Interview with Adrian Schiess
Conducted by Claire Schneider via fax August 25 through October 1, 2007
Would you consider yourself a painter?
Yes, a painter after Duchamp, like so many others.
How so?
Always questioning the medium of painting. As an artist in general you are working today with a bigger matter, of course. Maybe it’s different for a younger generation. But it seems typical of my generation.
Your primary concerns seem to be light, color, and shifting situational conditions, key concerns of a painter, yet you do approach these topics in a different way.
The main thing for me is to show something with my painting. To show what’s happening in this moment at this specific place. The light, the color, the viewer, his mood, the time, the site are parts of this happening. A happening of seeing.
What a beautiful phrase that sums up your work well. You provide an opportunity for the viewer to see in new ways. You force viewers to notice that the way someone sees is not fixed, but unstable, always changing. You said once in an interview that in the 1980s “painting had become impossible.” What did you mean by this? How did your search to expand what painting is get you out of this muddle? And how do you think your approach to this “crisis” differed from the approach of others starting to make work in the late 1970s and early 1980s?
In the beginning of the ’80s, with all of this neo-expressionism around, for me as a young artist it was impossible to understand painting in such a conservative way. The photographic series from 1980 (a series of twelve photographs) was for me an attempt to mark a field of what could be painting for me. I think my beginning in the early ’80s was not so different from other painters in my generation, or do you think so?
Well, so many artists in the 1980s (and 1970s, 1960s) were tired of painting; it had been used up in a way. There was no emotion left. It couldn’t hold any meaning. Many artists during this time replicated the commoditization of the world, of images, of art. Others questioned the emptiness of images. But you turned away from images and representation and focused on the sensory aspects of painting, made them even larger, and more unfixed. So yes, I would say you went in a slightly different direction.
Yes, I tried to go to the border of the artistic field. I tried to do something everybody could enjoy, everywhere in the world and without know-how about “art.” There is no value system inside colors. There is no story, for example, just some clouds passing on the sky. . .
What painters do you look up to? The whole wealth of modern and postmodern painting gets mentioned around your work, everyone from the impressionists and Cézanne to Gerhard Richter and Sigmar Polke.
Of course these are many. But especially important for me was the work of Monet, Les Nymphéas; Bonnard; Pollock, the drippings; Calder, the mobiles; Judd and Flavin and Fontana and Richter and Toroni. But, you know, there are so many beautiful paintings , and you’re right, I would like to remember this enormous richness of painting, and on the other hand I would like to show what’s happening now.
I can see why you would love the sensual embrace of color that can be found in Monet and Bonnard, the all-overness and the energy found in Pollock, the constant change of Calder, the factualness, grid structure and industrial quality of Judd and Flavin, and the loving aggression of Fontana and Richter. Can you expound on what you have learned from one or two of these artists? I imagine a different one can help solve a different problem. Is there any artist you are really consumed with at present?
Learning is not the right word. I think I was so fascinated by the work of these artists because they found a form to tell the same old story like it hasn’t been told before. And they showed me it’s not the story (the story is always the same). It’s the way the story is told. I was fascinated by the sparing use of the material and the complexity of the work by Judd. I was fascinated with how Gerhard Richter found a possibility to go on with painting.
You’ve chosen images of a few works at the Indianapolis Museum of Art to include in this book. Can you speak about your choices?
The works of Calder and Moholy-Nagy I saw in two shows in Zürich in 1975 and 1976. It was my first meeting with classic modern art. I was fascinated by the mobiles of Calder and the light machine of Moholy-Nagy. To see the moving compositional elements of Calder’s mobiles or the moving lights and shadows on the walls created by Moholy-Nagy’s light machine was for me like a trip. This unbelievable animation of seeing! Maybe that’s what is similar in Bonnard’s and Monet’s painting, but for both of them the surface is a big theme of their work, which was certainly pushed by the development of photography. I like a lot how they show that painting is an activity on the surface.
You’ve also mentioned your interest in works from the 1960s minimalist generation; we’ve been considering images by Judd and Flavin.
For me, Donald Judd’s work is something in between painting and sculpture. It is this “between” of his work that I like, and the fact that color becomes physical. This physical aspect of color is similar in Flavin, but in a different scale. You see, I’m looking at “minimal art” as a painter, and I was interested in seeing how they used color and space. Anyway, Judd for me is a painter. I’m sure you think I’m crazy.
But artists have always been questioning painting. What was particular to your generation in this questioning? Why reference Duchamp?
In Europe Duchamp became really famous during the ’60s. The generation of ’68 rediscovered this work. At the same time in ’67’/68, painters like Buren and Toroni became important in Europe. Also, there was the politically critical work of Hans Haacke; painting became reactionary and was excluded from the critical discourse. This was more or less the situation when I started with my painting in the late ’70s.
Why choose painting in the first place as the medium to dismantle?
Dismantle is a strong word! It sounds so formalistic. First of all, I was looking for a way to continue in painting. But not in an illustrative way. I was trying to destroy the significance. I’m looking for the biggest possible openness. I was looking for changing images and for always changing significance, and I wanted to show how time is passing by. You know, it’s more than twenty years ago and it’s hard to remember.
But why choose painting to do this? What is at painting’s essence that you wanted to keep but do in a different way? What can painting provide that other forms of art can’t?
Nevertheless or exactly because of this reason, I started with painting. It was a reaction against all the dogmas from the ’70s. Don’t do this, don’t do that! Some years before it, ’76 or’ 77, I was visiting the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. I have seen for the first time, in person, cut-outs from Matisse and a lot of color-field painting in their collection. I was overwhelmed by this freedom and openness. And for me painting was always the medium or, better, color was my medium. Until now I’m feeling an endless desire and fancy about colors and a kind of a need to collect them (like an idiot), you know, like a collection of nothing. Yes, it was first the color (better, the colors) why I was doing painting and second, the surface. The skin is the deepest on the human being, Paul Valery said.
Some artists that loved painting, color, and light and isolated these elements have been classified as monochrome painters. You have mentioned before that you don’t think this label fits.
Because I understand one panel as a fragment, as a part, a pixel if you want, of a huge endless painting (a work in progress I am working on). Always adding a color here and another color there. The painting I’m working on is not a monochrome painting. What you see in shows is always just a part, fragments of this work in progress. These fragments always changing their significance and they’re building unstable relationships with their surroundings.
What do you think of the tradition of abstraction? Would you place yourself in it?
Since the beginning in 1980, the distinction abstract-figurative wasn’t so important for me, and my recent work shows that this distinction for me doesn’t make sense. For example, since the beginning in 1980 I was working with photography.
Can you tell me more about that early photographic series? What did it teach you?
It was an attempt to mark the field, which is for me painting. The photographic series includes some reflections about the site, transparency, density, nature, art, representation, sentimentality, image, paint, figure (self-portrait), light, space, time, hopelessness, color, possibility and impossibility of painting. It showed me the field I’m working in since then.
Why did you start painting directly on flowers?
This work where I painted directly on a flower is one of the works in the 1980 photo series. It was an attempt to paint directly into the reality. To use reality as a canvas a little bit like this. There were also other questions, like how to paint a flower, questions about representation, doubts about painting, hopelessness, incompetence, and an attempt to deal with beauty, of course.
This desire to bring reality right into your work is key.
It seems to be so. And to ask at the same time what is that “reality”? And, of course, Illusion and Time.
What other things did you photograph? How did these images function as a kind of alternative painting?
Not as an alternative. I needed some orientation and was looking for possibilities and impossibilities of painting (for myself in my work). To paint on a flower, I think, is a hopeless attempt. I see at the same time how beautiful is the flower and how limited is this slimy stuff called paint. There is a lot of ambiguity and contradiction in these photos. For example, the painted flowers on the snow. Transience was an issue in this photo series, like the flowers painted in the snow. Then there is my face, which I painted on. Daily I painted a new painting on my face and went out for work. (I did my apprenticeship as a graphic designer at this time.) This way making my painting public everyday. I had seen a lot of arte povera at the INK in Zürich in 1977/78, and this early photo series is influenced by this work and always the questions of representation. Nevertheless, this photo series of 1980 became a basis for my painting.
How do you choose your colors?
The colors are chosen by desire (or surfeit). I see a color somewhere and I like to add it in my painting, I like to get this color in a size of 2 x 3 meters.
This hyper-focus on just recording the color of something is what the impressionists did.
Yes, but on an impressionist painting a certain color/brushstroke is always related to a specific significance and has its own specific place in the whole painting. It means part of the sky or shadow of the hair and so on. But in my painting when I’m collecting colors, only in the beginning the color comes from a specific “thing” I have seen or dreamed, but from then on this color will change its significance constantly (meaning the reflections/images on the surfaces are changing all the time and the sense is fugitive/cursory) dependent to the site, the light, the mood of the viewer and so on. But this plate can be alone or together with other plates, other colors, and even this “composition” and relation is provisionary and accidental. The “composition” of plates changes from one show to another.
Color is a strange thing. It’s always shifting. It easily deceives. It’s seductive, but not considered intellectual. What draws you to creating seas of colors? To highlighting this aspect of painting more than any other?
There was a need to have these colors around me in this size. And since the beginning in 1980, I was looking for a possibility to paint with or directly into reality or what we call it. It’s an attempt to activate everything and every color around the works. For me the plates are like huge brushstrokes for painting into the reality to convert reality into painting or illusion.
How did you come to use these large panels and car paint?
I wanted to occupy some square meters for nothing, BUT a happening of viewing. I wanted a brilliant, shiny cursory happening, so I used glossy industrial paint. I never used car paint; that’s, for example, some of the “famous” misunderstandings.
There is a real freedom in working horizontally. How did you come to work this way?
You answered already the question. Try to escape the history of painting and all this stuff was very important for me in the beginning. Try to escape the representation also. But it seems to be impossible to escape the history. It would be so beautiful not to categorize, not to qualify, not to analyze, not to name, not to fix. And sensual aspects are dangerous because you can’t control them. Freedom is tempting, but you can’t imagine how hard it is for me to get a few square meters to show the plates on the floor, not only at art fairs, even in museums. There are always excuses for not showing the works horizontal on the floor. Slowly but steady the works move against the walls, to be showed vertically leaning against the wall, how a painting should be presented in a traditional way. I’m not completely against a presentation in an upright position leaning against a wall or behind a fridge or a piano. But only if there is not enough place on the floor. Normally collectors (private and public) show the plates leaning against the wall because this way they look like paintings, and it represents a painting or a joke about a monochrome painting or other stupid things. So often collectors are happy.
You can’t image how hard it is to get some square meters on the floor for showing nothing except how time is passing by, some reflections, or a colored glow.
When you approach a new installation, where do you begin?
Normally, I start with choosing colors and I arrive with these colors in the gallery or the museum where I do install the “painting.” I am always looking for windows to show the world outside, to show the reflections, the shine, the brightness of the colors. To bring the outside in.
In thinking about your installation for Extreme Abstraction, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery’s all-encompassing exploration of the history of abstraction, what guided you?
At the Albright-Knox I tried to give to the visitors, passing this corridor, a kind of “visual sound,” a good feeling, a feeling to be actor or actress and alive, while passing this corridor looking at the colors or at the sky.
After seeing the work installed with such a range of works, from Frank Stella’s Fez to an early Robert Irwin painting and a John McCracken non-plank piece, as well as contemporary artists Peter Wegner, Teresita Fernandez, and Joseph Marioni, did it change for you?
The painting is changing all the time. It was a painting among other paintings and for me the relation with the Franz West sculptures in the garden was very important, more important than the relation to the Stella painting.
The large, colorful jumbo cartoon abstractions of Franz West that were just outside the large windows. Can you talk more about why you see a kinship with West?
It’s not exactly a kinship. It was the fact that Franz’s sculptures were very present, capturing the view. I tried to find a balance inside, in the corridor. Franz’s sculptures outside forced me to show what painting is. What painting is good for. And of course I like Franz’s work a lot.
There is something very anti-establishment about West in a very humorous, yet biting way. You can commit the ultimate taboo with his sculptures, you can sit and even play on them. They are also purposely too sexual, too bright, and the opposite of ideal. You talk about wanting to work against the mechanisms of power. What were you thinking of specifically?
Roland Barthes said, “Everywhere where I’m feeling depressed there is some power.”
Roland Barthes was important to you as a young artist.
Yes, very important for some years. His writing is so beautiful, such an absence of every authority, always trying to disperse the sense.
You say that you don’t like the over-intellectualization of art, that you would even be happy to exclude art history from it. Yet, you are a very informed painter, one who knows and seems to relish history.
It’s this sentence from Goethe, “Denken ist interessanter als Wissen, aber nicht als Anschauen,”* I mean. And to look at is so hard! With my painting I want to give a possibility to look, again and again. Maybe in the memory of a viewer these short moments of looking become images.
You said on the phone that this question of history is a difficult one, how to not over- intellectualize it, but not disregard this all together. You said, “The way history is constructed is always a history of power, because the part of society that is in power is writing history, but as human beings we need a memory.” What memory of painting do you sometimes think gets lost in the way art history is conceptualized?
History I’m understanding as a tool to get information about the present. Every generation, every time/epoch has new questions of its own about the present. We are using history as a tool to find answers concerning the present. About your question, I don’t know if things get completely lost in the memory, but for the moment we don’t need them to find answers concerning the present.
How do you think your practice has changed over the last fifteen years, since your early installations at the Venice Biennale in 1990?
The work became more complex in the last seven years, because with a new generation of inkjet printers I found a possibility to print all my photographs I did since the late ’80s, on the plates. So I found a possibility to put into my work all these photographs. These photographs were drafted as paintings. To print then with silkscreen on the plates I could not afford. I’m very happy now with these new inkjet printers printing directly on the plates. I’ll show pieces like these in Indianapolis. The practice with the plates did not change so much since 1990; it seems that I’m feeling more free working with the pieces in the exhibition spaces, so I would say the painting is more loose/relaxed.
Our conversation has focused primarily on the painting, what painting can do and not do, how it can be pushed and pulled. Do you think this is the appropriate question to be asking? Have I missed something?
I don’t know. Of course, we could go on and on with this interview, we could talk more about photography, fleetingness, memory, presence, light, colors, surface, work in progress, about time, beauty, chance, transience, illusion. There would always be something missed; if not, my work would be boring. And, of course, my intentions, questions, doubts concerning those I’ve had since the beginning in 1980. How can I go on with painting, what is possible with painting, how I can show the world around us and in us.
What are you planning for Indianapolis?
In Indianapolis I want to show new works, not only monochrome ones. I’ll show also works with photographic images, which makes the whole thing we are talking about more complex. It’s hard to talk about now before the show is done.
* To think is more interesting than to know, but not more (interesting) than to behold.