Daniel Gustav Cramer
Interview realised in autumn 2021
Your work is composed of multiple forms, mainly photographs, but also sculptures and texts. The narrative dimension is very important in your work and it is especially through edition that we can notice it. Working with edition is always specific, how does artists’ publications arrived in your work?
As a kid, my mom used to read books to my brother and me. We were cuddled next to her, one on the left, one on the right. This way I consumed hundreds, probably thousands of books while falling asleep. In my youth, I dived into the world of comic books – Spirou, Lucky Luke, Bone, Clever & Smart, Spiegelman’s Maus. My path led me to more abstracted ways writing story books, like Neil Gaiman’s, Dave McKean’s and Alejandro Jodorowky’s experimental deconstructions. Around that time I decided to become a cartoon artist. After finishing school, I had to do a social year, in which I was helping elderly people in Düsseldorf. Often I was sitting with them, they were telling stories of their past, of the Second World War or their childhood, while I was drawing quick sketches. I began studying at the university in Münster that was known for its focus on drawing. In the first year of my studies, I focussed on photography and bookmaking. In those years in Münster, I discovered ways to express my passion for story telling, well, for suggesting stories without really telling them…
Story telling is indeed an important part of your work, either it is through the work on images, or text. There is something interesting in your work, besides the content I mean, it is its formal aspect; there is something very systematic in your layouts. In the mid 1960’s, Marshall McLuhan wrote ‘‘the medium is the message,’’ which, on some point, reminds me of your work. Could you please tell us more about your editorial work? Does the layout contribute to the way you approach the content of your work?
You are right. The placement of images and text, the material of the publication itself, it all contributes to the experience. I guess the process of finding a form for a story to exist, shaping a work, is exactly that, the details one emphasises and leaves out, the means by which a story is told. It might take weeks for me to test different visual edits. I can feel how the emotional approach to a story changes with the graphic framework. In the process I am printing out and building several dummies, sometimes fifty or more for a publication of 8 pages, and leaf through the pages over and over; to experience the size, the position of images, the proportions of the text. And the typeface, however it is used, exists in a space of its own references. The shape of the letters speak their own language. A text written in a classic monotype, like Courier for example, evokes images of early Hollywood script-writing, Hitchcock, Welles – and this visual image colours the story told and enters into a conversation with it.
When you tell a story in a restaurant – you can sit still and tell it in a restraint manner, so the listeners ears grow, longing for each word – or you can get up, raise your arms, gesture, in a way that the story becomes animated and event-like. When it comes to books and works of art, I personally feel deeply moved by stories being suggested rather than told. In Yasunari Kawabata’s Thousand Cranes for example, a drama unfolds without it ever being directly named. The story exists in the book, but seems hardly touched by the writer, it lingers between the lines and pages, palpable for the reader, distant and intimate at the same time. A publication can operate in a similar manner. It is a physical object that carries the story, open and expressive – or suggestive and obscured.
When I make a work, I am almost always thinking of it sculpturally. I don’t see myself as a storyteller, but rather use a specific material, story-telling, to create a work. A story has a beginning and an end, you can leave things out and tell of others in great detail. Think of it like a large stone, an object in itself, that can be chiseled in parts, and left as is in another.
I like that idea of approaching publications as sculpture works, it leads us to something I’d like us to talk about. Not only you are publishing editions, but you are also exhibiting them. Generally, we are used to see artists’ publications and editions in display cases, because of the nature of those works (they indeed can be fragile, rare, etc.). On the contrary, you are making stacks, sometimes libraries, inviting the viewer to manipulate and experience your work, which is, in some way, more ‘‘democratic.’’ What does exhibiting publications mean to you?
At times I am exhibiting books as part of installations. The books, on plinths, shelfs or small tables, are works contributing to the reading of the show – the visitor is invited to take them and look at them, as objects. These books are produced in small editions, 3 or 5 – plus the exhibition copies. The books change the mode of an exhibition, a kind of zooming in.
Frequently I have shown text works on the floor. These are short texts, printed on an A4 sheet and then stacked. Visitors can take the texts, read them in the exhibition space or take them home. There are several things happening to those stacks when installed. For one, they create a kind of landscape, they connect in the space and create a horizontal plain. Then, there is something about the fact that visitors can take them home with them. These texts are works, in a sense gifts, but the gift, if one looks at it in this way, is the space created with the words. The paper I use for the texts is wood based, impermanent; it yellows over time, deteriorates like a tale that slowly disappears in our memory.
The sculptural bodies these texts create are not visible in the space, but part of the experience and narrative unfolding in the exhibition. When I walk along the isle in a supermarket, stand in line at the cashier, I am captured by my own thoughts, what to cook for my son, my parents’ health, a work in progress, a friend’s situation. I then remind myself that every single shopper around me has a similar experience. It’s the fabric of life, the way we live and experience being in a place. In a way the texts do something similar.
There are physical, visual works, sculptures orphotographs in the space – and a second realm, as present, intertwined. The entrance doors to this realm is through the stacks.
Sometimes I have added a publication to an exhibition, for example at Grey Noise in Dubai or La Kunsthalle Mulhouse. In both cases, one of the works of the show was a publication that was not inside the exhibition space, but rather a celestial body, an afterthought.
Also, how would you define the place of publications in your practice?
When I think of a song – a musician may perform live, produce a record or has the composition and lyrics written down on paper. When approaching a musical piece in one or the other way, the song, the work, is the same. Certain attributes might stand out in different situations, but the space created through this piece remains untouched. No one described it better than David Berman in Snow is falling in Manhattan: “Songs build little rooms in time / and housed within the song’s design / is the ghost the host has left behind / to greet and sweep the guest inside / stoke the fire and sing his lines.” I am intending to make such rooms, invite friends to come inside and share a moment of joy or reflection. There is no room more important than another and, to continue this analogy, all the rooms combined create a house, a humble castle, in which all these spaces connect to and create a singular, large home. The rooms connect by the equal attitude and care they have been treated with. The publications are an integral part of my practice, like the sculptural works, films or photographs.
We can also see the links between all of those practices and the place that publications take in your work in your photographs for example, as in the series Tales, where the margins are important and could be seen as torn out pages from a potential book. Apart from the publications you are producing for installations and exhibitions, there also is a part of your work that exists, as you said earlier, outside of the show, due to a collaboration with a publisher. How do you approach those works? And how is the collaboration working?
It is different each time. In most cases though, a publisher contacts me, for one reason or another, and proposes to do something together. I have shelves, drawers, notebooks and folders of unrealised works. I propose one or more. Once we settle on a work, I dive into the details – nuances in every respect – image selection, typeface, an infinite edit of the text. When this is solved, we print it and… publish the book.
Since a couple of years now, you are collaborating with Haris Epaminonda on an ongoing project called TheInfinite Library. Could you tell us more about this project?
The Infinite Library had its starting point in 2007. Few years after my grandfather has passed away, I was asked to take all the books I wanted from his library. I found several beautiful picture books of a range of subjects – the Balaton, photographs of Iceland, animal hunting in Africa. Back in the studio, I was living together with Haris at the time, we looked through the books, opened them, placed them next to each other and somehow, the idea came up, to take the books apart, deconstruct them into individual pages, and then merge two or more books together, really just as an experiment. The outcome was incredible, we were really moved by the result. We realised that when you combine a book of precious stones with another of typical German family homes of the 50’s and look at them as one entity, the houses become object-like, the precious stones gain an architectural quality. Well, this was Book #1 of the library, and from there we continued. The project has been a loose conversation all the way through by the means of books, images, pages – Haris using found book pages in her work as material, while I work with books as sculptural spaces. We have now neared a hundred books. And finally, after 10 years in the making, a book documenting the first fifty books will be published in mid December by New Documents.
As we said earlier, publications occupy an important place in your practice, you multiply the format of publications (books, stacks, folders with images, etc.), but also, because you work with publications in an unique way, I was wondering how are you seeing yourself in the contemporary editorial landscape? Also, I would have been curious to know what were your thoughts on the actual scene?
I studied printmaking at the Royal College in London. I felt drawn to the power of the image, its immediacy, the way it manipulates us, cigarette advertisings for example. At the time, the Americans morally lost the war against Iraq. The reason was the leak of images depicting American soldiers posing with Iraqi prisoners – photographic images, such dangerous weapons. I read somewhere that 85% of all images in the internet are pornographic – can you imagine? At the Royal College I learnt a lot about these issues, especially from Jonathan Miles and John Stezaker, who were both teaching in the humanities department. At the same time, I felt uncomfortable to define myself by a technique – etching, screen printing or photography. I love, I have an infinite passion for books, booklets, texts, publications: the metaverse the human race is built upon. Yet, when it comes to identifying myself as a part of a group of publishers, book makers or editors… I tend to withdraw silently. I have never shown myself at book fairs – although I always go and visit. There are artists that publish amazing material. I am trying to get hold of everything I find from Yutaka Matsuzawa, Douglas Huebler, stanley brouwn, Ian Wilson, Yoshihiku Ueda, as well as Jason Dodge, Alejandro Cesarco, Florence Jung, Gareth Brookes, Jochen Lempert, Yann Serandour, Nicolas Giraud, Mora Davey, Thomas Geiger, Eva Barto, Stefan Sulzer, Roni Horn and so many others… but in a way, what I like about all those works is independent from the fact that these are publications. They used the medium in a decisive moment, for a reason, and express an issue close to their heart that on another day they’ll might express in some other form. Looking from outside onto the scene, I think it is beautiful to see that the relationship to the world through the book, pages, a physical object, has relevance even today.
‘‘To publish’’ comes from the latin word publicare, to make public, which, in some point, could be compared with the fact of exhibiting. In the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, artists were also using books (mostly) in what they thought was a more democratic way to share their work with the audience. I’ve mentioned it a bit earlier, but I’d like to know if this aspect of the work is something you take into consideration?
There have been some fundamental shifts in the way we live and the way we access art. Most importantly, the Internet has done in a large scale what artists did in a much humbler way in the mid 20th century by making books and publications in larger editions. Youtube, Spotify, Google. It feels to me that today, in a world where millions of “users” are potentially, instantly connected, a booklet in an edition of 50 or 100, even of 500, can be sold out in months or a few years and is then a somewhat rare and elusive work. Perhaps, because of its silent existence, a publication has a subtlety, in opposition to a work of art on a wall in a museum, claiming its space, demanding to be looked at as art. Publications exist like stories told from one to the other, and might eventually be forgotten, it is part of their nature.
After all, isn’t the crucial moment the one where we are confronted with a work of art, be it as a live event, a concert or a novel, read from beginning to end – a sculpture seen, even if only on a pdf or in the web, or… a publication? At the end of the day, all works of art confront us with ourselves, with the fragile, finite time we spend together – and to see all this through the eyes of someone else, to see urges and struggles another person faced and resolved at some point in the past, and are able to relate – and to momentarily question ourselves, perhaps even opening up to the simplicity and complexity of it all.