A Conversation with Werner Kramarsky

CR: I have the same thing. It’s also generations are getting shorter and shorter, I think. Now I go to a gallery and I see people who are five years younger then I am and they refer to completely different references and so on. And that is beyond whether or not you follow the same kind of popular culture, in a way. A first generation is coming into college age that was born after the Berlin wall came down.

WK: Yes.

CR: You know, there are certain general geopolitical parameters that have since ceased. I am probably the last generation that actually lived through the Cold War, which I think has tremendous consequences on the kind of environment or the kind of historical consciousness out of which you produce work.

WK: For me, for example, I look at certain work and I can see, yes, thinking back this artist probably knows something about what Woodstock was all about or this artist knows something about what 1968 was all about and what happened in those days and what it meant to the artist community of that time. But I also see a lot of work where I absolutely don’t understand the reference and then I ask and I very often don’t know the names. It’s part of getting older.

CR: When I think of Sol LeWitt, when I think of the 60s, when I think of everything that happened in that time, I believe we all agree, now looking back at it, that there was a tremendous wealth of really radical innovation that was made. Not just in terms of general culture but also in terms of very specific art historical things. Most of the important concepts that we look back at originated in that decade. But, with regard to the artists of that generation and of that time, did you have the feeling that during that time it presented itself as radical, as experimental, as something genuinely new? And do you think that a younger generation of artists you follow has a different relationship? That what you see in the work is almost a reference to those moments rather than a genuine experimental continuation of it?