Rainer Fuchs / Manfred Grübl / Kathrin Rhomberg / Converation / ISBN 3-85486-2

Rainer
You got into art through your interest in architecture. Is there something insufficient about relating purely to architecture and what interests you about architecture?

Manfred
Creating unfamiliar situations and triggering something off in the viewer. For me architecture isn't just limited to fixed spatial constants but also defines a virtual level where an individual form of architecture can be perfectly simulated and constructed. We have learned to work with new systems of organisation and to move within these so that the borders between real and imaginary space are becoming increasingly blurred. With variables, people for example, who are in the space the human systems of perception can be so connotated that they are in a state of permanent change, and activate areas, i.e. applications, that are normally concealed. Real architecture very often merely serves as a stage and so it becomes a backdrop.

Kathrin
But there are also pieces of work that intervene directly in the existing architecture. Spaces that are explored by light, scanned.

Manfred
In Scanner, but also in other pieces (Analograum, Personelle Installation, Jalousie, Rendering 03 and work with reflective material) the visitor to the exhibition is a part of the artwork or a part of the architecture. Without the visitors to the exhibitions these projects would function completely differently as they trigger one another off, altering the way things are seen.

Kathrin
With this orientation towards the viewer, you often deny the space gravity. This is what I felt in your graduation piece. Scanning it with light makes the real existing space seem like it has become a virtual space.

Rainer
In Scanner the space is really blended out and then reconstructed with a strip of light. So blending out the entire space becomes one of the conditions of the reinterpretation and makes it possible to maintain a certain distance to an understanding of the space as something static and homogenous. That the space, the architecture, is literally and metaphorically to be immersed in a new light seems to be an essential starting point for your work with light as a medium. But even if you work with people who are situated in the space according to a specific arrangement and design a special architecture of relationships, new perspectives open up in the existing space.

Manfred
The person in the space changes when the situation changes, and of course so does the architecture. Their double function as recipient and as a surface for projections provokes its own virtuality. In the work with the light scanner the people who enter the ball of light are absorbed too, without any differentiation to the space or to other things that are in the space, and so are integrated in the piece of work. It is a very similar situation with the installation of 8 people, where I start from the specific situation of the opening of the exhibition, which is itself very closely linked to the public, so that a similar situation is created as the one in Scanner but realised quite differently in formal terms.

Rainer
The viewer's memory is decisive where the space also exists in the perception as a reconstruction in the mind. With this piece it was also the case that one couldn't avoid looking into the light during the scanning process. So it was possible to identify with the space itself. You experienced personally what you saw, so to speak, in terms of the space when the light hit you. The concept of space and movement, or space as movement, also characterises the piece with the three monitors and the virtual lines that wandered across them.

Manfred
This line scans the surface of the monitors, and of course you can relate this to the viewer, who has the feeling that they are being registered. A kind of extension of the monitor function occurs here that is really only there to convey something. The movement of the line there is always a continuous one independent of how many people are in the space, so it's not interactive. This systems works autonomously and cannot be influenced from outside.

Rainer
So it's really an inversion of the darkened space that's covered successively by the bright strip of light. But also a deliberate negation of the narrative flow of images and information in the media.

Manfred
We are used to being immersed in an image in the same way that it works on television. So you have this counterpart, the film that's running, and it blends out the surroundings, the living room. A similar phenomenon arises in this piece as in a touch-screen, where the monitor is allotted an active function.

Rainer
Seen like that, though, it's also another interpretation of the flood of images and information by the non-fulfilment of the information and entertainment norms. To a certain extent, you purge the monitor of all those images in order to open up a space for thinking about the phenomenon of the flood of images. The moving line is virtual but it creates the illusory effect of having a real movement.

Kathrin
...and that is scanning a virtual space. I also see the project with the buses in Innsbruck or the one with the plastic bags in Vienna that you did with Elisabeth in this context.

Manfred
In those two projects it was about working with the structures of a town, circulating something in them that could both be used and perceived. A network is created by the movement which is precisely laid out beforehand by the bus routes. The bags are handed out in places on the intersection between art and youth culture. Plastic bags are not things that are simply thrown away, they are used again frequently and then after a while they re-emerge again somewhere else. We are interested in when and where these bags emerge again, and what they are being used for and the way this network in the urban fabric changes.

Kathrin
The sociological moment seems to me to be significant in many of your works. But it is seldom discussed. This aspect was also clear in your project for the Junge Szene held in the Secession in 1998.

Rainer
Making structures visible and interpreting them can also be the result of entirely different basic situations. In this respect your contribution to the Junge Szene was a good example of art being themetised in a context of participation and exclusion, as your piece implied that the presentation of certain artists is a simultaneous not-showing of other artists.

Kathrin
But at the same time you also inverted the relationships and fixed positions within the exhibition. Artists from whom the practise of exhibiting demands objects are themselves put on show, and that without any reference made to their own artistic work, as a composite element of precisely such a 'product'. So the work also themetises essential conditions in the presentation of art, its ritualised forms of reception excluding an isolation of the artwork from the artist's persona.

Manfred
The individual participants in the exhibition are shown in my video one after the other in analogue form, lined up like on a conveyor belt. I replace the artworks with the artists without going into any specific characteristics of their personalities. The claim to represent an entire scene in the title is impossible to realise. Every exhibition is a selection according to an often questionable scheme. Even the artists' claim of self-reflecting meaning and significance transported in their work is open to question.

Rainer
You also do projects like, for example, the actions with people where you establish a particular organisational concept, without the organisers' knowing about it, integrating it into the public visiting the exhibition so that it can hardly be noticed. The protagonists use, for example, their body-language and gaze so that they become quasi-invisibly linked to one another within the public. By doing this, you really turn the exhibition, which usually provides the entire framework for various artworks, to an artwork of your own. So you are inverting the status quo in the art-market.

Manfred
I use the complete framework of a space or an occurrence of limited duration. Here possibly the artworks on show, the visitors and the respective background to the event become of no more significant than the architecture itself. The individual installations were held in quick succession in three different places: Berlin, London and New York. The almost simultaneous projects where based on the idea that the same people would be alternately beamed to each of the three places, and that the virtual aspect of an endless succession of events could be generated. In a similar way, the 8 people of the individual systems are connected in such a way that they could be one and the same person.

Rainer
What difference does it make to you whether a project is a commission from curators or whether you conceived it on your own as a form of participation, like you did with the dumb performer in the public at an opening. Do these various points of departure mean different types of basic concepts for the work?

Manfred
It makes no difference to my production whether I look for a space, an event, myself or whether I am invited to do something for an exhibition space. Although an unexpected intervention provokes entirely different reactions from the visitors and organisers than it would have if I had discussed projects in advance or announced them.

Kathrin
In this project, and in others, you work with extremely reduced artistic means that clearly appear to separate themselves from the spectacular moments in our society.

Rainer
When you – as I mentioned before – position your protagonists as a calming pole in the hectic crowd at the opening to an exhibition in other projects, then you form a contrast to the event-orientated society. They are the manifestation of a deliberate negation of those experiential qualities and modes of conduct typical of events.

Manfred
The installations with people in particular can only be seen during a particular period of time even though they have been there from the beginning. It's a contradictory principle when one side of the space is cleared of visitors and at the same time the part of the space with the installation of people gets fuller and fuller with them. This constellation of people dissolves when the last visitor leaves the space. The so-called 'event culture' demands obvious, clear, striking repetitions as the staggering 'mass of data' has to be processed first. I find it far more interesting to draw on content and modes of conduct that stand, as you say, in contrast to what is there. That's why I try to intervene in familiar systems of perception using subtle interventions and minimal shifts, so that the form of the confrontation can reconstitute itself.

Rainer
The clear structure of the work leads to an irritation, then, of conventional ways of viewing an exhibition. Instead of remembering the exponents of an exhibition most clearly you can experience the exhibition itself as an enigmatic artwork.

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