On the symbolism of the Berliner Schloss and Palast der Republik foundation piles.
A conversation between Ottjörg A.C. and Christine Nippe.
2020
Christine Nippe: What is the relevance of printmaking in your artistic work? And why did you choose this technique in the case of the foundation piles for the Imperial Palace and Palace of the Republic in Berlin?
Ottjörg A.C.: Perhaps I must first digress to my relationship with painting and sculpture. I was accepted at what was then called the HdK art school in Berlin with a portfolio of paintings and drawings. The reactions of the teaching staff during the basic course were extremely positive. The subtle colours in the red tones of the branches and how their slightest changes announce spring still inspire me every year anew. However, the concept of the artist with easel and canvas in his studio, so beautifully depicted by Picasso, put me off rather than attracted me. So, after the basic course, I switched to sculpture in anticipation of a greater variety of materials and more human interaction.
There are also other reasons that made this seem logical:
1 I spent the first eleven years of my life in a quarry stone house that was built in 1693 and had various outbuildings. The house was being renovated bit by bit and changed accordingly. I was particularly impressed when the roof timberwork was torn down and replaced. The carpenters used their bandsaw to cut boat hulls out of what remained of the beams and I floated them on the nearby stream.
2 After my Abitur (A-levels) and in anticipation of a difficult economic future as an artist, I did an apprenticeship as a carpenter and therefore have a solid base in craftsmanship. However, the craftsman’s practice is of a different nature than that of the artist and follows another line of thought. While working throughout the day in three dimensions as a carpenter, come the evening, I was only able to take decisions in another medium. So I painted.
3 As a child, it was not unusual for my father to drag me to three or four churches, basilicas, crypts, some castles, fortresses, amphitheatres and the like during the holidays. I am convinced that this provided me with a clear and intense sense of space.
Subsequently, some site-specific, installative works came together. A really interesting one that was quite ground breaking for me was Betoner Barock (Concrete Baroque, 1995) in the bed of the Wien river in Vienna’s Stadtpark. This location, which in 1949 had already been an important location for the film The Third Man with Orson Welles, was used for the first time for an art installation. The catalogue hosts an excellent text by Peter Gorsen.
I had mounted shopping trolley frames in the riverbed which, when it rained heavily, caught all kinds of suspended solids floating in the water. These authentic materials (twigs, plastic bags, toilet paper, preservatives...) completed the sculpture. So, at that time already, I was concerned with real stuff in an increasingly digitised world.
Whilst studying with Alfred Hrdlicka, I found it really nice that he was such a passionate etcher. When he was dismissed in Berlin and went to the Hochschule für angewandte Kunst (University of Applied Arts) in Vienna, I continued to learn with him there. At that time – around 1990 – universities were thinking more about closing down analogue printing workshops rather than motivating students to work with these techniques. I had a key to the university etching workshop and could often work there entirely on my own, even at weekends and during the holidays. This had a certain appeal and the workshop gradually filled up with other students. My experience was that the printers were much more communicative and mutually supportive than the painters. This was a great experience, particularly with my Deskxistence project (see page XX).
Christine Nippe: It's very interesting to think of the etching plates in sculptural terms. Why is the idea of multiplication so important in your work?
Ottjörg A.C.: Multiplication plays an important role in my printmaking not on a primary level but on a meta-level. During my studies, both Rolf Szymanski and Alfred Hrdlicka repeatedly pointed out the necessity of multiplication as an important economic tool. But that never really interested me. I think the last time I conceived an edition was about 20 years ago for the project Existentmale, U-Bahnscheiben werden zu Druckgrafik (see page XX).
I participated in the exhibition Die Macht der Vervielfältigung (The Power of Multiplication) with monotypes in Porto Alegre in 2017 and in Leipzig in 2018, for which I played a not insignificant background role in the project development. I think multiplication can exert great power and be extremely evocative. In Albrecht Dürer's time, it was copperplate engraving and woodblock printing as you can see from his image of a rhinoceros, which stemmed from pure imagination. It is a period when the potentials of printmaking for the Reformation and the Peasants’ War are not to be ignored. Also, the European image of South America has lastingly been shaped by printmaking.
But I believe that when it came to the Russian Revolution, film took on a more important role. So traditional printmaking is freed from the constraints of multiplication. But it retains the serial moment. As an artist, I’m not interested in the number of sheets in the edition of an etching by Rembrandt. What is interesting to me are the different states of the plate.
Accordingly, in Deskxistence, where I printed the unchanged structure and inscriptions of school table tops, I did not produce an edition but made two separate prints, each in a different colour, to achieve a different sensation. When asked, especially in China, why I didn’t scan the table tops and then plot them, my answer was that the direct contact between table top and paper would be lost. The piece becomes a data set of zeros and ones that can be manipulated and form a visual interface elsewhere. We see this particularly well in the development of digital photography. The program in the camera processes the image in the way the programmer believes the majority of consumers want to see it, e.g. exaggerated sharpness, brightening-up of darker areas, etc.
Of course, when I print, I also intervene in the image by choosing a colour. But this is a conscious decision related to the individual piece and not to an assumed consumer expectation.
The image, the print, retains its body. In most cases, the display surfaces of digital devices are designed as touch screens or smooth drawing pads. They always have the same feel, no matter what application is being used. They are glass-smooth and flattering at first, but boring as hell in the long run. The question for me is what will happen when school desks disappear from classrooms and are replaced by screens? Will the glass get scratched?
When I concentrated on lithography during my guest semester in St. Petersburg, the surface and the grain were what interested me the most. In the seventies and eighties there was a wide range of handmade crockery. The cups all felt different. Today, practically everything has the same feel, glazed porcelain, sometimes thicker, sometimes thinner. To have a piece of wood in your hand, heavy, light, rough, smooth, sharp-edged, rounded – is that not an enrichment to life?
Why do people try to get their name incrusted in the Great Wall of China if the ultimate issue is an Instagram post? With the piles, I’m doing just the inverse. I let them carve themselves into Chinese silk. They inscribe their specific authenticity by leaving not only their surface structure, but also small physical remnants – pieces of wood that have lost their solid attachment to the healthy wood due to centuries in the water – on the silk.
Christine Nippe: Why do you use blood, a most archaic substance, for the prints with the foundation piles?
Ottjörg A.C.: Blood connotes life and death. The fact that the Imperial Palace was built on these piles was the outcome of the collapse – due to poor foundations in Berlin’s sandy and peaty soil – in 1706 of a tower that had been planned by Andreas Schlüter on the site of the Old Mint. Count Otto von Bismarck spoke of the debates at the Parliamentary Assembly of 1848 in Frankfurt as a talking shop. In 1862, he declared before the Prussian Landtag that the Assembly had not been able to agree on German unification because of all the talk. The great decisions of history were made by blood and iron. From 1871, the Prussian King’s Palace became the German Imperial Palace. Even though, by German standards, there followed a long period of peace, the genocides of German imperialism and colonialism led to much bloodshed elsewhere. The termination of the reign of the last German emperor was marked by a cruel and blood ridden global war.
But this was not the end of the story. The Social Democrat Gustav Noske was aware of the fact that Karl Liebknecht, who had proclaimed the Republic from the palace balcony, was to be shot. The same Noske ordered the workers on Lindenstraße to be shot; that is where my studio is today.
I think there are enough reasons to use blood. For me, it is also a metaphor, since there can be no state structure without violence. At the same time, only in civilisation can coexistence and the sustenance of a large number of people be organised and guaranteed. That also means life and death. I am not a romantic who closely associates beauty and death, but what we consider to be art is only conceivable in civilised society.
Christine Nippe: What is the symbolic meaning of the foundation piles from the Imperial Palace or the Palace of the Republic in your work?
Ottjörg A.C.: To me an interesting aspect with the piles is that they were driven into the earth to form a solid base for an aristocratic residence. The same year, Johann Jacob Diesbach, a Berlin alchemist, accidentally came across the world’s first synthetic pigment called Berlin blue, a synthesis of blood lye salts and iron oxides. This blue was one of the cornerstones of the developing chemical industry in Berlin. The moment the Elector makes himself king, marks the development of industry, i.e. of the bourgeoisie and of the working class, which together will eventually deal the final blow to aristocracy. The moment the GDR is founded as a Workers’ and Peasants’ State, agriculture is already on the road to rationalisation. In 1949, at the time of the foundation of the GDR, some 30% of the population was still employed in agriculture. When the Wall came down, this group counted not even 4% of the population of the Federal Republic, and today it is only 1.2%. So few farmers cannot constitute a state. The employment figures for workers are likewise in decline: from just under 50% in the mid-sixties to just under 15% today.
Christine Nippe: The result is very aesthetic and delicate wood grains, almost like landscapes. Why do you transform these weighty piles into light, subtle prints?
Ottjörg A.C.: The piles have lost their function as a supporting base, as pillars. They have sort of met their end. The wood as a massive element has become obsolete, has died and many of the piles have been processed into parquet. The flooring is promoted as rich in history. At this point I would like to mention that I consider the presentation of such a pile in the James Simon Gallery of the Humboldt Forum to be of high quality in terms of wood conservation, but otherwise it is an insignificant, long pine trunk with the looks of a telegraph pole.
In my frottage, the pile is liberated from its earthly burden. It does not become a despicable blockhead. It gives our thoughts a floating lightness in space and time and ties them to the real history that took place in space and time, when the pile was lodged in the mud.
Christine Nippe (Dr. phil.) is based in Berlin. She has curated many exhibitions i.a.: at the State Museum of Contemporary Art Thessaloniki, 5th Prague Biennale, Stills Gallery Edinburgh, and was guest curator at the Museum for Applied Arts in Frankfurt/Main. She publishes on contemporary art, transnational networks, urbanity, and ethnography. She is program coordinator at the Schwartzsche Villa in Berlin Steglitz.