Affinities

PD   So how did you then start collaborating? I know you’ve always had an intense dialogue, but then you really started working on projects together.

KB   The first collaboration was It’s Our Pleasure to Serve You, the non-dancing dance group named after New York deli coffee cups.

AK   I felt an immediate affinity with you, Kerstin, at school and felt really inspired and activated by your practice in ways I didn’t totally understand. From the beginning, so much of our conversation was natural, but also the way we both questioned things. We had an appetite for the same things, even if our paintings never looked the same—there was always a shared instinct to question.

KB   Yes, a curiosity. I was really drawn to your questioning of figuration and your ability to express that by analy­zing material intuitively and translating it into language. The way you emerged within the painting process, but somehow looked at it from the outside. We didn’t talk so much about painting per se, but it was more about a common approach and interests, looking at things in similar ways. A shared humor or lightness.

AK   Almost like opposites attract in terms of visual endpoint. I was so drawn to your abstraction and this non-objectivity that I couldn’t ever commit to. I always needed an image to get beyond it, whereas—

KB    —for me, it was the exact opposite.

PD   Thinking about your history of working together, I came back to an early video piece of yours with Georgia Sagri and Adele Röder—filmed during a trip to the Bahamas in 2008. It is a beautiful black and white travel video which shows three young women—the two of you and Georgia—walking around, performing in front of the camera. I like the casualness of it, and also the slapstick moments. 

The most striking aspect for me, though, is the role-playing—you take turns to fill the roles of actress, tourist, model, image maker. This way of slipping in and out of different roles that either you want to occupy or that you find yourself in as (female) artists or as painters, really feels like something that’s still very much at play in your respective practices. Could you describe if, and how, this aspect from 15 years ago still figures in your work?

AK   That’s such a good question. I feel like the best thing about the dance group (that wasn’t really dance or performance), was its spontaneity. We worked with a script that we could then manipulate. In some ways that was also how we painted.

KB   We had a very fluid sense of ourselves and what we were doing, and how we would relate to space and each other. Spontaneity was key, but also this mix between authenticity and irony. This trip and essentially the video happened because our friend had to get her visa renewed. It wasn’t like a commentary—we were in the moment. It was almost like a spider’s web where we went in different directions and then came back again. A moment to breathe. And as painters, we opted to work in a medium we didn’t feel at home in.

PD   One can totally sense the intuitive approach to the situation in the video. But at the same time, there seems to be something very on point about this: what does it mean to be a female performer in front of a camera? And how to undo these roles and attributions?

I have a sense that this still holds today in terms of the way both of you think of your practices. How you, Allison, basically, use language and painting, moving in and out of different representational systems. While for you, Kerstin, it’s a lot about who you collaborate with and in what constellation. This video already seems to open up a lot of the questions that you are looking at in your work.

AK   It’s so true. We were very clear from the start that we could balance our doubt with our belief and vice versa. By being together, we could risk not painting. I personally felt that I needed the group to try out these ideas, away from the canvas. I came back to the frame with more bravery and freedom based on this shared experience. Even today, I still take a sense of permission from Kerstin’s practice.

KB   Yet all these questions you just raised, Patrizia, were abstract and not really formulated when we started painting. Within the non-dance group, moving our bodies, using our gestures, our facial expressions—it was so literal. It was all about a certain dispersion of the self.

In terms of translating this into painting, my German professor before Columbia was not a painter, so for me it’s still about a relational aspect in painting and how to relate painting to the body, whether it’s psychic, physical, social or mental. All my different approaches, with artisans, collaborators, or within different mediums—it’s still the same investigation.

PD   As you said, Allison, you come from very different angles in your approaches to painting, despite your many shared interests. You have a strong leaning towards language—using motifs like words, you create an idiosyncratic syntax or even a visual language of its own.

AK   Every painter begins with their own handwriting, the way they unconsciously make a mark. I believe in that, but I also want to challenge it, to push that so-called natural instinct horizontally, into as many variations as I can. It’s like seeing how many painters I can be. I’m not striving to consolidate into a single voice. I think of painting as a conversation, a multiplicity of voices driving the act. I also mean that literally, on a practical level, language generates visual ideas for me. Writing, reading, speaking. The naming that goes along with looking is the ultimate game of creation. Rhyme, wordplay, slips of the tongue, chance, euphemism, quotes … all these everyday poetics open up pictorial possibilities.

PD   The way you describe mark-making as a tool to embody different ways of painting is, I think, something that is very closely connected to your practice, Kerstin. You literally do just that. By bringing other people in to constantly change your practice through the skills and material knowledge they can provide, as master marbler, stucco, mosaic or stained-glass craftsmen.

KB   In my case, there’s a certain delay and extension of my signature via the craft processes. You work within the same parameters in painting: light and color. But it’s my brushstroke materialized as stained glass. If I use a tradition like marbling, a liquified painting where you exchange the brushstroke with a drop of ink, that is a questioning of conventional painting practices. Or with the stucco marmo that creates something solid with powder: It’s like the painterly pigment has crystallized and collected time, creating a fossil painting.

These artisan practices aren’t painting per se, but when you look at the translational gap of natural forces—heat, water, fossilization—from a painter’s perspective, that changes. You achieve new conditions of painting through a different materiality.

PD   Talking about self-dispersal, I was really struck by the amount of trust that the two of you have. I think one of the most poignant examples is, when you, Allison, wrote a lecture for and in the name of, Kerstin. What interested you in doing that?

AK   For me, it was an opportunity to really put into practice this idea of sharing and to see how it is both a challenge and an opportunity for expansion—to really believe that your voice is made up of other voices. Through love and trust, one can take a risk and see what new thoughts emerge. I was really grateful because it’s actually quite a novel thing to take on someone else’s voice.

I felt entrusted with that weight but was also really inspired by speaking not as myself. There’s a lot of freedom and humor in that. It loosens up ideas of self and it demonstrates how ideas exceed any one person or moment. Kerstin and I could be attracted to the same thing but through our different embodied experience, we will do something different. So even the idea of an idea gets undone, and becomes much more ephemeral and giving.

PD   Kerstin, can you talk about your experience of working with so many different people in so many different ways?

KB   My art-making is a space where different practices come together—that extends into different media and different people. As Allison just mentioned, it’s based on trust that builds something which is almost ineffable or unpredictable, because one plus one is not two. One plus one becomes a third entity.

With my collaborators I have a shared life experience, and they have to be as willing as I am to walk into the unknown; to be able to see a new perspective. I’ve been painting for decades, but I walk into the moment with the painting as if I’ve never painted before and may discover something unfamiliar in the familiar.

PD   In closing, can we talk about the projects that you have coming up for the Aspen Art Museum? In very different ways, these rely on either imagined or actual conversations or collaborations. In your instance, Allison, your research into Pompeii, while your proposal Kerstin, relates to your history of collaborative making. Allison, what are you currently thinking you might be doing?

AK   First, I just wanted to say, the fact that we are exhibiting at the same time is a coincidence. And I feel this is one of the gifts of our friendship, that these things happen, whether or not we even plan them. I love that.

In Aspen I am going to be researching artworks from local, personal collections to create an exhibition around origin stories of display based on the design and use of Ancient Roman houses. I am looking at the ways in which certain ideas of identity, framing and value originated in this mixed-up use of domestic, public and mercantile space. I am hoping to be able to borrow fragments of frescoes and other objects from the archives of the Archaeological Park of Pompeii, in Italy, where I was recently a Fellow, to transplant them into a contemporary context and think about how artworks are relational and can be seen anew within different conceptual frameworks. Based on this structure, I will also present my own new paintings, created in response to this archeological research, but which dovetail with pre-existing subjects and motifs, since these themes have been preoccupying me since I first started painting!

KB   Hearing you explain this is fascinating, your starting point is the remnants of mosaics and ruins, while I’m using that technique. My rooftop commission takes up the idea of our daily profane space, the home, and how it gets extended outwards, almost into a transcendental realm: I’m working on mosaic benches for people to sit on and stained-glass constructions for climbing plants and nesting birds. I consider the mosaic a traversable painting facing the sky, allowing body, nature and art to merge into each other. The lifespan of the artwork can stretch into a different paradigm of time by including natural life.

AK   Exactly. I think there are so many affinities just through things that we’ve always been interested in, but in this context, it’s almost exaggerated in a really exciting way.

PD   And I think that is really beautiful in relation to Pompeii. Through the volcano erupting, the city was conserved. If this natural disaster had not occurred, we might not even know about Pompeii because it might have fallen apart and rotted. It really raises the question of, what is the life of art? It feels very pertinent to our time—these questions of preservation, in view of the energy crisis and climate change. I see a whole firework of connections popping up between the two projects you have in mind.

Patrizia Dander is Head of Curatorial Department at Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf, Germany.

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