Carlo Antonelli: Who are these people, the ones that populates your works?
Kai Althoff: They accumulate. Some return more often than others. Some are friends I never had. Yet had hoped to have. Some despicable characters. Some annoying people who have “lived through something” and do not mind to let it show and reflect in their attitudes. Some who really know of things, that I had wished they would have let me in on, and yet I am denied their profound insight, or their source of undeterred lightheartedness, their simple acceptance of joy.
That is all to say, they all stem from my soul and mind. They are certainly all of much more significance than my true self. Even those made of the most boring aspects, their mediocrity will outshine mine by the dozen. Many possess all I lack. I must say: I do not plan them to appear, they visit as if taking up on a subconsciously muttered invitation that I may utter over and over again while going along. They may appear as if spirits, but I guess, they are a reality.
CA: What was your favourite comic book and tv shows when you were a kid?
KA: I cherished the German Version of Marvel Comics’s series called HORROR. I think it really was only published in Germany under that name. So many ghosts and monsters, but still never enough. Drawn in styles and from angles unknown to me. I did even then assume that these particular styles could only grow out of America, however little I knew of it. Say, the story would be set in 1878 Paris, I could feel this is an American’s idea of how the street lantern’s feeble gaslight would cast such abominable shadows.
CA: In the case of the second, I try to refer to the fantastic seventy minutes you did with Isa Genzken as home video. But If I am wrong with this reference, I am wrong, and skip it, please.
KA: Isa did mention the Incredible Buster Keaton, when first asking me to participate. And she asked that all should be episodes, skits, and most of all Funny ! Now what is funny to us, was to be told. Ever so swiftly all self-evolved and fed into each other. We exchanged written ideas of the next ones we wanted to film by mail, and when either Isa came to Cologne or New York, or I went to Berlin, we just got on with shooting these. Some more improvised, some closer to the original ideas. All required almost no verbal exchange on how to execute, or act. In retrospect I must say, I do not even understand how we did this all.
You rarely find anyone in life to so unconditionally and effortlessly just give yourself to, and then such thing emerges! It might as well be a film about Love. It is to me.
CA: Marionettes, folk figures, vaudeville: how many entities live in Kai? Who gave you the freedom to whoever you wanted and want and will want to be?
KA: It may seem there are many, and I at least like to believe not to be bound to this one existence, the one body and mind that one was assigned to for whatever a lifetime is. I also never felt quite convinced of a reality as such anyway. I do however wake up the same Kai. There must be some consistency. I see it is fleeting though. I feel my body no longer is quite mine, I do no longer fully own it. Something changes. I often felt that, when all turned the way that was worst expected, or fulfilled all paramount of its prediction, or a constellation moulded into the most sickening of stereotypes, I tended to leave myself in stoic silence to it, or turn very silly, inwardly, outwardly or both. I do know, this may just be a mechanism of stubbornness, not to be willing to accept. Yet I assume this is just the same what lends me this freedom that you mention, to think to be capable to become someone else, for better or worse. I do also not like myself enough to think I can only be this one Kai. I need to believe there are other me’s.
CA: A wise man once said that artists are simply people who give themselves the real freedom to express the most part of their personalities. Look at one carnivalesque you’s in action, below
KA: Though I do not know you, I feel you must be wise.
CA: “Music makes the people come together…” Having a band is one of the best things in life. Workshop is a parallel happy life in symbiosis with others, I think.
I would like to ask you what are the dynamics between musicians and also about fights between them. And how it is to have an alive mass of real people in front of you, instead of the shadows looking at what you do/did in museums or galleries.
KA: This Band started out as a group formed foremost with my oldest friend Stephan Abry. We knew each other since earliest high school. So we were twelve years old then. And I may have to disappoint: between the two of us, or the other members joining later (Stefan Mohr, Christoph Rath………Francia Gimble Masters, Christer Bergentz…), we really never fought much. The most relevant question seemed often enough: how much to give yourself to the joy of pure music-making, this immediate pleasure from playing together or alone, opposed to questioning all this emotional “expression” in supposedly free form. I think I was concerned with that very much. I may have not liked our “free form” results enough at these early times to give it without some implied intellectual silly content then. But neither then nor now, do I think my intellect could separate these approaches enough to follow either without ridiculing the mere source of all expression, which is that as a human you will hardly always be quietly listening and following once you discover all the milliards of options your body, heart and mind provides you with. That comes early in life. It is a blessing!
We maybe played about twenty times in front of larger audiences. Maybe the largest was seven hundred people, if even. Our last performance was maybe in 1999. We never got out of Germany. We were often very exuberant. The audience seemed to like what we did, thus I felt confident as a concert went on. I was prepared to become attacked. Once there was a performance which was Stefan Mohr and myself listening to our own recording called Stobbi
on a reel to reel machine. We just sat there and listened drinking wine and smoking and sometimes we were getting up or moving our bodies a little. Some contortion. This did not go to well. People were asking questions, rightfully. Some seemed very bored, but most lingered. The recording was demanding as well.
I do think of course these things happened a milliard of times in history. I liked it though, very much. But our real concerts were full of true energy. And when we felt it ignited some of the audience, it was ever so beautiful. One felt like: “Oh, I can make someone feel something properly.” I can make someone smile instantly or dance. You know this is all very encouraging but just the same much was spent also trying not to even think anyone watches or listens. I knew I was better then, as well not feeling watched.
CA: Ah, and Fanal I, II, III etc.?
KA: With Fanal I never performed, and it is a whole different time within my life when this started. Really only by myself, out of some loneliness. I started this as if victimized, yet I am the aggressor in this.
CA: “Music mix the bourgeois and the rebel…” How did you mix them (bourgeois and rebel) in your life and your work? Also as historical references.
KA: My friend just told me this is of a 1999 Madonna song. So I do not know what she wanted to imply: That music can cross many boundaries and bring people together? It is true, it can, and I think this is a most blissful thing to happen. Maybe I rather wish to separate, just as much. That desired unity, though as much as it is a human desire to come together, people seem not really to be made for, given what happens once some music stops, and you still are together. It is of course of huge complexity to determine one’s own bourgeois parts and those rebellious. I do not know, if I purposefully ever wanted to incorporate any of the two in what I do or am. I think to the outside world it seems that you are being of some rebellious spirit in moments, and then you see yourself just wanting to be left in peace to eat Cereal or look at a beautiful glass for very long. Sometimes I feel all striving for personal wellbeing, luck, contentment is bourgeois in its very root. And yet, you want to to feel at ease, about buying yourself another beautiful jacket you never needed. It cannot be justified and thus it is right to be feeling bad about it. This is a most flimsy example, I know. However, this is a petty bourgeois thought and action.
All I do is filled with these endless dilemmas and so I am. There is no true “balance” for me. I never cared to be rebellious. I think I just wanted other’s and myself to be as free as possible.
CA: I think that for you hairstyle has always been important. Probably in terms of construction of identity of identification. Is it so?
KA: So first my mother cut my hair, then a good friend, as of then I always cut it myself, as I disliked going to a hairdresser. I still do it. In the 80s, I wore it sticking up and smeared with bees wax and Tiger balm, and even condensed milk that I had spilled on the kitchen floor at my parent’s house. I decided to use it on my hair rather than for it go to waste. After a day something smelled rancid all around me constantly. I could not make out for some time what it was, but yes.
A friend encouraged me to tell you. I had very short hair in the early 90s, then I let it grow, with side parting, and further I cut it shorter and now for almost sixteen years, it did not change much. It looked quite nice I thought, but now often because of the humidity of where I live, it curls and I think it looks quite silly at times. Luckily enough I do not care so much anymore.
CA: Speaking of haircuts, how was the scene in Cologne from mid-80’s to end of the 90’s?
KA: I have a cat on me by the name of Ettore! I finished high school in 1985. So my scene were my friends I had made in the years prior. They were all quite different characters. I certainly always had friends that were interested in art and music, movies, styles acceptable, styles shunned and mocked. You know, these things you share with friends. Also being rambunctious. Occasionally we would venture into the city center, to maybe go to a movie, an art opening even, a disco, a cafe where things were supposed to be really stewing nicely. But we were also always kept pretty much to ourselves. Cologne was at that time, an ART city. But I knew this all along. Of course a magazine like Spex emerged, initiated by some of the city’s most brilliant minds. These people I admired, and still did, when some years later even got to know some of them a little more. But we, my friends and myself, were suburban somewhat still, and I realized the best of scenes, and most worshipped of them by me, was rather that of its rural nearby small towns of Bergisch Gladbach. Some of it had retained the essence of the 70’s, with such disarming accuracy, as well as that all these characters of people in it seemed to had been much more encouraged to be THEMSELVES, as I had not encountered elsewhere. So I was falling for this very much. I was thinking, “Why do they dwell in that, while I care to be more modern?” They did not need to answer me that, as it was so obvious.
I think it was just a natural given. They did certainly not care too much about the outside world.
In the earlier ‘90s I finally, more or less, did get to know more of some contemporary scene. It was full of discourse and equally different characters and significant fights on subjects worthy and challenging questions asked and asked again and intellectualism that one could not forego. I do not know if I was part or not. I certainly cherished all I witnessed and also being involved in at times. I felt I needed to arm myself intellectually, and that I tried. It was most significant time. It felt of formidable significance.
CA: We’re talking about the last century, with a strong residual resonance to the II world war. There was a bombed church in the center of the city. Am I wrong? Or everything was past, and a feeling of future was predominant?
KA: There is no way to not have this in my mere blood. For all times. My parents were born into Fascist Germany, being young children as the the war ended. They grew up and became teenagers, twens (German term for people in their twenties) of absolute awareness and turned against all that had survived in society after Germany’s shattering, that would constitute grounds for any reemerging of such malignity to befall a people amongst which they lived. (Including LAUHEIT!) My parents were left wing, very liberal people. They would not shy away from confronting people verbally, if they detected any kind of streak that would suggest ideas that had maybe led to Germany’s past. I do know it sounds maybe silly, but I cannot find a way to say it otherwise: they were righteous people, in as far I can imagine people can be, within their personal area of influence through action and thought in an every day life. Their conduct in life is immensely present within me, they are what I am made of to huge parts. But I certainly did things that would anger them. And my parents took me and my brother, Ingo, to that church you mention, and so many more churches, but also so many museums, to the woods, the seas, to France, to Italy, to England, to Scotland, and to Denmark. My father was a policeman and my mother a graphic designer, though she never worked as such after having my brother and me. I speak of my parents, which obviously only covers a tiny fraction of what my answer would be to your question. I need to compress: Cologne was almost all in total shambles after the war, and the architecture I grew up with was in part executed in haste, some very thoughtful, some very practical, typical of its time, the early ‘50s and on. And I think I saw many young trees, planted on purpose, to replace the many dead ones. These trees amongst new social housing was a beautiful sight to me. I can only guess, but the will to rebuild and also leave all behind was very strong. Germany is truly made of all that, the residue, as you say and the wish to do prevent anything from this to happen again. But obviously the people within it have many different thoughts on that. So both reigned then, the wish for a bourgeois future and quite some rebelling, and some remaining indifferent, but rather leaning towards one side or the other secretly. But you can vote! And if this was not enough, then there is terrorism. Since I spent time mostly with people of the kind my parents were like, and their children, I would not be exposed to any conservative mindset carried to such extremes like nationalism, or fascism still present. I do know it existed, and my interest in that would be growing later in life. The future has long begun, and I think its complexity is so overwhelming, that problems then seemed almost solvable. I do not want to sound sarcastic. And now, as you ask me all this, I am since there were such strong ties between Italy and Germany, I am most intrigued to hear what it felt like for you to grow up in Italy post Mussolini. I know this may not be the place to ask, but since my interest is huge, and has always been, I would be so glad to hear of someone like you.
CA: How do you feel in this position on balance between two centuries (modern and contemporary art history included). Does this inform your work?
KA: As I mentioned, I was exposed to art from my earliest childhood. Since my parents loved art and took me to museums ever so often. Cologne had one of the most important art fairs then, and to go to that with my parents, in the mid-seventies and on, was of incredible influence on me. Now a century begun and I see the complication, the complexity in so many terrains including art. But then I never lived to be a witness of my time and give account of it for any audience in the past or future. I cannot and never cared to. This is not a very modern age to me. However loudly it would shout that at you.
Do you know the part in a Pasolini episode ending with: “Morale: Essere morti o essere vivi è la stessa cosa,” (I think it has Toto, Ninetto Davoli, and Silvana Mangano in it). I mention it as it was like a most beautiful revelation to me. Something I could at least believe.
CA: Starting from Ettore, what is the role of pets (cats, dogs, fishes, etc.), or animals in general, in your life and maybe work?
KA: I do love animals. I want to be a cat. If all is gone, there is an animal to retrieve me from the abyss. A donkey, a cat, a sheep.
CA: What is the role of love, partners, lovers? In life, in general, but I am also referring to the impact of AIDS, if there was some.
KA: I had been deeply convinced love was the force, which made me go where I would go. I was also thinking it was of godliest origin. As I felt it was pure in itself, only as a God could be. Yet, the longer I live, I seize to be able to think that I can really understand concepts like purity or Godliness anyway. I am not surprised, all these ideas loose importance with me. If I love very strongly, I assume it is like I would think God desires to be loved or approached. It happened and will maybe happen. Then I will let myself go there fully. I am full of unspeakable sensations. I do not know if this
is love.
CA: What is the role of death?
KA: It is most prominent and imminent. It frightens me as much as I want to be in the center of its nutshell. I spend my life witnessing it outwardly all around me, mercilessly. Or then again of mercy. Its true ultimate nature is almost never revealed. though some claim to know. It may even be different for each one of us in the end. Or no end, no beginning, no time
or the opposites. We react to its outward appearance as fatality. With grief and sadness. I know nothing really of what it is. I must admit. It is because it seems to bereave us all the time. What role death has may be of as little importance as the role of life. Its role may be huge or of no significance at all. I heard of people who gave baits, that is pieces of barbed wire rolled into meat to wolves in new emerging populations undesired by some. So once gobbled up, it would slit their intestines and it makes them slowly die, through infections, inner bleeding and such.
CA: Once absorbed the Pasolini’s sentence, how do you image your own death, and being dead?
KA: If it is like Pasolini says, and I only can make myself believe in it without contrived effort, then it maybe really is like living! When I was younger, I entertained to ponder its apparition, but now as I know I will likely fail to grasp it at all, I will let myself drift towards it with less and less of high strung concern. And as I only know THIS life, it may end up being the same. I screamed often enough, when I sensed its real gravity. But I do not want to be afraid. It is meant to be. One needs to go. So I want to as well.
CA: By the way, where are you now?
KA: I am upstate New York, in a district called Milan.
