Rosa Olivares: Something Like Desing - Interview with Jörg Sasse

Transcription

1 Rosa Olivares: Something Like Desing - Interview with Jörg Sasse The accumulation of images, a certain idea of a visual encyclopaedia, of an atlas of possibilities, is one of the characteristics running through all your work, both in the photographs you take yourself and in those you find over the course of time. Regarding the series Private Räume, in which the landscape appears as a symbol or a metaphor, removed from its essence in reality within a decorative representation, I would like you to talk about the image of nature, of the landscape, within the impersonation of these terms which takes place in urban life. JS: The "image of nature" appears in very different forms. The closest image to nature is a chaotic, nonstructured picture in layers. maybe something like what Pollock did with his drip paintings. The next distanced form has some kind of organic structure, for example Karl Blossfeldt worked on it in photography or, in a very different way, Mario Merz. who used the system of the Fibonacci numbers to construct his sculptures. These are more adaptive or analytic works on nature. What you see in my still lifes is a much more transformed version of "nature". What you find in most of them are patterns that were created by just using an organic structure. So it is less a form of impersonation or appropriation it s something more like design. RO: I think this use of the floral, of nature, defines and shows a need for nature, a desire for what is natural, to keep in touch with that part which is simple for some, beautiful for others, of a natural landscape. Do you think this enthusiasm for dressing ourselves, furnishing our walls and our furniture in floral print, for decorating everything with flowers, for hanging pictures which are a window onto a perfect nature is just a desire to decorate, or does it hide something more? JS: Maybe it's some kind of tension that grows out of the relation between organic and geometric structures, between conformity and difference. Finally it depends on the place and time that you are looking from. As Vilém Flusser described, in Brasilia nature is something you have to fight against, because it is permanently coming closer than you like it to be. In Europe, people are cultivating every type of nature. Running around with a monochrome shirt in Hawaii once made me feel really displaced, which might be the other way round with a Hawaiian shirt in the woods of Småland in Sweden. But you will not realise that in the more and more uniform metropolis of the world. RO: In your work, one of the themes that is permanently being addressed is the dialogue which is established between images of the exterior and the interior. This is something central in these series in which the idea of landscape, of nature, is combined in a fragment of the interior decoration of an inhabited space. How do you come to establish this specific visual dialogue? Through research or by chance? JS: When I began taking photographs in private flats or of shop windows, in addition to the referential quality based on the realism of a photography I started to work more on the formal aspects of creating an image. Something that was not been far away for me because I was still painting at that time. The question was "What is the difference between the photography that just attracts me once and photography that keeps a secret, that looks more and more interesting each time I look at it?" So I started to create a tension in each single work, mostly in a form that finds a balance between depiction and the formalism of a self-referential image. The referential part is made to be seen as something well known and familiar, at the same time the colour or the structure attracts you in a more abstract way. In the still lifes you often see some type of "perfect picture" in combination with the depiction of something worthless. RO: I am struck by the intimate, somewhat melancholic tone of your images from these series. It is as if you felt an emotion towards, or had some special attachment to these false landscapes. But at the

2 same time, you cannot avoid a hint of irony, a wink, or the shadow of a smile on seeing what has become of this grandiose idea of the landscape. JS: The image becomes a counterpart to you, when you are looking at it. It is a little bit like a mirror, where you see what you already know or what you have seen before. So it just might be your own "melancholic tone" or "irony" that you are observing! My part was to create something that is common lo contemporaries in a special region. Something like a visual experience, that could be shared. What I didn't know when I made these pictures was that even if today the objects shown in the pictures look older than twenty years ago, the pictures themselves still look very modern. Maybe it has to do with my idea of not showing one individual place but a possible place - very special but also very common in the sense that it makes you believe you know what you are seeing. RO: In your wide-ranging work I cannot remember a series which deals extensively on landscape. Have you never been tempted to create sublime landscapes? Do you feel more affinity to those enclosed landscapes of our homes? JS: Even if the difference doesn't seem to be that big, I was never working in series. From the very beginning it was my idea to work on something that in German is called the "Alltag", maybe "everyday life'' in English. I tried to accept everything visual that appeared around me. I worked like a scientist, just collecting, trying not to value things and to bear the situation of not knowing what would happen during the work process. For me it was never an option to have an idea that should be transformed into or illustrated by a visual work of art. Doing my work often felt like making a big puzzle, not knowing how many pieces it was going to have. When suddenly some pieces fitted together and it began to show more than the single piece, it felt like doing the right thing. In the mid-eighties I was already collecting amateur photographic material, not really knowing what to do with it. In the last twenty years it became a little obsession, and I saw hundreds of thousands of anonymous snapshots. I made selections and started in the early nineties to work with relational databases to find out what kind or common visual desires could be hidden in all that thoughtlessly taken amateur material. This was the beginning of my Tableaux, which are based on photographic material, worked out on the computer. Landscape appears very often in that material, therefore I did a lot of works concerning the old art historical category of "landscape". On my website you can find it under to see if it fits your idea of it. Between the photographic material and a tableau is a step in the work that I call a "sketch", because it's very close to a fast drawing - just handling filled up space instead of empty paper. After years of doing these sketches I decided to publish them for the first time in 2004, to show the part of the work that leads to the tableaux. (I published a book with the first 184 shown sketches, it is called Der Grenoble Block.) After that step I had the feeling more and more that it was time to leave the idea of working only on one "puzzle" behind. I wanted to make a parallel work on several meta-pictures at the same time. So I created the first Speicher, a mixture of storage, sculpture and analogue database containing 512 images, that can be accessed in multiple contents. Here, obviously, the landscape category appears in multiple variations ( 12.html). IN: Exit #41, 2011

3 W , Düsseldorf 1983 W , Paris 1991 P , Ludwigsburg x 38 cm W , Paris 1991

4 P , Darmstadt 1992 S , Düsseldorf 1990 W , Hamburg 1990 W , Köln x 28 cm

5 W , Düsseldorf 1989 P , Grevenbroich x 38 cm