October 1, 2006
Interview with Joseph Leo Koerner
Mark Thwaite of ReadySteadyBook has published an interview with art historian Joseph Leo Koerner that discusses Dürer, Caspar David Friedrich, his book The Reformation of the Image (University of Chicago Press), and modern and contemporary artists and art historians. An excerpt:
Still, I was raised in a household that confessed the heretical creed that nothing of enduring value would ever produced under the banner of Modernism. And I became an art historian partly as a response to (or as Freud might say, as repression of) this primal critical scene; I therefore place little weight on my personal judgements on modern art, though that does not keep me from eclectically loving many contemporary painters—Gerhard Richter, Anselm Kiefer, Ed Ruscha, and Francesco Clemente are all figures who have meant a lot to me.I feel much freer approaching contemporary photographers. I am a huge admirer of Jeff Wall, and hearing him explain his procedures made me even more fascinated by his example. I enjoy the big photos of Andreas Gursky, partly because I find the modern spaces he photographs naturally beautiful to begin with—similarly the coal mines shot by the Bechers. Having spent much of my life in Vienna, I am fascinated by the nostalgic element of early photographs (Atget) and by the magical photograms made by Adam Fuss. I was bowled over by the first installation I visted by Ilya Kabakov. I am especially intrigued by the installations that feature deliberately obsolete oil paintings; they’re painted by Kabakov, but purport to be by some unknown artist working without a public somewhere in Russia. These, together with the particular apartment house interiors Kabakov creates, transport me back to my childhood in Vienna, where my father was took us every year, and where he painted his peculiar canvases often without any public to see them.
[ . . . ]
These days the books currently on my shelf that I reach for most often are ones by Bruno Latour, Michael Taussig, Valentin Groebner, and Miguel Tamen. The authors I return to, again and again over the years, and with changing responses, are Martin Heidegger, Hans Blumenberg, Carl Schmitt, and Paul de Man. When I feel I am losing my voice and need to find it again, I read Wallace Stevens, Sigmund Freud, and Franz Kafka—I listen to their cadences and how they reason about completely unreasonable or unspeakable things. When I feel I am losing my intellectual energy, try to write something about my father. Ambivalence is a great energizer, I think.