ICONOfly, Paris Oktober 08

Diary of a performance

Interview between David Galloway and Claudia Rogge

Your way of starting a new piece often reminds me of the work of Pina Bausch. She also asks her performers to improvise simple gestures or situations and then weaves the results into a choreography. In this way, her dancers become her collaborators. Is this a relevant comparison for you?

Dance theater is important for me, of course. So are opera and theater in general. It’s also true that my subjects make a direct contribution to the aesthetics and the emotional impact of a work. The difference is that the actual “performance” takes place on a one-to-one basis, through the camera lens, and later I create the interrelationships myself on the computer. What the performers have delivered is my raw material, my visual vocabulary.

Once that vocabulary is complete, you then gather the contributors into a mass in which the individual’s identity may seem threatened, even extinguished. Is this intentional?

Only in the sense that they become supernumeraries or members of the chorus – that the ensemble becomes more important than the individual player. During the actual shooting, however, what I’m trying to coax from the performers is something spontaneous and personal and open-ended. This is where the strategies of performance art become important. But I admit that I’m fascinated by the concept of the mass in all its guises: parades, processions, refugees, concertgoers, rallies, football fans, prisoners, exiles, etc., etc.

Historically, this is a touchy subject for a German artist.

Of course it is, and that’s why we need the assistance of thinkers like Siegfried Krackauer and Elias Canetti. Influenced as we all are by mass culture and mass media, we should rethink our attitude toward the human mass and not merely see it as something primitive or threatening. Beyond the political, social and psychological aspects of the theme, there is an aesthetic of uniformity that fascinates me. Think of a flock of starlings or the choir performing Verdi’s “Requiem” and you have a very different take on “the masses.”

Doesn’t this subordination to a group mean the surrender of a personal, private identity?

On the contrary. Despite all the talk about globalization and growing uniformity, never before has there been such a chance for the individual to express a unique style. Yet at the same time, we’re bombarded by copies and copies of copies – most obviously, in the world of fashion. The dilemma affects us all, in virtually every aspect of our lives: in the supermarket or the boutique, in airports and furniture stores. We’re swallowed up by the mass, yet we have extraordinary chances to express our own individuality. This is a theme I try to explore through the mechanisms of performance.

Isn’t there something contradictory about working only with individuals but taking the crowd as your theme?

I create my own artificial crowds, and the notion of the artificial is central to my own private aesthetic. After all, photography itself is a serial, reproductive process. With the aid of new technologies, I can push this even farther, generating my own masses. But the strength of the work as a whole lies in the performances of individuals. It is, I suppose, a classic case of the whole being greater than the sum of its parts.