Lines that intersect outside the image space
 
Dieter Detzner in conversation with Andreas Schlaegel
 
 
 
AS: Let’s start with the pink work at Tissi^[1] ….
 
DD: It wasn’t pink, it was clear mirrored, so it looked silver.
 
There you see how memory colours things more kindly!
 
It was in three parts. There are also one-piece works, in green. And in black, which are also mirrored from behind.
 
The back is silver mirrored? 
 
The Plexiglas is 80% dark grey, so you don’t see much of the mirror effect any more: it looks as if you were taking a completely black material with a shiny surface. But this makes the colour brilliant and gives it great depth, like water. The format of the work is loosely based on the size of the panels. 2m x 2.8m, that’s the biggest you can get. 
 
When did you start this work?
 
The first blocked the entrance to my exhibition in Munich in 2007. In the back room hung a long work of octahedrons strung together (Eva/ 2007)^[2] made of ivory-coloured acrylic glass, stretching across three rooms at stomach height. It was only attached to the walls at the two ends and sagged a little in the middle due to its own weight. Because of this curve, it was necessary to calculate each individual element separately, which means that angles and lengths had to be determined and cut individually for each edge of each element. For the statics, an aluminium rail runs through the sculpture, connected to the walls, onto which the elements were strung like a string of pearls. Everything was precisely measured beforehand and precisely calculated with a structural engineer. The total length was 15 metres. 
I wanted to work with the existing spaces, on the one hand to overcome the length of the sequence of rooms, and on the other hand to prevent the overview perspective that resulted from the gallery’s entrance situation.
I also wanted to deconstruct these almost stuffy rooms, which are very reminiscent of a bourgeois living room, with their moderate dimensions and parquet floors. Often there are only two pictures or a small sculpture hanging in each of these three rooms. My gesture was also meant to shake up this somewhat inert institution in Munich a little. Even the (non-)colour of my work, reminiscent of old telephones or computers, was also a response to the white of the gallery spaces, and the dominance of the dark oak parquet.
The question of where to place the sculptures, where to position one’s own work and how to deal with it as an artist first brought me to the relief works that followed, and to the idea of tubes that intersect and then continue without knowing where to go.
The Munich work was very much related to the situation found there, which is why it is somewhat out of the ordinary. Since then, I have taken a different approach, there are three different sizes, a smaller format, a medium format and a few very large works, like the one shown at Clemens Tissi.
There is also the consideration of detaching the tubes again, from the context of the surface and the reflection created by them. I learn a lot about how to arrange them. I start with pencil drawings, then transfer them to paper with adhesive tape, and this is already followed by a design on the computer. In the beginning I experimented with five or six tubes, now the considerations have become much more formal. The questions are always the same: how little can I make without it ceasing to function as a picture, and how far can I put the intersections out of the picture.
 
The works thus occupy an intermediate area between sculpture and painting, strictly speaking between relief, wall and panel painting. But they are not hermetic, they offer dramatic insights…
 
Exactly. There are front and back sides on which you can see marks, with felt-tip pens, traces of glue and so on. You could remove these production marks, or paint over them afterwards, but I’m not interested in that. It should also look like it was cut out.
It is not a design object, for example by Ron Arad, who also worked with the aesthetics of mirrors. But it should calmly contain traces of the handmade, and you should also see them.
 
Artists like Koons often produce works that seem to be reduced to a hermetic surface. This is not the case with you, rather the surface is disturbed, by the visible glued edges, or hints of the thickness of the material or the just discernible construction. 
 
That’s why it’s plexiglass and not stainless steel. I’m not interested in a pop aesthetic, I want to foreground an idea that is about graphic resolution. It’s always also about where these lines intersect. That gives the works a lightness that reminds me of certain paintings by Franz Kline. And at the same time, there is an effort that is possibly hardly in proportion to what the result looks like in the end. I sit there for weeks, drawing, calculating angles, and then I spend a long time cutting and sanding. A lot of time goes into that.
There is a connection to the splashes^[3] , where I was also concerned with the time reference – making the splashes was very quick, but cutting out the splash shapes took a very long time. What remains is the appearance of speed.
There is also something of a light gesture here, but it is deliberately made heavy again by the material. 
 
It also reminds me of Mikado sticks. No, it is clear that the position of the individual elements is anything but random.
 
This tension between coincidence and non-coincidence is a theme that has always interested me very much, in all my work, from the Explosions to the Splashes to today, where the confrontation takes on a spatial form. 
This column dives into the sculpture, turns and goes out again. The middle element is like a cell, a reactor. 
 
Looking back at your ouevre, one finds very specific groups: Photographs of bouquets of flowers and explosions, splashes poured onto Styrodur and cut out, followed by a phase of sculptural exploration of Aristotelian bodies, whose rational form symbolises a world view, quasi-philosophical bodies that actually embody an idea.  
 
In the new works, reflection has become very important to me again, because I was able to bring the gallery space into the work with it in Munich, or Potsdamer Strasse with its activities in the case of Clemens Tissi. At the same time, the reflection of the environment is broken again and again by the form of the work.
What I have done this year are drawings for which I blackened glass plates with soot, like in physics lessons in the past, when you wanted to observe a partial solar eclipse, for example. The drawing was created by a pendulum, with a plumb line hanging from the studio ceiling on a string. The movements made by the resulting Foucault pendulum due to the earth’s rotation leave traces by scratching lines in the soot.
Of course, this is not entirely left to chance, it also plays with mystery. After all, the soot plate is not exactly the most modern recording device. It is a game with something intangible. I had thought about giving the works produced with the pendulum titles, like questions, such as those asked at a séance. But I don’t want to claim I was penduluming here – that would be too kitschy for me. And I am certainly no medium or esotericist, and far be it from me to make fun of it. It is enough for me to look at the pendulum and the traces it has produced. I can also nudge it myself.
One influence was the drawings of the Swiss alternative practitioner and artist Ema Kunz^[4] , who was introduced to the art context by Harald Szeeman. Her drawings were often made on graph paper, on which she balanced points and then connected them. These drawings are formally very appealing, but these formal qualities are at least as pronounced in someone like Sol Lewitt. But I was more interested in this path to the construct.
In this respect, there is a correspondence with, for example, the great black work, Theodore. I am interested in the construction of metaphysical models. But rather the model itself, or how the metaphysical is transferred to the model. That’s something that art is always about: everyone reads out, perhaps only for themselves, a certain metaphysical reference to the work…
 
Like Ad Reinhardt^[5] and his black paintings?
Rather, perhaps, certain Chinese sculptures that are often too quickly portrayed as Zen-influenced. I am thinking specifically of the so-called Chinese scholar stones^[6] , stones that have been hewn to look like they were found in nature. A real semantics of these stones was developed. It could become a life’s work to make such stones. They were placed in rivers to make them appear even softer, more naturally shaped. The finished stones were provided with inscriptions and signed. For me it is essential that no stone was taken from nature.
 
Of course, this is reminiscent of Vilja Clemin’s moulded finds^[7] .
 
What’s appealing about it is the absurd and banal, the amount of work that you don’t see, and how the forms dissolve. Isn’t it the perfect abstract sculpture?
 
Isn’t that a very puritanical idea: the good form? As was the case with the Shakers^[8] , whose credo was that everything should be beautiful and nothing superfluous should be added, reduced to a truthful core.
 
In this respect, Ettore Sotsass^[9] is also interesting, and the postmodern perspective that introduces Greek columns and another canopy, and thus engages in a formal game that can also do without ornamentation. Sotsass expresses himself with what he needs. This concentration is what it’s all about, getting to the point. 
A friend said the other day that Warhol and Duchamp ruined everything for us. Of course they made great contributions to art, but like all great art, they pose the question of how it can still be possible to work differently afterwards. In other words, to charge forms with content again, when they were so completely emptied by Warhol and Duchamp.
So as not to be misunderstood: I’m interested in pop, but I also want to distance myself from it, because often, as in pop music in particular, the popular becomes too silly for me, and the recipients seem too stupid. It doesn’t become funny any more.^[10]
 
Is there, then, a new angle from which to continue the discussion about the hermeticism of surfaces as it was discussed in the eighties into the nineties? I am thinking of the work of Stefan Kern, but also of Wilhelm Mundt.^[11] In a certain sense, one could only talk about surfaces and forms, because they are the only visible things, and thus the only politically relevant things, everything else being speculation.
 
Isn’t it more interesting to have an opinion and not to evade this discussion? Isn’t that precisely the problem?
 
Many artists then solved this by realising functional references to their surroundings. Through symbolic functions, such as in Liam Gillick’s discussion platforms. With him, this took on an almost cynical component.
 
But that doesn’t really work. There we are again at the beginning – I think the boundary between decoration and artwork has to be sounded out again and again.
I’ve been involved with architecture for a long time, and what upsets me is the work of Zaha Hadid, Ron Arad, and others, which increasingly degenerates computer design into an end in itself, leading to fruitless virtuosity. It is hardly functional anymore, hardly original, whether Hadid’s Chanel Pavilion, or Arad’s chairs. It amounts to something that is the opposite of the Shaker chair mentioned above. That’s still actually the model. Or the Bedouin carpet, for example. There are old, monochrome Bedouin rugs with conspicuous weaving faults that have often made one wonder whether they really represent random irregularities. There are certainly strong reasons to believe that these weaving faults were deliberately introduced, and I do believe that. Why would someone who does a whole carpet well suddenly lose the thread in the second third or in the middle?
 
Because it is reserved for God to produce something perfect? Perhaps these were also works by very religious people. This ties in seamlessly with the question of ornament and morality, or decoration and truth – but perhaps also with the question of taste?
 
I think it’s important that when you work on the theme of taste, it also looks good, but doesn’t play with an elitist attitude to taste, and moves in a fashion context, for example, where art and fashion come very close together. Something that looks very good but totally trashy for the non-initiated, like Bless^[12] , for example, would be such an interface. That’s too elitist an attitude for me. And too conservative, because it’s too transparent. Provocative fashion that is elitist, that’s what Vivienne Westwood did in the seventies, and thought of as fashion. I think that the way we see Vivienne Westwood today, we will look at these deconstructivist clothes of today in twenty years, or at the art that plays with them. I don’t mean that you always have to provoke. 
At the weekend, there was an interview with the Pet Shop Boys in the newspaper, who also talked about the fact that they present themselves as graphically minimalist on the outside – and musically do the complete opposite by producing opulent synthetic sound spaces. And thus cleverly position themselves between aspiration and reality. Metallica has been positioning itself as a metal band in a similar way for some time now, musically acting brute, but in interviews (or in the film „Some Kind of Monster“) it’s actually a soap opera that plays out as if someone had written a script for it. When I listen to modern classical music, it seems to resist emotions, producing intellectualised emotions again. 
Some time ago, I read a book about nineteenth-century art collectors in Berlin, and I came across an aspect that I had never considered before. That historically, for the first time, the collectors were predominantly bourgeois – and no longer the increasingly impoverished aristocrats. The attempt of the urban educated bourgeoisie to imitate the representative grandeur of the (rural) aristocracy in the city flats or villas, which for a variety of reasons were conceived in a completely different way, even though they were spacious, was not successful. 
In the 1920s and 1930s, the Bauhaus^[13] triggered a similar change, which can almost be understood as an act of defiance against everything representative that art, architecture and design had been supposed to achieve up until then. And this is expressed in the imperfection and radicalism of the early Bauhaus furniture. 
There I see a proximity to my work. 
 


_{^[1] The Invisible Dieter Detzner as a guest of the Clemens Tissi Gallery, Christiane Meixner in the Tagesspiegel on 10.5. 2008: „Again and again the perception of the reflective surface is broken, shattered by its pattern of intersecting tubes, and the perfect structure is ultimately a chimera.  (…)The details of his works, which are almost always based on polygonal basic forms, are indeed constructed; first they are created in the mind, then on the computer, finally as a model. And even here, the beauty and clarity of the thought is worn away by the imperfection of the material.(…) „Paul“ as a sculpture is a pure construct that takes up or quotes elements of art, architecture and design. Paul“ as a proper name gives this abstract form a concrete body. The fact that Detzner borrows the names of all his works from art history plays a subordinate role: whatever the viewer associates with it becomes as much a part of the interpretation as the countless impressions on the reflective surface. A synonym for the diversity and constructive uncertainty that Detzner’s strict vocabulary of form ultimately generates.“
^[2] Dieter Detzner usually gives his works male or female first names, in reference to historical or contemporary artists who have been an inspiration for him in highly different ways, for example through inconspicuous details in historical photographs.
^[3] Angela Rosenberg:Ouverture Dieter Detzner in Flash Art May June 2001: „The splahes are instantly recognisable because of their implicit working process, which is reminiscent of action painting, and indissolubly linked to the perception of the work: with a flourish and verve, the paint is poured onto the surface. Abe the radical, almost anarchic gesture is then withdrawn, as the shape of the splasherst is defined at the end, when it has been cut out: a central body with grotesque, thin tentacles, abstract forms with the appearance of microorganisms.“ 
^[4] Emma Kunz described her visual work as „design and form as measure, rhythm, symbol and transformation of number and principle“. Harald Szeemann refers to a larger context: … „through drawing as spiritual indication and prophecy, she wanted to lead humanity into the light through work, to bring the arms of the cross into the lowering rights of redemption.“
^[5] Kazimir Malevich’s black square, the mother of all black monochromes, was understood by the artist as an icon for nothingness, a zero point of painting, if not of art in general. Ad Reinhardt extended this model in his black paintings: only a barely perceptible cross in the middle kept the black surface from falling silent in the deep sadness of an almost absolute black. He himself described his works as „free, unmanipulated, unmanipulable, useless, unvaluable, irreducible, unreproducible, inexplicable icons…“ As a result of subtractions, he arrived at a quasi-absolute painterly form. He understood his extreme reductions as testimony that the entire cultural development of man had led less to great achievements than to ever greater failures. Nevertheless, Reinhardt did not give up painting, but led it to a contradictory, negative form of religiosity that points to where the divine is precisely not to be found. 
^[6] Scholar’s stones are traditionally described according to four basic criteria, shape, material, colour and surface. Shape refers to the overall appearance, to what extent the stone looks like an animal, a landscape or a mountain. If it resembles a dragon, for example, then that is a lucky sign, yet it should appear as if it was formed by natural erosion, and look interesting from all sides. Known stones were drawn from many different angles, such as the stone that was drawn in ten different views by Wu Bin in the late 16th century. The texture of the surface was also a significant factor; countless adjectives were used to describe famous stones until the idea of a „clear and moist“ surface became accepted as canonical, with the most picturesque folds, wrinkles and holes possible. 
They should also be old, and if possible have a regular family tree of previous owners, who often immortalised themselves with a discreet inscription in a selected place. 
The stones were used for contemplation, as objects in which the principles of nature and the cosmos could be discovered, and were thus regarded as symbols of a free life. 
In their book Natural History, the architects Herzog & De Meuron explain: „You never know whether these wonderful forms are figurative or abstract. They have the aura of an objet trouvé and yet are manipulated. Most of the time, however, it is hard to see how this was done. In many cases, the stone is accompanied by a base that has obviously been artificially worked, but which conforms to the stone in the same way that a prosthesis does to an amputated body part. The plinth imitates the stone, but often also exaggerates it in terms of form, colour and materiality. And this, in turn, increases the uncertainty about what is real and what is completely or partially manipulated. 
^[7] Vilja Clemins: To Fix the Image in Memory, (1977-78) For this work, Vilja Celmins made bronze casts of eleven stones she had found while hiking in New Mexico. She painted the casts until they looked as much like the original stones as possible, and displayed them in a „constellation“ with these original stones: „Part of the experience of displaying them together with the real stones,“ the artist said, „was to pose a challenge to the eyes. I wanted your eyes to open wider.“
^[8] In his classic video film Rock my Religion (1984-85), Dan Graham tells of the Shaker sect founded by Ann Lee, a Manchester locksmith’s daughter who did not know how to read, following a revelation she had after reciting the Bible rhythmically. Now believing she was the female reincarnation of God, she decided to organise a utopian commune in the New World. She managed to gather a following around her and actually emigrated to America with her in 1774. Every Sunday, the Shakers met to perform their dance circles, in which men and women took turns forming concentric circles and stamping, marching, jumping and clapping their feet while intoning Bible verses, in order to be freed from their own sins in collective ecstasy. 
The Shakers were under strong Calvinist influence, and the belief in the immortal human spirit, in life after death as eternal salvation or endless damnation. God himself distributed the souls, but man could influence his own actions on earth. The goal was to be an angel on earth, simple and close to God. Ecstasy was only allowed in proximity to God. This idea of simplicity extends even to the details of furniture design, to its symmetry and choice of materials. Even the distances and surfaces of individual struts can still be recognised as reflections of communal social networks. Simplicity and order as quasi-religious virtues also meant that there was a strong interest within the community in communicating these qualities and making the representation of these values clear. Conversely, even an implied ornamentation already meant moral ambivalence, asymmetry certainly posed a threat to salvation. „Hands to work and hearts to God“ was the motto of the founder, accordingly the Shakers achieved a high level of craftsmanship perfection in their self-produced everyday objects, which also brought economic success and led to the Shakers mass-producing furniture of consistently high quality in the nineteenth century. 
This proximity to industrial design led the forerunner and pioneer of the Danish design boom, Kaare Klint, who trained countless Danish furniture designers and architects, including Børge Mogensen and Poul Kjaerholm, to order a Shaker rocking chair in America in the 1920s and use it as illustrative material in his classes in Copenhagen. 
^[9] Ettore Sottsass was active as an architect, artist, author and curator, but is most closely associated with the Memphis design group. Their furniture, screamingly colourful, edgy and with unusual or cheap materials, was perceived in the 1980s as an affront to good taste, and was considered anti-design that polemicised against furniture as a prestige object, as well as against conventional ideas of design and ergonomics, material ethics and simplicity of form. Despite international success, the hype quickly got on the nerves of the group’s spiritus rector, who withdrew from the Memphis environment and continued to work mainly on industrial design projects with his group SottsassAssociati. 
^[10] With the death of Michael Jackson, the King of Pop, an end of a conception of pop itself was increasingly reflected. The fragmentation and increasing diversity of the media landscape prevents the rise of such global pop stars, and thus the proliferation of a scenario such as Pierre Bourdieu observed in the 1960s seems more likely again. While workers listened to cheap pop music, intellectuals listened to jazz and executives to classical music. The Beatles, Madonna and Michael Jackson balanced this out in a society shaped by postmodern consumer culture; everyone listened to the same things in the eighties, not exclusively but also. Social interaction on the internet, for example, makes it more likely that targeting will continue to prevail and develop into different classes adopting different cultures, the return of class society in culture, so to speak. 
^[11] Wilhelm Mundt (*1959) became known for his numbered Trashstones, for which he has been hermetically sealing production residues in a shell for twenty years, thus reflecting sculptural traditions or conventions of modernity. The sculpture as a beautiful shell, so to speak, but one that is completely filled with rubbish. Consequently, he wrapped himself in a Trashstone in a performance. 
^[12] Under the fashion label Bless, Ines Kaag (Berlin) and Désirée Heiss (Paris) design fashion and products, also in cooperation with big brands like Nike, Adidas or Wrangler. They developed do-it-yourself trainers, sock boots and disposable T-shirts, opening up their fashion to a radical position of interchangeability and arbitrariness in terms of design. The focus is thus always on the question of the motivation to design something, rather than concepts such as wearability, glamour or branding. Through this conceptual strategy, the label succeeded in positioning itself as a border crosser between avant-garde fashion and art.
^[13] „If you ask an architect to design a chair, it will be beautiful. If you ask a carpenter to build a chair, it becomes comfortable. If you let an architect and a carpenter develop a chair – while abolishing the hierarchy – it becomes beautiful and comfortable.“ (Walter Gropius on Bauhaus philosophy)}