人物的瞬时性——弗里德里希·埃因霍夫的珍贵采访
弗里德里希·埃因霍夫个展：
人是个谜
Lithograph on paper 平版，512 × 435 mm
TATE Collection 泰特美术馆收藏
Temporary Figures
Conversation with Friedrich Einhoff about ephemeral compositions and people in flux*
B: On February 28, 2009, you will be awarded the Hans Platschek Prize for Art and Writing dedicated to "flaneurs between the genres" in the context of the art Karlsruhe, International Fair for Classical Modernism and Contemporary Art. You yourself are, if you will, a flaneur between painting and drawing, figuration and abstraction. Which connection do you personally have to the painter, essayist, and critic Hans Platschek?
E: From about 1958 to 1962, I was occupied with questions, which at the time occupied many who came from Informal painting-among other things, which amount of figuration one might permit and under which circumstances one might become illustrative. In this respect. Hans Platschek, who was thirteen years my senior, had already developed a number of ideas, which at that time deeply affected me. I was very intrigued by his portraits of Franz Roh and others. This also applies to the early work of Peter Blake and to other British artists who during that period were involved in finding new forms of expression with regard to the figure-Bacon, of course, or also David Hockney.
B: From the very beginning, the figure plays a central role in your work, undergoing various transformations in the course of time. At first the figure still appears rather abstract. Then it becomes more concrete, but in principle it oscillates between a recognizable individual and a collective being. This is generally characteristic of the figures, which appear and disappear in your work.
E: Here, you are touching on something that has always concerned me very much and has always linked me with Platschek namely the question: when is one merely repeating a figure, and when is one developing one's very own figuration that conveys more than an image of a specific person? In the 1970's I was not focused upon the individual portrait. I was more interested in situations that were recognizable and namable - up to socio-critical approaches, which were very strongly influenced by the British artists of the time. However, this was not the path I wished to follow. I responded to this in the early 80's with an increased neutralization of individual traits in favor of a type. From the late 80's onwards this changed again because I had a strong urge to once again more intensively deal with component parts of the figure - with eyes, nose, mouth, ears, and so on-and yet, of course, was seeking my own distinct method of creating these differentiations.
In the past twenty years, I had to work out these matters. And yet I have never lost the inclination to destroy and minimize everything again, only leaving torsos, so that actually, today, I have both possibilities: to become more concrete, creating figures that look at the viewer or have a specific posture of the head as well as other figures, which are rigid, alienated, and which one can no longer address as individual persons. Now have both options. This is why I no longer play these off against one another.
B: In your speech on the occasion of the prize awarded to you by the Free Academy of the Arts in November, 2008, you palpably described how already at an early age, due to your personal history-because of a long-term illness you had to rely strongly on yourself and the creation of your own world as a child - you conceived of your compositions as stages, upon which your figures acted out the events you chose them to perform.
E: Indeed, these are figures whose existence runs parallel to life, characters who incorporate parts of the life that l was unable to participate in.
B: ...thus inhabiting a parallel world...
E: A parallel world, or, if you want, a substitute world. But in works of art this is often the case.
B: Certainly, a further decisive biographical influence lies in the fact that you grew up during the war. Through war and illness a certain threat, of course, was always latently present, which becomes manifest in the fragility of your figures and counter-worlds or parallel worlds, Simultaneously, a kind of darkness is predominant in your compositions. One has the feeling that the figures are living in a world, into which very little sunlight enters. Often the figures have a conspicuously pale skin and thus appear like beings, which habitually dwell in the dark...
E: ...like potato sprouts, which inhabited a darkened space and were not subjected to sunlight.
Now, my specific colour scheme did not develop by chance. Indeed, when evoking the figure in one's imagination one always has the entire history of art, that is, the faces others have conceived, in one's mind. It is difficult to be without bias. In so far, much of what I do is also an evasion of predilections. One response to this, fir instance, was the avoidance of a specific, subject-matter-related palette. This is closely linked to the fact that -- without using surrealist method -- I work with alienation effects. These are effects that are not immediately obvious, but transform the figures to a high degree. I isolate my figures and greatly reduce them, as in hard-egded photograpthic prints. I use various methods of alienation, working with material, such as earth, for example, but also with the deletion and overlaying of given elements, whereas these alienations though - if one even wishes to adhere to this term - proceed in a gentle manner. Sometime the slight alteration of an eye or a small twist of the head insufficient to create the desired alienation effect. What you just mentioned with regard to parallel world or an imaginative world or an imaginative world is of course a decisive point. At the same time, my works are always vehicles of my experiences, attitudes, and myself, as well.
B: Now, life also occasionally takes place underground. On the one hand, one might visualize a sundrenched, well-lighted exterior lives, on the other hand, one that proceeds in more quiet places. Or also in more seditious places, which perhaps though do not reveal themselves so readily in glaring daylight. When perceiving your figures, I have to think of the "Walpurgis Night" scene form Goethe's Faust, namely the passage dealing with the notion of "fishing in murky waters" -- particularly in view of those who are pursuing various mysterious activities, where one never quite knows what they are up to. And yet one also has the impression that these figures seek exactly this murkiness in order to draw energies from it. Might this also be a central motif of your work?
E: I am often asked to explain the impulses governing my works. There are people who have difficulties with them and infer from them to the manner in which they consider my person. And I always have to disappoint them when I say that I enjoy life and am very positive in many ways. However, this is not an impetus for me or for my work as an artist. It has always been the "nightshade" phenomena - as you call them - that have induced me to develop a composition. My work always takes this course, and I am only satisfied with it when this is the case. My figures, whether presenting themselves as a solitary being or in a group, are pretty somber, like detritus or references to something that is disturbed - also to a kind of transitoriness.
B: Of course, to that as well. Or to the notion of arrested time, which seems to permeate your works.
and about which various people have written: this Magic Mountain-like suspension of time, which one find: in the sphere of sanatoriums, remote places, prison wards-in each space that is removed from the ordinary temporal or societal zones, and where one dwells to better oneself or to be healed.
E: With respect to this notion there is a great sentence written by Hanna Hohl in a catalogue on my works from 1983, where she says that my figures are located in spaces as if they were simultaneously sheltered and imprisoned.
B: l find this comparison very apt. Indeed, both options appear to be valid. But in my view you are also dealing with the suspension of time, that is, a situation that contrasts with the flow of time in everyday life and is ruled by its own dynamic. Your figures might be located in a space in which three hundred years comprise three minutes or three minutes last for three hundred years
E: This probably also has to do with the fact that I am greatly impressed by ideas such as these. For example, I recall a small exhibition with the title Hautnah that took place in 2002 at the Kunsthalle in Hamburg and deeply affected me. The side cabinets in the museum where it was staged were totally transformed. In the darkened spaces illuminated casts of people, heads, and animals derived from 19th century academic collections had been hung or placed. One had the feeling of encountering human beings from former times there who no longer existed with individual features, which, however, were alienated to such an extent that it appeared as if these were still present, suspended over time-over a hundred years and more-and arrested in a particular state. This was very fascinating for me. Edward Kienholz, whom, by the way. I have never mentioned up to now, also impressed me very much-he works with effects such as these as well.
B: I can immediately see that, and yet in Kienholz's case everything is much more concretely formulated, less subtle than in your works....
E: Yes, absolutely-due to the principle of montaqe and to the fact that he stuffs everything into tiny spaces and that the materials that he employs are aged and used. And still Kienholz is much-and I don't mean this in a negative sense-more demonstrative than I am. He deeply moves me because of this. I have always liked this overwhelming effect that a work of art can have, and basically have always sought to bring it about myself. With the often rather quiet undertones I favor I'm not actually the type to induce this effect, but I'd very much like to trigger a certain irritation with my works.
B: You definitely trigger irritation and also a latent perturbation because one often does not know exactly what it is one is actually perceiving. In a text l once wrote about your works, l mentioned that the figures appear both too strange and too familiar. I believe that this peculiar tension contributes to the impression that one is confronted with something that has come to the surface, but should preferably have remained in the dark. This also corresponds to the definition that Sigmund Freud expounded in his essay on the “Uncanny”, which revolves around the notion that in the phenomenon of the uncanny something comes to light that should not have come to light, that is, that something reveals itself, which should actually have remained concealed.
E: This is very much in accordance with my ideas. Although from my point of view I do not conceive of the uncanny in my works as horror film scenarios-in my case it doesn't go that far.
B: No, in your works it is, as already mentioned, much more elusive. Of course, the term "uncanny" does not necessarily imply a horror scenario, but rather something that was once familiar and through a slight shift has turned into something alien, or rather, uncanny.
E: In my works, this shift takes place in a very palpable manner. l am very much attracted by completely banal photographs from daily newspapers or from magazines. When leafing through these, I am stopped by certain images, and l always envisage how I might transform them, what they would look like if they were contained in a work of mine, what l would omit, what l would allow to remain. There is an old portrait photo, for example, of the publicist Siegfried Kracauer, who is wearing a dark suit and sitting diagonally in a room, looking slightly past the viewer. There is also something fractured in the image, arising from a reflection in a broken mirror. This image has literally dug itself into my mind, and will doubtlessly become manifest one of these days in one of my works. Photographs, particularly if they are images from contexts of everyday use, in which case one does not have scruples to change or to utilize them, offer possibilities to me, which reality with its fluctuations does not allow me to grasp. Indeed, the photograph already represents suspended time. And thus enables one to perceive things which one would not be able to see in passing, Photos function as a stimulus for me, as mental images. However, when working, I have nothing concrete before my eyes; neither a person sitting for me as a model, nor a photograph, both would distract and restrict me.
B: Photographic images are more like a secret reservoir in the background, a kind of archive of ideas?
E: Yes, they function like a reservoir. What I find fascinating in a photograph, for instance, is the posture of a figure, which perhaps hardly looks at the viewer or averts its head in such a manner that merely an ear is to be seen. This can entice me to produce a painting or a drawing, which contains these elements. Yet I have to be entirely alone with the painting itself and the material. It is pointless for me to have a photograph directly before my eyes, but it exists as a source of inspiration. I rework photographs, that is, l often produce enlarged copies of photos, which I then work on or delete, sparing only a few elements. I started doing this back in the 1960s. Today I try out what can be changed on such copies and gain experience for my drawings and pictures.
B: I find that your works encompass a paradox combination of traits. On the one hand, they are keenly present. On the other hand, and this phenomenon has already been described in a number of ways, they also invariably incorporate the fleeting and ephemeral, having to do, among other things, with the delicate layers from which you compose your works, the obliterations, the color scheme, as well as other characteristics pertaining to your painting methods. One constantly has the feeling as if one were looking through a veil or perceiving dream images, which might disappear at any moment without actually doing so. A concretization of the ephemeral takes place, which simultaneously keeps annihilating itself. as Werner Hofmann has vividly described. in so far as the painted statement already contains its own dissolution.
E: I could not formulate the notion of the one being contained in the other more succinctly. Both is always there-the dissolution and the development. Sometimes the act of disappearing, sometimes the act of developing is in the foreground. But in any case the non-stationary, the not quite solidified is an important aspect for me. This is connected to the fact that, save for a few exceptions. I keep working on paintings that remain in the studio for a longer period of time. Behind this lies the desire to keep changing the works over and over again. One's own perception changes from day to day, from week to week, also with regard to one's own compositions. The conclusive, final state of a work probably does not exist. These are merely attempts at approaching the creation of a figure. My production method does not follow along the lines of first sketching an image, then becoming more detailed, and building one element on top of the other, but is a rather informal procedure, I work on the floor, walk around on the painting. It is like a tanned hide that ultimately develops through the working process.
B: Your characters are essentially temporary figures.
E: Yes, “temporary figures”is an excellent expression.
B: In a broader sense, they thus become existential heroes. Because ultimately, in this life, we all are temporary figures
E: This is indeed also resonant in the works. And if they make this visible, I have no objections.
B: I have noticed that in describing your works many-and I don't exclude myself-tend to draw upon literary motifs-whether Werner Hofmann pithily points to Samuel Beckett's Endgame, or, as in my case reference is made to Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain. Or whether, as in Claus Mewe's text, the Portuguese Nobel Prize laureate José Saramago and his remarkable archive are mentioned. Again and again., literary, narrative aspects crop up in connection with your work.
E: For me, there are two possible explanations for this-one reason might be that some know that l also studied literary theory and perhaps think that literature might therefore be particularly adequate for the interpretation of my works. Another reason might be that people recognize that my works are not dealing with real life, but rather with..
B: dreams, absurd dramas, fragmentary allegories of being
E: In Beckett's writings the figures are indeed also very isolated, defective, and grotesque, and sometimes they are also not to be seen in their entirety. Here a connection clearly suggests itself. I have indeed acknowledged the literary references - be they to Beckett, Kafka, or others - as something that concerns me, yet in hindsight, after having completed my work. My inspiration is not grounded in literary subject matter, but there is a propinquity to the authors. Perhaps sometimes more so to these than to painters, particularly in Beckett's case. I have always felt a strong closeness to him as a person as well.
B: Probably also with regard to the manifestation of paradoxes, the juxtaposition of the light and the heavy, of the uncanny and the comical. of presence and absence, that is, in the conflation of opposites that actually exclude one another.
E: And which also have always created problems for me. On the other hand, when looking back at my works, l also recognize that these have a certain continuity and homogeneity.
B: Do you perceive consistent elements in your work, regardless of whether the figures are depicted as solitary beings or in groups, whether they are being accompanied by apparatuses of some kind or, vice versa, are accompanying these, or whether they are just standing around in some abstract sphere?
E: This is difficult to answer directly, yet the figures do have a particular facial expression. There is a penchant for particular materials and preferences in the manner of producing the works. One consistent aspect is the fact that I always have to work hard to execute my works, which sometimes display a certain awkwardness because of this, as well as that I immediately destroy anything that appears too obviously virtuoso or too brilliantly painted. The works always have an austere air, a disturbing, brittle quality.
B: One of your exhibitions was entitled Personenregister (Registry of Personae), a term, which Claus Mewes has examined at length in connection with your works in his text. This also brings up the question whether your figures are not, in fact, principally collective beings, which in turn perform the function of representatives
E: When I worked at the artist-run institution Künstlerhaus Hamburg in 1995 for a few months, incessantly conceiving and varying figures and faces on sheets of paper of equal size, I sometimes felt as if l was in a registry, in which the characteristics of a species are observed and recorded, as if they belonged to an interconnected, superordinate system. Here, the notion of the registry entered my mind, which - in analogy to specific registries listing persons in the relevant books - was used for the first time as the title of an exhibition in 1999, and in 2001 became the title of a publication.
B: I find the idea of a coherent system, in which your figures are interrelated with one another, very interesting. When regarding your works, one also has, as already mentioned, the mental image of closed systems, in which the figures are driven by certain internal dynamics, and a pecseliar logic reigns. At the same time, the works open up to the broader panorama of existence - to an extra-pictorial reality.
E: As already mentioned, I have always had a strong affinity to photographs, which l incorporated in my compositions in reworked and alienated forms. My personal archive includes old, anonymous photos from flea markets. In the book Personenregister, I describe, among other things, how from a very early stage onward I had the inclination to look at photographs and to think about what might have become of the people depicted in them. The aspect of the ephemeral has always been very present to me in photographs, and has never lost its hold on me. It was also for this reason that Christian Boltanski impressed me.
B: In a conversation, Boltanski once told me that one of his objectives when assembling and presenting anonymous images and objects is to help these to once again acquire a narrative and to liberate them through the encounter with the viewers from their anonymity
E: I can well imagine that he would make this kind of statement. Yet I have always seen him in a different light. What connects me with Boltanski is his use of those strangely processed photos of faces, which comprise the substance of some of his installations. I have always felt that he makes tangible what remains. what is still there-not the individualization. but actually the last remnants of an individuality. which has ceased to exist.
B: The remains of the day…
E: If I were concerned with making something tangible in my work then it would be a notion such as this.
B: But certainly the factor of securing traces is also relevant. In his works, Boltanski is constantly gathering traces that refer to something else, or that establish a connection in the form of substitute figures, which stand for the larger community of man, to the viewers, as is the case in your works as well.
E: I do in fact call some of my works "figurative traces," which also implies this notion of the fragmentary that you mentioned a while ago. This is linked to the fact that I am not interested in depicting what is whole or complete. And I attach a lot of importance to the concept of developing my compositions in a manner that lets the viewer perceive the transitory in images that are not static...
B: …something, which your protagonists embody as well…
E: Yes, in their capacity as temporary figures and figural traces.
This interview is based on a conversation between Friedrich Einhoff and the art critic and publicist Belinda Grace Gardner which took place on January 11, 2009 in Hamburg.
出版社: Kerber
出版年: 2010-3-31
页数: 256
装帧: Hardcover
弗里德里希·埃因霍夫
贝琳达·格蕾丝·加德纳教授 Belinda Grace Gardner (PhD) 是美学理论和视觉研究博士，艺术与文学理论家，独立策展人，艺术评论家，汉堡与明斯特美术学院艺术史系教授。研究方向为现实、身份、记忆、地点和空间的跨文化和跨媒体建构；在不断变化的社会中的全球危机、移民和流离失所情境的背景下，对当前艺术中现实的（后）殖民和审美行动主义进行研究；曾在欧洲各国的艺术机构如奥地利美术馆等独立策划重要艺术家如贾科梅蒂等的展览。
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