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Interview
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Jochen Gerz
interviewed by Simon Baker, Parls, February 2001

How do you respond to the term installation in relation to your own practice?
I use the term installation deliberately in order to apply it to work that doesn't
take place in the museum or at least not exclusively in the museum; work that
has a double status. By this I mean that the work might originate in a public
space but that it may be transferred to, or aimed at, a museum. In this way the
museum is no longer the exclusive point for the handlingof art and this process
itself is the ongoing challenge. In the current situation, given the speed at which
everything becomes a museum, trying to 'kill the museum' has become

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ridiculous. What I think is the real issue for the museum is to have to deal with
things that happen somewhere else, in other spaces which do not physically
seem to include the nomenclature of the museum.

Fig. i. Jochen Gen: Caution. Aft Corrupts. 1970. late. London. Courtesy Atelier Gen.

OXFORD ART JOURNAL 24.2 2001 25-40 OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Interviewed by Simon Baker
FI~. 2. Jochen Gen: Miami ~&t, 1999.
Thurgau. Courtesy Atelier Gen.
Do you identify with the term in your own work?
I do, but like many things in art today, it is a battle that has already been won and
victories inevitably end in commemorations and I'm not sure that I am that
interested in this process. I'm not saying that I'm not interested in installation's
historic achievements but that I am quite happy to accept them as such. What
was an innovative art form at the end of the Sixties and the start of the Seventies
is much less so today.
Given that there has been a shift in installation from a marginal practice in that
early period to its present visibility and centrality, how have you responded to that
change?
That is exactly what I have tried to do and what I wanted to explain at the
conference. When I think of installation today, I think of it in the same way that it
was thought about in the late Sixties and early Seventies. Today, it still means
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getting away from the object, getting away from the pedestal, getting away from a
central place for sculpture. Actually installation means situating the viewer in this
central space. Installation is progress because it surrounds people and it's
closer to any living space or any space of experience, interaction, or sociability.
In this way it is stressing not only itself, as installation, but it stresses the fact
that there is a viewer.
How does this figure in your own work?
Recently I had an exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Des Kantons in Thurgau,
Switzerland. I invited people to come to the museum through newspaper ads
rather than invitation cards and they were asked to bring an empty bottle with
them. At the entrance to the exhibition, which was a long, dark space, there was
a barely legible sign that instructed visitors to go to the far end and throw the
bottle against the wall. People entered one by one but could not see the far wall
in the darkened room and so would have to decide for themselves when they
were close enough to throw the bottle (Fig. 2). At a certain point, crossing this
dark space, they would find themselves walking on shards of broken glass. So
there was a decision for everybody, a question 'what should I do?' If I am invited
to do something in the name of art, is there a special thing that I must do? If a
political system asks me to do something, what do I do? There are decisions to
be made about why I do this, whether I want to do this, the doubt before doing it.
The piece was called Miami Islet and it was a homage to Robert Smithson, who
tried in 1970 to dump fifteen tonnes of glass on a small tidal island off the shore
of Canada. He couldn't do it because at that time there were the first
manifestations of Greenpeace. They understood more or less what he wanted to
do but did not share his priorities. It was the first time that these two avant-
gardes, which were still in their early stages, had met and they had very different
agendas.
Given the changes in the way that installation is perceived, do you still think that it
can be a resistant practice?
I think that even terms like 'resistance' are very relative and have now become
part of the commemorative process. We commemorate resistance and we
commemorate progress and I don't think that every evocation of 'resistance'
means what it says. Installation is still interesting. Ijust think that it should keep
on moving. Art is not contemporary if it is just quoting movement, it has to
actually move. Any kind of immobility is institutionalized, or institutionalizable.
 Jochen Gem

Good art corrupts more than bad art but is more difficult to track down. The
institution has an interest in tracking down movement, but it also has an interest
in putting sand into its own motor. A failure is not always failure. In art we have a
history which says that perhaps failure can be creative and that it is non-failure
that is the reactionary, stubborn, repetitive process. We should be daring to give
credit to non-conclusiveness, to non-communication, to non-functionality. I think
that's part of the spiritual resources that we can make function.

How is this idea manifested in your own practice?

I did a very simple piece recently, in many different museums, called My Word. It
was just a page in the newspaper asking the question: 'If you could choose
among all the words in the world which word would you choose?' There was a big
bracket and people had to write the word that they felt best represented them.
Then they came to the museum with the word and they could exchange that word

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for a teeshirt and they wrote the word on the teeshirt. Also written on the t e e
shirt was - 'This tee-shirt is part of the permanent collection of the museum' -so
you had a situation where it was part of the collection but was no longer in the
museum. Some of the people wanted to hang their tee-shirts up on the wall, and
others wanted to wear them and put them in the washing machine (Fig. 3). So
there are different ways of dealing with 'the work', working or reworking the
terms. Doing work today means making a declaration of what can be achieved
and what was achieved and what can be recycled into something that has not yet
been achieved. It's a little bit like a dialogue with the history of art.

Can installation be marshalled in defence of public works of art?

Yes, in those terms, installation is not something that is limited to museum
manifestations and it can be quite subversive in a way. A museum can help an
installationto happen at the corner of a street where there is no museum and no
curators and no invitation cards. But the museum is still backing it theoretically,
spiritually, and socially by saying this is what our work is about and we are
backing this. It is interesting that in this way you could have something
happening in society that is not the work of an artist, perhaps in a 'fluxus' or a
'dada' way. I think that the museum is a powerful manifestation of the culture, it
has never been as powerful as it is now and yet I think we are still behaving as
though it were not.

So the museum can be brought back, almost in spite of itself, to perform a useful
function?

Yes, as a cunning and unpredictable presence. The museum is like a tiny society
or an image of society and installation is a laboratory for the functioning of
society. Installation in a museum makes something different out of the museum.
Paintings in a museum are almost like a caricature of a society but with
installation you imagine that you go from strut to strut, from layer to layer, from
palimpsest to pallmpsest. from time to space. You check yourself out all the
time in these different environments, which are a kind of active display of
possibilities. So I think that bringing the idea of installation into society brings
the museum into society, which is a utopian idea which has never left us.
C
- -
-, - w 0---
zi

Given that you clearly see yourself as being able to use institutions in this way, do
m
you think that the relationship between artist and curator has changed at all?
F&. 3. Jochen Gem: My Word. 1999.
Today we have many curators. Not so long ago specific curators for contemporary Respubhca. Bozen. Courtesy Ateher Gem.

OXFORD ART JOURSAL 24.2 2001 29

Interviewed by Simon Baker

art didn't exist any more than specific galleries or museums. Now we have both.
So these curators, working professionally around installation, artists, commun-
ication, didactics, and theory are partly artists too. I think in fact it's a Joke to try
to uphold all these identities, curators are closely involved in the process of
creating. I think that today the curator, like the artist, is somebody who can give
up a little of their exclusivity and win a lot.

How does the site relate to the work?

The site Is as important for an installation as the canvas is for a painting.
However, you can only say that in a general way because each site is of course a
new decision, while the canvas remains a canvas. Each site has a history,
requires an empirical approach. You can't talk about a site if you don't know the
site. You can't parachute yourself into a site, you need to have some familiarity,
common roots, and common past with a site. It's a funny thing but work in a

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public space is more limiting than studio work, which can be much more modem.
Painting, for example, is actually much more modern than making site-specific
installations - you don't need anything, you just need your house-shoes, your
slippers, and you're painting. If you go into a public space you have to be there,
you have to know about it, you have to learn from it. You can't just say 'lets do
something In Newcastle'! The site can be something very challenging because it
is part of the unique nature of the commission. And there you come to something
totally different: how in contemporary art can you have something like a
commission. That's another thing that's not modern at all. As the young Marx
said, 'the revolutionary is conservative'. I think that creativity is not freedom;
creativity Is what you do if you understand that you need freedom.

Are your works slte-spectflc?

Yes. For example, when I was awarded a prize for a public commission I was
asked to do a work in Bremen, in the north of Germany, but I didn't know what I
should do. The people who had given me the prize wanted me to make a work of
art but I thought, you don't really want me to come to your city to make a work of
art, after all there are many other people who could have made a work of art
there. I asked what they thought I should do and after three years they still didn't
know and they said that the Renaissance is over, we can't tell you what to do. I
decided to ask the taxpayer what we should do, what was urgent, what should
happen, and then do a work of art about that. Altogether, 50,000 people in the
city of Bremen were asked their opinions about what should be done. It was very
interesting and it resulted in the work, the Bremen Questionnaire. So the site
creates the work and that's a beautiful thing because then the work is shared
between the artist and the audience.

Do you believe that the site inevitably consumes the work?

It could be that a work seems to disappear, as for example, with my proposal for
the empty plinth in Trafalgar Square in London. There is so much bland visibility,
you may have something to look at, that engages the eye, but then you don't see
it anymore, it's just another dead horse. There is this one plinth which is empty
and which of course I'd never seen, and I was asked to think about something
that I'd like to put on it. My proposal was that every year, a piece of turf from the
pitch of the English football team that won the championship that year should be
put on it. Each year this turf would be replaced. You replace the big metal thing
usually on top of such a plinth with a homage to that year's champion, let's say

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Interviewed by Simon Baker

dragged out of oblivion and denial - the shame and lies that had to be made
public. But in this process it would have been frivolous to talk only about
personal memories, they had to be sacrificed to the larger picture. Actually, we
didn't ask for remembrance, the victims did. Now that the victims have achieved
the status of public memory, maybe it is possible. I am now doing a work in
Barcelona about the first public bombing of a civilian population in 1937 and in
this context I found myself writing on a piece of paper, 'I have been bombed too'.
It seemed crazy but that was the first time that I dared to remember.

How does that very personal Interaction with memory relate to the importance of
the political dimension within the work?

In Spain, society never retreated from its history so there you have an ongoing
narrative from Franco to the independence movement, to the republic, to Europe,
and it's the same people - there has never been a Nuremberg, a cut-off. So the

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bombing in Barcelona was very well known in the Thirties but it had since been
practically forgotten because the victims, as much as the perpetrators, if they
were not one and the same, didn't have an interest in talking about it. So there
was a different situation altogether. It is an astounding example of the
healthiness of what is happening today not only in Germany and the United
States but everywhere. History needs to recover memories, but modernity seems
at the same time to be suggesting that history could dispense with memory
because it's too abstract. Today, without any kind of advocacy or any kind of
pressure, young people are interested in questions of historical memory.
Although some claim that it's a political movement you can't really say this, it is
not a political movement. There's no political consciousness. Politics is now
something totally authorless and the politicians are having a hard time trying to
play 'author'. It seems that there is an element in the general audience of
democracy that no longer wants to be the audience, it wants to be something
more like an author, closet authorship. I see it in the same way in the arts. There
is a commission: make a work of art about the first civil bombing in Europe. I tried
to find people who were in favour of it; everybody was mildly in favour of it. I tried
to find people who were against it; everybody was mildly against it too. The
socialists were against it, the republic was against it. They say its too late, the
Italians are our friends, Europe is our friend. It's a very different, a more modem
situation but just because you don't have partisanship, victims, perpetrators,
doesn't mean that society stops working. We can't say that there is no more
politics, there is no more theory. Theory is going to happen and politics is going
to happen, we just don't have the authors of theory or politics any more.

What form did the commission take?

It will happen late in 2001. There will be some kind of artificial memory day, sixty-
five years after the first bombing in Barcelona: it's all fake.

So there won't be an object?

Oh yes, there will be an object, there will be a little hill made out of the ruins of a
house. It will be in the centre of the Plaza de la Universitat, a very large, clear,
neat space in the centre of Barcelona. For the first three years there will be a
little pile of rubble, like the remains of a house with toilets or whatever poking
out, but after three years it will be covered in grass. I witnessed this process at
the end of the war, the grassing-over of all kinds of rubble. Maybe kids will use it
to cross it very quickly like a little hill. It is called The Hill. In one way it's a

32 OXFORD ART JOURNAL 24.2 2001

 Jochen Gerz

disruption. Normally you say, 'we have a park and now we will make a sculpture
to go in it'. Now we have a sculpture that becomes a park but the park is not
really a park. In Europe the park is not nature, the park is culture (Fig. 5).

How would you describe the relationship of your work to its audience?

It's clear that sooner or later, the production of anything is related to people. For
example, last summer my work Les Mots de Paris was situated in front of the
cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris. I engaged twelve homeless people and
allowed writers, people from theatre and from the visual arts to work with them
so that together they could make a place to collect money but also for
discussion. I think that everyday 15,000 people came to that place and perhaps
10,000 saw the work so by the end of three months there would have been a
huge number of viewers (Fig. 6). However, I don't think that this is necessarily the
opposite of another place where you have your usual two per cent of whoever

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comes by, and whoever sees. There is a right of the people not to see and it's
very important these days because information is so powerful. I think its very
important not to be informed, not to see, maybe as important as it once was to
be informed.

Oo you have a preconceived idea of the audience or Is this different for each work?

In 1970 there was an art magazine that asked artists the same question and I
said that I consider that when I do a thing in the street that I am a guest. I quoted
Artaud who said that if you want to have interest in the street you have to come
with tanks and barbed wire. The magazine, which was very much about
participation and contributions wrote, 'no comment'. I think that work should be
unpredictable in a society but it should be virulent. It should mean something
even if it is a riddle.

You have said that you don't presume to tell people what to think when you create
a monument but do you make assumptions about the cultural knowledge or
historical experience of your audience?

Well if you do works like mine, like the monuments against racism or against
fascism, you do them in Germany because there the issues exist. It's not as
important to make a work as to keep a discussion going. A traditional work of art,
like a statue or a classical monument, has the tendency to put discussion to
rest. I am interested in creative processes that enable discussion. You don't
need to talk about art all the time in order to be heard, in order to be taken into
account. We live in a very cultured society. After the war, Germany didn't have
many options, it couldn't make many commemorations. An intimacy with
progress coming out of the wounds formed by the knowledge that culture hadn't
prevented the Holocaust, was the only way forward. It was very fitting to
challenge society with notions of art that were not familiar to people. Sometimes
a discourse is going on but you don't hear a word, its like a taboo, you have to
unsettle the stone and turn it over and it's a very long process. Works like this
can take anything between three and ten years to complete.

Is the idea of the witness Important in relation to the audience?

This is interesting and virulent with respect to the idea of the relationship of
victim and perpetrator. Who is the witness? Is the witness the perpetrator, or is
the witness the victim? We have a tendency to become more and more
conscious about things but we retreat more and more from the space of the

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 Jochen Gerz

So operating with an anti-aesthetic for the Harburg monument, was it then

important to make the form of the work relevant to the site?

In a way it had to be something like this because the column had to disappear.
To complete the process you take into consideration what makes you really think
about disappearance. To make a very conventional column disappear was like an
attack on our own fragility, on what we don't want to see. So there are different
parameters defining the way a work looks, its visual appearance. In a way, what
sometimes seems unusual to viewers about a work of art, is nonetheless the
result of formal and technical decisions that are very normal. The object
becomes a player in a team, it doesn't always need to become the only focus of
attention. The text is very similar in that sense too, a text is a very object-oriented
manifestation. It might happen that one day the work is a manual but in the visual
arts it remains important that the 'thing' is also an object.

Is your work always the result of a commission?

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Until the early Eighties, works in public space were perhaps the most retarded
type of art practice. It was as though the recycling of modernity had overtaken
them and painting, sculpture, installation, or performance were all more
advanced than collaborations between architects and artists. But gradually in
Germany a pretty wild program of public art developed. This was perhaps
because many cities had an image problem. These cities developed themes and
specific commissions by encouraging the art world to collaborate with the
politicians. Slowly, through this praxis, or the enlargement of this praxis, these
commissions became themes or became issues for artists and artists
responded to these initiatives. Almost the second work that I made for a
public space, the Saarbrucken 2146 Stones - Monument Against Racism, was
not a commission but a secret work (Figs. 8 & 9). It was, as we found out later,
also an illegal work. Each work redefines your position and the commissioning
process has become more and more refined over the years and I always say that
half of the work is in the commissioning. The creativity of a work and the quality
of the work depends upon the commission.

Do you have a preconceived notion about the work before you begin, or do those
commissioning the work have a preconceived idea of what you might do?

The commissioning body, or the jury, want you to do something. They are
partners and it's very good to live in a world of partners and competence.
Whether it's for three people or 3,000 people is not really the issue, but it's
important to imagine that you do your work for somebody, somewhere. With the
work, Les Mots de Paris, I worked for five years to communicate and publicize
the idea so I almost did the commissioner's job. The commission came back
and said yes, but it all started in a casual talk between a curator and myself. In
the same way, I don't think about future works that I would like to do but rather
about the people who are going to ask me to do them and the potential
audience.

In the past you have described politics as one of the primary materials of your
practice. Does this remain true today and has your construction of the political
changed?

Initially, it seemed that politics was what other people owed you but now it is
more like politics is something that you owe other people. You have to
understand that whatever you do, in terms of criticizing society, you do

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