IG: But I’m not an art historian. That’s the freedom I have as an artist. Yet you have to get a lot of new visual impressions, again and again. Otherwise you get completely limited.
Isa Genzken, Kindershirm, 2004, plastic, metal, wood, palm leaf, and fabric, 86 5/8 x 47 1/4 x 33 27/32".
WT: I see that as almost the most important duty. To take the freedom is actually the hardest work.
IG: Yes. One often thinks, “I’ve got this driving feeling. I have to drive the motorway to the very end,” and then, “I must do this and this and that.” But that’s not good. It’s much better when one interrupts this routine in order to approach what one does differently. One gains a lot from this process—all that time that one . . .
WT: . . . thinks one is losing, one has actually won.
IG: Yes.
WT: Last year I had an intense experience relating to that. One morning I was on the subway to the studio and thought, “The most incredible thing now would be to just keep sitting on the train and go to the last stop.” A minor action, yet I knew what a deed it would be. Still, I didn’t do it. I thought, no, I still have things I have to do. A few days later, I walked again to the tube station, and from that station there are also trains to Brighton, and I just got on one instead of going to the studio and spent a day by the sea. And there I decided to change things and move to Berlin for the summer.
IG: That’s a great story.
WT: Like taking the lid off your head.
IG: [Laughs.] It’s important not to be all tensed up in the visual work one is doing. One has to maintain one’s sense of humor and wit. A man with special wit that I particularly liked was Joseph Beuys. I was privileged to encounter him several times when he was alive. He had a unique face. Crazy—I was fascinated by it.
View of Isa Genzken’s studio, Berlin, 2005. Photo: Wolfgang Tillmans.
WT: He was extremely charismatic, right?
IG: Well, he actually kissed my hand once and said, “You are my teacher.”
WT: [Laughs.] Really?
IG: Yes. In Venice, with his whole family in the background.
WT: That is fabulous.
IG: I met him only rarely. I once called him and said, “I must talk to you.” And he said, “Just come over.” I must say there is a certain energy among artists. He didn’t say “Okay, when do you want to come by? Next week, or what?” We sat under the cherry tree in his wonderful little garden and he asked, “Well, what do you want from me?” I said, “Architecture is a catastrophe in Germany; we’ve got to change that.” Then he said, “Go ahead, you can always sign for me.” [Laughs.] I wasn’t there for long. Even though we didn’t see each other often, we got on really well, in a very direct way. We didn’t need to say much. It’s beautiful when that happens. That’s what it was also like with Dan Graham and Lawrence Weiner. One doesn’t need to say so much about things.
WT: One can read it straight away in the other.
IG: Yes, and that is exactly the relationship one has to the person and to the art that person makes. It’s pretty much one to one.
WT: Because art is, after all, an extreme mirror of the person. I truly believe that artworks can translate thinking and psychology beyond words, and an interesting take on the world will yield an interesting result in a form that doesn’t necessarily follow speech or writing patterns.
Wolfgang Tillmans, Freischwinmer 26, 2003, color photograph, 70 27/32 x 94 1/2". Photo: Wolfgang Tillmans.
IG: That’s why we’re dealing with aesthetic problems—in order to visualize what we think. That’s what it’s all about.
WT: Yes. But most don’t even think that.
IG: That is why someone like Léger is a kind of illness to me, because there art is used for something it’s never had anything to do with. You know, something strange happened to me recently when I was in the Museum Ludwig. There was an exhibition there comparing Léger and Beckmann. Neither is all that interesting to me, because in a curious way they are both so unrealistic. Léger—nobody looks like he paints.
WT: Neither was ever a favorite of mine.
IG: And when I saw this exhibition, I had the feeling that in these forms of art lie the root of all evil in twentieth-century art, and there is a line right through to today. This is the feeling that came over me; I wanted nothing to do with it. It’s different with Matisse, who worked at the same time, after all, or some wonderful works by Picasso, for example. If we’re concerned in a certain way with realism, be it in painting or photography, there’s another energy there.
WT: I think it’s much more radical to see and show things as they look instead of making them somehow subversive through alienation or estrangement. I find it less shocking when it’s estranged. It’s better if you can show an inner thought or something shocking with a so-to-speak realistic representation, without it becoming immediately “art.”
IG: I wanted to ask you something: When I see your photographs I think of painting. Is that wrong or right?