Thomas Trummer, The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, Juli 2007

TT: Tell me about the dummies. You talked about the soul.

AG: I wanted to create a space, where the „Inner Voice” has its say, has its own voice without being deconstructed, without a need for a narrative – is just present and alive. That was 1992, after I made sculptures of inner organs for a couple of years. I thought about history and the term „soul” and came to the ventriloquy technique. I sought out a ventriloquist, wrote a script and built a dummy - initially for a German version. At that stage in my work I started to deal with languages. I made some European versions of the „Inner Voice” and began to think about the American „Inner voice”. That could only be the Native American „Inner Voice”. I searched for a Native American ventriloquist and found him in Las Vegas at the World Ventriloquist Convention, where once a year a couple of hundred ventriloquists meet with their dummies. From this time on I worked predominantly with Buddy Big Mountain. He is an impressive ventriloquist, who portrayed the „Inner Voice” in nearly all theater performances.

TT: Do ventriloquists usually write their own scripts?

AG: Yes, the beauty of the old, classic Vaudeville ventriloquist scripts is that they are short, non-intellectual, crude, offending and a play with taboos. I prefer this unpretentious style. The language makes a good inner voice – I think. For the video productions of the „Inner Voice” I wrote the dialogues myself. The dialogues for the theater production were written by Tim Etchells and Deborah Levy. For a one hour dialogue my dramaturgical capabilities just did not suffice.

TT: Describe your dummy. What are the personality traits of the dummy?

AG: It should be a doll, the partner of the ventriloquist, she is old and young, she is wise and naïve, she is ugly and beautiful. She is a nun, part witch and part clown. She isn't male. There is a Spanish ventriloquist however, who played her as a man and this is how she became a man. The dummy turned into a nun out of technical reasons, as the ventriloquist's hand had to be concealed. She is technically the inner voice of the ventriloquist. She conducts those conversations with the ventriloquist, which we have with ourselves, the ones where we try to find out what goes on. What makes us feel great? What happens when those things that we always wished for become reality and do not make us happy. Those sort of things.

TT: Describe the Superego, but sometimes your dummy has a certain „Id” (Unter-Ich, Es). Meaning not only „you should” but also „let it out”.

AG: The inner voice has a different function, than all the other voices. The inner voice is pure reflection. What interests me most about the inner voice is that amongst all voices, that accompany us throughout the day, it is the one that is most like us. No matter how educated, wealthy, beautiful and successful we are, the inner voice does not necessarily sound like that. Deborah Levy once said that the inner voice of someone who studied Wittgenstein or Derrida, might possibly sound like Donald Duck or Barbie, or it is simply shy or loud and brash or nasty.

TT: How is it that you are interested in the great themes and not the small everyday issues or political subjects?

AG: How do people interact, that is what interests me foremost. How does society function? At which point does it work well and where not at all; and „What makes one tick?” I have taken on the great themes in life – such as love, death, friendship, aging, how we deal with our own strengths and weaknesses and the question of how we want to handle other people.

TT: Are you one with yourself, when your ego is split with your inner voice?

AG: Yes, because one is not only one's self, we also consist to a great extend of those who educated and shaped us and who taught us how to deal with ourselves. This depends on coincidences and is not a hundred percent the self.

TT: Does one have a self?

AG: Yes, but not only one.

TT: So one is a sort of actor or a puppet of one's surroundings?

AG: Well, I shy away from these types of attributions, saying the self is this or that. I do not know why one has to make these attributions. Theories want to explain, how something is and to constitute one truth. What I am more interested in is the duality of a theme. For example I worked on a version of the „Inner Voice” about friendship. Here as with all other complex themes there are many aspects and truths, about what friendship is. When one argues in absolute terms so no other point of view is valid, one narrows down many things. That is not how I approach life. To judge good and bad – false and accurate – educated and uneducated – beautiful and ugly – cool and un-cool - does not amount to much - does not integrate. One can not get by without assessments because one needs them to navigate. But when one is indecisive, one realizes that there is not only one truth, that there are various paths, when you are open to them. That is the beauty of it, when you break new grounds without expectations or concepts of truth – a lot more happens.

TT: What is the function of art in this case?

AG: Well, with my subjects I want to communicate my position on humanism or my idealism or through the forms, demonstrate my position on aesthetics.

TT: Let's get back to: What is the soul?

AG: Fifteen years ago, when I started the project, it was the medieval perception of soul, which drove me towards ventriloquy. I learned that in former times people believed that the soul or the conscious was an organ in the body. In postmortem examination the organ was not found. Later it was believed that it was where the solar plexus lies or that the soul was so small that it could not be found.

TT: Part of the exhibition title is the void. Can you make any use of the void?

AG: I can make a lot of use of it. Tim Etchells wrote a dialogue for a theater production titled „The Inner voice/Dead Air”. In the radio this refers to an outage, when there is no transmission, silence, the void. That fascinates me very much. Nothingness, the absence of something, ignorance, insecurity. The agonizing over how to proceed. The silence before something changes. I like to play with protracted breaks: Buddy is a good impersonator of breaks. There is a part in „The Inner Voice/ You are Good” video, where the dummy asks: „What is good?” That makes Buddy uncomfortable, because he has no answer. That is a question that interests me: to know nothing and not being able to admit that some questions can not be answered. Consequently the text also deals with the artist's fear to fail in public and not being able to reach the audience, and about the tactics and skill to reach the audience nevertheless.

TT: One gets the impression that exactly these insisting questions that the dummy asks, open a door, behind which the void is to be found.

AG: Yes, Exactly. You are getting to the point. Breaks create a tension, because the viewer can barely stand this situation. When someone gives a lecture and looses the train of thought, the viewers will start to commiserate.

TT: But there is a difference between the rhetorical mean and of course the truly flawed...the genuine suffering.

AG:...the innate genuine suffering.

TT: What appealed to me, which pertains to all ventriloquists, is the dichotomy of the voice. When speaking one has the feeling that the voice belongs to oneself. But sometimes, when the voice fails, one senses that it takes on a life of its own.

AG: This involves the notion: why is one the way one is? One could also be a little different.

TT: Your dialogues reflect your interest in psychology. But the genre in itself is regarded as a little vulgar?

AG: It' inherently banal and absurd, comical or is Low-Art as well. I don't want to elevate it. It should work without meaning. It should also have an aspect of simplicity. Basically it is a difficult medium. Some famous ventriloquists such as Ronn Lucas own their own theaters with 1500 seats and two performances a day. He is technically extremely proficient and would rather perform good scripts, but then he would not have enough audience. That is why my project was always popular amongst ventriloquists. They loved to experiment. Ventriloquy had its heyday with Edgar Bergen, who had his own radio show in America. The dummy was called Charlie McCarthy. It was very political and intelligent, half of America listened in. He created a Kunstfigur „artificial character”. After Edgar Bergen this does not exist anymore. We are living in a time of technical reproducibility, one could fake anything.

TT: It is a humor, that is disturbing or at least has one wondering. Is that the effect you want to achieve?

AG: I like hidden depths.

TT: Ms. Grötting, thank you very much.

Thomas Trummer is curator and project manager at Siemens Arts Programm, Munich