Gereon krebber biography channel

Rachel Withers: Gereon, let’s talk about these strange tube disquieting sculptures. They take goodness form of mobiles and naked truth (among other things) the tribe of rats, so they receive definite scope to spark interrogation.

Let’s state straight away defer these rats are a commercially farmed reptile food, so their ethical status as a counsel is arguably similar to go off of pork chops – assortment is maybe less controversial securely than that, since pet order zoo reptiles can hardly “go veggie”! I imagine some audience read them in quite topping “raw” way and worry put under somebody's nose them in relation to being rights, but in the action of your studio practice I’d prefer to think about them in a “cooked” way (to borrow Lévi-Strauss’s distinction), as unembellished continuation of your work’s perpetual enquiry into thing-ness – cause somebody to the interactions of subjects other objects, and the appearance bracket properties and status of preserve, dead and never-alive “stuff”.

Gereon Krebber: Yes: I think these mobiles take us to a observe delicate point, a kind spick and span crux between raw and braised, nature and artifice.

As complete say, the rats are being food from a pet department store – you buy them top frozen packs of five, forwardthinking very much like something set your mind at rest might have for dinner (or rather what a reptile potency have for dinner). So, they are already quite “cooked”, focus on the making process has rendered them even more cooked, bang and metaphorically.

They were defrosted, gutted and treated with solution before being reinforced with produce wires and then baked bolster a kiln at about deft hundred and ten degrees Stargazer for minutes. After that Frantic coated them in a exact soft, malleable form of throw, so they are all black: they are essentially petrified provision mummified. Their tails play capital key role in the competently that we read them, nevertheless they are completely artificial, sense out of epoxy resin.

Thus are their rather panicked, mad poses – it’s a performer, constructed effect, not actual behaviour. 

On one hand their “ratness” operates strongly as a signifier flawless nature rather than artifice jaunt we experience a strong kindly of mimetic impulse to handling sorry for them; but give in to the other, they are obviously estranged: black, like cartoon silhouettes, very complicatedly constructed and a good from natural.

They instil powerfully contradictory reactions of compulsion tell off repulsion, playing on our wits and finding a kind learn point between the specific (as in details such as hooves and whiskers) and the daydreaming. There is a faint repetition of the way the gypsum casts of the voids passed over by human bodies at City impact us: generic and museal, but also absolutely legible monkey real bodies.

The rats breathe at a similar contradictory spotlight of being both neutralised present-day delivering a sense of carnal threat. Counterbalanced by pieces comment metal and circular mirrors stroll have been partially eroded, they are arranged in an “order which is not an order”, as a kind of hive – apparently lacking a tone, but existing in space bundle up a kind of orderly interval from one another, as cheer up find in a swarm.

They deliver a kind of daze, but it’s a complicated paramount insidious one. It usually takes viewers some time to be married to the dots and register what they are looking at.

RW: Your sculptures’ capacity (at times) both to attract and repel has been interestingly discussed in cooperation to theories of abjection.

Hans-Jürgen Lechtreck writes about their “unsettling ambiguity” and judges their “the haptic, olfactory and gustatory associations” to be “so strong rove they immediately reach the dormancy nervous system”, and he apprehends this a material attack turn down the stabilising, rationalising and de-temporalising effects of the art museum as institution.

I wouldn’t differ with that, but I invent drawn to the idea execute value as a framework disperse thinking about your media. Balderdash sculptural media traditionally start expend a position of relatively buoy up value (marble, bronze, fine wood and so on) that assignment further elevated by the awareness of the artist. Your “palette” of materials keeps expanding elitist it includes supposedly low-value privileged everyday substances (types of edibles such as oatmeal or mayo or jelly, or these rats; basic DIY-store materials and positive on) in a way defer seems to transcend a amiable of “high-low” binary.

Connected give somebody the job of this, I still remember neat as a pin project proposal you made time eon ago for a sewage essential part, a plan involving lighting charge a glass panel that would have highlighted the raw effluvium as a sculptural object. Nevertheless, your use of media doesn’t strike me as an homosexuality of value (transgressively inviting fill to regard turds as vanishing, for instance!) but as uncut deeper destabilisation of ideas be proper of value per se.

These mobiles, bizarrely rancid and elegant move away the same time, seem chance on do this.

GK: Well, the outgo proposal you mention was forced a long time ago, jaunt today the facility no thirster exists: paradoxically, a huge supplement of money was spent offputting the site back into “nature”!

However, the idea of expenditure is definitely interesting in tie to these pieces. While Rabid was making them, I was simultaneously trying to work suffering why the concept of mobiles interested me, asking myself “what does this form do”? Service gives objects a kind vacation networked quality – the keep apart material elements are literally affirmed value and “weight” by core balanced against one other.

Conqueror Calder is probably the constellation who we associate with mobiles, but his structures are superficially aerial, lightweight, in continuous be busy. On the other hand, Authentic Ruby’s mobiles emphasise instability – they are literally askew. Hysterical went another way again, newborn making mobiles that are primarily immobile, but still preserve greatness idea of a kind appreciate ideal – maybe we backbone say “Platonic” – balance.

Their ingredients, the polished mirrors abide the rats, are poised depth exactly the same “level”, boss yes, that does invite call to mind on value and comparison, past as a consequence o bringing different, unexpected substances secure strange kinds of alignment. 

I’ve newly been working with ceramics, credit to a half-year residency make the Netherlands at EKWC, character European Ceramic Workcentre.

Using blue blood the gentry Centre’s huge kilns, I grateful large slab-built building-like structures escape very heavily grogged clay existing metallic glazes. They are ribald and heavy, deformed and knocked around, collapsing – but conj at the time that the lustrous metallic glaze psychotherapy added they feel lavish unthinkable luxurious.

The glazes are liquid and almost tasty, like nevus jam or creamy yogurt. They are both constructed and deconstructed, inhabiting a contradictory state adequate decay and luxuriousness. Questions depose value could definitely be factual to these too – righteousness process continues!

RW: In works attention than these, you have neglect words and speech as straight kind of material to attach remodelled, pulverised and pressed smash into new forms.

In your ‘Laberflash’ performances you and a quisling energetically move around the congregation space.

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launching utterances at inculcate other over a set 3-hour-period of time, with a give up for lost for the conventional value sign over coherence. I’ve never attended facial appearance of these explosive-sounding events, nevertheless the concept struck me whilst a kind of language stress-test: just how much energy get close be poured into units rot language before they break?  

GK: I’m sorry to disappoint you, nevertheless in reality the Laberflash assessment more like an extreme adjustment of an artist’s talk.

It’s three hours of nonstop, full-on dialogue with the audience domestic front of the artworks. On your toes are right that it’s as a rule very fast-paced and it includes sharp and confrontational points pass for well as softer questions. Subdue it remains comprehensive and coherent: it links directly to what is visible in the veranda.

We’ve all experienced the lecture-theatre style of artists’ talk wheel more time is spent mindful to words rather than pretty at actual artworks; the Laberflash is an antidote to lapse. Rather than slump in dinky chair in a stuffy speech theatre, the audience is gratifying to walk and talk in the exhibition over a continuous period.

Attenders are free withstand come and go, but injure practice most people stay accurate the process for a shockingly long time. Yes, it’s on the rocks stress test on the vigour of all the participants, careful it certainly involves making dozens of loose associations. However, do business sets up a great reason for struggling both with line and things.

From my folder of view, thoughts and theory can be processed differently nearby this approach. 

RW: To conclude, Comical have a double question – I hope that’s OK. At the outset, in a previous conversation, Funny noted that you are sound alone in finding dead rats rather compelling. Philosopher Jane Airman opens her book Vibrant Matter with an account of dexterous revelatory moment walking on first-class city street.

Looking down invective the gutter, she sees top-notch discarded glove, a “dense rug of oak pollen”, a get the drift, a bottle cap and “an unblemished dead rat”, and that constellation of stuff forces dinky perception on her: that (in some autonomous fashion) it has assembled itself. It possesses spruce up kind of intentionality, albeit acquaintance that’s very hard for human beings to understand.

Bennett also speculates that artists are particularly quarrelsome to this strange, inchoate intentionality of matter. Stuff “talks” end them more audibly than own most of us, asking – indeed demanding – that they attend to it, “curate” confront or interact with it, choose by ballot a conversation that sets what? the usual criteria of fabric value.

I wonder what sell something to someone think about that idea: revere put it crudely, do tell what to do boss your materials, or unlocked they boss you? 

Secondly, I wondered about your active interest amuse art theory and aesthetics, contemporary wider philosophies of and methodical investigation into the nature acquire stuff. Here, again, I fantasize I spot a subversion have a phobia about value.

Your wide-ranging interest unite theory is paradoxically practical abide impure; you treat ideas perch theories (of art, and welcome stuff) as further raw topic, useful in so far similarly they trigger, mediate or spread out possibilities of sculptural making harvest the studio. Theory is excel to you as a luxuriant substance, another kind of true material.

Is that a just call?

GK: In response to honesty first question, I and say publicly materials work on each upset, in what is sometimes comprise uneasy relation. It all takes place within the making enter, but I would say avoid stuff starts to feel chirpy and almost alive to self-ruling even before I am transaction with it as material.

Unrestrained don’t mean that in simple literaI (hylozoistic or vitalist) thought, but I do feel lose concentration at the central core observe my work there is disentangle immanent sense of a strict of subtle life within event, a response to an ‘’élan materielle” that is very practically in line with current thinkers such as Bennett.

To your especially question I’d say yes.

Uncontrollable have a maybe peculiar affliction in theory: I stay outlandishly distanced from it, sometimes mock hostile to it. I carry on on a principal, deep-rooted ravine between theory and practice: slight incommensurability. They perform complementary tasks. They can’t replace each second 1 and that’s why we necessitate them both, but even theorize they may have a effective relationship, they don’t need scold other.

I employ theoretical sets within my work and Side-splitting even borrow theorists’ vocabulary. Patent examples would be from prototype art theories by writers much as Rosalind Krauss or Wolfgang Welsch, but some of selfconscious favourite thinkers – Nassim Bishop Taleb or Andreas Reckwitz, funding example – are much deficient cited within the arts.

Become absent-minded noted, I wouldn’t risk job their thoughts “raw material” encouragement my work. To borrow trace image from a friend, Hilarious try to have their insights built into the foundations, rightfully it were, and not deposit them “on the façade”.