An Artist Talk with Dan Graham and Jeppe Hein
Between Reflection and Communication

On the occasion of the sculpture presentation of Dan Graham's WATER PLAY FOR TERRACE and Jeppe Hein's MODIFIED SOCIAL BENCHES and MODIFIED STREET LIGHT  at Forum an der Museumsinsel, we re-publish an excerpt from an earlier artist talk between the two, moderated by Dieter Roelstraete. Originally held during the inauguration of their joint exhibition FROM SERIOUSNESS TO SILLINESS at Kölnischer Kunstverein in 2008, the conversation explores the influence of past artists, the interplay between humor and spirituality, and the centrality of communication in their practices. Reflecting on collaboration, site-specific work, and the energy exchanged between artist and audience, Graham and Hein offer a candid insight into their artistic dialogue.

© Wolfgang Stahr

Dan Graham: At first, the idea was collaboration, but in the end, we're just mutually influenced by each other and have the same interests—in other words, playfulness. It's not just the mirror image but more the works' playfulness overall that little girls like very much—although boys are slowly getting into my work, too. Jeppe has a daughter; I made a big splash thing for her, and she splashed in it. And the work is not site-specific; it was actually done originally for a show in Munich, but here Jörg Johnen found an amazingly great site for my work. My work is partially about a garden situation—also I'm a big fan of Georges Seurat, as you've probably noticed with this perforated stainless steel, so that you can see flowers through it like a Seurat painting—and secondly, it relates to the banal urban landscape, the 1950s hotel architecture. Its view suits the location amazingly well. And I have to thank Jörg Johnen for finding that site.

There was a little bit of back and forth in doing this piece with Jeppe. It's actually based on a piece I did for his café in Copenhagen and he suggested we continue doing that. Water is a big feature for him, and I've used water before, and Jeppe, as a younger artist, has been very supportive of my work.

Dieter Roelstraete: Jeppe, perhaps you could tell us a little bit more about the experience of 'discovering' Dan's work. How would you define its influence, the significance it has had for your work? How did this collaboration (obviously an inevitable one) come about?

Jeppe Hein: It started really early. When I entered the art world and was inspired by art history and met, of course, Dan's work, I started reading about it, seeing it, and found it really interesting how he worked with the surrounding site-specific issues in public spaces but also in galleries. And I think it was this kind of coincidence that happened ten years ago when we met in Austria, where Dan was making a site-specific pavilion and I was working as an assistant for another artist, and started a dialogue. Although at that time Dan was not in a talking mode, after a couple of days I asked a lot of questions and we started talking, and I think from that time we met each other once in a while.

We started to plan our meetings, and then Jörg and Rüdiger came to my studio two and a half years ago and asked whether I could imagine a show or collaboration with Dan.

DG: We actually talked a lot in Berlin, where Johann König—who I knew as a small child, an incredibly funny guy—was always trying to seduce me into seeing more and more of Jeppe's work. And I think the common element is not the mirror, it's water. The element of water I've been using for a long time.

But also: Jeppe visited my dealers in Vienna, Christian Meyer and Renate Kainer, and I had an amazing piece there that was never realised—a boutique for Liza Bruce—and that we're going to place in the exhibition here, a work that only a very brilliant artist could understand. It is a great work because it is just a diagram. Jeppe put it in his show and I was so impressed with that level of worship that many of my collectors don't have.

JH: I wasn't collecting the work, I was a young student at the time and I asked to borrow that piece to bring it to Denmark because I thought it would be important to show in my off-space—a piece like that.

© Images by Roman März

DG: It is also the kind of playfulness that his work has—I enjoy enormously—and the play possibilities relate to the fact that little girls like both of our work equally.

JH: I'd say the common thing—while you say mirrors, you say water—is the social aspect, how people interfere or interact within the artwork. I think what we have in common is what I've been using a lot as inspiration from Dan's work for many years. That is one of the reasons why we are sitting here today and why we make a show together. And I say that I admire Dan's work a lot. I'm not afraid of telling him, I'm not afraid to tell him where I get the inspiration for some of my works from or how I can use this to get back to the discussion of re-doing works, which is up in the time right now. But the way I see Dan's work, and mainly my work, is to be a tool. We're producing a tool, we're putting it out there in a public space, and the piece starts to work within its surrounding.

DG: This is what I enjoy most about Jeppe's work—it's the participational mode. I have to say there's another artist at the same gallery as Jeppe is, at 303 Gallery—Ceal Floyer—whose work is also about the participation of the spectator. And what I also like about Jeppe's work is that it's down-scaled, not these huge monumental things most artists of his generation do.

DR: When I named the mirror stage as a common feature, Dan replied that water was in fact the connective tissue. Now, both water and mirrors have a reflective capacity—they both reflect things in a literal sense—but of course they also point the way to the possibility of a space for reflection in a metaphorical sense, meaning both the thought processes that you pointed out and a broader idea of social interaction, of the artist engaging with public space and the public sphere. I'd like to know how you 'synchronize,' so to speak, this idea of a critical, reflective stance in the public sphere with the idea of play. Just to play the devil's advocate here: doesn't art that is playful necessarily venture into the house-field of what Marcuse called an affirmative culture?

DG: I come from the 60s, and Marcuse wanted people to relate to the perverse of playfulness. The idea of play was against the Oedipus complex, so the idea of playfulness comes from Hippie culture, and although he became a Punk afterwards, I was still very related to it. And my work in terms of politicalness comes more from Abbie Hoffman, who wrote a book called 'Steal This Book'.

One work I used water for was the 'Star of David' in a castle in Austria. I said I never wanted to show in Austria, I'm Jewish, and Kurt Waldheim was the President of Austria at that time. I saw the work by Arnulf Rainer, the important Austrian painter. The work was a cross and blood, so I thought, why not do a water pavilion in Austria that would be in the shape of the Star of David, so that you actually could walk on the water like Jesus Christ in Cecil B. DeMille's films. And also that there is a water basin for the people in the neighbourhood, for the little kids to put their feet into the water.

I think my humour has a lot to do with being Jewish. Being political for me is to undermine corporate culture, so I deconstruct two-way mirror glass which is used in corporate buildings. In my work, the reflective glass is equally transparent and reflective. From the corporate one-way mirror glass, I make a kind of heterotopia. It's like a funhouse for children, and Jeppe's work is also oriented as a kind of funhouse.

JH: Funhouse is a dangerous word but also a nice word when you have children around, which I do have now. Works that indicate playfulness really have a thin borderline to define. If it gets too funny, then it can fall into a funny house. Works that have interactivity or have playfulness are working on different levels. You can have children playing on your piece and having fun, and you can have people coming in that have an intellectual background. And you hopefully can read something from this to pull it into another story and, in this way, find a new theme or a new idea, a new name for what is actually going on here.

So I think to work with playfulness is an extremely good way to start a communication. I see art in general as being about communication on different levels. If I'm making a drawing of one of my pieces at home and just put it in a drawer and don't talk about it, then it's only an idea or a sketch. But if I'm here and talk about it to Dan or to you, saying I really did a good sketch, then I start a communication and it becomes something—art or a specific project. In these terms, my interests compared to Dan's are trying to work together and becoming friends at the same time.

The generations between us are actually one or two, but we're using sometimes the same materials, the same interests. The social aspect of these interests is sometimes lying in a different place though. I'm not from the sixties, though I'd loved to have lived then. My father almost was a Hippie, Dan even says he was a Hippie, and I didn't discover. Of course, I read about that time. I've been living from the seventies and up, seeing how everything has changed, and I think we are living in a society right now that is unfortunately getting more and more racist in many ways.

I'm from Denmark and we are getting more and more racist there. I think that has a lot to do with misunderstanding, communicating things differently. A lot of people in Denmark don't understand when you have people from another culture around because we maybe don't get told the story in the right way. That means some of our works in common can help to start a communication between people with different cultural backgrounds. Like you can go into a water pavilion or one of Dan's reflecting pieces, stand on one side and see someone with beautiful brown eyes and dark hair who has a different cultural background within the same reflection, having the same silhouette and standing in the same place as you—and you smile to the other person and start a communication as you'd never do seeing the same person walking on the street.

© Image by Roman März

DG: Jeppe is talking from a moralistic point of view, a kind of late 1960s Protestant moral perspective, unlike Kierkegaard. He has not worried about the existential meaning of life and death, so he's not a Kierkegaardian. I want to talk about public space—we both work with public space. I think the most important exhibitions I've been in here in Germany, the Münster exhibition and Documenta, are basically about education, particularly for children, and entertainment for the whole family. In my work in Münster, the Octagon was a garden work which related both to the Baroque palace and park and to the idea of the wooden rustic hut and the nineteenth-century adaptation of the park. It has also a pole inside—it's both Brancusi's pole of the world but also for little children to rotate around, the way the women on the Jerry Springer show do sometimes, like in a go-go cage. Basically, entertainment for children and a photo opportunity for the parents.

So my work is more anthropological, more about the family structure in a certain sense. I think the work in a public setting is quite important for both of our work, and even though we both have private collectors, we put a lot into our public work.

DR: I obviously never executed a work of art in public space myself, but I do have a bit of curatorial experience working in the field of public art. In 2001, I was involved in a large-scale exhibition of that kind in The Netherlands—Sonsbeek 9 in Arnhem. What I remember from it more than anything else today is the sheer, incredible level of vandalism that we had to deal with throughout the exhibition—which some people suggested was just a local form of criticism: the nonverbal criticism of the wordless. To what extent have you had to deal with the experience of vandalism in the past? The 'answer' that many artists formulate in the face of the challenge of vandalism is to simply make indestructible things—Richard Serra is probably the world's most vandal-proof artist in that sense.

JH: He doesn't allow any kind of contact with his work anymore.

DG: Just to jump in from a curatorial point of view: I know that where I grew up in suburbia, many people's windows were vandalized by little boys with BB guns and they replaced the glass—so everything needs maintenance. The biggest problem I have sometimes is when my two-way mirror glass is more transparent than a mirror and a bird will fly into it, seeing its own reflection and thinking it's another bird. So killing birds is the greatest danger, but if glass is broken you just replace the glass, right?

JH: Let me comment not on broken glass or dead birds but on when you work with public art. As an artist, you have to be extremely aware of what kind of material you're using. That means when you're working within the public sphere, you have to be aware that the works can communicate with all kinds of people. So that people can look at it, people can pee against it, people can tack on it, or people can try to smash it...

DG: Or make love in it ...

JH: ... or make love in it, of course. I think in these terms you have to define. A lot of artists are not aware that they're using materials that won't hold for the period due. Another question is: how long should a public art piece hold?

DG: That's a good question: permanence. I think that graffiti is the biggest problem, but as a matter of fact, you can treat the glass so that the graffiti can be taken off. The worst thing is scratches for glass. But I think Jeppe is bringing up that it's very important to see how is the context—which could be temporary. If it's permanent, you put it into a situation where there are guards or if it's in a museum the gates close at night. I also have a piece in Hamburg, where homeless people sleep inside at night, and frankly, I really approve of that very much.

JH: But I think about guards—that this is the problem with public spaces. What is happening with a piece like Dan did in Copenhagen recently—which I hope you all will be coming to look at once and which I made as a kind of a public artwork including some other artists—there has been scratching on one of the panes a couple of months ago.

DR: Is that the Karriere project you're referring to?

JH: Yes, this is the Karriere project. I didn't tell Dan yet, but he's coming soon to Denmark and I can show him. It's just a small scratch. There are thousands of people coming every weekend, standing outside there in the nights and drinking—that's part of life. How long should works like these stay?

DR: I wouldn't call it vandalism if someone is 'just' scratching his name or the name of a loved one in a pane. My conception of vandalism is that of the expression of people who don't want art. A lot of public art is state-funded, and perhaps therefore very often the type of intervention into public space where such an intervention is simply not tolerated or wanted. Now of course, it's up to the artist's intelligence to 'force' his or her audience into negotiating certain challenges, but still...

DG: In Antwerp, the city where you work, I was deluded by a very idealistic and dynamic, young independent curator, Barbara van der Linden, who didn't live in Antwerp but saw that Antwerp was changing in an area that's a working-class, neo-nazi neighbourhood where there are also African immigrants. They were trying to develop the area, and she thought it would be a great idea to make a bridge between the new development and the people who lived there. But she miscalculated how long it would take for this to happen. The piece was put into a very beautiful location, but it was vandalized by the local people, probably beer drinkers—not that I'm against beer drinkers—but it was a miscalculation. She didn't really know the city because she was actually from Brussels.

DR: Didn't someone shoot at it even?

DG: I don't know. It's been relocated to a very important but for me rather boring location, the Middelheim Sculpture Park. In fact, that sculpture park has two wonderful works—one was a Paul McCarthy inflatable that was temporary and actually deflated sometimes, which was very good because it was poo. He also had a fake Henry Moore inflatable with holes in it which made fun of the kind of sculptures that were there. The other work is a wonderful work by Jef Geys, a great Belgian artist who did it up in a tree where it's not destructible.

JH: One of the main arguments happening right now is who's deciding in the end which art is right. And the line is going all the way down to the artist. If you invite the wrong artist, you're getting the poo he's talking about, and then you're getting a problem because the people who decide have the older generations as interest. Let's say Denmark: you have political people there deciding about an area, and before anything else happens, they invite the same three artists who are normally invited the last ten years. This is a big, big mistake, I think, and a big, big problem too. Maybe they should invite artists to make works in a more physical way, maybe they should research in a completely different direction that we of course need to define. There's all these art advisors around right now, and maybe there should be some other people deciding because in the end, it's political people who decide where the money comes from and where it goes.

© Image by Roman März

DG: I have another comment: One of the best works I did was the Dia Foundation piece. It's about New York City in the seventies and eighties. It was both a seventies alternative space and an eighties corporate atrium put together. It had a lot to do with Battery Park City, and I know New York City—whereas, in fact, I didn't know Antwerp at all. I didn't know anything about Austria and my instincts were not to show there. But then I thought of wonderful fellow Austrians like Billy Wilder, so I came up with some Jewish humour. But maybe that's because all us Jewish people go back to old Europe since we have a grudge to settle there. The former secretary of Defense Rumsfeld talked about "old Europe," but maybe I just didn't understand old Europe.

DR: I actually wanted to ask you something about how the "Atlantic divide" has deepened in the last couple of years—in terms of art, that is. Dan, you've worked a lot in Europe, to the extent perhaps that your artistic life has unfolded here more than anywhere else—this has certainly been the case in the field of public art. What has been the major difference, with regards to this exact practice, between the European context and the American context? You mentioned that poking fun at corporate culture is at the heart of your practice—now I wonder, how does the omnipresence of corporate culture in American 'public' life (or what little remains of it) force you into taking a stance as an artist?

DG: Well, I'll tell you, Europe in the eighties was so important for me because America was inundated by Baselitz and neo-expressionist artists like David Salle, whereas in France, the socialist government—which I really approved of, the Mitterand government—had the idea that art should be decentralized. Regional centres of art were often in big gardens with châteaux. So I did a lot of garden pieces in gardens of châteaux owned by FRACs in Brittany. Now I'm doing work for two French mayors. For instance, the socialist mayor of Paris commissioned pieces for a tramway station at the edge of the city which was low-fares for working-class people and older people, making a centre for culture at the suburban edge. I'm also working in La Rochelle, which has a socialist mayor too.

So I actually work out of idealism in a certain way, and Europe has supplied some amazing idealistic situations. Corporate culture is everywhere—for example, in the centre of Münster, my piece is using two-way mirror glass because all the banks in the centre of Münster, in administrative buildings, use two-way mirror glass. I think you can't avoid corporate culture, it's not American—that's too naive—it's international, corporate culture. In fact, the really best example now is Berlin, which is a little behind the times but has all these big glass buildings. It happened in the eighties, nineties, and much later in Berlin than anywhere else. I think that it's a privilege to work outside America. And also: Art is an export item—we have to admit this—it's luxury goods, and it's also importing exotic people from other countries. I know Jeppe has experienced working in mid-Western states like Indiana, and of course this is our job, to be foreign workers in other countries.

DR: Let's go back to something we said before with regards to Jesus—his walking on water and the irony of all that. The piece that is installed in front of the Barceló Cologne-Hotel offers the opportunity for people to walk on water, just like Jesus did—as does the piece in Berlin. Now obviously water is also a defining feature in much of Jeppe's work. I would actually like to venture into the terrain of the religious now, and briefly look at the connection between art and institutionalized religion proper. And we're in the right city to talk about it too—after all, Cologne is now home to the 'Domfenster', the huge stained glass window piece that Gerhard Richter designed for the city's cathedral. Has there ever been any moment in your respective careers when both of you were engaged (or were tempted to engage) in similarly messianic or ecclesiastical activity?

DG: I think older artists, like Gerhard Richter, get involved in this, also Matisse did. I've not reached that stage yet. But the whole thing about walking on water: I first used grids for a piece in Clisson in Brittany, and I got the idea from a great work of Daniel Buren in Palais Royal, the idea of putting grids over water. So this was originally not my idea and I have to say that the work that you saw, the elliptical pavilion in Berlin which is a great piece, is on an artificial water basin. The water, reflective pond that my work was on, was kind of artificial in a certain way. My work like the 'Star of David' relates a lot to Jewish humour.

DR: Your work, too, Jeppe, often engages a certain spiritual quality (if you want to call it that way) that emerges from its totalizing environmental effects. I'm quite interested in this dialectic of transcendence and immanence, but also in your statement that communication is essentially the bedrock of your artistic practice, claiming it to be one of the finer features of art proper. Now what's with the 'spiritual' in your work?

JH: I'm not Christian at all and not believing in anything but I believe that the energy you send out to people you get back again. Not from the same people but from a lot of other people. I'm sure about that. I think I have a really fantastic life. I am sitting here tonight with a lot of people hoping that we're saying something really wise—I can't promise that but what I can swear is that I've been working with my communication for 15 or 17 or 18 years now and there's maybe about 120 people here today, so I get something from it in terms of a learning process.

I definitely believe that when you give something out of yourself you get it back maybe a hundred times. We all should think about that. It's a small detail in everyday life that can make a big difference. That's why Dan and I are communicating so good, not only within our works but also within our funny, bad jokes. Because we understand each other not only when we talk but also when we just sit and look.