ON RECORD #5: Peter Coffin
The Long Way Around Can Also Be the Most Direct:
Peter Coffin on Field Tests in Modalities of Consciousness
ON RECORD is a series of dialogues with contemporary artists about the ideas and influences that inspire their works. ON RECORD #5 was conducted in Tokyo and edited by ART iT in collaboration with Peter Coffin.
Untitled (UFO) (2008- ), functional flying saucer, appearances: Baltic Sea Region, Gdańsk, Sopot; Southeast Region of Brazil and Rio de Janeiro. All images: Courtesy Peter Coffin Studio.
We had almost completed a full circuit of the 16th-century Japanese garden adjacent to the New Otani Hotel, itself one of the locations of the 1967 James Bond film You Only Live Twice and not far from the Imperial Gardens. Our walk included a detour up a wooded service road, a pause in front of the garden's waterfall, and a hike up a small hill that led past a mysterious installation of an idle projector in a weatherproof case placed across the pathway from a freestanding square glass panel.
The weather was sunny with a slight chill, and we were sitting on a bench next to a small pine tree overlooking a pond. Helicopters periodically flew overhead and at other times the din of construction work could be heard from beyond the hotel complex. We had agreed that day to discuss the idea that "things aren't always what they seem."
"During our walk you were telling me about your Untitled (UFO) project, for which you worked with a sociologist and a PR company. You were interested in encouraging people to think about what the UFO phenomenon represents psychologically. So you created a UFO with a production company called Cinimod Studios and it has flown twice in the past few years, once over the Baltic Sea near Gdansk, Poland, in 2008 and again off the coast of Brazil and Rio de Janeiro in 2009. You told me that it was designed as a kind of archetypical flying saucer based on references from various sources: fictional descriptions, television, and movies. The result was a seven-meter wide flying saucer with thousands of lights that produced a dynamic spectacle in the sky. Why did you do the project?”
[Before we speak about the UFO and the idea that things aren't always what they seem, I want to point out that it's appropriate that we're in a Japanese garden. These gardens are designed to integrate illusions of scale and depth in space. They're meant to encourage us to think about and experience space and time differently.]
[I'll tell you how I decide on an artwork and it will shed some light on the UFO project. I happen to think of it as more of an experiment and I’ll explain what I mean. I usually choose a subject matter that will end up being about more than what it appears to be about and that inspires ideas beyond it. I'll hope it encourages a reevaluation of the subject and a new engagement with it. In this way it may even take on a life of its own. This is an approach I take with my work because art ends up being useful for encouraging alternatives to the rational sensibility that tends toward fixed meaning. I’m interested to generate something beyond representation for the sake of engaging further inquiry. I don’t pretend to have control of the meaning an art experience inspires but am happy to try and catalyze it.]
[I chose to realize the UFO project because I was interested to think about the nature of the collective conscious, and used this subject to explore how we think about ourselves in our reality. This approach - using a subject to explore something else - is rooted in a desire to understand how we think, instead of just what we think, so that the subject is useful for bringing new perspectives into consideration. I am not really interested in UFOs, but found that taking a look at the UFO phenomenon the way we did was useful in thinking about the psychology of belief and fantasy.]
[I mentioned that the UFO project was a kind of experiment. We didn't predict how it would be received and how people would react to the UFO although we had some inclinations of what may happen having looked at psychology studies concerned with 'fantasy prone projection' and other themes in psychology that have to do with belief. The experiment was meant to allow the experience to take its own course, unscripted. I decided to not create a 'shock-and-awe' kind of experience you'd associate with a UFO. The UFO was announced in advance and we were aware that not everyone who may see the UFO would have had advance knowledge of it. This is something I wanted the project to capitalize on. To this end we worked with a small group of sociologists and the local press in the Baltic Sea region and again later in Brazil, anticipating some interesting dialogue and exchanges between those who knew and those who did not. The sociologists who participated, gaged the responses and involved people in the dialogue about it before, during and after.]
[We got involved in thinking about what the experience represented for people but were not aspiring to draw any conclusions about what was happening - just some creative cogitation. With projects like this I want to generate an experience that engages further inquiry. Most of the people who saw the UFO without prior knowledge of its presence were surprised and reached out to friends or family to learn more. Their exchanges with people who witnessed the UFO and had previous knowledge of it generated discussions about knowledge and belief, human consciousness and the inclination to connect with unknown things, which seems to be at the heart of the UFO phenomenon. Many wondered about the desire people have to connect with other life and the curiosity about a more advanced life like what people imagine visit us on earth in UFOs. There was a lot of discussion about the future and our connection to it, which led us to wonder whether the UFO phenomenon inspires people to compare themselves to a kind of future self that may be embodied in the ideas our culture generates about intelligent extraterrestrial life.]
Top: Untitled (Greenhouse) (2002), greenhouse, plants, speakers, soundtrack, sound system, musical instruments. Middle: Yamataka EYE performing in Untitled (Greenhouse) at the 4th Yokohama Triennale, 2011. Bottom: OOIOO performing in Untitled (Greenhouse) at the 4th Yokohama Triennale, 2011.
"You mentioned earlier that a reference point for the this project was Carl Jung's treatise on the UFO phenomenon, Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies, which was published in 1952. Jung's ideas were less concerned with the reality of flying saucers than with their reality as a socio-psychological and cultural phenomenon. The book was written in the aftermath of World War II and put forward the premise that sightings increase during times of social duress and war, and that the belief in UFOs reflects a desire to escape the self and perhaps connect with some projected self. Was Jung also involved in the Music for Plants genre of music that that was part of the Untitled (Greenhouse) project we discussed earlier?
[Not as far as I know. Carl Jung's ideas about the social and psychological aspect of the UFO phenomenon are curious to me separate of the work with Music for Plants. But both are driven by a desire to connect with something out of the ordinary, ideas that people have been curious about, ideas that concern belief, ideas that have been popular or unpopular for potentially interesting reasons, ideas that we may want to believe but can’t prove, ideas that solicit the imagination, engage us to project or just generate more questions. It may just be an idea that is absurd and thinking about absurd things is creative. Thinking about why something is absurd is an exercise in thinking. I am attracted to ideas that polarize and are taken seriously by some and not seriously by others. They’re useful to consider in thinking about how we adopt a point of view. They also hint at another perspective that transcends belief or disbelief and may tell us something altogether new. Jokes and riddles can do this occasionally. Anyway, I don't much care for Jung's writing but am happy that a respected psychologist took on a subject like the UFO phenomenon - something we can be amused by, find absurd or be drawn to because we're curious or want to believe in it. Subjects like this are rich and have the capacity to generate interesting questions about how and why we occupy ourselves with the idea of intelligent beings that think and exist differently and visit us in a UFO or the idea that plants have a consciousness and enjoy music, regardless of belief. Jung made a serious study of dreams and was interested to know how the mind works - why we think the way we do. He inspired many people to think about the mind and to learn from what it might tell us about ourselves which is a great accomplishment after the psychological damage of the World War II.]
[The idea of Music for Plants was a kind of conceptual springboard for the Greenhouse project. I built a greenhouse in a gallery as a staging area for experience and experimentation. And as I mentioned, it wasn't meant to be scientific but still manages to become something like a laboratory every time. The scenario of the work is like a proposition: 'Here's the possibility for an experience based on an idea that you may try for yourself.']
[And again in this situation, I didn't care for people to think too much about whether plants listen to music or not, just to imagine it. Like an exercise. As you might know, the Music for Plants genre was popular in the 1970s. I wondered why it was popular then and not now. This is just conjecture, but my feeling is that when people bought Music for Plants records they weren't really committed to playing it for their plants. I think you'd probably find that most people were just interested to know how plants think. This is why I became interested in the idea of this phenomenon. I was sure that there was something else happening that was far more interesting and it was more than just the idea of plants listening to music.]
[How strange to think about what it's like to experience music as a plant. The moment you've entertained the question, 'What’s it like?' - you've begun to project yourself into the imagined consciousness of a plant. It is an automatic act of creative self-extension. We do this when we mythologize, when we imagine the things we can not experience or know for certain, when we develop a space program to go to places and see things we can only imagine and when we seek new questions. These activities do not concern us by necessity and they’re not, at least immediately useful. We project and extend outside of ourselves using our imagination because it's in our nature.]
Left: Sculpture Silhouette (R Smithson, "Gyrostasis," 1968) (2009), powdercoated aluminum, approx 279.5 x 198 x 2.5 cm. Right: In foreground, Sculpture Silhouette (U Boccioni, "Unique Forms of Continuity in Space," 1913) (2008), powdercoated aluminum, approx 264 x 145 x 2.5 cm; and Sculpture Silhouette (S LeWitt, "Incomplete Cube," 1974) (2008), powdercoated aluminum, approx 213 x 214 x 2.5 cm.
"You talk about projecting. Is this also what is going on in your Untitled (Sculpture Silhouettes), for which you created monumental, flattened silhouettes of famous sculptural works from art history, ranging from the Venus of Willendorf to Rodin's Thinker and some iconic contemporary works?"
[It has more to do with abstracting. I wondered about how and in what way these icons remain with us and how they've stuck in the mind of culture. I'm aware that there are many factors that influence or determine what gets remembered in art history that are not just the mind at work and that they may be considered in the larger cultural context alongside subjective experience. This project got me thinking about how we interpret and with what perspective we look at something like memory, what our relationship is to it from that perspective. I paired this with an interest in how sculpture is experienced in space and time - in particular perspective. We move around a sculpture and look at it in a way that we might work around an idea; we look at it from different points of view and observe it over time so that we can know it more broadly.]
[The Sculpture Silhouettes have been installed in public parks and in gardens. They're flat and resemble iconic three-dimensional sculptures devoid of their original volume - objectified in this way as simulacra that seem to hover weightless above the grass. When moving through the space of a park or a garden, the Sculpture Silhouettes seem to change shape by virtue their flatness and our changing point of view. If within a person's field of view, a Sculpture Silhouette is perpendicular, the representation will appear as we know it in our three-dimensional reality. When the viewer's perspective has moved to the next 90-degree point of view, it will have gradually become a vertical sliver, unrecognizable and almost invisible - not unlike Duchamp's idea of the 'infra-slim.' The basic experience of the work includes an awareness of what represents a three-dimensional shape is in fact only two-dimensional, and that it's merely a simplified representation of the reference. While the flat shapes change as we move through the park, they produce an awareness of physical perspective while encouraging a consideration of how we look at and interpret some thing - including its representation or simulacra - from various perspectives in the space of our thought. I'd like the awareness of its changing shape - the result of our physically changing point of view - to occur in tandem with the considerations of the various perspectives with which we look at and think about a referenced image. It is a physical metaphor for the way in which we interact with the idea of a thing like a sculpture, considering the point of view or points of view with which we think about it. For example, the Sculpture Silhouettes go in and out of view as we move through the space, just as their references and all that they signify slip in and out of memory. The purpose of the scenario the work creates is to further abstract the representation and shift attention on interpretation and point of view. Can we look at these representations and understand them differently? Can they be understood in another way without ignoring the memory and associations linked with them if they're familiar or somehow otherwise recognizable? Questions like this are part of the impetus of these works in space. The way we look at something and interpret its associations and references can be considered in parallel with how we understand them in space.]
"Let's return to the UFO project. Gdańsk has an interesting history, as it was the first place the Nazis occupied at the beginning of World War II and was the site of German U-boat production. You mentioned that the hangar where the UFO was built was in fact the same hangar where the U-boats were built, and that the UFO was the last project constructed there, as the hangar was razed shortly after. How did that history affect the project?"
[That was an interesting discovery and not something we planned. Gdańsk just became an intriguing location for the context of the UFO project for that reason among others. In the discussions with the sociologists that we worked with during and after the UFO flight, people talked about Poland's connection to Catholicism and the country's experience of having endured so many wars. They found this relevant to the discussion of what the UFO represented. The discussion of war, belief and Jung's idea about UFO sightings as a psychological response to war became part of the dialogue that engendered the work and lent it significance.]
[In my research about the UFO phenomenon I learned that the UFO and the idea of aliens from the 'red planet' was a popular surrogate for a fear of communism during the height of the cold war. For people like SunRa who claimed to be connected to intelligent life in outer space, it may very well have been a kind of emancipatory release from social or political restrictions in a still racist society. The UFO phenomenon and the desire to connect with intelligent life in outer space represents deeper feelings and aspirations that are interesting to consider with respect to how we make sense of ourselves in reality.]
"What were the survey results in Gdańsk?"
[It was qualitative. We had no intention of drawing any scientific conclusions and were intent in observing what came of the experience. The initial question from folks was, "Why was this done?" The project included a coordinated press announcement of the UFO in advance, because I didn't want it to be a surprise. That was odd to people and they wondered, 'Why would you not surprise us with a UFO?' What followed naturally were more interesting questions like, 'Is it a UFO if it is man-made?' and, 'What does the idea of the UFO represent?' 'Is it also man-made?' 'How and from what does our curiosity - or in some cases belief - in UFOs originate?' 'What can our beliefs and our imagination tell us about what we think and how we think?' And so on.]
[The notion of the UFO is a thing outside of ourselves because we either don't care to believe it, are curious to believe it but can not validate it, or have faith it is real. The not knowing itself, despite some possible faith in it, is what keeps it apart from us while remaining a part of our culture and linked to it by a desire to connect in belief or curiosity. This link is powerful and concerns cultural belief and trust broadly. Think of religion, trust in authority, faith in advancement of society, for example, and then beyond this, the imagination of all else that we can't know but want to. It is in our nature to project into the future, use our imagination to explain things we can't explain and to imagine beyond what we know. In this scenario, the UFO was explicitly man-made. It originated with us and with that awareness, is no longer a thing apart from us - only a representation of it. In recognizing it as an outward projection we can compare it to the UFO of mystery and consider it neither a myth, hoax, nor a true UFO. It is now a thing to be thought about with a kind of objectivity as we consider our own subjectivity and the subjectivity of our culture out of which the UFO phenomenon arose regardless of belief, and significant to the suspension of disbelief and our imagination. In stepping out of the ordinary perspective - often limited to polar positions of belief or disbelief, yes or no - to think about the social-psychological and cultural phenomenon of the UFO, we find that it tells us about ourselves.]
"That seems to relate to what you said earlier, 'How strange to think about what it's like to experience music as a plant.' It's funny because the idea of what you call creative self-extension, or projecting consciousness, seems to have a counterpart in the sex act, during which your entire bodily and mental frames of reference are suddenly reoriented away from the conscious mind to something that is so intensely physical it can become transcendental or out-of-body."
[I hadn't thought of this. I do like to involve perspectives that are alternative to the ordinary perspective and transcend it. I'd say that it anticipates some kind of emancipation or urge to transcend. Humor can have this affect, and I'm attracted to how that works. Its ability to encourage an absurd way of looking at some thing can allow for a brief escape from ego and ordinary perspective. There's an experience that I'm interested in, when after having just laughed at a joke, I wonder again about what was funny, how and why. While a joke may not seem to have great depth it usually leaves us just a little more to think about. It's as if the joke permits us to get a glimpse of something in a momentary transcendence of perspective that allows us special entry into a question.]
[It reminds me of what we were discussing earlier, that the shortest distance from one point to another is not necessarily a straight line. It might be a long windy joke, an imagined explanation or an elaborate myth that seems to be roundabout but ends up being more direct. It might be the walk around a sculpture when we look at it from all sides that provides us a more direct connection to it.]
Both: Untitled (UFO) (2008- ), functional flying saucer, appearances: Baltic Sea Region, Gdańsk, Sopot; Southeast Region of Brazil and Rio de Janeiro.
"During our walk the subject of religion came up, and the idea of how some religious traditions involve an activity that seems to be a process of 'going through the motions' as a way of life, whereas in others the requirement that a position should be adopted closes people to other perspectives."
[I like not having my mind made up entirely - to stave off the kind of closure of fixed meaning. Like the space between doubting the existence of UFOs and believing, where thinking outside yes or no is useful for the sake of asking about the question itself and everything else that might be relevant to the doubt or the belief. 'Where does this idea come from?' is often a much more interesting question to ask before adopting a position. 'Why am I inclined one way or the other anyway? What does it tell me about the way I think about things?' Religion is interesting to think about because it's a mode of thinking that people get involved in despite the fact that many of its beliefs can't be validated by anything but trust. Just as we hold a faith that art is significant and generates meaning, I can not control it nor do I have the capacity to define its significance. I'm interested in the desire to believe in things that can't be proven. Ideas just exist after all and they get worked out. What's more interesting is how they exist.]
[It does. This series began with shapes of iconic sculptures that were abstracted as flat shapes that I worked with in space. Each has its own cultural and historical significance left as a reference. They're not chosen because of what they represent or because I like them or dislike them for that matter. They just exist in the consciousness of our culture. I made an effort to choose them arbitrarily and without thinking. That's not really possible, but it's the effort I made in choosing from various genres, cultures, historical periods and from images that have been around me. Trying not to think is an exercise in and of itself. So the original shapes have been abstracted in one dimension - similar to the way in which I have considered abstracting an idea so that I might get more out of it and understand it more objectively. They've been reduced to a two-dimensional and more concrete representation. As a result, they have a new dynamic presence in three-dimensional space because appear to move in our field of view although they're standing still.]
"The artifice of art is a part of the idea that we may allow ourselves something like an objective view about the thing we are interpreting. Through the acknowledgment of its own existence as a real unreal thing to be thought about objectively, the UFO project encouraged onlookers to engage in philosophical questions that they might not have asked if the work tried to conceal the fact that it is a construct or had addressed the topic with a focus or interpretation that was prescribed. It creates a foil for understanding the world as a construct. It reminds me of what someone once told me about Japanese gardens:
'It is clear that everything is highly manicured. It's not pretending to be natural; it allows everybody to know that it's both natural and constructed. That's why I like the sticks holding up the tree branches, because you can see that the tree never had the idea of growing that way by itself.'"
Work by Peter Coffin is currently on view in the 4th Yokohama Triennale, "Our Magic Hour - How Much of the World Can We Know?" through November 6.
Peter Coffin on Field Tests in Modalities of Consciousness
ON RECORD is a series of dialogues with contemporary artists about the ideas and influences that inspire their works. ON RECORD #5 was conducted in Tokyo and edited by ART iT in collaboration with Peter Coffin.
Untitled (UFO) (2008- ), functional flying saucer, appearances: Baltic Sea Region, Gdańsk, Sopot; Southeast Region of Brazil and Rio de Janeiro. All images: Courtesy Peter Coffin Studio.
We had almost completed a full circuit of the 16th-century Japanese garden adjacent to the New Otani Hotel, itself one of the locations of the 1967 James Bond film You Only Live Twice and not far from the Imperial Gardens. Our walk included a detour up a wooded service road, a pause in front of the garden's waterfall, and a hike up a small hill that led past a mysterious installation of an idle projector in a weatherproof case placed across the pathway from a freestanding square glass panel.
The weather was sunny with a slight chill, and we were sitting on a bench next to a small pine tree overlooking a pond. Helicopters periodically flew overhead and at other times the din of construction work could be heard from beyond the hotel complex. We had agreed that day to discuss the idea that "things aren't always what they seem."
"During our walk you were telling me about your Untitled (UFO) project, for which you worked with a sociologist and a PR company. You were interested in encouraging people to think about what the UFO phenomenon represents psychologically. So you created a UFO with a production company called Cinimod Studios and it has flown twice in the past few years, once over the Baltic Sea near Gdansk, Poland, in 2008 and again off the coast of Brazil and Rio de Janeiro in 2009. You told me that it was designed as a kind of archetypical flying saucer based on references from various sources: fictional descriptions, television, and movies. The result was a seven-meter wide flying saucer with thousands of lights that produced a dynamic spectacle in the sky. Why did you do the project?”
[Before we speak about the UFO and the idea that things aren't always what they seem, I want to point out that it's appropriate that we're in a Japanese garden. These gardens are designed to integrate illusions of scale and depth in space. They're meant to encourage us to think about and experience space and time differently.]
[I'll tell you how I decide on an artwork and it will shed some light on the UFO project. I happen to think of it as more of an experiment and I’ll explain what I mean. I usually choose a subject matter that will end up being about more than what it appears to be about and that inspires ideas beyond it. I'll hope it encourages a reevaluation of the subject and a new engagement with it. In this way it may even take on a life of its own. This is an approach I take with my work because art ends up being useful for encouraging alternatives to the rational sensibility that tends toward fixed meaning. I’m interested to generate something beyond representation for the sake of engaging further inquiry. I don’t pretend to have control of the meaning an art experience inspires but am happy to try and catalyze it.]
[I chose to realize the UFO project because I was interested to think about the nature of the collective conscious, and used this subject to explore how we think about ourselves in our reality. This approach - using a subject to explore something else - is rooted in a desire to understand how we think, instead of just what we think, so that the subject is useful for bringing new perspectives into consideration. I am not really interested in UFOs, but found that taking a look at the UFO phenomenon the way we did was useful in thinking about the psychology of belief and fantasy.]
[I mentioned that the UFO project was a kind of experiment. We didn't predict how it would be received and how people would react to the UFO although we had some inclinations of what may happen having looked at psychology studies concerned with 'fantasy prone projection' and other themes in psychology that have to do with belief. The experiment was meant to allow the experience to take its own course, unscripted. I decided to not create a 'shock-and-awe' kind of experience you'd associate with a UFO. The UFO was announced in advance and we were aware that not everyone who may see the UFO would have had advance knowledge of it. This is something I wanted the project to capitalize on. To this end we worked with a small group of sociologists and the local press in the Baltic Sea region and again later in Brazil, anticipating some interesting dialogue and exchanges between those who knew and those who did not. The sociologists who participated, gaged the responses and involved people in the dialogue about it before, during and after.]
[We got involved in thinking about what the experience represented for people but were not aspiring to draw any conclusions about what was happening - just some creative cogitation. With projects like this I want to generate an experience that engages further inquiry. Most of the people who saw the UFO without prior knowledge of its presence were surprised and reached out to friends or family to learn more. Their exchanges with people who witnessed the UFO and had previous knowledge of it generated discussions about knowledge and belief, human consciousness and the inclination to connect with unknown things, which seems to be at the heart of the UFO phenomenon. Many wondered about the desire people have to connect with other life and the curiosity about a more advanced life like what people imagine visit us on earth in UFOs. There was a lot of discussion about the future and our connection to it, which led us to wonder whether the UFO phenomenon inspires people to compare themselves to a kind of future self that may be embodied in the ideas our culture generates about intelligent extraterrestrial life.]
Top: Untitled (Greenhouse) (2002), greenhouse, plants, speakers, soundtrack, sound system, musical instruments. Middle: Yamataka EYE performing in Untitled (Greenhouse) at the 4th Yokohama Triennale, 2011. Bottom: OOIOO performing in Untitled (Greenhouse) at the 4th Yokohama Triennale, 2011.
"You mentioned earlier that a reference point for the this project was Carl Jung's treatise on the UFO phenomenon, Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies, which was published in 1952. Jung's ideas were less concerned with the reality of flying saucers than with their reality as a socio-psychological and cultural phenomenon. The book was written in the aftermath of World War II and put forward the premise that sightings increase during times of social duress and war, and that the belief in UFOs reflects a desire to escape the self and perhaps connect with some projected self. Was Jung also involved in the Music for Plants genre of music that that was part of the Untitled (Greenhouse) project we discussed earlier?
[Not as far as I know. Carl Jung's ideas about the social and psychological aspect of the UFO phenomenon are curious to me separate of the work with Music for Plants. But both are driven by a desire to connect with something out of the ordinary, ideas that people have been curious about, ideas that concern belief, ideas that have been popular or unpopular for potentially interesting reasons, ideas that we may want to believe but can’t prove, ideas that solicit the imagination, engage us to project or just generate more questions. It may just be an idea that is absurd and thinking about absurd things is creative. Thinking about why something is absurd is an exercise in thinking. I am attracted to ideas that polarize and are taken seriously by some and not seriously by others. They’re useful to consider in thinking about how we adopt a point of view. They also hint at another perspective that transcends belief or disbelief and may tell us something altogether new. Jokes and riddles can do this occasionally. Anyway, I don't much care for Jung's writing but am happy that a respected psychologist took on a subject like the UFO phenomenon - something we can be amused by, find absurd or be drawn to because we're curious or want to believe in it. Subjects like this are rich and have the capacity to generate interesting questions about how and why we occupy ourselves with the idea of intelligent beings that think and exist differently and visit us in a UFO or the idea that plants have a consciousness and enjoy music, regardless of belief. Jung made a serious study of dreams and was interested to know how the mind works - why we think the way we do. He inspired many people to think about the mind and to learn from what it might tell us about ourselves which is a great accomplishment after the psychological damage of the World War II.]
[The idea of Music for Plants was a kind of conceptual springboard for the Greenhouse project. I built a greenhouse in a gallery as a staging area for experience and experimentation. And as I mentioned, it wasn't meant to be scientific but still manages to become something like a laboratory every time. The scenario of the work is like a proposition: 'Here's the possibility for an experience based on an idea that you may try for yourself.']
[And again in this situation, I didn't care for people to think too much about whether plants listen to music or not, just to imagine it. Like an exercise. As you might know, the Music for Plants genre was popular in the 1970s. I wondered why it was popular then and not now. This is just conjecture, but my feeling is that when people bought Music for Plants records they weren't really committed to playing it for their plants. I think you'd probably find that most people were just interested to know how plants think. This is why I became interested in the idea of this phenomenon. I was sure that there was something else happening that was far more interesting and it was more than just the idea of plants listening to music.]
[How strange to think about what it's like to experience music as a plant. The moment you've entertained the question, 'What’s it like?' - you've begun to project yourself into the imagined consciousness of a plant. It is an automatic act of creative self-extension. We do this when we mythologize, when we imagine the things we can not experience or know for certain, when we develop a space program to go to places and see things we can only imagine and when we seek new questions. These activities do not concern us by necessity and they’re not, at least immediately useful. We project and extend outside of ourselves using our imagination because it's in our nature.]
Left: Sculpture Silhouette (R Smithson, "Gyrostasis," 1968) (2009), powdercoated aluminum, approx 279.5 x 198 x 2.5 cm. Right: In foreground, Sculpture Silhouette (U Boccioni, "Unique Forms of Continuity in Space," 1913) (2008), powdercoated aluminum, approx 264 x 145 x 2.5 cm; and Sculpture Silhouette (S LeWitt, "Incomplete Cube," 1974) (2008), powdercoated aluminum, approx 213 x 214 x 2.5 cm.
"You talk about projecting. Is this also what is going on in your Untitled (Sculpture Silhouettes), for which you created monumental, flattened silhouettes of famous sculptural works from art history, ranging from the Venus of Willendorf to Rodin's Thinker and some iconic contemporary works?"
[It has more to do with abstracting. I wondered about how and in what way these icons remain with us and how they've stuck in the mind of culture. I'm aware that there are many factors that influence or determine what gets remembered in art history that are not just the mind at work and that they may be considered in the larger cultural context alongside subjective experience. This project got me thinking about how we interpret and with what perspective we look at something like memory, what our relationship is to it from that perspective. I paired this with an interest in how sculpture is experienced in space and time - in particular perspective. We move around a sculpture and look at it in a way that we might work around an idea; we look at it from different points of view and observe it over time so that we can know it more broadly.]
[The Sculpture Silhouettes have been installed in public parks and in gardens. They're flat and resemble iconic three-dimensional sculptures devoid of their original volume - objectified in this way as simulacra that seem to hover weightless above the grass. When moving through the space of a park or a garden, the Sculpture Silhouettes seem to change shape by virtue their flatness and our changing point of view. If within a person's field of view, a Sculpture Silhouette is perpendicular, the representation will appear as we know it in our three-dimensional reality. When the viewer's perspective has moved to the next 90-degree point of view, it will have gradually become a vertical sliver, unrecognizable and almost invisible - not unlike Duchamp's idea of the 'infra-slim.' The basic experience of the work includes an awareness of what represents a three-dimensional shape is in fact only two-dimensional, and that it's merely a simplified representation of the reference. While the flat shapes change as we move through the park, they produce an awareness of physical perspective while encouraging a consideration of how we look at and interpret some thing - including its representation or simulacra - from various perspectives in the space of our thought. I'd like the awareness of its changing shape - the result of our physically changing point of view - to occur in tandem with the considerations of the various perspectives with which we look at and think about a referenced image. It is a physical metaphor for the way in which we interact with the idea of a thing like a sculpture, considering the point of view or points of view with which we think about it. For example, the Sculpture Silhouettes go in and out of view as we move through the space, just as their references and all that they signify slip in and out of memory. The purpose of the scenario the work creates is to further abstract the representation and shift attention on interpretation and point of view. Can we look at these representations and understand them differently? Can they be understood in another way without ignoring the memory and associations linked with them if they're familiar or somehow otherwise recognizable? Questions like this are part of the impetus of these works in space. The way we look at something and interpret its associations and references can be considered in parallel with how we understand them in space.]
"Let's return to the UFO project. Gdańsk has an interesting history, as it was the first place the Nazis occupied at the beginning of World War II and was the site of German U-boat production. You mentioned that the hangar where the UFO was built was in fact the same hangar where the U-boats were built, and that the UFO was the last project constructed there, as the hangar was razed shortly after. How did that history affect the project?"
[That was an interesting discovery and not something we planned. Gdańsk just became an intriguing location for the context of the UFO project for that reason among others. In the discussions with the sociologists that we worked with during and after the UFO flight, people talked about Poland's connection to Catholicism and the country's experience of having endured so many wars. They found this relevant to the discussion of what the UFO represented. The discussion of war, belief and Jung's idea about UFO sightings as a psychological response to war became part of the dialogue that engendered the work and lent it significance.]
[In my research about the UFO phenomenon I learned that the UFO and the idea of aliens from the 'red planet' was a popular surrogate for a fear of communism during the height of the cold war. For people like SunRa who claimed to be connected to intelligent life in outer space, it may very well have been a kind of emancipatory release from social or political restrictions in a still racist society. The UFO phenomenon and the desire to connect with intelligent life in outer space represents deeper feelings and aspirations that are interesting to consider with respect to how we make sense of ourselves in reality.]
"What were the survey results in Gdańsk?"
[It was qualitative. We had no intention of drawing any scientific conclusions and were intent in observing what came of the experience. The initial question from folks was, "Why was this done?" The project included a coordinated press announcement of the UFO in advance, because I didn't want it to be a surprise. That was odd to people and they wondered, 'Why would you not surprise us with a UFO?' What followed naturally were more interesting questions like, 'Is it a UFO if it is man-made?' and, 'What does the idea of the UFO represent?' 'Is it also man-made?' 'How and from what does our curiosity - or in some cases belief - in UFOs originate?' 'What can our beliefs and our imagination tell us about what we think and how we think?' And so on.]
[The notion of the UFO is a thing outside of ourselves because we either don't care to believe it, are curious to believe it but can not validate it, or have faith it is real. The not knowing itself, despite some possible faith in it, is what keeps it apart from us while remaining a part of our culture and linked to it by a desire to connect in belief or curiosity. This link is powerful and concerns cultural belief and trust broadly. Think of religion, trust in authority, faith in advancement of society, for example, and then beyond this, the imagination of all else that we can't know but want to. It is in our nature to project into the future, use our imagination to explain things we can't explain and to imagine beyond what we know. In this scenario, the UFO was explicitly man-made. It originated with us and with that awareness, is no longer a thing apart from us - only a representation of it. In recognizing it as an outward projection we can compare it to the UFO of mystery and consider it neither a myth, hoax, nor a true UFO. It is now a thing to be thought about with a kind of objectivity as we consider our own subjectivity and the subjectivity of our culture out of which the UFO phenomenon arose regardless of belief, and significant to the suspension of disbelief and our imagination. In stepping out of the ordinary perspective - often limited to polar positions of belief or disbelief, yes or no - to think about the social-psychological and cultural phenomenon of the UFO, we find that it tells us about ourselves.]
"That seems to relate to what you said earlier, 'How strange to think about what it's like to experience music as a plant.' It's funny because the idea of what you call creative self-extension, or projecting consciousness, seems to have a counterpart in the sex act, during which your entire bodily and mental frames of reference are suddenly reoriented away from the conscious mind to something that is so intensely physical it can become transcendental or out-of-body."
[I hadn't thought of this. I do like to involve perspectives that are alternative to the ordinary perspective and transcend it. I'd say that it anticipates some kind of emancipation or urge to transcend. Humor can have this affect, and I'm attracted to how that works. Its ability to encourage an absurd way of looking at some thing can allow for a brief escape from ego and ordinary perspective. There's an experience that I'm interested in, when after having just laughed at a joke, I wonder again about what was funny, how and why. While a joke may not seem to have great depth it usually leaves us just a little more to think about. It's as if the joke permits us to get a glimpse of something in a momentary transcendence of perspective that allows us special entry into a question.]
[It reminds me of what we were discussing earlier, that the shortest distance from one point to another is not necessarily a straight line. It might be a long windy joke, an imagined explanation or an elaborate myth that seems to be roundabout but ends up being more direct. It might be the walk around a sculpture when we look at it from all sides that provides us a more direct connection to it.]
Both: Untitled (UFO) (2008- ), functional flying saucer, appearances: Baltic Sea Region, Gdańsk, Sopot; Southeast Region of Brazil and Rio de Janeiro.
"During our walk the subject of religion came up, and the idea of how some religious traditions involve an activity that seems to be a process of 'going through the motions' as a way of life, whereas in others the requirement that a position should be adopted closes people to other perspectives."
[I like not having my mind made up entirely - to stave off the kind of closure of fixed meaning. Like the space between doubting the existence of UFOs and believing, where thinking outside yes or no is useful for the sake of asking about the question itself and everything else that might be relevant to the doubt or the belief. 'Where does this idea come from?' is often a much more interesting question to ask before adopting a position. 'Why am I inclined one way or the other anyway? What does it tell me about the way I think about things?' Religion is interesting to think about because it's a mode of thinking that people get involved in despite the fact that many of its beliefs can't be validated by anything but trust. Just as we hold a faith that art is significant and generates meaning, I can not control it nor do I have the capacity to define its significance. I'm interested in the desire to believe in things that can't be proven. Ideas just exist after all and they get worked out. What's more interesting is how they exist.]
[It does. This series began with shapes of iconic sculptures that were abstracted as flat shapes that I worked with in space. Each has its own cultural and historical significance left as a reference. They're not chosen because of what they represent or because I like them or dislike them for that matter. They just exist in the consciousness of our culture. I made an effort to choose them arbitrarily and without thinking. That's not really possible, but it's the effort I made in choosing from various genres, cultures, historical periods and from images that have been around me. Trying not to think is an exercise in and of itself. So the original shapes have been abstracted in one dimension - similar to the way in which I have considered abstracting an idea so that I might get more out of it and understand it more objectively. They've been reduced to a two-dimensional and more concrete representation. As a result, they have a new dynamic presence in three-dimensional space because appear to move in our field of view although they're standing still.]
"The artifice of art is a part of the idea that we may allow ourselves something like an objective view about the thing we are interpreting. Through the acknowledgment of its own existence as a real unreal thing to be thought about objectively, the UFO project encouraged onlookers to engage in philosophical questions that they might not have asked if the work tried to conceal the fact that it is a construct or had addressed the topic with a focus or interpretation that was prescribed. It creates a foil for understanding the world as a construct. It reminds me of what someone once told me about Japanese gardens:
'It is clear that everything is highly manicured. It's not pretending to be natural; it allows everybody to know that it's both natural and constructed. That's why I like the sticks holding up the tree branches, because you can see that the tree never had the idea of growing that way by itself.'"
Work by Peter Coffin is currently on view in the 4th Yokohama Triennale, "Our Magic Hour - How Much of the World Can We Know?" through November 6.
ON RECORD #4: Cheyney Thompson
Cheyney Thompson on Art Education
ON RECORD is a series of dialogues with contemporary artists about the ideas and influences that inspire their works. ON RECORD #4 was conducted in Tokyo and edited by ART iT in collaboration with Cheyney Thompson. This is the first in a multi-part interview with the artist.
Exterior view of Café et Restaurant Figaro near Rat Hole Gallery in Minami-Aoyama, Tokyo. Photo ART iT.
ART iT: Your works often reference art history as well as historical systems of knowledge and exchange, and you are also a member of the painting faculty at Bard College in upstate New York. What do you think about the current state of art education and curricula in the US?
CT: That's a big question. My experience as a teacher is almost exclusively in graduate teaching. I think I would prefer undergraduate teaching because that's where a curriculum makes more sense and you can take a more constructive approach to pedagogy. I wouldn't say that teaching in a MFA context is "reactive," but it's very responsive in real time, and most of that is one-on-one, varying from person to person. As graduate faculty you go from being a colleague to being a therapist to an asshole - you play all those roles in your relationships with students and, at Bard, colleagues alike. A big part of Bard's appeal is its emphasis on interdisciplinarity. I have to meet with other faculty members and students who are writers, musicians, filmmakers, and even among those groups one can cover a wide range of ground. That is a strength, but it makes it difficult to have a fixed curriculum or even a fixed set of methodologies.
If I were to generalize about my approach to critiques I would say that I tend to be fairly negative. It's rarely about looking at a specific thing or discussing a specific technique, though that does come up and I enjoy it. The exchange is more about trying to reach a zero or starting point where everything they're - that we - are doing is impossible; you think it shouldn't exist in some way, or there's no justification for it. In other words, I would hope that the issues that are discussed among artists in this away are able to be shared, precisely because they point to problems that threaten to move outside the narrow scope of the aesthetic.
I think an educational environment is a place to really feel the pressure of the split between theory and practice. This is something I don't always experience when I am working. Sometimes my practice is structured or informed by theory, but at others it feels like a set of technical concerns or the application of practical knowledge to a given problem, so I know that I am not always aware of the theoretical frame operative in the work. With teaching you can again experience the antagonism between those two poles. I think it's good for us to experience that pressure between the two because often history or theory is simply put in service of the work and is not seen as a threshold or a horizon that the work moves toward but can never reach.
ART iT: Do you think Bard's is a good model for art education?
CT: I think there are aspects of it that are great. It would be a stretch to say that this is because of its interdisciplinary structure - many programs are interdisciplinary - but the interesting thing about Bard is that it still tries to hold onto or figure out the specific parameters of the disciplines for which students apply. If you apply to the writing department, you'll spend two years trying to figure out what that means - and because there's something like 60 faculty to maybe 100 students, you have a pretty broad spectrum of practices represented in each discipline.
More importantly, I think Bard does not have a singular cultural-economic model -whether spoken or unspoken - in which the students feel pressured to participate. At Columbia you can pretty much assume everyone there wants to get a gallery show, and that's really not the case at Bard; whether it's painting or sculpture, those students and their faculties still have to answer to and be in contact with these other disciplines - music also - that are involved in widely different economic structures and widely different historical trajectories. These structures overlap at times but still apply to pressure to the positions they support.
ART iT: Have you looked at many other approaches to education? I know, for example, that you spent time at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris.
CT: I think in Paris I got a sense of how the European art school model works, which is really like the old master-student kind of relationship. There was one, primary professor who worked with me, and I was the student of that person. That doesn't necessarily mean you end up producing work like that professor - in my case Jean-Michel Alberola - but it's definitely an engagement with a specific point of view. We only met once a week and he almost never addressed individual work. We would have food and speak as a group all day. He would lead discussions on readings and films. The interesting thing about this model is that one was distinctly aware of one's professor's position in relation to his or her colleagues. I remember feeling like all the work that happened in that studio stood in opposition to the neighboring professor's studio and vice versa. It seems like this is a somewhat common feature of European art schools.
ART iT: Yes, I like reading about people on Wikipedia and I'm always struck at these lines of descent among the German artists - it's very romantic.
CT: …and patrilineal and phallocentric.
ART iT: Of course in the US there are programs like Yale and Columbia that are artist factories, but you don't really get the sense of that patrilineality, and I think at least until recently they were also good at hiding the factory element. The thing about the patrilineal structure, as well as the kunsthalle system, is that it seems to enable young artists in Europe to quickly assimilate into mainstream contemporary art practice whereas in general their peers in New York go through a slower build up.
CT: I think the advantage of the patrilineal structure - if you can even call it an advantage because it is and can be brutal if you are excluded - is that it does provide an identity in a more traditional sense, because you have a "father" and a genealogy and you can say, by right I am this person who has had access to this person and they had access to this other person, and that goes back to wherever they trace their origins, which is tradition in an almost necessarily racist, sexist or at least nationalist way. Maybe this accounts for what you're saying about the quick integration of young European artists into an art market but I think that has more to do with the great reserve of cultural capital that still exists in public institutions in Europe. American dealers can import this work with more confidence and cash in on that reserve.
On the other side I think the patrilineal structure is replaced by other particular economic models: supply and demand, competition based on proficiency, futures trading. So you go to school to become proficient. Strangely, for a while now proficiency means good critical thinking, having a grasp of critical histories of art, and I think that can cause a very confused kind of art when those histories are instrumentalized through the language of marketing.
My own experience of education was more piecemeal in a way. Though my CV says Harvard, it was Harvard extension school. My foundation was at the Museum School of Boston, which was still very experimental when I arrived and where most of the faculty had been there for a long time, through some of its best periods. But by the time I left, it had been reinvented as a pretty slick professional school.
ART iT: To what extent do you see the market or critical forums like the Whitney Biennial or Venice Biennale as playing out a shared, international curriculum? A canon, I guess, is the proper word for it.
CT: That's a tricky question. Despite what I just said about critical thought equaling proficiency, which is almost a best-case scenario, the cynical answer would be something like, as an artist if I go to grad school, I have to understand critical art theory in order to graduate and get a good show - although I doubt many people actually think that way. If you're talking in general about the survey shows of the last decade in which I've participated, I'd say maybe there's no criterion. On the one hand, it's a bunch of people trying to make a living and they do that on a participatory model saying, "OK, if we do these things, we know there's enough surplus capital generated by these large surveys such that everyone benefits, including the curator, and the artists." But the core of that of what's being said - what those shows ideally could frame as a set of concerns about cultural practice - I think that's last on the list. I think at the top is the machinery of keeping things going. That's the cynical account.
Taking the problem seriously, you have contemporary art as this huge set, and a potentially infinite set of practices contained within that set that have different geographic, political, aesthetic and historical programs that are put into play and the only thing that binds them together is that they're happening now, and that situation I would melancholically say makes it very difficult to experience the trauma of a given historical moment, in the sense that really experiencing the present as history seems like it would feel like trauma, in that you would notice it as history through violence and crisis, not simply through it's ability to maintain itself. I think that's a difficulty that pertains to schools and teaching - what kind of or how much emphasis to put on history and also on these survey shows, in terms of the contemporary art world as such. Obviously, even the galleries like the kind that show my work also show dead artists because of their importance for contemporary art, and seek to put history to work in the service of contemporary art. The dead and the undead mingle freely so long as the dead function as a reserve, which through brute proximity mystically confers value.
Installation view of the exhibition "Chronochromes, Data, Motifs" at Rat Hole Gallery, 2011.
ART iT: We are living through an interesting time though, considering the Chinese art boom as it's crested over the past decade as well as the brief rise of Japanese Superflat-style art in the international marketplace. In some ways these trends put the US-European canon in crisis because they don't conform to the standard curriculum.
CT: I agree to an extent, but I don't think it puts what you are calling a canon into crisis - and this may sound conservative - because I think the idea of a canon, especially in its ability to be put to work in a market context, has eroded, or rather been transformed. If we can agree that a canon has often been the expression of hegemony, then the question changes slightly. The question becomes, what is in the interest of power when it shows itself through its performance in a market or a survey show? How do we measure the shifts in cultural production so that the interests of power, and contrarily, those denied power, come in to focus? In some respects it poses no crisis because it's just a diversification of the market place. That's not assigning blame anywhere, it's not like the market is necessarily serving Western interests or Chinese-Japanese interests in promoting the work that's going on. I think it's a symptom of the near sacred conception of capital as something that's able to globally flow without interruption by labor or material, and the institutions that facilitate that aim.
ART iT: But if a Chinese artist doing pop figuration enters the New York market where you already have a local artist making the so-called critical work because that has been encouraged by the local curriculum, and the two end up on an equal plane, doesn't that throw the curriculum's equation of critical knowledge with proficiency into doubt?
CT: So in a way you're asking where does that critical knowledge come from, what are its boundaries? This is something I was talking about with the artist Ei Arakawa, who I know from New York and is now in Japan on a residency. He was saying that the history of Japanese art upon which he relies basically starts from the 1950s onward, but he's becoming increasingly interested in earlier Japanese art practices like 1920s Japanese Dada and Constructivism, and trying to understand that narrative.
There are nuances to any such narrative. For example: the Polish Unists who diverged from the narrated trajectory of Suprematism-Constructivism-Productivism that led to art disappearing in some accounts or being fully absorbed into state terror. In a way the Unists had the same theory, the same ideas, but because of the local politics, ambitions and ideals, their practices took a different form. They were responding to concretely different criteria. There will always be minor - from the point of view of power - cultural forms that in retrospect take on new contours of intelligibility, especially when there is a market that believes in its own consummate neutrality.
Of course at this point someone in the US could also have a career doing pop-figurative work, so that's not to say that what we're loosely referring to as critical practice is a unified lineage that starts from Courbet and ends at Andrea Fraser. I think you can try out those things but there are always exceptions, branches, parallel developments. It's just that I'm wary of having the criteria for recognition being a work's visibility and mobility within a global art market, even while that's exactly what I'm doing. I fully acknowledge that, but that's also why it's foregrounded for me. Why should I be able to come to Tokyo and show this work, which has aspects that are opaquely idiosyncratic but also participates within a particular account of a particular history? So you say, why? What's happening when it's moving around?
ART iT: I've not spoken with Ei about it, but from listening to you maybe one reason for his interest in the Japanese history is that it has been suppressed by the global market narrative of Superflat. Throughout the 20th century there are examples of Japanese artists actively exchanging critical ideas and approaches with their international peers and then starting in the 1990s everything - as refracted by the international market and critical forums - became very inward looking.
CT: I think historically, in the 20th century, cultural producers began to understand their task on an international scale as being both oppositional and integrated, and that's where you see overlaps with their peers through active exchanges, engagements and, of course, censure, whereas in the 1980s and '90s you have the rise of a neo-liberal economy and an art world that's participating in that economy, so it almost looks the same - certainly people collaborate and end up thinking things in a similar way across the world, there's still this international character to it - but it maybe loses some of its oppositional or antagonistic relationship to the world, mostly because the concept of the world itself shifts or at the very least the social itself becomes that which is only understood as the preeminent data set capable of insuring enough spatio-temporal fixes for the efficient accumulation of capital.
ART iT: Concurrently the international curriculum has become increasingly streamlined, so that you can go to school in France or Japan or the US and you'll probably come away with a similar set of references, although certainly differences in actual educational experience remain.
CT: My concern is always that economic models first and foremost structure those relations and even the types of knowledges - and this may sound like a business manual - that are useful in a global market place. But there are things that are outside of official histories that cannot be easily streamlined into a usable narrative to legitimize whatever it is you're doing, pertaining both to theory and to material practices. So again I don't know the details because I haven't taught in so many places but that's my hunch, unfortunately: there's a world that celebrates certain proficiencies, and rewards them, and it's hard for an institution to fight against that. To say, perhaps, there are all sorts of other knowledges and practices that may or may not be put to use differently - or even to simply engage in the speculation that a type of knowledge or practice may or may not be useful for learning certain things - with emphasis placed on the "may not."
Cheyney Thompson's work is currently on view in the solo exhibition "Chronochromes, Data, Motifs" at Rat Hole Gallery, Tokyo, through June 12.
ON RECORD is a series of dialogues with contemporary artists about the ideas and influences that inspire their works. ON RECORD #4 was conducted in Tokyo and edited by ART iT in collaboration with Cheyney Thompson. This is the first in a multi-part interview with the artist.
Exterior view of Café et Restaurant Figaro near Rat Hole Gallery in Minami-Aoyama, Tokyo. Photo ART iT.
ART iT: Your works often reference art history as well as historical systems of knowledge and exchange, and you are also a member of the painting faculty at Bard College in upstate New York. What do you think about the current state of art education and curricula in the US?
CT: That's a big question. My experience as a teacher is almost exclusively in graduate teaching. I think I would prefer undergraduate teaching because that's where a curriculum makes more sense and you can take a more constructive approach to pedagogy. I wouldn't say that teaching in a MFA context is "reactive," but it's very responsive in real time, and most of that is one-on-one, varying from person to person. As graduate faculty you go from being a colleague to being a therapist to an asshole - you play all those roles in your relationships with students and, at Bard, colleagues alike. A big part of Bard's appeal is its emphasis on interdisciplinarity. I have to meet with other faculty members and students who are writers, musicians, filmmakers, and even among those groups one can cover a wide range of ground. That is a strength, but it makes it difficult to have a fixed curriculum or even a fixed set of methodologies.
If I were to generalize about my approach to critiques I would say that I tend to be fairly negative. It's rarely about looking at a specific thing or discussing a specific technique, though that does come up and I enjoy it. The exchange is more about trying to reach a zero or starting point where everything they're - that we - are doing is impossible; you think it shouldn't exist in some way, or there's no justification for it. In other words, I would hope that the issues that are discussed among artists in this away are able to be shared, precisely because they point to problems that threaten to move outside the narrow scope of the aesthetic.
I think an educational environment is a place to really feel the pressure of the split between theory and practice. This is something I don't always experience when I am working. Sometimes my practice is structured or informed by theory, but at others it feels like a set of technical concerns or the application of practical knowledge to a given problem, so I know that I am not always aware of the theoretical frame operative in the work. With teaching you can again experience the antagonism between those two poles. I think it's good for us to experience that pressure between the two because often history or theory is simply put in service of the work and is not seen as a threshold or a horizon that the work moves toward but can never reach.
ART iT: Do you think Bard's is a good model for art education?
CT: I think there are aspects of it that are great. It would be a stretch to say that this is because of its interdisciplinary structure - many programs are interdisciplinary - but the interesting thing about Bard is that it still tries to hold onto or figure out the specific parameters of the disciplines for which students apply. If you apply to the writing department, you'll spend two years trying to figure out what that means - and because there's something like 60 faculty to maybe 100 students, you have a pretty broad spectrum of practices represented in each discipline.
More importantly, I think Bard does not have a singular cultural-economic model -whether spoken or unspoken - in which the students feel pressured to participate. At Columbia you can pretty much assume everyone there wants to get a gallery show, and that's really not the case at Bard; whether it's painting or sculpture, those students and their faculties still have to answer to and be in contact with these other disciplines - music also - that are involved in widely different economic structures and widely different historical trajectories. These structures overlap at times but still apply to pressure to the positions they support.
ART iT: Have you looked at many other approaches to education? I know, for example, that you spent time at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris.
CT: I think in Paris I got a sense of how the European art school model works, which is really like the old master-student kind of relationship. There was one, primary professor who worked with me, and I was the student of that person. That doesn't necessarily mean you end up producing work like that professor - in my case Jean-Michel Alberola - but it's definitely an engagement with a specific point of view. We only met once a week and he almost never addressed individual work. We would have food and speak as a group all day. He would lead discussions on readings and films. The interesting thing about this model is that one was distinctly aware of one's professor's position in relation to his or her colleagues. I remember feeling like all the work that happened in that studio stood in opposition to the neighboring professor's studio and vice versa. It seems like this is a somewhat common feature of European art schools.
ART iT: Yes, I like reading about people on Wikipedia and I'm always struck at these lines of descent among the German artists - it's very romantic.
CT: …and patrilineal and phallocentric.
ART iT: Of course in the US there are programs like Yale and Columbia that are artist factories, but you don't really get the sense of that patrilineality, and I think at least until recently they were also good at hiding the factory element. The thing about the patrilineal structure, as well as the kunsthalle system, is that it seems to enable young artists in Europe to quickly assimilate into mainstream contemporary art practice whereas in general their peers in New York go through a slower build up.
CT: I think the advantage of the patrilineal structure - if you can even call it an advantage because it is and can be brutal if you are excluded - is that it does provide an identity in a more traditional sense, because you have a "father" and a genealogy and you can say, by right I am this person who has had access to this person and they had access to this other person, and that goes back to wherever they trace their origins, which is tradition in an almost necessarily racist, sexist or at least nationalist way. Maybe this accounts for what you're saying about the quick integration of young European artists into an art market but I think that has more to do with the great reserve of cultural capital that still exists in public institutions in Europe. American dealers can import this work with more confidence and cash in on that reserve.
On the other side I think the patrilineal structure is replaced by other particular economic models: supply and demand, competition based on proficiency, futures trading. So you go to school to become proficient. Strangely, for a while now proficiency means good critical thinking, having a grasp of critical histories of art, and I think that can cause a very confused kind of art when those histories are instrumentalized through the language of marketing.
My own experience of education was more piecemeal in a way. Though my CV says Harvard, it was Harvard extension school. My foundation was at the Museum School of Boston, which was still very experimental when I arrived and where most of the faculty had been there for a long time, through some of its best periods. But by the time I left, it had been reinvented as a pretty slick professional school.
ART iT: To what extent do you see the market or critical forums like the Whitney Biennial or Venice Biennale as playing out a shared, international curriculum? A canon, I guess, is the proper word for it.
CT: That's a tricky question. Despite what I just said about critical thought equaling proficiency, which is almost a best-case scenario, the cynical answer would be something like, as an artist if I go to grad school, I have to understand critical art theory in order to graduate and get a good show - although I doubt many people actually think that way. If you're talking in general about the survey shows of the last decade in which I've participated, I'd say maybe there's no criterion. On the one hand, it's a bunch of people trying to make a living and they do that on a participatory model saying, "OK, if we do these things, we know there's enough surplus capital generated by these large surveys such that everyone benefits, including the curator, and the artists." But the core of that of what's being said - what those shows ideally could frame as a set of concerns about cultural practice - I think that's last on the list. I think at the top is the machinery of keeping things going. That's the cynical account.
Taking the problem seriously, you have contemporary art as this huge set, and a potentially infinite set of practices contained within that set that have different geographic, political, aesthetic and historical programs that are put into play and the only thing that binds them together is that they're happening now, and that situation I would melancholically say makes it very difficult to experience the trauma of a given historical moment, in the sense that really experiencing the present as history seems like it would feel like trauma, in that you would notice it as history through violence and crisis, not simply through it's ability to maintain itself. I think that's a difficulty that pertains to schools and teaching - what kind of or how much emphasis to put on history and also on these survey shows, in terms of the contemporary art world as such. Obviously, even the galleries like the kind that show my work also show dead artists because of their importance for contemporary art, and seek to put history to work in the service of contemporary art. The dead and the undead mingle freely so long as the dead function as a reserve, which through brute proximity mystically confers value.
Installation view of the exhibition "Chronochromes, Data, Motifs" at Rat Hole Gallery, 2011.
ART iT: We are living through an interesting time though, considering the Chinese art boom as it's crested over the past decade as well as the brief rise of Japanese Superflat-style art in the international marketplace. In some ways these trends put the US-European canon in crisis because they don't conform to the standard curriculum.
CT: I agree to an extent, but I don't think it puts what you are calling a canon into crisis - and this may sound conservative - because I think the idea of a canon, especially in its ability to be put to work in a market context, has eroded, or rather been transformed. If we can agree that a canon has often been the expression of hegemony, then the question changes slightly. The question becomes, what is in the interest of power when it shows itself through its performance in a market or a survey show? How do we measure the shifts in cultural production so that the interests of power, and contrarily, those denied power, come in to focus? In some respects it poses no crisis because it's just a diversification of the market place. That's not assigning blame anywhere, it's not like the market is necessarily serving Western interests or Chinese-Japanese interests in promoting the work that's going on. I think it's a symptom of the near sacred conception of capital as something that's able to globally flow without interruption by labor or material, and the institutions that facilitate that aim.
ART iT: But if a Chinese artist doing pop figuration enters the New York market where you already have a local artist making the so-called critical work because that has been encouraged by the local curriculum, and the two end up on an equal plane, doesn't that throw the curriculum's equation of critical knowledge with proficiency into doubt?
CT: So in a way you're asking where does that critical knowledge come from, what are its boundaries? This is something I was talking about with the artist Ei Arakawa, who I know from New York and is now in Japan on a residency. He was saying that the history of Japanese art upon which he relies basically starts from the 1950s onward, but he's becoming increasingly interested in earlier Japanese art practices like 1920s Japanese Dada and Constructivism, and trying to understand that narrative.
There are nuances to any such narrative. For example: the Polish Unists who diverged from the narrated trajectory of Suprematism-Constructivism-Productivism that led to art disappearing in some accounts or being fully absorbed into state terror. In a way the Unists had the same theory, the same ideas, but because of the local politics, ambitions and ideals, their practices took a different form. They were responding to concretely different criteria. There will always be minor - from the point of view of power - cultural forms that in retrospect take on new contours of intelligibility, especially when there is a market that believes in its own consummate neutrality.
Of course at this point someone in the US could also have a career doing pop-figurative work, so that's not to say that what we're loosely referring to as critical practice is a unified lineage that starts from Courbet and ends at Andrea Fraser. I think you can try out those things but there are always exceptions, branches, parallel developments. It's just that I'm wary of having the criteria for recognition being a work's visibility and mobility within a global art market, even while that's exactly what I'm doing. I fully acknowledge that, but that's also why it's foregrounded for me. Why should I be able to come to Tokyo and show this work, which has aspects that are opaquely idiosyncratic but also participates within a particular account of a particular history? So you say, why? What's happening when it's moving around?
ART iT: I've not spoken with Ei about it, but from listening to you maybe one reason for his interest in the Japanese history is that it has been suppressed by the global market narrative of Superflat. Throughout the 20th century there are examples of Japanese artists actively exchanging critical ideas and approaches with their international peers and then starting in the 1990s everything - as refracted by the international market and critical forums - became very inward looking.
CT: I think historically, in the 20th century, cultural producers began to understand their task on an international scale as being both oppositional and integrated, and that's where you see overlaps with their peers through active exchanges, engagements and, of course, censure, whereas in the 1980s and '90s you have the rise of a neo-liberal economy and an art world that's participating in that economy, so it almost looks the same - certainly people collaborate and end up thinking things in a similar way across the world, there's still this international character to it - but it maybe loses some of its oppositional or antagonistic relationship to the world, mostly because the concept of the world itself shifts or at the very least the social itself becomes that which is only understood as the preeminent data set capable of insuring enough spatio-temporal fixes for the efficient accumulation of capital.
ART iT: Concurrently the international curriculum has become increasingly streamlined, so that you can go to school in France or Japan or the US and you'll probably come away with a similar set of references, although certainly differences in actual educational experience remain.
CT: My concern is always that economic models first and foremost structure those relations and even the types of knowledges - and this may sound like a business manual - that are useful in a global market place. But there are things that are outside of official histories that cannot be easily streamlined into a usable narrative to legitimize whatever it is you're doing, pertaining both to theory and to material practices. So again I don't know the details because I haven't taught in so many places but that's my hunch, unfortunately: there's a world that celebrates certain proficiencies, and rewards them, and it's hard for an institution to fight against that. To say, perhaps, there are all sorts of other knowledges and practices that may or may not be put to use differently - or even to simply engage in the speculation that a type of knowledge or practice may or may not be useful for learning certain things - with emphasis placed on the "may not."
Cheyney Thompson's work is currently on view in the solo exhibition "Chronochromes, Data, Motifs" at Rat Hole Gallery, Tokyo, through June 12.
ON RECORD #3: Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster
Six Rooms for Enrique Vila-Matas
ON RECORD is a series of dialogues with contemporary artists about the ideas and influences that inspire their works. ON RECORD #3 was conducted in Tokyo and edited by ART iT in collaboration with Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster.
I.
II.
III.
IV.
V.
VI.
I. The Secret Beyond the Door
Une Chambre en Ville (1996), carpet, local newspapers bought each day during the exhibition, telephone and telephone connection, mini TV monitor, radio-clock, artificial lighting system. Installation view, ”Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Pierre Huyghe, Philippe Parreno“ at ARC/Musée d’art moderne de la ville de Paris, 1998-99. Photo Marc Domage/TUTTI, © the artist, courtesy Jan Mot, Brussels, and Esther Schipper, Berlin.
The books of Enrique Vila-Matas occupy a borderline between fiction and non-fiction writing: they are written in a way that makes you think nothing in them is fiction.
Before he began writing novels, Vila-Matas had a job contributing interviews and articles to a cinema magazine, but he fabricated many of the interviews that he submitted. For example, if he was supposed to interview a certain filmmaker but couldn't arrange a meeting, he would just make everything up. In many of his texts there are also references to encounters with historical figures like Marcel Duchamp or Marguerite Duras, although when the narrator meets such figures, the way they behave or speak is both very specific and yet not what one might expect.
I remember one day I was with Vila-Matas in a bar in Barcelona, and asked whether he had ever seen Fritz Lang's film, The Secret Beyond the Door. Vila-Matas replied, "No, I've never seen the film, but I met Fritz Lang once." He said it was at the cinema festival at San Sebastian - something about bumping into Lang in the men's room. It was difficult at that moment to tell whether this was a true experience or a fiction that had been made up on the spot
In the writing of Vila-Matas there are so many elements that make the fictional convincing, just as in the work of WG Sebald, who would often insert images into his novels in such a way that they act like a reality check: what you assume to be a fiction may in fact be real, but you're not absolutely sure that it is real because the only source you have is the author's text. In the case of Vila-Matas, all the names that appear - the street names, the writer names – lure readers into a comfort zone in the sense that much of it is, actually, real.
II. Dublinesca
TH.2058 (2008), three reproduced sculptures (125 percent of original size) or six
reproduced sculptures in original size, LED Screen, 229 shakedown beds, approx.
10.000 science-fiction books, sound, approx. 100 x 22 x 20 m. Installation view,
Tate Modern. Photo Tate Photography, London, © Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster.
Vila-Matas' latest book, Dublinesca, revolves around a publisher who has decided to retire from business and close his catalog. There is a moment in Dublinesca when the publisher says that one of his most interesting reading experiences ever was from a book by the Austrian author, Peter Handke, in which the American film director John Ford is one of the characters. The publisher recounts a scene in the book in which the protagonists are talking and then suddenly John Ford walks over and begins a conversation with them. The publisher says that to have this presence of a real person inserted into a fiction was shocking.
Dublinesca is the first book that Vila-Matas has begun and completed since we have known each other. I observed the process of the book's writing, or, rather, I was able to follow some of the process. I already knew, for example, that if Vila-Matas decides to do a lecture somewhere, then that experience might end up being incorporated into his next book. But what I have experienced firsthand now is that there is a constant back-and-forth between things Vila-Matas is planning to do in his real life and those that he is planning to write about in his novels, or even things that he plans to do, but doesn't do, but still includes in his novels.
When I asked him to write a catalog essay for my exhibition "TH.2058" at the Tate Modern Turbine Hall in 2008, I sent him my request by email, and even that became part of Dublinesca. The publisher, who is Vila-Matas, receives an email from "Dominique." In the email, I described the importance of rain to the concept of the exhibition and its apocalyptic mood. In the novel, this email then connects with the state of mind of the publisher, and rain continues incessantly throughout Dublinesca, just as it does in the scenario I envisioned for my exhibition.
Yet the book is not a diary, which I think could almost be described as passive compared to what Vila-Matas does. This is more an extreme case of writing influencing life and life influencing writing.
III. Travels in the Scriptorium
chronotopes & dioramas (2009). Detail view, Dia at the Hispanic Society, Photo Cathy Carver, courtesy the artist and Esther Schipper, Berlin.
The scripting of a story through referencing events that occur in one's life, or scripting events in one's life so that they develop into a story, would only be marginally interesting if it wasn't connected with a deep knowledge of writing. For Vila-Matas, this switching between his own life and the world of his stories is always mixed with his exploration of the giant library that the world has become. Dublinesca focuses on James Joyce, while París no se acaba nunca focuses on Marguerite Duras, as well as Jorge Luis Borges and some other writers.
Another central character in Dublinesca is the American writer Paul Auster. There is an episode in which the publisher visits Auster at his home, which brought back memories to me of the time in the late 1980s when I was heavily influenced by Auster - I made a work based on his writing - so it's interesting now to see how these two authors connect.
Auster has entered a difficult phase. His recent book, Travels in the Scriptorium, has somehow managed to relate to his previous writings and characters in a way that suggests a feedback loop. What impresses me about Vila-Matas is that he's also in a loop, but it's productive. I have the feeling he is writing one book, that all his books are part of a masterwork, even though these works are able to exist independently of each other in terms of theme, as is the case with Bartleby & Co, about writers who can't write, and Doctor Pasavento, which is about the opposite, an obsessed reader.
Vila-Matas has reconnected me with literature. He is like a curator, and this is why I think the publisher in Dublinesca is such an important character, and tells so much about him. When Vila-Matas writes about Sebald, Auster, Roberto Bolaño or Franz Kafka, you really want to read these authors. Similarly, Sebald's approach to writing parallels the way that many visual artists work now: a kind of nonscientific research that creates links between a certain piece of architecture and a certain piece of music, an intuitive research into the world that results in strange findings. Sometimes it's not so easy to understand the process of making art, how much it involves collecting information and then metabolizing information in a way that goes beyond the academic; it's almost like the crazy people who invent machines that don't work.
IV. Dublinesca Revisited: The Gutenberg Galaxy
RWF (Rainer Werner Fassbinder) (1993). Installation view, Hohenzollernring 74, Esther Schipper/Michael Krome, Köln. Photo Lothar Schnepf, courtesy Esther Schipper, Berlin.
Regarding the works of Vila-Matas, Sebald or even Borges, you can see there's a strain of literature that connects deeply to the way the Internet works today. There have been a number of articles on Borges that say he was really the one who envisioned this whole circulation of information: the world as library.
This is something that comes up in Dublinesca when the publisher - confronted with our changing relations to the printed word - contemplates making a requiem for the end of the "Gutenberg Galaxy." I'm not sure whether this is a term that Vila-Matas found somewhere or invented himself, but here "Gutenberg" refers of course to the first printer and "galaxy" refers to the era of printing. Another theme that emerges is the idea of the hikikomori, understood as the techie recluse who accesses society virtually, a character who travels only in the confines of his room. In the book, the publisher turns into a kind of hikikomori, and over the past two years I have heard Vila-Matas himself use this word frequently. Dublinesca is the first book by Vila-Matas in which he is so conscious about these new media - the Internet, blogs, emails - and I think it is partly related to the fact that Vila-Matas has now developed his personal website into something that is almost a parallel enterprise to his novels.
So the idea - already present in works like Bartleby & Co and Montano's Malady - that Vila-Matas is investigating literature at a crossroads is more apparent than ever. I must say that when I read his books I always wonder what the experience would be like for someone who has no interest in literature at all. I imagine it's similar to visiting a completely foreign country where you can't relate to anything. What becomes clear though is that it's an endless process: you read something and you quote it and then it gets passed on to someone else and it's a chain that never stops. Vila-Matas creates a landscape of meanings and encounters, an aesthetic reminiscent of John Cage. There's one part based on chance but at the same time everything ties together.
The discovery by the publisher in Dublinesca that he has become his catalog of writers, an amalgam of all the writers with whom he has worked, is ultimately a refutation of the closed and stiff notion of identity that has become so tied up in the concept of the author. This multiplicity is something that Borges had already identified, so many years ago, but becomes all the more relevant in the context of the Internet.
V. París no se acaba nunca
Tapis de Lecture (Enrique Vila-Matas) (2008), one midnight-blue moquette carpet, 300-500 books, dimensions variable. Installation view, Musac - Museo De Arte Contemporaneo De Castilla y Léon. Courtesy Esther Schipper, Berlin.
For a long time I knew of Vila-Matas by name, but never read any of his books, thinking that they would not interest me. Then one day I started reading and was surprised to find out that it was not at all what I had assumed. The first book I read was París no se acaba nunca, which evokes Ernest Hemingway's A Moveable Feast. In this book Vila-Matas is young and moves to Paris to become a writer, by chance renting a room from Marguerite Duras, who gives him advice. Among other people he meets is the Argentinean writer and filmmaker Edgardo Cozarinsky, who I myself had met a few years before I read the book. Vila-Matas and Cozarinsky meet in a cinema, where Cozarinsky introduces Vila-Matas to Borges' writings about cinema, and then Vila-Matas goes in search of Borges in Paris.
In 2007 I was invited by Hans Ulrich Obrist to participate in the group show "everstill/siempretodavía," held in Granada in the former house of the poet Federico García Lorca, and I suggested that we invite Vila-Matas to do a lecture in conjunction with the exhibition. The day I arrived in Granada I happened to check in to the hotel at the exact same time as Vila-Matas: I arrived, he arrived; we were both quite reserved. The next day, we did a long interview with Obrist, all three of us together. And from then on we continued to meet, since Vila-Matas visits Paris quite often.
In 2008 I invited Vila-Matas to Léon for a show I had at MUSAC, "Nocturama*," and he lectured about Georges Perec, while I made a new reading carpet installation, Tapis de lecture (Enrique Vila-Matas), that was all about Vila-Matas, his books and the books behind his books. Later that year I asked him to contribute an essay to the catalog for my exhibition at the Tate Modern Turbine Hall. When we communicate I use French and he responds in Spanish. So when I wrote to him about Tate I outlined the exhibition concept, which hinged upon the importance of quotations in an end of the world situation. In his reply, Vila-Matas was very enthusiastic about the concept, and basically repeated what I had written about quotations in an end of the world situation, but in a slightly different way. I was energized by his response and wrote him that it was exactly what I had wanted to articulate about the exhibition. It took me a day or two to realize that he had simply translated my ideas into Spanish.
We go back-and-forth like this. We might have a period without correspondence and then suddenly I'll hear from him, like the time I received a text message out of the blue from Vila-Matas when he was on a trip to Antwerp and found himself in the Antwerp-Centraal train station, the same station that figures prominently at the beginning of Sebald's Austerlitz.
VI. Vertigo
Video still from De Novo (2009), DGF/Corvi-Mora production, DVD, duration 20 min, French with subtitles, filmed on location in Venice. Courtesy the artist and Esther Schipper, Berlin.
My earliest installations, the "chambres/rooms" were adapted from novels and were an attempt to create narratives without text. When I started the "rooms" I was reading detective novels, like those by David Goodis, and one of the first installations is based on a Goodis novel. I had this idea of the clue as a correspondence between an object and a linguistic system, a kind of double articulation. I envisioned the installations as three-dimensional texts in which visitors could draw their own connections between different elements.
Although I've never been tempted to adapt a book into a film, literature is central to the work I made for the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009, De Novo. In this film there is a scene in which I am riding the Vaporetto and I throw a book into the lagoon. When my daughter saw the film she was terribly concerned that we would never be able to recover the book. She asked me whether I had written my name in the book. I said no. Then she asked which book it was. I replied that it was Vertigo, by Sebald. She thought momentarily before saying, "If it's Vertigo, then it's ok."
To that extent the action with the book was quite provocative; it was not easy to perform. Of course I love books, they have always been an essential building material for my practice, and any exhibition that I do could almost be reduced to 10 or 20 titles. But at the same time I'm a kind of failed writer, and as much as I love books there is a tension there: it has always been a mystery to me as to how one writes fiction, how to start, what to write about.
An Abridged Vila-Matas Reader:
Paul Auster
Roberto Bolaño
Jorge Luis Borges
Eduardo Cozarinsky
Marguerite Duras
Peter Handke
Ernest Hemingway
James Joyce
Franz Kafka
Claudio Magris
Georges Perec
WG Sebald
Enrique Vila-Matas
ON RECORD is a series of dialogues with contemporary artists about the ideas and influences that inspire their works. ON RECORD #3 was conducted in Tokyo and edited by ART iT in collaboration with Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster.
I.
II.
III.
IV.
V.
VI.
I. The Secret Beyond the Door
Une Chambre en Ville (1996), carpet, local newspapers bought each day during the exhibition, telephone and telephone connection, mini TV monitor, radio-clock, artificial lighting system. Installation view, ”Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Pierre Huyghe, Philippe Parreno“ at ARC/Musée d’art moderne de la ville de Paris, 1998-99. Photo Marc Domage/TUTTI, © the artist, courtesy Jan Mot, Brussels, and Esther Schipper, Berlin.
The books of Enrique Vila-Matas occupy a borderline between fiction and non-fiction writing: they are written in a way that makes you think nothing in them is fiction.
Before he began writing novels, Vila-Matas had a job contributing interviews and articles to a cinema magazine, but he fabricated many of the interviews that he submitted. For example, if he was supposed to interview a certain filmmaker but couldn't arrange a meeting, he would just make everything up. In many of his texts there are also references to encounters with historical figures like Marcel Duchamp or Marguerite Duras, although when the narrator meets such figures, the way they behave or speak is both very specific and yet not what one might expect.
I remember one day I was with Vila-Matas in a bar in Barcelona, and asked whether he had ever seen Fritz Lang's film, The Secret Beyond the Door. Vila-Matas replied, "No, I've never seen the film, but I met Fritz Lang once." He said it was at the cinema festival at San Sebastian - something about bumping into Lang in the men's room. It was difficult at that moment to tell whether this was a true experience or a fiction that had been made up on the spot
In the writing of Vila-Matas there are so many elements that make the fictional convincing, just as in the work of WG Sebald, who would often insert images into his novels in such a way that they act like a reality check: what you assume to be a fiction may in fact be real, but you're not absolutely sure that it is real because the only source you have is the author's text. In the case of Vila-Matas, all the names that appear - the street names, the writer names – lure readers into a comfort zone in the sense that much of it is, actually, real.
II. Dublinesca
TH.2058 (2008), three reproduced sculptures (125 percent of original size) or six
reproduced sculptures in original size, LED Screen, 229 shakedown beds, approx.
10.000 science-fiction books, sound, approx. 100 x 22 x 20 m. Installation view,
Tate Modern. Photo Tate Photography, London, © Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster.
Vila-Matas' latest book, Dublinesca, revolves around a publisher who has decided to retire from business and close his catalog. There is a moment in Dublinesca when the publisher says that one of his most interesting reading experiences ever was from a book by the Austrian author, Peter Handke, in which the American film director John Ford is one of the characters. The publisher recounts a scene in the book in which the protagonists are talking and then suddenly John Ford walks over and begins a conversation with them. The publisher says that to have this presence of a real person inserted into a fiction was shocking.
Dublinesca is the first book that Vila-Matas has begun and completed since we have known each other. I observed the process of the book's writing, or, rather, I was able to follow some of the process. I already knew, for example, that if Vila-Matas decides to do a lecture somewhere, then that experience might end up being incorporated into his next book. But what I have experienced firsthand now is that there is a constant back-and-forth between things Vila-Matas is planning to do in his real life and those that he is planning to write about in his novels, or even things that he plans to do, but doesn't do, but still includes in his novels.
When I asked him to write a catalog essay for my exhibition "TH.2058" at the Tate Modern Turbine Hall in 2008, I sent him my request by email, and even that became part of Dublinesca. The publisher, who is Vila-Matas, receives an email from "Dominique." In the email, I described the importance of rain to the concept of the exhibition and its apocalyptic mood. In the novel, this email then connects with the state of mind of the publisher, and rain continues incessantly throughout Dublinesca, just as it does in the scenario I envisioned for my exhibition.
Yet the book is not a diary, which I think could almost be described as passive compared to what Vila-Matas does. This is more an extreme case of writing influencing life and life influencing writing.
III. Travels in the Scriptorium
chronotopes & dioramas (2009). Detail view, Dia at the Hispanic Society, Photo Cathy Carver, courtesy the artist and Esther Schipper, Berlin.
The scripting of a story through referencing events that occur in one's life, or scripting events in one's life so that they develop into a story, would only be marginally interesting if it wasn't connected with a deep knowledge of writing. For Vila-Matas, this switching between his own life and the world of his stories is always mixed with his exploration of the giant library that the world has become. Dublinesca focuses on James Joyce, while París no se acaba nunca focuses on Marguerite Duras, as well as Jorge Luis Borges and some other writers.
Another central character in Dublinesca is the American writer Paul Auster. There is an episode in which the publisher visits Auster at his home, which brought back memories to me of the time in the late 1980s when I was heavily influenced by Auster - I made a work based on his writing - so it's interesting now to see how these two authors connect.
Auster has entered a difficult phase. His recent book, Travels in the Scriptorium, has somehow managed to relate to his previous writings and characters in a way that suggests a feedback loop. What impresses me about Vila-Matas is that he's also in a loop, but it's productive. I have the feeling he is writing one book, that all his books are part of a masterwork, even though these works are able to exist independently of each other in terms of theme, as is the case with Bartleby & Co, about writers who can't write, and Doctor Pasavento, which is about the opposite, an obsessed reader.
Vila-Matas has reconnected me with literature. He is like a curator, and this is why I think the publisher in Dublinesca is such an important character, and tells so much about him. When Vila-Matas writes about Sebald, Auster, Roberto Bolaño or Franz Kafka, you really want to read these authors. Similarly, Sebald's approach to writing parallels the way that many visual artists work now: a kind of nonscientific research that creates links between a certain piece of architecture and a certain piece of music, an intuitive research into the world that results in strange findings. Sometimes it's not so easy to understand the process of making art, how much it involves collecting information and then metabolizing information in a way that goes beyond the academic; it's almost like the crazy people who invent machines that don't work.
IV. Dublinesca Revisited: The Gutenberg Galaxy
RWF (Rainer Werner Fassbinder) (1993). Installation view, Hohenzollernring 74, Esther Schipper/Michael Krome, Köln. Photo Lothar Schnepf, courtesy Esther Schipper, Berlin.
Regarding the works of Vila-Matas, Sebald or even Borges, you can see there's a strain of literature that connects deeply to the way the Internet works today. There have been a number of articles on Borges that say he was really the one who envisioned this whole circulation of information: the world as library.
This is something that comes up in Dublinesca when the publisher - confronted with our changing relations to the printed word - contemplates making a requiem for the end of the "Gutenberg Galaxy." I'm not sure whether this is a term that Vila-Matas found somewhere or invented himself, but here "Gutenberg" refers of course to the first printer and "galaxy" refers to the era of printing. Another theme that emerges is the idea of the hikikomori, understood as the techie recluse who accesses society virtually, a character who travels only in the confines of his room. In the book, the publisher turns into a kind of hikikomori, and over the past two years I have heard Vila-Matas himself use this word frequently. Dublinesca is the first book by Vila-Matas in which he is so conscious about these new media - the Internet, blogs, emails - and I think it is partly related to the fact that Vila-Matas has now developed his personal website into something that is almost a parallel enterprise to his novels.
So the idea - already present in works like Bartleby & Co and Montano's Malady - that Vila-Matas is investigating literature at a crossroads is more apparent than ever. I must say that when I read his books I always wonder what the experience would be like for someone who has no interest in literature at all. I imagine it's similar to visiting a completely foreign country where you can't relate to anything. What becomes clear though is that it's an endless process: you read something and you quote it and then it gets passed on to someone else and it's a chain that never stops. Vila-Matas creates a landscape of meanings and encounters, an aesthetic reminiscent of John Cage. There's one part based on chance but at the same time everything ties together.
The discovery by the publisher in Dublinesca that he has become his catalog of writers, an amalgam of all the writers with whom he has worked, is ultimately a refutation of the closed and stiff notion of identity that has become so tied up in the concept of the author. This multiplicity is something that Borges had already identified, so many years ago, but becomes all the more relevant in the context of the Internet.
V. París no se acaba nunca
Tapis de Lecture (Enrique Vila-Matas) (2008), one midnight-blue moquette carpet, 300-500 books, dimensions variable. Installation view, Musac - Museo De Arte Contemporaneo De Castilla y Léon. Courtesy Esther Schipper, Berlin.
For a long time I knew of Vila-Matas by name, but never read any of his books, thinking that they would not interest me. Then one day I started reading and was surprised to find out that it was not at all what I had assumed. The first book I read was París no se acaba nunca, which evokes Ernest Hemingway's A Moveable Feast. In this book Vila-Matas is young and moves to Paris to become a writer, by chance renting a room from Marguerite Duras, who gives him advice. Among other people he meets is the Argentinean writer and filmmaker Edgardo Cozarinsky, who I myself had met a few years before I read the book. Vila-Matas and Cozarinsky meet in a cinema, where Cozarinsky introduces Vila-Matas to Borges' writings about cinema, and then Vila-Matas goes in search of Borges in Paris.
In 2007 I was invited by Hans Ulrich Obrist to participate in the group show "everstill/siempretodavía," held in Granada in the former house of the poet Federico García Lorca, and I suggested that we invite Vila-Matas to do a lecture in conjunction with the exhibition. The day I arrived in Granada I happened to check in to the hotel at the exact same time as Vila-Matas: I arrived, he arrived; we were both quite reserved. The next day, we did a long interview with Obrist, all three of us together. And from then on we continued to meet, since Vila-Matas visits Paris quite often.
In 2008 I invited Vila-Matas to Léon for a show I had at MUSAC, "Nocturama*," and he lectured about Georges Perec, while I made a new reading carpet installation, Tapis de lecture (Enrique Vila-Matas), that was all about Vila-Matas, his books and the books behind his books. Later that year I asked him to contribute an essay to the catalog for my exhibition at the Tate Modern Turbine Hall. When we communicate I use French and he responds in Spanish. So when I wrote to him about Tate I outlined the exhibition concept, which hinged upon the importance of quotations in an end of the world situation. In his reply, Vila-Matas was very enthusiastic about the concept, and basically repeated what I had written about quotations in an end of the world situation, but in a slightly different way. I was energized by his response and wrote him that it was exactly what I had wanted to articulate about the exhibition. It took me a day or two to realize that he had simply translated my ideas into Spanish.
We go back-and-forth like this. We might have a period without correspondence and then suddenly I'll hear from him, like the time I received a text message out of the blue from Vila-Matas when he was on a trip to Antwerp and found himself in the Antwerp-Centraal train station, the same station that figures prominently at the beginning of Sebald's Austerlitz.
VI. Vertigo
Video still from De Novo (2009), DGF/Corvi-Mora production, DVD, duration 20 min, French with subtitles, filmed on location in Venice. Courtesy the artist and Esther Schipper, Berlin.
My earliest installations, the "chambres/rooms" were adapted from novels and were an attempt to create narratives without text. When I started the "rooms" I was reading detective novels, like those by David Goodis, and one of the first installations is based on a Goodis novel. I had this idea of the clue as a correspondence between an object and a linguistic system, a kind of double articulation. I envisioned the installations as three-dimensional texts in which visitors could draw their own connections between different elements.
Although I've never been tempted to adapt a book into a film, literature is central to the work I made for the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009, De Novo. In this film there is a scene in which I am riding the Vaporetto and I throw a book into the lagoon. When my daughter saw the film she was terribly concerned that we would never be able to recover the book. She asked me whether I had written my name in the book. I said no. Then she asked which book it was. I replied that it was Vertigo, by Sebald. She thought momentarily before saying, "If it's Vertigo, then it's ok."
To that extent the action with the book was quite provocative; it was not easy to perform. Of course I love books, they have always been an essential building material for my practice, and any exhibition that I do could almost be reduced to 10 or 20 titles. But at the same time I'm a kind of failed writer, and as much as I love books there is a tension there: it has always been a mystery to me as to how one writes fiction, how to start, what to write about.
An Abridged Vila-Matas Reader:
Paul Auster
Roberto Bolaño
Jorge Luis Borges
Eduardo Cozarinsky
Marguerite Duras
Peter Handke
Ernest Hemingway
James Joyce
Franz Kafka
Claudio Magris
Georges Perec
WG Sebald
Enrique Vila-Matas
ON RECORD #2: Jun Yang
Defining a Proposal Through Questions:
Jun Yang on the Taipei Contemporary Art Center
ON RECORD is a series of dialogues with contemporary artists about the ideas and influences that inspire their works. ON RECORD #2 was conducted in Tokyo and edited by ART iT in collaboration with Jun Yang.
From A Contemporary Art Centre, Taipei (A Proposal) at the 6th Taipei Biennial, 2008.
1. What are the origins of Taipei Contemporary Art Center?
2. Has this project led you to question assumptions about art you may have developed in the European context and ideas about the role government should play in arts funding and policy?
3. You mentioned questioning who controls the space, and it made me think of manifesta as an "exhibition for Europe" and then the problems inherent to participating in an identity-building exhibition, which I think to their credit the manifesta curators tend to challenge. Is this something you have to think about when you're invited to participate in such biennials?
4. In the end could you say that your Taipei Biennial project, which lasted over a year - longer then the actual exhibition itself - and involved many trips to Taipei and much of your own money, is like an absurdist critique of the biennial situation but also a very genuine engagement with the biennial?
5. What has the art center been doing since opening in February?
6. How do you envision TCAC if it's still open after two years?
7. Did you consider any other examples of art centers and alternative spaces in Asia such as Long March Space in Beijing?
8. Who decides the programming?
1. What are the origins of Taipei Contemporary Art Center?
A group of 40-to-50 people including artists, scholars and curators in Taiwan have initiated a new space called TCAC (Taipei Contemporary Art Center) in two neighboring buildings - kind of classical narrow Taipei houses - located in the city center. TCAC opened in the last week of February and is now operating as a pilot project for the next two years.
The starting point of the whole project is that in 2008 I was invited to the Taipei Biennial, curated by Vasif Kortun and Manray Hsu. I had worked in Taipei before so I knew the context of what was going on there in terms of art spaces, and the situation of artists and curators. It was a very particular moment in Taipei, and at that time I myself was working on a long-term project about the conditions of exhibiting.
What is the space surrounding an artwork? Who controls the spaces, who finances them, for what purpose are these spaces built? How should a space for showing artwork look today? What are the local conditions, peculiarities and needs? As an artist I was interested to think about these conditions of exhibiting. Not necessarily in the context of an institutional critique or a social critique of the city or the site, but on a very basic level, researching fundamental questions related to the production of "artworks."
When I was invited to the Taipei Biennial I thought it was a great chance to take this further. I could use the best-known exhibition in Taiwan as a research project to ask these questions across several layers. Even though the curators were considering showing one of my films or something similar I proposed a research project with the title A Contemporary Art Centre, Taipei (A Proposal). Within the question of the conditions of exhibiting I was "proposing an art center" without proposing a concrete image that might recall an existing art center; it was more about asking people to think of the possibilities for a space. What could such a space be? Would it even have to be physical? Who could, who would control such a space and with what intention? What are today's art centers and spaces for exhibition?
For instance most spaces in China, or in fact almost all of them, are run as companies simply because there is no legislation for nonprofit organizations, nor is there government funding for such private initiatives. So where does the funding come from and how does it influence the structure and the space itself? These questions seemed particularly relevant in Asia.
I assembled a small team to look at existing models and past initiatives of art spaces in Taiwan. People who ran spaces in their apartments, artist-run spaces, smaller collective spaces, spaces that were funded by companies and so on. Looking at these examples, each of them expresses a certain condition, a socio-political situation and a necessity of being.
Recently I started teaching in art schools and universities in Austria and Taipei. It seemed that younger art students were concentrating on making their classical definition of an artwork. By this I'm not only referring to making "something to hang on a wall," but also to the students' realm of concentration - even within critical or performative or social interventions - the boundaries of their work definitions were still within a given frame. I don't want to generalize, but there are still these tendencies: every gallery wants its artists to concentrate on producing their works.
So with the Taipei Biennial project one of my hopes was for younger students to reexamine this hierarchy of production where artists think, "I have to wait for a gallerist or a curator to knock on my door, or I have to apply for governmental funding and if I get it then I can do the work, and if I don't get the funding then I can't." Even for artists who do not necessarily create visual objects, there is still the necessary moment of realizing an encounter between work and audience, whatever it may be. The same goes for curators as well.
More than their spatial characteristics or scale, their influence or their exhibitions, the essence of art centers has been that they bring together people who are interested in contemporary art. An art center is a platform for the exchange of ideas through the display of artwork, through provoking discussions and through creating opportunities for outreach. An art center is a reflection of the art community, ultimately becoming one of its voices and a visualization of contemporary art for the greater community.
If the goal of the Taipei Biennial project was to think about the conditions for exhibiting contemporary art, then building a physical art center was just one possible outcome of that project. But before that it was essential to think about the current circumstances facing contemporary art in Taiwan, taking a look at its financial, political and educational issues.
So what did we do during the Biennial? One, I occupied a pavilion in the park next to the museum. It was some kind of leftover building, a small glass pavilion that I turned into an office and research base. Because the sun heated up its interior so intensely, I created a wood façade in front of the pavilion and used it as a billboard, writing the title of the work, A Contemporary Art Centre, Taipei (A Proposal), on it in huge letters. I also placed a blue flag on top of the pavilion, with the idea of marking the site and giving the proposal a physical presence in town, like a pinpoint on a map. Even though we used the space as an office, most people who came were disappointed because they couldn't see any "result." On the second floor I had an installation of around 15 examples of existing and past exhibition spaces from the past 20 years in Taiwan.
Additionally, I created a poster with the text "a contemporary art centre in Taipei is … (blank), should … (blank), could… (blank), would be… (blank)." People could write anything into the blanks - "Make my mom happy," or whatever they liked. It wasn't a survey, it was just a way to make the question more present. Then we organized gatherings of university art students, sort of like a series of parties outside, just to get them involved in the question.
One of the main ideas was to create a conference for 10 international art figures to discuss art spaces today. For instance, I wanted to invite someone who runs a gallery, like Hu Fang of Vitamin Creative Space, to reflect upon and discuss the idea of commercial galleries that overlap with the nonprofit platform of art centers. The goal would have been to discuss various models for creating spaces for exhibitions and visualization, as well as the considerations that go into that. But the more I thought about it and talked with people, I realized it wouldn't have been very helpful or engaging for the local public. If I were truly interested in this question in the particular context of Taipei, I would have to think about how to generate a real discussion in town on existing models and future possibilities.
Like most museums in Taiwan, the museums are controlled by the city or the national government. Prior to starting the project with the Biennial I had worked with Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei, in 2006. It was then controlled by a hybrid private and city-run art foundation. In 2007 it was essentially reintegrated into the city's art council, thus losing its independence, and has since been overseen by the city's arts commissioner. The same department also oversees the Taipei Fine Arts Museum and organizations like Taipei Artist Center, which means that Taipei's most prominent institutions are all in a very direct line of control with the city's politicians. If the mayor changes, these institutions are directly affected, with the city appointing new directors for their programming.
Of course this situation occurs to some degree everywhere, but the question is, what is the distance between politics and professionalism, how many layers of independence and criticality can we create between these two poles? How do we define the "independence" of an independent art space?
In Taipei we had extensive discussions on this question of independence because some people define independence as refusing government funding. But coming from a European context I believe that it's vital to take governmental support while challenging a city and a government to sponsor these spaces without controlling them, to actively protect and provide for freedom of expression.
If we look at many bigger state-run museums in countries around the world, they tend to function as extended political tools, which means that if there is the 20th anniversary of relations with Zimbabwe, they will do Zimbabwe exhibitions five times in a row and so on. This is not in itself a bad thing; every city should have such programming because it is important for other aspects of society. I think it's very good in a way because it might create new opportunities for people to visit museums - why not? But I do think within the diversity of a city and especially within the possibility of a democratic government that a diversity of positions and viewpoints must be protected or upheld or nurtured in various ways. The problem arises when cities only support "Zimbabwe" exhibitions at the expense of other layers of production and communication, which characterizes the situations in both China and in Taiwan. This is the bigger challenge of the whole project, which leads to the question, what is the role of contemporary art in different societies? What is the necessity to sponsor these spaces and to support contemporary art, not just in regard to spaces themselves but also as in terms of artists and curators and their productions?
I have always insisted that even though at this moment TCAC is not receiving government funding, its long-term goal is to challenge the city and Taiwan to recognize that even if it's something that cannot be controlled, it's vital for a city and a democracy to support and create the possibility of these different opinions.
To return to the biennial project, instead of organizing an international conference, I started to think about how to host a local conference. The problem with local conferences is that many people simply might not attend or might not actually engage in a real dialogue because everybody is already familiar with everybody else's opinions. So I decided to invite everybody to a weekend retreat in the north of Taiwan at a beach hotel. It had to take place away from Taipei since many people in the south criticized this project on the basis that Taipei, as the capital, is in itself a center and already home to a concentration of art and money. Since it was a retreat, all participants had to travel and nobody could just go home, since everybody stayed together at the hotel. I invited around 50 artists, curators and scholars. I purposely chose not to invite any officials, since it was more important to create a discussion rather then a face-off between government and artists, or a platform for officials to propagandize. I was interested in content. I felt that among 50 participants there would still be room for dialogue. And even though it was a relatively manageable number of participants, this retreat was the first time that so many people in the Taiwan art community had come together to listen to each other.
Nobody prepared anything in advance but we had three, primary discussion sessions, each having two moderators drawn from among the local art community.
The first session addressed the status quo of art in Taiwan. It was a chance to discuss where each participant thought the "problem zones" are. Why are all the art centers and museums under the control of the government? Why isn't Taiwan producing more curators? Why are there so few exhibition spaces? What is the situation for independent curators and artists?
The second session went deeper into these problems and then in the third session we discussed possible initiatives that could change the status quo and produce a stronger voice for contemporary art in Taiwan. If we think with regard to Taiwan of the government's stake in contemporary art on the one hand and then the commercial interest of corporations and galleries in contemporary art on the other, how far can contemporary art professionals go to produce a third voice that expresses an opinion on tendencies in cultural policy, or expresses its opinions on issues affecting society.
We had discussions about writing a petition, writing a statement, some people discussed the necessity of a new art association, others discussed the possibility of creating a new art space. We have a transcript of the whole thing, which is around 100,000 words in Chinese and is online for anybody to read.
We also had engagement in less formal settings like at coffee breaks, dinner and the bar, which we had booked out. In contemporary art, so many discussions take place in such informal situations, so I wanted to combine these informal moments of communication with formal discussions to create diverse scenarios for exchange. Participants included the curators Manray Hsu, Hongjohn Lin, Meiya Cheng, Amy Cheng and Wang Jun-Jieh, as well as artists like Chen Chieh-Jen, Chen Kai-Huang, Tsui Kuang-Yu and Yao Jui-Chung.
The third phase of this project was to "take over" a magazine. I convinced the popular Taiwanese art magazine ARTCO to let me guest edit an issue on the question of art spaces and my project (May 2009). I invited seven international contributors, each of whom are involved in an art space themselves, to introduce to readers four or five art spaces that they like, showing therefore the variety of today's art spaces and expanding the definition of "art centers." The final list included galleries, art museums, Internet platforms, alternative spaces and private foundations. In another section in the magazine I wrote three proposals for an art center in Taipei, as a way to sum up the research I had done to date. And then there was also a summary of the weekend retreat written by Meiya Cheng.
Even though the whole project was officially part of the Taipei Biennial, I worked almost completely independent of the Biennial framework, paying for almost 90 percent of the project by myself. And because of that, I did not need to ask for permission or go through bureaucratic processes for each step of the project. I asked the Biennial to provide me no more than the average - or even minimum - support for participating artists (eg, one flight ticket, five days in a hotel and minimum production fee). The rest of the costs I paid by myself or through my own sponsors. So I would rather say the project was produced in the context of the Biennial then to say it was a Taipei Biennial project.
Basically this was the conclusion of my Project. I had spent more then nine months working on it and felt quite relieved. It had created many discussions and also different possibilities for the future. Honestly speaking, as an artist these research projects can be extremely frustrating since I felt I was constantly talking to people and negotiating with them.
Then at one point the question of whether or not to "give it a try" cropped up. In discussions that followed the weekend retreat, participants already began to express their hopes and thoughts about experimenting with creating a new space in Taipei. Since everybody felt that such a space was missing, why not work towards initiating TCAC?
A core group met again in August 2009 to brainstorm about how to realize such a space, from issues like who would run the space to practical necessities and whether this new art center would actually need a physical space and if so, how big it would have to be. How could funding be created; what models could we apply for making decisions, how to include the community and so on.
From that moment on it became a collective project; it was no longer my concept, and my opinion became just one of several. A group of 30 people founded the art center – forming at the same time an association to ensure its future "independence" and to create an alternative to the classical power hierarchy. We did not want to create a museum with a director but instead think of an open structure where decisions would have to be made within a certain collective framework. Now the association has grown to around 70 members. It could easily have 200 members, but there is no point in having too many people since it would stall any serious decision-making. Also the TCAC does not only cater to its members, its goal is to stimulate and support the broader contemporary art field in Taiwan. Thus we include activities organized by non-members; basically there is hardly any difference between members and non-members at this moment.
The idea of membership is more related to legal considerations but also in anticipation of a possible future scenario in which TCAC actually does grow into an influential institution. What happens then? Instead of setting up a cabal of directors we felt that having an association could ensure the art center's future balance through open board elections, such that the center has to constantly ask itself about its own necessity and direction over and over again.
This is something that would not necessarily be possible in a place like China, where it is illegal for citizens to form associations, because of the fear that such groups could evolve into political parties. Even if you were to form an association as a "company," you would still be constrained in what you could do. And if you are running a space in Beijing it would be silly to challenge the cultural policy of China at this moment. It would be very silly to say, "I think the professional art people should organize themselves and be a counter pole to the existing governmental situation." It would practically be suicidal. But on the other hand there are very critical projects taking place in China; the thing is how to find, within the system, possibilities for raising questions and discussing issues.
For instance, I work with Vitamin Creative Space in Guangzhou. At one point we had planned to show a video I produced for the Venice Biennale in 2005, but the work is actually quite controversial in China, so we had to ask ourselves, to what extent would it endanger the gallery and the people involved? In China you have to work with different strategies.
The same strategy we use in Taipei might not even make sense in Austria or Germany, because each locality has a very different cultural context for contemporary art.
In this sense TCAC is a very particular project that resulted in Taipei, and I think for every freedom we gain we ought to use this freedom as best as we can. This is also evident to an extent in Hong Kong, where the artists that I know there are also actively engaged in social and political issues.
So what happened since last August is that we started writing out the concept of TCAC, dealing with legal issues, possible future scenarios, practical necessities, how to fund the space, how to build its framework. We felt ultimately that it was important to have a building. Virtual things can be wonderful and enriching, but we felt it was important to give Taipei a real building – a new art center where you can go and do something there and it would be public.
We started negotiating with the city and several private companies, mostly real estate. The city was interested and has a lot of land, but it was important for the art center not to be hidden away on a mountain somewhere, it had to be easily accessible for young people. Art centers should not be tucked away in the suburbs; they should be in the city center next to the biggest cinema or whatever. But it was very difficult and time-consuming to negotiate with the bureaucracy, and we were more successful dealing with a real estate company. We finally came to an agreement with a company that frequently engages with contemporary art and design and architecture. This company buys up buildings one by one in different neighborhoods until they own enough land to create an apartment or office building. We were able to negotiate to have two buildings in one neighborhood in central Taipei. The relationship between TCAC and the company is that they provide the space, we do not owe them anything, do not have to do any exhibitions for them or seek approval for anything, nor do we pay rent. They have given us the space for two years; we did the renovation on our own budget.
There is something like a café or public space for small gatherings right at the entrance, and then we have the office also on the ground floor. The presentation, screening and discussion space is on the second floor, and exhibition space is on the third and fourth floors. The rooftop can be used for screenings and presentations as well. The office has a working station and an archive at the back, which is very important to the whole concept of the art center, while most of the events happen on the second floor.
Until now we've been primarily organizing screenings, sound events and discussions. We have only done a few exhibitions because they are the most expensive kind of event to produce: the production-, shipping- and display-related costs are expensive and for a small art center with no budget it is ultimately inefficient.
And also what the city was most lacking was a discursive space for initiating public issues or presenting various forms of contemporary art. For instance, if I have just finished a film, even if I take it to a museum, they cannot really fit it into their program because everything must be planned out far in advance. Nor would a gallery necessarily be open to doing an informal screening. So TCAC attempts to provide a more spontaneous element to local dialogue and exchange.
From A Contemporary Art Centre, Taipei (A Proposal), (2008).
2. Has this project led you to question assumptions about art you may have developed in the European context and ideas about the role government should play in arts funding and policy?
Yes. Like I said, the project wouldn't make as much sense as it does now if it were in Germany or Austria. The situation now – having a physical building for TCAC – resulted out of long discussions. Also the funding situation is very different to central European systems.
In the last few years, when you look at many countries in Europe, funding for contemporary art has been cut and you have private companies now sponsoring art centers, museums and so on. I am not using the phrase in a necessarily negative way, but this situation creates a conflict of interest - for example, when you have auction houses sponsoring exhibitions. It is a very complex issue.
It was interesting to look at this issue in Taipei because the structure itself is not that huge. The problems and the conflicts arose very quickly. Also within the broader background of the Chinese or Japanese context or other places in Asia, I thought it was very interesting to ask this question, since there is traditionally very little governmental funding for contemporary art, compared to the arts' strong connection to the social state in European countries.
From A Contemporary Art Centre, Taipei (A Proposal), (2008).
3. You mentioned questioning who controls the space, and it made me think of manifesta as an "exhibition for Europe" and then the problems inherent to participating in an identity-building exhibition, which I think to their credit the manifesta curators tend to challenge. Is this something you have to think about when you're invited to participate in such biennials?
As an artist you are always expected to deal with the local situation. As an artist you are invited to go some place and do a project there that has a certain sense of sustainability, but then how much can an artist create in a such a short situation, maybe going for only two visits in a year's time? So I saw my project as a question for the biennial itself. I had been invited to several biennials prior to Taipei, and it's pretty much the same expectations, no matter what the theme of the show actually is. It is in fact a strange situation for the artist; quite often the locals are not happy about "their" biennial. In many cases the local artists will feel left out and feel that these are prestige projects with very little impact on the local situation of contemporary art – a waste of money. The biennial flies in all these international people who then leave after a couple days of creating in many cases a so-called "site specific" work. So I felt that to develop a project with exactly these frictions of the biennial situation in mind would be a perfect frame.
From A Contemporary Art Centre, Taipei (A Proposal), (2008).
4. In the end could you say that your Taipei Biennial project, which lasted over a year - longer then the actual exhibition itself - and involved many trips to Taipei and much of your own money, is like an absurdist critique of the biennial situation but also a very genuine engagement with the biennial?
I'm not sure about the vision for the biennial, nor am I saying my contribution will resolve the problematics of biennials, but I think it's an ongoing topic of debate. There are so many biennials coming up and Taipei is a very classic example where a very big amount of the city's cultural funding goes into this show (although in fact it is relatively not that much) and once there's such a flagship project the problem really is that it diverts money from other possible smaller-scale projects in town, and this is a real problem. Contemporary art is not a seasonal thing happening every second year.
For a city it's certainly easier to market a biennial than a museum exhibition. But I do see many initiatives to question or to expand the possibility of these biennials. If biennials are a reality, and cities do think they are worthwhile marketing strategies, it's not for us to say, "We refuse to work with them," or "We must dismantle them," but rather, we can view them as a tool that exists within our realm of possibilities, and then think about how to use them more critically, and how we can create something within that context that would lead to a stronger contemporary art environment, or more diversity, or how can we use them to implement certain discussions, critiques and so on. As long as we don't just purely affirm the situation - and I think again this relates to the roles that we play, or our responsibilities as individuals - as long as we do not affirm these hierarchies and relationships but challenge them, then it can be constructive. I certainly don't plan to recreate this project at every other biennial. I'm very happy that it's done and can sit at home and work on the next film that I'm planning.
Exterior view of Taipei Contemporary Art Center, Taipei.
5. What has the art center been doing since opening in February?
When we started the whole project many artists stepped forward and offered to donate work. Around 40 artists donated artworks that we can sell to raise money - a small part of which goes to the artist as a production compensation and the rest going to TCAC. TCAC takes these works on commission for two years, during which we try to sell them. This is a one-time agreement; we won't ask artists to donate every year; we are not trying to usurp the role of the galleries. We spent a lot of time talking to each gallery to say that it's not a threat and that it's vital to work together.
This was important because many people did feel threatened by the center, as it had accumulated all these supporters, a large space of 800-square-meters and created a substantial new entity within the city's art scene. But the art center operates on a very tight budget, basically derived from the works we sell, but the bigger goal would be to push the government and private companies to contribute support to the project. At this moment we have to prove the necessity of the space first. We have had some success to this end because through our activities suddenly collectors have taken note and are interested in supporting us. And some galleries have realized that we are not a threat, and that their artists are involved in TCAC in any case, so why not support us. It sounds nice but I have to admit we have intense discussions, fights and talks behind every step of the way.
View of office facilities at Taipei Contemporary Art Center, Taipei.
6. How do you envision TCAC if it’s still open after two years?
We are already in the process of negotiating a long-term plan, looking for a building with a long-term lease, creating a starting budget and thinking about how to continue this project. But even if it stops, my personal opinion is that we have a minimum time limit to make the project a success. If contemporary art is always about renegotiating spaces and also the necessity of constructing spaces, then it is important within the next two years to experiment and try things out.
It's the exact opposite of huge museums as enterprises such as the Mori Art Museum or Ullens Contemporary Art Center in Beijing where the institution has a big ambition to affect the art scene and it's coming top-down but not necessarily responding to anything local, or perhaps not even able to provide a real space for professional discussions, since they are catering to the mass audience, which is not to say that they thus produce bad exhibitions.
Maybe Ullens had a genuine desire to create something of a discursive space for Beijing but I don't think they were really on the ground thinking about how to do it. I think when Ullens had Fei Dawei as director along with an international group of curators, there was a real hope for creating discussions within the contemporary art community in Beijing, but I think this is now absolutely missing after changing both directors and curators and setting a new direction.
I think a discursive space or simply an exhibition space involves discussions and communication not only for critics and curators, they're also vital for artists to reflect upon their works and to contemporary art production. And the vital thing is that these spaces need to be public. Of course there are many discussions in Beijing that take place in smaller groups, but these discussions should be accessible to younger artists and art students who are not invited to the in-group discussions and dinners. This is something that is in a way missing in Beijing. You will meet enough people in Taipei who say that as well of the art center. It's very difficult. The art center tries to be very open; but then there are groups or people who I guess feel left out. The Friday Bar event is one of the tools we hope will be able to open the art center for the public as well as professionals from other fields of cultural production such as filmmakers and musicians.
When we started TCAC we discussed how this experiment could be different to an art center run by a small group. In a way, classically speaking, you would say that the small group itself has its own agenda and its actions reflect this agenda, thus making such an organization a kind of self-promotion and not necessarily about broader public issues affecting contemporary art. Also the group does not necessarily have to step into cultural policy or engage in discussions that are not really related to their agenda. What the art center attempts is to think about how to raise issues and support contemporary art with the broader picture in mind. For instance the archive in the office, which is publicly accessible, includes material from artists, scholars and projects associated with Taiwan that are not part of the association.
Installation view of the opening exhibition, "Donated Works Exhibition No. 1," at Taipei Contemporary Art Center, Taipei, 2010.
7. Did you consider any other examples of art centers and alternative spaces in Asia such as Long March Space in Beijing?
I know Long March but I'd rather speak about a different but similar project since I have been working with them. Vitamin Creative Space in Guangzhou and Beijing started out as a nonprofit art space but given the necessities of funding the space and creating a stronger program, Vitamin now operates as a commercial entity as well. This is comparable to Skuc Gallery and Foksal Gallery in Europe, commercial galleries that started out as art centers or foundations.
I don't really see a problem with that, because the gallery system itself grew out of a context at the end of the 19th century when commercial galleries first came into existence. So in this sense it's a very old model that reflects a different necessity and social context from those that led to Vitamin or Foksal or Long March, which is very interesting to observe.
From A Contemporary Art Centre, Taipei (A Proposal), (2008).
8. Who decides the programming?
The association has elected a board that "controls" the art center and convenes every Tuesday at meetings that are open to all association members, although usually no more than 10 people actually show up. We're trying to include more people but it's an endless process. So at the moment we haven't really found a smooth way of running it. When a lot of people come together we have to readapt our methods of communication and negotiation. But all the information is fully transparent and sent to every member for discussion.
In the beginning we didn't have any intent to organize an exhibition because we didn't have a budget, but because we received works donated from artists we decided to have a two-part donors' exhibition. It's interesting because the art center has a collection of 40 art pieces and in a way it's a stronger collection than that of the city. We are now working on a bigger exhibition using even more spaces that will take place around the same time as this year's Taipei Biennial, so that is our major project for this year.
We also have a series called Friday Bar, where every Friday one artist or curator or anyone else takes over the art center to host and create music events, lectures or discussions. Sometimes we even have several events on the same evening. These events are interesting because they open the art center as a platform for various people in the art field as well as various events and forms that are part of contemporary art. And then every month we do a Sunday art salon inviting younger artists to show and present their works outside of the regular university situation. So there are a lot of different activities.
Another thing is that all members of the association are invited to propose something. Again, practically speaking few people take advantage of this, and we are by no means overrun by proposals, but at least every week there are one or two events taking place at the center, constantly.
It does not mean all the events are extremely well attended but I feel the fact that there are people hosting events and people coming clearly shows the necessity for such a space in Taipei. It would be great if TCAC could work with other spaces in Asia as well, inviting them to do projects in Taipei or simply to exchange ideas on different strategies and possible approaches. This would depend mainly on budgets. In any case whenever international curators or artists visit town we ask them to do a presentation. The whole thing is just two months old and we are constructing the car as we are driving it - for example, we haven't had time to finish the homepage yet.
All images courtesy the artist.
Jun Yang on the Taipei Contemporary Art Center
ON RECORD is a series of dialogues with contemporary artists about the ideas and influences that inspire their works. ON RECORD #2 was conducted in Tokyo and edited by ART iT in collaboration with Jun Yang.
From A Contemporary Art Centre, Taipei (A Proposal) at the 6th Taipei Biennial, 2008.
1. What are the origins of Taipei Contemporary Art Center?
2. Has this project led you to question assumptions about art you may have developed in the European context and ideas about the role government should play in arts funding and policy?
3. You mentioned questioning who controls the space, and it made me think of manifesta as an "exhibition for Europe" and then the problems inherent to participating in an identity-building exhibition, which I think to their credit the manifesta curators tend to challenge. Is this something you have to think about when you're invited to participate in such biennials?
4. In the end could you say that your Taipei Biennial project, which lasted over a year - longer then the actual exhibition itself - and involved many trips to Taipei and much of your own money, is like an absurdist critique of the biennial situation but also a very genuine engagement with the biennial?
5. What has the art center been doing since opening in February?
6. How do you envision TCAC if it's still open after two years?
7. Did you consider any other examples of art centers and alternative spaces in Asia such as Long March Space in Beijing?
8. Who decides the programming?
1. What are the origins of Taipei Contemporary Art Center?
A group of 40-to-50 people including artists, scholars and curators in Taiwan have initiated a new space called TCAC (Taipei Contemporary Art Center) in two neighboring buildings - kind of classical narrow Taipei houses - located in the city center. TCAC opened in the last week of February and is now operating as a pilot project for the next two years.
The starting point of the whole project is that in 2008 I was invited to the Taipei Biennial, curated by Vasif Kortun and Manray Hsu. I had worked in Taipei before so I knew the context of what was going on there in terms of art spaces, and the situation of artists and curators. It was a very particular moment in Taipei, and at that time I myself was working on a long-term project about the conditions of exhibiting.
What is the space surrounding an artwork? Who controls the spaces, who finances them, for what purpose are these spaces built? How should a space for showing artwork look today? What are the local conditions, peculiarities and needs? As an artist I was interested to think about these conditions of exhibiting. Not necessarily in the context of an institutional critique or a social critique of the city or the site, but on a very basic level, researching fundamental questions related to the production of "artworks."
When I was invited to the Taipei Biennial I thought it was a great chance to take this further. I could use the best-known exhibition in Taiwan as a research project to ask these questions across several layers. Even though the curators were considering showing one of my films or something similar I proposed a research project with the title A Contemporary Art Centre, Taipei (A Proposal). Within the question of the conditions of exhibiting I was "proposing an art center" without proposing a concrete image that might recall an existing art center; it was more about asking people to think of the possibilities for a space. What could such a space be? Would it even have to be physical? Who could, who would control such a space and with what intention? What are today's art centers and spaces for exhibition?
For instance most spaces in China, or in fact almost all of them, are run as companies simply because there is no legislation for nonprofit organizations, nor is there government funding for such private initiatives. So where does the funding come from and how does it influence the structure and the space itself? These questions seemed particularly relevant in Asia.
I assembled a small team to look at existing models and past initiatives of art spaces in Taiwan. People who ran spaces in their apartments, artist-run spaces, smaller collective spaces, spaces that were funded by companies and so on. Looking at these examples, each of them expresses a certain condition, a socio-political situation and a necessity of being.
Recently I started teaching in art schools and universities in Austria and Taipei. It seemed that younger art students were concentrating on making their classical definition of an artwork. By this I'm not only referring to making "something to hang on a wall," but also to the students' realm of concentration - even within critical or performative or social interventions - the boundaries of their work definitions were still within a given frame. I don't want to generalize, but there are still these tendencies: every gallery wants its artists to concentrate on producing their works.
So with the Taipei Biennial project one of my hopes was for younger students to reexamine this hierarchy of production where artists think, "I have to wait for a gallerist or a curator to knock on my door, or I have to apply for governmental funding and if I get it then I can do the work, and if I don't get the funding then I can't." Even for artists who do not necessarily create visual objects, there is still the necessary moment of realizing an encounter between work and audience, whatever it may be. The same goes for curators as well.
More than their spatial characteristics or scale, their influence or their exhibitions, the essence of art centers has been that they bring together people who are interested in contemporary art. An art center is a platform for the exchange of ideas through the display of artwork, through provoking discussions and through creating opportunities for outreach. An art center is a reflection of the art community, ultimately becoming one of its voices and a visualization of contemporary art for the greater community.
If the goal of the Taipei Biennial project was to think about the conditions for exhibiting contemporary art, then building a physical art center was just one possible outcome of that project. But before that it was essential to think about the current circumstances facing contemporary art in Taiwan, taking a look at its financial, political and educational issues.
So what did we do during the Biennial? One, I occupied a pavilion in the park next to the museum. It was some kind of leftover building, a small glass pavilion that I turned into an office and research base. Because the sun heated up its interior so intensely, I created a wood façade in front of the pavilion and used it as a billboard, writing the title of the work, A Contemporary Art Centre, Taipei (A Proposal), on it in huge letters. I also placed a blue flag on top of the pavilion, with the idea of marking the site and giving the proposal a physical presence in town, like a pinpoint on a map. Even though we used the space as an office, most people who came were disappointed because they couldn't see any "result." On the second floor I had an installation of around 15 examples of existing and past exhibition spaces from the past 20 years in Taiwan.
Additionally, I created a poster with the text "a contemporary art centre in Taipei is … (blank), should … (blank), could… (blank), would be… (blank)." People could write anything into the blanks - "Make my mom happy," or whatever they liked. It wasn't a survey, it was just a way to make the question more present. Then we organized gatherings of university art students, sort of like a series of parties outside, just to get them involved in the question.
One of the main ideas was to create a conference for 10 international art figures to discuss art spaces today. For instance, I wanted to invite someone who runs a gallery, like Hu Fang of Vitamin Creative Space, to reflect upon and discuss the idea of commercial galleries that overlap with the nonprofit platform of art centers. The goal would have been to discuss various models for creating spaces for exhibitions and visualization, as well as the considerations that go into that. But the more I thought about it and talked with people, I realized it wouldn't have been very helpful or engaging for the local public. If I were truly interested in this question in the particular context of Taipei, I would have to think about how to generate a real discussion in town on existing models and future possibilities.
Like most museums in Taiwan, the museums are controlled by the city or the national government. Prior to starting the project with the Biennial I had worked with Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei, in 2006. It was then controlled by a hybrid private and city-run art foundation. In 2007 it was essentially reintegrated into the city's art council, thus losing its independence, and has since been overseen by the city's arts commissioner. The same department also oversees the Taipei Fine Arts Museum and organizations like Taipei Artist Center, which means that Taipei's most prominent institutions are all in a very direct line of control with the city's politicians. If the mayor changes, these institutions are directly affected, with the city appointing new directors for their programming.
Of course this situation occurs to some degree everywhere, but the question is, what is the distance between politics and professionalism, how many layers of independence and criticality can we create between these two poles? How do we define the "independence" of an independent art space?
In Taipei we had extensive discussions on this question of independence because some people define independence as refusing government funding. But coming from a European context I believe that it's vital to take governmental support while challenging a city and a government to sponsor these spaces without controlling them, to actively protect and provide for freedom of expression.
If we look at many bigger state-run museums in countries around the world, they tend to function as extended political tools, which means that if there is the 20th anniversary of relations with Zimbabwe, they will do Zimbabwe exhibitions five times in a row and so on. This is not in itself a bad thing; every city should have such programming because it is important for other aspects of society. I think it's very good in a way because it might create new opportunities for people to visit museums - why not? But I do think within the diversity of a city and especially within the possibility of a democratic government that a diversity of positions and viewpoints must be protected or upheld or nurtured in various ways. The problem arises when cities only support "Zimbabwe" exhibitions at the expense of other layers of production and communication, which characterizes the situations in both China and in Taiwan. This is the bigger challenge of the whole project, which leads to the question, what is the role of contemporary art in different societies? What is the necessity to sponsor these spaces and to support contemporary art, not just in regard to spaces themselves but also as in terms of artists and curators and their productions?
I have always insisted that even though at this moment TCAC is not receiving government funding, its long-term goal is to challenge the city and Taiwan to recognize that even if it's something that cannot be controlled, it's vital for a city and a democracy to support and create the possibility of these different opinions.
To return to the biennial project, instead of organizing an international conference, I started to think about how to host a local conference. The problem with local conferences is that many people simply might not attend or might not actually engage in a real dialogue because everybody is already familiar with everybody else's opinions. So I decided to invite everybody to a weekend retreat in the north of Taiwan at a beach hotel. It had to take place away from Taipei since many people in the south criticized this project on the basis that Taipei, as the capital, is in itself a center and already home to a concentration of art and money. Since it was a retreat, all participants had to travel and nobody could just go home, since everybody stayed together at the hotel. I invited around 50 artists, curators and scholars. I purposely chose not to invite any officials, since it was more important to create a discussion rather then a face-off between government and artists, or a platform for officials to propagandize. I was interested in content. I felt that among 50 participants there would still be room for dialogue. And even though it was a relatively manageable number of participants, this retreat was the first time that so many people in the Taiwan art community had come together to listen to each other.
Nobody prepared anything in advance but we had three, primary discussion sessions, each having two moderators drawn from among the local art community.
The first session addressed the status quo of art in Taiwan. It was a chance to discuss where each participant thought the "problem zones" are. Why are all the art centers and museums under the control of the government? Why isn't Taiwan producing more curators? Why are there so few exhibition spaces? What is the situation for independent curators and artists?
The second session went deeper into these problems and then in the third session we discussed possible initiatives that could change the status quo and produce a stronger voice for contemporary art in Taiwan. If we think with regard to Taiwan of the government's stake in contemporary art on the one hand and then the commercial interest of corporations and galleries in contemporary art on the other, how far can contemporary art professionals go to produce a third voice that expresses an opinion on tendencies in cultural policy, or expresses its opinions on issues affecting society.
We had discussions about writing a petition, writing a statement, some people discussed the necessity of a new art association, others discussed the possibility of creating a new art space. We have a transcript of the whole thing, which is around 100,000 words in Chinese and is online for anybody to read.
We also had engagement in less formal settings like at coffee breaks, dinner and the bar, which we had booked out. In contemporary art, so many discussions take place in such informal situations, so I wanted to combine these informal moments of communication with formal discussions to create diverse scenarios for exchange. Participants included the curators Manray Hsu, Hongjohn Lin, Meiya Cheng, Amy Cheng and Wang Jun-Jieh, as well as artists like Chen Chieh-Jen, Chen Kai-Huang, Tsui Kuang-Yu and Yao Jui-Chung.
The third phase of this project was to "take over" a magazine. I convinced the popular Taiwanese art magazine ARTCO to let me guest edit an issue on the question of art spaces and my project (May 2009). I invited seven international contributors, each of whom are involved in an art space themselves, to introduce to readers four or five art spaces that they like, showing therefore the variety of today's art spaces and expanding the definition of "art centers." The final list included galleries, art museums, Internet platforms, alternative spaces and private foundations. In another section in the magazine I wrote three proposals for an art center in Taipei, as a way to sum up the research I had done to date. And then there was also a summary of the weekend retreat written by Meiya Cheng.
Even though the whole project was officially part of the Taipei Biennial, I worked almost completely independent of the Biennial framework, paying for almost 90 percent of the project by myself. And because of that, I did not need to ask for permission or go through bureaucratic processes for each step of the project. I asked the Biennial to provide me no more than the average - or even minimum - support for participating artists (eg, one flight ticket, five days in a hotel and minimum production fee). The rest of the costs I paid by myself or through my own sponsors. So I would rather say the project was produced in the context of the Biennial then to say it was a Taipei Biennial project.
Basically this was the conclusion of my Project. I had spent more then nine months working on it and felt quite relieved. It had created many discussions and also different possibilities for the future. Honestly speaking, as an artist these research projects can be extremely frustrating since I felt I was constantly talking to people and negotiating with them.
Then at one point the question of whether or not to "give it a try" cropped up. In discussions that followed the weekend retreat, participants already began to express their hopes and thoughts about experimenting with creating a new space in Taipei. Since everybody felt that such a space was missing, why not work towards initiating TCAC?
A core group met again in August 2009 to brainstorm about how to realize such a space, from issues like who would run the space to practical necessities and whether this new art center would actually need a physical space and if so, how big it would have to be. How could funding be created; what models could we apply for making decisions, how to include the community and so on.
From that moment on it became a collective project; it was no longer my concept, and my opinion became just one of several. A group of 30 people founded the art center – forming at the same time an association to ensure its future "independence" and to create an alternative to the classical power hierarchy. We did not want to create a museum with a director but instead think of an open structure where decisions would have to be made within a certain collective framework. Now the association has grown to around 70 members. It could easily have 200 members, but there is no point in having too many people since it would stall any serious decision-making. Also the TCAC does not only cater to its members, its goal is to stimulate and support the broader contemporary art field in Taiwan. Thus we include activities organized by non-members; basically there is hardly any difference between members and non-members at this moment.
The idea of membership is more related to legal considerations but also in anticipation of a possible future scenario in which TCAC actually does grow into an influential institution. What happens then? Instead of setting up a cabal of directors we felt that having an association could ensure the art center's future balance through open board elections, such that the center has to constantly ask itself about its own necessity and direction over and over again.
This is something that would not necessarily be possible in a place like China, where it is illegal for citizens to form associations, because of the fear that such groups could evolve into political parties. Even if you were to form an association as a "company," you would still be constrained in what you could do. And if you are running a space in Beijing it would be silly to challenge the cultural policy of China at this moment. It would be very silly to say, "I think the professional art people should organize themselves and be a counter pole to the existing governmental situation." It would practically be suicidal. But on the other hand there are very critical projects taking place in China; the thing is how to find, within the system, possibilities for raising questions and discussing issues.
For instance, I work with Vitamin Creative Space in Guangzhou. At one point we had planned to show a video I produced for the Venice Biennale in 2005, but the work is actually quite controversial in China, so we had to ask ourselves, to what extent would it endanger the gallery and the people involved? In China you have to work with different strategies.
The same strategy we use in Taipei might not even make sense in Austria or Germany, because each locality has a very different cultural context for contemporary art.
In this sense TCAC is a very particular project that resulted in Taipei, and I think for every freedom we gain we ought to use this freedom as best as we can. This is also evident to an extent in Hong Kong, where the artists that I know there are also actively engaged in social and political issues.
So what happened since last August is that we started writing out the concept of TCAC, dealing with legal issues, possible future scenarios, practical necessities, how to fund the space, how to build its framework. We felt ultimately that it was important to have a building. Virtual things can be wonderful and enriching, but we felt it was important to give Taipei a real building – a new art center where you can go and do something there and it would be public.
We started negotiating with the city and several private companies, mostly real estate. The city was interested and has a lot of land, but it was important for the art center not to be hidden away on a mountain somewhere, it had to be easily accessible for young people. Art centers should not be tucked away in the suburbs; they should be in the city center next to the biggest cinema or whatever. But it was very difficult and time-consuming to negotiate with the bureaucracy, and we were more successful dealing with a real estate company. We finally came to an agreement with a company that frequently engages with contemporary art and design and architecture. This company buys up buildings one by one in different neighborhoods until they own enough land to create an apartment or office building. We were able to negotiate to have two buildings in one neighborhood in central Taipei. The relationship between TCAC and the company is that they provide the space, we do not owe them anything, do not have to do any exhibitions for them or seek approval for anything, nor do we pay rent. They have given us the space for two years; we did the renovation on our own budget.
There is something like a café or public space for small gatherings right at the entrance, and then we have the office also on the ground floor. The presentation, screening and discussion space is on the second floor, and exhibition space is on the third and fourth floors. The rooftop can be used for screenings and presentations as well. The office has a working station and an archive at the back, which is very important to the whole concept of the art center, while most of the events happen on the second floor.
Until now we've been primarily organizing screenings, sound events and discussions. We have only done a few exhibitions because they are the most expensive kind of event to produce: the production-, shipping- and display-related costs are expensive and for a small art center with no budget it is ultimately inefficient.
And also what the city was most lacking was a discursive space for initiating public issues or presenting various forms of contemporary art. For instance, if I have just finished a film, even if I take it to a museum, they cannot really fit it into their program because everything must be planned out far in advance. Nor would a gallery necessarily be open to doing an informal screening. So TCAC attempts to provide a more spontaneous element to local dialogue and exchange.
From A Contemporary Art Centre, Taipei (A Proposal), (2008).
2. Has this project led you to question assumptions about art you may have developed in the European context and ideas about the role government should play in arts funding and policy?
Yes. Like I said, the project wouldn't make as much sense as it does now if it were in Germany or Austria. The situation now – having a physical building for TCAC – resulted out of long discussions. Also the funding situation is very different to central European systems.
In the last few years, when you look at many countries in Europe, funding for contemporary art has been cut and you have private companies now sponsoring art centers, museums and so on. I am not using the phrase in a necessarily negative way, but this situation creates a conflict of interest - for example, when you have auction houses sponsoring exhibitions. It is a very complex issue.
It was interesting to look at this issue in Taipei because the structure itself is not that huge. The problems and the conflicts arose very quickly. Also within the broader background of the Chinese or Japanese context or other places in Asia, I thought it was very interesting to ask this question, since there is traditionally very little governmental funding for contemporary art, compared to the arts' strong connection to the social state in European countries.
From A Contemporary Art Centre, Taipei (A Proposal), (2008).
3. You mentioned questioning who controls the space, and it made me think of manifesta as an "exhibition for Europe" and then the problems inherent to participating in an identity-building exhibition, which I think to their credit the manifesta curators tend to challenge. Is this something you have to think about when you're invited to participate in such biennials?
As an artist you are always expected to deal with the local situation. As an artist you are invited to go some place and do a project there that has a certain sense of sustainability, but then how much can an artist create in a such a short situation, maybe going for only two visits in a year's time? So I saw my project as a question for the biennial itself. I had been invited to several biennials prior to Taipei, and it's pretty much the same expectations, no matter what the theme of the show actually is. It is in fact a strange situation for the artist; quite often the locals are not happy about "their" biennial. In many cases the local artists will feel left out and feel that these are prestige projects with very little impact on the local situation of contemporary art – a waste of money. The biennial flies in all these international people who then leave after a couple days of creating in many cases a so-called "site specific" work. So I felt that to develop a project with exactly these frictions of the biennial situation in mind would be a perfect frame.
From A Contemporary Art Centre, Taipei (A Proposal), (2008).
4. In the end could you say that your Taipei Biennial project, which lasted over a year - longer then the actual exhibition itself - and involved many trips to Taipei and much of your own money, is like an absurdist critique of the biennial situation but also a very genuine engagement with the biennial?
I'm not sure about the vision for the biennial, nor am I saying my contribution will resolve the problematics of biennials, but I think it's an ongoing topic of debate. There are so many biennials coming up and Taipei is a very classic example where a very big amount of the city's cultural funding goes into this show (although in fact it is relatively not that much) and once there's such a flagship project the problem really is that it diverts money from other possible smaller-scale projects in town, and this is a real problem. Contemporary art is not a seasonal thing happening every second year.
For a city it's certainly easier to market a biennial than a museum exhibition. But I do see many initiatives to question or to expand the possibility of these biennials. If biennials are a reality, and cities do think they are worthwhile marketing strategies, it's not for us to say, "We refuse to work with them," or "We must dismantle them," but rather, we can view them as a tool that exists within our realm of possibilities, and then think about how to use them more critically, and how we can create something within that context that would lead to a stronger contemporary art environment, or more diversity, or how can we use them to implement certain discussions, critiques and so on. As long as we don't just purely affirm the situation - and I think again this relates to the roles that we play, or our responsibilities as individuals - as long as we do not affirm these hierarchies and relationships but challenge them, then it can be constructive. I certainly don't plan to recreate this project at every other biennial. I'm very happy that it's done and can sit at home and work on the next film that I'm planning.
Exterior view of Taipei Contemporary Art Center, Taipei.
5. What has the art center been doing since opening in February?
When we started the whole project many artists stepped forward and offered to donate work. Around 40 artists donated artworks that we can sell to raise money - a small part of which goes to the artist as a production compensation and the rest going to TCAC. TCAC takes these works on commission for two years, during which we try to sell them. This is a one-time agreement; we won't ask artists to donate every year; we are not trying to usurp the role of the galleries. We spent a lot of time talking to each gallery to say that it's not a threat and that it's vital to work together.
This was important because many people did feel threatened by the center, as it had accumulated all these supporters, a large space of 800-square-meters and created a substantial new entity within the city's art scene. But the art center operates on a very tight budget, basically derived from the works we sell, but the bigger goal would be to push the government and private companies to contribute support to the project. At this moment we have to prove the necessity of the space first. We have had some success to this end because through our activities suddenly collectors have taken note and are interested in supporting us. And some galleries have realized that we are not a threat, and that their artists are involved in TCAC in any case, so why not support us. It sounds nice but I have to admit we have intense discussions, fights and talks behind every step of the way.
View of office facilities at Taipei Contemporary Art Center, Taipei.
6. How do you envision TCAC if it’s still open after two years?
We are already in the process of negotiating a long-term plan, looking for a building with a long-term lease, creating a starting budget and thinking about how to continue this project. But even if it stops, my personal opinion is that we have a minimum time limit to make the project a success. If contemporary art is always about renegotiating spaces and also the necessity of constructing spaces, then it is important within the next two years to experiment and try things out.
It's the exact opposite of huge museums as enterprises such as the Mori Art Museum or Ullens Contemporary Art Center in Beijing where the institution has a big ambition to affect the art scene and it's coming top-down but not necessarily responding to anything local, or perhaps not even able to provide a real space for professional discussions, since they are catering to the mass audience, which is not to say that they thus produce bad exhibitions.
Maybe Ullens had a genuine desire to create something of a discursive space for Beijing but I don't think they were really on the ground thinking about how to do it. I think when Ullens had Fei Dawei as director along with an international group of curators, there was a real hope for creating discussions within the contemporary art community in Beijing, but I think this is now absolutely missing after changing both directors and curators and setting a new direction.
I think a discursive space or simply an exhibition space involves discussions and communication not only for critics and curators, they're also vital for artists to reflect upon their works and to contemporary art production. And the vital thing is that these spaces need to be public. Of course there are many discussions in Beijing that take place in smaller groups, but these discussions should be accessible to younger artists and art students who are not invited to the in-group discussions and dinners. This is something that is in a way missing in Beijing. You will meet enough people in Taipei who say that as well of the art center. It's very difficult. The art center tries to be very open; but then there are groups or people who I guess feel left out. The Friday Bar event is one of the tools we hope will be able to open the art center for the public as well as professionals from other fields of cultural production such as filmmakers and musicians.
When we started TCAC we discussed how this experiment could be different to an art center run by a small group. In a way, classically speaking, you would say that the small group itself has its own agenda and its actions reflect this agenda, thus making such an organization a kind of self-promotion and not necessarily about broader public issues affecting contemporary art. Also the group does not necessarily have to step into cultural policy or engage in discussions that are not really related to their agenda. What the art center attempts is to think about how to raise issues and support contemporary art with the broader picture in mind. For instance the archive in the office, which is publicly accessible, includes material from artists, scholars and projects associated with Taiwan that are not part of the association.
Installation view of the opening exhibition, "Donated Works Exhibition No. 1," at Taipei Contemporary Art Center, Taipei, 2010.
7. Did you consider any other examples of art centers and alternative spaces in Asia such as Long March Space in Beijing?
I know Long March but I'd rather speak about a different but similar project since I have been working with them. Vitamin Creative Space in Guangzhou and Beijing started out as a nonprofit art space but given the necessities of funding the space and creating a stronger program, Vitamin now operates as a commercial entity as well. This is comparable to Skuc Gallery and Foksal Gallery in Europe, commercial galleries that started out as art centers or foundations.
I don't really see a problem with that, because the gallery system itself grew out of a context at the end of the 19th century when commercial galleries first came into existence. So in this sense it's a very old model that reflects a different necessity and social context from those that led to Vitamin or Foksal or Long March, which is very interesting to observe.
From A Contemporary Art Centre, Taipei (A Proposal), (2008).
8. Who decides the programming?
The association has elected a board that "controls" the art center and convenes every Tuesday at meetings that are open to all association members, although usually no more than 10 people actually show up. We're trying to include more people but it's an endless process. So at the moment we haven't really found a smooth way of running it. When a lot of people come together we have to readapt our methods of communication and negotiation. But all the information is fully transparent and sent to every member for discussion.
In the beginning we didn't have any intent to organize an exhibition because we didn't have a budget, but because we received works donated from artists we decided to have a two-part donors' exhibition. It's interesting because the art center has a collection of 40 art pieces and in a way it's a stronger collection than that of the city. We are now working on a bigger exhibition using even more spaces that will take place around the same time as this year's Taipei Biennial, so that is our major project for this year.
We also have a series called Friday Bar, where every Friday one artist or curator or anyone else takes over the art center to host and create music events, lectures or discussions. Sometimes we even have several events on the same evening. These events are interesting because they open the art center as a platform for various people in the art field as well as various events and forms that are part of contemporary art. And then every month we do a Sunday art salon inviting younger artists to show and present their works outside of the regular university situation. So there are a lot of different activities.
Another thing is that all members of the association are invited to propose something. Again, practically speaking few people take advantage of this, and we are by no means overrun by proposals, but at least every week there are one or two events taking place at the center, constantly.
It does not mean all the events are extremely well attended but I feel the fact that there are people hosting events and people coming clearly shows the necessity for such a space in Taipei. It would be great if TCAC could work with other spaces in Asia as well, inviting them to do projects in Taipei or simply to exchange ideas on different strategies and possible approaches. This would depend mainly on budgets. In any case whenever international curators or artists visit town we ask them to do a presentation. The whole thing is just two months old and we are constructing the car as we are driving it - for example, we haven't had time to finish the homepage yet.
All images courtesy the artist.
ON RECORD #1: Heman Chong
8 Rules for Writing Fiction:
Heman Chong on Influence and Appropriation
ON RECORD is a series of dialogues with contemporary artists about the ideas and influences that inspire their works. ON RECORD #1 was conducted and recorded using an online chat program and edited by ART iT in collaboration with Heman Chong. All spelling, grammar and punctuation that appears below has been retained from the original chat.
The Sirens of Titan, catalogue page for Manifesta 8, 2010, offset print, edition of 2000.
[5/28/10 1:37:36 PM] 00 Heman Chong 00: ok lets start
lets do a text chat
i'm more lucid that way
i'm thinking : lets not talk only about Stalker
cause i think the issues are much wider than that
plus we're both not experts in it
and there has been so much talk about it already
so i'm proposing to talk about
[5/28/10 1:38:45 PM] 00 Heman Chong 00: the anxiety of influence
how one thing becomes another
what do you think?
[5/28/10 1:39:05 PM] ART iT: sure
so you'll be talking about your personal influences?
[5/28/10 1:39:30 PM] 00 Heman Chong 00: no, lets talk about it as an issue for artists
[5/28/10 1:41:57 PM] 00 Heman Chong 00: We've all been there before, and some have left it but other are stuck in it. Your Godard moment, The Tsai Ming-Liang Obsession, Kobe Abe Rocks!, Haruki I want to have your baby!... and so on. Countless situations where we feel at once empowered but at the same time, somehow distraught... with artistic material... what to do with it? Where to go with it?
The parable of Noah from the Bible becoming Robinson Crusoe becoming Foe by J.M Coetzee... the possibilties are endless yet what makes a good remake or a good rethink? I think its one of the prominent questions that afflict contemporary artists today.
[5/28/10 1:44:38 PM] 00 Heman Chong 00: are you going to chip in?
or do i just keep going?
[5/28/10 1:44:51 PM] 00 Heman Chong 00: its better that you chip in
[5/28/10 1:45:02 PM] ART iT: really? I was waiting to see where you were headed
[5/28/10 1:45:09 PM] 00 Heman Chong 00: hahahhaha
over the cliff and onto a desert island
[5/28/10 1:46:26 PM] ART iT: well, how about the substantial number of artists working with sci-fi? just bumped into Martha Rosler earlier and she mentioned her own sci-fi project
what is so attractive about that genre to artists?
or i should say a certain type of artist
[5/28/10 1:48:28 PM] 00 Heman Chong 00: That genre is useful for artists who are concerned about the state of the world that we live in, but cannot somehow bring themselves to the front line (or are arrogant enough to think that an art object is an effective political tool) of activism, to have this situation where you can introduce ideas about an alternative(s). Well, at least that's how I'm using it.
[5/28/10 1:49:22 PM] ART iT: so is it a rethinking of sci-fi though, or just an appropriation?
[5/28/10 1:49:58 PM] 00 Heman Chong 00: I don't think sci-fi belongs to anyone, especially not the sci-fi writing community.
So its really up for grabs, I guess.
[5/28/10 1:50:45 PM] ART iT: so there's no anxiety of influence there?
[5/28/10 1:51:19 PM] 00 Heman Chong 00: I don't have to play out definations of what sci-fi is and what it is not. For example, many mainstream writers like Michel Houellebecq and Kazuo Ishiguro have written novels that are totally sci-fi but whether or not they want to see it as that, its another thing altogether.
A lot of it depends on how you define it and distribute it.
[5/28/10 1:54:08 PM] 00 Heman Chong 00: Tarkovsky's films, Stalker and Solaris are absolutely sci-fi, and are adapted from sci-fi novels which are canons in the genre, but I wouldn't necessarily say that he's interested in sci-fi. In fact, in the documentary, Voyage in Time, in a conversation with Tonino Guerra, he states that he hates sci-fi!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyage_in_Time
[5/28/10 1:55:50 PM] 00 Heman Chong 00: Cinema has from the very beginning been a great source of inspiration for artists. Although I'm not sure if its such a good thing...
There's really very little to produce out of it, except to appropriate.
[5/28/10 1:56:37 PM] ART iT: like Cindy Sherman's film stills?
[5/28/10 1:56:39 PM] 00 Heman Chong 00: I mean, there are countless projects out there about L'Avventura, countless art films that are bad remakes of Godard rambles
I guess Sherman's film stills somehow signal the beginnings of it all.
[5/28/10 1:58:07 PM] 00 Heman Chong 00: Don't get me wrong, I'm not an old fart who regard Appropriation as a bad thing.
As with all other artistic strategies, its pretty hard to get it right, and I suspect you can't get it right all the time. So artists who use it ALL the time can find themselves in a big deep rut...
I don't think cinema is the only influence that's tricky. I think literature is pretty tricky too.
I guess all sources of influence are somehow hard to manage, and you need a certain amount of dexterity and intelligence to deal with it
Selection from Untitled (Paperback Covers #02) (2007), Laserjet print
on paper, unique, 129 x 990cm.
[5/28/10 2:05:45 PM] ART iT: what about kobo abe, what makes him significant to you?
[5/28/10 2:08:16 PM] 00 Heman Chong 00: I got very interested in Kobo Abe because he's one of those writers who are immensely cruel to his characters. They often don't make it out at the end of the novel alive, or if they do, they are usually broken down to a point, you can hardly call them a character anymore. Its about encrypting the narrative in a kind of life process of the character and allowing it to surface as a series of conversations with his/her surroundings in a highly abrasive manner.
Its quite similar, I think to the characters you would find in a Michael Haneke film
[5/28/10 2:09:30 PM] ART iT: so do you see him as an influence on many artists or just a personal influence?
[5/28/10 2:12:24 PM] 00 Heman Chong 00: I think his film "The Woman In the Dunes" which was produced out of his novel has influenced many artists (I can imagine someone like Mike Nelson would have seen it and loved it) but I don't think many artists have read the entire scope of his work, which contains similar themes found in "The Woman in the Dunes" but in a much larger expanded manner. The Ruined Map, for example. I think Abe imagined the entire Tokyo as the hole found in "The Woman in the Dunes" and allows for certain similar cruel acts to be enacted in this urban nightmare.
[5/28/10 2:13:17 PM] ART iT: have you read The Box Man?
[5/28/10 2:13:49 PM] 00 Heman Chong 00: That's so fucked up.
Its like the source material for "Cube".
[5/28/10 2:15:13 PM] ART iT: what's Cube?
[5/28/10 2:15:17 PM] 00 Heman Chong 00: I think Haruki Murakami stole a lot from Abe.
Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World is totally stolen from Abe.
[5/28/10 2:15:51 PM] 00 Heman Chong 00: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cube_(film)
Someone recently tagged my work with these words : "Referential Systems"
I quite like that.
The reason why I started making these book covers more and more is because I get so tired of talking rubbish at openings with new people I meet and somehow it because a thing for me and for them to want to talk about the books whose covers I've painted and I guess I'm not so bored anymore.
[5/28/10 2:19:55 PM] 00 Heman Chong 00: You know, like I've mentioned, influences come in waves for me. Once, I got screamed at by a curator, Beatrice Leanza who shouted at me when I said I don't really follow the entire oeuvre of an artist as much as falling in love with specific works from them.
For example, I adore "Happy Together" from Wong Kar Wai but I can't stand watching anything else from him.
[5/28/10 2:23:56 PM] 00 Heman Chong 00: I don't like all of my own works, why the hell should I love every film that Antonioni has made?
The Eclipse is highly influential on my work, but the rest... poof. Forget it. Everyone raves about L'Avventura. I've never sat through a single screening of it. I always fall asleep.
[5/28/10 2:25:47 PM] ART iT: I don't see the point in having to embrace an artist's entire oeuvre
[5/28/10 2:26:22 PM] 00 Heman Chong 00: most people do it
its easier that way
its like eating a buffet
you just eat everything
its disgusting
I hate buffet lunches or dinners or whatever. You eat an entire spectrum of stuff and you have all these bad mixes in your mouth afterwards and you don't know what you've eaten. Its sick. Symptomatic of how our society works. You just want everything in your mouth.
[5/28/10 2:33:39 PM] ART iT: so what makes an artist - any genre - influential for you? what are you looking for?
[5/28/10 2:34:55 PM] 00 Heman Chong 00: Humor. But a kind of cruel humor in seeing things for what they are.
Someone like Kurt Vonnegut fits the bill I guess.
You know his rules for writing, right?
[5/28/10 2:35:52 PM] 00 Heman Chong 00: Kurt Vonnegut - 8 Rules For Writing Fiction
"1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
4. Every sentence must do one of two things -- reveal character or advance the action.
5. Start as close to the end as possible.
6. Be a sadist. Now matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them -- in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages."
[5/28/10 2:36:34 PM] 00 Heman Chong 00: I love these rules
I use them in my work all the time.
[5/28/10 2:38:04 PM] 00 Heman Chong 00: Its a kind of straight talk that I feel very close to. I don't mince words and I don't see why my art work should mince words. If there's something to be said, just say it in the least confusing manner possible. Of course, its very hard to achieve... and there's almost always this desire to digress or to use metaphors...
But I aspire to these rules. I think they should be taught in all art schools.
[5/28/10 2:38:45 PM] ART iT: so does vonnegut count as an influence?
or is it an appropriation?
[5/28/10 2:38:58 PM] 00 Heman Chong 00: The Sirens of Titan count as an influence.
And an appropriation.
[5/28/10 2:39:22 PM] ART iT what's that about?
[5/28/10 2:40:00 PM] 00 Heman Chong 00: Eight Recommendations
(A Monument for Manifesta Eight)
Heman Chong
The project Eight Recommendations (A Monument for Manifesta Eight) surrounds itself with a series of book recommendations that can very quickly become a tool to think about the exhibition by everyone involved. It has the capacity to generate conversation, without having to revert to small talk. I would like to produce a series of 8 posters (each measuring 841 x 1189 mm, A0 size) as a starting point for this project. This will be displayed as a tableau, one right next to another. This will formulate the visual and material aspect of the project. Another situation I can anticipate is that of a lecture performance, where I will talk about these books, directly in relation to some of the works in the exhibition, producing a floating world, an audio guide that does nothing but digress inwards, deeper and deeper into a series of deconstructed contents.
The eight books are :
The Sirens of Titan
Kurt Vonnegut
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sirens_Of_Titan
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
Haruki Murakami
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wind_Up_Bird_Chronicle
Correction
Thomas Bernhard
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correction_(novel)
Gravity's Rainbow
Thomas Pynchon
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity%27s_rainbow
The Kingdom of this World
Alejo Carpentier
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Kingdom_of_this_World
Noli Me Tangere
José Rizal
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noli_me_Tangere_(novel)
The Brief Wonderous
Life of Oscar Wao
Junot Díaz
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Brief_Wondrous_Life_of_Oscar_Wao
Elizabeth Costello
J.M. Coetzee
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Costello
[5/28/10 2:42:22 PM] 00 Heman Chong 00: It takes a long time before I get to work with any novel, and there are many streams involved in it that I don't quite understand yet. There is of course, an initial desire to want to work with it, but also I discovered that it is important to see how the content could somehow influence the dialogues I would have with people about my work, and how talking in this straight but somehow digressive manner can establish a situation where the work is discussed on the basis of the influence. So it becomes a very intimate situation in a very short time.
That's really something that I want with my work, that somehow I can have this temporary intimacy with someone.
7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
[5/28/10 2:44:46 PM] ART iT: so what was the process toward working with Sirens of Titan?
[5/28/10 2:47:15 PM] 00 Heman Chong 00: When I got married to Puyi, we put together our book collections, and I found The Sirens of Titan amongst her books. She highly recommended it, so I read it. You can somehow call it a total shift in my perspective of sci-fi after the experience. Never have I found a novel with such big claims put together with such an incredible amount of irony and hope, all mixed into one massive clusterfuck of an epic.
So it started from a recommendation, which leads me to the discovery of the contents, which translates into an expanded recommendation.
[5/28/10 2:48:24 PM] ART iT: a recontextualization
not an appropriation?
[5/28/10 2:48:28 PM] 00 Heman Chong 00: Yes.
I think we'll see more and more of such recontextualizations in my work.
Selection from Untitled (Paperback Covers #02) (2007), Laserjet print
on paper, unique, 129 x 990cm.
[5/28/10 2:49:46 PM] ART iT: the idea for this chat was to talk about Tarkovsky's Stalker, and then we ended up not talking about it. but then you mentioned you thought Roadside Picnic is better than its film adaption. So why is that?
[5/28/10 2:51:51 PM] 00 Heman Chong 00: Because Roadside Picnic has humor in it and Stalker doesn't. Stalker is just a daft "Oh Look I'm A Victim" kind of work.
Its also not fair to say that Stalker and Roadside Picnic are the same work. They're just totally different.
Made with different intentions with different sensibilities.
All I want to say is that I don't want Tarkovsky to be my neighbor. His energy is too severe for me.
[5/28/10 2:53:48 PM] ART iT: right, humor. I think humor is very misunderstood in popular understanding. Like the Mori Art Museum's All About Laughter show was so depressing precisely because to me it was a complete simplification of approaches to humor
[5/28/10 2:54:10 PM] 00 Heman Chong 00: I didn't see the show so I can't say. But yeah, I can imagine.
I think everyone's confusing humor with "a laugh".
[5/28/10 2:55:13 PM] ART iT: I was checking out the Roadside Picnic entry on wikipedia and this caught my eye:
Meaning of the Book Title
The name of the novel derives from a metaphor proposed by Dr. Valentine Pillman, who believes there is no rational explanation either for the alien Visitation or the mysterious properties of the Zones or the purpose of the artifacts found there.
In the novel, he compares the Visitation to "A picnic. Picture a forest, a country road, a meadow. Cars drive off the country road into the meadow, a group of young people get out carrying bottles, baskets of food, transistor radios, and cameras. They light fires, pitch tents, turn on the music. In the morning they leave. The animals, birds, and insects that watched in horror through the long night creep out from their hiding places. And what do they see? Old spark plugs and old filters strewn around... Rags, burnt-out bulbs, and a monkey wrench left behind... And of course, the usual mess -- apple cores, candy wrappers, charred remains of the campfire, cans, bottles, somebody’s handkerchief, somebody’s penknife, torn newspapers, coins, faded flowers picked in another meadow." The nervous animals in this analogy are the humans who venture forth after the Visitors left, discovering items and anomalies which are ordinary to those who discarded them, but incomprehensible or deadly to those who find them.
This explanation implies that the Visitors may not have even noticed or paid any attention to the human inhabitants of the planet during their "visit" just as humans don't notice or pay attention to grasshoppers or ladybugs during a picnic. The artifacts and phenomena left behind by them in the Zones were garbage, discarded and forgotten without any preconceived intergalactic plan to advance or damage humanity. There is little chance that the Visitors will return again, since for them, it was a brief stop for reasons unknown on the way to their actual destination.
[5/28/10 2:56:02 PM] 00 Heman Chong 00: Exactly.
Isn't that super funny? How we always consider ourselves the center of the universe while in fact, we might be just only cockroaches to other civilisations?
If you read the novel, you'll know what I mean. Its also the way its written, how these inhabitants clumsily deal with the technology for their own narrow-minded purposes.
[5/28/10 2:57:20 PM] 00 Heman Chong 00: YOU KNOW WHAT?
Woody Allen should have made the film version.
Its totally Woody Allen.
All images courtesy the artist.
Heman Chong on Influence and Appropriation
ON RECORD is a series of dialogues with contemporary artists about the ideas and influences that inspire their works. ON RECORD #1 was conducted and recorded using an online chat program and edited by ART iT in collaboration with Heman Chong. All spelling, grammar and punctuation that appears below has been retained from the original chat.
The Sirens of Titan, catalogue page for Manifesta 8, 2010, offset print, edition of 2000.
[5/28/10 1:37:36 PM] 00 Heman Chong 00: ok lets start
lets do a text chat
i'm more lucid that way
i'm thinking : lets not talk only about Stalker
cause i think the issues are much wider than that
plus we're both not experts in it
and there has been so much talk about it already
so i'm proposing to talk about
[5/28/10 1:38:45 PM] 00 Heman Chong 00: the anxiety of influence
how one thing becomes another
what do you think?
[5/28/10 1:39:05 PM] ART iT: sure
so you'll be talking about your personal influences?
[5/28/10 1:39:30 PM] 00 Heman Chong 00: no, lets talk about it as an issue for artists
[5/28/10 1:41:57 PM] 00 Heman Chong 00: We've all been there before, and some have left it but other are stuck in it. Your Godard moment, The Tsai Ming-Liang Obsession, Kobe Abe Rocks!, Haruki I want to have your baby!... and so on. Countless situations where we feel at once empowered but at the same time, somehow distraught... with artistic material... what to do with it? Where to go with it?
The parable of Noah from the Bible becoming Robinson Crusoe becoming Foe by J.M Coetzee... the possibilties are endless yet what makes a good remake or a good rethink? I think its one of the prominent questions that afflict contemporary artists today.
[5/28/10 1:44:38 PM] 00 Heman Chong 00: are you going to chip in?
or do i just keep going?
[5/28/10 1:44:51 PM] 00 Heman Chong 00: its better that you chip in
[5/28/10 1:45:02 PM] ART iT: really? I was waiting to see where you were headed
[5/28/10 1:45:09 PM] 00 Heman Chong 00: hahahhaha
over the cliff and onto a desert island
[5/28/10 1:46:26 PM] ART iT: well, how about the substantial number of artists working with sci-fi? just bumped into Martha Rosler earlier and she mentioned her own sci-fi project
what is so attractive about that genre to artists?
or i should say a certain type of artist
[5/28/10 1:48:28 PM] 00 Heman Chong 00: That genre is useful for artists who are concerned about the state of the world that we live in, but cannot somehow bring themselves to the front line (or are arrogant enough to think that an art object is an effective political tool) of activism, to have this situation where you can introduce ideas about an alternative(s). Well, at least that's how I'm using it.
[5/28/10 1:49:22 PM] ART iT: so is it a rethinking of sci-fi though, or just an appropriation?
[5/28/10 1:49:58 PM] 00 Heman Chong 00: I don't think sci-fi belongs to anyone, especially not the sci-fi writing community.
So its really up for grabs, I guess.
[5/28/10 1:50:45 PM] ART iT: so there's no anxiety of influence there?
[5/28/10 1:51:19 PM] 00 Heman Chong 00: I don't have to play out definations of what sci-fi is and what it is not. For example, many mainstream writers like Michel Houellebecq and Kazuo Ishiguro have written novels that are totally sci-fi but whether or not they want to see it as that, its another thing altogether.
A lot of it depends on how you define it and distribute it.
[5/28/10 1:54:08 PM] 00 Heman Chong 00: Tarkovsky's films, Stalker and Solaris are absolutely sci-fi, and are adapted from sci-fi novels which are canons in the genre, but I wouldn't necessarily say that he's interested in sci-fi. In fact, in the documentary, Voyage in Time, in a conversation with Tonino Guerra, he states that he hates sci-fi!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyage_in_Time
[5/28/10 1:55:50 PM] 00 Heman Chong 00: Cinema has from the very beginning been a great source of inspiration for artists. Although I'm not sure if its such a good thing...
There's really very little to produce out of it, except to appropriate.
[5/28/10 1:56:37 PM] ART iT: like Cindy Sherman's film stills?
[5/28/10 1:56:39 PM] 00 Heman Chong 00: I mean, there are countless projects out there about L'Avventura, countless art films that are bad remakes of Godard rambles
I guess Sherman's film stills somehow signal the beginnings of it all.
[5/28/10 1:58:07 PM] 00 Heman Chong 00: Don't get me wrong, I'm not an old fart who regard Appropriation as a bad thing.
As with all other artistic strategies, its pretty hard to get it right, and I suspect you can't get it right all the time. So artists who use it ALL the time can find themselves in a big deep rut...
I don't think cinema is the only influence that's tricky. I think literature is pretty tricky too.
I guess all sources of influence are somehow hard to manage, and you need a certain amount of dexterity and intelligence to deal with it
Selection from Untitled (Paperback Covers #02) (2007), Laserjet print
on paper, unique, 129 x 990cm.
[5/28/10 2:05:45 PM] ART iT: what about kobo abe, what makes him significant to you?
[5/28/10 2:08:16 PM] 00 Heman Chong 00: I got very interested in Kobo Abe because he's one of those writers who are immensely cruel to his characters. They often don't make it out at the end of the novel alive, or if they do, they are usually broken down to a point, you can hardly call them a character anymore. Its about encrypting the narrative in a kind of life process of the character and allowing it to surface as a series of conversations with his/her surroundings in a highly abrasive manner.
Its quite similar, I think to the characters you would find in a Michael Haneke film
[5/28/10 2:09:30 PM] ART iT: so do you see him as an influence on many artists or just a personal influence?
[5/28/10 2:12:24 PM] 00 Heman Chong 00: I think his film "The Woman In the Dunes" which was produced out of his novel has influenced many artists (I can imagine someone like Mike Nelson would have seen it and loved it) but I don't think many artists have read the entire scope of his work, which contains similar themes found in "The Woman in the Dunes" but in a much larger expanded manner. The Ruined Map, for example. I think Abe imagined the entire Tokyo as the hole found in "The Woman in the Dunes" and allows for certain similar cruel acts to be enacted in this urban nightmare.
[5/28/10 2:13:17 PM] ART iT: have you read The Box Man?
[5/28/10 2:13:49 PM] 00 Heman Chong 00: That's so fucked up.
Its like the source material for "Cube".
[5/28/10 2:15:13 PM] ART iT: what's Cube?
[5/28/10 2:15:17 PM] 00 Heman Chong 00: I think Haruki Murakami stole a lot from Abe.
Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World is totally stolen from Abe.
[5/28/10 2:15:51 PM] 00 Heman Chong 00: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cube_(film)
Someone recently tagged my work with these words : "Referential Systems"
I quite like that.
The reason why I started making these book covers more and more is because I get so tired of talking rubbish at openings with new people I meet and somehow it because a thing for me and for them to want to talk about the books whose covers I've painted and I guess I'm not so bored anymore.
[5/28/10 2:19:55 PM] 00 Heman Chong 00: You know, like I've mentioned, influences come in waves for me. Once, I got screamed at by a curator, Beatrice Leanza who shouted at me when I said I don't really follow the entire oeuvre of an artist as much as falling in love with specific works from them.
For example, I adore "Happy Together" from Wong Kar Wai but I can't stand watching anything else from him.
[5/28/10 2:23:56 PM] 00 Heman Chong 00: I don't like all of my own works, why the hell should I love every film that Antonioni has made?
The Eclipse is highly influential on my work, but the rest... poof. Forget it. Everyone raves about L'Avventura. I've never sat through a single screening of it. I always fall asleep.
[5/28/10 2:25:47 PM] ART iT: I don't see the point in having to embrace an artist's entire oeuvre
[5/28/10 2:26:22 PM] 00 Heman Chong 00: most people do it
its easier that way
its like eating a buffet
you just eat everything
its disgusting
I hate buffet lunches or dinners or whatever. You eat an entire spectrum of stuff and you have all these bad mixes in your mouth afterwards and you don't know what you've eaten. Its sick. Symptomatic of how our society works. You just want everything in your mouth.
[5/28/10 2:33:39 PM] ART iT: so what makes an artist - any genre - influential for you? what are you looking for?
[5/28/10 2:34:55 PM] 00 Heman Chong 00: Humor. But a kind of cruel humor in seeing things for what they are.
Someone like Kurt Vonnegut fits the bill I guess.
You know his rules for writing, right?
[5/28/10 2:35:52 PM] 00 Heman Chong 00: Kurt Vonnegut - 8 Rules For Writing Fiction
"1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
4. Every sentence must do one of two things -- reveal character or advance the action.
5. Start as close to the end as possible.
6. Be a sadist. Now matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them -- in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages."
[5/28/10 2:36:34 PM] 00 Heman Chong 00: I love these rules
I use them in my work all the time.
[5/28/10 2:38:04 PM] 00 Heman Chong 00: Its a kind of straight talk that I feel very close to. I don't mince words and I don't see why my art work should mince words. If there's something to be said, just say it in the least confusing manner possible. Of course, its very hard to achieve... and there's almost always this desire to digress or to use metaphors...
But I aspire to these rules. I think they should be taught in all art schools.
[5/28/10 2:38:45 PM] ART iT: so does vonnegut count as an influence?
or is it an appropriation?
[5/28/10 2:38:58 PM] 00 Heman Chong 00: The Sirens of Titan count as an influence.
And an appropriation.
[5/28/10 2:39:22 PM] ART iT what's that about?
[5/28/10 2:40:00 PM] 00 Heman Chong 00: Eight Recommendations
(A Monument for Manifesta Eight)
Heman Chong
The project Eight Recommendations (A Monument for Manifesta Eight) surrounds itself with a series of book recommendations that can very quickly become a tool to think about the exhibition by everyone involved. It has the capacity to generate conversation, without having to revert to small talk. I would like to produce a series of 8 posters (each measuring 841 x 1189 mm, A0 size) as a starting point for this project. This will be displayed as a tableau, one right next to another. This will formulate the visual and material aspect of the project. Another situation I can anticipate is that of a lecture performance, where I will talk about these books, directly in relation to some of the works in the exhibition, producing a floating world, an audio guide that does nothing but digress inwards, deeper and deeper into a series of deconstructed contents.
The eight books are :
The Sirens of Titan
Kurt Vonnegut
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sirens_Of_Titan
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
Haruki Murakami
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wind_Up_Bird_Chronicle
Correction
Thomas Bernhard
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correction_(novel)
Gravity's Rainbow
Thomas Pynchon
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity%27s_rainbow
The Kingdom of this World
Alejo Carpentier
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Kingdom_of_this_World
Noli Me Tangere
José Rizal
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noli_me_Tangere_(novel)
The Brief Wonderous
Life of Oscar Wao
Junot Díaz
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Brief_Wondrous_Life_of_Oscar_Wao
Elizabeth Costello
J.M. Coetzee
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Costello
[5/28/10 2:42:22 PM] 00 Heman Chong 00: It takes a long time before I get to work with any novel, and there are many streams involved in it that I don't quite understand yet. There is of course, an initial desire to want to work with it, but also I discovered that it is important to see how the content could somehow influence the dialogues I would have with people about my work, and how talking in this straight but somehow digressive manner can establish a situation where the work is discussed on the basis of the influence. So it becomes a very intimate situation in a very short time.
That's really something that I want with my work, that somehow I can have this temporary intimacy with someone.
7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
[5/28/10 2:44:46 PM] ART iT: so what was the process toward working with Sirens of Titan?
[5/28/10 2:47:15 PM] 00 Heman Chong 00: When I got married to Puyi, we put together our book collections, and I found The Sirens of Titan amongst her books. She highly recommended it, so I read it. You can somehow call it a total shift in my perspective of sci-fi after the experience. Never have I found a novel with such big claims put together with such an incredible amount of irony and hope, all mixed into one massive clusterfuck of an epic.
So it started from a recommendation, which leads me to the discovery of the contents, which translates into an expanded recommendation.
[5/28/10 2:48:24 PM] ART iT: a recontextualization
not an appropriation?
[5/28/10 2:48:28 PM] 00 Heman Chong 00: Yes.
I think we'll see more and more of such recontextualizations in my work.
Selection from Untitled (Paperback Covers #02) (2007), Laserjet print
on paper, unique, 129 x 990cm.
[5/28/10 2:49:46 PM] ART iT: the idea for this chat was to talk about Tarkovsky's Stalker, and then we ended up not talking about it. but then you mentioned you thought Roadside Picnic is better than its film adaption. So why is that?
[5/28/10 2:51:51 PM] 00 Heman Chong 00: Because Roadside Picnic has humor in it and Stalker doesn't. Stalker is just a daft "Oh Look I'm A Victim" kind of work.
Its also not fair to say that Stalker and Roadside Picnic are the same work. They're just totally different.
Made with different intentions with different sensibilities.
All I want to say is that I don't want Tarkovsky to be my neighbor. His energy is too severe for me.
[5/28/10 2:53:48 PM] ART iT: right, humor. I think humor is very misunderstood in popular understanding. Like the Mori Art Museum's All About Laughter show was so depressing precisely because to me it was a complete simplification of approaches to humor
[5/28/10 2:54:10 PM] 00 Heman Chong 00: I didn't see the show so I can't say. But yeah, I can imagine.
I think everyone's confusing humor with "a laugh".
[5/28/10 2:55:13 PM] ART iT: I was checking out the Roadside Picnic entry on wikipedia and this caught my eye:
Meaning of the Book Title
The name of the novel derives from a metaphor proposed by Dr. Valentine Pillman, who believes there is no rational explanation either for the alien Visitation or the mysterious properties of the Zones or the purpose of the artifacts found there.
In the novel, he compares the Visitation to "A picnic. Picture a forest, a country road, a meadow. Cars drive off the country road into the meadow, a group of young people get out carrying bottles, baskets of food, transistor radios, and cameras. They light fires, pitch tents, turn on the music. In the morning they leave. The animals, birds, and insects that watched in horror through the long night creep out from their hiding places. And what do they see? Old spark plugs and old filters strewn around... Rags, burnt-out bulbs, and a monkey wrench left behind... And of course, the usual mess -- apple cores, candy wrappers, charred remains of the campfire, cans, bottles, somebody’s handkerchief, somebody’s penknife, torn newspapers, coins, faded flowers picked in another meadow." The nervous animals in this analogy are the humans who venture forth after the Visitors left, discovering items and anomalies which are ordinary to those who discarded them, but incomprehensible or deadly to those who find them.
This explanation implies that the Visitors may not have even noticed or paid any attention to the human inhabitants of the planet during their "visit" just as humans don't notice or pay attention to grasshoppers or ladybugs during a picnic. The artifacts and phenomena left behind by them in the Zones were garbage, discarded and forgotten without any preconceived intergalactic plan to advance or damage humanity. There is little chance that the Visitors will return again, since for them, it was a brief stop for reasons unknown on the way to their actual destination.
[5/28/10 2:56:02 PM] 00 Heman Chong 00: Exactly.
Isn't that super funny? How we always consider ourselves the center of the universe while in fact, we might be just only cockroaches to other civilisations?
If you read the novel, you'll know what I mean. Its also the way its written, how these inhabitants clumsily deal with the technology for their own narrow-minded purposes.
[5/28/10 2:57:20 PM] 00 Heman Chong 00: YOU KNOW WHAT?
Woody Allen should have made the film version.
Its totally Woody Allen.
All images courtesy the artist.
1
Latest
- 11/08/15 18:00
- ON RECORD #5: Peter Coffin
- 11/05/11 02:39
- ON RECORD #4: Cheyney Thompson
- 10/10/13 15:00
- ON RECORD #3: Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster
- 10/07/14 12:00
- ON RECORD #2: Jun Yang
- 10/06/04 19:54
- ON RECORD #1: Heman Chong
RSS
