munich - Katya Tylevich

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Mirko Borsche Cover design for Zeit Magazin, 2012 Hong Kong, Paris, Berlin, Hamburg. When I come back, it’s nice to be somewhere small, to run into people you know. The designers in Munich really know one another very well. — You collaborate together? Most of the time, we just drink together. In this neighbourhood especially, I’ve recently seen a lot of architects, industrial and graphic designers moving in. There are about five bars that we all go to, so we see each other every once in a while. When we’re there, we also know the barman, the bouncer, the guy on the door. Munich is an easy place to come back to and feel at home. It rarely startles you by changing, but there’s still enough happening here. — You seem to make a clear differentiation between the art and design scenes, but your own practice is often involved with museum projects and exhibitions. Do you see overlap? We're not artists at all. We’re designers. So even if a mu seum asks us for work, we draw from what we’re good at – something printrelated, typographyrelated or movierelated. We know how hard it is for an artist to be an artist. We don’t pretend that we’re artists, too. — You don’t think you can be an artist and designer, at once? In Berlin, designers often says they’re artists. Here? No. — Is it a matter of pragmatism? It’s a matter of metaphor. The words ‘artist’ and ‘designer’ stand for two different things. 184 185 Munich Poster for the Bayerische Staatsoper, 2011
Maximilian Geuter Wonder Wheel, 2006, Pigment Print on laid paper, 54,8 x 80 cm Maximilian Geuter, myself, and our two afternoon coffees, are seated on the large outdoor patio of the Haus Der Kunst, a contemporary art museum, originally realized as a Third reich monument. In 1937, Haus Der Kunst opened to the Führer’s fanfare, on a mission to display and preserve art stamped with Nazi approval, and it was host to the notorious ‘Degenerate Art’ exhibition just before WWII. These days, Haus Der Kunst is home to provocative art exhibitions and one of the nicest cafés in Munich, called The Golden Bar [Die Goldene Bar]. The night before, we heard a DJ set on that same outdoor patio, barely aware that we were sitting above a row of bunkers, currently being used as an unlikely and effective hall for temporary video exhibitions. Is this what happens to ugly history, in the present tense? It flickers in and out of focus when cocktails and electronic music take the foreground. Geuter tells me how satisfying it is to see people playing table tennis in a place like this. He thinks of it as a symbol for modern Germany, and especially for its artists and poets. He says, ‘Of course, it’s better to see change for the better, but whatever the change, I am a part of it. It’s not a conservative personality that keeps me in Munich, where I was born, it’s my desire to observe a single tree as it grows. It’s important for me to observe my surroundings intimately.’ But Munich changes slowly, Geuter says. ‘It isn’t New York or Berlin. That’s fine.’ Geuter is patient. With regard to his work, he says, ‘I need to take my time. I produce, maybe, ten photographs a year. The funny thing is that I very rarely shoot in Munich – I find my subjects in different cities and countries, in books and on the internet. I soak up a feeling or an impression while abroad, then I come home to make sense of it all. My small studio is the only place where I can put my impressions down on paper.’ Geuter’s works range both in technique and focal point, but he says each photograph or project is an abstraction that belongs to a single series. ‘Essentially, what I want to do with every image is better understand and show the life of a contemporary person’, he says. Many of Geuter’s works are a collage of analogue and digital, the lens piercing dead ahead without wandering. On his website, Geuter divides his photographs into ‘Human’ [Menschen] and ‘Not Human’ [Nichtmenschen] – though human presence is often detectable in the latter category, such as in the bite of a burger (Burger, 2010), the torso of a gramophone (Propaganda, 2012), or on the receiving end of a foggy transmission tower (o.T., 2011). Conversely, humans often take on the qualities of objects in Geuter’s works, draped as they are in Christmas lights (Dimitri, 2006), frozen as ‘neutered’ mannequins (…And I Can Not Lie, 2009), or poised like a wallmounted picture of the Virgin Mary (Charly, 2008). The photographs don’t fit the definition of candidness, even as the personalities in them aren’t staged. But perhaps that in itself captures the life of the contemporary person: a creature hyperaware of being looked at; a composite of material and spiritual fragments. Geuter never studied photography at university. He spent his first five years out of high school assisting photographers before he ‘broke free’, he laughs. In addition to his art projects, Geuter also does commercial architecture and fashion photography, and creates company portraits for various groups and businesses. ‘You have to earn money to live in Munich, especially if you’re raising your kids here. But having that need has a surprising effect on my art – I want to do it more. If I was completely free to do my art without working for it, I don’t think I would be as productive as I am now. Anyway, it keeps me balanced, and I try to soak up as much as I can from my commercial jobs. I see the value of travelling between different worlds.’ If I want to know his real background, Geuter says, it’s from the nineties graffiti scene in Munich. What? I’ve never heard of a graffiti scene in Munich. ‘Yeah, in the mideighties and especially the nineties, train writing was really big here. I met many of the artists and designers I know now through that scene – people who think about forms, colours and expression in a really special way.’ Among those artists are Florian Hubalek, founder of Firstlines Gallery, which represents Geuter; and Frank Balve, another Firstlines artist and Geuter’s friend. Both of whom we meet hours later, as part of ‘Geuter’s walking tour of Munich’, in which our new friend takes us past the Eisbach (‘where young people in Munich try surfing’), through the Englischer Garten (‘where, to your left, you’ll see that public nudity is legal in here’), through the university neighbourhood of Schwabing (‘historically an artist’s neighbourhood, before the rent got too high’), inside the Academy of Fine Arts (where we find Balve literally living and sleeping in the auditorium, trying to finish his next exhibition), and finally to Firstlines Gallery, in the stylish Glockenbach neighbourhood, where we spend at least an hour talking to Hubalek. All the while, Geuter tells us a unique and conversational detail about every block, every street and every tree (kind of). ‘You know what I meant when I said that’, he laughs, at one point. ‘I’m not really here to watch the trees grow. I’m watching the city, and the people in it.’ 186 187 Munich Burger, 2012, Lambda Print, 40 x 60 cm
Page 1 and 2: Photography Alexei Tylevich VI Dest
Page 3 and 4: Munich An artist in Munich is neces
Page 5 and 6: Munich in 2005, and reopened its do
Page 7 and 8: Benjamin Röder CLUB TROPICANA less
Page 9 and 10: Carlos De los Rios Untitled, 2010,
Page 11: Mirko Borsche Unplugged - Design Wo
Page 15 and 16: Tom Schmelzer Responsibility-to-pro
Page 17 and 18: Tom Schmelzer Maybe Next Time or wh
Page 19 and 20: Sonja Herpich From the series Habit
Page 21: Tom Ising Design for Fussball Wunde

munich - Katya Tylevich

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