Thomas Struth: Nature & Politics
Thomas Struth, September 2019, Photo credit: Vanessa Enders, Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery.
Interview by Trip Avis
Trip: Thomas, your latest project takes us through diverse research facilities, from the Leibniz Institute to the labs at CERN. Could you elaborate on the connection between these settings and the underlying “Nature & Politics” concept?
Thomas: I am always interested in the contemporary world, where we’re going, why we’re going, and what’s happening. That affects everyone, and it affects me as well. Technology promises have always existed, but maybe they are more prominent now. In the digital world, visibility is disappearing more or less completely—what I call asocial media. In 2007, I had the idea to look at places of technology and sculptural evidence. Previously, you had to be in the minds of a select few to create this—it could be a space shuttle, plasma physics, or laser research. I photograph these environments and see them as a human phenomenon: what does this tell us about atmospherical energy? This may sound strange, but not in an unfamiliar way, as I looked at streets as unconscious places, as places of a population’s collective unconsciousness, culture, and different attitudes. There can be ignorant buildings where the owners and designers completely ignore what is left and right of that building. So, in a way, I wanted the place of technology, except for one picture of the series, to have no people in it. Because it’s a creation that people did, that we did of the contemporary world. I like this idea of entanglement, this promise of technology, that the future world will be a better place because of technology, which I don’t think is true.
Trip: What inspired you to pursue this project and to photograph these animals?
Thomas: The photographs of dead animals, or rather animals that have just died, are not quite cadavers. When my father died at eighty-four, my nephew called me. Because I was on my racing bicycle near Dusseldorf, he left me a message and said I should come to my parents’ house in Cologne as soon as possible. So I went there. He had died that morning, maybe an hour before I arrived. I noticed that in the next few hours or the next morning, how my father was dead, but he was really in between. His soul passed away more and more. This was a very particular experience for me, my mother, and my siblings. I came to the dead animals because a few years ago, having worked in this field of technology for a while, I was thinking, what area have I not touched? I thought: oh, medicine! Technology and the body—how they come together very prominently. We made some calls to a hospital in Berlin and found this remote surgery robotic machine called DaVinci, which is used for prostate cancer operations. I called the surgeon and asked if I could look at the machine. The machine, of course, is a design object; I wasn’t interested in photographing that. I asked him if I could be present at an operation and ended up watching three different ones.
Mainly, I tried to make a picture of the operating table, where you see part of the patient’s body together with the nurse, and the screen that she looks at shows the inside of the patient’s body. That picture was quite intense and very, very good, I thought. But one image is not enough. You can make one work, and it’s great, but you have to prove to yourself as an artist that you understand yourself and what it means. You prove with another picture that it is intentional. I wondered what other body part could be interesting; I thought of the brain. I found a brain surgeon, and he invited me to be present at a tumor removal in a patient’s head. I made snapshots, but it’s tough when you’re not in the medical field. It’s very extreme. I was very close to mortality.
Someone there told me: “Oh, you should go to the dissection room of the Leibniz Institute.” I started taking pictures of the animals, a symbolic narrative of giving in. An exhale. Letting go of the theatre of life. You can find calm and stillness. I started this about six years ago; I liked the idea that I would show these works for the first time during the presidency of Donald Trump. Because it had these two elements of gigantic promises of technology, we all have to die. It sends out a message of immortality.
Thomas Struth, Sumatra-Tiger (Panthera tigris sumatrae), Leibniz IZW, Berlin, 2022, Inkjet print, © Thomas Struth, Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery.
Trip: As I looked at the images of the animals, I felt a sense of unity in how you captured them. There is unity in death from large animals like a bear or zebra down to a small fox. It doesn’t matter how mighty the creatures are; they are all on the same slab, portrayed similarly.
Thomas: This was very important to me in my pictures. For example, there was no gesture in a picture of a turtle and several others I took. When you mention the bear, it has his arms wrapped toward him, like when you fall into deep sleep and embrace yourself. The zebra has fallen to the side. In this typical fox gesture, the fox is, but he’s exhausted.
Trip: It’s very naturalistic. The zebra looks almost like it is running.
Thomas: The images are in the realm of artistry that speaks about mortality.
Trip: They are like the Memento Mori photography popular in the Victorian era.
Thomas: Exactly. I couldn’t photograph dead people because they have a name, birthdate, and family. It would be impossible to use a dead individual as a general symbolic gesture. Animals, especially in zoos worldwide, can be given names by those who care for them. But in general, they are just creatures. I also needed animals with a larger general narrative—like a bear or a fox. Children love bears; they have this fairy-tale quality to them. Animals have these historical narratives as figures and what they mean to people across different cultures. That is something that I consider in my choices.
Trip: How did you decide to show these animals alongside these photographs of research facilities? It feels like a juxtaposition of the naturalistic and manufactured artifice. What was your intention in pairing those two very disparate aesthetic concepts together?
Thomas: When you put things together that contrast very much in their content, each one gets highlighted in its essence. If you place all the same kind of food together at a dinner, it’s less interesting.
Trip: Right, because it’s very jarring, and like you said, it highlights their differences. It draws the eye to them through their differences.
Thomas: I did this show for the first time at a big exhibition at the Guggenheim in Bilbao in 2019. It was the most difficult space in the museum, where the walls come down at an angle with a fifty-meter ceiling, and I thought: “Jesus, this space is impossible.” I had five standing walls in the middle, and all the walls around, and what you saw when you walked in were all technology pictures. When you walked to the back of the room and looked back at the back side of the five standing walls, there were five pictures of dead animals. It was a jarring, theatrical installation that was extremely striking. It was very unexpected, in a way.
Thomas Struth, ProtoDUNE, EHN 1, CERN, Prévessin-Moens, 2023, Inkjet print, © Thomas Struth, Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery.
Trip: Your images have a physicality; in your container shots, it is as if the viewer can reach out and feel the cold metal, the durable plastic, and the sharp edges.
Thomas: I used to be a painter in the beginning. When I studied at the academy in Dusseldorf, the peak of conceptual, visual, and minimal art was the awareness of a work of art in its context of the space in which it is shown. It is very important and thematically present, which I greatly liked. It was a very good lesson in the awareness of how things function in the environment. Only some people were interested in architecture and the urban environment then. For example, when I taught in the early 1990s, my students had no eye for, no consciousness, and no awareness of architecture’s effect and workings. They didn’t consider it an interesting production of human existence with messages about humankind. In that respect, I never liked the idea of the standard, small size of photographs. I love sculpture; maybe, in a way, I’m trying to overcome the limits of photography by having the picture occupy the space intensely and strikingly. I love composition; I’m very meticulous about it. The more complicated the subject matter is, the more interesting the photograph. To orchestrate the details and make it work together like a piece of music. It is like an orchestra of details; it has to make a particular visual sound.
Thomas Struth, Beam Line Zone 1, EHN 1, CERN, Prévessin-Moens, 2021, Inkjet print, © Thomas Struth, Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery.
Trip: One of my favorite ones featured a rusted grate filled with metal shavings, and they are communing with cigarette butts. You would not expect to see the two things together, but they work together in beautiful, unexpected harmony.
Thomas: The container images came about during my fourth visit to CERN. I noticed these containers where people would discard unused parts, so I started photographing them. I’d climb on a ladder and photograph them top-down by hand with a digital camera. This is the first time I’ve shown them together with the bigger pictures, which are in an intentional order. The compositions of the bigger images are not understandable when you’re not a particle physicist, but the order is deliberate and serves a purpose. Whereas in the containers, that’s happenstance. This play between a very high degree of intention and the unintentional, references the history of object collages, like Picasso’s bicycle seat with the racing handles that form a bull’s head.
Trip: In your eyes, what would you say is the relationship between nature and politics?
Thomas: This title came about when I began this project after visiting Cape Canaveral. I was giving a workshop at the Atlantic Center for the Arts; they invite people to teach master classes with eight students. They invite artists, composers, poets, dancers, and so forth. They invited me, and I liked the idea, so I went for three weeks and in the end, I decided to make a visit to Cape Canaveral, which really struck me. The next area I covered was plasma physics, and I visited the Max Planck Institute. Back at the studio, when I had to give the project a name to my assistants, I said: “Well, it’s nature and politics,” as an ironic thing. Many years later, when I started to show the photographs and publish them as a book, I decided to use the title. What it means is these things you are looking at cannot exist without nature, but in all of them, politics is involved. There’s a political side to them.
Thomas Struth, Container 7, CERN, Meyrin, 2023, Inkjet print, © Thomas Struth, Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery.
Trip: You touched on this earlier: all of the pictures in these laboratories lack human subjects, allowing the spaces to take on quiet sentience.
Thomas: The genre of the scientist in their environment is a typical, known category of pictures, and I did not want to go there. It is really saying: okay, what you are looking for is what existed previously in people’s imaginations. For example, there was one photograph I made when I was at Cape Canaveral, where you see the underside of a space shuttle. You see a woman checking the heat tiles, which I like because it resembles a museum photograph. That is the only exception in the series.
Trip: Coming from a layperson’s perspective — someone unfamiliar with the inner workings of these facilities — your images inspire an almost childlike awe. Was this an intentional choice? Despite their captions, the meaning or purpose behind these mechanisms is almost opaque, allowing you to explore your imagination.
Thomas: Exactly. I wanted to evoke the feeling of them being a sculpture and feel what it feels like without even knowing what it is. It is not so important to know what it is or what it does. That’s the point. If I gave them a big explanation, it would seem as if I was advertising for science and technology, which was not my intention. I don’t reject technology—otherwise, we wouldn’t sit here and be able to talk between Mecklenburg and Florida. There are a lot of advantages. There is definitely a discrepancy in the development of technology and some of the decline of the social fabric we are witnessing. Since I’ve started with this, it’s even gotten worse. Peaceful coexistence in the world is definitely under threat.
Trip: Thank you for taking the time to talk with me and illuminate my perspective on your work and the state of our world.
Thomas: I am happy to talk about it. I think art, in general, is a very personal passion, but it also has something to do with the general human interest. That is what the draw of art is.
Thomas Struth, Container 2, CERN, Meyrin, 2023, Inkjet print, © Thomas Struth, Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery.
