Artist Story: Jorn Ebner

Please give an introduction to yourself as an artist.

When I was asked, growing up, what I wanted to become, I thought that I didn’t want or need to become anything. I already am a person. Going on to be an artist seemed the natural conclusion. Of course, there were certain trigger points: my grandma did printmaking in her basement; I had been excited by artists and art (Marcel Duchamp, DADA, Surrealism) from early on. Yet I also contemplated becoming an actor. I would have liked to be a musician; a writer, too, as I’ve always loved literature. Eventually, I noticed that so far, I’ve been doing all of these things in one way or other since.

Most important to me as an artist was my time in London as a student at Central Saint Martins in the late 1990s, during the height of the YBA, the emergence of great commercial galleries, such as Robert Prime or Greengrassi, visiting amazing shows and galleries (one of the first being Gillian Wearing at Interim), meeting Liam Gillick, Keith Tyson, Angela Bulloch, Jaki Irvine, my main tutors at Saint Martins, Catherine Yass, Anne Tallentire and Monica Ross, and many more. The opening parties, late nights.

Why is drawing so important to your practice?

I was hooked on a remark by Joseph Beuys, who said that drawing is thinking. Initially, at college, I tried several modes of drawing, such as installations of pencil shavings, sound experiments. I used a video camera like a pencil/painting brush to create video drawings of Soho. Drawings became part of exhibiting my performative pieces, something that I might add as visual thinking to the actions. I did these slide pieces at the time, that documented objects in action. Quickly, the drawings became an element of the projections themselves: first as photographed drawings, eventually as digital drawings outputted on slides. In parallel, I developed proto-animations with slides of photographed drawings, and digital drawings, which eventually filtered into my online pieces (animated squiggly lines as environment and outline style human figures).

During the 1990s, at college and beyond, I studied a bit of Buckminster Fuller. One sketch of his influenced my drawings for slide animations and later web animation. Flash files had to be small, hence, my way of drawing used simple lines. Within the digital context, drawing and Flash were considered ‘eye candy’ by people engaged in net.art. This somewhat spawned my desire to create gestural images that suggested less machinery and more handmaking, whilst at the same time lacking expressionist aura. Which then led to the way I draw today.

Now, drawing to me means primarily the layering of matter. In this way, the way I produce sound pieces, is also a way of drawing. Drawing an analogy. Certain figures of speech suggest that the immateriality of thought and the materiality of fixing a thought through drawing are closely related. Maybe. In the past, I contemplated that a drawing is less fixed than a painting for instance. But that is simply an economic convention, as a drawing usually has less commercial value.

Why has music had such a big impact on your art?

My first noise/sound experience was as a youth, sitting at a train station listening to the sound of a commuter train. Since then, I wanted to make that sort of noise music. I listened to Brian Eno, Throbbing Gristle and the like. At college, together with my student friend Dominic Garwood, we talked a lot about music/sound. I experimented a little bit with recordings of water. Yet the trouble was equipment. I had to rely on borrowing machines from friends or organisations I worked with. Sound became increasingly important after digital equipment became affordable. Eventually I got a Zoom 2 and Pro Tools to work with sounds on my own computers.

I guess everything is connected: some music, literature, film, friend, experience, age thing sparks a certain artistic impulse, which in turn guides the respective interests in new or in-depth directions. These then inform the artistic impulses. With my series of sound/drawing pieces, Dortmund Demo Tape (shown at Vane in 2018), I followed this structure: I made soundscapes related to Dortmund (Germany), then I drew graphical scores to visualise them. These were interpretated on three occasions by individual musicians. Recordings of those inspired new drawings I made listening to those interpretations.

What song and/or musician had the biggest impact on yourself as a person and your art?

There are many. Music that inspired me early on: Pink Floyd: ‘Be Careful with that Axe Eugene’; Brian Eno’s albums: ‘Another Green World’ and ‘Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy)’, Frippertronics; Throbbing Gristle: ‘Weapon Training’; György Ligeti: ‘Atmosphères’. The Beatles and John Lennon’s murder had great impact too – and continue to do so. Only recently I discovered the Beatles’ ‘Carnival of Light’ (1967) on YouTube, recorded for an exhibition at the Roundhouse but never released on record.

When I started working on soundscapes, I began researching and listening to more experimental music. I am still into discovering new noise, sound, music; John Cage’s ‘Roaratorio’ is amazing. I love Luc Ferrari’s works. There are some exciting noise people working in Berlin too, like Chris Dreier. New pop/rock, etc, rarely excites me nowadays, apart from Richard Dawson or Black Midi; Björk; or some Cambodian 1960s music, such as the singer Ros Serey Sothea, who was murdered by the Khmer Rouge.

Why did the murder of John Lennon have such a big impact on you as a teenager?

I was 14 years old when it happened, and at first, I thought he was murdered for political reasons, because of the messages in his songs. My first reaction, hearing the news on radio, was to make a badge to wear at school. A couple of days later, it emerged that he was killed by a deranged person without political intent at all, which confused me: it seemed just a futile death. I guess the mix of feeling that political activism for peace and justice was paid for with death, and the realisation that it wasn’t political at all but pure futile chance, disturbed me. It may well be that this single moment filtered into my political mind as a whole.

If you had to choose between making art and listening to music for the rest of your life what would you choose?

I’d choose to make art while listening to music.

How do the different media and processes you employ in your work relate to each other?

Most of my works, whether sound or image, follow on from a previous piece. Something I didn’t care for in one, appears on another. Usually. At the same time, I try keep in mind what one of my professors in Hamburg (where I briefly enrolled in illustration in 1995) said: Giacometti always seemed to work afresh on each new painting, he said, working through each line, as if re-discovering the actual making all over again. I’m not sure now whether this is actually true, but what I took away (and still do), is not to rely on a style or be content with approved achievements.

There is no transition from drawing to sound. The sound works developed from my performative works, pieces that engaged with urban environments. The soundscapes that I make usually use material from the real. My drawings from some point onwards included figures: they were also city related, like my Jack Kerouac series. This annoyed me, and a way to get away from figuration was to draw through the dance of death by Hans Holbein. His Death figures offered a way to process through the dissolution of the figurative representation towards a gestural abstraction which suits me best for now.

Could you say something about the work of specific writers that also informs much of your work?

Only through engaging with a text, does the writing start to exist. At first it is an object, a book. When reading it, it comes into being, its thoughts, its stories. To me, the work of art is most interesting when it stimulates the mind, when something else comes into being beyond the connection between eye and object.

As regards literature, there was never the one text that excited me most but plenty of them. In my youth, the most important writers were Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Samuel Beckett, James Joyce. The pinnacle of writers seemed to be Thomas Bernhard. They instilled an existentialist philosophy that guides my life.

I still read a lot. I love experimental writings, surreal writings, recently books about specific animals. Some philosophy, every now and then. When I embark on a new project, I read a lot of background information (I recently specialised in bees, for instance).

For inspiration: as with music, there is not one specific writer, but there are writers that accompany me. When I discover certain lines in a book that resonate with me, I write them down; sometimes they filter into titles of pieces. Often, when hooked on some writer or some music/composer, I start to consume everything else by that person or group. Completion mania.

For my drawings, there were the stories by William S Burroughs that blew my mind; Kerouac’s On the Road; books that dealt with movement, with unstructured, unstable, fluid lives. My latest infatuation was with the complete oeuvre of Virginie Despentes. At the moment I am reading a lot of JG Ballard and some Timothy Morton.

Would you describe your work as being quite fixated on death?

Not really, but it surfaces frequently. Landscape/cityscape, the universe, natural science, these also inspire me. ‘Life is being unto death’. Death is a close friend of Loss. Ancient philosophy sees a kinship with Sleep. Death is a somewhat hidden motor of human existence, in the sense that we try to avoid it. We eat and drink to stay alive, we try to establish an economic condition that allows us to live and eventually die comfortably. Strangely, I associate death with the Middle Ages; the seemingly raw cultural and visual reactions of that time have always fascinated me. Flagellants, Dance of Death, etc.

Our digital life glosses over (or tries to make shiny) everything that is raw, revolting, bodily. Death is the ultimate bodily condition, for a dying person as much as for those who deal with the dead. When a loved one dies, it causes all kinds of bodily reactions.

Death is also the one aspect of life that we don’t understand. It is a ‘strange attractor’, an unpredictable yet foreseeable moment. When the object of love, the object that mirrors one’s happiness, is no longer around, it has died. Although that doesn’t mean it has completely gone or vanished from one’s mind. Death causes in-between states.

I read a lot about bees during the last few years, and about crows. Interestingly, both animals are culturally/historically associated with death, although in different ways. Whenever I feel that what I do is uplifting, humorous, and taking a direction to the unknown, like the universe, to bees, to crows, it always seems that a reference to death emerges at some point.

I don’t ponder death all the time. It just happens to emerge regularly.

Is there anything else specific you would like to say about your work?

At one of my first exhibitions at Mota in London (1999) curated by Patricia Kohl, someone noted the similarity of my drawings to computer print-outs. I had drawn on templates printed off DTP-files. There is a continuing engagement in my works that balances digital and analogue images, offline and online presentations. I love it when one could potentially be the other, when the visual shape does not obviously display its form of making.

I guess, part of my preoccupation with death stems from my recurring annoyance with aspects of the digital revolution (mostly in terms of economics). Digital life seems to block out the sense of ending, because technology doesn’t really allow the preservation of memories other than photos or text entries. Once something has died a digital death, it is gone, unless some digital archiving has managed to rebuild a piece in a new format. Most of my online works are now offline, because technology stopped supporting them. This is a paradoxical situation: Digital promises never ending memories and archiving. But really only from the moment onwards that Digital came into power, and only on its current operational terms. Anything built in Flash leads a difficult life these days, until it is converted into some post-Flash file. There is a death built into technology that society doesn’t really like to acknowledge.

However, I always embraced the limited lifespan of online works. It is similar to performance, and in some way mirrors the finite lifespan of our own existence too. Again, back to death.

Do you have any particular memories of your experience of working with Vane?

In 2002, I was awarded an AHRC fellowship at the University of Newcastle, which lasted until 2005. In 2004, I moved from London to live in Newcastle full time. It was a vibrant time; BALTIC had just opened, exciting artists-in-residence were based in the region, some even choosing to move to Newcastle permanently. At the same time, I saw Vane’s pre-gallery projects in the city. After my fellowship ended, I was introduced to (Vane directors) Paul and Chris by fellow artist Eva Weinmayr, who participated in the gallery’s opening show at its first location in Kings House, Newcastle. I was thrilled when, soon after in 2006, we started working together, leading to many exhibitions since and art fairs, including ones in Cologne and Copenhagen. At some point, Paul discovered that we were born on the very same day in the same year. That’s quite special, too. I relocated to Berlin in 2009, but Vane for me isn’t just a gallery. With some gallery artists, I struck up friendships – amongst them Kerstin Drechsel, EC Davies and Simon Le Ruez – and there is a feeling of mutual support amongst us. It is an expanded field. Of course, Paul and Chris came to visit Berlin many times; and I really love this ongoing personal connection and exchange.