing the means of art, to retain a ‘view’ of it, and so still function in a more or less ‘normal’ way. As with my mother’s storytelling, in my own narrative I am also creating a version of events, but then I wouldn’t be the first artist to do that: Joseph Beuys’s famous Werklauf – Lebenslauf is also a version of events, as is Rainer’s explanation of the Űbermalungen.
So
there is something ‘symptomatic’ there, but that is not the whole story, and
precisely not, I would say, because of the choice of ‘arena’. My education in
art in the 1970s was one that stressed the self-reflexive and the analytical.
That approach was in itself important for me in creating the first images that
I would later scrutinise and question in terms of what I felt I knew best, that
is, my mother’s narrative of the time before me, of her life in
As to my undercutting my own story, I would say that artists work in many different ways, and with varying motivations. Also there are many pressures on them to produce work to criteria not necessarily of their own choosing: from their education, from the art market, from critics, from theory. Like most artists, I also produce what I do out of, in relation to, and in response to, this complex situation. So I would still prefer not to tie my work inextricably to a causal relationship with my own history (though we could ask what one’s own history consists in), even if I myself make such a ‘reading’ of it. In a way it is quite ‘normal’ for the artist to be, at one and the same time, a producer and his or her own audience - Wim Wenders was surely referring to himself as the artist when he has one of his angels describe his occupation as ‘specialist and layman in one’. Nevertheless, we are not the final authority on the meaning of our own work.
Stuart, 10 April 2009
What I am always struck by in your responses is the very high level of self-consciousness you have about your work and its ‘origins’, so much so in fact that you are even self-consciously aware that you are being self-conscious! What space is left, then, for ‘art’? If we understand ‘art’ to be something which is more or less un-self-conscious? Perhaps we can no longer understand art that way at all, after modernism, the Holocaust, and the other disruptions of the present. It is clear to me that the self-conscious aspect of what you do is inseparable from the work itself; in fact, it is the work itself, as you have said on a number of occasions, as you don’t perceive a break between work (on the canvas) and the context of the work, the space (mental and physical) it inhabits and relates to and with.
Your references to the ‘symptomatic’ and to using art as a means of retaining a ‘view’ of the life you have constructed as an artist, or indeed the ‘life’ you have constructed fullstop, have made me much more aware (I should have been earlier, since you have spoken of ‘symptoms’ before) of the therapeutic function of art for you, as a means of working through issues. But I am still struck by your notion of ‘normal’, that art allows you to function in a more or less ‘normal’ way. What would that normality be? To be free of the past, to not be overshadowed by the past? Is the urge for ‘normality’ actually a form of nostalgia, nostalgia for a time when art didn’t need to be self-conscious? As for silence as the most ‘ethical’ response to catastrophe; this, obviously, implies suicide as the only ethical response to survival in a situation in which so many others did not survive. I understand the urge to silence, which seems to manifest itself in your work too (in the evacuation of ‘meaning’ or ‘content’), but clearly you still feel the need to speak, and to respond. There must be ‘ethical positions which stop short of silence, and I sense that is what you are trying to find.
I’d like to hear more about your training, to return to more pragmatic matters – I don’t have much understanding or knowledge of the kind of ‘art education’ you had, and of how your performance work relates to your move (back) into painting?