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Joachim Koester
"Lazy Clairvoyants
and Future Audiences"
Joachim Koester in Conversation with Anders Kreuger
Anders Kreuger: Among the topics we have discussed in the course
of our collaboration, which started a couple of years ago, is 'the
future'. We have talked about the importance of the future in photography,
which is part of your practice, part of what you do. Could you elaborate
on the idea of the future in relation to your work in general and
in relation to your involvement with photographic images in particular?
Joachim Koester: All images, but particularly photographic images,
have a time dimension. Photographs tend to become more interesting
as time passes. Everything around us is designed to appear in a
certain way. This 'index' of things is almost invisible, since we
don't notice it. But as time passes after a photograph is taken
we are suddenly able to see how all these shapes really look, how
cars and houses and everything else have been created.
AK: An image, say a photograph, film image or video, is conditioned
by so many of these things around us that we are unable to see now...
JK:...and as time passes these things become apparent. They become
very visible signs of how reality was once constructed.
AK: And therefore people in the future will want to look back at
images that to them represent a past?
JK: Yes. Something that has interested me a lot is how ideas and
narratives take on a physical form, how stories and history materialise.
I believe most human activities leave traces in space. In one way
or another, spaces are transformed by human action, and in my work
I am, if you like, ghost-hunting spaces. I look for these storylines,
which may not always be very apparent but are still present.
AK: Is this your take on visuality, that it is to do with traces
of activity? Finding the traces of things that could be narrated,
and showing these traces?
JK: I think this has been my approach to photography from the beginning.
I started photographing in Christiania, a former military base in
Copenhagen that in 1971 was transformed into a 'free state', a space
that allowed its inhabitants a maximum of personal freedom. What
interested me was how this site, which was obviously originally
about control, could be transformed to accommodate new and different
ideas. Would it be possible to see this? Had this intention been
visualised as something that could be documented?
AK: The tension in all your work is, I suppose, a tension between
your interest in and research into a specific subject and what can
be seen, read and understood from the images you present of that
subject?
JK: I approach different images in different ways. There are works
where the subject-matter is very much in the images. "Pit Music"
is one example. You can watch the whole video sequence, with the
string quartet playing in the gallery, without knowing anything
about my underlying intentions. But in all my works there is a tension
between the apparent narrative, which the viewer immediately sees,
and what remains invisible or illegible.
AK: Do we need to know what you know, or do you allow the images
to tell the stories they tell themselves?
JK: It is all to do with settings. The settings I bring into my
work make my images different from other people's images. I approach
my subject matter with a certain knowledge of what has happened
in a specific place and then I take photographs there. Of course
I am not sure how they will turn out and whether it will be possible
to read the narrative or not. My intention is not to just take a
photograph, nor to illustrate a story. I want the photograph, my
documentation, to exist in a field of tension between what is depicted
and the narrative content.
AK: So you count on the viewer to share your interest in the subject-matter?
JK: Of course I hope the viewer's interest will mirror my own, at
least to some extent. What is so great about contemporary art is
that it allows you to try out different settings in your relation
with your audience. Who is the audience, how does this audience
look, what are its interests? Perhaps that is the obscure thing
about my work, that I'm looking for an audience. An audience that
I don't necessarily have.
AK: But it would be too easy to say that your subject matter is
obscure, don't you think? Sometimes it is not, sometimes you choose
a subject matter that many people have already been interested in,
written about and worked with, such as the Swedish explorer Salomon
August Andrée for example, or Christiania in Copenhagen,
or Immanuel Kant, or Dracula. These themes are by no means obscure
in the sense that they are unknown. There is a certain obscurity
involved, however, perhaps partly because of what we talked about:
the relation between the image and a narrative.
JK: Perhaps this is best illustrated by the work I did from Resolute,
in the far north of Canada. Only 200 people live there, but it has
witnessed significant events. The explorer Franklin disappeared
in this area, the architect Ralph Erskine planned a model Arctic
town, there are traces of the cold war and the horrible relocation
of Inuits to Resolute in the 50s which continues to sour relations
between Canada and the new autonomous state of Nunavut. These things
are hardly something discussed in the news pages of the mainstream
media. But it is curious that Resolute, the ship that named the
place, was made into a desk that the British then gave to the Americans
for their help with trying to locate Franklin. That desk is now
in the White House, in the Oval Office. It is called the Resolute
Desk. There is a famous photograph of President Kennedy sitting
at the desk and his children playing under it. That is the kind
of obscurity that interests me: things that take place at the fringe
but thrive secretly at the heart of mainstream culture.
AK: You are interested in visualisations of history and one of the
most commonly employed ways of achieving them is to use documentation.
But you still don't let go of your fascination with the potential
for the future, which can also be sensed in this documentation.
There is kind of a double take on time in your work...
JK: When you document something what is at stake is the past, the
present and the future. A series of photographs can be viewed as
a small archive. A scene for potential narratives to unfold. In
the Andrée project that I am preparing for Venice, I'm trying
to achieve precisely this: maintaining some of the integrity of
a material from the past and releasing that potential for us today,
i.e. for the future.
AK: Just to clarify: what exactly is this project, "Message
from Andrée"?
JK: I think this work is probably where I'm most explicitly trying
to tackle the problem of postponing a message for the future. The
title is somewhat opportune, a play or reference to all the unanswered
questions that seems resonate with the history of the Andrée
expedition.
AK: You have made a film based on the photographs by Nils Strindberg,
one of the explorers who tried to reach the North Pole by balloon
in the late summer of 1897...
JK:...and his films were lying in the Arctic ice for 33 years after
he and his two colleagues perished. Most historians who have worked
with this material have looked straight through the layer of visual
noise, of stains and blots, that covered the photographs. They have
looked into the narrative in the pictures. But I stayed mostly on
this surface layer, trying to squeeze something out of it that would
be both part of the narrative and a cover-up of the narrative. We
could say that the narrative is embedded or enmeshed in all those
blots...
AK:...which are the result of what happened to the films as they
were lying frozen for so long.
JK: So I'm trying to release a certain potential in terms of a narrative,
of the documentary. I'm very deliberately going to the edge of what
a document and a documentary implies.
AK: Are you concerned with the 'operational' question whether people
will get the message, your message? This work is called "Message
from Andrée", but will people get it? Will they see
this as more, or less, or nothing but a sequence of flickering grey
dots on a screen?
JK: What I do is to create a setting for working in the borderline
between language and non-language, between narrative and non-narrative.
I want to work on the edge of what could be called the unknown,
because if language is what we can grasp with language, the unknown
is at the boundary of language. It is what separates this time and
some other time, it is between now and what happens in Venice, in
the future. That is the unknown. Will people get it? Well, as I
said I'm looking for an audience...
AK: Your work, I think, illustrates the idea of art not as communication,
not as conveying a message, but as conversation. The real message
is what can be said about the images or the film. I don't see this
as a deficiency in your work. I don't see your work as images that
can't stand on their own, that no one will get it if they just look
at the pictures or the films. I understand that you go into each
project as if it were a conversational venture. You converse with
the visual material, with the underlying narratives, and the work
becomes one statement in an ongoing conversation.
JK: I think that is very precise. I find myself very much engaged,
even when I'm 'only' photographing, in a conversation with the place
and the narrative behind it. I think visual art has never stood
alone. It has always used words. Especially within the genre of
allegory, where words have always been used to ensure that the viewers
are properly directed, that the audience stays on message.
AK: So you would also argue that it is not a deficiency if your
work needs explaining?
JK: I don't know if my work needs explaining in the strict sense,
but it needs a context. All artworks do. I think the only artworks
that don't need explaining are those that rely on a parameter that
is very well known. If, for instance, you went to an exhibition
in 1950 you would be quite sure about the premises for most of the
works. They would be, basically: abstract/non-abstract, composed/spontaneous.
And the categories: painting, sculpture, drawing. But if you go
to a show now you will have to adjust to the work each time. You
need to find the manual for the show, and sometimes it does need
a manual and I don't see anything bad about that. I think it is
refreshing that it is still possible in today's world, which in
many ways is getting smaller, to make work that distinguishes itself
on so many levels.
AK: Your strategy is to produce work that would be intriguing to
your prospective audience, to the people you want to have a conversation
with. That is perhaps how your message could be summarised: you
are interested in intriguing the people with whom you want this
conversation.
JK: I think the questions and the answers are all in the work. That,
anyway, is what I hope. I don't think the texts that I write are
explanatory, really. Usually my work is shown with a short text,
but it is just a little manual that provides the basic facts.
AK: In order to intrigue the viewers or for them to engage in the
story or the content of your work, the least you can do is to make
people aware of the top-of-the-iceberg quality of your work. The
image you present is always the top of an iceberg of information
and fascination. There is always a background. Your photographs,
for instance, are very rarely just about taking a picture.
JK: You know how nothing in the world is more boring than participating
in a game when you don't know the rules. What I try to do is to
sketch out the basic rules for my work. This can be done very briefly.
AK: What is more important for you: the actual work, the outcome
of your preparations, or our research, your traveling? Is the 'fieldwork'
you do perhaps at the core of your interest?
JK: I think the research part of my work mainly comes out of interest
in a specific subject. But looking back my methods are not all the
same from project to project. The themes may be the similar, but
they may reappear in different disguises. For "Pit Music",
my research was just seeing a lot of films with musical scenes.
I made little notes every time I saw one, looking on how it was
filmed, or how a symphony orchestra was filmed on television. That
type of research is very different from the research going into
the Kant work that I'm making now. The Kant research is more academic
in style; finding out where exactly he took his walks, which has
proved quite difficult.
AK: Sometimes your research is process-orientated, sometimes it
is knowledge-orientated...
JK: I hate to say this, but... My approach is very much through
association. One thing leads to the next. I have become more and
more attached to this method, which is basically a chain of thought,
of thinking. Which leads me to the question whether you can think
through art. I think you can. So perhaps that is the answer to the
question, that my work is a way of thinking through art, and that
every action that goes into it becomes part of one and the same
process.
JK: I just wanted to touch upon one last thing, just to illustrate
what could be called 'the invisible index of things'. It is a work
titled "Darwin Place", in which I re-photographed a place
that Robert Adams had photographed in 1969.
AK: A suburban situation. Where is it?
JK: In Colorado Springs. When I made the work I had Adams' book
"The New West" with me. I found myself looking a lot.
It was interesting.
AK: To find the right place and to take the picture from exactly
the same position...
JK: Most of the locations were hard to find again because the environment
had changed completely. I think what is apparent in that work is
history or time as material. When you compare Adams' photograph
to mine, you see how the suburban house which is depicted is now
obsolete. It's too small for today's standards and the house is
falling apart. Trees have grown up in the garden and behind them
you see the Rocky Mountains, which represent another time zone:
geological time, prehistoric time. You can really grasp time as
a material through this very simple act of comparison.
AK: As in the Andrée work, where Strindberg's photographs
become material for your work...
JK: The photographs become material, and time becomes material.
That is one way to approach history and time: as material. And perhaps
time always points towards the future. What is there to predict
about the future? It is sitting there with all these lines, all
these traces coming from the past. Calling them lines makes them
seem very linear. But I don't see them that way. They seem to have
all kinds of influences, they come together from all sides. You
try to see where they lead to and that is of course predicting the
future. I think that is what Walter Benjamin meant with his 'Prophetic
Corner', the 'profetischer Winkel' that he discovered in the Berlin
Zoo: that he would be able to trace all the historic lines he could
see at a certain place, trying to follow them through, and this
would be a way to predict some future events. That is why he called
those who went to clairvoyants to find out about the future lazy,
because for him predicting was about looking back, about gathering
information from the past and making that information potential,
making it continue... In that sense, the future is also about a
certain momentum that you want to affect.
AK: Just to conclude, "Message from Andrée" provides
a kind of future...
JK: I think "Message from Andrée" is very much
about having set this thing in motion and seeing it just run and
run. That is the message from Andrée: a ghost from a certain
moment that may lead us somewhere. I found it really interesting
to approach these questions and to look at history not as a affirmative
past, but as a potential future. Perhaps that is the message: the
message is a potentiality of the future and contains a potential
for the future.
The conversation took place in Copenhagen on March 19 2005. The
recording was transcribed by Raluca Voinea and edited by Anders
Kreuger and Joachim Koester.
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