12/08/2024
Online-Release

Interview

Every picture is a decision

Jörg Sasse in conversation

Dear Jörg, you spent two evenings here in the DFI e.V. project space speaking about your work Speicher II as well as your artistic practice in general. What was that like for you?

On the first evening, I gave a chronological talk about my work for the first time. I had always avoided doing that in the past, because I try to make every talk new and with a different focus so that it remains interesting for me. But when I saw the project space, which is directly opposite the Kunstakademie, it seemed obvious to accept the challenge of approaching things from a chronological angle.

What did this chronological approach achieve for you?

For decades, I thought that the work I do was like a big jigsaw puzzle, where things start to fall into place here and there but it only becomes clearer over time what the whole thing actually is. Yet to this day I don’t even know how many pieces there are! Then I was sitting in a workshop with students from the Kunstakademie, talking and occasionally looking out of the window at the academy building, and it reminded me of when I started studying art there exactly forty-one years ago.

How would you describe Jörg Sasse, the freshman student?

I came to the academy with a big problem with authority, but then something happened that I could never have wished for because I could never have imagined that it could exist.

What was that?

This kind of freedom. This academy as a big box, as a large space where something unexpected could happen. And should! This scope for freedom has perhaps diminished over the years due to study regulations and bureaucratic visions of uniformity.
I can remember exactly how all new students at the academy back then were given a hectographed sheet of paper that said something to the effect that they should be aware that their education at the Kunstakademie would very likely not result in them being able to earn a living. And that they were advised to look for a secondary, commercial livelihood. Although “commercial” was definitely not the term that was used.

They probably meant a middle-class, so-called “normal” profession.

A way of earning money, yes. And when I read that at the time, I thought to myself: I’m in the right place. I often looked for this bit of paper later, but I never found it. Perhaps the original is still in the archives of the academy somewhere.

You came to the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in 1982. Ten years prior to that, Joseph Beuys had been dismissed because he refused to turn down applicants. He wanted to accept everyone. Was Beuys still around when you started?

He had a room, but was not allowed to continue teaching. It was funny because Beuys’s classroom was mainly used by the FIU [Free International University]. There was a board on the wall that said: “Only 2,190 days left until the end of capitalism.” As far as I can remember, the number would be wiped off occasionally and updated. We were in the aftermath of the 1970s: the spirit of Joseph Beuys continued to roam the halls for a while. And sometimes Beuys himself could be seen on campus.

Beuys’s conflict with the academy was sparked by the fact that he wanted to accept everyone who applied to study art, but he was unable to implement this.

And his attempts to implement it led to his dismissal, which ended in a settlement with the state after a lengthy legal battle. In the end, however, the academy must have agreed that it might not be such a bad idea to accept more applicants. And that these freshmen students should all spend an interdisciplinary foundation year together in the so-called “Orientierungsbereich.” When I arrived, there was a prefabricated annex on the north side of the academy building where the first two semesters were taught together. An intense, sometimes very explosive mixture. Nevertheless, for many students their time here was the most intensive chapter of their entire academy career, a great experience.

What did the Orientierungsbereich lessons look like?

There weren’t any assignments or obligations to attend any of the teaching sessions. However, this was probably the part of the course when most of the students spent most of their time on campus. During the first semester break, it became noticeable that some people thought that it was now the vacation period and that they should take a break from art and working. I found that rather strange.

You didn’t take a break?

No. I started studying in 1982. The era of the APO, the left-wing extra-parliamentary opposition, was long over by then. Being outside society was a thing of the past. You had to find a place within the system, not outside it. And I wanted to do something that I alone was responsible for. That was the promise of art. I had made music before and had also performed with a band. But I was much more dependent on the whims and moods of others—and the others on mine. That was difficult for me.

You then joined Bernd Becher’s class, the first ever photography class at an art academy, the famous Becher class. How did that come about?

In those first weeks at the academy, a lecturer said to me: “You’re a photographer, you need to contact Bernd Becher.” I had always taken photographs—I came to Düsseldorf with my first ten thousand mainly black-and-white negatives—but the longer I was at the academy, the less interested I became in photography. Nevertheless, I continued to take photos, but I had no idea that this could have anything to do with art. Then I had to work up the courage to call Bernd Becher and tell him that a lecturer had advised me to meet him.

Bernd Becher worked intensively with Hilla Becher on his own artistic practice alongside his teaching activities. How did that fit in with an engaged mentorinof students?

Bernd told me that he had been talked into doing this job. The Bechers didn’t have much money, but they were adamant that they wanted to continue their work. Bernd told me he had only accepted the professorship at the academy on the condition that he didn’t have to get involved in any committees. And he never did.

What was Bernd Becher like as a teacher?

I thought he was pretty great. He had a special status at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, if you like. Bernd would seek out the photographic approaches among the students that he felt he could work with, and then he would take these students into his class. At the time, I was fundamentally skeptical of anyone above the age of thirty. Not for political, APO reasons—I had just had really bad experiences. And here, suddenly, was someone who listened to me and with whom I could talk.

What did you talk about?

We talked a lot about painting and politics and not that much about photography. Although I wouldn’t have been able to join his class until after a year, he offered me the chance to work with a large-format camera after just six months. And so I was already working in Becher’s class by the second semester. But at that moment in time, I actually still wanted to do sculpture.

Your second teacher at the academy was the sculptor Norbert Kricke.

Norbert Kricke had already retired by that point, but he still had one class that his assistant continued to teach. I had already met Kricke before because I had bumped into him with Luise Kimme, the Orientierungsbereich professor, on Ratinger Straße. He came shuffling towards us in his long coat, and then the two of them got talking and Luise said, “Norbert, why don’t you come visit the O-Bereich and tell the young people a thing or two?”

What did Norbert Kricke have to say? Do you remember anything in particular?

He said a lot of things, but the one thing I never forgot was his statement that if you specialize in your art and do research, you will always get ahead. At the same time, however, this also means that fewer and fewer people will be able to keep up. You get lonelier, and so you have to be really careful. I now know that this is true. As an artist, you have to be careful not to lose your ability to course correct. You have to maintain contact with people who are open and critical. And who help to keep your work open to the outside world.

We’re talking about the early 1980s here. What was the mood among Düsseldorf art students back then? What was the vibe?

It was a time when although it was possible to study art to become a teacher (something that Beuys had long promoted), it had become rather difficult to get a job after graduating because there was a surplus of teachers. I think it’s important to know this context. For many people, it was not easy to believe in the future: it was a desperate time. Between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five, you see yourself standing at the end of history. When I was twenty, I didn’t believe that I would live to see 1984, that I would be twenty-two. It was a situation that felt really dramatic. What would happen to the environment? Would the East–West conflict escalate? But I wasn’t alone in my feelings.

Teachers are even more important in times like these.

The academy is a safe zone—even back then, it was already attracting a lot of desperate young people. Many of them managed to find the right supervisor. The spectrum ranged from Konrad Klapheck, who used to come to the academy every day on his bike and peek into his classrooms to the left and right of his own studio every few hours to see what the students were up to. He was the kind of person who would say: “No, that’s not right, you need to do it differently, give me the paintbrush.” Nam June Paik, on the other hand, turned up once or twice a semester, looked at everything, said “Great, keep it up,” and then invited everyone for lunch. After that, he was on his way again.

This kind of attitude assumes you are already very, very independent as a student.

Yes, and that’s one of the things that many of my fellow students failed at back then. Their expectation was: “I’ll go to the academy and be taught how to make art there.” But that’s not how it works. After my initial fascination with the academy came skepticism. I realized that not everyone had come here out of an inner conviction, but because their art teacher had told them that they were good at drawing, for example, or because some parents thought it was really great for their children to study art. Now it’s debatable whether you can even teach art at all …

Can you?

I would say you can. You can teach people quite a lot from your own background and your own experience, and you can spark their curiosity. You can encourage people to develop their own sense of purpose and help them to find it—in other words, to find out what their own individual thing might be. You can nurture that in a supportive way. But of course, it’s difficult to teach someone to be self-motivated over a fairly long period of time—and to be able to put up with themselves in the process. With visual art, it’s not like it is for musicians or actors, who perform something on stage for an audience that either turns away, applauds, or is ecstatic, and thus provides an immediate response. Feedback is rather indirect and difficult to obtain in the visual arts. And there is the question of whether being a lone wolf is even worth it in social or commercial terms. Despite this, some artists still like to pull the genius stunt because they simply want to be a pop star. In which case, of course, it’s “helpful”—in quotation marks.

Why is finding more original than inventing? That’s a quote of yours.

Of mine? Could be. I’m just thinking about where it comes from. It could have also originated from Karl Valentin. The strangest stories are found, not invented. That’s something I’ve always liked to convey. During my studies at the academy, I realized that I was in a protective box there, and it was difficult to leave it and go out into the world. But when I’m holding a camera between myself and the world, for example, it makes a difference. It gives me a bit of security. Having a big mouth is often another defense mechanism, but it becomes less important once you have a camera offering you protection.

In other words, photography gives you access to the world. But is it actually possible to reproduce the world in front of the camera?

Well, is it possible to draw the world?

Definitely not exhaustively, but to some extent. It’s not the same thing.

Yes, it is! I’ve never put it like that before, but perhaps it makes things clearer. Drawing is also about transformation. Being able to draw is a technical skill, in other words, having the ability to work in a specific medium. The question that remains is for what purpose. For an architect, if we take this room as an example, all they would need is a floor plan and elevations. Nowadays, you would probably make a 3D model, but even that would only be a construct. The same applies to a camera, of course. With a camera, however, another difficulty is that a photograph already shows everything that was in front of the lens. In most cases, this is actually a disadvantage rather than an advantage.

Shouldn’t it actually be an advantage?

When drawing, you start with a blank page. You draw the first few lines and perhaps realize: “Damn, that’s not right, I’d better start again.” And then, of course, some people believe that a photograph depicts reality because it resembles a fragment of what they have seen with their own eyes. Of course, that’s long been nonsense. Maybe it always has been.

A photograph looks like a slice of reality, but isn’t?

Yes, but then aren’t romantic paintings a form of reality, too? Realism in painting, which is now quite an old genre and often involves a deceptively real image? Or some still lifes from the sixteenth century? The fact is that a human has made the entire thing. When it comes to the camera, the notion persists that the skill actually lies with the machine. But perhaps there are some people who have an interest in claiming that certain photographs represent reality. In Düsseldorf in the 1980s, the advertising industry was very present, as well as the fashion industry. I knew a few advertising photographers who would let me watch them at work. This type of photography is obviously complete fabrication from start to finish. Photographing ice-cold beer is fake, a total construct. But they still did this without a computer. It all had to be staged somehow in the studio, and some of the people in Düsseldorf were experts at that.

When I see advertising photos like those, I know as an experienced consumer that the items don’t look like that in real life. But when I see photographs taken by amateurs like me, I assume that they don’t have the skills to do this.

Perhaps you shouldn’t assume this: in recent years, the technology available has significantly enhanced the quality of the finished product, even in amateur photography. In the meantime, AI is making improvements and is still in its infancy.
The problem is the concept of reality. I don’t think we’ll get anywhere with this term because it’s too vague. And that is quite a useful starting point, because now we are really getting to issues that are important in my Speicher works.

Speicher is a group of works that you exhibited for the first time in 2008. There are now four versions, which are all physically present in the space. This makes the flood of digital images tangible, or at least gives a sense of it. Is that the intention behind the works?

Today, people like to talk about bubbles, especially on social media. Why are there so many right-wing extremist positions today? Who is accelerating them? How are these bubbles created? Algorithms and AI have now become extremely important in this respect—because what generates attention also generates money via advertising. Optimizing the system is not about distinguishing truth from fake, or reality from non-reality. The algorithm doesn’t care about the narrative behind it! But context is essential: if an apple is the last one in the basket at the market stall, you might think, “There’s only one apple left, I’ll buy it.” But if you came in here now and this apple was hanging from the ceiling right at your eye level and there wasn’t anything else in the room, then you would think about this apple in a completely different way.

I wouldn’t bite into it, for example.

Yes, that’s good: at least not now, in the mid-2020s, which opens up the important topic of the temporal context of reception. So: context is space. And context is time. In 1972, you might have come in here, taken the apple and bitten into it because it might have been part of a performance, or you would have understood it as such. That would probably have seemed completely plausible to you based on your socialization at the time.

I probably wouldn’t have had much respect for people who hang apples in exhibition spaces.

No, you might have asked yourself: “What kind of box is this with an apple hanging from the ceiling? Who has done this? What is my role in this context?” You would have eaten the apple, either out of disrespect or out of joy that someone would do such a weird thing. And then it’s gone. What is absence, what is loss, what is a void that needs to be filled. All of this would have become a field of possible experiences, without a text on the wall giving you any instructions.
Time and place are also the main criteria for our reception of photography. This is one reason why we perceive it with a different hemisphere of the brain to painting.

Is that so?

Detlev B. Linke, a neurologist who taught at the University of Bonn, told me this. Unfortunately, he’s no longer alive, but we were in contact for a while. Detlev was very interested in art; he once wrote a catalogue text about my work. However, this statement does not appear in it, so I can’t say exactly what the source is. I’m going to keep making this claim though, because the resulting distinction between the reception of language and images is extremely interesting. Especially in relation to the prevailing conceptual perception of photographs.

It’s just like finding and inventing. It’s a really great sentence.

When I started taking photographs, I wanted to find out how much you could actually leave out of a photograph. So, my images became still lifes, and they became more and more abstract. They were concrete photographs that sought to become non-representational and to introduce the autonomy of the image into the context. I pursued these ideas until the early 1990s. Then I felt like I was so formally proficient that I could transform anything into an image in which place and time no longer played a role. But I began to worry whether I had become an aesthete, as that had rather negative connotations for me. I didn’t want to produce art for the sake of beautiful art.

The promise of photography is also that anyone can take a photo, and potentially even a good one.

“You push the button, we do the rest.” Yes, that’s the Kodak slogan.
And that’s great. After all, amateur photography was mainly about being able to recognize someone. We’re talking about two or three generations of people who still had to attend slide show evenings, where one photo after another would be projected. And then someone would stand next to the projector and say, for example: “You can’t see this here in the picture, but it was taken on the same day as when such and such happened. And right after the photo, such and such happened …” The image serves as an aide-mémoire—the photograph as proof that you participated in your own life. But it’s also very boring for anyone who wasn’t there, who can’t understand the original context from the photo alone.

You started editing photos digitally at a very early stage, and then photos by other people soon afterward—amateur photographs that you either found or collected.

When I felt like I had everything formally under control, another question kept coming to mind: Hasn’t everything I am trying to do with my images already been photographed? Can I make artistic works that will keep my present legible in twenty years’ time? I couldn’t do that by deliberately trying to gather documentary evidence. I didn’t have enough confidence in photography for that. I felt that I needed to transform these photographic images somehow first. That’s when I started to look more intensively at other people’s material.

When did this start?

Relatively early on, back when I was still at the academy, or perhaps just after, in the 1980s. I would borrow photo albums or pull them out of containers. At first, I tried to make reproductions of cropped sections of these photos. We had a color darkroom in Becher’s class, and I thought that if I could enlarge my photographs more professionally and remove the color casts, it might be a step in the right direction. Unfortunately, it didn’t really work out that way.
I developed an early affinity for computers and learned programming languages. But for a long time, it was hard to imagine that you could edit images with a computer.

When did it actually become possible to edit photographs digitally?

From the beginning of the 1990s. Before that, however, there were these super-expensive machines that could somehow take pictures, as well as the first digital camera. But it was all experimental and never a viable option for me to use.

Were there no scanners for digitizing analog images yet?

Oh yes, scanners already existed. I had an acquaintance who owned a prepress company. He made my first five scans on a wickedly expensive drum scanner. They required so much storage space that each individual image had to be split onto eight floppy disks. To do this, each file was first marginally reduced in size by a compression program and broken down into suitable parts so that the image data could be transferred onto floppy disks.

It’s hard to imagine that nowadays.

It was a transitional period. As I said, I had an affinity for computers and programming from an early stage and found it interesting to dabble in this scene. People would swap programs with each other—they would sit in front of the monitor and chat to each other while waiting for the next disk change. No internet, just mailboxes and “remote data transmission,” which was too slow for larger files. But the first image editing programs were already available back then.
“Swapping” allowed access to apartments that I would otherwise never have been able to enter. Then it was easy to ask if I could photograph something in the apartment. I didn’t invent motifs in the studio, I found them somewhere.

When did you first think about establishing an image storage database?

When it became possible to digitize pictures, I soon wanted to have my own scanner to digitize my found images from the 1980s and 1990s and manipulate them on the computer. Then I could simply remove any problem areas.

Problem areas in the sense of parts of the image that aren’t any good?

Yes and no: problem areas that interfere with or obscure the potential of the image. I’ve actually always used the image as the starting point in my work. Just as a sculptor stands in front of a piece of material and knows that their sculpture is somewhere inside it, I first had to remove everything unnecessary so that I could see my work. Soon I had a growing collection of material. And since I was making money by programming databases at the time, it made sense for me to add the scanned and edited photos to a database, so that I could categorize them, for example. When the collection had grown considerably, the material seemed so interesting from a cultural and historical point of view that I thought about making it public. I had an exhibition in Grenoble in the fall of 2004 and was able to design the architecture myself. I had walls built for it that created one long corridor. Around 145 pictures were hung on one side, and I had compiled the sequence and selection of images with the help of my database. On the continuous wall, they took on the character of a long narrative. Starting quietly with depictions of nature, then the first animal, then architecture, people, urban scenes.

How was that received?

This “narrative” on the wall created a strong sense of personal closeness among those involved in the project, even while it was being set up. Later, this continued with the audience, because visitors realized that what they saw in the exhibition was very similar to the photo albums belonging to their grandma, their parents, or even their own. I thought that the intimacy of my „Skizzen“ (“sketches”) could also help people to approach my other works, the “Tableaus,” which are all actually based on the same principle, only much more elaborate. This sense of satisfaction and positive feedback from the audience was followed, as is so often the case, by skepticism. I was afraid of becoming a novelist. And that’s something I didn’t want to be. The long, narrative wall in Grenoble was linear—meaning that the fact that it had been created from a relational database had remained completely invisible. So, I began to work on making the unique aspects of a database visible, the non-linear relationships.

A novelist tells stories that happen to characters that the reader can identify with in some way. That doesn’t really seem to fit in with your approach.

My initial question was: How can I find a way to ensure that every image is of equal value? Because most things in the world always happen at the same time. You miss everything except what you are directly confronted with at that moment. Would it be possible to translate this into a completely analog form? Eight years before this, I had a solo exhibition at the Kölnischer Kunstverein, where Udo Kittelmann was the director at the time. With the help of a catalogue raisonné I had programmed in the exhibition space, you could use a touchpad to view all the images I had created up to 1996—which were also categorized—on a monitor in the middle of the room. The essential thing here is that, in a relational database like this, a picture does not just appear once, but in fact several times under the various terms that were linked to it. Nothing unusual today, but virtually incomprehensible for most people back then.

The photographs are indexed.

Yes, they’re indexed. Which just goes to show how powerful language and terminology actually are when viewing images. This brings us back to the context. To return to our earlier example, an apple is something completely different here in an exhibition space than it is at the market. When you make something visual into something tangible, it naturally becomes totally mind-boggling, because not only can it be communicated without language, but it also becomes a personal experience.

Because you experience it directly for yourself in a practical way instead of merely viewing it.

Exactly. I have just seen an image under the keyword “concrete,” and now I see the same image again, but assigned to a different term. And now I can see something completely different in the image. In the case of Speicher II, about half of the keyword categories are referential. In other words, they’re more about what was in front of the camera. The other half are categories that refer more to the image itself.

Do the large image databases of today work in the same way?

It depends on the database. There are scenarios in which it is difficult to use a relational database because certain elements are too different to be clearly categorized. Where do we mainly encounter databases today? On smartphones and the internet, of course. Every shopping system is still based on relational databases, and on collecting and analyzing the traces we leave behind on the internet.

What exactly does relational mean in this context?

That there is more than one defined relationship: in the Speicher, for example, any image can occur in any category. And the number of images and the number of categories are theoretically infinite. In the case of this Speicher, of course, they are not. The 512 images in it all have a unique number, and the categories in this instance range from 1 to 56. The question is, how do you bring the two together? A simple, direct classification would be to say that this or that image belongs in category 17, for example—but it actually belongs in category 7, too. I created a table in which I simply enter the image number and the category number. Image 1 belongs to category 17 and category 35 at the same time, as well as category 56. This means that you can give the database the instruction: “Show me all the images from category 17.” However, you can also start with the individual images and display all the categories that the image has been sorted into. This is the simplest form of relationality in a database.

The database therefore offers you the possibility of dealing with many images in an organized way. However, the flood of images in the digital age now has a completely different dimension than when you started working with your Speicher.

As I just said: the number of images is infinite, but so is the number of categories. Structurally there is no difference; the difference is in the capacity.

Are your Speicher a strategy for coping with the unrepresentability of the world? As we have just seen with regard to photography and drawing, reality is inexhaustible. And, as humans, we do not cope well with infinity.

My artistic intervention is basically to say: I have 512 images and 56 categories, no more. That is what I have defined. And each of these categories is something that has been defined, a decision. Every picture is a decision. I think it’s important that it’s not just any random image. The work exhibited here, Speicher II, is about what documentary photography—or rather, photography in a documentary style—could look like today. It is a kind of experimental arrangement. Beyond linear structures.

For Speicher II you decided to focus on a geographical region. All of the 5,000 original photographs were taken in the Ruhr region. Did you go through this inventory of images and see if any of them fit into your categories?

No, it’s actually the other way around. I trawl through the images, but it’s not until that point that I come across terms that might help me later. Let’s say you’re writing an article and want an illustration to go with it. Then you can say to your picture editor, find me something on the subject of “Düsseldorf, floods, 1980s.”

That would still be relatively easy. It gets difficult when it’s not about a concrete event for which a direct representation exists, but rather a topic that needs to be illustrated.

It’s great that you say that, because that’s exactly the problem. In this context, photography is only used for illustrative purposes. In the heyday of photojournalism, people were commissioned to work independently to produce a series of photos on a topic. Floods on the Rhine in this case, for example. The demise of this form of journalistic photography began with the fact that images were tagged in relational databases. A language-based reference system turned independent images into illustrations of terms. Today, photographers are relatively well versed in this tagging and produce images that will appear in as many categories as possible so that they are sold as often as possible.
The Speicher, which start with the image rather than the concept, illustrate this exact shift in the use of photography. When it comes to the Speicher, my requirement is that each image must function as an individual image, which protects them from a one-dimensional appropriation through language.

The special thing about the Speicher is that they always allow for new hanging configurations. But the combination of images is by no means random, right?

There is a maximum of seventy images in a category. But just because images in a category belong together conceptually doesn’t mean that they look good next to each other. That’s why I’ve developed a system in which I rate how well one image goes with another. The scale ranges from 1 to 5, so regardless of which category they appear in, you can see which image will look good placed next to another one. You can go from one picture to the next, and from that one to another.

The many potential arrangements are therefore pre-curated, so to speak.

It is a system that offers an easy entry point, but which still lets you achieve plausible and often exciting results from the image combinations. However, if we were to take one of the pictures down—this one here on the wall from the “Rituals” category—and replace it with another, then a completely different “statement” would probably emerge from the series of images.

Dear Jörg, thank you very much for this conversation!

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The interview was conducted by Boris Pofalla.

See also:

Jörg Sasse: Speicher II

Website of Jörg Sasse: c42.de

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With kind support by:
Kulturamt der Landeshauptstadt Düsseldorf