Finding solutions
Maja Majer -Wallat in conversation
with Barbara Weidle
Barbara Weidle: You have always been an artist, even though you worked in other professions for a very long time. How did it come about that you have now taken up this artistic work actively again?
Maja Majer -Wallat: On the one hand, I interrupted my artistic work, but I have also transferred it to another level. When I found myself in Bonn at this desk in the Art and Exhibition Hall. I asked myself the question: What am I as an artist, a master student of Eduardo Paolozzi, here in the Bundeskunsthalle? As a mother of two children with everything that goes with it? Where has my art actually gone? What is the resulting question? What is creative work and the production of art? I think: artistic creativity is not dependent on the production of a visible object, but it can be applied continuously in all areas and in every phase of life. That's what artistic creation is for me. I have brought this into in my work as a press spokeswoman for the Bundeskunsthalle, in life with my children, with ten Au Pair girls over the years, with friends, with parties, with illnesses, with finding the best solutions. One must find solutions all the time. Since I feel my life as self-chosen, solving the resulting problems is only a consequence that has always interested me. Similar to an artistic production.
BW: I thought you would answer the question about the artistic work in that way. I find this attitude very conclusive and have been able to observe it over a long time.
MM -W: When I finished being an employee, and even before that, when the children had left home, it was absolutely clear to me: There has to be some kind of orientation that would open up channels for my energy.
BW: What was your plan?
MM -W: Originally, I had planned to return to the craft part of ceramic production.
But that didn't work out because my hands didn't want that anymore. I had three operations on my hands, and the doctor told me, that it was better not to do that. Then I gave away the large lectric kiln in which I had been firing sculptures, at least the smaller ones. Then I found myself in a certain dilemma, because I didn't know what to do next. I then came across Jean-Francois Billeter's book A Paradigm, and simply by reading this little volume, I found myself in a different mind set, that I could embrace.
BW: What attracted you to this book, to the philosophical thinking in confrontation with Chinese traditions?
MM -W: I think it was in the first sentence, as describes how he sits in a café early in the morning and knows that he wouldn’t be disturbed, that he could follow his thoughts and let himself drift. He casually listens to the conversations of the others and lets his thoughts flow.
It's a kind of stepping out of the linear into the lateral.
BW: What kind of state of mind has the reading put you in?
MM -W: It was a state of opening into looking and observing what was happen-ing. During this time I was again in Brittany in various gardens, and in particular in that of a friend who also grows poppy plants.
BW: Why did you choose poppies as the artistic raw material for your work? How did you come up with it?
MM -W: On the one hand, the poppy is arbitrary. It could have been something else too. But after this opening and to the perception of beauty, I came across these poppies in Finistère. I saw the opium poppy in full bloom. Opium poppies have
incredible colors: almost black, purple, orange, yellow, red. I noticed that these flowers all have wonderful pistils. I cut out the pistil of one of these flowers because I thought: "Flower pistils. It was interesting that this is called a pistil," and I started to stamping with them. That was the primal moment (Urmoment) of opening up completely, associatively and also emotionally, that led me to my action. What came out of it, has astonished me. Goosebumps.
BW: What was that exactly?
MM -W: The fact that through this simple doing, a language of signs emerges. What might be possible there. With that I am still busy. It is not so easy to get to these stamps.
BW: A sign language and also a dynamic that reveals itself there.
MM -W: Half a year later, in the autumn, I went to Brittany again and found some-where a pile of these discarded withered flower stalks, which then encapsulate so wonderfully. Something made me to put this pile in a bag and take it with me. I built myself a workstation, a table by the window, with a view of nature and the sea. Allowed myself to a very waste horizon. Then I took what was there, a tube of glue, a pair of scissors, a kitchen knife, and started to experiment with these capsules. I used everything that came up, and everything I could find. The poppy capsules with stems, I took them back to Cologne. Here I have then set up a studio.
BW: The way you describe it, was it a natural process and not a decision at all?
MM -W: A natural process in that I felt something. I just followed that, as I do,
when I'm thirsty, I get a glass of water. So
had this feeling of just normal doing. Then I made further formal attempts, completely without goal. Very important. Without a goal, without time pressure. Maybe as free as I have never been in my life. I recognized the drawing quality of the stems, just as they are created in nature. For example, the stems of cultivated poppies are straight and rather boring.
While in Finistère, where it storms and the flowers fall over, the stems straighten up again to natural movements. These movements I have perceived and then arranged the stems linearly, always with in view their graphic quality. In a next step, I defined the beginning and the end of the lines by joining two stems with capsules at their ends. Joining them together. I took two, to define the beginning and end of the line. I first arranged them on the wall. In a second step I hung them under the ceiling.
BW: How did this step come about?
MM -W: During this time, I once again dealt with my dyslexia, which had been a drama in my life, and talked to a specialist about language, expression and other things. At the same time, an American artist was visiting, with whom I also talked about dyslexia. There seem to be special talents in this field. One of the most outstanding special talents is the sense of space. And that seems to be the case with me. I have a very good spatial thinking and I can sense volume. I didn't recognize that as a quality before. I believe that this has been a very important step. Afterwards, as I often do, I lay on the sofa looking at the installation of the stems on the wall. Then all of a sudden I thought: "If I connect these stems vertically to each other and only attach the top stem, and then and then when I walk past it, this drawing will move on the wall. That's what I did right away.
BW: What was the result?
MM -W: In fact, it was very beautiful, because there was always a slight
movement that arose with a breeze, when passing by. I kept searching and trying, experimenting. The floating was important to me. The impression was created by linking the stems with an invisible thread. Lying on the sofa, I wondered looking at the ceiling, "Why is there never anything up there? I got up, made a hook and hung these connected parts onto ceiling, and immediately lay down again, and I had goose bumps. I had goose bumps from the top of my head to the tips of my toes. It was an incredible feeling, a feeling of happiness. That was, when I thought, "That's right. Now it's right.“, such a feeling of: This is it! As a result, I thought about why this is so important to me, and how it is possible for me to feel and to see this total silence and slowness that gives me such happiness? And then I realized that in this work the quintessence of my own view on life, people, society life, every form of dynamics in the human sense is concretized, and I have called it "Balance and System". In the context of my twenty years of analytical and systemic therapy, it is the interactive interdepend-dence of everything with everything that is so familiar to me. It has crystallized for me in this.
BW: Your mobiles are drawings in the room, we've already talked about them briefly. What is your relationship to nature? It's surely no coincidence that you use natural materials for your artistic work?
MM -W: That has different roots. I come from a family of pharmacists and grew up with it, that both parents had great knowledge about nature. Especially my father, who comes from a family of foresters. My grandfather was a forester in Wangen in the Allgäu. So my father grew up in the forest by the lake and then later, through his studies in pharmacy, he came intensive contact with plants. He also produced medicines himself. We never went out into nature without it being explained to us. That digitalis can be extracted from foxglove from foxglove, which is poisonous, and that it becomes a heart medicine, for example. The same goes for mushroom picking. Learning how a biological key work so that you don't make any mistakes. Twice a year, we took students who had been to our pharmacy for practical training. I experienced this whole process many times as a child, and through this my knowledge increased.
BW: That's one aspect now, the pharmacist family, botanizing. But you can also read something else in it. The contemplation, the nature, it´s loss and perhaps the longing to go back there and capture the beauty.
MM -W: My longing for beauty is very great. But also the longing for free space as something, that has occupied me all my life. I have always had the feeling that I need space around me, in the actual spatial sense. This is certainly also related to my childhood: I was born in 1948, in the fifties under extremely standardized, constricted conditions. The complete lack of a psychological view or of the individual capacities of a child was formative. When, at the age of five, I asked my parents for a talk and officially informed them, that I would very much like to learn how to dance, my parents' answer was: You learn to swim and play the piano, like everyone else. Item.
BW: It's interesting that you bring that up. On the one hand it was so common at that time, and the standard in dealing with children. But the dancing definitely plays a role in your work.
MM -W: My oldest half-sister was friends with a dancer who used to come to our house when I was little, four or five. She said to my sister: "Your little sister, you have to keep an eye on her. She's talented, there's something physical about her. That is special." Of course, that didn't lead to anything. Unfortunately. But later an acupuncturist told me that I had the perfect jumping foot.
BW: Again, about nature. It's not a romantic longing or a reflection on the threat to nature posed by man that you thematize in your works?
MM -W: No, that's not me at all. But for example, when I moved here to Volksgartenstrasse in 1981, the courtyard was a desert. In the summer, scorching hot, the concrete and the fug tar, horrible. Then I started to work with the minimal means I had at that time, I bought pots and started to green the yard down there with an old zinc bathtub. Today there is the pretty little bamboo forest with a green room where you can sit in during the summer. That is, I am less regretful, but I need nature. So I have planted it for myself.
BW: Yes, but then that's a longing, a
necessity.
MM -W: I need nature, that's a feeling of home for me. The dancing. It's true that when I look at these elements, I have associations with the movement in space. They are in fact spatial drawings become. Almost something like choreographies. I have noticed, for example, that depending on how the mobiles form they describe a volume and then organize themselves linearly again. This happens quite by itself: lie down, look, wait.
BW: There are no determinations, but a great freedom.
MM -W: Yes, there are no specifications, not even how many elements the drawing has. However, there are now increasingly, of course, on an intellectual level, attempts at justification in me, what else it is in contact with the world, the art world and all that I have seen. I have always had a great longing to find a space that is not colonized by the art scene.
BW: You mean space that is not occupied by the art world?
MM -W: Yes, exactly. I found this space up there. Found it for me. And in doing this, it describes the moment in which the mind ceases to hinder thinking. Thinking does not necessarily have to take place in letters and language, but thinking is whole-bodily. Beuys also located it in the knee.
BW: I would like to return to the material once again. These implications that Mohn has in terms of cultural history, are
significant for you? Sleep and death? Dream? The ancient mythology, what's involved? Ancient cultivated plant, medicine, drug.
MM -W: It's nice that you bring that up. But it's not been an engine for it, I haven't thought about that. Now these "drawings" are moving in space, and only now I begin to think about these things. The selection has taken place because of the beauty and because the poppies were just there.
BW: That's very refreshing.
MM -W: I don't have to deliver anything.
I don't have to please. I'm free. In the past, for example, when I had an exhibition in the Artothek in Cologne with a large instal-lation of several large ceramic elements, it was already a matter of that I wanted something.
BW: How did this decision to work artistically with ceramics come about?
MM -W: I decided to study ceramics,
because I was a milliner before. It's both about volume. I studied with Eduardo Paolozzi at the Werkschule. Paolozzi was someone who also very strongly emphasized manual thinking, physical thinking, so to speak, by always recommending a technique to the students or every two semesters. He said: "Now we'll do paper, or now we'll do this, this, and that. And in this respect, I think his thinking was very close to me.
Once I came to him for a meeting and said. "I want to say this and that with my work.” He replied, "You're not here in a Pedagogical Seminar. As an artist, you are there to make a a form to make an expression, to express yourself."
BW: What else did you learn from Paolozzi?
MM -W: Paolozzi was someone who worked with everything, In my studio, that was where the gallery was, 50 meters from the Werkschule, on Ubierring, we often sat in the evenings, and then we worked together cooked spaghetti to-gether in a huge tin pot with olive oil and garlic. As an Italian, he had great fun with it, of course. There was some wine. Then we discussed with him until three in the morning. He was always the advocate diaboli for us. He challenged us so much, intellectually. That had a big impact on me.
BW: And then there's also the psychological level, which was very important for you.
MM -W: I have always done an analysis parallel to the artistic work. At the beginning of the seventies, it was still very spooky, when one expressed in society that one was moving in this direction. It was not accepted at all. And people didn't want to understand it, and they couldn't turn to it, in the sense that it was some-thing that could enables a new dimension of feeling and thinking.
BW: I would like to come back to the works. The colorlessness of your artistic material. In nature there are wonderful colors, the leaves are beautiful. Petals are sometimes like butterfly wings, even those of the poppy, as well as those of the tulip,
when they fade. But all this comes in your
your mobiles, your assemblages of natural materials. It is rather the absence of color that distinguishes them. Or at least they are only natural tones, and those of
those of the passing.
MM -W: I don't need the color. I take what I find, similar to Arte Povera.
BW: Do you actually want to enter into a dialogue with these works? Or is it more of a statement: "Here, this is me, this is my work. Do with it what you"?
MM -W: I'm just wondering whether it's important to me to be understood, and whether it was be possible to be indifferent to that ? I think I do care.
BW: That is, you take this freedom there, but you still want to be understood?
MM -W: Yes, I want to be understood. I also like to be asked. The friends or even artists who have looked at it, were amazed and found the works beautiful. What then might happen is something you only get if you take your time.
BW: Yes, I can imagine that. You have to lie here, look at the works.
MM -W: They're like individuals actually. I can also combine them to form new clusters. That's what I'm busy with that right now. How far I can reduce these individual. And on the other hand: How many elements can I connect? I am now at three elements. At the same time, I'm working on combining as many elements into a cluster and to explore the possibili-ties in connection with light and shadow in the movement. I lie here every day and look, look, look. The looking at these objects decelerates, actually leads into another state of thinking, another level.
BW: Like a meditation or an alpha state?
MM -W: It's a state between waking and sleeping. I wouldn't even call it meditation.
BW: So a state of relaxation that's in that in-between realm. Floating.
MM -W: Alpha state is nice. Meditation is too religious for me. I'd like to put it in more neutral terms.
BW: You've already talked about Paolozzi. Which other artists are important for you?
MM -W: I was fascinated from very early on by Meret Oppenheim. The "Fur Cup" or "The Ear of Giacometti". That was the second artistic work I bought. In Winterthur there was a Meret Oppenheim exhibition, I went there and bought this print. The very first work of art I bought as a student, right at the beginning was the multiple "Intuition" by Beuys. It hangs in my studio. At that time it cost 100 D-marks, which was a lot of money for me.
The "Intuition Box" also means something like that to me, as providing a space in which anything could happen, and it shows me that I have this space. I have it in my power of imagination.
BW: Fragility is a very central aspect of your work. Something floating, dance-like, but they also have this fragility.
MM -W: They are quite fragile. But every balance is fragile. I see this against the background of the heavy ceramic work Koiné (The Common in the Diverse) which I made in 1984 for the exhibition in the Artothek in Cologne. Before the whole heaviness, also in the sense of the actual, physically manageable weight of these ceramic sculptures. There is weight no longer, i.e. hardly any material weight.
And that the weighting in the work rather goes in a transcendental direction. For me, this aesthetic also has something very much in common with old master drawings in terms of their color and shades.
BW: Renaissance or Baroque drawings, for example.
MM -W: I remember seeing Rembrandt's self-portraits in Paris at the Petit Palais a long time ago and was so impressed by the tiny drypoint etchings that I started to trace them. I studied them, but it's all been forgotten. It's as if in the course of my artistic life and my life in general, a kind of composting has taken place. It now leads to corresponding things grown there.
BW: You call your current group of works "Balance and System". Why?
MM -W: The title not only describes the works, but refers to my very personal life experiences and my view and my view of the experiences in the family, in circles of friends, in all work contexts, at the theater in Paris, everywhere I have been, it was always about "balance and system" of the people among each other, I have always encountered the same problems. And that's where, of course, the analysis and also the group-dynamic can be found. Training and everything that I have done, provided both emotional and intellectual fodder, to perceive that. If you perceive it long enough, then the drawing suddenly comes together with such a life theme. And with any luck, it feels good.
BW: The horizontal/vertical theme is quietly present in your work.
MM -W: The vertical is, so to speak, the default for the hierarchy. That is one of the main themes, I think, in society in general, in the family, in patriarchy, in capitalism. And the horizontal and the contemplation has a very different result in the general orientation. Other things come out of there.
BW: In your work, you don't see the vertical.
MM -W: Exactly. You don't see them.
The interview took place on November 6, 2019 in Cologne.
Barbara Weidle: Journalist, art historian, publisher.
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