Extracts From Interview With Udo Kittelmann

From Total Strangers, Edition Cantz, Cologne, Germany, 1999

‘With Total Strangers, there was a circuit of uncertainty that went from the first meeting with the work in the gallery and back onto the street; you become uncertain of your position in relation to the work and these two spaces. That’s part of the big question; how do you renegotiate the relationship between making a picture of life and life. I am interested to work directly on life itself, to make the unmediated imaginative. Is there a way of turning things around so that the art, rather than being imposed on or privileged by the situation of the museum becomes the plinth by which you feel your own living and the world that supports it more powerfully?’

‘Sculpture is an act of faith in life, in its continuity. We all do things like this; we have a stone that we keep in our pocket which is a guarantee of life’s continuity, and it has to do with hoping that things will work out, that life will be okay.’

‘The body is a spaceship and an instrument of extreme subtlety, that communicates whether we recognise its communications consciously or not.’

‘The body is a language before language. When made still in sculpture it can be a witness to life and it can talk about this time now. We can use the space of art to face ourselves. The sculptures do not take their belonging to the world for granted, they are trying to find their place in it and they do not take the act of standing as a given; they are learning to stand.’

‘I am interested in the body because it is the place where emotions are most directly registered. When you feel frightened, when you feel excited, happy, depressed somehow the body registers it.’

‘The work comes from a lived moment and what I hope is that the viewer equally gives the sculpture a lived moment and that the way that the work is made and the way that the work works is similar: it stops time and makes a space... What I am making comes from myself but is not myself. It separates self from not self and in some ways it’s like looking, in the way that meditation looks or the way that psychoanalysis looks, taking a moment out of life so that it can then be reflected upon.’

‘The body is put together from these pieces of assembled mould taken at a particular time. That time has been fragmented, broken apart and then remade, healed in some way. It’s a fragmented or broken body that has been reconstituted. The wholeness had to be found again by being made again. They express the potential of being whole, and like the capability of standing they do not take it for granted.

‘Our place is the consciousness of another. The sculpture’s only real place is in the imagination of the viewer. Strange that something so physical can only find a real place within the mind.’

‘I’m more interested in what happens the other side of the gesture; where it stems from and perhaps where gesture is irrelevant. What is the internal condition of this space of becoming, and is it possible in some way to expose that space, baring something, using the skin, the envelope of life, as a membrane that can convey the inner condition of being?’

‘My work has come out of a moment of concentrated being. Not an illustration of it: a registration. I’m not interested in being the next step in a trajectory of western visuality, I would like you to feel that there is something coming out from under the skin.’