Overexposure
The Arts Interview
Rosie Millard
Monday 6th March 2006
The Arts Interview
Rosie Millard
Monday 6th March 2006
newstatesman.com
The arts intervew - He has cavorted naked with
Charlotte Rampling and covered himself in caviar for Marc Jacobs, but
Juergen Teller thinks "fashion is a wank". He talks to Rosie Millard about changing nappies, body fascism and what went wrong with Kate Moss
Juergen Teller is a confident man. An artist with a
stellar track record of still photography that encompasses high-end ad
campaigns, editorials in all the glossies and exhibitions at Tate Modern
and MoMA, he is now much more interested in taking photos of his family
than shots of leggy, loaded beauties. Phillips, the auction house,
recently invited him to shoot a forthcoming jewellery sale using a
clutch of supermodels. No, said Teller. I'm bored with supermodels. But
my mum likes jewellery. I'll shoot your diamonds hanging from her ears.
His reason for photographing his wife, the London
contemporary art dealer Sadie Coles, and his two children,
eight-year-old Lola and one-year-old Ed, is that he loves hanging out
with them. "I have no idea who the top models are at the moment. It
doesn't interest me. I like the luxurious, dressing-up aspect of
fashion. But I wouldn't want to do it like Mario Testino [the famous
photographer of Madonna and Princess Diana], day in, day out. There's
nothing wrong with it; I'm just not interested in it. Currently, I am
changing nappies, eating food and playing with my kids. And trying to
work, and I can't work on something very far away from my life. So I
used my family to model the jewellery. It made much more sense."
Although he has won the Citibank Photography Prize and
created a celebrated series of pictures with the American artist Cindy
Sherman, Teller appears remarkably unfussed about "getting on". He just
likes clients who let him do what he wants - like Marc Jacobs, for whose
own-name label he shoots campaigns. On a 2004 shoot, the only clothes
he used from Jacobs's sizeable empire were a pink silk shirt, worn by
the iconic beauty Charlotte Rampling, and a pair of grey satin boxers,
worn by himself. The resulting series, featuring himself and Rampling in
an ornate suite at the Crillon in Paris, gave new meaning to the words
"stark bollock naked", because most of the time Teller was.
After you have finished noticing his genitalia waving
in the air, you focus on other things, such as his appendectomy scar. He
is thin in some shots, and fat in others. Teller loves this physical
honesty. One picture shows Rampling's aristocratic face, close up and
haughty, right beside Teller's wedding tackle. A caviar spoon is draped
over his crotch. Dollops of caviar enmesh with pubic hair. "I was really
pleased to be there with her and the caviar," says Teller, as if he is
talking about a holiday snap in a Russian diner. "Then afterwards I
thought, 'What is going on? This is all about excess and I am being too
careful with this $1,000 caviar.' So I did this." We turn the page.
There is Teller, eyes shut, caviar spilt all across his face. Yes, it's
excessive.
I look at another shot. Teller kneels on a piano, his
back to the camera, sticking his naked arse up at us. Rampling is there,
too, looking as if she is trying very hard to ignore him. "A lot of
people say I have a snapshot style," he says. Well, I was thinking about
something else, but do carry on. "Every single picture is completely
thought through. If it doesn't work I have to do it again. These photos,
for example . . . Well, I was the art director and set up each and
every one. It looks casual - but that's the best thing about it."
Teller, now 41, came to Britain from Germany when he
was in his early twenties. He tells an excruciating tale of how he and
another German, sensitive about their homeland's recent past, would keep
their voices low when speaking in their own language. One time, a
British wag leaned over and stage-whispered, through hysterical giggles:
"Don't mention the war!" Teller, whose knowledge of English then did
not stretch to the finer points of Fawlty Towers, had no idea how to take this, other than at face value.
At the moment he is quite happy to take things at face
value. He shows a picture of the American supermodel Angela Lindvall.
She is lying on her back, legs wide open. White liquid is sprayed around
her crotch. "I called this Paris, Milan, New York, I'm Coming!," says Teller affably, "because fashion is such a wank."
For someone who made his career out of snapping sexy
birds in clothes, this is a rather daring sentiment. But then Teller's
entire approach is daring. He even questions the validity of his most
famous muse. "I am astonished about the Kate Moss story, and not just
the recent drugs affair. I'm astonished about the Kate Moss story, full
stop. I don't quite understand it. I have known her personally very
well, for about 16 years, since she was 15. She is an extraordinary
woman, so much fun and so energetic. But to get to be such an icon, to
have exploded like a rocket - I don't really get it. She is beautiful,
but so are many others." He goes on. "I don't think she looks any good
in any photos of the past five years. In fact, she looks crap in all of
her recent huge advertising campaigns. Chanel, Burberry, Rimmel. She
looks awful. It's as if it's enough just for her to look something like
Kate Moss. It's a dreadful life for her, to live in this position. And
cocaine? What a surprise that was."
He has a whole file of unpublished photos of Kate,
which he'd had printed up for publication just before her drugs bust.
"And I thought, '****, this is a stupid moment. Maybe in 20 years' time I
will publish them, but not now.'" I ask him if he considers himself
part of the fashion industry, where his romantic, fantastical
hyperrealism first made an impact. "Not at all," he says. "Since I
began, models now appear so alienated and airbrushed. They push a woman
to be a certain way, and to believe a certain false dream about beauty
products. And it just makes women feel very insecure. I would rather
push them to be OK about the way they are." Basically, if you have an
appendectomy scar, flaunt it.
In one of his latest shots, Kristen McMenamy lifts a
long dress all the way up to her belly, revealing a carefully clipped
pubic triangle. "That shot was for Artforum and Frieze
magazines. English magazines. I couldn't use that in an American mag,"
he says wryly. But beauty? "It's about having a certain aura, and a
certain confidence about the way you look. That was what Kate Moss was
like when she was young. She certainly wasn't supposed to be the
supermodel thing." Fashion mags are bun-kum. And cliched bunkum at that.
"What you see is an older guy with a 16-year-old model. But never the
other way around."
Teller's first solo show in Paris opens on 4 March.
Entitled "Nurnberg", it consists of a sequence of images taken at the
infamous Zeppelintribune parade ground, site of Nazi propaganda rallies,
which was designed by Hitler's favourite builder, Albert Speer. Over
several months, Teller has photographed the monument, the podium and the
steep, ruthless steps, all of which have been left to decay. Or not.
Teller, whose childhood home was close to Nuremberg, explains. "We were
never allowed to go there. Of course, that meant all the kids just
wanted to hang out there, the younger ones running about, the older ones
on bikes or snogging their girlfriends. It wasn't really maintained,
but if there was a broken step, or a smashed wall, it would be
mysteriously replaced with a new one."
Teller's photographs show the delicate weeds, flowers
and lichen that have grown up around the stone blocks. "In Germany,
there is a saying about letting the grass grow over things, meaning that
events will eventually be forgotten," he says. "Maybe this is what is
happening at Nurnberg. I wanted to give my personal past a positive
end." He has: the blocks and steps are full of fear and cruelty, but the
series is leavened by shots of his children. Another shows a newborn
deer curled up on a countryside track. These leave a distinct sense of
hope.
Will German artists ever stop referring to the war? "I
think that 20-year-olds are completely free from it," Teller says. "My
grandfather didn't fight, because he worked on the railway. And my other
grandfather came from the Czech Republic. He didn't go to the war
because he was a bridge-maker for violins, and it was such a rare job
that the Germans didn't want to lose him. That's a bridge there." He
shows me another photograph. Surprise, surprise, he's got nothing on.
"Look, I'm poking my willy through it."
Why do you love taking your clothes off, Juergen? You
have a very friendly, cuddly body, but you sure do love to show it off.
He puts it down to being German. Apparently nudity is pretty huge over
there. "Everyone walks around naked. Everyone goes into the sauna naked.
You go into the kitchen naked and make a cup of tea and walk back
again. Naked. It's much more normal, and free. It is how you are. A lot
of the time, naked. I find myself naked a lot. I find it quite
fascinating to see how the body works." He sighs, and smiles. "Society
has a strange relationship with nakedness."
Juergen Teller's work is on show at the Fondation
Cartier pour l'art contemporain, Paris 75014 (tel: 00 33 1 42 18 56 50)
from 4 March to 28 May
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