CONVERSATION PETER SANDBICHLER - CLAUS PROKOP
Edited by Renata Šikoronja im February 2001
Peter Sandbichler: Claus, you studied architecture. What brought about the change from architecture to painting? What were the reasons for that?
Claus Prokop: There was not a specific moment that triggered it. The main reason was certainly that I was missing the implementation of craftsmanship. I felt there were too many steps between the planning and the execution.
P.S.: So that is the reason for this direct approach that your painting has?
C.P.: It was probably painting, because that is the most direct and immediate transformation of a thought into a final product: every dot and every line is there exactly the way I put it there. There are no preliminary stages or sketches.
I also don't like to delegate work, and I prefer to do everything myself, because I need to relate directly to my work.
P.S.: Your paintings have the effect of being very unplanned, even though there are certainly consistent "patterns" or structures. You stick to a type of dots - to put it very simply - which then cover the entire surface. How did this idea come about?
C.P.: There are several questions in one here. This theme is derived from a series of abstract landscape paintings that best correspond to a view of fields from an airplane. I took elements that I used to structure the individual surfaces and made them the theme of a painting. The first painting of this kind, an intersection between two series, was made in New York at Halloween time, when the whole city was full of pumpkins. That was the first time I painted a surface with dots.
My paintings are created very spontaneously, because it is important to me that they retain a life of their own. In the beginning I have an idea, but that doesn't mean that a picture has to look the way I imagined it. So it can easily happen that I start with an orange picture that turns into a delicate gray one in the end.
P.S.: That means then that you have a very traditional approach to painting. You have a studio, you stretch your canvases, and then you simply start working without a grand plan, without a concept?
C.P.: Well, there is in fact a kind of concept behind it, but without a concrete message.
The autistic creative process is extremely important to me - in other words, me alone in the studio and my paintings. There are stories behind the pictures, specifically that they developed out of landscape paintings, that they deal with systems in the sense of order and chaos, that in a chaotic system there are subcategories, which are not chaotic and which correspond to our orthogonal way of thinking, which the eye looks for, even if they are not there. I am not concerned with an abstraction of landscape or a concrete structure, but rather in capturing in a picture a possibility of how organic structures can function; a superlattice running through the whole of nature.
P.S.: In your interventions in public space you have now even started to take these structures directly from the paintings, print them on sheets and apply them to glass.
C.P.: The structures are not taken directly from the paintings, though. For the work for the Gumpendorferstrasse, for example, I used a 1:1 scan of a picture segment that I revised on the computer and developed a new, large surface from the individual elements of a small segment. The idea was to create an "all over pattern" that could be placed over everything possible. An additional effect of tension came into it, because this abstracted picture - in the sense of another abstraction of my own paintings - attains life and color through what is behind it.
P.S.: This means the inclusion of the viewer.
C.P.: Yes, of the viewer and of the surroundings, because completely new and temporary originals are created through the semi-transparent sheet and what is moving behind it at any speed.
P.S.: You also use parts of your paintings for your kinetic objects.
C.P.: The kinetic objects developed in parallel to the works with photocopies. The story behind that is that I photocopied my own paintings, assembled new pictures from this and then revised them again.
P.S.: So this results in working in several layers. You place one layer over another and every picture is actually another layer over the previous picture.
C.P.: Perhaps you could say that I ultimately work on a single picture, or to exaggerate it, that all pictures are sketches for an idea that I cannot formulate either verbally or in painting.
P.S.: And yet you start a new picture again and again. You don't just keep painting the same picture on a canvas, but rather you repeatedly arrive at a stage, where you regard the painting as finished. What I find interesting here is that the source you draw from are your own paintings; so there are no other sources, except for the original one: that of landscape painting. Now it is a matter of "working on and on" from one picture. An obvious question, however, is whether you also draw inspiration from scientific observations.
C.P.: I use a great deal as inspiration, an article about order and chaos or taking a walk through the fish market in Venice; yet neither the one nor the other leads to a concrete translation into a picture. The things I pick up influence one another in some way and then come forth in the form of pictures.
P.S.: Unlike your paintings, the kinetic objects seem to have something laconic about them. You use old, cast off electric motors, work with wire, and integrate snips from your pictures. These works seem to be marked by an almost mechanical planning, because they also do something, are capable of something.
C.P.: Although this is a very spontaneous planning. I don't start by thinking that I want to build an object that works in a certain way, but rather I just have some parts and start putting them together.
P.S.: Do you always strive to avoid planning in this way?
C.P.: I wouldn't say that I consciously want to avoid it, but it is not something I strive for. I like letting my work take its course and not forcing it to do something for me.
P.S.: But a certain degree of planning is necessary in public space.
C.P.: That has something to do with my relationship to architecture. The spatial reference is important to me and I am more and more interested in creating paintings or works for concrete situations.
P.S.: In which tradition within painting do you see yourself? Maybe tradition is not quite the right word here, but I do mean tradition, because you move in an area that has long been an exciting medium. Who do you feel close to in your work?
C.P.: For a long time I imagined that I had to keep my work free from information and not be concerned with art history. In the meantime, I think that might have been a mistake, but it was probably right for me at the time. I wanted to do my own thing. Naturally there is a certain egocentrism inherent to my work, otherwise it would not be possible to go on as an artist, and I would not be able to spend eight to twelve hours a day working alone in my studio.
P.S.: That is what I was referring to when I said that you have taken up a very traditional way of making art, also especially within painting, in the way you proceed today. But this doesn't mean it always has to stay that way, does it?
C.P.: I am actually always trying to continuously expand the scope of my work. To go back to the question of tradition and artist colleagues, though: for me, those are artists like Richard Diebenkorn, Mark Rothko or Edward Hopper, so mostly abstract American painting. And in addition to these artists I am also fascinated by Ross Bleckner, Jean Scully or the African artist Romuald Hazoumè, who creates sculptures from found objects. He once said: "I can look at things, and I know what they want to become." In addition, he is also a voodoo priest.
P.S.: There is also something about the kinetic objects that is not exactly pleasant. There is something quavery about them.
C.P.: Yes, they have a certain nervousness. A visitor to the studio recently characterized them with a wonderful sentence: "Like a little child demanding attention."
P.S.: Now we come to the most important question. Did the birth of your son leave any traces in your work?
C.P.: I started with the kinetic objects after the birth of my son. I think they somehow have something to do with that.
P.S.: Do you draw from your sensations and feelings?
C.P.: In painting, certainly. But that was triggered less by my momentary state of mind, and more by the fact that through the pregnancy, birth and presence of the child, I reflected very strongly on my life, my own childhood, my own adolescence. There may be a link here, in that the kinetic objects are made of dismantled radios, cassette recorders or answering machines, and they have a playful aspect to them.
P.S.: Did you take objects apart when you were a child?
C.P.: Of course I did. I took them apart and couldn't put them back together again. I would have liked to put them back together again, but it just didn't work. In my parents' attic there are probably still boxes full of dismantled appliances. I dragged certain parts around with me for years without knowing what I would do with them.
P.S.: Taking a radio apart is diving into an electronic world - into the hardware - and it brings certain optical structures to light that you would not otherwise see; printed circuits, for example.
C.P.: It is an unfamiliar world that I don't know about. I can solder things together, I know simple circuitry, but I don't know about electronics. What is exciting about taking things apart is that I recognize certain structures that I know from somewhere else and have translated into pictures.
P.S.: Open it up, look inside, stick something in, look again to see what else is possible, look to see if it still twitches.
C.P.: This trash aspect is consciously used in the kinetic sculptures. I could work harder and build cleaner objects, but I'm not interested in that. I am more interested in this charged effect, seeing if it still works or not, and if it is working, how long it will keep going.
P.S.: I am especially interested here in this contrast between the objects and the pictures. Because they will stop functioning at some point, the objects have a limited duration, whereas the pictures have a certain claim to eternity. They are made well, consist of good material, and are based on a proven system.
C.P.: That was also the point of why I started with the works on photocopies. Painting pictures continues to fascinate me. Working with colors fascinates me, more and more also with colors that are not beautiful, and creating this tension. With these works, the result is not simply a picture as a painted picture, but the pictures are duplicated - and that with the most common method, an office copy machine. The fact that I chose transparent paper rather than normal copy paper has to do with the sensual fascination of the material. This also provides a broader scope, you can work on both sides, put layers on top of one another, create space and depth.
P.S.: When I picture one of your normal exhibition settings, there are the pictures that you can look at on the one hand, and on the other the objects that have something quavery, nervous about them and make noises. As a viewer, I find myself in two different situations. Does this involve the overall situation of an exhibition, maybe breaking up the viewer-picture situation?
C.P.: In an exhibition, I can place the works in a spatial and optical relation to one another. Although this relation is there in the studio, the only person who knows it is me. Otherwise, I have no opportunity to set my works in a scene. Unless I show them to a visitor in the studio. Yet that works differently, it runs like a film, one picture after another.
P.S.: Were the objects also created under the aspect of introducing an irritation into the traditional exhibition setting of painting?
C.P.: That wasn't until later. The first ones were made because of a certain playful urge - more or less by chance. I worked with photocopies and hung a paper coated with glue on a wire. I didn't pay much attention to the whole thing for a long time. Then at some point I noticed that it is good, that there is a lot in this thing and that it is a completely different presentation of the work. When I pick up works on paper, especially when they are already framed, I can't get away from the idea that they are paintings. Without additional information, it is not clear that these are photocopies and that they could not have been created without the pictures painted before. These are pictures that will probably hang individually in living rooms or other rooms at some point and no longer have any relation to one another.
With the objects I am able to take the work out of this convention. And the longer I worked on them, the more fascinating it became. I think being fascinated yourself is a good way of approaching the theme of art.
P.S.: Good, then let's leave it at your own fascination.
C.P.: I hope that other people are fascinated, too.
Edited by Renata Šikoronja im February 2001
Peter Sandbichler: Claus, you studied architecture. What brought about the change from architecture to painting? What were the reasons for that?
Claus Prokop: There was not a specific moment that triggered it. The main reason was certainly that I was missing the implementation of craftsmanship. I felt there were too many steps between the planning and the execution.
P.S.: So that is the reason for this direct approach that your painting has?
C.P.: It was probably painting, because that is the most direct and immediate transformation of a thought into a final product: every dot and every line is there exactly the way I put it there. There are no preliminary stages or sketches.
I also don't like to delegate work, and I prefer to do everything myself, because I need to relate directly to my work.
P.S.: Your paintings have the effect of being very unplanned, even though there are certainly consistent "patterns" or structures. You stick to a type of dots - to put it very simply - which then cover the entire surface. How did this idea come about?
C.P.: There are several questions in one here. This theme is derived from a series of abstract landscape paintings that best correspond to a view of fields from an airplane. I took elements that I used to structure the individual surfaces and made them the theme of a painting. The first painting of this kind, an intersection between two series, was made in New York at Halloween time, when the whole city was full of pumpkins. That was the first time I painted a surface with dots.
My paintings are created very spontaneously, because it is important to me that they retain a life of their own. In the beginning I have an idea, but that doesn't mean that a picture has to look the way I imagined it. So it can easily happen that I start with an orange picture that turns into a delicate gray one in the end.
P.S.: That means then that you have a very traditional approach to painting. You have a studio, you stretch your canvases, and then you simply start working without a grand plan, without a concept?
C.P.: Well, there is in fact a kind of concept behind it, but without a concrete message.
The autistic creative process is extremely important to me - in other words, me alone in the studio and my paintings. There are stories behind the pictures, specifically that they developed out of landscape paintings, that they deal with systems in the sense of order and chaos, that in a chaotic system there are subcategories, which are not chaotic and which correspond to our orthogonal way of thinking, which the eye looks for, even if they are not there. I am not concerned with an abstraction of landscape or a concrete structure, but rather in capturing in a picture a possibility of how organic structures can function; a superlattice running through the whole of nature.
P.S.: In your interventions in public space you have now even started to take these structures directly from the paintings, print them on sheets and apply them to glass.
C.P.: The structures are not taken directly from the paintings, though. For the work for the Gumpendorferstrasse, for example, I used a 1:1 scan of a picture segment that I revised on the computer and developed a new, large surface from the individual elements of a small segment. The idea was to create an "all over pattern" that could be placed over everything possible. An additional effect of tension came into it, because this abstracted picture - in the sense of another abstraction of my own paintings - attains life and color through what is behind it.
P.S.: This means the inclusion of the viewer.
C.P.: Yes, of the viewer and of the surroundings, because completely new and temporary originals are created through the semi-transparent sheet and what is moving behind it at any speed.
P.S.: You also use parts of your paintings for your kinetic objects.
C.P.: The kinetic objects developed in parallel to the works with photocopies. The story behind that is that I photocopied my own paintings, assembled new pictures from this and then revised them again.
P.S.: So this results in working in several layers. You place one layer over another and every picture is actually another layer over the previous picture.
C.P.: Perhaps you could say that I ultimately work on a single picture, or to exaggerate it, that all pictures are sketches for an idea that I cannot formulate either verbally or in painting.
P.S.: And yet you start a new picture again and again. You don't just keep painting the same picture on a canvas, but rather you repeatedly arrive at a stage, where you regard the painting as finished. What I find interesting here is that the source you draw from are your own paintings; so there are no other sources, except for the original one: that of landscape painting. Now it is a matter of "working on and on" from one picture. An obvious question, however, is whether you also draw inspiration from scientific observations.
C.P.: I use a great deal as inspiration, an article about order and chaos or taking a walk through the fish market in Venice; yet neither the one nor the other leads to a concrete translation into a picture. The things I pick up influence one another in some way and then come forth in the form of pictures.
P.S.: Unlike your paintings, the kinetic objects seem to have something laconic about them. You use old, cast off electric motors, work with wire, and integrate snips from your pictures. These works seem to be marked by an almost mechanical planning, because they also do something, are capable of something.
C.P.: Although this is a very spontaneous planning. I don't start by thinking that I want to build an object that works in a certain way, but rather I just have some parts and start putting them together.
P.S.: Do you always strive to avoid planning in this way?
C.P.: I wouldn't say that I consciously want to avoid it, but it is not something I strive for. I like letting my work take its course and not forcing it to do something for me.
P.S.: But a certain degree of planning is necessary in public space.
C.P.: That has something to do with my relationship to architecture. The spatial reference is important to me and I am more and more interested in creating paintings or works for concrete situations.
P.S.: In which tradition within painting do you see yourself? Maybe tradition is not quite the right word here, but I do mean tradition, because you move in an area that has long been an exciting medium. Who do you feel close to in your work?
C.P.: For a long time I imagined that I had to keep my work free from information and not be concerned with art history. In the meantime, I think that might have been a mistake, but it was probably right for me at the time. I wanted to do my own thing. Naturally there is a certain egocentrism inherent to my work, otherwise it would not be possible to go on as an artist, and I would not be able to spend eight to twelve hours a day working alone in my studio.
P.S.: That is what I was referring to when I said that you have taken up a very traditional way of making art, also especially within painting, in the way you proceed today. But this doesn't mean it always has to stay that way, does it?
C.P.: I am actually always trying to continuously expand the scope of my work. To go back to the question of tradition and artist colleagues, though: for me, those are artists like Richard Diebenkorn, Mark Rothko or Edward Hopper, so mostly abstract American painting. And in addition to these artists I am also fascinated by Ross Bleckner, Jean Scully or the African artist Romuald Hazoumè, who creates sculptures from found objects. He once said: "I can look at things, and I know what they want to become." In addition, he is also a voodoo priest.
P.S.: There is also something about the kinetic objects that is not exactly pleasant. There is something quavery about them.
C.P.: Yes, they have a certain nervousness. A visitor to the studio recently characterized them with a wonderful sentence: "Like a little child demanding attention."
P.S.: Now we come to the most important question. Did the birth of your son leave any traces in your work?
C.P.: I started with the kinetic objects after the birth of my son. I think they somehow have something to do with that.
P.S.: Do you draw from your sensations and feelings?
C.P.: In painting, certainly. But that was triggered less by my momentary state of mind, and more by the fact that through the pregnancy, birth and presence of the child, I reflected very strongly on my life, my own childhood, my own adolescence. There may be a link here, in that the kinetic objects are made of dismantled radios, cassette recorders or answering machines, and they have a playful aspect to them.
P.S.: Did you take objects apart when you were a child?
C.P.: Of course I did. I took them apart and couldn't put them back together again. I would have liked to put them back together again, but it just didn't work. In my parents' attic there are probably still boxes full of dismantled appliances. I dragged certain parts around with me for years without knowing what I would do with them.
P.S.: Taking a radio apart is diving into an electronic world - into the hardware - and it brings certain optical structures to light that you would not otherwise see; printed circuits, for example.
C.P.: It is an unfamiliar world that I don't know about. I can solder things together, I know simple circuitry, but I don't know about electronics. What is exciting about taking things apart is that I recognize certain structures that I know from somewhere else and have translated into pictures.
P.S.: Open it up, look inside, stick something in, look again to see what else is possible, look to see if it still twitches.
C.P.: This trash aspect is consciously used in the kinetic sculptures. I could work harder and build cleaner objects, but I'm not interested in that. I am more interested in this charged effect, seeing if it still works or not, and if it is working, how long it will keep going.
P.S.: I am especially interested here in this contrast between the objects and the pictures. Because they will stop functioning at some point, the objects have a limited duration, whereas the pictures have a certain claim to eternity. They are made well, consist of good material, and are based on a proven system.
C.P.: That was also the point of why I started with the works on photocopies. Painting pictures continues to fascinate me. Working with colors fascinates me, more and more also with colors that are not beautiful, and creating this tension. With these works, the result is not simply a picture as a painted picture, but the pictures are duplicated - and that with the most common method, an office copy machine. The fact that I chose transparent paper rather than normal copy paper has to do with the sensual fascination of the material. This also provides a broader scope, you can work on both sides, put layers on top of one another, create space and depth.
P.S.: When I picture one of your normal exhibition settings, there are the pictures that you can look at on the one hand, and on the other the objects that have something quavery, nervous about them and make noises. As a viewer, I find myself in two different situations. Does this involve the overall situation of an exhibition, maybe breaking up the viewer-picture situation?
C.P.: In an exhibition, I can place the works in a spatial and optical relation to one another. Although this relation is there in the studio, the only person who knows it is me. Otherwise, I have no opportunity to set my works in a scene. Unless I show them to a visitor in the studio. Yet that works differently, it runs like a film, one picture after another.
P.S.: Were the objects also created under the aspect of introducing an irritation into the traditional exhibition setting of painting?
C.P.: That wasn't until later. The first ones were made because of a certain playful urge - more or less by chance. I worked with photocopies and hung a paper coated with glue on a wire. I didn't pay much attention to the whole thing for a long time. Then at some point I noticed that it is good, that there is a lot in this thing and that it is a completely different presentation of the work. When I pick up works on paper, especially when they are already framed, I can't get away from the idea that they are paintings. Without additional information, it is not clear that these are photocopies and that they could not have been created without the pictures painted before. These are pictures that will probably hang individually in living rooms or other rooms at some point and no longer have any relation to one another.
With the objects I am able to take the work out of this convention. And the longer I worked on them, the more fascinating it became. I think being fascinated yourself is a good way of approaching the theme of art.
P.S.: Good, then let's leave it at your own fascination.
C.P.: I hope that other people are fascinated, too.