What (supernatural) gift would you most like to possess?
I’d like to fly…
Can you describe your most recent ecstatic visual experience?
I am intrigued by romantic drawings from the 1810s right now, Peter von Cornelius, Schnorr von Carolsfeld and those other guys from the Nazarene Movement.
And, well, the quality of Chris Ware’s work drives me insane.
Of all your works, past and present, which is your favorite? Why?
Please describe it.
I am mostly in love with my newer works, if they are reasonable. There are two pieces I show in Diepenheim that drive me crazy. In the wood inlay series Intarsia, there is a one-eyed extraterrestrial woman, guess it’s a woman, with a baby – a one eyed baby of course – in her arms. And the baby cries. It is cute, it’s kitsch, but also moving. A flying saucer hovers above her and functions as a halo. In the other one, the one-eyed sits and stares in flowing water, dipping a stick, very melancholic. It’s the water under Frank Lloyd Wright’s house Falling Water and the house is in all its beauty above her on the hill. The vegetation has gone and the extraterrestrial being sits and stirs the water with a stick … and the wooden materiality makes it all very stiff, retro, but since the shapes are very comic it’s like an ethnographic object left from modernity. I just love them.
Can you describe a scene from a film that particularly affected you?
I love Blade Runner, especially the scene where the Nexus dies on the roof. Great Rutger Hauer – Dutch guy by the way!!
Which artist, living or dead, would you like to have visit your exposition?
Dante would be fantastic… Utamaro…I’d like to discuss with Utamaro, yes I do. Easier might be getting Mark Wallinger into play, whose irony and reflective intelligence but still deep honesty I admire.
If you could permanently remove an art movement from the history books, which one would it be, and why?
Hehe. If removing something always start with yourself. Visual Arts: Out!
Please describe your ideal visitor.
Female, around 50, dark hair, high heels, leather skirt and a deeeep voice. And she grunts slowly: ‘Yeahhhhhh. I love it’. And she kicks her heels into a piece, I guess.
And your ideal exhibition space?
Every non-art place is better than white cubes. Lots of history traces.
How would you explicate this exhibit to your parents?
Look mom, it’s like walking through a fairy tale, you are never sure what magic forces the images possess and what they mean. But you know, they are connected and it is essential for your survival to trust and to let yourself be tricked. Walk through the show and put the pieces together and if you have a story and you really believe that it is the story than that is the story indeed. It’s for the spooky evil that hovers over your little pension money and you never quite grasp it, what they talk about when they say CRISIS.
And dad, let’s go upstairs to the wood inlay works. You were a carpenter and you know how tricky it is to give wood a good finish. Its only eight different types of wood – that’s what the craft people in India work with – not more and not less. Yes, I worked with people in Mysore in India. They do it all by hand and they are really good at it. I was deeply impressed. Not one machine. What’s on the pictures? Well, I don’t know if that matters here. It’s science fiction but since it is old science fiction it might be more of a fairy tale. I used a quote from a movie from your youth and you might know it – did you see Forbidden Planet in the fifties? Not? Well, it’s in there. I made a melancholic review of modern belief in the future, in the shape of a slow and traditional technique. The wood objects look like remnants from an ethnological museum. They are just beautiful, you know…
What do you not want the visitor to miss while visiting the exhibition?
The narratives connecting the pieces.
What do you not want the visitor to see?
Mistakes.
What would you be (doing), if you weren’t an artist?
I would be dead.

Quimby The Mouse from This American Life on Vimeo.

^{Chris Ware, QUIMBY THE MOUSE, 2009, music: Andrew Bird, EUGENE}