Some excerpts from a conversation with Gerold Tagwerker that starts out trying to apply a Juddish judgement system to DIY materials, and ends up hinging all its power on the transformation of those unnoticed materials into surface.

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Kos: Tagwerker’s work reveals an awe at what one can do with all that found stuff – he sort of revels in the abundance of options. One senses the appeal of all the stuff, that just about everything is fascinating. The decisive question for this generation of artists must necessarily be, “How do I select, where do I draw limits and how can I prevent myself from getting lost in all this abundance?” Perhaps the difference between good and not so good art depends on this question.

Kos: “Where does the artist find or what questions lead him to find the affinity infinitely present in commercial products?”. One can see that the retail objects are just as fascinating to him as huge structures, such as the multi-storied administration building.
Tagwerker: Sure, there is such a plethore of materials and prefab products. A baffling supply of things exists in the DIY or other stores, call them IKEA or whatever. I delight in the entire range of these supplies. My own selection is, of course, based on my subjective aesthetic perception or need. I may see a material whose aesthetic qualities appeal to me and remember it, perhaps only because I use it all the time – like adhesive tape or sandpaper. Repeated use or memory of the material may lead me to use it in my work, or to thematize it. Something in the subway, or a product in an underground parking lot like a cable canal, whose perforated ornamentation I might find aesthetically attractive, may catch my eye and become etched in my mind. If something catches your eye once you seem to see it again and again. I select various concepts before doing a work and ultimately decide for one of them because it speaks for itself. That’s how I start a new work.

Fuchs: Functionalism in everyday objects that surround us makes one ignore these things. Eyelets and nails function but also disappear – like language, though constantly used, vanishes as a live medium from our consciousness. For instance, adhesive tape that is used to stick something. But what does it mean when a person takes a tape and literally creates a representation of the very tape by sticking it on the wall? The functionality of the material is clearly defined when it is not used as the means to an end.

Kos:What I ask is: Is it no longer fascinating to make art with raw materials? Can’t it be an interesting contrast to all this found material?

Tagwerker: Auratic materials can be described as those which lead to new forms when treated differently. When a thinned, fluid material is applied on a support to create an image it is oil painting. I am not so interested in this kind of process even though I have enormous respect for such work. I myself don’t want to work with this artificial, art oriented material. I rather enjoy playing around with everyday materials, I mean stuff I am familiar with. Some of the materials prove extremely painterly and can also be applied in that way.

Welzer: I’m really curious about one thing here: What then does justified use of material mean?

Fuchs: I tried to formulate the very opposite when I spoke of bronze nudes. No precise definition for justified use of material exists yet. Material can be used in a number of ways, but it can also be involved in a reflexive process by varying the application or the way it is prepared or formed. Appropriate use of material as opposed to its inappropriate use, is perhaps also to be understood as a controversial conception. The expression can’t really be defined distinctly.

Achleitner: Had Tagwerker simply made holes in the material instead of the metal eyelets, it might have torn.

Welzer: Exactly. But that would also show me that the material reacts in this or that way. It’s like saying, “Rather than hanging it on metal eyelets, I am going to let it stretch out of form or just let it hang down limply.”

Achleitner: He would then be a process artist … (laughs)

Welzer: Precisely. What I really wanted to say was that I am bothered by the pathos in “appropriate use of material”. As if the material contained some sort of self-determination should be used appropriately. It is so didactic. Why should be this done appropriately?

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Generally, I delight in others’ clever use of DIY material for their visual properties, but I never do it myself: it just feels too neat and empty, clever rather than thought-out. As these five discuss, using a DIY material solely for its aesthetic aspects does transform it (for example, from tarp to blue, eyelet to bold brass glint), but I am also interested in the cultural transformations that are possible when you turn something people encounter everyday into something else. Using tarp as blue makes it paint, makes it a raw material, but can sacrifice its tarpness and the associations we might have with it (refugees, repairs, camping).

So, in the popular conceit, raw materials are meaningless, “art” materials. They carry no cultural baggage; they are inert portrayers of the information carved or assembled out of them. You choose a certain stone because of its translucency, not because it came from the rock that brained Jimmy Hoffa.

You can rise above clever when using DIY materials if the material-choices have meaning, which is leaving me in a very awkward position right now. When IKEA means yuppie and E.U. rather than crap and student and consumable lifestyle, I have to question my American cultural assumptions here in Serbia. It seems a rich place to work from: What Would Jelena Do?

So, rather than paralyze myself with vicarious-cultural second-guessing, I have decided to build my current piece three four ways:

1) art materials: devoid of meaning. Slick. Surface.

2) DIY materials: devoid of meaning. They have different shit here, and alot appeals purely viscerally, so I will just plunge into Serbian DIY stuff as paint.

3) DIY materials: American meaning. This is the method my gut and heart are aching for, and why I am so looking forward to my upcoming months 20 mins from a Home Depot and an IKEA and a Craigslist.

4) DIY materials: Serbian meaning. What is the equivalent of IKEA in Serbia? What material, shattered and exposed and reworked, says we have built shabby edifices for too long and now they are falling?