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Interview
with Dominic van den Boogerd
DB: A
striking aspect of your work is its immediacy and directness,
both in the use of materials and in the expression.
UF: I'm
not so crazy about design and technique. To me it's important
that I put the work together with my own hands and that I
can stop with it when I want. It's the challenge of bringing
about something that makes being an artist fun. It confronts
you with your limits. Poem-Donkey (2000) is about that. I
asked myself what actually is poetic about visual art and
if I could get away from that. Every day I wrote poems. At
a certain point I had hundreds of them. It's awful to have
to think about yourself all the time. All that self-pity,
all those feelings and emotions - they all became interchangeable.
Then I want to know where it went wrong. Was I limited? Did
I lack imagination? When is it time to stop? And how do you
go on from there? Finally I photocopied all of the poems onto
cellophane and pasted them randomly onto five large sheets
of glass. The sheets of glass are stacked upright, one behind
the other, in a metal stand, so that the texts show through
each other, dissolved in a mind for one day.
DB: The
nimble, playful irony of your work is sooner related to that
of Fischli & Weiss and Georg Herold, for instance, than to
the gravity of artists like Hans Haacke. Is your work politically
inspired?
UF: I
don't know. Not directly. I once made a bowl of plaster and
silicon. Really nice. But after a time it began to bore me.
I threw some change into it and then, all at once, it looked
right. I thought: yeah, this is what people do at home, this
is what tourists do when they throw a coin into a fountain
and make a wish. I showed Money Bowl in Switzerland and Italy,
and each time I threw some money in it. The next day it would
be gone. About five hundred guilders in all. That interaction
with the public wasn't anticipated, but there you go, people
do steal. It's a work which has no political message. I want
to make social art.
DB: What
do you mean by that?
UF: I
don't mean social in the sense of interaction. It has more
to do with my fondness for the documentary. When I watch a
documentary and I see how someone drinks coffee, puts on his
coat and goes to work, I begin to like that person. I like
those mild images of ordinary things that people do. My work
isn't supposed to be some display case of personal feelings
or statement of my beliefs. It should approach what I think
about and make all day long: what do you do with it without
immediately ruining it by making it important? That's a problem
I also have with my drawings. To frame them is uninteresting.
I don't want to make them more important than they are. People
often think my drawings are funny. I wonder whether they can't
be funny and serious at the same time. Like in a film, which
can be both comic and tragic. It wasn't until I began to use
my drawings for large collages that there arose a complexity
that I liked better.
DB: Some
of those collages, such as Eternal Soup of the Day (2000),
look like the bulletin boards of a maniac, full of felt-tip
sketches in a pop-like style. You've placed a drawing on transparent
plastic over this, a drawing of a tree with many branches.
UF: This
tree stands for a system that is equal on both sides. The
problem with systems is that you only get to see part of them.
You think that the roots are there to feed the tree, but maybe
the leaves are there to keep the roots intact. Artists see
themselves as individualists rooted in a culture, but they
are also the ones who feed that culture. You know, I'd like
to create a system that keeps on expanding. One that I can
put all my concerns into, where I can use everything that
I see.
Dominic
van den Boogerd, trans. Beth O'Brien Stedelijk, Museum Bureau
Amsterdam, N° 52 Urs Fischer, The Membrane - And Why I
Don't Mind Bad Mooded People, 2000
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