Interview Alf Löhr by Pat deCaro
The other new field of exploration is called painting on fabric. You have been doing this for a number of years now. Did your travels to India influence you?
Originally I started to paint on fabric in my studio in London. The reason was more that I wanted to learn more about it. That is my cultural condition, the terrible mark that the Kunstademie Düsseldorf leaves on you, to go and peruse your point of investigation to defend your position. I wish I could do it the other way and be like the watercolours and draftsman on Caption Cooks expeditions, who sailed into different worlds and drew flowers, grass and insects.
Was there a difference painting in India versus painting in London?
Fabric is of course a strong part in any culture but India seems to be most fluent in it. Beside that, it’s the country where order comes out of chaos, and that has always fascinated me. Being there gave me a freedom that I could not find in the western world that is obsessed with efficiency and accountability. India cultivates failure, which is such a strong part of art since Giacometti. I could also find a non-western format for my very specific type of paintings. Nearly all of them are 5 metres x 1.5 metres.
How does painting on fabric change the quality of the painting?
In painting on hand woven cotton, polyester, and silk, as opposed to paper or canvas, it becomes possible to let the painting leave the wall, and engage in the novel ways of the world. The fluid nature of the fabric means that light can also interact with the painting in a different way- it absorbs it, moves it, shapes it and thus light becomes a key component of creating the image. The paint is applied whilst the fabric is folded. The pigment then trickles through the layers of cotton and a structure emerges, as the cloth is unfolded. By leaving the traditional place of the wall and creating a new structure through the nature of the folds of the material, how the painting is made and viewed is changed. The other condition, with which we see, is of course light
So it's that time honored concern with light.
Light in western culture is often a heroic one that fights darkness and that for centuries did not come without direction. It’s difficult to side step such so attractive and dominant in abstract painting. Much of the traditional understanding of abstraction is based on immateriality, but this leads my viewer down the wrong path. My work is not about absence. The inner space I create through my paintings is not one of elimination, instead it is one of focus, of touch and being in touch.
Are you speaking of consciousness? Being in the moment?
My art is a physical process; intuitive, spontaneous and emotional. Like the lump of clay that becomes art when it is no longer material; for example, the shape of cherry, or apple. The painted fabrics hang on the wall or a washing line without being painting or washing. Technically speaking, they want to be in the neighbourhood of music that has no meaning, but than again, every collector who lives with a painting of mine would deny that there is no meaning. For me, my paintings allow you to see mark making in a different way, and of course, they allow you to watch the light settling on it freely.
Should the viewer deal with the space around the fabric paintings?
I am glad you asked that because it is so vital to understanding the fabric paintings. The space around them is not filled; it does not need to be described with words though it is important that it is there. My work always floats and it can only do that when there is air and ambiguity.
The fabric paintings- I want to know more: do they have a front, back, side, top or bottom? Winds, after all, can blow in any direction.
For a painting to have a sexy back side creates common confusion. It's a fad that drops in and out of an art context so quickly. The rules to stay inside the art context are very simple and have not been challenged much in the last few decades. People pretend to be open but they get irritated quickly. At an opening I once turned a picture upside down several times. I painted it so you could see it upside down or the other way round. My activity almost cleared out the gallery. People are so easily confused. To answer your question - why do they have a front, back, side, top or bottom is because I like to give the viewer her/his independence back so they explore their position. I don’t believe in art as a oneway street where the artist leads and the viewer follows. Ideally you lose yourself in one of my painting to be with yourself. You shut your everydayness out, build yourself a tent from the painted fabric, cover yourself with it either by looking at it or by lying underneath. Why shouldn’t it have energy by itself? A fellow artist has one over her bed and since than she has exciting dreams. Paintings are catalysts in our life, my paintings are very private affairs and I am proud of that. The wind has to blow from that direction otherwise they don’t really fly. It does not mean you have to be politely passive. Quite the opposite because we have art, we have democracy, you should be fully engaged
How should a viewer participate, or interact? or is that when video and performance comes in?
In the video of the dancer Murielle Ikareth, she is improvising how to move a painting (or painted piece of fabric) around. She is wearing a dress that her husband Joe Ikareth tailored from the same fabric. You are watching a video of the fabric moving. They are examples for three explorations of interacting with my painting in a physical way.
Many of the performance pieces seem sculptural. There seems to be a concern for an expression of the body too.
The fabric is often transparent or it has a tactile quality, which either has the quality of allowing a body to shine through or the quality of a body itself. In both the closeness of a human body is obvious. However there is no hierarchy. The body is neither a performer nor is the performance dance; it moves the painted fabric as a progression in painting.
Is that why you add music?
All performances are improvisations by the performers. In the preparation we talk a bit about the space and the painted fabric but than the movement is the performer’s exploration of the painted fabric. If they deal with it in a mental or in a physical way is up to them.
A soundtrack is like a title of painting. It does not say what it is but gives a direction in which the visual image can be read. We are conditioned to look for harmonies, juxtapositions in contemporary music or in African or Asian music allow us to seek a different level of understanding.
It sounds like you were attracted to dance, and may even have considered becoming a dancer rather than an artist and painter?
No - not at all. Although I grew up in Bochum, which is right next to Essen and Wuppertal, where my school friends took dance classes with Pina Bausch before she became famous, my teen age passion was to be a film director. You have to have a vision to do film and I am good with vision and ideas. Working together in a team to make a film appeals to me. Everybody has to be in the moment in film and yet only comes together at the end in a different place.
Should we "experience" your work with the whole body? Embrace it? Is this what you mean by "my paintings want to dance with you"?
What if what moves you would be a "movement"? What "shape" or "movement" would something be that moves you? It is not a dance in the literal sense that I refer to, and I assume you do not only mean your physical body.
Right from my art school days in Düsseldorf my work had a certain convulsive way. I constructed a large wooden sculpture at an outdoor exhibition on a mountain that you could walk in and it was painted and blocked the view, you could use it to hide in. One night, one of the good burghers of Freiburg took hours to dismantle it, and pushed it down from the cliff where it was located. In a way that was all the work could achieve. Of course I am lot more gentle these days, but if art does not move you, what is it for.
What happens when you do certain things in one medium, painting for example, and you convey something similar in another medium? How does that come about? Is it because you cannot take the project any further?
Over the years the style of handwriting becomes very strong. There is hardly a way to surprise yourself. Changing the medium is like trying to write with my left hand. It reveals lines that are not so smooth and experienced. Competence of skill is not always useful in art. My position can be expressed in many different ways. It is more of a worldview than a style.
The other new field of exploration is called painting on fabric. You have been doing this for a number of years now. Did your travels to India influence you?
Originally I started to paint on fabric in my studio in London. The reason was more that I wanted to learn more about it. That is my cultural condition, the terrible mark that the Kunstademie Düsseldorf leaves on you, to go and peruse your point of investigation to defend your position. I wish I could do it the other way and be like the watercolours and draftsman on Caption Cooks expeditions, who sailed into different worlds and drew flowers, grass and insects.
Was there a difference painting in India versus painting in London?
Fabric is of course a strong part in any culture but India seems to be most fluent in it. Beside that, it’s the country where order comes out of chaos, and that has always fascinated me. Being there gave me a freedom that I could not find in the western world that is obsessed with efficiency and accountability. India cultivates failure, which is such a strong part of art since Giacometti. I could also find a non-western format for my very specific type of paintings. Nearly all of them are 5 metres x 1.5 metres.
How does painting on fabric change the quality of the painting?
In painting on hand woven cotton, polyester, and silk, as opposed to paper or canvas, it becomes possible to let the painting leave the wall, and engage in the novel ways of the world. The fluid nature of the fabric means that light can also interact with the painting in a different way- it absorbs it, moves it, shapes it and thus light becomes a key component of creating the image. The paint is applied whilst the fabric is folded. The pigment then trickles through the layers of cotton and a structure emerges, as the cloth is unfolded. By leaving the traditional place of the wall and creating a new structure through the nature of the folds of the material, how the painting is made and viewed is changed. The other condition, with which we see, is of course light
So it's that time honored concern with light.
Light in western culture is often a heroic one that fights darkness and that for centuries did not come without direction. It’s difficult to side step such so attractive and dominant in abstract painting. Much of the traditional understanding of abstraction is based on immateriality, but this leads my viewer down the wrong path. My work is not about absence. The inner space I create through my paintings is not one of elimination, instead it is one of focus, of touch and being in touch.
Are you speaking of consciousness? Being in the moment?
My art is a physical process; intuitive, spontaneous and emotional. Like the lump of clay that becomes art when it is no longer material; for example, the shape of cherry, or apple. The painted fabrics hang on the wall or a washing line without being painting or washing. Technically speaking, they want to be in the neighbourhood of music that has no meaning, but than again, every collector who lives with a painting of mine would deny that there is no meaning. For me, my paintings allow you to see mark making in a different way, and of course, they allow you to watch the light settling on it freely.
Should the viewer deal with the space around the fabric paintings?
I am glad you asked that because it is so vital to understanding the fabric paintings. The space around them is not filled; it does not need to be described with words though it is important that it is there. My work always floats and it can only do that when there is air and ambiguity.
The fabric paintings- I want to know more: do they have a front, back, side, top or bottom? Winds, after all, can blow in any direction.
For a painting to have a sexy back side creates common confusion. It's a fad that drops in and out of an art context so quickly. The rules to stay inside the art context are very simple and have not been challenged much in the last few decades. People pretend to be open but they get irritated quickly. At an opening I once turned a picture upside down several times. I painted it so you could see it upside down or the other way round. My activity almost cleared out the gallery. People are so easily confused. To answer your question - why do they have a front, back, side, top or bottom is because I like to give the viewer her/his independence back so they explore their position. I don’t believe in art as a oneway street where the artist leads and the viewer follows. Ideally you lose yourself in one of my painting to be with yourself. You shut your everydayness out, build yourself a tent from the painted fabric, cover yourself with it either by looking at it or by lying underneath. Why shouldn’t it have energy by itself? A fellow artist has one over her bed and since than she has exciting dreams. Paintings are catalysts in our life, my paintings are very private affairs and I am proud of that. The wind has to blow from that direction otherwise they don’t really fly. It does not mean you have to be politely passive. Quite the opposite because we have art, we have democracy, you should be fully engaged
How should a viewer participate, or interact? or is that when video and performance comes in?
In the video of the dancer Murielle Ikareth, she is improvising how to move a painting (or painted piece of fabric) around. She is wearing a dress that her husband Joe Ikareth tailored from the same fabric. You are watching a video of the fabric moving. They are examples for three explorations of interacting with my painting in a physical way.
Many of the performance pieces seem sculptural. There seems to be a concern for an expression of the body too.
The fabric is often transparent or it has a tactile quality, which either has the quality of allowing a body to shine through or the quality of a body itself. In both the closeness of a human body is obvious. However there is no hierarchy. The body is neither a performer nor is the performance dance; it moves the painted fabric as a progression in painting.
Is that why you add music?
All performances are improvisations by the performers. In the preparation we talk a bit about the space and the painted fabric but than the movement is the performer’s exploration of the painted fabric. If they deal with it in a mental or in a physical way is up to them.
A soundtrack is like a title of painting. It does not say what it is but gives a direction in which the visual image can be read. We are conditioned to look for harmonies, juxtapositions in contemporary music or in African or Asian music allow us to seek a different level of understanding.
It sounds like you were attracted to dance, and may even have considered becoming a dancer rather than an artist and painter?
No - not at all. Although I grew up in Bochum, which is right next to Essen and Wuppertal, where my school friends took dance classes with Pina Bausch before she became famous, my teen age passion was to be a film director. You have to have a vision to do film and I am good with vision and ideas. Working together in a team to make a film appeals to me. Everybody has to be in the moment in film and yet only comes together at the end in a different place.
Should we "experience" your work with the whole body? Embrace it? Is this what you mean by "my paintings want to dance with you"?
What if what moves you would be a "movement"? What "shape" or "movement" would something be that moves you? It is not a dance in the literal sense that I refer to, and I assume you do not only mean your physical body.
Right from my art school days in Düsseldorf my work had a certain convulsive way. I constructed a large wooden sculpture at an outdoor exhibition on a mountain that you could walk in and it was painted and blocked the view, you could use it to hide in. One night, one of the good burghers of Freiburg took hours to dismantle it, and pushed it down from the cliff where it was located. In a way that was all the work could achieve. Of course I am lot more gentle these days, but if art does not move you, what is it for.
What happens when you do certain things in one medium, painting for example, and you convey something similar in another medium? How does that come about? Is it because you cannot take the project any further?
Over the years the style of handwriting becomes very strong. There is hardly a way to surprise yourself. Changing the medium is like trying to write with my left hand. It reveals lines that are not so smooth and experienced. Competence of skill is not always useful in art. My position can be expressed in many different ways. It is more of a worldview than a style.