Lothar Baumgarten

Interview by Liam Gillick

from Audio Arts Volume 14, Number 2, 1994

Transcript

Liam Gillick: I’m at the Serpentine Gallery talking to Lothar Baumgarten.

Lothar Baumgarten: Well first when I saw the space I got the message quite immediately that I only could survive in this space if I develop a site-specific piece. The architecture is squared and quite strong. On the other hand I thought I should relate to the location, which means the city of London, which is of course also the capital of the British Empire. And I found years ago once this trade mark from Kodak, print your own colour pages, and this piece I turned into a dialogue about the frame of reference: that means the tourism, movement and all the colonialism or before the exploring sea powers in Europe. Then I used the structure of this printed map of Kodak to shape the space. It means the shape had space as four walls, equal, and they represent North, West, South and East. So I turned the space into a globe, including the ceiling.

LG: What I find very interesting about your work is that it seems to imply that an artist might have an obligation to look beyond their immediate situation. Is that something that you feel strongly about?

LB: It has to do with dialogue and the most of the pieces are worked into the context of architecture or, the location, the urban structure or the historical framework. They are all time limited, after two months or a year they’re gone. They may remain in the mind of someone. They can be done again in different sizes and spaces but they remain a memory. It’s like air; it’s gone, no longer existing. It has to do with an experience I had when I witnessed myself trying to be an artist twenty-five years ago when I was thinking I’m a painter. I finally realized that I couldn’t continue and succeed as the person I was. I could not fulfil the daily work in front of a scaffold in the same space and having always new ideas and making a painting or a drawing. It didn’t fit with my personal structure. I had to move. I left the studio and I went out on the street. The things which I found on the road, on the street: the litter and the gravel and I worked with these things, on walls and houses like that. These were not performances. I called them ‘manipulated reality.’ They were things you could see, but you couldn’t have. The minute you touched them, moved them, the piece was gone. It had to do with the, let’s call it, arrangement; it’s like a blue theatre made out ten kilos coloured blue, or South American parrot feathers put into opened sequence of a parquet floor, enclosed again. So the piece was there but invisible. I made a photograph of cabbage broccoli, which looked like a South American Rain Forest. I worked with these kinds of things which didn’t need really a studio. So it was in the pocket of my coat, what I did, in my mind.