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 John Beeson, Sight Mapping, Rainer Ganahl: Art in Context, BOMBLOG, www.bombsite.powweb.com/?p=13142,                  

August 18, 2010

 

SEE furst bekiw the last corrected and edited version as it appears on the magazine's page:

below that see the unedited, un-shortened version that is not copy edited or corrected below:

edited verison --- there are alwasy problems wiht special signs: unreleted to editing - just hte dreamweaver doens't do a proper job:

JOHN BEESON - RAINER GANAHL

“Ganahl is having proper tea with Karl Holmsqvist, Berlin 2010.” Ink on paper and photograph (21 x 29.7cm (A4) each).

Only after five years of first studying philosophy and history did Rainer Ganahl come to art – as he says – more or less by accident. These years, which he considers to be the most significant of his formative years, have continued to define his relation to art as well as his conception of what it means to be an artist. Since the late 1980s, Ganahl has frequently exhibited his work in solo and group shows around the world; he has been included in biennials from Moscow to Shanghai, has shown in the Arsenale in Venice and as a representative in the Austrian Pavilion, and recently opened a series of solo museum shows around Europe. Ganahl was born in the city of Bludenz, in Austria, and currently lives with his family in New York, NY.

On July 10th of this year, Ganahl opened the exhibition “Tea Party” at Werkstadt Graz in Austria. Inspired by the boutique-like environment in the gallery, Ganahl conceived of the space as a teahouse with a reading-club atmosphere. During the first week of the exhibition, the artist presented a series of readings - as he has done sine the early 1990s, having been inspired by a photo of graffiti in Paris in 1968 which read, “Lundi Marx, Mardi Mao” (Monday Marx, Tuesday Mao), indicating the quick change in ideology at the time. The list of authors included in his schedule of readings reads somewhat like a syllabus for a master’s course in radical political thought - Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, Mao Zedong, Alfred Jarry, Tristan Tzara, and The Financial Times - and represents the theoretical backbone of Ganahl’s current artistic production. The physical works exhibited included a series of ink drawings combined with photographs documenting a recent group of performances. The series, titled “Proper Tea is Theft” – after Marx’s colonialist-minded paraphrasing of a famous sentence by Proudhon, “Property is Theft” – exemplifies the swirling universe of at-times absurd, ironic, and often referential subject matter that comprises this vein of Ganahl’s work.

 

JB: In her review of your recent exhibition “Language of Emigration & Pictures of Emigration” at Alex Zachary, Roberta Smith referred to you as a “veteran Conceptual artist.” Are you a Conceptual artist? And, more broadly, how does your work relate to its art historical context?

RG: Let’s say that being considered a “Conceptual artist” is less annoying than being called a “video artist” or a “media artist” – a label I really object to, although people in Germany seem to like it. Having studied with Peter Weibel [at the HAK-Vienna] and Nam June Paik [at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf], I was associated with these labels often; hence, I learned to enjoy being called a “Conceptual artist.” But, do I identify with it? When compared with straightforward painters, I might rather look like a conceptual artist, since ideas are the driving force behind what I do. But, when compared to some historical figures of classical Conceptual art, I am not always on their wavelength. At the art school in Stuttgart [in Germany] I even teach sculpture and lead a stone-carving workshop as part of my job.

To answer the second part of your question, I would say that I don’t really care so much about the historical lineage of classical Conceptual art. I feel no obligation to guard a tradition - quite the opposite. If some of today’s (young) artists stay hard the course of 70s Conceptual art practices, in most cases I find it very annoying. What was done in the 60s and 70s was relevant to the cultural, technological, social, scientific, political, and media environment of those specific times. Though, needless to say, some people, such as collectors and dealers, love it when things resemble or are nostalgic of previously successful periods and styles.

I try to relate to my world and my current situation and instead engage with modernist figures that predate even Marcel Duchamp and are not necessarily limited to the visual arts. I do so, for example, by thinking of Alfred Jarry, Vladimir Lenin, or Fritz Haber as unrecognized Dadaists. Compared to the apparently limited set of artistic choices made by Conceptual artists of the late 60s and early 70s – although great exceptions do exist – my choices are eclectic at best. I am not afraid to do whatever comes to my mind, whatever I find suitable for the situation and context, whatever I can produce or afford to have made. I am not afraid to use old and anachronistic media should I discover a contextual or poetic reason for them.

“DADALENIN,” 200X. Bronze, porcelain.

JB: You are currently a professor at the ABK-Stuttgart, and several series of your works take pedagogy, intellectual history, or simply informational exchange as their subjects. Nevertheless, this is normally done in a relatively personalized way, in a way that avoids the abstraction of information to the point of being dry or dense. Can this be considered as a functional difference between a conceptual dimension of your method – assuming that there is one – and the methods of historical Conceptualists?

RG: This might be a lovely difference to which I subscribe, but we shouldn’t forget those historical positions that are romantic or are based on idiosyncratic lifestyles and personal interests. I am thinking specifically of Alighiero Boetti, Bas Jan Ader, Douglas Huebler, or Vito Acconci, who were as much classical Conceptual artists as they were hopeless romantics. The problem with comparisons arises with the lumping together of all these heterogenic approaches that crystallized under the historical banner of Conceptual art.

Simply put, new approaches in art are less to be explained from within art than from the dramatic rotations of the world in which art is situated. I would even go as far as to say that the trend towards the conceptualization of the arts in the late 60s was an expression of the conceptualization of society and its technologies that had already occurred. We shouldn’t forget – to name just one example – that it was the introduction of 474 Boeing jetliners that created an international art scene, with its traveling protagonists. Only when you can choose from an international menu of artists and venues are curators needed and can big international group shows take off.

Installation view of “Holzwege. Ein Passionsspiel” at Hospitalhof Stuttgart, Germany, April-May 2010.

JB: Especially with you recent exhibition “Holzwege. Ein Passionsspiel” at Hospitalhof Stuttgart, you situate your work in contexts that inform and are informed by the works exhibited. Some works in that show commented on the identity of their specific context. To what extent were works conceived for this specific location? How does this dialogue reflect your artistic inspiration?

RG: Nearly all works of mine are based on some context, be it even just my personal life. I like that the word itself already says it all: ‘con’ (with) and ‘text’ – together, wildly translated as “with text.” Given my text-based education as a theoretician and historian, I have almost no choice but to engage with my contexts. In the case of Hospitalhof, we are looking at a complex that is nearly half a millennium old and has served as a playground for knights, a monastery, a hospital, a prison, an SS torture and detention center, and, since WWII, again as a church and education center with the inclusion of an exhibition platform.

For that exhibition, I decided to work with wooden sculptural relief, a traditional medium for church interiors. Given the site’s various functions, I chose a set of themes that overlapped with aspects of my work and interests. To give a few examples: in reference to its function as a church, I invoked the famous quote by Karl Marx: “Religion is the opium of the people” [also translated as “Religion is the opiate of the masses”]. Another work, a portrait of Theodor Adorno, a Jewish philosopher who became the main integration figure of post-war intellectual life in Germany and Austria, stood for the artistic and educational functions of Hospitalhof. Then again, the sinister and horrific function of the Büchsenschmiere (can lubricant) – as Hospitalhof was cynically called during the Nazi period – I saw best addressed with a work depicting used Zyklon-B poison cans at Auschwitz.

Several subjects in the exhibition related to each other in the following way: Zyklon-B was invented in 1918 by Fritz Haber, a German-Jewish Nobel Prize winner, who also invented and weaponized mustard gas for the German-Austrian side during WWI. Chemical weapons and gas masks became a very significant new marker for WWI, which, in the works, I compared to with the cultural activities occurring at the same time at Cabaret Voltaire in neutral Zurich. Dada and chemical warfare were innovations that transgressed laws and conventions to the point of uncontrollable escalation.

JB: Can you say something about the existence of motifs in your work - which have recently included Dada, Communism, Alfred Jarry, and bicycles?

RG: As I pointed out earlier, all that historical stuff enters as text through context. By playing texts against each other, I am able to reread history against its own institutionalized order and reopen it for new questionings and new arrangements. I became interested in Alfred Jarry because Jarry’s “King Ubu,” a play that stages the usurpation of total power by a subordinate who killed the entire royal family, was read at Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich. At the time, Lenin, himself, lived in the same small street where Cabaret Voltaire held its most celebrated events. Lenin was most likely a frequent participant in the activities of Cabaret Voltaire. Needless to say, very shortly after “King Ubu” was presented, Lenin gave the order to have the entire Romanov family killed. The coincidence of Dadaism and Lenin inspired an open-ended body of work that I call DADALENIN. DADALENIN has become for me a tragic-comic category that I try to project not only onto history but also onto the present.

“Fritz Haber,” 2007. Ink on paper.

For example: In 1933, Hitler finally removed Fritz Haber from his glorious position working as a chemist. Haber then committed suicide while in exile in Basel in 1934. Haber’s wife Klara Immerwahr had also committed suicide – in 1915 – in protest against her husband’s involvement in the war. Members of Haber’s own extended family might have even died after 1941 as a result of the creation that he had developed two decades earlier. And, in the same tragic-comic manner as DADALENIN is conceived, US and NATO helicopters are being shot down right now in Afghanistan by the same stinger anti-aircraft rockets that were given to the mujahideen by the USA in the fight against the Soviet Union.

Communism is “Alfred Jarry’s absurd theater plus DADALENIN” in the way Lenin proclaimed, “Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the entire country.” Communism and DADALENIN are broken hopes mounted on bicycles while colliding with a tramway, as Lenin did in Geneva, because of which he almost lost an eye. Alfred Jarry was one of the most radical bicyclists and doping advocates of all time (see: Perpetual Motion Food). Bicycles are modernist machines that enable the true and literal auto-mobilization of the masses. Bicycles are also an answer to our energy and obesity problems, a remedy for urban sprawl and planning impasses. Bicycles are the finest driving machines and can always be used for art making. Bicycles also cure headaches and heartaches and render social networking sites unnecessary.

JB: In a reciprocal way, is the scope of your work determined by the social, political, historical, and various other contexts that surround your subjects of interest? Would you resist including a motif that you have previously worked with – such as pedagogy – in the production of a work for DADALENIN if it has no logical relation to the themes and contexts informing that body of work? Do you freely combine motifs and themes, or do you limit yourself to what is logically related?

RG: The reality is that most things we do in life, we do without much thought – they are intuitive and need not be analyzed for every conscious or unconscious decision-making twist. As it relates to my work, the idea for DADALENIN came out of a five-minute conversation in which I learned some basic facts about Cabaret Voltaire – specifically that Lenin had lived just across the street – following an invitation that I had received to do a project there. Then again, the show “Tea Party” came together during a 30-minute visit by the curator of that exhibition. The Hospitalhof exhibition was conceived in a couple of minutes after seeing a student hammering away on a plaster relief in the stone workshop, which I had walked through by accident.

I think I am a very beauty-driven man and have barely ever opted for choices that I don’t also like aesthetically, emotionally, or otherwise. Needless to say, what beauty is for one person may be trash for another, and vice versa. A set of jewelry pieces that I made recently, which are conceived as portable mini-sculptures, are not well understood by some of my supporters, from what I can tell. I seem to have become “incalculable” and harder to anticipate for those who want me in this or that corner depending on their standing. But I don’t really care at all – I’ll do what I like. Now, for example, I’ll just go to sleep in the middle of the day – and not for art’s sake.

“DADALENIN,” 2010. Bronze.

JB: You travel, live, teach, and exhibit internationally. Is there such a thing as an international context for your work? Although you have a broad and keen understanding of art and history internationally, are there inherent difficulties in relating to your work for uninformed or provincial viewers?

RG: I do think that every work has a social and intellectual context that fits to it. I also believe that people who are informed by similar sources, similar educational backgrounds, and similar experiences are most likely to identity with my work. My case is in no way different from others, although the stages of my cultural and intellectual socialization are quite diverse, since I studied a variety of subjects in a variety of places, in a variety of languages, and in a variety of cultures. Still, all people share what one could call an “imagined context.” We are all aligned relative to certain experiences; we share common knowledge, standards, interests, values, and aesthetics, which are informed by our upbringing, our cultural formation, our education, our media consumption, and our product worlds.

Usually, I don’t intend for my work to be incomprehensible. I try to communicate and make art in order to reach people who share my “imagined contexts” – though I do that without any awareness – or with only the minimum amount of awareness one needs to, let’s say, pick a language. Now, you may ask, what happens to people whose contexts don’t overlap much with mine when they come in contact with my artworks? I don’t know. But, it goes without saying that people who have read books by Edward Said see the photos that I took in Said’s class at Columbia University [part of the ongoing series “Seminars/Lectures,” begun in 1995] in a different light than people who have never read his name. In the end, though, my work loses out, which explains why it is not easy to be sold or collected.

JB: What is your interest in the formal nature of your work? Is your formal interest subordinate to other interests? Is this representative of a larger political-artistic belief?

RG: Somehow I don’t think in these terms – form here, content there. The formal aspects are very, very important, but they are somehow determinate or given by context, by references, by the needs of the work, or by the producer of the work. When I work with painters or sculptors that I solicit on craigslist, the respondents are mostly art students, and, depending on the result, I either recognize the product as a work of mine or I don’t. I once had a nice guy who was supposed to paint letter by letter, but instead of doing so he just finished the text off with a simple stroke. In the end, even that lazy gesture worked very well.

I also appreciate traditional, craftsman-like renderings of subjects, if it helps to translate one media into another. This was the case with the wooden reliefs. But, the majority of my works – photographs or performances – are made following an Occam’s razor and a form-follows-function, straightforward, snapshot-like approach to doing things. Only in regards to DADALENIN and Alfred Jarry’s avant-garde decadence and absurd nonchalance do I also permit modes and forms of productions that had barely ever caught my interest before.

Whether this attitude is representative of a larger belief I don’t know, but I clearly have seen other people doing it as well – namely Jeff Koons, who was big when I was an art student, and many YBA artists, who also order absurd things to be made in absurd materials. These modes of production are less an expression of a political-artistic belief than of a galloping extension of conceptualism becoming mannerist. Artists today do whatever best fits their purposes, whatever these purposes are. With a quasi-dialectical twist, I’d like to offer an explanation for this hysterical “media-frenzy” [the production of many different works, many of which are in a different media] which definitely applies to me: the less an artist possesses traditional skills, the less he or she is bound by a specific medium, which allows him or her to choose from the entire spectrum of artistic and non-artistic options and styles.

 

===== AUGUST 2010

 

below see the unedited, un-shortened version that is not copy edited or corrected below:

Hi Rainer,

John Beeson: I've put together some questions for the interview. When you get a
chance to sit down and take some time to answer them, please do. I
think the best way to create this interview would be through an
exchange of emails, of which these can be the first couple. If you let
me know what plans you have in the near future, we can try to work
around them.

Rainer Ganahl: I’d like to point out that I just opened a show at Werkstadt Graz in Austria, in a tiny gallery run a quite renowned goldsmith (www.ganahl.info/werkstadtgraz2010.html). He asked me to make a show involving my presence. I offered to make a series of readings as I have been holding them since the early 1990s. For an entire week I came up with a schedule of authors that ment something to me: Monday – Marx, Tuesday – Lenin, Wednesday – Mao, Thursday – Alfred Jarry, Friday – Tristan Tzara and Saturday – The Financial Times. The proposed Kaffeehaus, as he suggested, I changed to a Tea House. The boutique like gallery in Graz’s historic center – the walls over 500 years old – resembled a tea house with a reading club atmosphere. The chaging of authors was inspired by a photo of a Paris 1968 graffiti which showed “Lundi Marx, Mardi Mao “ to was to indicate the quick change in ideology.

Saturday the exhibition started for which I made jewelry in bronze and porcelain with subjects relating to these authors. Looking into tea, one realizes very quickly that tea culture in Europe was a byproduct of colonialism and imperialism. Lenin was one of the best theorist and cricit during the hight of colonial politics. His book “Imperialism the highest state of capitalism” was written in Zurich, where he lived opposite the Cabaret Voltaire, the founding place of Dada with Tristan Tzara as one of the most active members (see: dadalenin.com) . According to various sources Lenin and Tzara knew each  other while Lenin frequentiedthe Cabaret – something that is quite obvioush given the proximity of their locations. Marx – as usual – know to address the subjecdt best: Paraphrasing Proudhons famous sentence “Property is theft” – he went “ Proper tea is theft. A series of Proper tea is theft (ganahl.info/propertea.html) works concluded the show together with a video entitled” I hate Karl Marx,” in which Marx is accused to be a reincarnation of Chinese.  (ganahl.info/Ihatekalrmarx.html)

 

Without further ado:

JB: In her review of your recent exhibition "Language of Emigration &
Pictures of Emigration" at Alex Zachary, Roberta Smith referred to you
as a "veteran Conceptual artist." Are you a Conceptual artist? And,
more broadly, how does your work relate to its art historical context?

 

RG: Lets say, being considered a “Conceptual artist” is less annoying than being called a “video artist” or a “media artist” – a label I really object to though in Germany people seem to like it. Having studied with Peter Weibel and Nam June Paik I often was associated with these labels, hence I learned to enjoy to be called ‘Conceptual artist’. But do I identify with it ? When compared with straight forward painters I might rather look like a conceptual artist since ideas are the driving force of what I do. But when compared to some historical figures of classical conceptual art I am not always on their wave lenght. At the artschool in Stuttgart I even teach sculpture and have a stone carving workshop attached to my job.

My first five years of studies - which I consider the most important for personal identity formation - I studied philosophy and history and didn’t even dream of becoming an artist. This all happened more or less by accident after my 25th birthday. Entering art school relatively late and with a rather set mind as a theoretician, I couldn’t even start to believe in the very concept of an artist with all its traditional connotations. This is why I paid always very much attention to this identification process and tried to stay skeptical towards the very concept of being an artist. I just look at it as a job description and say “I work as an artist.”

To answer the second part of your question, I would say that I don’t really care so much about the historical lineage of classical conceptual art. I feel no obligation to guard a tradition. Quite the opposite: If some of today’s (young) artists stay very hard the course of 70s Conceptual art practices I find it in most cases very annoying. What was done in the 60s and 70s was relevant to the situations and lives of their times regarding their cultural, technological, social, scientific, political and media environment. Today, the page has turned many times and it can’t be but pathetic and ridicules to reiterate the same forms and attitudes – and be it with whatever attitude. Needless to say, some people get quite some mileage out of it and collectors and dealers love it when things resemble or are nostalgic of previously successful periods and styles.

Of course, I’m very interested in what was done for what historical reasons forty or so years ago. But I try to relate to my world and my current situations now and rather engage with modernist figures that even predate Duchamps and are not necessarily limited to the visual arts – like Alfred Jarry, Lenin or Fritz Haber as unrecognized dadaists. I also have a special faible for Marx. Had Marx rather been a conceptual artist or a pop artist ? Compared to the apparently very limited use of artistic choices made by Conceptual artists of the late 60s and early 70s – great exceptions exist !! -  , my choices are eclectic at best. I am not afraid to do whatever comes to my mind whatever I find suitable for the situation and context, whatever I can produce or afford to be made. I am not afraid to use (and order) old and anachronistic media should I discover a contextual or poetic reason for it. The question is never “But is this conceptual art” (“Am I cutting off somebody’s tale”) – but rather “Does it make sense for me, now and here ?”

JB: You are currently a professor at the ABK-Stuttgart, and several series
of your works take pedagogy, intellectual history, or simply
informational exchange as their subjects. Nevertheless, this is
normally done in a relatively personalized way, in a way that avoids
the abstraction of information to the point of being dry or dense. Can
this be considered as a functional difference between your method and
that of the historical Conceptualists?

RG: This might be a lovely difference to which I subscribe but we shouldn’t forget also those historical positions that are as well romantic and based on idiosyncratic life styles and personal interests. I am thinking specifically of Alighiero Boetti, Bas Jan Ader, Douglas Huebler or Vito Acconci who were as much classical Conceptual artists as they were hopeless romantics. The problem of comparing arises with the lumping together of all these heterogenic approaches that crystallized under the historical banner of Conceptual art.

If you really want to look for differences I’d point out to very “ugly” shifts better described in the business and technological section of the still existing newspapers – which now everybody reads solely on line - than in the arts sections. Today, we are used to instant communication with hand held computers and digital assitants, have instant access to the entire archive of culture and historical archives – it’s now a complete different ball game. Shortly speaking, differences between the arts are less to be explained from within the art but from the dramtic rotations of the world in which art is situated. I would even go as far as to say that the trend towards conceptualization of the arts in the late 60s was already an expression of the conceptualization of society and its technologies. We shouldn’t forget – to name just one example – that it was the introduction of 474 Boeing jetliners that created an international art scene with its traveling protagonists. Only when you can choose from an international menu of artists and venues curators are needed and big international group shows can take off. Hence when art is bound for open and affordable skies its nature and content is going to change. Harald Szeemann – first international curator – and Conceptual Art were frequent fliers and brought to you by Boeing.

 

JB: Especially with you recent exhibition "Holzwege. Ein Passionsspiel" at
Hospitalhof Stuttgart, you situate your work in contexts that inform
and are informed by the works exhibited. In some cases - such as with
the wood carvings exhibited in the chapel that addressed German
history and the meaning of religion directly - the works commented on
the identity of their context. To what extent were works conceived for
this specific location? How does this dialogue reflect your artistic
inspiration?

RG: Nearly all works of mine are based on some context and be it just my personal life. I like that the word itself already says it all: ‘Con’ (with) and ‘text’ – wildly translated “with text.” Given my text based education as a theoretician and historian I have almost no choice but to engage with my contexts. In the case of Hospitalhof, we are looking at a complex that is nearly half a millennium old and has served as a playground for nights, a monastery, a hospital, (it’s current name), a prison, an SS torture and detention center for transports of people to camps, and since WWII again as a church and education center including an exhibition platform.

I decided to work with woodcuts, a traditional medium for church interiors. Given these various functions I chose a topic that overlapped with aspects of my work and interests: To just give three examples, for the church function I used the famous quote of Karl Marx, one of my heroes, “Religion is the opium of the people.” A portrait of Adorno, a Jewish philosopher who became the main integration figure of post-war intellectual life in Germany/Austria – on which I started to write a PHD paper without finishing – stands for the arts and educational functions of Hospitalhof. The sinister and horrific function of the Buechsenschmiere (can lubricant) as it was cynically called during the Nazi period I saw best covered with an image of empty / used Zyklon-B poison cans as they were found in Auschwitz. Zyklon B was invented by Fritz Haber, a German Jewish Nobel prize winner for chemistry (1918) who invented mustard gaz and weaponized it during WWI for the German-Austrian side. Gaz and gaz masks became a very significant new marker for WWI which I read together with the cultural activities that started around the Cabaret Voltaire in neutral Zurich at the same time. Dada as well as the gaz war were novelties transgressing laws and conventions to the point of total uncontrollable escalation. 

 

JB: What do the motifs of bicycles, Alfred Jarry, Dada, and Communism
represent in your work?

RG: As I just pointed out all that historical stuff enters as text through context. Playing it against each other, I reread history sometimes against its own institutionalized order and reopen it for new questionings and new arrangements. I Alfred Jarry discovered at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich where his play UBU REX was read, a play that stages the usurpation of total power by some subordinate who was killing the entire royal family. Lenin who lived in the same small street at exactly that time was most likely a frequent follower and participant at the activities of Cabaret Voltaire. Needless to say, very shortly after the KING UBU presentation Lenin gave exactly that order and had the entire Romanov family killed. The coincidence of LENIN and DADA inspired me wildely for an open ended body of work I call DADALENIN (dadalenin.com) to which the latest addition consists of jewelry (www.ganahl.info/neckless.html). DADALENIN thus becomes for me a tragic-comic category that I try to project not only  onto history but also onto the present. In 1933 Haber finally was removed from his glorious position by Hitler and committed suicide in Basel in excile in 1934 – just likes his a PhD in chemistry holding wife Clara Immerwahr did out of protest the day after Haber launched his first mustard gas attack in Ypres 1915. Haber’s all around defense consisted only of three words: Death is death. Needless to say, most likely members of his own extended family might have met death after 1941 through his creation he had developed two decades earlier. Didn’t Bush invade Iraq looking for weapons of mass destruction including poison gas arsenals? While I’m writing, aren’t US and Nato helicopters shut down in Afghanistan by the same stinger anti-aircraft rockets that were given to the mujahideens by the USA in the fight against the Soviet Union ?

Communism is 'Alfred Jarry’s Absurd Theater plus Dadalenin' the way Lenin proclaimed that 'Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the entire country.' Communism and Dadalenin are broken hopes mounted on bicycles while colliding with a tramway as did Lenin in Geneva almost losing an eye. Alfred Jarry was one of the most radical bicyclists - a velosophist - and doping advocates (Perpetual Motion Food) of all times on a stolen but very expensive bicycle, which he reflected in his writings. Bicycles are modernist machines that never have lost hope and sex appeal in the process of the auto-mobilization of the masses. Bicycles are also an answer to our energy and obesity problems, a remedy for urban sprawl and planning impasses. Bicycles are the finest driving machines and can always be used for art making. Bicycles also cure headaches and heartaches and render social network sites unnecessary. In New York bicycle riders get free admission to the MOMA, saving 20 $, if they are willing to pledge not to be Marxists. 

JB: In a reciprocal way, is the scope of your work determined by the
socio-political and intellectual contexts that surround your subjects
of interest?

RG: Well, context should never be just reduced to socio-political context. I am not sure what you mean by intellectual context since even beauty and poetry is in the end intellectual and context driven though I don’t want to “over-intellectualize” the world or over-determine it by intellect.  Only if asked or if in dispute I come up with these rational explanations. The reality is that most things in life we do without much thinking – they are so-called ‘intuitive,’ ‘just like this,’ and need not be analyzed for every conscious or unconscious decision-making twist. For example, my DADALENIN idea was based on an invitation to do something at the Cabaret Voltaire and a 5 minute conversation over it where I learned about some basic facts (Lenin’s address); the jewelry/tea party show was put together during having a 30 minute visit of the curator in New York, and the Hospitalhof show was conceptualized in a couple of minutes after  seeing a student hammering his head away on a plaster relief in the stone workshop I just walked through by accident. I think I am a very beauty driven man and barely ever opted for choices that I don’t also like aesthetically, emotionally or otherwise. But needless to say, what beauty is for person may be trash for another and vice versa.  The reaction for my jewelry – portable mini-sculptures - are not well understood by some of my supporters from what I can tell. I seem to become “incalculable” and harder to anticipate for others who want me in this or that corner depending on their standing. But I don’t really care at all – I’ll do what I Iike. Now, for example, I just go to sleep in the middle of the day – and not for art’s sake. 

JB: You travel, live, teach, and exhibit internationally. Is there such a
thing as an international context for your work? Although you have a
broad and keen understanding of art and history internationally, are
there inherent difficulties in relating to your work for uninformed or
provincial viewers?

RG: I do think that every work has a social and intellectual context that fits and is most likely to be identified with people who are informed by similar sources, similar educational backgrounds and experiences. My case is in no way different to others though the stages of my cultural and intellectual socialization are quite diverse and wide spread due to my multiple studies in multiple places in multiple languages and cultures. All people are sharing what one could call an ‘imagined context.” We are all aligning around certain experiences and share common knowledge and standards, interests, values and esthetics informed by our upbringing, our (national) cultural formations, our educational blocks, our media consumptions and our product worlds – and all this in altering concentrations and differing clusters.

Usually, I don’t go out and hope nobody understand me. I try to communicate and make art and anything else to reach people sharing my ‘imagined contexts’ – though I do that without any awareness – or lets say with only the minimum of awareness one needs to pick a language. Now, what happens to people in relationship to my art works whose contexts don’t overlap much with mine? I don’t know but instead of sculptures that show penises in porcelain entitled ‘I wanna be AJ ‘ (Alfred Jarry) they might see just porcelain dicks with AJ written on them. But it goes without saying that people who read books by Edward Said see photos I took in Said’s class at Columbia University in a different light than people who never read his name and don’t even google him. My work loses out which explains that it is not easy to be sold or collected.

JB: What is your interest in the formal nature of your work? Is your
formal interest subordinate to other interests? Is this representative
of a larger political-artistic belief? What is the viewer to
understand by this?

RG: Somehow I don’t think in these terms, formal here, content there. The formal aspects are very, very important but they are somehow determinate or ‘given’ by context, by references, by the needs or by the actual maker of the works. I have no formal skills but can draw nonetheless “something” – which I accept or don’t accept. The same goes when I work with painters or sculptures I solicit on craigslist (www.ganahl.info/morenews.html). They are mostly art students and return results I recognize or don’t. I once had a nice guy who was supposed to paint letter by letter but instead of doing so he just finished the text off with a simple stroke. In the end, even that lazy gesture worked very well.

I also appreciate very traditional craftsman-like renderings of stuff if it helps to translate one media into another. This was the case with my woodcuts (www.ganahl.info/holzwege.html) or with the creation of a marble monument for Fritz Haber and Clara Immerwahr when I was trying to shoot for mass appeal, ‘kitsch’ and ‘classical’ looks. But the majority of my works – photography or performances – is made with Occam’s razor and a form-follows-function straightforward snap shot like approach of doing things. Only in regard to Dadalenin’s and Alfred Jarry’s avant-guard decadence and absurd nonchalance do I also permit modes and forms of productions that had barely ever caught my interest before.

Whether this attitude is representative for a larger belief I don’t know but I clearly have seen other people doing it as well – namely Jeff Koons who was big when I was an art student and many YBA artists who also order absurd things in absurd materials. In Basel I just saw a new half-opened medical model of a human made out of marble by Damien Hurst. These modes of productions are less an expression of a political-artistic belief but rather of a galloping extension of conceptualism becoming mannerist. Artists today do whatever best fits their purposes whatever these purposes are. With a quasi-dialectical twist, I’d like to offer an explanation for this hysterical ‘media’-frenzy which definitely applies to myself: the less an artist possesses traditional skills the less he is bound by a specific medium which allows him to order from the entire spectrum of artistic and non-artistic menus and styles. Just go for it !