Interview with Stephen Feeke, 2008 on occasion of the exhibition "Asta Gröting Sculpture 1987-2008", Henry Moore Institute Leeds, UK

Stephen Feeke: You attended the Düsseldorf Kunstakademie; why did you choose to study there?

Asta Gröting: When I went to Düsseldorf in 1980, it had the most interesting art school and the biggest programme of art events. When I decided to study there - I was 19 at the time - I thought the city consisted entirely of art students and punk music. That was where I wanted to go, because that was my idea of a playful lifestyle and my approach to thinking about life.

SF: You were a punk?

AG: Once I cut my hair down to two millimetres and then dyed it peroxide blonde and then dark black. When I saw the shocked reactions of people on the street I let my hair grow again.

SF: What was the Kunstakademie like once you were there? Did you enjoy being an art student?

AG: In our year we would spend the whole day together in a kind of community spirit. We'd work together and go out together - to the Ratinger Hof - and listen to punk music. We visited the Galerie Fischer and saw Bruce Nauman. We had no distractions - there were no computers, answering machines or mobile phones, we had no obligations at the art school; we didn't have to attend classes or collect credits. And during our studies we didn't exhibit anywhere except at school. We were free to do what we liked. I think that going to the Kunstakademie in the time after Beuys and Kricke, we experienced the tail end of an era when free artistic work was possible.

SF: And what attracted you to sculpture? What possibilities did it offer you that another idiom did not?

AG: I grew up in the Ruhr area of Germany, where I also did my vocational training. I was drawn to sculpture because it was more physical and complemented my philosophy of life and the music I listened to. I did briefly consider becoming a painter - I think I was around twenty at the time - because that would involve fewer technical difficulties. But I didn't want to be a paintbrush-and-easel kind of artist. I also liked the personalities who represented sculpture at the Kunstakademie in the 80s; people like Joseph Beuys, Norbert Kricke and Klaus Rinke.

SF: Who were your fellow students?

AG: A lot of artists studied at there at the same time as I did: Monika Baer, Alice Creischer, Jürgen Drescher, Katharina Fritsch, Ludger Gerdes, Andreas Gursky, Thomas Huber, Reinhard Mucha, Thomas Ruff, Thomas Schütte, Andreas Siekmann and Thomas Struth and some remain good friends. There were others who I don´t recall right now...

SF: Looking back, how do you feel about the German sculpture of the 1980s?

AG: In a nutshell, the good thing about sculpture in the 1980s was Beuys. What was less good was the focus on form. At that time Düsseldorf was a place where you could express yourself playfully and without inhibitions, using any and every material without having to stick slavishly to theory. But it has to be said that 1980s sculpture often remained fettered by materials.

SF: So Beuys was a particular influence on your work, but was he also an intimidating presence?

AG: Of course Beuys influenced my work. The three sculptures that most impressed me in the early 1980s were Bruce Nauman´s `South America Triangle´ [1981] and `Seven Figures´ [1984] and Beuys´ `Schmerzraum´ [1984]. But I was not intimidated. I had already decided not to be intimidated by anyone and had a kind of youthful self-optimism, a feeling I could do whatever anyone else could. I tried too, to see if I could. But that was just an impulse, because my own story and the contents of my work are different.

SF: Having left art school, you had considerable success early on. Did that have an impact on you and your work?

AG: I began to exhibit and make a living from my art directly after completing my studies. That was what I had worked for and what I really wanted most. But after some years I started to feel under pressure due to the demand, and I wanted to be able to work in peace and without pressure. After I started working with ventriloquism, peace descended. I found it a liberating experience because it was completely new for me, working with ventriloquists. I did no sculpture at all for eight years and concentrated completely on this work - I wrote some texts for ventriloquists and also had the opportunity to collaborate with Tim Etchells and Deborah Levy; in the end I produced twenty-seven performances and video works with ventriloquists from all over the world.

SF: But how did you cope with all the demands made on you?

AG: I tend to feel myself under pressure fairly quickly. For some years my own expectations regarding my art suited the expectations of curators and gallery owners, but from the early 1990s this was no longer the case. I suddenly chose the freedom to make my work independently of what others thought. As an artist you don´t have to continually exhibit and sell your work. Your own programme can become a kind of golden cage, especially if you are successful with it.

SF: Was that why you started making film and performance?

AG: After making sculpture for ten years, I wanted to try something different. I needed a change. In particular, I was tired of all the materials and the problem of storing them. I wanted to say what I had to say through the media of film and performance. I wanted to say more but with fewer materials.

SF: I wonder then if making films was easier - perhaps it is a more cerebral activity and less physically demanding?

AG: When I started with film and video I thought I would be able to say more with less material effort. I quickly realised that a lot of effort was also needed to achieve my goals with film and video, and even more organisation that could easily distract from the simplicity of a good idea. What is nice about video is simply that the result can be kept on a small disc or in virtual form on a hard disc. No problems of storage, like sculptors normally have... [laughs].

SF: Having started making sculpture again, did you find you had missed it?

AG: After ten years of video and performance, I simply wanted a change again.

SF: Is sculpture harder for women?

AG: Yes.

SF: I meant physically hard? Does volume and weight restrict what you want to do?

AG: Most of my sculptures have human proportions - either they are between 170 and 200 cm high - or they refer to human proportions. I usually do the physical production work together with other people. It's important to me for everyone to have a good time in the production process, because making sculpture shouldn't spoil your day. Ideally, I'll be standing in a freshly-ploughed field, making plaster casts of the furrows together with people I like to work with.

SF: In your film and performance works you collaborated with a variety of specialists such as performers, writers and technicians. Does sculpture offer you more direct control? AG: No, because I make my sculptures with help from other people. I am happy to let external influences flow into my work. I prefer collaborating with others to working in solitude.

SF: Whether it is film or sculpture, your work often reveals things which are not normally seen - such as secret thoughts or internal organs. Could you explain this preoccupation?

AG: I am fascinated by invisible processes and I want to find images that make hidden processes visible. In the 1980s I used the images of underground conveyor belts [used in coal mines], then various organs made of glass, later ventriloquism, and in more recent years I have been interested in social and psychological issues as a way of communicating my views on humanism and beauty. My most recent sculpture - `Space in between two people having sex´, 2008 - deals with the void between two people along with all the unexpressed, inexpressible and hidden issues that relationships involve. I created a physical representation in order to be able to focus on the immaterial space which we can't see because we can't perceive negative space.

SF: Can you define what you mean by humanism in this context?

AG: I am not a fan of definitions because you can waste of lot of time trying to make general definitions. I am interested in individual cases, stories and relationships. Everyone has to find out for themselves what they mean by humanism, again and again every day and every night. Other people cannot see how someone makes their own decisions or mistakes. Just how secret and hidden this all is becomes very clear when we honestly ask ourselves how we come to make our decisions. I find it very useful and productive to try to get a bit closer to this invisible realm.

SF: What is about the `invisible´ that interests you? Is `The Inner Voice´, for example, interesting because the conversations we have in our heads are often concerned with the mundane side of life?

AG: Yes. I suspect that the big questions of life are reflected in the little ones. In `The Inner Voice´ series, I dealt with the secret thoughts and the internal dialogue that we engage in when we are trying to make sense of what's going on around us. Our inner voice says more about us and who we are than our speaking voice. Only we know the secrets we ourselves keep, and we don't know the secrets of others - but we probably know less than we think we do about our own motivations and our own truths. Ultimately I am interested in human weakness and everything that defines how people interact with one another.

SF: But how do you turn something intangible - like a thought or an idea - into something solid?

AG: In the late 1980s I observed several autopsies and they left me feeling very agitated. One evening I'd just watched an autopsy and was driving along in my car, when suddenly another car with a very smartly dressed, stylish-looking woman at the wheel cut off my right of way and I had to slam on the brakes as hard as I could. I was furious, but I didn't yell something abusive at her. Instead I thought to myself: `Sheesh, if you had any idea what you look like on the inside... Nothing like so chic!´ I thought about those opened corpses and the chaos inside them that has nothing to do with any of our standards of beauty, and I thought about our efforts to pretty up the surface. I later began working on a series of digestive systems made of glass. I chose glass because it's a material that isn't meant to be visible, and because it's decorative.

SF: In works like the glass intestines or `Cage´, you often you make things look more attractive than they actually are. Are you saying beauty shouldn't matter as much as it does?

AG: I like to flirt with ugliness because I see ugliness as a kind of beauty. I often think about whether beauty is a gimmick. To me beauty just seems too simple.

SF: But how does beauty function in your work? Are we initially attracted by something lovely but find something quite different on closer inspection?

AG: I don´t use beauty within a calculated strategy. Sometimes a work turns out to be beautiful, and I accept that fact just as easily as I do when a work is not beautiful. If I pour plaster onto a field then I cannot know in advance if it is going to look beautiful and so I don´t really care about that - I am making the work so as to discover what it will look like, what is possible, and to see if it can move me. Beauty and ugliness come later when the work is judged, and then as a means of orientation, a way of being able to talk about the work.

SF: Can you say what you find beautiful?

AG: I think so: Donatello´s `Magdalene´, Michelangelo´s `Pieta´, Mantegna´s `Dead Christ´, certain art works that have been made very lovingly, many people - too many to list - and landscapes like those I saw recently in Yemen, and music by Gnarls Barkley and Bonaparte. That is what I find beautiful today; maybe it will be different tomorrow - the beautiful and the ugly are just a game we use as a means of orientation.

SF: I hadn´t expected `old masters´ like Michelangelo and Donatello to have been an influence on you. Is it the use of materials that you admire?

AG: No, I think they did not really influence me. Donatello´s `Magdalene´ and Michelangelo´s `Pieta´ touched and moved me because of the theme and just how much these sculptures are able to express death. When I saw these works I felt like I was right in the middle of death. The material is not in the foreground.

SF: But your use of diverse materials is one of the most striking aspects of your work. How do you select which one is right?

AG: I choose any material which touches me, which I like and which I want to work with, or I might be curious to work with and which is able to express what I want to say. I often want to work with new materials; I try to remain playful in my working life and try not to get stuck with one particular material.

SF: This show spans your career to date, a kind of mini-sculptural retrospective. At this point in your career, how do you feel about the sculptures we have selected together? Do the earlier pieces compare favourably with the more recent ones?

AG: Of course the most recent work interests me most at the moment. Together with the earlier works it makes up an ongoing conversation.

SF: Has your sculptural practice or working method changed at all? AG: It has remained largely the same. My first sculpture in 1981 was a shell which I modelled and then I made a cast from the model in the plaster workshop in Düsseldorf. The workshop supervisor helped me. Practically speaking, this is still the way I usually work today. SF: Have the things that interested you changed though?

AG: My issues or contents and my stance have remained fairly constant.

SF: Is the use of mechanical and moving parts a performative element? I wonder whether sculpture is perhaps too still or static for you after having made films.

AG: When I started making films, it was partly for practical and economic reasons. My studio was too full of materials and the sculptures took up too much space; I wanted to be free from objects and from the problem of storage. But I also just wanted to know about a new process and what it felt like to make film. In the recent sculpture, I have never started with the idea of movement - motion itself doesn't interest me and I only use mechanics when it seems appropriate. In 'Roboter', for instance, I wanted to create a work about manipulating and being manipulated and so I produced a robotic arm that moved a toy coach through the air completely without purpose or feeling. 'Ja und Nein' moves like a slow carousel because I couldn´t say anything about the experience of 'yes' and 'no' without movement; I wanted to be able to see and feel 'yes' and 'no'.

SF: But `Roboter´ makes me wonder whether all of your work has been about performance in some way - whether it be a film or a sculpture?

AG: Maybe - but I am not thinking of that when I work.

SF: Your work also makes me think of fairytales. Like a fairy story, your work often shows us something that seems nice on the surface which conceals a horrible reality. Would you agree?

AG: I like the idea that there is something horrible behind something beautiful, and that under certain circumstances it can become beautiful again.

SF: And do you consider potential narratives?

AG: There is a story behind every sculpture. For example, in the 1980s patchwork leather jackets inspired me to create sculptures titled `Monkey Dance´. I discovered that the leather came from Turkish lambs. Taken after the lambs were slaughtered for meat, the hides were turned into patchwork leather by women home workers in Anatolia. The jackets were then manufactured in Istanbul and shipped en masse to Eastern Europe as raw materials. I found the jackets in a discount shop and wanted to close the circle in a kind of recycling process - by changing the upright, human form of the jacket back into animals walking on all fours. In the 1990s, I laid thirty of these jackets one on top of the other and exhibited them next to Freud's office chair in the Freud Museum in London. The manual work of women and the intellectual work of a man - that's a juxtaposition that really shows up the gender scandal.

SF: How do you convey such a story to the viewer?

AG: I can only hope that my work touches on and communicates what I tried to put into it. A work must also make sense without anyone knowing the story behind it or its title or without it having to be standing in the perfect place.

SF: Mentioning the `gender scandal´ makes me wonder whether gender issues are of concern to you?

AG: In gender theory the distinction is not between male and female in the sense of gender identity. Gender identity is historical. I don't ask that question of my work - but I do think it is good that others do. I do not plan with the categories of `male´ or `female´ and definitely want to avoid such clichés as basis for my work. I am sure that music like reggae, punk or techno, and the Ruhr area have influenced my work more than gender roles.

SF: But I also wonder if you feel that the world of sculpture is primarily dominated by men? How does that feel?

AG: Bad.

SF: What can you do?

AG: My contribution to the gender issue is by avoiding labelling.

SF: Aside from such serious issues, some of the work is humorous. Can sculpture be funny?

AG: This is not something I deliberately work to achieve. But if it happens, I don't have a problem with it. I'm German.