"I'm interested in the 'too much,' doing too much, giving too much, putting
too much of an effort into something. Wastefulness as a tool or weapon."
As
an artist I experience the same disappointment over and over again. I claim
that the end result isn't so important, but then, when I'm confronted with the
failure of my work, i'm disappointed. I don't want to sound coquettish--this
could easily come off the wrong way--but the constant failure of my works to
express the simultaneity that I'm after is probably what makes me keep on trying.
When I see the finished product I'm not satisfied, but I never feel like I know
how it should have been done instead. The attempt to capture an instantaneous
mental state, a "slice of consciousness," if you will--all the things that pass
through the brain in a second--that's what connects my works. In an instant,
all these things pass through my brain, different sensations that relate to
one another in a confusing way. I've tried to create an autonomous space, with
its own atmosphere, in which a critical position can be made clear. The idea
was to make a secret space on the periphery of the exhibition. It's somewhat
hidden. I think that one can express simultaneity only with the help of physical
space. My thoughts and sensations relate in a rhizomatic way to fashion, philosophy,
fiction, and reality.
This is like data structures. Trees: family trees. Directories. Direct our
trees. Recursion: to curse again.
They are there all at once, but how can I illustrate that? For instance, on
one of these tables you'll find books by Nietzsche, Georges Bataille, and Ingeborg
Bachmann, all of whom I like very much. But we also have fashion magazines,
which I don't really care about, but I have to relate to them, because everybody
must. Here, I tried to organize all of these connections that the brain makes
so fluidly, but my attempt hasn't been successful. People come to see the work,
and for the most part they're willing to spend time.
What I give them is space.
You can't do that in the same way with cinema or literature. Space makes it
possible to go from one thing to another and create connections. The eight tables
I set up for Critical Laboratory are organized according to themes. Here is
the Klein, Klein, Klein, Klein, Boss, Boss, Boss, Boss table. It's about fashion.
The other themes are literature, suburbs, mirrors, plants, and reality.
I always try to bring reality into my work. Not always my reality, but images
of a reality that is out there. Here there are, for instance, images from Bosnia.
I don't want to make political art. My sculptural vocabulary is chosen so as not
to exclude people, but instead to implicate them in my work--or rather, implicate
them in the world. That's what I try to do. That is why I work. That's my political
statement. This is also my world. The people who really give me stuff to think
about also make me feel implicated in the world. I get this feeling primarily
from writers and philosophers, not so often from other artists. Sometimes I don't
quite understand what these thinkers have written, maybe because I don't have
the right education. For example, I can't understand Nietzsche completely. I grasp
maybe fifty percent, or perhaps only thirty percent of what he's saying. But he
really gives me stuff to think about. Sometimes what's most interesting is what
you can't really understand or accept. Deleuze also gives me this sensation. And
Bataille's ideas about human values, how values are created, is something that
makes me relate to things in a new way. And the Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann
is somebody I love. I like her texts and I like her life--so I say love. She was
a person who lived and worked in resistance to the world. Why am I an artist?
Because I take a critical position toward how the world looks and what the human
situation is like today.
My non-agreement gives me energy to work.
I sometimes produce very large works, like in Venice recently, but they're never
monumental. I don't want to intimidate people, so everything's handmade. I want
to implicate the viewer--not so much in my work as in the issues that my work
deals with. I hope that I can make people think and relate to the world as human
beings. I don't want to be didactic, because I can't tell people how to act or
how to change the world. But without serious thought there obviously can't be
any meaningful political action, and I hope that I can make people feel involved,
in the same way that certain writers--like Bachmann--make me feel involved in
the world. It's not about interactivity. I give something to the viewer, but I
don't expect communication. I'm a transformer.