NICOLE BÜSING AND HEIKO KLAAS IN CONVERSATION WITH FRANK KUNERT

Photographs of small worlds

The art journalists Nicole Büsing and Heiko Klaas talked to the photographer and artist Frank Kunert.

Mr. Kunert, the seemingly trusted, suddenly tilts to the stage former absurd on her pictures. In the small butcher is an oversized battlesmeter, and the Pilsstube to the tunnel view is actually built into a tunnel. How do you come to such unusual image ideas?

I'm interested in facades that already have past, shrinking and traces and thus tell their stories about the people. And sometimes it is so that during a walk while looking at such houses, the thoughts in my head are moving in motion, and then something comes out later, what turns out as an idea that I may be able to use in a picture. Often, my work is also the game with words, thoughts, meanings based on me just busy. For example, I am first of the Pilsstube you mentioned out of the term "light at the end of the tunnel". I took this literally and spun. Whether this was one or the other Pils in the game, I can not say exactly today.

Exactly this language joke, this absolute "in-word-taking" of general talk species and terms have also noticed us in their work. Especially the often piercing language of the real estate industry, it seems to animate the most absurd image findings. Did you have bad experiences?

You could take that. However, fortunately, I had no traumatic experiences in this regard. But since in my pictures houses play the lead role, it is close for me to occasionally use the choice of words in real estate ads. Because just where advertising is made, the temptation is great to raise great expectations with the language. The question is always: What does the writer or speakers want to say, and what's up to the reader or listener? And then my game begins with the meanings. And the titles of my pictures do not lie, but they still fool something.

Her finely metered black humor is reminiscent of Anglo-Saxon role models, such as the cartoons from The New Yorker. On the recording petting zoo landless toddlers who like to climb on children's slides, unattended in the cage of a hungry lion - at least in the imagination of the beholder. Have you always liked to be driven by horror joke?

In the "right" life, I usually do not even evil, and maybe I, if I pull back to the silent chestnut, have a bit of catching up for my childhood. Then I can try the things that I would not dare to dare. But I try not to be hurtful with my humor or to raise me about someone. So far, it did not happen so far that the petting zoo was considered to be ninder. Presumably, because people can distinguish quite well between simply malicine and that that is hurtful. Every now and then comes the question of image viewers if I have children - but rather jokingly. By the way, the petting zoo and my picture children!, That shows a slide, which flows into a street, like to bought by young mothers as a postcard.

Some of their pictures speak a somewhat melancholy. The facades are gray, which crumbles plaster, the houses have long since become behind their best years. What irritates you to the inhospitability of the cities?

The somewhat rundown facades of the suburbs of prey stimulate my imagination, they tell stories. These have to do with faded gloss, transience, longing for luck and also the failure. I even live in such a Frankfurt district, which does not impress with flashing surfaces. Here is visible how the single person fights in his little existence, and although noble new bank highshills can impress me, the assembled outskirts settlements will be much more honest with their impurity. Here the traces of life show much clearer. This is not always pleasant, but also more exciting than a sterile new building, which has no history yet.

On many of their pictures, however, there is also the motive of exit from this gray reality. There are houses with jump boards as in the swimming pool and even a heavenly plot right above the clouds. Actually, they are a very optimistic person, right?

Yes I think so. Of course, the imagination of a "better world" is created with a gray tristesse. Maybe it's the little ones who irritate me. Where it seems to continue, the desire for comfort or the great liberation arises. And this yearning, I try to meet with a certain irony. My handling of everyday environment and his pitfalls I see for me on the whole as positive. But sometimes it is my way to meet with a visual anarchy of his own powerlessness.

Many of their artist colleagues are aiming today the superficial charm of the virtual. With the help of digital image editing programs, you create new visual worlds. But you deliberately go a different way and build models made of cardboard, foam and misleaded everyday objects. Sometimes you need up to two months for a motive. Why this commitment to slowness?

Sure, my way of working does not seem particularly contemporary. But maybe I just find the appealing. I just could just say that I do not really know myself with the computer - which is actually true. But if it would be interested correctly, it would not be hopeless if I appreciated useful knowledge. But there is certainly the following reasons: I believe that you look at my pictures that they own a very different materiality than it would be the case with the computer with the computer - not better or worse, just different. You may see with more closely look - especially with larger deductions - that many brush stroke, the game with sharpness and blur, show slight shifts in the size ratios on model scenes. And this genesis ensures that everything works in the finished picture as a casting. And when building itself, I find out very gradually, which corresponds to my original image idea - and also the statement, the atmosphere, which I ultimately intend. I sometimes think about how a front door should look like. There are walls again torn and rebuilt differently. For me, the direct understanding is important - touching and trying. And that's probably the most important reason for my technique for me. In this way, I may also be easier to core, even if it takes a fairly long time. Maybe such a work on the computer would be to abstract. And finally, I am also fun to play with found materials. I have a few drawers with packaging waste and other little finds, which suddenly get a whole new benefit. From a cheese packaging the glass of a front door, the lid of floss mutating to the tunnel lighting, the plastic tablet pack ends as a toilet rober box. And if at some point the backdrop is ready as far as I'm looking for the whole thing through the camera for the first time, that's an exciting moment. Suddenly, the miniature house looks almost like a real facade on the matte slice - except for a few irritations.

Then please tell us at the end, where you currently work straight and what exciting project could be irritated in the future? For example, would you like to build a whole city?

OJE! I do not like to talk about the project on which I'm working straight. I will go to mystery. While I burn over it, this nobody gets to face, and I'm also talking to anyone about it. My plans are always part of one piece, so I can only refrain from the development very short notice. So unfortunately I can not say anything about the direction in which my work moves. Although I have a sketch and ideas book, in which many spirit falls, but often I often realize if that was actually a good one. At least I wish me that in the future the ideas do not go out. But somehow you will always come from yourself. And if that maybe it will be a whole city, depends on the picture idea and the idea behind it that drives me. Well, and maybe of the fact, if I can eventually afford a bigger studio. Because for a whole city my current would be too small.

26.05.2008