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Astrid Küver interviewed byDominic Eichler | Berlin, October 2006

Dominic Eichler: Your new series of paintings ‘2nd hand holidays’ look like enlarged snapshots on canvas. They are pictures of good times from the past, showing a cast of pensioners doing things like spending Summer in the mountains or by the sea, or autumn in a wood. Can you tell me how you arrived at these images?

Astrid Küver: They are all painted after slides that I found at a Berlin flea market – a really rough, one where the dealers didn’t even bother to unpack the stuff they have carted-out from the apartments of the deceased. They just left it all in a row of boxes exposed to the weather. The market was on Moritzplatz and actually, it was over ten years ago. The slides were sitting in a rotten cardboard box. Funnily enough, I bought them because of their packaging – nice, well-made, old-fashioned, black cardboard boxes. I only looked properly at the slides inside afterwards. But, even back then, I thought: I have to keep them. It was immediately clear to me that a lot of them were really lovely compositions, and that whoever had taken them must intuitively have had a really good eye for pictures. Since then, I often go through slide collections at flea markets. But mostly they are really dreary, yellowed, out of focus, party pictures with people wearing silly hats, not at all interesting. I almost never found such a consistently good group again. I don’t want to paint things like the party people because I don’t want to just make fun of others. My painting of the row of men by a trout pond in Forellenzucht, Bögerhof (Trout breeding, Bögerhof, 2005) is funny – they look like a chorus line, but it is lovely as well. They seem alive and there’s lots of activity, which are both things I like.

DE: Why did you decide to paint these pictures-trouvé?

AK: Ah ha! Well, I often wondered over the years if I should paint them or not. I struggled with myself to find a justification for doing it. In the end I decided: let’s just see what happens when try. I realized that the slides were a body of collected memories that weren’t accessible to anybody. I wanted to make them visible again, but in a way that was different to doing a slideshow. Painting, of course, is slow in comparison to looking at a slide. Painting seemed right because painting required spending lots of time producing them. Reproducing them. In the last few years, I painted a series of pictures based on film stills called ‘landlines’ because they all involve scenes with people using telephones. Doing these paintings was similar, it was about finding an image that was difficult to fix, in that case it was stills from classic films that I liked. Normally, when you watch a film, you can’t focus on a single frame

DE: But there’s a difference between a film still which is visible as part of action and photographs which were made by someone anonymous, presumably unknown, perhaps forgotten. What I mean is that with the film stills they come with a lot of implied meaning and value. These abandoned holiday snapshots come from the other end of the hi-low culture stick don’t they?

AK: The film still paintings are pretentious in a way, or rather that was the danger, because they came from a work of art already. But actually what I did was about valuing the work of the cameraman, the picture-maker, not the stars or the director necessarily. In this way, the two series are similar, by painting these snapshots I am valuing another image-maker as well.

DE: While painting did you come to any conclusions – firm, speculative or otherwise, about who originally took these images?

AK: I’m embarrassed to say that at first I presumed that a man took the pictures, but now I’m not so sure. What I do know is that they probably all came from one camera. It is possible to recognize some people who reoccur in the pictures, like the woman sitting on the balcony in Imperia-unser Balkon (Our Imperia - Balcony, 2005). In other pictures she’s missing, and in some of them, there is a white-haired man with a red shirt. The woman must have taken-up the camera too. I’m pretty sure they were a married couple travelling Europe. Of course, this is partly just speculation because the people in the photographs all look kind of the same. They are all in their ‘Sunday outing’ uniform. The men wear grey suits and the women all wear the same cut of dress and have the same hairstyle. In that decade having a holiday was considered a luxury and you dressed accordingly. They also seem rather prudish. For instance, when they are lying in the sun they don’t even take their shoes off.

DE: What kind of relationship to the unknown photographers of these slides did you develop while you were painting or, was who they were or might have been unimportant to you?

AK: It’s funny because it wasn’t unimportant to me, but it was impossible. Recently, it occurred to me that even though I could recognize people in the pictures – perhaps the photographers, nevertheless the images remain also utterly superficial. People are captured in picturesque settlings, but they don’t say anything really, they are somehow interchangeable. They don’t transport any personal information. They illustrate people in front of ponds, on mountains or something. Even though to the people in them the pictures must have meant something – things like status … or adventure.

DE: Well, I suppose they do come from the world of the Wirtschaftswunder, a time when people could afford to travel again and did. To me these pictures have an atmosphere that also has to do with a kind of a nostalgic reclaiming a lost youth, acting out being carefree, as if it is something desirable, a life routine that has been forgotten along the way.

AK: Absolutely. Funnily enough, because of their lack of personal meaning they are valid for most people, because the images represent very generalized experiences. People told me, they have photographs just like that in their family album. The sun is shining, people are waving in the mountains like in Tessiner Tal (Tessiner Valley, 2004-5). Some of the men even opened the top button of their shirts. In the beginning it really intrigued me, the fact that these people are really enjoying themselves the best they can, even if it’s in a formal manner. On the other hand I am also aware of their superficiality – it’s in their body language and behaviour. These are people in their late 50s or early 60s, and therefore lived through the Nazi Germany period. That made me wonder. Particularly, when I came to the painting Bivio (2006). It shows the ‘Hotel Post’ in the Swiss mountains and has this kind of 1940s colouring. Everything is grey, ochre brown, green-grey and blue-grey, really gloomy. I felt like all of the colourful pictures of seaside holidays that I painted before this one had kind of tricked me. I realized that I have no idea about those people. That made me a bit uneasy about the paintings. Now I wonder if that uneasiness will stay or if my initial positive-ness about them might return, a sense of their loveliness, which I like.

DE: One of the main strengths of these paintings is probably exactly the sense of ambivalence that they convey about their subject, that generation and time. I think it is possible to see this in the way you have interpreted or translated the slides into paint. For instance: the fluctuation between getting into details or colours in a tender way and then elsewhere a sort of broad-brush technique, a kind of brutality or perfunctory quality to the handling. How do you approach painting?

AK: These I started by projecting a slide onto the canvas and drawing the outlines. The paintings have the same format as the slides, pretty much – except that the vertical formatted ones are slightly cropped, because I like that proportion better as it corresponds to the height of the horizontal formats which means that the paintings can hang in a neat row. The ‘landlines’ series tied me in a way to having to represent well-known actor’s faces. But with these paintings, because the people were anonymous, I had the freedom to really go into painting and do things like ignore some facial features if they were unimportant to the picture. I begin by putting down layers of acrylic paint, pinpointing highlights and dark sections. Then I destroy some of these layers or add to them. Layer after layer produces depth. While painting I use scans of the slides, slightly more blurred … this detachment gives me the chance to use the images as initiators, to get away from the duty to resemble. For example, when I painted the flowerbed in Kurpark Bad Eilsen (Spa gardens, Bad Eilsen, 2006), I didn’t paint a single petal. It’s all shading and structure. I became able to do this quite strategically. I mean, I don’t have this thing about the ‘romance of painting’ like feeling the urge at times and at other times not being able to do it at all. I apply a pattern to my production process which enables me to work even when I don’t feel like it – like going to work, you don’t always want to go to work. It’s a production process. At some stages of painting it becomes unimportant what you are painting. It’s about shapes. I find it really helpful to ignore what you are painting because your supposed knowledge about things tricks you into not observing properly. You paint your idea of something instead of looking at things abstractly. Ideally you should look at things like a camera or a scanner, which don´t interpret the image. I had a short-sighted professor in art school. He would sit outside with a pencil and paper and squint and make spots of dark and leaves bits of lit and in the end it would be an amazing drawing of architecture for example – perfectly accurate in its inaccuracy. I like the fact that some of my paintings look, from a distance, like realist paintings, not photorealist but realist. Close up they look intentionally rough, lazy even. I don’t have the patience for photorealism. That´s not what I´m interested in. I would rather just make a big prints from the slides!

DE: You said earlier that the slides already had a special quality for you even though they are probably a hobby photographers attempts to get different conservative genres right: landscapes, portraits, that kind of thing. I mean they are somehow pictorially deeply ordinary and conservative. I wonder what qualities did you see in them? Can you reconcile this sense of their quality with what you called the pictures’ superficiality?

AK: Actually I find some of them compositionally astonishing, really stunning. For instance: Autobahn-Ostzone (Freeway – East zone, 2006), where the treetops reach precisely to the corners of the frame, and then you have a twist of lines running towards the middle. Quite often there is nothing at all in the centre of the images. They are full of interesting diagonals, weights and counterweights. These purely formal qualities struck me. They aren’t just snapshots, they don’t look snapshot-like enough for that. They almost looked staged. But as you don’t know the people in them you can just slip off the surface, that’s what I meant by superficial.

DE: Do you think that these qualities were intentional or studied or as far as the photographers and subjects of the pictures are concerned – the people with buttoned-up shirts or perfect hairdos - about conforming to an expected standard of representation? I mean, the way they represent themselves in life in these pictures, and the way they represent the world when they use a camera?

AK: People weren’t snap-happy back then. They took representative pictures. Each picture, each negative exposed was valued. Some people were better at seeing pictures than others. The genre for them is going on holiday. The purpose of the picture is to show to people who weren’t with them, and say: ‘Look how good it was, and how good we felt.’

DE: Sometimes they mistakes unwittingly like in the seaside pictures that remind me of John Baldessari’s Wrong (1967), a tongue-in-cheek pictorial mishap in which a man looks like he has a palm tree growing out of his head.

AK: That’s great too! One of the first pictures I wanted to paint was Imperia-Porto Maurizio II (2005). First when you look at it you think it’s a beach then you realize the actual subject is a boat on the horizon line that is hardly visible. Or in Artallo (2005), the ghostly lady on the stone steps in Italy. I thought the main subject was a tourist looking at a local Italian woman, but in the dark background there is a third person in the shadows. Maybe the lady tourist is actually looking at her.

DE: …or the two big palm trees in Imperia-Blick aus Fenster (Imperia –view from window, 2006), which completely overpowers the tiny central subjects …

AK: It’s funny that the subject of these slides often seems to be either in the centre or not at all in the centre. What I loved was when the photographer took pictures of people in which they sort of blend-in with the scenery. Like o.T. (Untitled, 2006) depicting a woman strolling in an autumn forest, or Monako-Exzot Garten (Monaco Exzot, Garden (2006) …

DE: … which is of ladies walking in a shadowy cactus garden … all of the titles come from what was writing on the original slide, right? The incorrect spelling of ‘exotic’ on the slide label is kind of revealing.

AK: The slides were all so neatly framed, a lot of care had been taken with them, they are all mounted between two pieces of glass, bound together with archival tape, and labelled by hand. The untitled painting is from an unlabelled slide. It’s interesting because there is an implication that the unlabelled, untitled picture is the most personal one, the one without representational value. o.T. is one of the most emotional pictures in the series.

DE: Their palette is also emotionally laden isn’t it?

AK: The high contrast in the slides forced me to use a lot of black, but never from the tube. I mixed black to give it a certain tone, one you can sense. My paintings are not ‘bright’ in the cheaply colourful sense, they use subtle, faded and bleached tones. For some weird reason, except for a few, they all have this kind of slight greyness about them, which gives them a slightly depressing touch. The slides weren’t actually faded. I think it is the clothes because all the men wear grey and the women wear white dresses with little floral patterns … smudged non-colours. The brighter colours are coming from nature or architectural surroundings: they are not so intense in comparison with say … plastic! The only bright colour is brought in through plastic or flowers! Take for example the painting Artallo II (2006) – the man drinking at a fountain, it’s all brown grey and blue except for the flowers. I like this image because it’s almost like a tricky manipulated Photoshop image in which only one zone has been kept in colour. I wonder whether the photographer was interested in the man drinking or in the flowers. I chose to paint this picture because the main subject was so unclear. It’s the same with Kurpark Bad Eilsen (Spa gardens, Bad Eilsen, 2006) - was it the flowers or the couple pushing a pram? The strong diagonal makes it an artful composition. But nothing really seems like the main subject.

DE: What can painting do that photography can’t?

AK: It can capture an essence, dispense with superfluous information. It can allow for illusionism. A splotch of titanium white can be a coat. It materializes the virtual. The slides are just slides, if you have a slideshow you just throw filtered light against a wall. A painting is material. Photography begins with a click, whereas in painting the click comes at the moment the painting is finished.

DE: For the viewer these paintings are holidays into the past?

AK: Of course, but second hand ones. They aren’t yours or mine. They are all places I haven’t been to, in a time when I didn’t exist yet. The pictures are the only access you or I have to that place at that moment in time.

Interview by Dominic Eichler