metropolis m

‘This is really only the second show of my work that has ever taken place that I wasn’t involved in the conceptualizing or planning. Until 2002, all the shows I did were project-based and basically conceived of, organized and curated by me. Even my retrospective at the Kunstverein Hamburg in 2003 I more or less curated myself. It’s really very recently that museums have started organizing exhibitions of my work on their own. The show at de Hallen Haarlem will be on a fairly large scale. I have been thinking of performing Official Welcome at the opening and it would be a new performance of an old performance. However, being curated is a new experience for me.’

‘It’s an experience that I accept. Most of the work that I’ve done since the mid-1980s that is still shown has been fairly site-specific. Some of that site-specific work has taken the form of performance, on the basis of which I then generated video tapes. For a long time it was really only videotapes of performances that would get shown in exhibitions and sort of circulate relatively autonomously. Sometimes my project documentation gets re-shown, but that’s pretty much the extent of the work that I’ve done that can be curated in those ways.’

‘Well, it varies. Perhaps one of my best known performances, Museum Highlights: A Gallery Talk, exists in my opinion in 3 different forms: there was the original performance at the Philadelphia Museum of Art; then there was a videotape, which I produced in reference to the kinds of videos that museums often produce about themselves; and then there was the script, which was prepared for publication by the journal October at the invitation of Douglas Crimp. Because the script for Museum Highlights was comprised largely of quotations, it was constructed very meticulously, with proper quotation marks and over 50 footnotes. Some of those notes were critical as well, so they developed a theory about the history of art museums in the United States that was rooted in Foucault and an investigation into philanthropy and public policy. For May I Help You I moved from footnotes to a list of sources because at that point I started re-writing material more extensively.’

‘Allan didn’t want to call it a collaboration, so at the time it was May I Help You (in cooperation with Allan McCollum). I learned an enormous amount from Allan; he was one of the first artists I met who talked about art and culture in terms of class. He was famous for having really good ideas for other people’s work, so I’m not sure if doing a performance as a gallery sales presentation was his idea or mine. I remember the lunch where the idea emerged and I insisted that he work with me. It was a specific installation because I think this was one of the few instances that he installed his plastic surrogates in a single row. I also quote him extensively at the end of the script. The other important connection is that May I Help You represents the point at which Pierre Bourdieu really kicked-in to my work.’

‘Oh no, that would be a little megalomaniacal. Not when it comes to archive research. In 1992, I started doing interview-based research. I interviewed Colin de Land, my art dealer at American Fine Arts Company; I interviewed a German collector for a kind of commission piece; I interviewed the board of directors at the Kunstverein Munich and the curators of the 1993 Whitney Biennial. It was difficult working with these institutions; the relationships were complicated. In some cases it became that my use of material was contested and I had to do quite a bit of negotiation. With the individual collectors and with Colin, one could think of these more as portraits, and in that way, more like collaborations.’

‘That’s an interesting question. I’ve never thought of that. Did I ever go back to that? I don’t think I ever did. I stopped doing performances for awhile in the mid-1990s and when I returned to performance in 1997 for InSite, I remembered very consciously not interviewing people. People who participate in a project like that are doing so as individuals, whether they’re officers of an organization or not, and I did feel a kind of ethical obligation to them. I didn’t want to be constrained by that.’

‘When I re-performed May I Help You myself at Orchard, Jeff Preiss, who is a cofounder of the space and a filmmaker, shot the performance in 16mm and edited it. So that is a collaboration for me. What’s online is an excerpt of that and is totally authorized. The Official Welcome up there, somebody shot off the screen at a show in Toronto. I should probably get in touch with YouTube about this. I wouldn’t mind if there was just a bit of the footage online, but to have the whole thing up there, and it’s really poor quality.’

‘I love YouTube and I think it’s fabulous, but I’m a little ambivalent about it as a thing artists are using as self promotion because I’m a little ambivalent about artists using anything as a platform for self promotion. I think it shouldn’t be about artists promoting themselves, but rather about something. The other problem is that there’s a long history of artists appropriating popular cultural forms and venues with a rational that this is a process of the democratization of art or a critique of elitism, when all they’re doing is exploiting it for their own purposes and reframing it in terms of art discourse. And so that’s something that I wouldn’t want to condone. I do think that YouTube is one of a number of phenomena in media and television in the last 5 or 10 years that has put art in its place in a certain way. What I mean is it has revealed how artists really don’t have a monopoly on visual invention and political or media critique and that art exists as such because it exists in the “art world”. YouTube does level the playing field. The issue is that art generally makes very specific kinds of demands on audiences and the choices that artists make are defining those audiences. What kind of competency art demands to be legible — so that one understands why it’s valuable or interesting at all — are also the kinds of pleasure it might give. Those are the issues that define the audience for art. Not distribution.’

‘For me, one of the basic motivating principles of site-specific work is that you need to be specific in thinking about whom you’re addressing or what kind of dialog you want to have with whoever encounters your work. So there are pieces that I’ve done that are for general audiences and others that were done more like services for what I call a “cultural constituency organization” or art spaces that exist within and for a community of artists. I just did a piece for Tate Modern for a show that’s opening next week and it’s based on the multi-media guide. Instead of the audio guide that I used in Little Frank and His Carp (2001), many museums now have multi-media guides where you punch in a number and you get audio, video, animation, games and historic recordings and they have one for adults and one for families and so on. On the one hand, it’s an incredible wealth of material and a lot of it is very interesting and political and put together on the basis of very progressive thinking. On the other hand, a lot of it is just incredibly patronizing and you have this confrontation of museological ideology of populism, discourse and history. Ultimately I feel it closes-off the visitor to a range of interpretations and experiences. So I took all these little files with all of these different pieces of information and I created a program where they open randomly in sequence, about 35 of them, and play more or less simultaneously [laughter] like—“Hello, welcome to Tate Modern” and then, “HELLO! And WELCOME!” And then something else opens up and these animated images appear and there’s Giacometti. It’s really one of those things I can enjoy as if somebody else did it.’

‘There are these kinds of classic strategies that go back to Futurism and Dada that have also played out in institutional critique. This is a very different approach than the one that I’ve been associated with, but it’s one that I take up every once and awhile.’

‘I wanted them to exist. I like them. There’s a certain narcissism involved; I was 18 at the time that I made them and they were the first thing that I did when I stopped painting. I had been hand-drawing them; for the last one I drew, I projected de Kooning’s Door to The River [1960], rendered it in graphite, and then projected some sort of neoclassical nude over it. And then I realized I could just do it photographically with slides. Some, I bought in museum gift shops but I borrowed many from the Metropolitan museum slide library. I just re-photographed them on a light box. It was very primitive.’

‘Exhibition is really a product of my first hobby, developed at age 35, which was Samba. I had spent a lot of time in Brazil following my participation in the Sao Paulo Biennial in 1998 and I wanted to do something with that experience. The work also has a lot to do with a moment when there was so much video and performance and artists were appropriating popular culture and its spectacle. Carnival in Brazil is the most massive, participatory cultural event in the world. I wanted to try to represent the gap between that and the solitary artist working alone in the studio. After my experience in Brazil, it became clear just how totally ridiculous the pretensions of artists who propose to aspire to the popular really are. So, in the video, I am dancing the samba in this carnival costume in a kind of black box, which is the ultimate non-site, and nowhere near the site of the white cube. It’s the total erasure of any context. Cut into that is this very live footage from Carnival in Rio, so I was trying to explode the two to bring home the non-site-ness of that space.

‘I don’t know; it’s too new. I’ve always done a lot of lecturing in art schools and museums. That always felt to me like a very important part of what I did. But I’m a performer, so that bleeds into my teaching whether I want it to or not. It’s a challenge. In studio teaching I want to find out what is important to the student and to develop a sense of purpose that’s rooted in their own lives. I find it really challenging to present the art world as it exists today and also from a critical perspective.’