The interview: Dr. Astrid Legge in conversation with the artist Paul Schwaderer

At the finissage of the shop window exhibition "Little Must" in the Kö-Bogen, a conversation took place between Dr. Astrid Legge, curator and board member of 701 and the artist Paul Schwaderer in the most beautiful summer weather.

Paul, the exhibition ‘WENIGER MUSS’ is the first presentation of your work in public space. You can see a ‘multimedia round dance’ consisting of video works and sculptural objects.

What attracted you to the unusual exhibition venue and what were possibly your concerns?

PS:
The location here between Schadowplatz and Hofgarten is very exciting. It forms a kind of passageway, it’s not a place you go to consciously, but one you pass by, at least if you don’t know that there’s an exhibition to be seen here. And it also follows that the visitor does not necessarily expect to see art here.

An important aspect of art is its ability to irritate. Art can free us, at least for a moment, from our habitual ways of seeing and thinking and thus gives us the chance to look at the world in a new and different way. And it is obvious that this irritation is strongest and most immediate where we do not expect it. So in a place like this.

When we go to a museum, we expect to be confronted with art – after all, we paid for it. In public space it is different. We encounter the artworks there more by chance and unplanned, and sometimes we may not even realise what we are dealing with. I see great potential in that. In addition, art in public spaces can of course reach a completely different audience. The art is free and visible to everyone. Whether he or she wants to or not.

AL:
Looking at your work, it is noticeable that as a sculptor you prefer to work with ‘technical apparatuses’, with digital and electronic media, with rotating objects or LED light bands. The flatscreens, screens and displays always serve as projection surfaces for the actual work. During the tour, your final presentation consisted of a motorised curtain that gave a view of a video with a 3D animated duck every 4 minutes. How does this choice of material come about in your artistic practice?

PS:
I originally started my artistic training as a photographer. In photography, you usually observe or create some process, and at some point during that process you press a button and then you have an image. I have often found it unsatisfying to see only a fraction of a second in the result. There is always at least one before and one after missing. But the world is not like that. Fundamentally, things are always in motion and in development.

To put it exaggeratedly, one could say: it is either presumptuous and megalomaniac or simple-minded to believe that one can hold on to a state and create something that remains as it is for longer than a moment.

My way of working has developed out of this doubt about the static and about holding on, which always tries to set things in motion and keep them in motion. I am interested in making processes and developments visible, and artistic methods and techniques that happen in time are of course suitable for this. Either in moving images – that is, in videos, or in which objects actually move. So basically, in my choice of material, I’m not so much interested in a particular technique and fixed on it, but my material is change itself.

AL:
With ‘less must’ you have chosen a very meaningful title that runs like a thread through the exhibited works, because they all have something to do with ‘reduction’. Originally, the title refers to a work exhibited here that you developed last year.
What at first sounds like a statement or a demand to limit oneself to the essential is possibly only partially correct, because in a statement you said: ‘I want less must’. What do you mean by that?

PS:
In work, a lot of questions are asked, all of which follow the same rigid pattern: ‘Do I have to do this… Do I have to do that… Do I… Do I… Do I have to’. And then you are also presented with answers that one or the other might find an imposition because they might disagree, but you can’t argue with the work through the window panes. And the artist is rarely on site to clarify this. The only thing left for the viewer is to endure the contradiction to their inner conviction and say: No, I don’t have to! So I understand the sentence as a call to inner resistance! I don’t want to have to.

AL:
“What must a person be like who dares to explore the ‘really really big questions’?” You ask this question in the work ‘Do I have to dig a hole under the earth?’ Your preoccupation with the ‘big questions of meaning’ in human history: ‘Where do we come from, where are we going?’ is based on the consideration of whether religion, philosophy or even art have possibly had their day as models for explaining the world and has inspired you to the speculative idea of building your own ‘world-explaining machine’ – modelled on the famous particle accelerator at the CERN research centre in Geneva, which is actually also called the ‘WORLD MACHINE’ with the aim of researching the origin of our universe. Can you describe what the preliminary work for this was like and what the questions are about?

PS:
First of all, it remains rather unclear in this work what it is actually about, what these questions refer to. There is a letter here in the window that explains it, but of course most viewers will first read the questions and answers on the screens and make up their own minds – and that’s fine.

Nevertheless, I will be happy to explain what is actually behind it, and perhaps this will cast a completely different light on the work:

What you can read here are 61 questions that I asked a researcher in fundamental physics at CERN in Geneva, and which he answered YES and NO to. The preliminary thought behind this was that – just as you say – the classical world explanation models of religion, philosophy and art may be somewhat in crisis. Never before has the world been so strongly shaped by natural science and technology as it is today. So I asked myself how I, as an artist, can get involved.

Can I build a particle accelerator myself? What do I have to do for it? What do I have to learn? What do I have to be like to be able to do that? So in the end, the question is not so much how to actually build a particle accelerator, but rather how to generate real knowledge as an artist. That is what the core of this work is about.

PS:
At work, a lot of questions are asked, all of which follow the same rigid pattern: ‘Do I have to do this… Do I have to do that… Do I have to… Do I have to’. And then you are also presented with answers that one or the other might find an imposition because they might disagree, but you can’t argue with the work through the window panes. And the artist is rarely on site to clarify this. The only thing left for the viewer is to endure the contradiction to their inner conviction and say: No, I don’t have to! So I understand the sentence as a call to inner resistance! I don’t want to have to.

AL:
“What must a person be like who dares to explore the ‘very big questions’?” You ask this question in the work ‘Do I have to dig a hole under the earth?’ Your preoccupation with the ‘big questions of meaning’ in human history: ‘Where do we come from, where are we going?’ is based on the consideration of whether religion, philosophy or even art have possibly had their day as models for explaining the world and has inspired you to the speculative idea of building your own ‘world-explaining machine’ – modelled on the famous particle accelerator at the CERN research centre in Geneva, which is actually also called the ‘WORLD MACHINE’ with the aim of researching the origin of our universe. Can you describe what the preliminary work for this was like and what the questions are about?

Nevertheless, I will be happy to explain what is actually behind it, and perhaps this will cast a completely different light on the work:

AL:
‘clear and distinct’ is the name of another video work lying on the floor and originally refers to an engagement with a Rembrandt etching. One sees LED lights shining on the display, forming a stylised hand and performing different gestures in slow succession. The longer you look, however, the more ambiguous they seem. You have also described them as ‘white spots’ in interpersonal communication without legibility and interpretability. Can you explain this?

PS:
My artistic involvement with hand gestures actually began much earlier. I started making plaster casts of certain hand gestures several years ago and using them in my work. “Specific” hand gestures are actually not quite right, because it was rather “indeterminate” hand gestures that interested me.

There are, after all, gestures that can be translated relatively clearly into word language: Thumbs up, the Victory sign, the extended middle finger…. but some of them – like the language of words – have different meanings and interpretations depending on the culture. For example, what means ‘everything OK’ to divers under water would be a terrible insult in Italy. And then there are many gestures that cannot be clearly translated into language. The amazing thing is that we use them anyway and that they are still understood. That fascinated me. So they are certainly readable and interpretable, but not easy to translate into language. A language without words. For an artist, a great medium.

AL:
In the work ‘Capitulation I+II’ you see 2 rotating portrait busts (one female and one male – the second a self-portrait of you) that gradually reduce. This fractal splitting of the human body into its elementary building blocks leads to the question of what actually makes us human and thus also to the current social debate about human identity and anonymity in the digital age.

PS:
Exactly. The question here is: how much or how little information is needed to recognise a person? Where is the tipping point at which a just recognisable human figure becomes an abstract geometric form? How long can I, as a viewer, maintain the idea of a human image in the course of the reduction (nevertheless!)? And can what remains in the end be understood as the condensed essence of the figure, or are they only meaningless remnants of data? In my imagination, the reduction of the clear and unambiguously determined human image is also an act of liberation. Less image also means “less must”.

AL:
The ‘extended pause’, a slowly rotating glass tube filled with white powder, implies the aspect of ‘time’ and its relative perception.
Despite the ‘slow-motion mode’ of the scroll, the viewer witnesses a phenomenon in ‘fast-forward’ that is reminiscent of natural processes such as glacier movement or geological rock reshaping. What inspired you to create this work?

PS:
I can still remember very well the moment when I noticed how some powdery substances behave in tubes when you turn them. I had collected fine ash in a preserving jar for another job and had a closer look at it. Maybe there was a news programme on somewhere in the background – breaking glaciers, landslides, or something like that – in any case, I noticed how similar this powder in the jar behaves to geological processes. And it struck me that – as you mentioned – there is a strange temporal mismatch: even if I turn the tube as slowly as I can: In relation to actual geological processes, it’s still like a time-lapse. Fast-forward and slow-motion are very close here. The title of the work also refers to this temporal discrepancy: an extended pause.

And so I decided to isolate and automate this process. The beauty of the work is that it never repeats itself. I mentioned at the very beginning that I believe things never repeat themselves. This work perhaps manages to show some of that.

AL:
We live in a time of visual sensory overload, in which we are literally inundated with an abundance of images, data and information every day. This is more than evident here in the urban environment of the KöBogen. Through your exhibition, opulence and asceticism now meet as opposing ‘playing partners’.

Does this possibly give your work a new level?

PS:
If you mean that in the sense that there is some kind of synergy, then I’m not sure. I think it is rather a pleasant contrast that comes together here. The contrast is heightened. That is something in itself.

AL:
Can your working method of ‘reduction’ in data, language, gestures or signs possibly be interpreted as a demand for reflection on the essentials and the really important things in life?

PS:
To be honest: I don’t know what the essential and what the important things are. And if I did know, perhaps I would have been better off not becoming an artist. But I believe that the question about it and questioning in general are important. And in order to work out questions, to sharpen them, you have to leave out a lot of things. Hence the rather reduced – I would say concentrated – artistic mode of expression that directs the gaze to individual, isolated phenomena. Hence the liberation from unnecessary ballast and unnecessary opulence. Hence the regular asking of questions and the questioning of certainties and routines. I believe this means “WENIGER MUSS”.