kunstforum interview
TRANSCRIPT
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Interview with Julian Stallabrass
Q: In your book Art Incorporated, you quote Adorno: absolute freedom in art,
always limited to a particular, comes into contradiction with the perennial
unfreedom of the whole. In a complex society that is informed by free trade, what
does a term like free art stand for? What is its current potential or would you
rather argue for a change in concept?
A: The book is arguing that we need a change in the concept of free art, of the notion
of a free art lies deep inside the art world and its relationship to other elements of
society. It is a deeply unexamined ideal of free art as offering a repository for our free
subjectivity and human agency both as artists and as viewers, as followers of art.
And that ideal is deeply under pressure in various ways, particularly as museums
become more commodified and branded spaces. Also because, as we have seen over
the last five years or so, contemporary art has become the most extraordinary
business. There are many people who move into it for purely instrumental reasons
such as investment. The state also looks to art for various tactical and instrumental
gains including the attempt to civilize the socially excluded When art is plainly
turned to use, the ideal of its freedom becomes more fragile and also perhaps more
visibly absurd. So, I wanted to take a cold look, I suppose, at the ideal and what its
current state of health is and also to argue that to hold on to that ideal in these
circumstances is to play along with one of the ideological cloaks that the system uses
to conceal its operations.
Q: What would be alternatives? If you say that free art is something we have to think
about and work out a different concept if the relation between free art and free trade
is very fragile and free art as a symbol does not work anymore. Do you see an
alternative way?
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A: I think there are certainly alternatives. One kind of alternative is found in what is
broadly called tactical media, particularly with collective online groups of art
workers making interventions together. But there is no pretence there that the
interventions are of a highly mysterious or ineffable kind. They are playful, tactical
interventions in a mobile, changing field of business. Those groups that emulate and
undermine corporate models, such as etoy and RTmark are examples. Another kind
in an extremely different field would be, say, Sebastiao Salgados work for the
landless peoples movement in Brazil, the MST. At that point, Salgado very much
placed himself to the service of the movement and made work in large print editions
that he sold to raise money for it. So he placed his very considerable photographic
skills not to make an art of individual subjectivity but into making things which are
very complex form of propaganda.
Q: When we look at these practices and the people involvedespecially when it
comes to new media, digital and documentary formsit seems that many, if not to
say the majority of proponents arent artists really. Actually, they dont call
themselves artists and dont want to be called that way. So, what is the role of the
artist in this respect? Do we need art at all, what is the necessity of art here? And
somehow contrary to that in Salgados position, if it wasnt for the brand, the
celebrity status of the artist, what would happen in this case? What does this tell us?
A: Thats a very good question. I think a lot of the early net artists in particularplayed with their art status. Many made works that were certainly not for the art
world and not seen in art-like spaces in that time. There was a great deal of debate
about what it would mean, especially as the dotcom boom got going and museums
became more and more interested in these kind of works. What would that
appropriation into the art world of this material might mean? You find that there are
many artists or online workers who are ambiguous about the art world and about the
term artist. So someone like Vuc Cosic would say to you simply something like
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Well, I use the term because girls like it or Ill show in museums because it
pleases my mother, as a way of trying to say that he doesnt assign too much
importance to it. Such practices lay somewhat within and without the art field. And
maybe the part which lies outside the art field is in a way the more important part.
Those who make such work use the art world as a way of getting invitations, get
their work shown, online and in the gallery.
Q: So can we see the art world as an institution? If you dont see yourself as an artist
you could still use the art world as a global system to actually transport what you
want to say, to make people aware of it, they use the structures of the exhibition, the
museum, of magazines, etc.?
A: Yes. In some way yes. Let me just go back a moment. I heard Geert Lovink talk
about tactical media and professions for such artists recently at an art fair. And one
of the things that was interesting, was that he was still very much attached to that
ideal of free play and free expression and free subjectivity. So, we shouldnt
underestimate the degree to whichalthough the ideal is under pressureit is still a
powerful attraction to many people. It offers a model of unalienated labour and still
has much power.
Q: Is the art world as a whole becoming an institution?
A: It isnt singularyou can look at the huge national differences, those between
localities, how different art institutions are even in the same nations and the same
city, and look at the personalities that run these institutions. But I do think that is it
important to take one step back and look at the broader picture, especially as the art
world has become more global in many striking ways in the last twenty years or so,
and to ask what the broad tendencies are.
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of spectacular, slightly extreme conversation pieces that meet that need. And then
there is the standardisation that comes about as nations are branded in the global art
marketplace, so that artists have to perform their nationhood on the global stage.
Q: We talked about alternatives before. Do you see developments that artists and art
movements proceed in a useful way in contrast to the uselessness of art that you
wrote about? Is there a need for a use, a function? Are we witnessing such
developments today, such as a new kind of applied art or other more virtual forms?
A: Certainly, some of the products that came out of recession in the past showed a
move towards applied and decorative arts. That was true for the Great Depression in
the 1930s in this country because a lot of the middle class was less affected, and many
of them had new homes that they wanted to be decorated in a more modern style,
and artists started to cater to that need. The market for high art was also part of the
investment bubble and fell apart entirely in the 1929 crash. So artists had to make
knick-knacks for middle-class homes. So that may happen again. I guess the huge
thing that has changed is what has been called Web 2.0, and the idea that not only
the means to create cultural products but to publish them, to network them and
comment on them and get into dialogue with others has become available to most
people in developed nations. And that seems to offer a huge arena for I wouldnt
say cost-free but a relatively cheap and dematerialised light form of art production in
which nevertheless you can do interesting things and have an audience for it. Also,in some of the art schools, there is some thinking about environmental issues in the
arts which I think has very profound implications for the way the art world operates.
So much of what the art world does has to do with creating large, expensive, rare
objects which are flown around the world to be shown or sold to people, and has to
do with creating events, artists interventions but also the presence of people that
have to travel there, and this is not even to talk about the collectors and the major
curators who fly around in private jets to Basel and Kassel and Beijing. So, what you
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arte talking about there is on one level catering to the superrich and this kind of
culture club of culture consumers and one which is deeply environmentally
damaging.
Q: In a simplified way one could say that we see iconic, very polished, simplified
objects and works of art to be sold and on the other hand there is this highly complex
situation of dematerialised, democratic, communicative approach to art. Is there any
path that connects these kinds of art production, that brings them together? A
combination of dematerializing and materialising productions, so to say?
A: One of the paradoxes of contemporary art production is that an increasing
amount of it is essentially dematerialised. A Gursky photograph, a Matthew Barney
videothese are data. They might be materialised in certain ways but fundamentally
they are data. Both of them are very popular artists and there is something about that
popularity that goes way beyond the restricted products the artists end up selling.
So, Barney for instances makes a version of Cremaster 3 that is 30 minutes long and
has sold it as an unlimited edition on DVD. But you cant get the whole thing
because thats restricted to collectors who are willing to pay for it. But you can find
Barney videos circulating on peer-to-peer systems, and this is obviously illegal, but it
is also the place where they should be. And also, these things are dematerialised but
then they take a materialised form in a particular display mode. So you could say
that the display of a particular Gursky photograph on my monitor at home is a formof materialisation of that image. As many people have more large screens at home,
the demand for and high definition files of paintings, photographs will increase. The
control of these data files is going to be a very interesting issue, as it has been for
music and film.
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Q: Is this comparable to music and pop culture? Such as, if you have a large screen
you can buy a collection of all kinds of paintings and other works of art of the last
3000 years and zap to whatever you like. Might there be hit parades one day?
A: Yes, there are very profound and interesting implications. One may also think of
the model of just-in-time publishing, of printing one-off copies of books for sale and
more generally the whole idea of the long tail as well. Things which used to be
commercially unviable to produce become viable.
Q: To stay with the example of music, where even radical approaches, e.g. in hip-
hop, play with the genre and its reality as a market, where there are hit parades not
only for the very commercial styles but also for other forms of music can we see
such a multiplying of proliferation where many market situations evolve, where
many new forms of communication that are, dependent on their agenda, more
market and money related or less will flourish? Is this an option, a road that art
might be going?
A: Absolutely, and I think it is a very interesting one. In the pop world now there are
plenty of bands that are making a quite considerable sums of money without ever
been played on the radio, without a record contract, without going through all the
usual procedures of getting established. And this might relate to art.
Q: Is art then becoming a mass culture?
A: Well, it could be when it is not tied to mechanisms which assure its exclusivity. I
suppose the interesting thing here might be to break the link between some of the
determinants of how we recognise something as art how it is written about and the
mechanisms of institutional assurance of what were looking at as art, to greatly
broaden the kind of cultural products that we are prepared to treat in an art-like way,
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and within that broader frame, to see the regularities as much as the oddities, the
mass as well as the individual.