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Gianni
Jetzer: I find it striking that your works are very often
linked with mass-media or commercial products. Are they media
ready-mades, or inventions of your own?
Olaf
Breuning: I like to choose subjects that I come accross
in everyday life. I take them over, make changes, form new
combinations. So it's not just a cut and paste job. More a
kind of remix. All my subjects are references to the world
out there, I mean to fashion, advertising, films, etc. They
are also visions that have not been internalized or fantastic
dream images like the Surrealists produced.
GJ:
Scanning's a word you hear a lot from trend-hunters now. They
mean looking at magazines and fanzines for hour and hours.
Is systematically looking at current image production part
of your work as an artist as well?
OB:
Up to a point, yes. I even try to see things in an unprejudiced,
almost mechanical way, so that I can look at new visual material
as openly as possible. I definitely don't want to have a world
view or a filter that would distort the way I see things.
The life-style idea, which is everywhere nowadays, is far
too restricted. I deliberately keep my input as broad and
as open as I can so that I can interpret things in new ways.
GJ:
How do you make your choices? What are the images that stick?
OB:
I'm looking for visual language that has some sort of charisma
and can make its presence felt amidst all the visual codes
and statements. In brief: I select the strongest visual stimuli.
This can be a vacuum cleaner or a particular model's make-up.
Sometimes these visual stimuli are linked with products and
then I try to let the goods into my creative language. What
fascinates me about the way commercial messages are put over
is the pragmatic element, the fact that being comprehensible
is such a big deal. It's language that's accessible to anyone.
You often see clips on MTV that can move people emotionally
in a really simple way. The best ones have something enigmatic
about them. We often code things too much in art. Not many
people know about iconography and can get through to see what
a picture's actually saying. I think this coding is completely
unnecessary.
Story-Telling
as a Reality Scan, Interview with Gianni Jetzer
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