Interview mit Burkhard Rosskothen / Besuch in der Werkstatt von Anna Tretter in Amorbach / Einfallsreich tv Mainz
Oops, my God. Hello, it’s us.
It’s open.
Are you there?
Yes I am, hello.
Hello.
How are you?
Fine. Did you have a nice ride?
Yes.
Should I show you the short films? I waited to download them. Some of them are really nice, others are a bit worse.
This Sommerberger -Garden-Tour?
Yes, exactly.
One camera on the left side, one to a forward perspective.
Do you have a film of the set-up in Stuttgart, or where ever it was?
I do, but it’s still on the camera.
And I also have some shots somewhere about Michael, when he makes a sculpture out of ants, it’s really nice.
I’d have to look for it but it would be really a nice range of films.
I’ll try.
It’s a bit like clay.
Anna, is the sound also on?
It’s always on.
Oh shit!
Why?
I just wanted to tell you a story.
Go ahead.
I’d rather not if everybody hears it.
It doesn’t taste too good, one would have to do it with more patience.
That’s their typical behavior, only that I’m filming it.
It’s a bunch of intellectuals between them.
When he suddenly appeared in our hut, with a cute little girl, and told her to get naked, which she did immediately end of the chapter.
Let’s take a small break.
The one in the front is U We Claus. This one is Michael Fölsch. This movie might be interesting for city people, they can see some nature in the internet. Practically seeing what I saw.That was the day we reinstalled an old locomotive.
Smoke, smoke chu, chu, it’s going straight through the Sommerberger garden.
At this point you can give a bit of background information about the garden, and how the project worked out. And then we can show different film sections.
Exactly.
It can be made really well.
One gets more, one gets less.
I’ll take the smaller one.
I need coffee to wake up.
That was last year’s exhibition in Schwäbisch Hall. That was the Manja Ristic performance at a festival in Belgrade, I sent the video and asked, if there was someone there who want to play my line. She answered, so we met and rehearsed, I projected my line and she played it as music. I have a DVD that I could give you.
It’s really great we could play it.
Similar to this, I had a glow in the dark paint performance with a composer from Berlin. He played a tone, and the volume corresponded with the amount of glow the paint exhibited.
But since there are two factors, the eyes getting used to the darkness and the paints glow dimming there is an amazing curve which he converted to sound. It was shown in the Podewil in Berlin and in the Kunstverein, Aschaffenburg.
Later one of my friends danced the Musidora, a vamp in France to the glowing paint. When she stood in front of the paint with the lights going on and off with her moving away, her shadow stays there. Really fascinating.
A funny story is that whenever I paint, kids would ask me to do it again and again because they love the shadow of light that stays behind after I move my hand.
Many of the installations I create are inspired by games I played in my childhood, for example in one game two players each have a paintbrush or pencil and take turns pushing flicking the pencil, trying to make the final line in connecting the two.
It’s like this. Let’s play it. It’s about to get a long line. We have to look where the lines meet. Who’s first meeting the other line wins.
I got inspired by such stuff.
And then when I was in Poland for the first time, and documented the bus stops. We drove there and waited, bad streets ah now comes the highway, when we went on it and it continued to bump, it was terrible. There were signs limiting to sixty, but it was impossible to drive faster anyhow. I thought I had to document it so I took a pen and held it on a piece of paper, due to the vibration my painting was formed. Later in Slovakia I did the same thing for the road section from one of my bus stops to the next. I used the same technique in trains, I documented many different tracks.
When I was at the conference in Dresden, with the topic “Space in music”, “Music in Public Space”, I thought about what I could do and then asked my colleague if he could prepare something for me. He then put the system on an electronic tablet, I traced a line for the entire train ride 155 KM, this line then became a video as a moving line, which in turn became a musical score for Manja Ristic.
This caused me to think about the way composer read their music. I always thought it is dumb that they have to turn physical pages, instead there could be a video with all the notes.
This was a project with poems, The idea was taking a poem by Kafka, and making an animation of the way we take up the words, and in what rhythm the words are read, I really wanted to install this process in nature, I had something planned for Göppingen, a room with touch screens, certain words had links to other poems.
Another room should have had direct links to authors and poem titles, so if someone changed the poem in that room it would appear in the other, complete with different links.
Similar to the strange feeling you get when somebody is reading a newspaper over your shoulder.
What kind of artist do you consider yourself, media artist or what?
Multimedia artist is what I would call myself. Basically I explore space and what space is. It started with sculpture, classical wood carving is what I studied, then I did things like relieves, similar what you see on this poster, in which I studied what we really see and what we believe to see, studying the different perceptions we have of two and three dimensions. How the eye produces images in connection with the brain, remembers.
Later I went on to installations. For example in Kornwestheim I also began using the partitions, the movable walls for my sculptures. Using the space, constructing new spaces. Some time later I expanded to the public space as in Small Houses. For my bus station project I put photos of a bus stations on the next one.
This used to be my families workshop, my father built glide planes here.
I often jumped to different subjects and did what I felt like. Often times I also found something interesting randomly and then studied it. Or I stumble about something and make it. Sometimes I think the amount of jumping I do is bad because the public wants an artist to remain in one field so that they are identifiable, Rupprecht Geiger with his red, or another trademark, but I jumped a lot touching many things, for example others have taken my Bus stop concept and did it in bigger scale and are selling it like crazy.
When I analyzed my work in my first speech I noticed that there are connections between many of my works, some topics have been there early on as the line for example and I often go back and touch on them in different perspectives.
If I feel the notion to develop on a theme further then I do. Without space there is no picture, the moment there are no restriction, everything fades away. There is nothing. So I have to work with space but the phenomenon space goes beyond the visible. Basically I measure the things I know, do, and feel with what I do. It’s important to see that I do something so I can work with it.
Recently in a text I explained it as a foil in what I think and what I do, and in that moment I can work with it. The moment it becomes concrete I can improve it. This process is what my work is all about. Not only when I do art but permanently.
The last time we sat together I came to the conclusion that I research. There is nearly nothing that isn’t interesting at all but I have to decide on something at some point, otherwise everything stays half-baked. I am dealing with a lot of stuff, with music, painting, dance, psychology for example. What they discover.
Recently I heard highly interesting things about human perception of space, and the brain’s view of new media. What’s interesting is that most of this research is funded and done for military reasons. An interesting story I heard was the discovery of a new gas which stimulated the test subjects to only think about love, something the military could naturally not use.
What’s important is that everybody develops his own attitude towards the world.
This is so important because otherwise you are just a follower, who doesn’t do anything significant his whole life. Of course you have to shop, to clean etc, so you can spent your life.
In the end looking beyond yourself is rewarding, that always was the idea of men who thought about the public welfare, the basic conditions. Taking care for the people in your environment, is good for you too, because you can increase your happiness by being around happy people. So we have to work on this. As Adorno says: “There is no true life within the false.”
Adorno followed the same theory, so we have to follow it.
Tretter, Anna: Einfallsreich tv
Interview with Burkhard Rosskothen / Visit Anna Tretter in her workingplace in Amorbach / Einfallsreich tv Mainz /
Max Willert: Translation