In conversation with cultural journalist Pirmin Bossart about «The Museum of the Future/KKLB Berlin» in the urban space of Berlin. From January 2017, this project could be visited for several years in the German capital in the form of guided tours of up to 12 people per group.

 

As director of the KKLB, Silas Kreienbühl has helped shape a vibrant art venue at the historic site of the former Landessender Beromünster radio transmitter, while also realising his own artistic work. His project «The Museum of the Future/KKLB Berlin» will take him to Berlin for a year in 2017. A conversation about the possibility of drawing inspiration from impossible places.

Pirmin Bossart: Your art seems very direct, taken straight from life. Where does that come from?

Silas Kreienbühl: The longer I engage with art, the clearer it becomes to me that it has to tell us something about life. That is when it grips me. Art awakens my interest when I can read it as an analogy and it helps me to engage with something I do not yet know. It can open up paths and show me a way of dealing with the still unknown or unfamiliar. In this way, art sets reflection in motion.

Pirmin Bossart: At the KKLB you launched the project «Museum of the Future/KKLB Berlin». What does this museum make possible that a conventional one does not?

Silas Kreienbühl: Sometimes I ask myself: does the umpteenth Picasso exhibition have any relevance today? Does an artist from the century before last have anything to say about the issues that concern us now? Perhaps he does. At the same time, there are good contemporary artists who would certainly have far more to say. Either way, none of it is of any use if the engagement with the audience does not take place in an appropriate form. Seen from this angle, the classical museums seem to render themselves obsolete. Above all, no real engagement takes place in the viewer within this time-worn context.

Pirmin Bossart: What makes you say that?

Silas Kreienbühl: In this institutional framework, pre-chewed a hundred times over, everything is often already predetermined: Picasso's paintings are great, he is a star, understood. Of course Picasso is an outstanding artist. His exceptional œuvre has been the subject of thorough engagement over the decades. By now – as with other well-known artists – it is only the record sale prices that come into view. And at times, the public debate seems to confine itself essentially to that. What I miss is a friction with the issues that move us forward as individuals and as a society.

Pirmin Bossart: Are today's museums unable to do this work? Or do they lack the audience?

Silas Kreienbühl: Of course the classical institutions have a certain audience. But as a rule, those who engage with the artworks are not a representative part of society. If art is to have any relevance today, the debates about it would have to take place far more broadly. Unfortunately, we artists and cultural practitioners are poorly prepared for this. We often operate miles away from the questions that arise when art is confronted with a broad public. That produces nothing but a pseudo-debate. And this is why I think one might just as well go a step further and leave out the artwork altogether.

Pirmin Bossart: So what does your Museum of the Future look like?

Silas Kreienbühl: The Museum of the Future needs no buildings and no particular place, no collection and no exhibition programme. The Museum of the Future is focused on perception. Everything depends on the attention and the significance one gives it. A Museum of the Future comes into being as soon as it is defined by anyone at all. And it exists for as long as someone sustains it through their perception.

Pirmin Bossart: And yet your Museum of the Future is also very concrete when one looks at the photographs with which you point to it. It contains spaces and situations exactly as everyday life writes them: among them, for instance, a kind of scrapyard in Berlin, overgrown and strewn with rubbish. Where is the art buried here?

Silas Kreienbühl: That is precisely a place where real engagement and friction can occur. Where is art, if not there? It is a very honest and therefore a particularly compelling place. It simply emerged out of everyday life; it was not designed. Nobody thought up how this place ought to be. It is, so to speak, a symptom of life in Berlin.

Pirmin Bossart: Life is not only orderly and trimmed for functionality. Is it the immediacy that acts as the artwork here and speaks to you, or a particular aesthetic?

Silas Kreienbühl: Why should only that which is designed, constructed, artificial be perceived as beautiful? Beauty must also be discoverable in what is real, in what actually exists. Only then do we move forward – in art, personally, or as a society. Letting a place take effect on you that has become what it is without any concept, simply of its own accord, does more than sharpen perception. What it triggers is, in the end, far more interesting than the standardised consensus on what everyone finds beautiful anyway.

Pirmin Bossart: Art should touch reality: this way of perceiving would surely also have to influence how we behave in everyday life.

Silas Kreienbühl: It does. To find beautiful only what has been made, at great expense, to appear beautiful – that I experience as a limitation. Because then we behave the same way in life. We like someone whom everyone likes. We like what everyone likes. The point would rather be to discover things for ourselves, to have our own experiences, to decide for ourselves on the basis of our own values. Merely asking oneself the question of what would have to change in my perception for this place to appear compelling to me is already a huge step. A whole new world opens up – on a great many levels.

Pirmin Bossart: So what happens when I am confronted with the scrapyard as a site of art?

Silas Kreienbühl: In a place like this, my judgement is not yet locked onto a track. If anything is pre-formulated, it is to block the place out categorically, to be disgusted, or simply to dismiss it as «rubbish». The challenge is to approach it as neutrally as possible and to form one's own picture. The place throws you back onto yourself. Perhaps beauty can even be discovered. Then it would not be prejudices or fixed ideas at play, but simply one's own experience. To find, in the end, something entirely different from what one expected: if that is not a good lesson for life….

Pirmin Bossart: At least as important in your artistic work as a photograph or an installation is, for you, mediation. You do not only make things; you also think intensively about what an audience might do with them. How do you lead the interested into the Museum of the Future?

Silas Kreienbühl: I use photography as a medium of abstraction. I give the viewer a perspective: the composed image is meant to ease access and allow a tentative approach. On a museum visit, we first discuss the photographs and what they trigger in us. Only then do we visit the real place.

Pirmin Bossart: Why do you place photography in between?

Silas Kreienbühl: The photographic work is a way for me to become clear about what I am doing. I go through the very process of perception that the audience can then go through as well. Questions arise, reactions are awakened. Change and transience are ever-present.

Pirmin Bossart: Applied to the concrete project, one could also say that the interplay between depiction and image, idea and reality, in turn generates a tension and an engagement of its own.

Silas Kreienbühl: Absolutely. Perhaps the place no longer exists in the form in which it was depicted. Perhaps the weather is entirely different from the picture. There is nothing to truly hold on to. Finitude and change move to the centre. These are, at the same time, themes that by their nature pose a particular challenge to the classical museum. It is also possible that, on the way to the real place, I begin to look at other places in the same way and to question them. It is always, anew, about something we do not yet know – in life just as in art.