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Through her work, the self-taught artist considers the complex relationship between nature and technology.
“Works in Progress” highlights artists across a range of disciplines whose work deals with ecological themes. Considering the particular role that artists play in the climate movement, this column will share their voices and provide a glimpse behind the curtain into their creative processes and experiences. Through a combination of Q&As and narrative pieces, this column will discuss the relationship between the natural world, advocacy, and the art itself.
For more than 40 years, sculptor and installation artist Gloria Friedmann has been challenging people to think about how humans contort nature for their own means. She began her artistic journey as a fine art photographer, creating a series of self-portraits in abandoned locations, and soon turned to sculpture, painting, installation and performance art. Many of her pieces integrate both natural and synthetic materials, combining materials that may seem incompatible, inviting viewers to reconsider their relationship with nature.
Friedmann has staged solo exhibitions at the Centre Pompidou in Paris and Kunststation in Cologne, Germany. She has also participated in group shows at the Musée du Louvre and Palais de Tokyo in Paris and created a number of public art installations. Her works are included in collections at museums across Europe.
A self-taught artist, Friedmann was born in Germany and currently lives and works in France. She spoke with Bluedot contributor Lily Olsen about how she became an artist, what her work means to her, and what she hopes people get from viewing her art.
Lily Olsen: Can you tell me about your journey as a self-taught artist? How did you develop your techniques and style?
Gloria Friedmann: Any path to becoming an artist is a good one; the important thing is to have a world of your own and find the best means of expression. I never went to any art school. I started taking pictures of myself. And then somebody wanted to show them. Then I decided photographs are not so interesting; there are so many materials you could work with.
Then I thought, what can I talk about? What do I love? As I like being in nature, I started imitating nature with materials that are contrary, such as made out of plastic. I went from representation in materials that didn’t belong to nature but represented nature to more or less using only natural products like earth and feathers. Most of the materials I use today are natural products.
LO: A lot of your work seems to juxtapose nature and industrialism. What inspired this?
GF: Nature and me. As a piece of nature, I am nature and myself at the same time. Hence my interest in non-human nature, outside me. Under various guises, the evocation of nature in my work persists, because I love it and observe it. For me, it's less a question of I think that I think that I think, but rather of I feel that I feel that I feel. The result is an art of sensitization outside any old/modern dialectic.
I put a lot of sculptures outside where they can live in nature. I make a little contribution so people will think about our situation and perhaps take more care.
I try to grasp the life of this time and not cry because probably homo sapiens, this upright ape, is going to set the earth ablaze. He's going to mobilize a mega-technical world, so that one day he'll bump his head into the stars. The Earth, our cradle, will then become our museum.
LO: What drives you to create art when you’re seeing all of these sometimes-overwhelming ecological problems around you?
GF: I put a lot of sculptures outside where they can live in nature. I make a little contribution so people will think about our situation and perhaps take more care.
LO: One of these sculptures is Le Gardien [a stag standing atop the oversized head and neck of a man]. Can you tell me about the meaning behind it?
GF: In the sculpture, where you have the brain, it’s cut off, and the head is replaced by an animal. A human is another animal. We are a part of nature and not outside of it.
LO: In your sculpture Oryx + Crake, the materials are all electronic devices and wires. What are you conveying here?
GF: They’re two robots. It’s like Adam and Eve. The female one has a television inside, which is still blinking out pictures, the weather reports, whatever. It goes on and on. She’s pregnant with it. Humans are able to reproduce themselves, but perhaps robots are going to be able to do the same without any help.
LO: Can you tell me about The Correspondent, the piece with a stag standing on newspapers?
GF: It’s a journalistic expression. It’s a very classical sculpture. The stag is on compressed newspapers that were thrown away. So this is a question of news, political things, ecological things, commercial things, publicity: everything we get every day and throw away the next day for something new that’s coming.
All this paper is made out of wood and comes from a forest. The forest is the home of the stag. The stag is sitting on this media and all this information we have to digest every day. We are overwhelmed with this information. And the stag, what does he do with it? Nothing. He just thinks about his forest, which he’s losing.
LO: I saw your piece Bonjour Tristesse [the skin of a horse suspended by the snout, with electronic wires and circuits cascading from the eyes] at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. What does this piece mean to you? What do you hope viewers think and feel in response to this piece?
GF: We are all surrounded by more and more robots. Perhaps they are going to have the best of us humans. We’re surrounded by things we don't recognize anymore. In a way, all the sciences imitate living humans and animals. But in fact they’re something completely different. Now you have little robots that they use for war that look like dogs or animals.
But when I first showed this piece, most people hated it, in a way. The stag [in The Correspondent] is completely stuffed, nobody cares about it, but the emptiness [of the horse], they didn’t like this representation. It scared them a lot.
This horse from a third or fourth version of robotics, useless today, empty of all organs and thus emptied of meaning: Try to prevent this from ever happening to you!
