MUSEUM RITTER - Interview Werner Bauer

After beginning with representational art you were quick to turn your back on figuration and embrace geometrical abstraction. Did Constructivist and Concrete Art serve as a model for your artistic production, and what acted as a real spur for you?

In point of fact Constructivist and Concrete Art provided a kind of anchor while I was searching for a direction that really suited me. I was able to moor myself here and create a basis for myself which I have continued to build on to this day. The alphabet of Concrete Art immediately proved to be a very suitable means for realizing my artistic ideas. Naturally I received outside stimulus. I realized that I did not see myself as a painter, because for me the point of departure was always the material.

Your early objects are chiefly made of wood. They are mostly square objects, to which you apply elements in specific patterns and structures. These works suggest spatial depth and motion. What interested you in this?

With the wood objects it was initially a tool, a mortising drill, that caught my attention. Working with a wooden board, this drill created simultaneously in and on the wood a large negative circular column with a small circular column in the middle every time I used it. These two forms struck me as something quite wonderful. At that time I also discovered the beauty of serialism, which has never released me from its clutches.

From the 1970s on you created works with polished Perspex elements that produce a virtual motion. During this period you inquired into the way treated Perspex bodies refract light. Was this your answer to Op Art?

Constructing objects in a serial manner using pieces of shaped Perspex opened up a lot of new possibilities for me. A structure consisting for instance of almost serial parts, which differed only minimally from one another on the basis of how they were ground, was particularly telling for me. I studied the way the light was refracted, but wanted to distinguish myself clearly from works I knew from elsewhere that used industrially made ribbed glass. I wanted to create my own individual handmade elements.

A large portion of your work is devoted to light; one could describe your œuvre as a fascinating interweaving of light, movement and space. How long have you worked with light, and what is it that interests you in this artistic examination of an intangible, immaterial element?

By light I understand natural and artificial light. Ever since my Perspex works I have worked with both kinds of light. And both forms of motion appear in them: apparent motion, which is caused by the movement of the beholder before the objects, and genuine motion, as is produced for instance by a motor. Sunlight has always existed. Artificial light has become one of the important elements of our times, but sadly it has also been misused because if employed to excess, in connection with frantic motion, all too often it recalls a funfair or advert rather than art.

You have experimented from the very start with different materials and techniques, and have an exceptional talent for placing new materials in the service of art. How and when did you discover silicone as a light carrier?

The first silicone light objects were done in 1981. I discovered quite by accident that this transparent silicone that you can buy in cartridges for building work could be used as a material: I had inadvertently placed a sheet of Perspex on a patch of silicone that had oozed out of its cartridge. And standing beside that was a fluorescent light. My growing anger at the spoilt sheet of Perspex quickly gave way to astonishment as I noticed that the sheet lit up at the spot where it lay on the patch of silicone. Normally the light that is conducted through a piece of Perspex is invisible as a result of total internal reflection inside the plastic. It can only emerge at the cut edges. But the contact with the silicone eliminated the total internal reflection at this point and allowed the light to spill out. I at once realized that this discovery would have a great impact on my work.

You manufactured all of your works yourself, and unlike other artists never ran a large studio with lots of assistants. You cut the foils for your works yourself by hand, and then structured the parts on a support. As a result, you are very often referred to in the literature as an artist of structures and light. Is that an apt description?

That is certainly right. My works with light almost always aim at coming up with structures that not only make the properties of a certain material visible, but also fit my visual ideas.

Eugen Gomringer has written that you "arrange light". What exactly does that mean?

The essence of light lies in the way it extends in all directions. In my works it is prevented from doing so, whether by being enclosed in a box or by arrangements in which discrete forms are produced by the laws of refraction, or even by the use of other materials in which light creates clear or ambiguous forms by means of cutting or bending.

Your works never have titles. They are clearly designated, mostly with letters of the alphabet which can be read as abbreviations of the materials you have used, together with a number. Why don't your works have poetic titles?

I have no objection if my works come across as poetic. But I find titles misguided for Concrete artworks, because they do not try to imitate nature or natural phenomena. In the catalogue by the Museum für konkrete Kunst in Ingolstadt that appeared in 2005 on Eugen Gomringer's 80th birthday, he writes that Max Bill declared that creating structures must be regarded as an essential feature of Concrete Art. Add to that the two terms care and precision and you arrive at my works. The poetry that people sometimes wish to find in a work is too personal and subjective for it to be generalized in a title.

When one looks at the developments in luminokinetics, we see that artists have always been dependent on the current state of the technology. So it may be said in all conviction that your artistic production is visionary. By constantly experimenting and trying out novel materials for your art, you have anticipated and stepped beyond the current state of the research.

What is interesting for me is the knowledge that many of my materials, and in particular the OLF film, prove in quite an astonishing way to be materials of our times. This film presents extremely subtle visual experiences and, through the prismatic structures, also allows the additional experience of perceptual confusion and overload. The aesthetic use of this film mirrors in some ways our society's reactions to a world that is becoming increasingly hard to take in.

Wenn man die Entwicklung der Lichtkinetik betrachtet, so sind Künstler immer vom aktuellen Stand der Technik abhängig gewesen. Man kann Ihr künstlerisches Schaffen daher mit Überzeugung als visionär bezeichnen. Durch Ihre kontinuierlichen Experimente und das Erproben neuartiger technischer Materialien für die Kunst haben Sie den aktuellen Stand der Forschung antizipiert und überschritten.

Für mich ist die Erkenntnis interessant, dass sich viele meiner Werkstoffe und hier besonders die OLF-Folie in verblüffender Weise als Material unserer Zeit erweisen. Diese Folie bietet ganz subtile Seherlebnisse und sie birgt durch die Prismenstruktur zusätzlich das Erlebnis von Irritation und Überforderung der Wahrnehmung in sich. Die ästhetische Verwendung dieser Folie spiegelt in gewisser Weise die Reaktionen unserer Gesellschaft auf eine immer unübersichtlicher werdende Welt wider.