Galerie Hubert Winter

News from No-man's- land
Michael Hoepfner talking to Christian Kravagna and Christian Reder, — exhibition catalogue: Unsettled Conditions. Kunstraum NOE, Vienna. 2008

CHRISTIAN REDER: Parallel to accelerating everything and everybody, there are contrary positions as well as those intended to slow things down: Ivan Illich, the Austrian-born then Mexico-based technology sceptic, pleaded for walking everywhere whenever possible, for not moving any faster than a bicycle or an ox-drawn cart as a prerequisite for world perception. He regarded his own frequent flying as an interim compromise. The title Sten Nadolny gave his book The Discovery of Slownessalmost gained the status of a slogan — for an unrealistic agenda. Your images slow events down further: down to a standstill, a different tempo too.

MICHAEL HOEPFNER: I address what walking really means to me. In Land Art, by Richard Long for instance, his walking gains the significance of a sculpture. In my case, though, it's clearly about achieving a different — heightened — state of perception: taking a trip, like taking drugs. Part of it is the unfamiliar, travelling in remote places. If that becomes a nomadic myth, as it did for Bruce Chatwin, then it goes too far. We remain part of a society of tourists.

CHRISTIAN KRAVAGNA: Land Art is conceptual. Concept Art can be staged for the camera, and that’s it, it’s a context of its own. Your art, your approach, actually lives from real activity, the process of actually walking, arriving at different and unfamiliar perspectives by going slowly. What exactly are you pursuing?

MICHAEL HOEPFNER: It begins with a sense of longing, wanting to see beyond, behind, the horizon. On my travels in Central Asia, in Tibet and West China it became obvious that I was actually immersing myself in living conditions totally foreign to me, because of the exposure. I encountered certain personal physical limits, but at the same time was also confronted with the way the people there survive.

CHRISTIAN REDER: A lasting memory of mine is of running into two Tuareg accompanied by loaded camels who were on their way from Libya to Niger on foot, just to visit some friends. That's the same distance as New York to Los Angeles. Because we aren't capable of living like that we don't understand the way they live, something that would be a key factor for taking any kind of a global approach. Who would be able to envisage surviving on 20 or 60 Euros per month, perhaps a preliminary issue for any debates on Orientalism or Postcolonialism?

CHRISTIAN KRAVAGNA: The acceptance of different ways of life is also a key issue for me: even as a way to question one's own categories of thinking or the standard yardsticks for modernisation. But the 60 Euro situation can be compared to the existential difficulty of living on 600 Euros in our latitudes — for a single mother with a child, for example.

MICHAEL HOEPFNER: Attempting to understand others confronts you with your own culture. The result is looking back and forwards. Your origins appear in a different light.

CHRISTIAN REDER: Respect for forms of survival that are well beyond our own capacity increases one's awareness in many ways. When the electricity is cut off where we come from everything stops, even my PC. The level of dependency is constantly increasing, it's the price we pay for comfort. Traditional societies, which we're talking about, are characterised by incredible improvisation in comparison. Is that the secret fascination?

MICHAEL HOEPFNER: The simple rules behind the organisation of a nomad camp are impressive; while the collapse of these ways of life is to be observed everywhere. So I always wonder to what extent my romantic search for authenticity is based on self-deceit. Was there ever such a thing?

CHRISTIAN REDER: In his book Studien zur nächsten Gesellschaft [Studies on the Pending Society — not translated into English] Dirk Baecker insistently poses the question of the direction societies take when they break down. Important is the continuity and that what follows next remains recognisable as a society. The belief that things are getting worse is just a belief. Even positive advances personally experienced are soon forgotten. Perhaps the prospect is just more bleak.

CHRISTIAN KRAVAGNA: The incredible creativity found under conditions of economic scarcity has a correlation to experiments carried out in survival camps or to the history of modern development, which has repeatedly been defined in terms of a view of this other at least since the 19th century. In your work you touch on what these different living environments share in economic, political and cultural terms. As an artist the aim can't just be to satisfy yourself. How does this tie into in your approach as an artist?

MICHAEL HOEPFNER: For a while untouched deserted landscapes were important as images of longing, as a way of engaging with things that are disappearing. It went so far that I even felt I was disappearing myself, quasi-dissolving. This wasn’t going anywhere in terms of the statement it made, making the incorporation of social elements necessary — carefully, by insinuation. To analyse the predetermined I increasingly try to visualise the gap between a longing for authenticity and the reality precisely, with staged photographs of people I encounter that have deliberate associations with early ethnographic photographs. I widen the scope of my work by not concealing the Western perspective or playing it down.

CHRISTIAN REDER: A yearning for nature became more extreme with increasing industrialisation, expressed also in mountaineering and climbing in general. Moving between civilisation and wilderness has its history too. Instead you walked through Tibet. Just going through Bhutan costs a fortune. Why, though, are more aware people more frequently to be encountered in simple accommodation than in luxury temples, the prototypes for a beautiful life worthy of imitation? I see connections here to our questions about the foreign: One's own society is becoming increasingly alien, more unpleasant, due to a talk show people presented as increasingly infantile from year to year. It's as if there’s a deliberate agenda of alienation behind it. The distant is easier to respect, like in James Cook's day, who travelled with scientists and draftsmen like Georg Forster. Those were highlights in phases of otherwise increasing brutality. I'd have liked to have been there, perhaps Michael Hoepfner would've too.

CHRISTIAN KRAVAGNA: I'm sceptical there, because the scientific and artistic achievements running under the heading 'Enlightenment' created the basis for the domination and exploitation of the colonial system. Anxiety about nature arose with that kind of generation of knowledge, with the glorification of nature, the kitsch. I'm interested in this ambivalence because solutions need to be worked out under modern conditions — without invoking the ostensibly ‘simple life’.

MICHAEL HOEPFNER: It was always about finding a contrast to the city. The first mountaineers came from London. In Tibet very similar processes are currently occurring, visibly so — for example in the presence of Chinese tourists. It provides a kind of retrospective view of our own history, of what's understood everywhere as development. Things are happening thererapidly that took a relatively long time where we come from.

CHRISTIAN REDER: This notwithstanding, for me Hoepfner photographs are messages from No-man's-land. Neither the states nor the natural environment care about the people there. Seen in a global context, the inner land masses are becoming increasingly deserted, are drying out socially too. It’s a complex process of desertification. Over half of the human race now lives in the urban agglomerations, everything is moving towards the coast, especially in Asia. Michael Hoepfner is travelling in the opposite direction.

CHRISTIAN KRAVAGNA: Adding the term 'desert' to talk about the social desert is, in my opinion, very appropriate. Which brings us back again to the schism between the privileged and the underprivileged. I have a hypothesis for you here: Widespread privileged living conditions only existed in the European social state in the decades following the War. Social differences were evening out to such an extent that the privileged no longer had to feel permanently under threat. Unfortunately this phase of balance is over. It didn't exist anyway anywhere else in the same form. It was a brief regionally restricted state of equilibrium. It couldn't be applied universally. This dilemma has to be faced in taking a global view.

CHRISTIAN REDER: Closely guarded upper class islands with social deserts in-between them are becoming a ubiquitous nightmarish scenario of polarisation. But let's go back to artistic approaches. I travel primarily in a context of tasks I have set myself — developing projects that students, artists, scientists participate in. Professional travelling, in your case in an even more extreme form, is distinct from tourism.

MICHAEL HOEPFNER: A painter goes to the studio, where they have their Utopian space. My projects have a great deal to do with departure, with opting out of the daily routine. The themes develop step by step. I find them in deserts because I view them as cultural landscapes and zones of transfer, not as voids. What I bring back from there is the result of the minimalism necessitated on such expeditions.

CHRISTIAN REDER: It is only in retrospect that I realised my projects were concentrated around the Mediterranean world of antiquity: Herodotus, North Africa, Syria, the Indus, and recently the Dnjepr and the Don. The result are sketchy topographies of those parts of the world, documented in books — i.e. in 'mobile exhibitions'.

MICHAEL HOEPFNER: The large-scale exhibition is still important to me, alone for the space. That overland travel — at least where conceivable — plays a role for you, as you've often emphasised, caught my attention. It deepened my interest in zones of transfer. From China these are the desert routes of the Silk Road. You get — visually too — a new view of Europe and a different take on the geography of certain parts of the world.

CHRISTIAN KRAVAGNA: Asking in my capacity as an art critic: How can that be de-subjectified, how can you make that clear? Existing contacts motivate me to travel, especially relationships with artists as a basis, not thinking in geographic regions. Whether I actually get anywhere overland is not important. Gaining insight is the purpose.

MICHAEL HOEPFNER: You travel a lot in Africa. For me, it began with early expeditions in East Turkey, to Syria, in Iran — with the confrontation with the unfamiliar, its visual dimension, the aesthetics. Then the new and the familiar are experienced differently. That’s why I frequently go back to places I already know, to go deeper and look more closely. You only understand a lot of it when you’re back home, and the result is the next project.

CHRISTIAN REDER: Isn't it an urge to travel into the unknowing? In Austria prejudices, presumptions, body language, ways of speaking, clothing are permanently throwing one back to stereotypes. In a genuinely alien environment you can see with more distance — apart from significances that remain concealed — as 'abstracted' imagery. Language, apart from small-talk in English, has almost no significance. I find it liberating for a limited time. Although the unavoidable resulting superficiality always brought me back to Europe. For you the imagery is also paramount...

MICHAEL HOEPFNER: ...Initially imagery that I already have in mind. As a guide, but I want to get away from these images, and find another and far more precise language than the images of the 'exotic' presented in the media. That not understanding a foreign language can be liberating is an important personal discovery: a concentration on seeing, smelling, feeling, an awareness of distances. That distinguishes my work from travel reporting, which often suggest an intimacy while only showing impressive moments. The openness of interpretation is very important to me, not the fiction of a participation.

CHRISTIAN KRAVAGNA: That we project our own histories into your work is problematic. But to really be able to verbalise the difficulties accurately we would have to proceed more systematically, take up more space...

CHRISTIAN REDER: ...Like in the Hoepfner exhibitions, where drawings and notes add dimension to the photographic work.

MICHAEL HOEPFNER: What should I say to that? As mental mapping my notes and sketches provide transparency about how I work, the photographs’ background as they are always just one aspect of my work. As a visual thinker I seek to establish connections via my 'manifestations', and to convey these experientially.

CHRISTIAN KRAVAGNA: Many of your photographs are effective on their own and don't need any commentary. Some of the landscapes could be more easily misread. The intention is clearer in series.

MICHAEL HOEPFNER: It's about stages of understanding, which we talked about. As an artist you believe that the image already says everything at the time. Then you notice how the viewers’ readings deviate. You react with irritation, like in my new series of slides, which have an almost filmic character. Footprints are an irritation in the untouched natural environment. Anxiety about pending incursions is expressed. Each new road completely changes everything.

CHRISTIAN REDER: For me, your images are also an expression of an idiosyncratic way of life, expressions of taking a great deal of personal freedom. I’ve never wanted to accept a strict separation between life and work.

MICHAEL HOEPFNER: Nor me. Art needs such Utopian aspects, ultimately as individualised attempts — to all intents and purposes affecting one’s own life.

CHRISTIAN KRAVAGNA: As impressed as I am by such an approach, I can't derive any rules from it. I can also gain something from the artist as an unheroic 'bureaucrat'. The positioning in contrast to currently promoted models lends one's own behaviour contours. An artwork is not more valuable because an expedition took months instead of a fortnight. Insight gained through extensive travel experience can be shown indirectly, though, as a progression. I find the way the composition of your images allows the excluded surroundings to resonate interesting. A road could be built soon, threatening the 'virgin soil'. Even though it can also benefit scores of people. Cultural pessimism on its own doesn't produce any perspectives.

MICHAEL HOEPFNER: I explore exactly these different narrative strands to develop a particular atmosphere, which can be felt and read by the recipient.