Diedrich Diederichsen, Professor of Theory, Practice and Mediation of Contemporary Art at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna, was chair member of the nGbK from 2010 through 2014. He advocated a redesign of nGbK communications, resulting in a new logo and a new way of writing the name. Interview conducted December 21, 2023, in Berlin.

Anna-Lena Wenzel: Before we get started, I wanted to ask when you became a member and whether you’re still a member today?

Diedrich Diederichsen: I am still a member, yes, and I joined when Anja [Corcilius] asked me if I’d like to be involved in the chair. I don’t usually become a member of anything [laughs]. But then I stayed on. I’d known Anja for a long time, from other contexts, and at some point she did a project at the nGbK for which I wrote a text. At the time she was in some work group or other [Revisiting Home] and so she was also in this …

ALW: … coordinating committee (KOA).

DD: It was through her project that I came into contact with the nGbK, apart from her I’d also known Frank Wagner for a long time.

ALW: What was it like being part of the chair?

DD: It was less unknown or unfamiliar than I was expecting. I got on well with the other two members. Once a month we had to go and sweet-talk Ingrid Wagner, our contact person in the Berlin administration. As well as its own meetings, the chair’s main job was to visit her regularly to discuss how things were going. I had no trouble with this, but there was a general image problem. Although I found much of what the nGbK was doing was interesting, the organization had retreated into a kind of Kreuzberg identity and its communications celebrated old-fashioned formats of “insolence,” “quirkiness,” and “defiance” that reminded me of kindergarten names or rock cabaret acts. Often in English. My main problem was not the content of the exhibitions—whose content was very diverse, ranging from AIDS activism to many other issues—but this public image. Which also impacted on other formal questions that are ultimately always part of the content itself. As a matter of principle, I think you have to keep moving, otherwise overspecialization always gains the upper hand—the gravitational pull of the niche—you have to counteract that in some way.

ALW: So you initiated a process that culminated in the exhibition Is it (still) the same old story? in December 2012, for which six communications specialists were invited, as the press release put it, “to think about the ways art institutions like the NGBK present themselves.” There was an accompanying program of events, some of which you moderated.

DD: A number of ideas were produced and then communicated via events. There was a kind of symposium with people including Christian Philipp Müller and Michael Dreyer and many others I knew at the time. Through the Merz-Akademie in Stuttgart, where I stopped working around this time, I had contacts to many people involved in communications and graphic design. But I also asked Michael Schirner, whose agency I’d previously worked for.

ALW: How did you invite people to design the new logo?

DD: It was based on brainstorming, with people contacting all kinds of other people they knew. ¹ Mostly friends and acquaintances of the office team and the chair at the time. It wasn’t the most attractive job; it meant working for little or no money. There was also rivalry, as all the proposals submitted were put on show. Then there was a complicated procedure with a jury, and I think a combination of several ideas was selected.

ALW: Not just Michael Dreyer’s?

DD: I don’t think so, no, but I can’t recall exactly. ² He certainly had the very good idea, that came up in this symposium, of saying that the nGbK is actually an academy. It produces huge amounts of printed paper and texts that are discussed. These are essentially the same activities as an educational institution. You can demonstrate empirically that many people who were in nGbK work groups subsequently became curators, in one way or another. The second thing was the new styling, with “bildende” and “neue” lowercase, “Gesellschaft” and “Kunst” uppercase [previously they had all been uppercase]. I think the overall look came from Dreyer, with input from other people on things like letterheads. I recall that he didn’t have enough time to implement everything. The proposals were then simply put into practice by the office team.

ALW: The original logo, designed by Gernot Bubenik, had come out of a collective process. Was any thought given to launching such a collective process again? The way you describe it, there was some kind of collaborative dimension.

DD: That was less in the call for proposals and more with the jury procedure. Dreyer only got involved at all became he was such a fan of Bubenik. Out of a genuine interest. That was definitely a factor, including this multipart communications model.

ALW: There’s a text by Dreyer in which he describes his ideas, and he mentions Bubenik and his early cybernetic-poetic graphics. ³

DD: Yes, he was always interested in the question of what left-wing communication is, something few people have focused on. Political claims usually come from art rather than design. And when they come from design, it never expands into art, remaining an internal debate. But there’s a reader on visual communication from 1971 [Visuelle Kommunikation. Beiträge zur Kritik der Bewusstseinsindustrie], about which I once wrote an article, on its links to the visual culture debate of the late 1990s that had similar goals. Around 1970 the focus was on reforming school teaching: art classes were to be replaced by visual communication as a way of raising young people’s awareness of the lies told by advertising. Visual communication was also an issue at the nGbK; there’s a publication from 1977 [Aufschlüsse über die Wirklichkeit – Projektstudium Visuelle Kommunikation]. It was inspiring to have access to the archive, to see all the things that had happened. Best of all was the translation of early-1970s added-value theory into graphic terms [Funktionen bildender Kunst in unserer Gesellschaft, 1970/71]. What interested me about the visual communication movement was that it tended more towards design than towards “revolutionary art” in the spirit of the young Immendorff, who painted the Party Conference of the German Communist Party—this chimed with certain discussions from the 1990s, about art as a service and so on. But by the time we were dealing with it in 2010, all that was already far, far away. This historical context had disappeared, replaced by a spirit that felt to me more like a street festival, with plenty of preaching to the converted. And, as I said before, a slightly childish attitude of protest. Especially in the way project concepts were communicated to the public. There was a strong sense of nostalgia, which had a lot to do with a rose-tinted view of West Berlin as it was in the 1980s. Berlin had become bigger in every way, but this development hadn’t reached the nGbK.

ALW: And especially not East Berlin.

DD: Right, although the East was also less and less present in the East itself. At the beginning there had been more assertiveness, for example not accepting the way English was being automatically introduced everywhere as a second language.

ALW: How did people respond to the communications initiative?

DD: Some welcomed it. Those who regularly realized projects knew the problem. Even if they didn’t share our view exactly, they knew what we were talking about. But there were also people who were very critical, who wanted to continue focusing on the neighborhood, working locally.

ALW: In the text accompanying the project, you claim to have squared the circle. There’s continuity, but also an adjustment to the Berlin of the 2010s. The new image remains recognizable, oscillating between pride in the principle of grassroots organizing and the desire to evolve and become more professional. Did the notion of professionalization rub some people up the wrong way? There’s always been a strong rejection of neoliberal tendencies and concepts.

DD: Professionalization isn’t necessarily neoliberal; communist professionals exist, too. From another angle, there’s something quite puritanical about this staunch amateurism, especially when practiced with the kind of self-righteousness sometimes found at the nGbK. And yes, we’re surrounded by other institutions that communicate with the public. All of them draw attention to themselves in specific ways, making sure people keep talking about them, generating discourse. The nGbK does have ways and means not directly linked to communications strategies, like networking, knowing people, but not courting people’s attention at all while making claims on the formal level struck me as problematic.

ALW: To me, it seems unusual for a member of the chair to push for something like a new logo. How did you perceive your scope for action?

DD: I didn’t know it was unusual; I had no grounds for comparison. I did have the feeling that Katja [von der Bey] and Leonie [Baumann, managing director 1991-2011] were interested in activities and that rather than being restricted to arbitration, the way they saw their role included moving the nGbK in a particular direction. And they, too, thought that meant professionalizing, more of a compact image, not always just being the ones known for being polyphonic and compartmentalized. Also, I thought I’d be wasting my time if I just sat there as a mediator, especially as that was something I wasn’t much good at. There were conflicts where I didn’t feel like getting involved and taking a specific stance, because it was about structural problems where it’s hard to know whether you’re right. In that light, it was the only thing I could do [laughs].

ALW: You were on the chair for four years?

DD: Yes, I was reelected once and then I left at the end of the second period. Who was the third person on the committee when I started?

ALW: Cornelia Reinauer.

DD: Yes, it was a female triumvirate. The three of them—Leonie, Katja, and Cornelia—were a well-established team. Reinauer was also a politician, she’d been a district mayor for The Left. Then something happened that caused a general upheaval and that prompted Katja’s departure. A year later, I said I didn’t want to continue.

ALW: What kind of conflict was it?

DD: It wasn’t a conflict about project content, it also didn’t concern the structural conflict within this form of organization between the office team and the project groups, and nor was it about the perpetual conflict over money. It was about a member of the office staff and her conditions of employment. But as a former representative of her employer I can’t go into any more detail, for legal reasons. This blew up into a highly charged conflict between the office team and the coordinating committee; the behavior of certain people eventually led Katja to announce her departure, and sooner or later Karin Rebbert [managing director 2011–2015] also left.

ALW: I’d like to come back to professionalization, from the viewpoint of the work groups. There are often different levels of experience and degrees of professionalization where exhibition-making is concerned. But how can professionalism be measured? The activist background of many artists also generates valuable knowledge, as does their experience with processes of negotiation. How an institution defines itself is a fundamental question: Must it conform to external standards? Or can it be proud of what it has?

DD: I think the nGbK is incredibly proud of its structure in any case. To use advertising terminology: that’s its USP. We’re the ones who reach decisions this way! The problem is that individual members and groups had interests that were not openly discussed. There were people who wanted to become curators, and there were others who saw themselves purely as activists and who saw the nGbK as one outlet among others, with the possibility of receiving a modest amount of financial support. They were interested in the same content, but with different personal perspectives. There were exhibitions where some people were ambitious about hanging things a particular way, while others wanted the same space for everyone. There was no culture of discussing such conflicts. For me, professionalism means being able to talk about such things and not to ignore the context—i.e., Berlin in the twenty-first century. After all, they were producing exhibitions at that time, not a publication or a magazine.

ALW: Although the formats can be very different. There are projects that take the form of a series of events or a website.

DD: That was a mantra at my time, too, but it rarely happened. What happened was exhibitions. The practice of doing something else had been forgotten. People were amazed that there had been a project in 1975 where the group members did nothing but research for a whole year and then published a slim volume at the end.

ALW: That’s interesting in the light of the two-year funding module for artistic research started by the nGbK in 2020, and the fact that the Berlin Artistic Research Program was born at the nGbK, linking back to past research projects at the nGbK itself.

DD: That’s good news. At my time, many were gripped by the desire to make exhibitions, a curating boom that also affected activists. That was the coolest medium. It’s what everyone wanted.

ALW: So what does everyone want today? You’re able to observe things directly in Vienna.

DD: Everyone still wants to make exhibitions. Even more than before. In Vienna, various new exhibition locations for students have opened around the Academy in recent years. But there’s also an emphasis on curating symposia and invitation-based activism.

ALW: In general terms, I see a trend toward consumer positions requiring no structural care: people use car sharing and live in furnished apartments. I fear a lack of understanding, as people are less and less willing to perform the kind of structural work required by projects at the nGbK, where things aren’t served up on a plate, where you have to become actively involved. Would you agree?

DD: I don’t think this is a new conflict within the field of fine art. Of all the arts, fine art is the most globally mobile. Firstly there’s more money, secondly there are none of the usual language barriers, thirdly the structures are not so fixed. The tendency to enter a situation briefly, to make a scene and create a buzz, using the host like an e-scooter, has always been a problem with activism and activist art. There is the aim of making a sustained impact, which often translates into staying somewhere for three months instead of three weeks. But there are few genuinely long-term models. Most community art concepts last maybe one semester, although the last edition of documenta was full of projects that wanted to be more long-term. But I don’t see any solution that led to a new format, all I see is an awareness and a need to name and discuss this issue.

ALW: For me, this also involves a specific definition of art and artistic work—is it more about communicative processes and developing structures, or is it about autonomous creativity?

DD: I’d say neither is enough on its own, but these are questions that go beyond the capacities of an institution. When you’re operating as an institution in a city, the main question is one of context. If it’s no longer the district of Kreuzberg but the whole of Berlin, then that calls for a rethink. With the new location, the whole Kreuzberg identity has gone!

ALW: When I think of the project In Dissent? Neighborhood, Gentrification, and Artistic Engagement in Oranienstrasse (2019), it used the example of Oranienstrasse to address issues impacting the city as a whole, that are found on a global scale. In my view, the nGbK is not as local as you describe it.

DD: In my day it was very local. Also, although gentrification is a large-scale problem, it’s always discussed using the same old examples: Kreuzberg, East Village, Ottakring. These discourses have been around since the early 1990s, in some cases even longer, and they’ve been thoroughly documented.

ALW: I’m still quite attached to the notion of the academy as applied to the nGbK by Dreyer. Last year, in the process of producing the exhibition Class Issues, we looked in-depth at the accessibility of art institutions and academies, the question of how one gains entry to the field of art. The notion of the academy strikes me as ambivalent, I have the feeling that it stands for the tradition of an educational institution that demands large quantities of prior knowledge, which is at odds with the nGbK’s self-image as an accessible institution. Did you also discuss this aspect?

DD: In general terms, yes, although I didn’t find the old-school subcultural style of the nGbK at the time especially inviting to outsiders either, but this was discussed more in general terms, not in connection with the notion of an academy. The idea was not that the nGbK should be viewed as an academy, but that it had the impact of an academy in practical terms and that this was one way of approaching its history—as a place of knowledge that has shaped and influenced people and institutions beyond its own internal evolution.

ALW: Reading the texts and the slogans on the posters for Is it (still) the same old story? I was struck by the language. I’d like for there to be such an ironic, self-aware undertone, such playful use of language. By comparison, things today all sound very serious.

DD: The idea with the academy was also a joke or a provocation. It was about saying that although all this work of formulating texts, programs, titles, and exhibition concepts serves a communicative purpose in the short term, it’s actually an education or a course of training, in the sense of a series of exercises.

ALW: I like the idea of the nGbK as an educational facility. For me it’s also a space for experimentation. Are there things you learned during your time on the chair that proved useful later at the academy, for example when mediating in a conflict?

DD: Hmm, I wasn’t especially good at mediating. Conflicts took place and I can’t say what I contributed to their unfolding, in positive or negative terms. A major advantage of the nGbK was that one at least knew where everything could be addressed, as arguments took place at meetings, not so much behind people’s backs. The platform was relatively well-regulated. People did still hide interests behind slogans and content, but the way discussions were conducted was traditional in a good sense, the way it was done in older leftwing contexts.

ALW: What you’re describing now are internal processes, but the chair also acts outwardly, meeting politicians, learning specific ways of speaking and performing.

DD: Yes, but this outward-facing activity, promoting the institution, didn’t usually go beyond the visits I mentioned to Ingrid Wagner and her colleagues; that didn’t generate any noteworthy experiences. Sometimes I found it quite pleasant to sit on the fence, although there were also situations where the chair took sides, but it was less of a personal burden for me than for some of the others. I didn’t envy Karin her position as managing director. She often came under attack.

ALW: I have memories of harsh discussions and strategic alliances at the annual general assemblies.

DD: Some of the interventions were pretty aggressive. But in such cases I would try more to say something in my role as a member, to support specific projects. The only role of the steering committee in such cases was to make sure the discussions stayed on topic.

ALW: The trend now is toward safe spaces. I think the nGbK is more of an arena in which people can learn how to deal with such conflicts, how to endure them.

DD: Yes, there were situations where it wasn’t about thrashing out the arguments, but about inflicting damage on someone. That’s something I’ve seen more than once at general assemblies. The nGbK is not a safe space.

ALW: Which also has its advantages.

DD: Indeed.