In Conversation with Nicolas Feldmeyer
INTRODUCING: You were trained as an architect and then you went to San Francisco Art Institute for a year (please correct me if I’m wrong). Can you please tell us more about the influence your architectural education had on you? Nicolas Feldmeyer: It surely developed a sense (and a love) for space and geometry. Even when I work on drawings, for me, it is about space. Also the education in Zurich, solidly based on the history of Modern Art and Architecture, goes back to classical Art, the Renaissance and the Antique era. I remember that most of my fellow students in San Francisco drew more references to Contemporary Art in their work than to Art History, as I was used to. My teacher Renée Green found that I was always thinking in typologies and concepts, even when I was focusing on craftsmanship, and that is was surely a symptom of architecture too! I: We noticed in your studio that you have books of the modern expressionist masters Freud and Bacon and then contemporary mavericks Fischli and Weiss. We found it a curious selection. Can you tell us more about what you find fascinating about these artists? (if there are other artists you find influential in your practice, please elaborate) N: With Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon and Lovis Corinth I was interested in the human condition as a piece of (tortured) meat, or flesh. I think they are great painters, and I try to learn by looking at their works and copying them. I couldn’t make an exhaustive list of artists that I want to learn from, there are too many. But I could say for sure Giorgio Morandi, Albrecht Dürer, Anish Kapoor, Van Gogh, Cy Twombly, Egon Schiele, ... I: A piece of “tortured” meat or flesh?! Do you mean the distortion of figures? N: Well, yes, the distortion of figures by Francis Bacon, or the materiality of Freud’s and Corinth’s figures. I’ve read that one of Corinth’s fellow painters teased him saying he was maybe not a great painter, but surely the greatest slaughterer ever. Looking at his crucifixions or bacchanalia, you don’t only recognize symbols and metaphors, you see torture or drunkenness, cruelty and pleasure. The bodies I see by these three painters are not idealized, they are bodies that want to fall to the ground, that bleed if you cut in them, heavy bodies, animal bodies (Freud paints his dog with as much care and as much raw realism as Kate Moss.) I: How about Fischili and Weiss? N: With Fischli Weiss I love the absurdity involved, and their philosophical humour. I really like their works. The Way Things Go for example, or the Questions. By the way I met Peter Fischli once. He was guest critic for one of my semesters at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, by his friend the Prof. Peter Märkli. He is very articulate and has an impressive knowledge about architecture. He liked my project for a restaurant, so I felt entitled to go to him after the crit. I told him I wanted to be an artist, not to build houses. He looked at me slightly irritated and asked me why. I said something about freedom I think, which he waved away with his hand and told me he himself would love to build a house one day. He told me being trained as an architect, going for art is as sure as playing poker, that it took him 15 years to be able to call himself an artist and that it was a very bad idea altogether for me to try. It was very encouraging. I: Now it’s probably good timing for this question; when did you realise you wanted to become an artist instead of an architect? And what made you set your heart on drawing? N: Art and Architecture are so intertwined in my background and experience that I couldn’t really decide what belongs to what and when it all began. I was taught by artist-architects, worked for architect-artists, and for architects that worked with artists. But surely drawing was there before already. All the time while designing building projects, sketching people, places, planning installations, I kept filling sketchbook after sketchbook. And one day I felt that there was more material in these sketchbooks than in the (sometimes) finished works for developing a poetic language. I used to think that drawing does not work as a goal but only a step towards something else. So I tried other things, but eventually favoured the preparatory drawings than the things. I also began to notice that other people reacted to them. And then, while in San Francisco I saw a book about Van Gogh, the “Master Draughtsman”, a book called Vitamin D and also a book by Tania Kovats, both on contemporary drawings. I thought ok, let’s be a draughtsman too. I: Do you see any parallel between architecture and art? N: There are many parallels. Maybe more than divergences. Considering Art and Architecture as vocations, if the latter is generally considered useful, the former one is often suspect. Also the markets on which each are valued and sold are of very different nature. But I think it is more a question of depth. An architect that questions the essence of a wall is very close to an artist that questions the essence of a wall. They don’t share the same duties and social responsibilities, and might come with different solutions. But for sure they share questions and would like to communicate. And they might want to listen to what a writer says about Walls too. There is only one question I keep asking myself: can you do a pessimistic building, as you can make a pessimistic painting? I: Do you mean the level in which personal emotions get carried through a piece of architecture and a piece of art is different? N: Yes, exactly, that is what I was wondering about. Maybe it is not only about personal emotions though. It is about how different the reactions of artists and architects to a historical context can be. If you think of difficult times, let’s say a war, artists and writers will maybe come up with a pessimistic vision of the society, but the architect has to be positive, constructive; he or she has to think about the future. I mean, this is what I was asking myself. But it would be quite unpleasant to live in a house like an Otto Dix painting I guess, and who would pay for it? I: It’s interesting that we are on the subject of emotion. Do you think it’s one of the abilities of art, to convey/express the maker’s emotion? It’s fascinating how it has become un-fashionable (for the lack of a better word) perhaps since post-modernism was coined. When painting started becoming more about the canvas than what’s on it and when the debate around sculpture centred around the plinth, the ’emotion’ of the artist gradually became obsolete and irrelevant. What’re your thoughts on that? You know when someone feels an emotion in front of a video or a drawing, is it the maker’s or the beholder’s emotion? I think great artists can create vectors of emotions, works that will awake strong feelings, maybe in themselves when they work, but also in various people that don’t know them and don’t know each other. So I don’t really care about Tracey Emin’s emotions for example, because I don’t know her personally. I just feel something myself when I look at some of her drawings, and I know that she has touched something very strong with her work. Another good example, Bacon, he painted the Popes after Velasquez and the pieces of meat after Chardin, the screams after Eisenstein’s film and he had a huge archive of photographs. So even if the pain in his work might have emerged from his own private pain, he translated it into the vocabulary and forms of Art, it has become a pain that anybody could feel in the Tate Britain a few months ago for example. I: A huge part of your practice concerns so-called craftsmanship. Your chosen medium is drawing and you seem to have a quite ’old school’ attitude towards it. What I mean is you seem to think that skill is very important which probably explains why you’re looking at the artists you’re looking at. Since Donald Judd, Sol Lewitt, contemporary art now seems to have less and less problem (in most cases no problem at all) with artists who get their work made for them by technically more accomplished experts, a crew of museum technicians, or simply an army of studio assistants. (Of course, the tradition of ’studio assistants’ traces back to the Renaissance.) How do you feel about this in relation to your practice? N: Yes, craftsmanship is essential to my approach of drawing. Actually I think it is strongly linked to the previous question about emotions. I noticed that when I draw something happens on the paper that I don’t understand rationally, something that I couldn’t ask someone on the phone to do for me. The hand does it with the eye somehow. The finished drawing has sometimes more to say than myself and I’m very thankful. I often do good drawings when I’m in a bad mood for example, or too tired. I get angry, and work fast, without thinking. But this spontaneity can only be fertile if I have exercised carefully before, if have studied works of other people, trained my hand and my eye. It is not only about academic studies, even if I have a great interest in classical teaching methods, it can be about drawing 50 circles in a row, or trying to sketch dancing people, or trying to draw a sound. It is about spending time “on the paper” like a carpenter spends time with wood, to get used to it, to learn to know it. I: The way you see/treat your work is very interesting. A drawing can be considered as 'finished', 'complete' or a piece of art at one point but is treated as source material or a step towards a bigger picture the next day. Do you think the state of your work is often in a flux? N: You are absolutely right about the flux in which my work evolves, each “concretion” (page, drawing, collage) being potentially a work and/or the raw material for the next. I like the idea of working for several weeks on a series of complex layered drawings and at the end to consider one of the first sketches as actually richer than the final product, even if one could not have been made without thinking of the other. I: We assume that the act of 'selecting' must be very important in your practice. In a way - based on the way we understand that you see your work/practice, a piece of drawing/painting/note of yours becomes a piece of art (final piece) when you decide that it is, when you make the selection. Based on this, the act of us selecting your work becomes an artistic one instead of a curatorial one. If we make the selection of 'final pieces', we'll be consequently deciding what we think is 'art' out of your archive of 'works', while normally you as the artist are the person who makes that decision, and we as curators simply get given the 'art' and try to contextualize it. N: I agree that your role as a curator and mine as an artist are not different in the selection process, but I would be careful talking about the selection process. First of all, even if I agree that the selection is at least half of the artistic process, the production is still the magic part of art for me: transforming ideas and feelings in shapes. I never understand how it works. I: I am a little bit confused. I understand that a piece of art should be open for interpretation, but nevertheless artists have their ‘trained’, ‘informed’ intuition based on how much they understand their practice and possibly the history of art, and with this intuition they put one work on a plinth and the other in the skip. Generally you would make the selection/decision of what to submit to a exhibition/showcase/competition. How do you make that call normally if you believe that the decision is not in the hands of the artist? F: Well I just don’t think that what make something have an artistic value or not is completely deliberate. I guess it depends if you consider that some absolute values exist at all or not. If not, than what the artist decide to put on the plinth is art. And then fashion decide if this artist will be considered good or be forgotten. Now if there are some absolute values, say, proportions, contrasts, symmetries, archaic instincts, universal feelings, than what is in the skip might be stronger than what is on the plinth, notwithstanding the artist’s opinion. Think of Karl Blossfeldt photographs for example. He made his collection of plants as a mere lexicon of shapes for art and design students. Nowadays nobody would contest that they were a very important contrubtion to art. Or when one look at a sketch of two praying hands by Dürer, that was made 500 years ago and still amazes people in the age of digital technologies, does it matter that it was not a finished work for the master if it has so much to say? Or think of what Kafka wanted to throw away. To make it short, I don’t think art is a private thing, I think it is a very complex communication, over many generations sometimes, between many people. Your contribution as an artist is maybe like taking part to the conversation around a table. You raise your voice to say something you consider really smart, and the other find it boring, and what you thought would be banal they might remember. Or they would just like the sound of your voice, or be thankful for you to be quiet.
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