Artistic Research
Week 2023

This research publication documents a conversation between Sabeth Buchmann and Astrid van Nimwegen, in which they discuss Astrid’s work and research methods.

Sabeth Buchmann is an art historian and art critic. She is currently a Professor of Modern and Postmodern Art and the Head of the Institute for Art Theory and Cultural Studies at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. She regularly contributes to books, magazines, and catalogues. 

Her publications include “Kunst als Infrastruktur” (2023); co-ed. of “Broken Relations. Infrastructure, Aesthetics, Critique” (2022), co-ed. of “Putting Rehearsals to the Test. Practices of Rehearsal in Fine Art, Film Theater, Theory and Politics” (2016), co-ed. art works. “Ästhetik des Postfordismus“ (DFG-Netzwerk Kunst und Arbeit, 2015), co-ed. “Textile Theorien der Moderne. Alois Riegl in der Kunstkritik” (2015), co-author of Hélio Oiticica and Neville D'Almeida, “Block-Experiments in Cosmococa“—Program in Progress (2013). “Film, Avantgarde und Biopolitik” (2009), “Denken gegen das Denken. Technologie, Produktion und Subjektivität“ bei Sol LeWitt, Yvonne Rainer und Hélio Oiticicia (2007) and “Art After Conceptual Art“ (The MIT Press, 2006).

Sabeth: Can you speak about your decision to live in a truck and locate yourself in the countryside? I ask this because it connects you in a very different way to the environment than if you lived in a usual apartment. My question is whether this kind of connection implies a literal ‘space making’ and whether your space is part of your artistic process in a larger sense? 

Astrid: Previously, I lived in a little farmhouse in the middle of some fields. After some years there, the farmhouse was destroyed, and I could not imagine myself moving into a village or city with neighbours around me. It became clear that I needed solitude and silence to have a space to think. 

So then, my minimalistic and basic lifestyle was a deliberate choice. This way of living connects me to the environment in a specific way because it makes me more conscious of my ‘needs’. For example, when switching on the light it is not always a given that the light will turn on because I have solar panels that charge my batteries. When it’s cold, I must make fire, and before I can make fire, I must cut the wood. 

From a psychoanalytical perspective, the reason I enjoy this way of living could be traced back to my childhood. During winter, my parents took me to Portugal in a big truck which had been converted into a campervan. Portugal was still very rural in the 1980s and I have fond memories of the smell on the streets, making fire, pet goats, interacting with stray dogs, playing outside with our family dogs and so on. I connect my way of living now to those early years of my life when I was in close connection with nature and where I always felt safe. Following this, I like to think of my truck-house as a ‘uterus’ on wheels, a place I have built to feel safe and comfortable. Perhaps my decision is influenced by a certain ‘longing for belonging’, which may sound nostalgic, but it is certainly not my intention to romanticize the past. Further, the physical labour of building my own home helped to balance out my over-active mind.

So yes, living in close connection to nature affects my work and research in a particular way. It’s prompted me to rethink what it means to separate humans from nature. Such a division goes against my belief that we are part of nature, we belong to nature. 
My research is very much concerned with how such a separation determines our contemporary position in relation to nature.
It is important to consider that my natural surroundings are very much domesticated as much of the Netherlands is below sea level and would not be livable for humans without human intervention. 

Sabeth: Since you didn’t move to an already existing community and that you don’t try to create a community, does this mean that you decided to live independently? 

Astrid: I stay on the property of an elderly couple just outside Amsterdam, the area is between two small villages with cows in the backyard. 
I have a strong desire to isolate myself, it gives me a lot of time to think and ‘to stay with the trouble’ as Donna Haraway puts it.

Though at the same time, I am not completely alone. I have become part of the community here and that gives me the agency to speak from within when it comes to the creation of my video work. In this sense, my way of life is also a method of relating to the inhabitants of this area, both human and non-human.

Sabeth: I see that you, on the one hand, take methodologies as research tools and procedures seriously. On the other, you try to avoid certain academic forms of research. You've said that you feel the need to separate your research from your project. What does this separation mean for your work?

Astrid: I would phrase that differently, rather as my need to separate making from thinking. The artistic procedure for me is an instinctive process relying on knowledge based in emotions and intuition, while the academic discourse is based on a logocentric understanding of concepts, methods and intentions.
As a visual artist who thinks through the creative process, I sometimes have to resist analysis and reflection in my work.
I define my concepts after filming because during the making I don’t feel the urge to be so specific. Rather, I trust that my interests will emerge through what I do because of my subjectivity and position.

Lately, I have come to see my work more and more as an artistic, visual investigation within the academic discourse. I would define my basic nomadic lifestyle in my truck as a method of exploring my relationship to my environment; the rural landscapes located between the village and the city in the Netherlands. A particular area of interest is the contradiction between the great amount of care for the landscape and animals and the violent act of ending that care through inevitable death. In these areas, the fragility of life and life cycles is very palpable.

Sabeth: The way you work with animals seems to me like an attempt to connect to the physical world in a different way, which is about relations. One could probably speak of building an alternative infrastructural system – an idea I borrow from US-American anthropologist Brian Larkin. By that I mean a system that’s not only subject to your own will and intentions, but that is presenting its intentions and its agency.

Astrid: Exactly, I try to create space and time to become aware of these intentions and agencies. I want to understand how we possibly can respect these agencies, especially concerning animals. I think about that a lot. There is a pig farm next to my house. I often hear the piglets shriek as they are transported every few weeks when they are fat enough to be slaughtered, this touches me deeply.

I feel there is an urgent need to reflect on what this killing and consuming of animals means. If we decide to eat them, we could say that they live on in our bodies. Paying attention to their existence is a way of acknowledging their lives as meaningful. And, paying this attention not once, but again and again, is an effort to reconnect and understand such a connection on a deeper level. Meaning is not something fixed in the object of observation, but something that comes from the attentive encounter with it. And, it is through connection that things take on meaning. 

Sabeth: And it’s at the same time about shifting existing meanings by shifting relationships and structures. One could mention here Donna Haraway’s ‘companion species’ as well as Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network-Theory. I think how you perform the interaction between the camera, the dog, and the human being behind the camera, shows something both playful and technological, direct and mediated interaction that provides all participating actors - human beings, animal and machine - shared agency and control. I see your work as a reconfiguration of actors and actions based on visible instructions, decisions and settings that replaces individual intentions with interaction-based rules, exercises, and rituals.

Astrid: The idea that all existence is interconnected is a very comforting thought to me, this notion that we belong somewhere in this chain rather than belonging to a Western capitalist pyramid where we put man at the top. Indeed, you could say that I am trying to break down that hierarchy in a playful way, to explore ways to stand with each other and other species.

Ecologist and philosopher Mathijs Schouten argue that in order to reconnect, we must constantly rethink our position. But before we can change our attitude, there is a need to stand still and look at ourselves honestly to realize where we are right now. 
I believe this is why I create very slow images, almost like living photos or tableaux vivant, I am looking for a certain tension within the present moment, a tension between stillness and movement, control and contingency, life, and death.

An example of this tension is the video series ‘Pieta’ in which grandparents are carried in the arms of their grandchildren.
With that work, I am questioning to what extent we inherit the thinking and acting of generations of the people that came before us. 
The video portraits are based on a photo I took in 2013, a rather alienated image, in which I carry the fragile body of my grandfather in my arms. When I returned to the photo, I missed movement in the image which is why I wanted to make a video series.
I am fascinated by the cycle of generations, which can also be considered as a chain but one of another temporality.
The models in that work are family, I asked the grandchildren with grandparents to hold their pose as long as possible. This performativity builds tension, and the duration depends on the endurance of the actors. Although I filmed the whole action, I made a conscious choice to cut the beginning where the grandparents are lifted and the end when they are put down again. Including the beginning or the end would break the tension.

This also applies to the hunting dog portraits, where a different kind of tension is present in the work. There is a sense of frozen or “arrested time,” a term I borrowed from Professor Lisa Baraitser’s book ‘Enduring Time’, which speaks on unfolding time staying; remaining; pausing; and enduring. In one of her lectures she quotes a beautiful phrase by the poet Denise Riley about how the perception of time changes through loss and grief, this is also a personal motivation and source of inspiration in my work. Riley states:

Sabeth: I think this type of imagery reminds us of your education as a visual artist; your work is embedded in specific iconographic traditions. By this I mean also your affinity for theatrical settings, which are used to turn the given order upside down.  Regarding Pieta, the mother is carrying the dead body of her son: this reverses the generational logic of time. Sons should carry their parents. Chronological time is turned around and shows that there is something wrong. The image of the grandparents treated as babies implies a concept that Brecht called ‘Verfremdung’ – a term he used for his strategy to visualize the false, but naturalized order.

Astrid: Yes, it raises questions of care and responsibility - who should take care of whom? Caretaking is another important theme in my work, and one I touch on through my exploration of the animal-human relationship as for me relationality is about mutual care. When I dug a little deeper into my family archive to study the role of dogs in my childhood and relationships with the dogs I later lived with, I observed that they acted as a sort of substitute for my parents who passed away at a very young age, which was traumatic for me. Here, I want to note that our human tendency is to anthropomorphize, this functions as a coping strategy for dealing with loneliness when human connections are unavailable.
Through my extensive research on emotional support dogs, I’ve become aware that dogs are increasingly being used to help people suffering from PTSD. I believe this connects with differences in time perceptions between humans and dogs. Dogs live in the present, and when you relive a trauma, it is as if a past becomes present and thus profoundly effecting your experience of time. Dogs then can help us to stay in the present moment and by doing so one can avoid reliving the trauma. Further, they seem to understand the world instinctively, perhaps another reason why I find it so easy to connect with dogs. 

Sabeth: Children and adults with psycho-emotional problems often have a direct relationship to cats, dogs, horses, and other animals because they can be loved without those difficulties that strain human relationships. Does the caring of pets also imply a caring of ourselves?  
One could also interpret those relationships conceptually since they are experienced from moment to moment. Here I jump to the mode of occurrence of trauma experienced only in the present. As US-American philosopher Judith Butler writes, there is no linear connection between the event that caused trauma and its remembrance. It can appear or better reappear in moments when you don’t expect it. The relation to your trauma is based on disruptive connections between different moments and times.

Astrid: Yes, the trauma is also not the event itself but the emotional response to that event. 
 When I hear you talk about linear time perception, it’s a nice bridge to discuss my research question. I’ve struggled with the single-screen format because it is a storytelling device within a linear timeline. Linear or ‘classic’ editing, which is made up of several shots, automatically builds a story.  But I look for a different structure, a non-narrative, non-linear, non-logocentric approach to film.A structure that allows for a world of coexisting images; therefore the format of video installation better suits my work. Multiple channels allow me to bring images into the same world to maintain the experience of arrested time in the present moment.

Sabeth: It’s about coexistence, conviviality and cohabitation in the sense of a non-hierarchical contemporaneity. But in your case, it is also based on disciplined work with your dog: it has to learn certain skills to be able to help you in emergency situations.

Astrid: I don’t train my dog professionally; it is unfortunately very expensive to do this. But her presence and sensitivity helps me manage dangerous, overwhelming feelings and gives me a sense of security. It has been scientifically proven that dogs have a so-called “Jacobson’s organ” in their mouth which allows them to smell pheromones. They can be trained to respond to human pheromones, produced by anxiety and stress, and calm people down by pressing their body or nose against that person or pulling them out of a stressful situation.

Sabeth: I’m not an expert on this, but what interests me here is the experience of loss of control, or more precisely: the experience of sharing control over your life with other species.

Astrid: Yes, that’s an interesting point. All these concepts come together in my research to form the basis of my creative process as a visual artist. Those concepts being: the disruptive experience of time caused by trauma, companionship with my dog acting as an emotional aid and my method of living in the present moment at a slower pace.

Sabeth: What I find impressive in your work is the already mentioned topos of contemporaneity, which thwarts the linear distinction of the past, the present and the future, also in terms of frozen time. It’s about the composition of heterogeneous times, or of heterogeneous 
experiences of time. I think this is a decisive conceptual framework for your work. 

Astrid: It has to do with being aware that other species live in different temporalities which we do not fully understand.
I can never be a dog, of course, but I can try to see myself as a non-dog rather than her being non-human to me. This is a thought influenced by reading Derrida where he talks about being naked in front of his cat in ‘the animal that therefore I am’. In my view, the notions of human and non-human seem problematic because it again implies that human beings are the centre of existence.

Sabeth: Does this mean that you define yourself in negative relation to anthropocentric categories? Probably a negation of human identity and subjectivity as such?

Astrid: If we consider all life as interconnected, the idea of individuality doesn’t make sense. Of course, there are a lot of problematics in this since we are now talking about domesticated animals, not about wildlife.
For example, with the dog family on the Victorian couch. The connotation of Renaissance paintings is obvious, the Renaissance was the beginning of humanism, the centralization of man, where a strong focus on individualism emerged and also where the focus shifted from religion to the question of what it is to be human. A time when people redefined and repositioned themselves in the present by looking back into history.
One could perhaps say that I appropriate European iconography in order to relativize the idea of human individuality and to rethink power structures.

With the mise-en-scene in my work I try to give a stage to things we seem to take for granted.
In this context, a stage is the landscape, or a bench or sometimes the front of a house. I also play with role reversal, so the domestic dog is on the sofa instead of a man and humans stand in front of their house as if in their natural habitat.

Sabeth: I think right now it becomes clearer to me what is meant by these kinds of locations. You always define those elements like the couch or the door as signs and sites, it’s about the characteristic situatedness of the people and animals in your work that always appear in slightly alienated environments. But you also work with affect-response patterns: It immediately affects you if you see a little puppy on a huge bourgeois couch.
 
Astrid: I'd like to link this to what you said previously about losing control. The way I frame my shots with strict rigid parameters is a form of control. Yet, through an extended present time, the ‘chance’ element, the uncontrollable, appears. For example, the puppy’s contingency on the presence of the vast couch tries to frame the uncontrollable, you can not predict what will happen. I like to play with such contradictions. 

The experimental documentary ‘a Few Mornings, an Evening’ invites a meditative look at the daily routine on a small farm in the Czech countryside. With great patience, the camera observes how domesticated animals and humans inhabit the place and draws attention to their coexistence.

Where at first sight all days seem the same, there appears to be a world of wonders hidden within the everyday. When we repeatedly look at all the details, we see something new every time, and it becomes clear that everything is subject to change, from the weather conditions to the behavior of the animals. Chickens turn into individual characters, one goat insists to be milked in a different place than the others and then suddenly, with the arrival of a billy goat, the daily routine changes drastically.