VI.
Installation view of the exhibition “Let me disclose the gifts reserved for age” at Rat Hole Gallery, Tokyo, 2011. Courtesy Rat Hole Gallery.
ART iT: In Berlin the first time we met we discussed how you started out as a painter, and how you compose sculptural installations almost in the way that a painter would arrange elements on a canvas. Is there any other relationship between painting and sculpture for you? Does a painting ever become sculpture?
TD: Painting might become three-dimensional or project into space, but now increasingly I use it as an element in sculptural arrangements. I like for viewers to be able to see the work from all directions. I don’t like to direct where people should look, which is what already happens when you put a painting on the wall. Sculpture allows you to have your own point of view.
The only work in which I purposely tried to direct perspective was Archäologie Politik Politik Archäologie, Archäologie Politik Politik Archäologie, Archäologie Politik Politik Archäologie (Archaeology, Politics…, 2008) and that was because I was responding to the history of the Museum Kurhaus Kleve, where the Kaiser had constructed a position from which he could see the perspective of all the buildings in the town converging at a single point. I wanted to play with this, so I covered everything up and specifically directed the sightlines in the space.
But in general I like allowing for viewers to approach the work from different directions. Seeing a work from one side would be fine, but seeing it from another perspective the same work would be completely different. It allows viewers to have different possible relations to the work.
ART iT: Is there any significance to your use of color?
TD: There are periods in which I work with specific colors. For a long time I used a violet-blue shade, which came from the wall paint of my childhood school. There is also a greenish-blue color that was commonly painted on the walls of hospitals and other institutions in Tbilisi, which I hated as a child but find to be so comforting today in the way that it embraces the space.
ART iT: What does it mean when you paint one of these colors onto something you’ve made?
TD: I don’t know. Sometimes I know, but sometimes I forget that I know or why I know, and then I read something and remember again. I need something to remind me.
But forgetting is an important component of the work. It’s not about erasing – more like letting go, because there is already too much information or too much involvement happening. So making things and then leaving them alone plays an important role in my process. While I’m making the sculptures I might work for an hour and then at the point when I’m most deeply involved I would stop and try to make some banal, unrelated thing, or cook, or wash the dishes, or play some game, in order to completely escape from and forget the space. Then when I come back I would see something new and carry on. Otherwise I can’t do it. I always have to go away, forget and come back.
For example there’s a piece in the current exhibition. I was working on it a lot and trying to balance all the elements together in an impossible way, with this woven part and plywood base resting on an iron stick standing in the middle of the space – and I actually got everything to balance. I left it the whole day and it stayed standing, but then at one point I didn’t like it. Even though the work was very attractive when it was balancing, and dramatically showed how all this weight could hold up, something about it made me uncomfortable. I needed to see the plywood base, which I had painted black on one side, as a frontal aspect of the work. So I ended up taking everything down and leaning it against the wall.
ART iT: In Berlin we also talked about remembering and forgetting, and came up with an interesting concept for understanding the differences between fiction and story-telling in terms of empty space and existing space, although I can no longer remember how it went exactly.
TD: When I was a child I was always fascinated by our capacity for memory. There’s always a specific image or moment that stays with you across the years, and I always questioned how it could be stamped in my mind. I tried several times to commit a situation to memory. It was like an exercise: ok, now I will remember this moment as it is happening. It only worked once, the first time. I was sitting on a leather chair eating an apple. I can always recall this image, but the other things only come on their own.
ART iT: In my interactions with my daughter I have had something of the reverse experience, where I am so completely in the moment with her that, even though it is almost hyper-real, I feel it escaping from memory as it’s happening. It’s like a quicksand effect where the impressions are so intense that they immediately collapse under their own weight. And then maybe that’s why we have poetry, which is not about actually remembering what happened to make you feel some way in a given moment – the moment itself is already gone – but rather about creating an analogue, a parallel reality for accessing something like that feeling.
TD: Yes. It can be through completely different words, or a description of a different space, but it can create a new instance of the same effect that happened inside you. It is impossible to fully translate anything. If something profoundly touches you then it is your experience alone and cannot be shared with others in exactly the same way.
ART iT: As an analogue, then, would you say poetry is a parallel structure to personal experience that is equidistant from – and therefore equally accessible to – everybody?
TD: Well, it explains things that I can’t explain to myself. I feel, but I can’t explain why, and then some words or phrases open up a way to express it. I remember when I was 12-years-old I would still think about things in a childlike way, and then there was a specific moment when I began to see things as an adult: I was at a birthday party naïvely playing with the other children when I overhead a conversation about a film that I had seen but interpreted literally, while the others had understood it in an entirely different way. Listening to them discuss the different aspects of the film that they found significant, I suddenly felt my mind opening and had a visceral experience of perceiving the film in a new way. And ever since then I have been able to see things symbolically. I can never forget this experience.
ART iT: But do your works resist the idea of meaning or significance?
TD: The works have no symbolism – not for me. I was talking about film or poetry, not sculpture. When I see other sculptural works I understand them through the language of my own experience. I recognize a similar language or an alien language or an exceptional language. This is a different thing from what I was saying about seeing something and having the experience of understanding it. That is not important for me at all in sculpture. What is important is the language I’m using.
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Thea Djordjadze: The Secret Border in Human Closeness