Antje-Britt Mählmann: Dear Lennart, how does material research relate to texts or theoretical research in your work?
Lennart Lahuis: Theoretical research is very much related to material investigation for me. But material research is often where it starts. I make an observation, like a burned page in a fireplace or water curling up. These observations always involve natural phenomena and are related to the elements. This then leads me to exploring new materials and techniques to work with, finding out how to write in steam or water, for example, or how to burn pages while trying to keep the information readable. This is one trajectory of research, which I then apply to a given context or specific content. When I deal with textual or theoretical content or research, it is often similar to the observations that lead me to do material research; it mostly depends on me coincidentally running into a poem or book, or a certain aspect of the venue where I am exhibiting. I work with content that I want to bring into dialogue with the material research that I have been doing. This dialogue is very important to me, so let’s say both types of research depend on one another.
AM So, you work a lot with natural materials and the elements, but then you go into the condition of these materials like a scientist, and you also often add this element of language. Could you further elaborate on how natural science and the poetic feed into each other, especially in your text-based works?
LL Yes, when you study natural processes and the elements, you also have to acknowledge volatility and transience. These qualities, to me, are in constant tension with the idea of creating meaning and readability. Natural processes tend to follow the laws of entropy, which, in a sense, means an absence of meaning as we tend to describe it. So, I like to juxtapose these two things. On the one hand, there is a letter or word that requires a specific shape for us to ascribe meaning to it, but if you confront that shape with natural processes or materials, then the appearance of that shape can never be continuous. That tension is something that has fascinated me for a long time.
AM Does this tension tell us something about the human condition? Or does the human not figure in this? Is the human aspect or perspective not important to you?
LL I guess the anthropocentric view is a little bit more in the background in my work. I tend to be more interested in the material conditions of communication than the message or meaning as such. Texts and images become such fragile structures if you bring them into relation to broader timescales or the elements. I focus on this fragility of information. It is somehow very appealing to me.
AM We invited you to work with our collection of works by Joseph Beuys and to do research at the archive. Were you interested in the work of Beuys before? Was he an influence on you as a young artist?
LL We went to Hamburger Bahnhof when I was in my first year of art school, and then we walked into the Beuys room with the Tallow pieces. I saw them for the first time and noticed that there was equipment attached to the fat blocks to measure their physical state and rate of deterioration, which has always stayed with me. And of course, I was aware of how he expanded the notion of what is possible to use as material and what an artwork or installation can be.
AM This meeting point between art, science, and natural materials seems to be something you both have in common in your artistic practice.
LL Yes, but I didn’t know that it was so present in his work. This was the main question for me when you invited me, or, actually, there were two parallel interests that I started with. How does his work relate to the elements, and how does it relate to technology? There are a lot of examples where he combines both. For example, objects such as Erdtelefon [Earth Telephone] or Tisch mit Aggregat [Table with Aggregate], and drawings like Kondensator [Condenser] or Fabrik am Fluss [Factory by the River]. There were way more works with these themes than I could have imagined. In the end, in our exhibition, we focus on the relationship of Beuys’s work to the elements as materials fire, earth, water, and air.
AM Yes, this is also the way we divided the exhibition according to the elements water, fire, air, and earth, and to bring these works of Beuys into dialogue with yours. I also asked you to select artworks by Joseph Beuys for the exhibition. One of my favourites is Brennender Gully [Burning Gully], which is a fantastic, beautiful, poetic piece. Could you tell me why you selected this one?
LL Sometimes I see a work, and it doesn’t matter whether it is from another time or geography, but I just wish that I would have come up with it, which is the case with this performance. He takes a newspaper, folds it, and puts it in a drain in the street. He then lights it, so only a flame reaching above street level is visible. Hiding a newspaper underground and setting it on fire is already a poetic gesture, but the fact that it is an immaterial artwork makes it extra special and feels very close to my practice. Like in my work, he connects current events with transience and, above all, emphasises that the poetic is something immaterial. It is very strong.
AM One of the other elements that we can discuss is water, because you have created a new work called Settling Sediment ~ Portrait which is a response to Das Unterwasserbuch-Projekt [The Underwaterbook Project] by Joseph Beuys. I am really curious to hear how this work came about.
LL When we formulated that question of how Beuys’s practice can be related to the elements, then The Unterwasserbuch Project also came up, which was initiated together with the photographer Lothar Wolleh. They wanted to make a book that would have to be presented underwater, with a flashlight lighting the book. They printed the sheets to make an edition in a relatively large number, but the printing of the images went wrong, and it wasn’t realised as intended. Besides the relationship between water and print, that aspect of the project not being fully realised felt like an invitation to continue.
It also brought me back to a few clay tablets I made in 2018, which were imprinted with text. Water was flowing over these tablets to erode the text during the timeframe of the exhibition. When I made these works, I worked with soft, wet clay. And when I would wash my hands, I would use a bucket with clean water, and then I saw how there were these beautiful clouds of clay particles that turned the clear, transparent water into mud. When I would come back to the studio the next day, the water would be completely clear again. I always wanted to do something with that process.
With my new work, Settling Sediment, I hypothetically continued The Unterwasserbuch Project and brought it together with this observation. I thought it would be really beautiful to have a water tank where every few hours clouds of clay particles are being shot into the clear water, hiding whatever is submerged in the tank, as a constant process of appearance and disappearance.
In Beuys’s The Unterwasserbuch Project, he is constantly the centre of the camera’s gaze; it was a book that seemed to have helped to build his public persona. Especially what he wears is of importance to this persona, in Unterwasserbuch there is also a reproduction of his Felt Suit. This made me think about the role of clothes in his public appearances. It made me want to submerge a rather anonymous outfit of myself that constantly appears and disappears under a cloud of clay particles, emphasising in this case, the absence of the artist as a person.
AM Talking about drowning and obscuring a semblance of Joseph Beuys, from your point of view, what was your first perception of him when you came to the archive? — Your impression of him as an artistic persona?
LL Yes, the public image was an aspect that was in the foreground at first. And then I met a very different kind of artist when I was doing research in the museum, which opened up his work for me in an entirely new way. And I think that this discrepancy has something to do with wanting to comment on the artist as a persona. I think that in the exhibition we are putting this aspect in the background; the emphasis is on material remnants and physical processes in his artworks.
AM Beuys has a performative side to his work, but it is also a sculptural process. Do you think that these two kinds of work benefit from each other? Do you think that with this exhibition you are emphasising the sculptural process? Or is it also working with the performative in a way?
LL Throughout my research in the museum, I realised that the sculptural process and the performative are completely intertwined in his work. Recently, I got to know the concept of spolia studies, which reflects on the way objects are constantly repurposed, de-and recontextualised over and over again. This was interesting to me in relation to this exhibition, in which we are mostly showing remnants of events and decontextualised materials and objects. To name an example, we will show Tisch mit Aggregat which is an object that Beuys apparently made quite early on but then became part of his Hirschdenkmäler [Deer Monuments] installation, where it is part of a larger concept, and now it has been on view in the Museum Schloss Moyland as an edition. And then there is the air pump that we will be showing, which is part of your collection as a singular object but was initially part of his Vakuum ↔ Masse [Vacuum ↔ Mass] performance. On my part, I will be showing MURMUR, which consists of clay fragments that are remnants of the aforementioned clay tablets. The text on these tablets was a one-to-one reproduction of a scientific article, but now there will only be snippets of that text left visible. The same clay is recycled for Settling Sediment. All this is just to say that in many works in this exhibition, we are showing objects that have a biography, a genealogy, and have had a rich life. This realisation, that many objects in Beuys’s works are remnants of other events or installations was very interesting to me. And I think it is connected to the concept of spolia studies, in which scholars analyse objects in the different states and contexts they have been in.
AM Yes, it is very well known to art historians who had to study mediaeval churches where the use of spolia was very common, for example, in Romanesque churches. Indeed, the changing context of an object is extremely interesting. It is also intriguing how you made this one room almost into an archaeological site. With Beuys’s works, we are talking about the twentieth century. But we already have to do this archaeological digging into this very recent part of art history.
LL Yes, it is interesting to me to apply these archaeological terms to 20th-century art or 21st-century events. But I also have to think about this other term, media archaeology, where people are tracing back older and forgotten forms of media and information technology, using archaeological methodologies in a different context.
AM For the museum that we are working at right now, it is an important question what to make—maybe not so much of the persona, but of the work of Joseph Beuys—and how to work with and through it with artistic research because there is an afterlife? But, as you know, I have the impression that, when solely perceived through art historical terms, there is a very strange polarisation concerning the image of Joseph Beuys. But it is so valuable to go back to the actual artwork, precisely to experience the afterlife of artworks.
LL Yes, exactly. And I think this is what we have been doing in the exhibition, right? How can we read his work when we look at the materials and processes that they are made with? How can it be read differently than solely through art historical terms?
AM Yes. I think that is very, very valuable to the museum’s process, but also to the art historical process. This kind of artistic activity can feed back into art history and update it in some way. When there is a stuck and rigid kind of discourse or scholarship, I think artistic research can help to change perspectives and bring new information to light in new ways by just doing something that is not “allowed” in traditional art historical methodologies. Adding new parameters.
LL You have mentioned a few times that our way of working with the collection towards this exhibition process do you think this happened?
AM It happened on so many occasions. I think that there are a few rule-breakers in art history who made rule-breaking very productive. Aby Warburg for one, and also Hans Belting. Mieke Bal used art historical methods, among others, to develop new ways of interpretation based on temporality. You know, there are quite a few. But basically, when you study art history, there is a strict rule set that determines the way that you can work. In this discipline, you have to look at all the literature that is already there, especially the recent literature. But you also have to choose a predetermined methodology. So I can decide do I want to do an iconographic interpretation of this? Or do I want to look at the cultural context? Or do I want to read this from a material-aesthetic perspective? Anyway, I have to determine the methodology first, and then I have to stay within this framework, so I have the liberty to determine the parameters of my research and how I use my methodology. But I have no freedom to jump back and forth between frameworks and disciplines, you know, which is also absolutely logical. But artistic research just frees you up a little bit from this very language-based way of working around objects within a physical space that we are dealing with. So sometimes I think the art historical language is not enough to figure out something about the inner quality of an artwork. But another artist, artwork, or process can. And this can also help art history expand its vocabulary in some way.
LL Yes, and I think an example of that in our exhibition is that we did not explore Beuys’s relationship to ecology or mention that word anywhere at all, although it is around the corner. We never considered including any material that refers to his relationship to “Die Grünen” [The Greens] or 7000 oaks, for example, which are usually mentioned as first when it comes to this subject. Did you realise that? Do you agree?
AM True! Yes, which is fine. Because I thought that you were going into this more poetic dialogue with Joseph Beuys, which seems very fitting to your practice. I think that you unearthed some very obscure parts of the work of Joseph Beuys, like the air pump, the Unterwasserbuch, Brennender Gully. All these things are super interesting; they tell us a lot about the art of the time, but they are not in mainstream discourse, and that is what makes them so fascinating.
LL Yes, the objects and documentation we chose are very open hopefully, I think that allows for freedom of association.
AM True. I am very excited and very much looking forward to finding out about the audience’s reaction to this exhibition.
LL Yes, very much.
AM It is your first solo show in Germany, isn’t it?
LL Absolutely. Yes. New territory.