A conversation between Raphaela Vogel and Elisa R. Linn

E: I still remember that as a child it was often whispered to one that the giraffe is a cross between a camel and a leopard because of its physique and fur pattern. Are your giraffes female or male and does their sex matter at all?

R: This is actually a couple that is already fully grown. You can recognize this, for example, by the testicles of the male animal. The giraffes are neither life-size nor miniature. They are medium-sized, so to speak.

E: Medium-sized can sometimes sound like a compromise…

R: Yes. The grand narratives are over. The garland of letters here also refers to a well-known thought by philosopher Jean-François Lyotard, which has become something of a postmodern slogan. On the one hand, it described the failure of the project of modernity. On the other hand, it was interpreted as that micro-politics could now take over.

E: That means the sculpture also resonates with a kind of idea of extinction?

R: Exactly. But also the idea that in parallel there are medium-sized stories that are more than just micro-politics—anti-racism or feminism, for example —but that are also not encompassing everything. These are stories in the sense of interpretations. The giraffes become spokespeople and carry the phrase in front of them, beyond being working animals. They have a certain authority by communicating the sentence from above… almost like smart alecks.

E: With the phrase “THERE ARE INDEED MEDIUM-SIZED NARRATIVES”, you can't help but feel like you've missed the beginning of a conversation, like you're a bystander stumbling into the middle of a discussion or speech.

R: That's right. The sentence is intentionally ripped out of context, an argument. It's a dialogue between advocates of large and very small initiatives. You just pick up scraps of words and wonder what "indeed" and "but" refer to. Did you feel the same way?

E: Yes. I immediately tried to look at these "medium-sized narratives" under a magnifying glass and tried to grasp them—in vain, because although the lettering and the giraffes supposedly speak directly to an audience, something is obfuscating here and neither the story itself nor its scale become concrete.

R: "Medium-sized narratives" is here, in a way, also a nonsense phrase. After all, no comparison is drawn to similar objects or ideas, which could serve as a guide for its definition. So one has to look for this comparison oneself.

E: Yes, "medium-sized" has almost something unsatisfying as an adjective, it is neither fish nor fowl, somehow "lukewarm." However, some absolute superlatives aren't more meaningful—like "oberfaul" (very fishy), for example.

R: Or: "ultranackt” (ultra naked).

E: That sums it up even better. That was the title of your exhibition in Basel, right?

R: Yes.

E: The aesthetics of the garland pick up on this latent contradiction with its robust engraved letters that one might expect to find on a memorial plaque. And yet they seem—so isolated, attached to a thin string and jingling when set in motion by gusts of wind—a little frail. What was the inspiration for the material and typeface?

R: I actually made an attempt to not choose a neutral or technical font—such as Arial or a squiggly one like old German—from the font palette that was available at the tombstone dealer. Instead, I chose one that was in between and not immediately recognizable. Do you have a particular association with the font?

E: Although my stepbrother runs one of Berlin's oldest funeral homes, I've somehow missed diving into tombstone inscriptions until now. The font doesn't really have any pre-assigned connotations for me, but it still feels familiar because of its subtle 3D comic-like character. I somehow had to think of the Stone Age flair of the "Yabba Dabba Doo" lettering that adorns the lawn of the infamous “Flintstone house” in California. That may not be a coincidence.

R: Yes, but the Flintstones represent a very big story. Or actually not. Nuclear family forever, from the beginning to the present day. With the letter garland, I had thought of an inscription, as one knows it from gravestones. The starting point for the sculpture was the meaning and function of monumental sculpture in public space today, which also suggests bronze as a material. The function of monumental monuments no longer exists in this sense, and yet it was important to me to work out elements of it. In the past, people put what was always already big, the dominant, on a pedestal and made it even bigger. The giraffes are considered big, but they are only medium-sized. They do not rule. However, that they are not nothing either, one sees only when they stand on a pedestal: you can then imagine that they have not been placed on it, but have climbed it. Like at Speaker's Corner in London. Only instead of a box, they have placed themselves on the refrigerators of the economic miracle, to then talk about the slogans of the following epoch—postmodernism. They thus find themselves in a historical temporality in which regimes follow regimes…

E: Even statues can die. Recently, in light of revived debates about colonialism and racism, monuments have been violently torn down. One might think also of Leninopad (literally "Leninfall"), a pun that arose from the massive wave of grotesque demolitions of Lenin monuments in the wake of decommunization in Kiev. Can your sculpture be interpreted as an attempt to negotiate the role of monuments and their transformation over time—the fact that during upheavals, public space is actually always reordered in terms of political remembrance?

R: However, this is also true: the statues can die to the same extent as the concrete or generic things or persons they represent live on.

E: Did you think about this sculpture in public space in a substantially different way than you think about sculptures that you develop for exhibition spaces?

R: Yes, certainly. This is my first sculpture in public space, which is fundamentally different from the gallery space and new territory for me.

E: Especially from the 1960s on, art in urban space went hand in hand with having an effect beyond the cult of the expert, reaching an audience beyond the museum walls on the street, and using sculptures (mostly created by male artists) as a disruptive factor in the bourgeois ideas of public space.

One is reminded of Vostell's "concrete Cadillacs" on Rathenauplatz in 1987, which drew fierce citizen protests. By the end of the 1990s, things got a bit more pragmatic. In his 1997 published book, aptly titled Die Kunst im öffentlichen Raum oder Ein Gemeinplatz und sein Elend (Art in Public Space or a Commonplace and its Misery), the psychologist and art historian F. W. Heubach wrote about the "subjugation of art to the demand, hitherto directed more at post offices, urinals and stores for daily needs, namely: to be accessible within walking distance.” Would you agree with that in light of "medium-sized narratives"?

R: What would be the opposite of "daily needs"? "Sunday needs"? Church? Art at sites of pilgrimage? Public space is neither the salvation nor the downfall of art. But Mail Art, Duchamp and Broodthaers have already taken care of post offices, urinals and small stores…