Hubertus von Amelunxen: Beate Gütschow, you have been awarded an ars viva prize within the frame of a call for submissions titled »Narration«. Close to thirty years ago, when the »condition postmoderne« was ushered in, Jean-François Lyotard spoke of the end of the narrative. We no longer have a goal, the ideologies are gone, religion no longer has a grip on us, capitalism is insecure, communism has failed, and now we have art, which is less intent on creating a future than on working with the material of the past, in the form of pastiche, paraphrase or plagiarism. Today, art on all levels, be it the fine arts, architecture, literature, up to video games, raises questions about the narrative, about what can be narrated. We shall return to this aspect of your young work later on in the conversation. You studied at the Hochschule der Bildenden Künste in Hamburg and passed your final exams in 2000 with a work which I was able to view at the time and - since it has no title - I allow myself to call »digital landscapes«. They are technical digital landscapes, but they are foremost removed, sublime landscapes which you produced in large formats, with the signum of technology at the edges and in the format of the pictures. When you think back to the year 2000, to your studies at the Hochschule der Bildenden Künste, can you retrace what led you to this work during the course of your studies?

Beate Gütschow: The idea was to reconstruct landscape paintings of the 17th and 18th century. The depiction of landscapes during this period followed a predefined scheme that I wanted to rebuild - but as photography. So the idea was there first, and then I started to take photographs. Beforehand, photography, for me, was merely a means to document my own installations. First there was the concept and then the implementation in the medium of photography.

Hubertus von Amelunxen: So you adopted a scheme, a grid of historical landscape painting?

Beate Gütschow: That’s right, a scheme to order reality: Painters at the time did exactly the same thing. They didn’t just go outside and paint a part of the real landscape either, they instead constructed and, above all, idealised a landscape. And that is precisely what I wanted to adopt. It is therefore a copy of a scheme of thought.

Hubertus von Amelunxen: So they are abstractions of landscapes?

Beate Gütschow: Yes, that’s right.

Hubertus von Amelunxen: Up into the 19th century, landscape painting - as you also say - was a construction, and models were indeed constructed, just like nowadays we calculate models using computers. Historically, your work ends at the moment when painters started to grasp time and space as actual coordinates for the picture on site and go out into the world, like William Turner.

Beate Gütschow: Exactly, that coincided with - or slightly preceded - the emergence of photography, namely, that landscape painting adapted to photography when it arose, it became more realistic. Particularly with C.D. Friedrich, the picture is no longer a stage where there is no reference to something outside; his paintings are much more partial, more photographic; the horizon suddenly runs through the picture, and there are things that could take place to the left and right of it and which are withheld from the viewer. Something changes in the depiction of landscapes, and this has to do with the influence of photography. This is where I make a cut in time. I don’t copy Friedrich but artists from the previous generation, such as Claude Lorrain and Thomas Gainsborourgh.

Hubertus von Amelunxen: Caspar David Friedrich died in 1840 and Turner reacted to the invention of photography by saying that he was glad that his oeuvre was already completed. »Et in arcadia ego«, was the notion of a paradisiacal state here on earth important for you?

Beate Gütschow: Idyll, or utopia, is a concept which I would like to use for orientation because I find that both work groups deal with utopia, one in a positive, the other in a negative way.

Hubertus von Amelunxen: When you speak of utopias, then these are places that do not exist but should. Places we should approach and orient our existence towards?

Beate Gütschow: Perhaps, because a utopia implies that it is doomed to failure, that it is an unattainable state ...

Hubertus von Amelunxen: Which means that any striving for a utopia, a City of the Sun, or any of the utopias we have been more or less familiar with for eight hundred years, would be doomed to failure?

Beate Gütschow: Yes, when viewed as a process. What if utopia is reached? What will happen then? The model of utopia is very static, it is disregarded that things will always continue. If the state of utopia could be reached, everything afterwards would become worse ...

Hubertus von Amelunxen: Maybe we shall return to the concept of non-place later on in connection with your architectural localisations. These digital landscapes also possess a sublime aspect, something that is not visible, and a horror.

Beate Gütschow: Yes, in this respect my work has a lot to do with the sublime, because it is very much concerned with exclusion. As opposed to direct photography, I am able to remove anything I don’t want. I can therefore deal with reality in a very rigorous manner. Exclusion is certainly the frightening aspect of the sublime.

Hubertus von Amelunxen: The montage in your work is not visible, yet at the same time we sense the seam of the cuts.

Beate Gütschow: Exactly. I work in such a way that the borders between the individual parts are not visible. Nevertheless, it is no secret that my photos are montages: With the landscapes, one catches on to the fake via one’s recollections: One doesn’t remember the motifs as real places, but is familiar with them from landscape paintings.

Hubertus von Amelunxen: The classical montage, the way it evolved in photography parallel to film in the 1920s, from Hanna Höch and Raoul Hausman to El Lissitzky and John Heartfield, attached a meaning to the line of montage, to the disparate separation and joining together. There was a narrative moment in the montage, namely, that the entire explosive force of the narration was situated precisely in this visible separation of totally heterogeneous picture elements which were joined together. You wipe out these lines, these separations, and shift the cut, and one’s expectation of it, to the entire picture surface. But it is only possible to follow this if, as a precondition, one possesses a certain historical knowledge required to recognise this break. You start with a very high degree of abstraction.

Beate Gütschow: Yes. There are two levels of reception with the landscape works: Either you just look at the photos, take them in directly without questioning them. That’s the naive level of reception which is possible due to the perfect montage. And then there’s the level of reception where you are familiar with the scheme of landscape painting, and the montage thus dissolves because the recognised scheme is considered alien in photography. For me, the first group of works was a reflection on digital photography. In the second group of works, on the other hand, I make use of the possibilities of montage much more as a matter of course, without having to underpin them conceptually.

Hubertus von Amelunxen: Is the question of digital photography, the question of manipulation, a matter of course for you today, in 2006?

Beate Gütschow: Yes, today I assume that the viewer knows that a photo could just as well have no equivalent in reality. There could equally be something that took place in front of the camera. I start from the assumption that the viewer considers both possibilities when looking at a photo.

Hubertus von Amelunxen: What role does »authenticity« then play for you? It was an ideological construction of the 19th century. When speaking of the authenticity of a picture, one speaks of the relation of viewer and picture and how a reality is constituted. Above all, however, the belief in the reality of the picture is constructed via the picture.

Beate Gütschow: I would rather like to work with the difference between what is depicted and reality. What is seen on the photo is very similar to what was in front of the camera, yet there is a huge difference which we often do not perceive. And I would like to point out this difference.

Hubertus von Amelunxen: You thus formulate an artistic concept. In regard to the upcoming sound film, Sergeij Eisenstein spoke of the dialectical montage. Sound was to act against the image so as to weaken any kind of illusionistic effect. And let’s think of 1960’s Conceptual Art, where artists worked with photography to make evident and highlight precisely the gap between a reproduction, a photographic reproduction and a genuine pictorial work. I would like to view your works in this tradition as well.

Beate Gütschow: Yes, that is correct. For example, I was occupied with Kosuth before starting with the landscapes. I studied the works with the chair, the chair as photo and the chair as concept. I find them very beautiful in their simplicity.

Hubertus von Amelunxen: Another conceptual artist, Victor Burgin, stated several years ago that the transition from analogue to digital photography would mean that we leave historical space, the space of the trace, of the negative, the space that provides a means of checking, and in a certain respect also the space of authenticity, of testimony, in favour of the discovery of psychological space - indeed viewed positively. Could you agree to this in regard to your two work cycles - also in the transition to the present architecture cycle, if one can and may call it so?

Beate Gütschow: Yes, I would relate that to the architecture cycle. It has something to do with time and the moment of shooting. Architecture sets a timeframe that reveals to the viewer when the photo was taken. Due to the fact that certain buildings are missing (e.g., the Twin Towers) there is an »afterwards«. Or through the presence of certain stylistic elements there is an »already«. In my pictures there is no uniform time of shooting. The source material was shot at different times and places. In the montage, I detach the source photo from the time and place of shooting.

Hubertus von Amelunxen: But at the same time, when you look at the works they are neither timeless nor placeless. Long dismissed, the »photographic fact« nevertheless remains. At the end of the 1920s, Salvador Dali called the photographic fact the securest carrier of a poetry between reality and surreality because, as Roland Barthes put it, the referent is attached to the picture. Parallel to the conceptual development of art there is a development of technologies, and one has the impression that both are converging. Your work, the way you now deal with architecture, when you say that you extract it from time, making it placeless, so to speak, actually speaks for this convergence. Nonetheless, you lend the architectures a new time and a new place.

Beate Gütschow: That’s right. When sampling and fragmenting like wild, the suspicion of arbitrariness could arise, that would be a danger, and in this context I would like to return to the »psychological space«. The architecture photos are my vision of the world. I escape from arbitrariness because I have a clear notion of the places the way I later conceive them in my photos. They are a summarisation of everything I see. That is, of course, subjective.

Hubertus von Amelunxen: You collect photos over a long period of time, store them on a computer and let them develop a psychological reality; you mix them with your own visions, projections, excavations, and condense everything to a new image. That is reminiscent of the layers of psychological space.

Beate Gütschow: But I do ask myself one question: How do I deal with reality? For example, I was in the Balkans last summer to take photos. In this former crisis region, I was confronted with the political reality. But despite this, I use the material just like any other, I process it in my own pictures. So, I naturally ask myself: What does this mean? What kind of dealing with reality is this?

Hubertus von Amelunxen: And do you have an answer?

Beate Gütschow: No.

Hubertus von Amelunxen: You have travelled a lot, that’s a concrete activity in time and space. You capture traces on these trips, you archive them using your own system of order, which is a double system, meaning your own personal one, your powers of recollection, your projections and suppressions, and the computer’s system of order, the memory that collects the images and keeps them available for further »processions«. You finally reach the point, as you have just described, when you newly combine the images, the rests of time. And I assume you have a pretty clear notion of which elements belong to each other, although they were taken from totally different time-spaces and points in time, to then create a new fictitious memory, as it were. And they can contain places of horror, like the Balkans or the war in Iraq, and we do not see all of this in your pictures, although your architecture works possess something very depressing. They are monochrome, black-and-white, they all deal with destruction or incompleteness, with barrenness, desertedness. One could say that they form the opposite to what the utopias or idylls effected, but they are very close to us. How does this come about?

Beate Gütschow: Yes, I think that architecture is always an expression of society and I believe that this is what my works are about: Precisely by collecting photos from different countries I produce a summarisation of what modernism has been. Perhaps a form of modernism that lies fifty years back, while we are already much further (in the future?). Modernism is disintegrating, it has not worked, and is now nothing more than a sort of shelter. It hasn’t proven itself. And it also stands for totalitarianism, which was also a part of modernism - giving orders and surveilling. In my works, I am more concerned with describing a by using architecture; it is not really about architecture but about the state.

Hubertus von Amelunxen: You have brought together architectures, architectural fragments or ruined architectures to form a possible narration. I have the sentence of Walter Benjamin in mind, that the idea of architecture would speak far better from a ruin than from any construction drawing. The buildings in your works are in the process of decay or are led a step further towards decay by the way you newly situated them in the surroundings. And where the architecture itself is not yet disintegrating on account of weather and time, you start off and lead the architecture to ruins. Do you consider your works to be allegorical?

Beate Gütschow: The second group of works, yes, the first, no. There are allegorical elements in the first works, but they are recycled: With Ruisdael, the trees have an allegorical character. I adopted that. In the second group of works, on the other hand, there are signs of an own allegory.

Hubertus von Amelunxen: Are the works part of an allegorical narration in which »life unwinds from death«?

Beate Gütschow: Photography itself could have something to do with that: ... It is always about the moment that already existed. But I also dissolve this again by combing many moments: I am not dependent on the one moment, I can always repeatedly intervene beforehand and afterwards.

Hubertus von Amelunxen: You traverse time. So the method of digital photography means that you join together elements from different points in time, thus creating not a synchronous but indeed a diachronic photography that traverses history. What role does your computer play?

Beate Gütschow: I do not really grant my computer a role of its own.

Hubertus von Amelunxen: Aha. You don’t respect it?

Beate Gütschow: Not really. It allows me to treat the photographic surface freely, the way I want to, but it does not really lead a life of its own, it only offers me the opportunity to deal with photography in a different way.

Hubertus von Amelunxen: But isn’t it the case that, because it offers you different opportunities, you arrive at different concepts due to this potential?

Beate Gütschow: That is correct and it is also a theme of my work: Not only to demonstrate what digitalisation enables, but also to show the altered perception of photography and thus of mediated reality. That is only possible with the computer.

Hubertus von Amelunxen: The tool cannot be viewed independently of what it produces and bears witness to, i.e., the creation and testimony of the tool is also included in the work.

Beate Gütschow: Maybe I can briefly point out how I relate to the image processing program Photoshop: I only use classical photographic tools, meaning I cut (the scissor), I add exposure (the dodge tool), I brighten up, I adjust the colours, more yellow, more red, and I retouch. These five Photoshop functions are enough for me. I don’t use the rest. These functions simulate old photographic tools. I do classical photography within new photography, so to speak, but simulated. By the way, I never worked with classical photography, that is maybe also quite interesting. I only started doing so when digital photography came up, because that’s when photography began interesting me. I have never made a print from a negative. I don’t even know how that’s done.
Two years ago I was faced with the decision whether I should start using digital cameras to shoot the source material (until then I had used analogue cameras and scanned the material). I decided against it because I felt the grain in the completed work was important: I found it nice that there is this inscription at the beginning of the process, this inscription-in-the-surface. And at the end, because I output the file to photo paper, a laser writes light onto the paper. The output is a retransfer to analogue photography. If one would look at it through a magnifying glass, one would not see pixels but the grain. In this respect my reference is analogue photography, which frames the process.

Hubertus von Amelunxen: That seems to be important for your treatment of materiality. In the sense of Vilém Flusser, you switch between different programs, the analogue and the digital.
I have one last question. After your exams in the year 2000, you quickly found a gallery, and just as quickly your works found collectors and an art audience. Exhibitions are becoming more frequent, yet you have been strictly working on only these two work cycles for seven years. The market, as the economy necessitates, is enormously voracious and constantly demands renewal. What is your stance towards this art market?

Beate Gütschow: I actually knew the moment I came up with the idea, and at the latest when I saw the first large prints of the landscapes, that this would function in the art market. But that was also an uncanny feeling. The fact that these works were so opulent and huge had to do with reasons immanent to the work, because it related to equally large paintings ... That my works were marketable was a side effect, so to speak. As an individual, I am rather self-sufficient, almost autistic - just like my work that treads paths of its own in the art world. In this respect it was unaccustomed for me to land in the art market. On the other hand it was, of course, good to not have to worry about money and to be able to work. Besides, I work very slowly, sometimes I only complete five works a year ... I produced two groups of works in seven years, which in market terms in very little, but it corresponds to my working method.

Hubertus von Amelunxen: I hope and wish that you can keep to this working method, because certainly at least two thirds of the photographic works on the market today will not endure, because they adapt to the rapidity and arbitrariness of the market. What is even worse, and this is something we also observe, is when a work that was formerly stringent work loses its substance with each new picture.

Beate Gütschow: Yes, stringent concepts tend to keep you captured, you have to find a way out!

Hubertus von Amelunxen: Of course. But that’s your chance, not a way out, but to perceive the consistency of the paths.