Oh Rats!
Gereon Krebber and Rachel Withers in conversation
Rachel Withers: Gereon, let’s talk about these strange and disquieting sculptures. They take the form of mobiles and feature (among other things) the bodies of rats, so they have definite scope to spark controversy. Let’s state straight away that these rats are a commercially farmed reptile food, so their ethical status as a material is arguably similar to that of pork chops – or is maybe less controversial even than that, since pet or zoo reptiles can hardly “go veggie”! I imagine some viewers read them in quite a “raw” way and worry about them in relation to animal rights, but in the context of your studio practice I’d prefer to think about them in a “cooked” way (to borrow Lévi-Strauss’s distinction), as a continuation of your work’s persistent enquiry into thing-ness – into the interactions of subjects and objects, and the appearance and properties and status of live, dead and never-alive “stuff”.
Gereon Krebber: Yes: I think these mobiles take us to a very delicate point, a kind of crux between raw and cooked, nature and artifice. As you say, the rats are pet food from a pet shop – you buy them in frozen packs of five, looking very much like something you might have for dinner (or rather what a reptile might have for dinner). So, they are already quite “cooked”, and the making process has rendered them even more cooked, literally and metaphorically. They were defrosted, gutted and treated with formalin before being reinforced with steel wires and then baked in a kiln at about a hundred and ten degrees Celsius for 900 minutes. After that I coated them in a specific soft, malleable form of bitumen, so they are all black: they are essentially petrified or mummified. Their tails play a key role in the way that we read them, but they are completely artificial, made out of epoxy resin. So are their rather panicked, frantic poses – it’s a theatrical, constructed effect, not actual behaviour.
On one hand their “ratness” operates strongly as a signifier of nature rather than artifice and we experience a strong kind of mimetic impulse to feel sorry for them; but on the other, they are palpably estranged: black, like cartoon silhouettes, very complicatedly constructed and far from natural. They instil strongly contradictory reactions of compulsion and repulsion, playing on our senses and finding a kind of point between the specific (as in details such as paws and whiskers) and the abstracted. There is a faint echo of the way the plaster casts of the voids left by human bodies at Pompeii impact us: generic and museal, but also absolutely legible as real bodies. The rats exist at a similar contradictory point of being both neutralised and delivering a sense of physical threat. Counterbalanced by pieces of metal and circular mirrors that have been partially eroded, they are arranged in an “order which is not an order”, as a kind of swarm – apparently lacking a system, but existing in space at a kind of orderly distance from one another, as you find in a swarm. They deliver a kind of shock, but it’s a complicated and insidious one. It usually takes viewers some time to join the dots and register what they are looking at.
RW: Your sculptures’ capacity (at times) both to attract and repel has been interestingly discussed in relation to theories of abjection. Hans-Jürgen Lechtreck writes about their “unsettling ambiguity” and judges their “the haptic, olfactory and gustatory associations” to be “so strong that they immediately reach the vegetative nervous system”, and he reads this a material attack on the stabilising, rationalising and de-temporalising effects of the art museum as institution. I wouldn’t disagree with that, but I am drawn to the idea of value as a framework for thinking about your media. Western sculptural media traditionally start from a position of relatively high value (marble, bronze, fine woods and so on) that is further elevated by the activity of the artist. Your “palette” of materials keeps expanding and it includes supposedly low-value or everyday substances (types of food such as oatmeal or mayonnaise or jelly, or these rats; basic DIY-store materials and so on) in a way that seems to transcend a kind of “high-low” binary. Connected to this, I still remember a project proposal you made years ago for a sewage plant, a plan involving lighting and a glass panel that would have highlighted the raw sewage as a sculptural object. However, your use of media doesn’t strike me as an inversion of value (transgressively inviting people to regard turds as art, for instance!) but as a deeper destabilisation of ideas of value per se. These mobiles, bizarrely rancid and elegant at the same time, seem to do this.
GK: Well, the sewer proposal you mention was made a long time ago, and today the facility no longer exists: paradoxically, a huge sum of money was spent turning the site back into “nature”! However, the idea of value is definitely interesting in relation to these pieces. While I was making them, I was simultaneously trying to work out why the concept of mobiles interested me, asking myself “what does this form do”? It gives objects a kind of networked quality – the separate material elements are literally given value and “weight” by being balanced against one other. Alexander Calder is probably the sculptor who we associate with mobiles, but his structures are seemingly aerial, lightweight, in continuous motion. On the other hand, Sterling Ruby’s mobiles emphasise instability – they are literally askew. I went another way again, by making mobiles that are essentially immobile, but still preserve the idea of a kind of ideal – maybe we might say “Platonic” – balance. Their ingredients, the polished mirrors and the rats, are poised on exactly the same “level”, and yes, that does invite reflections on value and comparison, by bringing different, unexpected substances into strange kinds of alignment.
I’ve recently been working with ceramics, thanks to a half-year residency in the Netherlands at EKWC, the European Ceramic Workcentre. Using the Centre’s huge kilns, I made large slab-built building-like structures from very heavily grogged clay and metallic glazes. They are earthy and heavy, deformed and knocked around, collapsing – but when the lustrous metallic glaze is added they feel lavish and luxurious. The glazes are fluid and almost tasty, like strawberry jam or creamy yogurt. They are both constructed and deconstructed, inhabiting a contradictory state of decay and luxuriousness. Questions of value could definitely be applied to these too – the process continues!
RW: In works other than these, you have treated words and speech as a kind of material to be remodelled, pulverised and pressed into new forms. In your ‘Laberflash’ performances you and a collaborator energetically move around the gallery space. launching utterances at each other over a set 3-hour-period of time, with a disregard for the conventional value of coherence. I’ve never attended one of these explosive-sounding events, but the concept struck me as a kind of language stress-test: just how much energy can be poured into units of language before they break?
GK: I’m sorry to disappoint you, but in reality the Laberflash is more like an extreme version of an artist’s talk. It’s three hours of nonstop, full-on dialogue with the audience in front of the artworks. You are right that it’s usually very fast-paced and it includes sharp and confrontational points as well as softer questions. However it remains comprehensive and coherent: it links directly to what is visible in the gallery. We’ve all experienced the lecture-theatre style of artists’ talk where more time is spent listening to words rather than looking at actual artworks; the Laberflash is an antidote to that. Rather than slump in a chair in a stuffy lecture theatre, the audience is invited to walk and talk within the exhibition over a sustained period. Attenders are free to come and go, but in practice most people stay with the process for a surprisingly long time. Yes, it’s a stress test on the stamina of all the participants, and it certainly involves making lots of loose associations. However, it sets up a great basis for struggling both with words and things. From my point of view, thoughts and arguments can be processed differently via this approach.
RW: To conclude, I have a double question – I hope that’s OK. Firstly, in a previous conversation, I noted that you are not alone in finding dead rats rather compelling. Philosopher Jane Bennett opens her book Vibrant Matter with an account of a revelatory moment walking on a city street. Looking down at the gutter, she sees a discarded glove, a “dense mat of oak pollen”, a stick, a bottle cap and “an unblemished dead rat”, and this constellation of stuff forces a perception on her: that (in some autonomous fashion) it has assembled itself. It possesses a kind of intentionality, albeit one that’s very hard for humans to understand. Bennett also speculates that artists are particularly attuned to this strange, inchoate intentionality of matter. Stuff “talks” to them more audibly than to most of us, asking – indeed demanding – that they attend to it, “curate” it or interact with it, in a conversation that sets aside the usual criteria of material value. I wonder what you think about that idea: to put it crudely, do you boss your materials, or do they boss you?
Secondly, I wondered about your active interest in art theory and aesthetics, and wider philosophies of and scientific investigation into the nature of stuff. Here, again, I think I spot a subversion of value. Your wide-ranging interest in theory is paradoxically practical and impure; you treat ideas and theories (of art, and about stuff) as further raw material, useful in so far as they trigger, mediate or expand possibilities of sculptural making in the studio. Theory is important to you as a generative substance, another kind of raw material. Is that a fair call?
GK: In response to the first question, I and the materials work on each other, in what is sometimes an uneasy relation. It all takes place within the making process, but I would say that stuff starts to feel animated and almost alive to me even before I am dealing with it as material. I don’t mean that in a literaI (hylozoistic or vitalist) sense, but I do feel that at the central core of my work there is an immanent sense of a kind of subtle life within matter, a response to an ‘’élan materielle” that is very much in line with current thinkers such as Bennett.
To your second question I’d say yes. I have a maybe peculiar interest in theory: I stay strangely distanced from it, sometimes almost hostile to it. I insist on a principal, deep-rooted difference between theory and practice: an incommensurability. They perform complementary tasks. They can’t replace each other and that’s why we need them both, but even if they may have a fruitful relationship, they don’t need each other. I employ theoretical sets within my work and I even borrow theorists’ vocabulary. Obvious examples would be from classical art theories by writers such as Rosalind Krauss or Wolfgang Welsch, but some of my favourite thinkers – Nassim Nicholas Taleb or Andreas Reckwitz, for example – are much less cited within the arts. That noted, I wouldn’t risk calling their thoughts “raw material” for my work. To borrow an image from a friend, I try to have their insights built into the foundations, as it were, and not put them “on the façade”.
Gereon Krebber, Detail photograph of Rat pack I, 2016, Mobile with mummified rats, bitumen, concrete, steel, metal tubes
Gereon Krebber Rat pack I, 2016, Mobile with mummified rats, bitumen, concrete, steel, metal tubes, width 260 cm
Installation view of Gereon Krebber - Keramocringe, Skulpturenmuseum Glaskasten Marl, 2021
Front: Dyaden, 2014
Mid: Smavos, 2021
Rear: Tnösis, 2020
Installation view, Gereon Krebber - Keramocringe, Skulpturenmuseum Glaskasten Marl, 2021
Left: Hut (Over the top), 2021
Mid: Inzwischen (Verbrannte Passage), 2021
Right: Agiens, 2020
Gereon Krebber, Zygnius (Intruder), 2013, Foil, filling, timber, 25 m long, installed at K20-Kunstsammlung NRW, Düsseldorf
Gereon Krebber, Zygnius (Intruder), 2013, Foil, filling, timber, 25 m long, installed at K20-Kunstsammlung NRW, Düsseldorf
Gereon Krebber
Front: Detail of Depridog, 2020, H: 145 x 90 x 80 cm, plinth: concrete 82 x 82 x 25 cm
Rear: Brevis (Kleine Schwester), 2021, H: 115 x 55 x 50 cm
Tape, foil, Polyurethane foam, spray paint, epoxy resin, metal, concrete, plinth: 58 x 58 x 18 cm
