Interview: Thomas Kilpper

Thomas Kilpper, The Ring, 2000. Woodcut on fabric; view of the floor/matrix.

Thomas Kilpper is a German artist and activist currently based in Berlin. A prolific artist that does drawings, sculptural and performance-based work, he is especially known for his large woodcuts, or “floor cuttings.” Kilpper takes woodcut to another level in terms of scope and scale, so that it becomes site-specific and attains literally architectural proportions. Kilpper carves the entire floors of buildings slated for redevelopment or demolition, often taking inspiration for the images from the history of the building itself. The floors become vast matrices and can sometimes be visited, but often end up being destroyed. The prints, done in fragments on paper or as enormous banners on fabric, are the witnesses to this obliteration of urban history. They are hung on the facades of the buildings as a way to bring the hidden or repressed buildings to the surface, literally exposing them to the public gaze.

Perhaps one of the strongest works to date is State Of Control, currently on view at the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein. Kilpper carved a linoleum floor of the former headquarters of the Stasi, the fearsome secret police of the German Democratic Republic. The building is accessible to the public for the first time, and it seems fitting that prints are the medium for opening up this symbolic Pandora's box of Germany's recent past. The images recall different aspects of German history, intertwined with images from Kilpper’s own biography as well as references to State repression, censorship, and resistance to injustice throughout history.

This interview was done via email.

J. Roca.

José Roca: When did you become interested in woodcuts in particular and printing in general?

Thomas Kilpper: I think it was in 1996 or 97. At that time I was still studying at the Staedel Art School in Frankfurt- where I was doing large-scale charcoal drawings- and I thought it might be good to heighten the resistance of the material, to do cutting rather than drawing to intensify the physical process of my work.

JR: How did your project of engraving the floors of condemned buildings come about?

TK: I learned that a building compound where I had been living got cleared for demolition and I knew there was parquet flooring. I went there and took some 12-15 square meters out. I considered reassembling it in my studio and using it for carving a woodblock and then printing it. But in the studio, becoming aware of how much labor was involved in reassembling all the bits and pieces, I changed my plan and went back to the empty building and started to carve up the floor. It was fairly quickly decided. I did not ask for permission. After four or five days of carving, when I was starting to do a test-print, I was discovered by the contractors. They kicked me out, but not without threatening to charge me for having destroyed the parquet flooring.

The artist carving the parquet floor with a power router and printing with a roller.

The following night I came back with a friend and took a print before the whole building came down. Afterward, I was not quite happy with the result. The image was not adequate for the concept and I decided to search for a building where I could get permission to do a site-related intervention. In 1998 I found such a site, where I was able to cut into the very substance and material of the building. Gordon Matta Clark's “house-splittings” and his other architectural interventions were among my favorite bodies of work when I was a student. I was attracted by the physical process of destroying, of hammering and cutting but creating something new at the same time. But in contrast to Matta Clark I wanted to refer not only to the aesthetic but also to the social and political aspects of the specific site.

I never took any printing course at the academy. I considered this project both a sculptural intervention and installation, and also a printing workshop- tattooing the skin of the building, and turning the architecture, the floors of the building, into a stamp. Maybe the attraction to do so has to do with my relation to my father, who was an architect too.

Thomas Kilpper, The Ring, 2000. View of the banner installed on the facade of the Orbit building, London, a former boxing ring.

Are you questioning a society of planned obsolescence, where things -even large “things” like buildings- are replaced in order to make way for something more economically efficient?

No. I love to take odd looking or smelly derelict houses. In the eighties I did some years of squatting, and it was exactly that same feeling of “conquering” something that is considered worthless for others, but that could mean so much to you. Vacancy is a widespread byproduct of our economy and as such, vacant space somehow becomes semi-public: it is privately-owned, but publicly neglected. At the same time it is an opportunity to get space for free or for cheap. I always find it interesting to do projects aside from the art-institutions. Right away, the projects are not just stuck inside an ivory tower, but instead try to communicate unprotected with people in society who are not museum-goers.

Two prints from The Ring (2000).

A printmaker recently told me that the best way to tell if you are a printer at heart is to check whether you have engraved the image backwards in order for it to read properly while printed, which is the case in all of your monumental projects. Do you consider yourself a printer?

I consider myself an artist and not a printer. An artist using installation, sculpture, drawing, video, photo, graphics and printing... and in the future maybe something else. But not only printers are able to mirror their images or texts- this sounds strange to me. Until now I have realized only two projects using printing and carving, and only after ten years, I am about to come back to it with a third project: a cut into a lino-like PVC flooring.

Thomas Kilpper, State of Control, 2009. Linocut on fabric.

Since the beginning, prints have been instrumental in social and political struggles, helping carry the message to many. Do you regard your work as drawing on the tradition of the politically–engaged print?

Of course I am in touch with this tradition and I can see a line to my floor-carving and printing projects. Nevertheless, I consider my work to be rooted as well in installation and sculpture. There are probably several streams amalgamated in my work.

Preparation of the linoleum floors for carving and final installation view of State of Control at the former Ministry of State Security (Stasi), Berlin, 2009.

Can you speak about your recent project at the former offices of the infamous Stasi police?

It was the first time I made a large scale linocut. The carving and cutting is very different. The ones done on wood have been much harder- you need a beater or toggle to carve, and wood splits off when the chisel is hammered in; it calls more for hard black-and-white contrasts. Linoleum is less resistant and softer, but does not jump or split away. It lends itself better to create gray-tones and details.
The stark history of the building prompted a massive intervention: to take over and try to dominate such a place with your artwork is always a fascinating challenge.

Linocuts printed from the floors at the former Stasi building.

Interview: Gunilla Klingberg

Mantric Mutation, 2006. Screen-printed stickers on walls and floor, laser-cut texts in mirror, surveillance mirrors, light tubes. Installation view at the Moderna Museet, Stockholm. Detail of Mantric Mutation. Swedish artist Gunilla Klingberg has worked with many types of consumer goods, including their branding and logos, combining them physically or graphically to a point where they lose their individual forms and become altogether new. Klingberg has used paper and plastic bags from supermarkets, cheap rice-paper lamps, surveillance mirrors like the ones used in convenience stores, neon lights, plastic flowers, fans, and in general any product that is readily available in a consumer economy. She often combines logos in geometric patterns so that they become pure form; distinct brands are only recognizable upon close inspection, their communicative role neutralized. Klingberg’s art is a poignant take on the pervasiveness of corporate persuasion in our daily lives, while at the same time it turns consumer products into beautiful, seductive environments that immerse the viewer. This interview was done via email. J. Roca.

Seven Eleven Twist, 1997. Paint on wall, surveillance mirrors.

Jose Roca: In your works you have taken different ready-made forms, patterns, and simple commercial objects, and through repetition you have done all-inclusive sensory environments. Print in its various forms appears to have been instrumental in your work as an iconographic source and also as a medium. Is this a correct appreciation? If so, can you elaborate why and how?

GK: Before studying art I was a graphic designer. The logos I use for my patterns are all taken from cut-price supermarkets or gas-stations around the corner and are not glamorous- they represent brands we do not identify with, brands that are instead a part of our everyday doings and rituals. The logos, as well as the shops, are big chains that look more or less the same all over in the Western world, and often even have the same owners. Printing as reproduction is then a natural choice since both content and technique/medium have the same socioeconomic reference.

Brand New View, 2003. Laser-cut adhesive vinyl.

JR: In your installations, one is drawn in and seduced by the visual beauty of the ensemble, but on close inspection one discovers a more troubling matter in the form of logos of corporations and companies. Is this intended to provide a reflection on consumerism or globalization, or are you interested more in the loss of the communicative power of these images once they are subsumed within a larger composition?

GK: Both, I would say. I experience a lack of essential symbols in my own culture. In some cultures ancient symbols and images still play a vital role and I am interested in images used for spiritual guidance, like the Buddhist/Hindu mandala, a cosmological diagram used in meditation. My forms and patterns consist of the Western street iconography, and become images of how our daily rhythm of commonplace doings blends with the advertising and enters deep down into our lives, homes and minds. They are a link between our public and private spheres, maybe even to the collective unconscious. I work with the distant and the close details: the patterns fluctuate between the abstract and the recognizable, and the images almost dissolve. One could get lost in the patterns.

Cheap High, 2000-2003 (with Peter Geschwind). Plastic bags, tape, electric fans.

JR: Your work is an ironic commentary on the role of advertising (faith-enhancing, form-based strategies), underlining the pervasiveness of branding while breaking down the communicative clarity of the individual logo?

GK: In a way yes, but I think that pictorial language and color works in an archetypal way as well, where the actual message could be secondary. Many brands have a seductive and even psychedelic potential that I use to generate a clash.

JR: Coming back to the mandala forms, I know that you visited India and were struck by how many Westerners are traveling there seeking a form of spirituality, while at the same time Western companies are furiously peddling their brands to enhance consumption in one of the fastest-growing economies in the world. How did your trip to India affect your artistic output or your view of the world?

GK: It seemed evident that India is a place where spirituality and commercialism, rich and poor, old and new come together and merge in an almost brutal way. These travels were a starting point for the works I am doing now where the function of contradictions is often essential.

Cosmic Matter, 2007. Printed packing-tape, polished metal. Installation view at the 10th Istanbul Biennial.

What ideas do you have for Philagrafika 2010?

GK: I am planning to collect material on-site. In some way, the work will reflect part of the city environment.

Interview: Eric Avery

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Doctor, 1974. Black and white photograph.

Some of us who work with art, when confronted with a difficult situation, force ourselves to realize that, despite the magnitude of the problem, there are more crucial things in the larger scheme of life. Art is important, but it does not save lives.

Well, sometimes it does: Eric Avery's is one of those rare cases in which an art practice is intimately linked with a life-defining situation. While often artists have another profession, it is rather unusal to have a practicing doctor that works with equal passion on art-making. In Eric Avery’s work, two professions that appear to be radically different come together naturally within the same practice. Trained as a doctor in a rather difficult time in American history, Avery started early to use his artistic output as a way to raise awareness towards pressing health issues. Ignorance can equal death, as one of the eary mottos by Act Up warned. Or, as he put it in a print done about a refugee camp in Somalia, “Food is medicine.” Some of his prints have a distinct political purpose. As we all know, the official treatment of disease is informed by political agendas that vary in relation to the social group that is endangered. Since the late seventies, Avery has been an active printmaker. In the last few decades he has done performances in art settings in which he tests visitors for HIV/AIDS, Hepatitis C, and other diseases. His prints hark back to the history of printmaking as a way to spread a message and to reach a larger audience in public space. His long career can be looked up on his aptly titled blog, DocArt.com.

This interview was done via email.

J. Roca.

Amnesty International Poster, Laredo, Texas. Xerox, 16" x 11"

Jose Roca: You studied Medicine and are a practicing doctor. How did you become interested in art? When did you start making artworks and participating in exhibitions?

Eric Avery: I was cutting linoleum blocks in Pecos, Texas when I was 13, printing note cards that were sold in a yarn shop on Highway 80. I'm still cutting linoleum 47 years later. Printmaking has been a curse. I majored in art at the University of Arizona. I had a terrific printmaking teacher/mentor Andrew Rush. This was the Vietnam War time. My draft number was 7, so I would have gone to the war if I hadn't figured out how to continue my education. Andy said I always talked about being a doctor. He suggested I give it a try. I didn't think it was possible because I was an artist. Andy said I would always make prints and suggested I go have an interesting life and that my prints would fall like dandruff on my trail.

I took some science classes. I loved Biology and didn't have to take Calculus. I did good enough to get into medical school at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, Texas. This was during the early days in the development of Medical Humanities in the United States. I made prints all through my medical school years in Texas and then in New York City during my psychiatry residency training. In 1972, I silkscreened all 700 of my medical school's yearbook covers. My first exhibition was after medical school in 1974.

Las Dure Refugee Camp Certificate, 1980. Woodcut, 12" x 16" edition: unique.

My first real woodcuts were made in Somalia, in a big refugee death camp in 1979 and 1980. If I didn't make prints in that place, I think I would have cracked. When I returned to Texas, I left the practice of medicine. I worked through all the death with my printmaking and had an important exhibit, "Images of Life and Death," in 1982. During this time, I added papermaking so I could print from three-dimensional wooden templates.

I've been making prints and paper and exhibiting regularly since 1982. In 1992, I returned to practicing medicine and became a psychiatrist specializing in caring for people with HIV/AIDS. I would have cracked during the really bad AIDS times if I didn't make prints. Cutting wood and linoleum, hand-rubbed printing, beating paper pulp from my work shirts, pressing paper with my hydraulic press- all of these physical acts move trauma from the brain out through the body. Printmaking is good medicine if you've got a lot of distress and emotional pain. The prints can be hard to look at and live with. They are almost impossible to sell. I've made a lot of prints related to HIV/AIDS. A bunch of my medical-related prints are in the ARS MEDICA Collection at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. They are a part of the print history of the AIDS pandemic.

Healing Before Art: Public HIV Testing Action

Installation at Mary Ryan Gallery, New York City, 1994

A clinical art space to be used for the public HIV testing of art world representatives (artists, art dealers, collectors, curators).

Here, artist Sue Coe’s blood is drawn by Phil Muskin, M.D.

JR: Your work is often performance-based, doing medical tests in the context of an art gallery. Is the main intention of the work primarily to raise awareness of pressing health issues?

EA: I've used a lot of the print forms but I was always working to get the prints off the walls and connected to the life I was witnessing and living. After working in Somalia, I quit practicing medicine and didn't see patients for eleven years. I lived on the Texas-Mexico border and worked to help Central American and Haitian refugees fleeing for their lives. Their human rights were being abused by U.S. immigration policy. I made some really good prints about the war in Central America and about how I felt about my country.

Sixteen years ago, when my friends began to die in Houston from AIDS, my life turned back to the practice of medicine at my old medical school, The University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, Texas. I've worked as a psychiatrist in the HIV Clinic and on the medical wards since then and my prints, print actions and installations have been about health matters.

At UTMB, the Institute for Medical Humanities had developed into a multidisciplinary humanities program. I'm the visual artist on the faculty. One day of my week has been protected for me to work on the connection between visual art and medicine- to reflect upon what I do in my clinical practice.

JR: A practice that involves art and medicine would seem a sleight of hand, but it seems to have come naturally to you.

EA: It might be so now, but it wasn't thirty years ago. I've always thought that the relationship had something to do with space. I used photography to look at the literal spaces of healing. As my artistic and medical practices grew, I was able to ask art museums wanting to exhibit my work if I could create healing spaces in their museums. I flipped functions. Printmakers are always working with reversals. Several anthropologist friends helped me understand liminality and the neither/nor.

Allen Kaprow's blurring of the relationship between art and life was an inspiration. Warhol did it. It's an old story. I just blurred the line between visual art and medicine. I used my prints in clinical art spaces where medicine was practiced in the aesthetic dimension. Doctors practicing medicine in an art museum- it's a subversive practice in liminal space. Each art/medicine action has had an educational and instrumental purpose. A number have been done on World AIDS Day. They also raise conceptual questions about the relationship between visual art and medicine. I'm really proud of the questions my art/medicine actions have raised about the function of art museum and gallery spaces. Wouldn't it be fantastic if you went to an art museum for health care? I have only a small audience, but the print form, historically connected to social content and information dissemination, works for what I've tried to do with art/medicine.

JR: Speaking of dissemination, we are on the verge of the first pandemic in the new millenium. What are your ideas for Philagrafika 2010?

EA: Your blog posting of the Poli/gráfica de San Juan was an inspiration. Miler Lagos’ woodcuts on tree stumps led me to propose text woodcuts on The Print Center toilet seats (that would imprint bottoms) perhaps something related to HIV risk reduction. Jose Carlos Martinot’s printers in palm trees- why not health-related information on toilet paper, or printed wallpaper in front of the urinals?

I'm also excited about my proposal of prints depicting wounded Adam and Eve on the wall of The Print Center. These 3'x6' linocuts of Adam and Eve (via Durer, Cranach's first couple) will have them being attacked by vectors and modes of transmission of Emerging Infectious Diseases. The snake will be coughing Avian Flu. Title of my piece might be: "So Who Needs The Snake In Our Garden Of Eden." From these key index images I'll have other printed and photographic images that relate to the various infectious diseases.

And I am trying to conceptualize a small booklet or pamphlet that will work with the prints. When I last wrote to you I remember writing that we were just one mutation away from a pandemic. Recently the World Health Organization officially moved H1N1 to Level 6 pandemic status. By next winter's flu season, we are afraid that H1N1 will return in a more virulent form. The worst fear of Dr. Margaret Chan, Director-General of the World Health Organization, is that H1N1 will mix with H5N1 (avian flu, but anything can happen with the influenza virus).

I'm trying to connect my prints to Philadelphia and infectious disease. In 1792, the Yellow Fever was so bad in Philadelphia that the United States Capital moved to Washington D.C. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson fled the city. One of the first water treatment plants was built in Philadelphia in 1811 on the Schuykill River. I've got a great photo of this federal building with the Philadelphia Museum looming in the background. I don't know if the water treatment plant still exists. There is an inverse relation between amount of water flowing through a house and infectious diseases.

Emerging Infectious Diseases, 2000. 2-color lithograph with linoleum block print on mulberry paper collaged into molded paper (made from used surgical green towels) woodcut frame. 44" x 31" edition: 10.

Philagrafika 2010 will be happening during flu season. There should be a vaccine by then. But I want my piece for The Print Center to do something to educate about flu protection- something as simple as cover up each cough and sneeze or you will spread disease, or about the importance of hand washing. I was amazed in my HIV Clinic that my undereducated patients don't know what a virus (HIV) is, so I made a printed book to educate them. I might make a book about the influenza virus.

JR: It could be said that you are countering the dissemination of a contagious disease with the dissemination of information.

EA: You write so eloquently about printmaking as form. I think my work has something to do with what Philagrafika is about. As a psychodynamic psychiatrist, there is a natural connection between the unconscious and disease. Getting better involves connecting what's under to what's out. With prints, I'm thinking about Goya's Disasters as access to the worst in humans and his prints' dispersal and dissemination as connected to healing. A social worker gave me a line I use with my patients, "Getting real is the only way to heal." Emerging infections are a real problem. Avian flu is killing children in Egypt today. We are a mutation away from a global pandemic. As a printmaker I know a lot about the graphic and as a psychiatrist, I know a fair amount about the unconscious. Art as medicine: Why not?

Johnny Garrett is Dead. 1992. Woodcut on machine-made Okawara paper. 36" x 48" Edition: 10

Johnny Frank Garrett was just seventeen years old when he committed the brutal murder that sent him to death row. He was chronically psychotic then, a victim himself of unspeakable brutality throughout his childhood and formative years. Treated like an animal for most of his young life, he responded by behaving in the only way he had ever known- violently. Society should not be surprised; the priorities are all too clear. There is little money available to help abused children but plenty available to punish or kill them when they, in turn, offend by doing violence to others.

Now, the poor, damaged, confused life of Johnny Garrett was drawing to its end. What was he thinking, with just ten minutes’ existence left? What goes through a person’s mind at a time such as this?

We were some twenty Amnesty International members and other opponents of the death penalty gathered together. I like to think we were a dignified group with our simple handwritten signs, making our witness and our protest. Rain-filled clouds scudded by overhead and we huddled together for warmth, our candles flickering points of light in the gloomy night.

A few minutes before midnight, “they” arrived. A rowdy crowd of about 80 college students, mainly white youths in baseball caps. They had come to celebrate the death, to gloat over Johnny’s fate, and to taunt us. They taunted us because we cared, because we care about a man’s broken life and a bigger principle: that governments have no right to use the power we bestow on them to kill us.

“Kill the freak.” “Fry him.” “Remember the nun.” Their ignorance was extensive. Texas kills by lethal injection, not electrocution. They did not know Johnny’s history. And they did not know that the murdered nun’s convent community (together with the Pope and all Texas’ bishops) have appealed vociferously for clemency. They wanted their beloved Sister Tadea Benz to be remembered not with another murder, but with forgiveness and mercy. Their pleas for compassion went unheeded.

We stood in thoughtful silence under a stop sign. The mob roared its approval of Johnny’s murder under a dead tree. They counted down to midnight and the moment of execution. Voyeurs in the night, cheering as the hour struck.

Revenge is ugly. At least one death penalty supporter was so appalled at finding himself part of the grotesque display that he crossed the road and silently joined us. AI recruited new members that night.

Cameras flashed and snapped as the media came and went among us, seeking the usual superficial stories, bereft of depth or insight. I was asked what I thought of the circus under the dead tree. I said it epitomized so much that’s wrong with the death penalty. Executions encourage our most primitive instincts; they set a brutal and dangerous example to society. In short, they bring out the worst in people. The world is sick enough already, I told the reporter. Shouldn’t we be striving for a better way?

From "Witness to an Execution: Thoughts on the Killing of Johnny Garrett", by Mandy Bath ( A.I. International Secretariat, London, 1992.)