Georgia Creimer in conversation with Pia Jardí – English

P J: Many vegetable organisms follow spiral growth patterns –similar to a curve that proceeds around a single point or axis, approaching or distancing itself from the beholder, depending on the perspective. This idea is inspiring to me. There are elements in your works that you have returned to throughout your career –as if they were a living body- and there are characteristic forms hat you resort to time and again.

G C: That’s right. Organics forms and cellular structures keep popping up in my work, as do the colors white and black and the concave mirror that I have been using for many years as a “perceptual apparatus”. But also natural material such as animal hides, plants, rocks, dog urine. The decision to reuse something and put it in a new context is not conscious; it happens intuitively in my process. The creation of a new work is the result of some insight I gained from previous works. Each work gives birth to a wealth of possibilities. This has to do with nature and perhaps with the spiral growth you mentioned insofar as the infinite formative and self-generating structures in nature can be compared to artistic processes of generating forms.

P J: Audiences viewing your work for the first time and reading your biography would probably ask to what extent and how Brazilian culture is a concrete influence on your work.

GC: Here I am reminded of Oswald de Andrade, the Brazilian poet and “performer” from the 1920s, and his Cannibalist Manifesto, which could be outlined as “irreverent appropriation” and regarded as a countermovement to the dominant European culture at the time. In 1928, Andrade demanded an orientation toward Brazil’s ethnic and cultural heterogeneity that was to manifest itself in the productive exploration of different realms of experience-indigenous or colonial. He countered the purity, the scientific approach, and the “European desire for difference” with “tropical exuberance, approximation, naïveté, wildness, and poetry”. And “instead of brushing aside that which is alien to us, to devour it” in order to create a hybrid identity (Of course I’m paraphrasing here.) I welcome these ideas. In my childhood, I was close contact with tropical, explosive nature. Not only at the beach, where my family owned a house near Sao Paulo, but also in the city itself. Nature in these parts of the world is huge, almost untamable, and not at all “tidy”. It’s quite impressive to walk the streets and see the roots of an old tree breaking through the asphalt and destroying it. Studying art in Brazil of course also left a significant mark on me. We did didn’t have master classes back then, but different professors with different understandings of art and therefore a looser approach to art. My favourite professor was the artist Nelson Leirner, who taught conceptual art and in his own work explored questions of popular culture in Brazil. To me, his work is a good example of the kind of humorous and disrespectful appropriation of elements from world culture that Oswald de Andrade probable had in mind. I have now lived in Austria longer than in Brazil, and my deeper engagement with art started here, right after my studies in Brazil and my first solo exhibition in Sao Paulo at the age of 23. The decision to move to Austria and begin working on my art without my own network has led me to feel thrown back to my own faculties, which, in effect, I was. Despite my circle of art-loving friends, work for me was a lonely affair at first, entering a process of deep internalization and primarily drawing from my own resources.

P J: You came to Austria and stayed here. Part of your family has a Central European background.

G C: Yes, because of their Jewish background, many of my ancestors fled from Europe to Brazil. My father emigrated from today’s Moldova to Brazil at a very early age in the 1930s. My great-grandfather was Austrian, his wife Dutch; they both moved to Brazil at the beginning of the twentieth century. Europe and its history were a tangible presence in the old family albums, so Europe did not seem so alien to me. This is the fate of many Brazilians: Many have this European background; many haven’t even drifted very far from it. My father, for instance, always spoke Yiddish with his friends, and his Portuguese was full of funny mistakes…But I must say that, although I don’t have the best command of the German language (you would know what I mean if you read the unedited German version of this interview), it is an important reason for me to be here. Being a person with two languages that couldn’t be more different and remain alive in me by using them incredibly rewarding and has always been important for my work.

P J: I see two big similarities between your work and that of the Brazilian artists Lygia Clark. One is the sensory aspect in many of your works, which make the viewers want to explore them by touch. How would you characterize this?

G C: If one were to explore my images by touch, one would only feel a cold, smooth surface. But here, the eye also directly connects with the inner world of the body. Whether I paint a picture or create a sculpture, it is always important that these things become virtually alive and, within the framework of their own laws, real. This vitality is generated in dialogue with the viewer and is the result of letting oneself engage with art. The best way to go about this is physically, not mentally. Terms such as “sensibility” or “somatic intelligence” in the sense of “bodily feeling” play a big role in this.

P J: The other similarity I see is exemplified in a work Lygia Clark created in 1963: O dentro é o fora (The Inside is the Outside), a mobile object that invites manipulation and about which the artist once said, “What moves me about the sculpture O dentro é o fora a is that it transforms the perception that I have of myself, of my body. I become formless…” This work is the materialization of the rational and irrational, the conscious and unconscious –a disintegration of mental and physical borders.

C G: This makes me think of the works Schlafend hell (Sleeping Bright) and Schlafenddunkel (Sleeping Dark), which I made about then years after I had come to Vienna. They strongly reflect what preoccupied me as a person and, above all, as an artist at the time. Back then I was all about questions of identity and what I felt about being an arsits in Vienna. It became clear to me jus how intense the aforementioned process of internalization was during thes first ten years: In contrast to Brazil, where life constantly calls outward, this call was mostly an inward one in Vienna. Strange works emerged in which my photographed face –as an example of an artist’s face- protruded from the wall with closed eyes, flat and disembodied in a long plaster cocoon, much like a telescope. After a while, I returned to painting. But even there I created a kind of prelude for myself-something I still tend to do- in order to give my unconscious a lot of room. I draw my so called “half blind” drawings: I sit at my table with my eyes closed, a large piece of paper in front of me and a pencil in my hand. The drawings I created are an expression of the relationship between hand, pencil, paper, an my relatively empty mental state. Like in a dance. Later, I try to recognize something in the sheets of paper and emphasize certain contours with a pen. In this process I become a collector of forms and formation that constitute the core repertoire of my drawings and paintings.

P J: The Mexican poet Octavio Paz once said that the poet is not served by words; he is their servant. Some of your works seem to depict an archetypal universe. It is preverbal and only shows itself through enigmatic symbols or in images that appear as mental associations.

G C: That’s beautiful…That has something incredibly receptive and intuitive. Similar to the idea that the sculptor doesn’t invent the sculpture but liberates it form the rock. This has to do with collective consciousness and the ability to liberate accidents from their banality and to see thing as if it was for the first time. I dare to say that artist have this ability –if they are lucky. The title of the work All these signs…,for example, expresses the astonishment I felt when I photographed traces of dog urine. As though I was asking myself what all this was supposed to mean…The work Brut (Breed) also materialized by accident from leftover handmade balls intended for an old project model, which were stacked on a plate in my studio. They had sat there for years until they found their purpose at the KunstraumWeikendorf. Such things fascinate me, because they seem to exude some sort of magic. Looked at more closely, however, they are nothing but artistic practice in flux.

P J: Your work is extremely versatile. One notices that you can work with tools that are immediate, such as smartphones, as well as with paintings, which take weeks to complete. What does inspiration mean to you? What makes you want to create something and to do so using one specific technique and not another?

G C: For me, making art is an exercise, an empirical process, a kind of life science. There are no topics separate from this activity that are of any interest to me; everything is yielded by my work as an artist. Different conditions constantly arise, both in my life an in my work, and as an artist, I am quite capable of reacting to change –because everything is equal; everything is material. Sometimes there are prerequisites, for instance when I work in a public space. I wouldn’t see these conditions as confining, though, but as inspirational material and as an equal part of the game. Like in my work Wood, which I created during an artist residency for the small mountain village of Tux in Tyrol. As an artist I was free to do what I wanted, on the sole condition that the finished work could be presented and displayed on the tables of an old tavern. I chose one of those tables as the main actor in a photo series. Even if I am completely free to do what I want in my artistic work, there are always preconditions…I as a person and the possibilities available to me at a given moment –those are already conditions.

P J: Let’s turn to painting for a moment: generally, artist who engage in painting are called “painters”, as if this artistic category deserved its own term. What is your relationship to painting?

G C: Painting really is its own discipline, a form of conscious self-regulation. Even if there are no rules, the absence of rules alone leads to a form of self-regulation. Painting sucks you in, in a way, it acutely appeals to the visual sense. At least fifty percent of the painting process is spent intensely observing. I often look at it anymore…To me, this act of intense looking in painting has an erotic quality, because is essentially has to do with the “pleasure of the eye”. No matter what you intend to do and how conceptual your approach is, it only works when you satisfy the eye. I find that very interesting, mainly because the decisions that are made are purely subjective…One cannot explain it, but one knows exactly what is.

Georgia CreimerIncorporado,

Schlebrügge Editor, 2017