SelfSelector

Conceptual art offers viewers a journey along an associative chain. There is always a bottom. O rather, the work attains its own life by cannibalizing the half-lives of its sources. Looping back through multiple tropes to arrive at its own existence, the conceptual art work offers itself the protagonist of an old-fashioned, well-crafted story composed through the collision of historical referents rather than characters.

Chris Kraus, ‘Where Art Belongs’ (2011)

At the end of the summer of 2011 Ryan Gander presented ‘Locked Room Scenario’ (you can read my review here), a grand scale mise-en-scène that perfectly embodied his interest in loose associations and in the creation of narratives, whose elusive rewards are often found in their very difficulty to be grasped and deciphered. It is this collision of historical referents that Chris Kraus mentions in the opening quote, as well as the characters that Gander constructs, what makes the work of this British artist a challenge to the viewer. But as he himself has quipped: “Spectators need to invest their time and their energy in my work, in order to receive something in exchange. It is my way of filtering and encountering people who aren’t just looking for a dinner party conversation”. In a long conversation conducted in his East London studio, Gander and I discussed his work, his (anti)curatorial practice and why he isn’t an elitist.

'Associative Template # 23 - And all that chatter around your career'. Credit: Dave Morgan

I’d like to start by asking you about the concept of control. I have the feeling that some artists make work in a quest for control: how the work exists and how it is experienced and interpreted. In you practice, including  ’Locked Room Scenario’, your goal seems to be completely the opposite: opening up possibilities and discussions…

Bad artworks only have one reading. Really good artworks start in one place but go to multiple places; they have multiple readings, different possibilities and outcomes. For me, bad works are linear, singular and describe only one idea. But if there is only one idea to describe, you can probably articulate in speech. You don’t really need to “make something” out of it. The point of “making something” is that it can be interpreted in multiple ways. The more ways it can be interpreted and the more complicated the journey to get to that interpretation, the better the work will be.

Regarding ‘Locked Room Scenario’, I found that many people were trying to unravel a mystery by gathering as many clues and signs as possible. As if there was a complete narrative behind all those clues, a “right version” of the work.  Is there a “right way” to experience it?

No, there isn’t a proper or more correct way to experience the work. Different things happen to different people by the nature of the work. It is constructed like that. So you probably miss about 60% of it if you only visit it once. You’d have to go and see it like ten times in order to see everything, and even then some of the things only happen on certain moments, so might miss them all. So every person’s experience is completely different, which is one thing I wanted, so they would end up sitting in the pub asking each other “did that taxi driver offer you a free ride home?”, “No, but I was followed by a deaf person”. That’s important.

I mean, there is a story, but it is my story and it is just an excuse to produce the work. It’s not important that the visitor understands it, what’s important is that the visitor uses his imagination. It’s a bit like a treadmill for the imagination, like being in the gym. Because the imagination is like muscle that needs exercising and we are all pretty rubbish at it. Do you remember when you were a kid, and you would look out of the window from your parents’ car and the things you could imagine? Or when you were playing in the garden making a tree house or sitting on the bed which turned into a boat… And you really believed these things! But you get older and  you simply can do these things anymore. Your imagination becomes a bit stilted, lazy and flabby. ‘Locked Room Scenario’ is just an experience that can last as long as you want, and that gives you lots of catalysts to daydream and use your imagination. But I’ve noticed that a lot of people are scared of letting go and using their imagination.

'Locked Room Scenario', 2011. Credit: Julian Abrams

It seems to me that the critical discourse around your work tends to focus on its ideas and concepts, the intangible part of it, which is logical to an extent given the conceptual nature of your practice. But it sometimes feels as if we were forgetting to discuss the aesthetic part of your pieces…

It is not that it is neglected, it just doesn’t matter what it looks like. That’s not important. The only important thing about aesthetics is that they communicate the story of how the work came to be.

But I do think that you have an interest in aesthetics which shows, for example, in the way you curate. Like the Limoncello show, for instance, which was all white and black and very sleek…

But that wasn’t due to an aesthetic interest, meaning that I just liked the way it looked. There was a conceptual reason for it. It was meant to be a tongue in cheek comment on conceptual art being boring. All my aesthetic choices have reasons behind them. What I mean is that the things I do look the way they do because of the thinking behind them, not because I have made aesthetic decisions. The material thing is just the leftover from an idea. It’s a physical manifestation of an idea, like a receipt that proves the idea existed.

Installation view of 'Young British Artists', Limoncello 2011. Credit: Leon Yearwood

You’ve said that you wouldn’t want people to consider ‘Locked Room Scenario’ a critique of the art world.

Yes, some people suggested that because it centres around an exhibition it could be read as some sort of parody. But for me these are the less interesting conclusions to the work, while the ones around fictional narratives are the most interesting.

In any case, some people criticise your work on the basis that it is very self-referential and opaque. Do you agree with that?

What I’ve heard is that I make art for the art world, rather than about the art world. Which could be true, to a certain extent. You make work for the people that are going to be interested in it…

'Locked Room Scenario', 2011. Credit: Julian Abrams

On that same note, there is a feeling, when encountering your work, that if one has some previous knowledge of the history of art and even of your own practice, he/she will have more chances of navigating the piece sucessfully and understanding the wealth of quotes and references that you place all over. For example, in ‘Locked Room Scenario’ you reference several movements in the history of art, such as Situationism, Fluxus or Conceptualism. And you also quote yourself in the use of Santo Sterne, which is a fictional artist that you’ve already used in previous projects. Isn’t it a sort of a natural selection, whereby only the more knowledgeable spectators will understand the piece?

No. It doesn’t matter, it’s just a different experience. It is still an experience, no matter how much previous knowledge you have. A lot of these things are just excuses to make things. Just because there is a reference to me in it, it doesn’t mean that you need to know it to understand the work. It’s not elitist in the sense that the more you know the more you get from it. I have seen people getting much more from my work than people that know everything about art. It doesn’t have to do with how much you know and how much you research. It has to do with how much you let yourself go and how much you invest of yourself in it.

'The Medium', Lisson Gallery, 2010. Credit: Adlard/Dave Morgan

If it is not elitist then, is your strategy just a playful game of references?

It depends on what exactly you are talking about. In my works there are different levels of encryption, of closure and camouflage. And there are things that people will never get cause they are just things that happened to me. There are works that mean something, that have a lot of meaning. And there are works that are totally meaningless, like a painting of clouds. People make work that doesn’t mean anything more than “I’m artist and I like these materials”. I am not interested in that at all, because it doesn’t do anything for me if it doesn’t have a meaning.

What can you tell me of your participation in the last Venice Biennale, ILLUMInations (2011)?

In the para-pavilion, for example, I showed a vitrine with two dice of forty-two sides, each side with the initials of all the artists that were included the show. But I had more works scattered around the biennale. I showed five works in total. They were big works for me, but for biennale standards they were actually pretty small. I remember going to Venice previous years and encountering these huge bombastic, business-card projects that shouted “this is me!!” in a big room. And I decided that I wasn’t going to do that, so I thought I’d make five works and ask the curators to put them wherever they wanted, spreading them in different location. That was meant to make them function as punctuations. Some people thought it worked well, that it was refreshing to see works of smaller scale in this context. Others, on the other hand, thought, “Ryan Gander, who does he think he is? He is everywhere!!”. You can’t really win, can you?

'In Hearts?', Venice Biennale 2011. Credit: Kiki Triantafyllou

What connections do you find between your curatorial practice and your own artistic practice?

I don’t have a curatorial practice.

Well, I think you do… In 2011 you curated the Limoncello show and the opening exhibition of the Lisson Gallery in Milan. And when you did the Art Now show at Tate Britain in 2008, you chose to curate other artists’ works, rather than present your own…

No, I really don’t have a curatorial practice. What I do is not curating. I just invite people to participate in a show…

How is that different from curating?

It isn’t curating because I am not a curator. It’s like making a mixtape. And every time I “curate” something anyway, the logic behind it is sort of “anti-curating”, of a critique of curating.

How does that logic work?

For example, in the Young British Art show (Limoncello Gallery, 2011) I did a sort of experiment. You could put up an exhibition with the same thirty-eight extraordinary artist and because no one knows who they are, not many people will come. But I called the show “Young British Art”, and two thousand people turned up to the opening. I like testing that sort of thing. It exposed the ludicrousness of the art world, but it was also brilliant for the artists in the show! (laughs).

Installation view of 'Young British Artists', Limoncello 2011. Credit: Leon Yearwood

Maybe two thousand people showed up because you curated it…

No, I don’t think so. It had to do with the name, with being all black & white works and with opening on a Bank Holiday weekend…

What about the Tate Art Now show? Did they ask you to curate a small show instead of presenting some of your works or was it your idea?

They asked me if I wanted to do something, if I had any ideas. And just a few weeks before I had been invited to see their stores, and they pulled out all these amazing storing walls full of artworks, with paintings upside down, without any sort of order, chronological or thematic. They were placed just wherever they’d fit, so you’d have a Pollock next to a Steve Claydon, which I thought was brilliant. There was this really nice happenstance and that’s why that show I did was also a critique of curating. I just picked two walls by rolling a dice and hung its contents in the gallery in exactly the same locations as they had been in the store. The fact is that you can make associations and pull connection and collisions between things by just rolling a dice and it will look great. And that’s not curating, is it? It’s so easy to curate, and it seems that the harder you try to curate the worse the show ends up being.

You have always said, regarding your own artistic practice, that it is much more interesting to put a set of works together that just an isolated one. That the dialogue between works creates something much more powerful…

That’s true. So if we call that “curating”, which I’d rather not, and your question is whether there are connections with my artistic practice, there are connections indeed. The interest in the creation of new meaning by putting a set of works together is definitely present in both. The “Loose Associations” lectures or the “Associate Templates” series are mainly based around that principle.

'It’s a right Heath Robinson affair', installation view at Kadist Art Foundation. Credit: Aurelien Mole

 ’Loose Associations’ will  be ten years old soon. Were those lectures and the subsequent book a declaration of intent, a summary of your artistic methodology?

It wasn’t mean to be like that, but the truth is that it does represents the way I work. Coming back to the idea of curating my own pieces in sets, I think I have a sort of privilege in that I make a lot of work. I make work really fast and I am not that precious about letting it go. Some artist are really afraid of their artworks leaving their studios but I just need to see how my pieces work out there. Here in the studio we make at least a 100 works a year. I would be so bored if I only did a couple of projects per year! I am not interested in doing masterpieces, I am much more interested in seeing how different works go together, so I can “curate” my own shows. That’s where I get the most enjoyment.

The typical response to your work involves a love or hate reaction. Many people seem to get annoyed by it, why do you think that happens?

Yes, it seems to irritate some people. But that is just because they let themselves. It has to do with their own characters rather than with my work. The other day I went to the kitchen department of John Lewis with my brother and he turned all the egg timer’s alarm clocks exactly in three minutes and then walked off. I though that was a brilliant creative act, but imagine how many people were irritated and annoyed. These are the people that also get irritated with my work (laughs).

-

An shorter version of this interview was published on this is tomorrow in November 2011. You can read it here.

Images courtesy of Studio Gander and Artangel.

This interview was originally published in ‘An Art Newspaper: Special DECADE Issue, April 1, 2011′.

Donelle Woolford

Lorena Muñoz-Alonso: I was reading David Joselit’s piece on you, in which he describes you as a quasi-mythical character and as an “avatar”, which allows “for an imaginary/real mobility” that a regular artist lacks. I am wondering: How do you interpret this concept of mobility, and why does it symbolise something positive or desirable?

Donelle Woolford: The dichotomy of “real” and “imaginary” reminds me of the three kinds of beds in Plato’s Republic: the idea of a bed (“bedhood,” if you will); the object that is made by a carpenter (the bed itself); and the representation that is made by an artist (a likeness or imitation of a bed). Though Plato was quite confident about the distinctions he drew between ideas, objects, and representations, in our time we’re no longer committed to such utilitarian hierarchies. So, what are these paradigms of “real” and “imaginary?” Am I, Donelle, a “god-made” idea, and if so, are ideas real or imaginary? If I’m an object—and as such, useful—does that make me more real? Or am I an imitation of something—an artist, perhaps—that relegates me to the realm of the imaginary? If I’m enjoying some kind of mobility it’s between these levels of being (or not). This chimerical quality is key to myth. Being a character-driven myth, a kind of shared theatrical figure, allows me to be fixed and flexible simultaneously. There is the underlying, common notion of Donelle Woolford as a young artist—my character, so to speak—and then there are the particular embodiments of that character by the different actors who interpret it. Myth allows me to be in several places at once, or to be instantly fluent in German, or tall, or somber, or handsome. Every version of me is different, and yet every version is still me.

In your artist statement you define yourself as the “quintessential market artist”. Could you explain what you mean by that and how it relates to your political agenda?

I’m just trying to claim some valuable intellectual territory for the left. I’ve never understood why so-called political artists almost completely cede the power of commerce to conservatives. The belief that refusing to make saleable art objects for a market economy somehow symbolizes a critique of that market is dubious and shortsighted. Eliminating the object of exchange only turns the artist herself, or the public event, or the community involved, into commodities that get bought and sold in an institutional marketplace of museums, biennials, and state-funded public art. So what we somewhat lazily refer to as commodity critique is really only a transformation—an exploitation, really—of systems and networks of people into art objects. That doesn’t sound very liberating to me, in fact it sounds quite corporate and repressive. If one of my desires is to empower myself within a system like the art world, it seems more resistant and effective to collect free material, use my skills to organize it into meaningful images, and try to control the flow (and value) of those images as my sustenance.

Your narrative as a working-class black female is written by Joe Scanlan, a middle- class white man. Do you have any idea why Joe decided you should fit this description, what were his most intrinsic reasons and thoughts to engage in a race and gender conflict that doesn’t really affect him that much?

Actually you have it backwards. Joe is the working-class artist, I’m the privileged one. My father was a real estate lawyer who made a successful transition into entertainment law. My mom is a natural healer and author. And I graduated from Yale. If I were to say anything about Joe’s characterization of me it would be that he wrote me to be everything that he is not. That counts in the basic, white / black, male / female way, but it also counts in terms of class and education and family history. I’m everything he is not in those ways, too, and I think those are the ways that really matter. I also question your assuming that race and gender don’t really affect him. Aren’t we all equally affected by this conflict? I think a working-class white male is just as bound to a stifling categorization as a bourgie black woman is, or a queer Arabian monarch. We’re all trapped in overlapping sandboxes, and in that sense Joe and I play well together.

'Osaka'. Wood scraps, enamel paint, latex paint, wood glue, screws.

So far, you have been played by many different actresses. I am wondering, if you could choose to be embodied by a really famous actress, who would it be?

Salma Hayek is always a good answer to any question regarding celebrity embodiment. I could say Tilda Swinton but I think she’s too tall—even though I love her body language, her screen temperature. Does Patti Smith count? She would be the exact opposite of both Swinton and Hayek, so you kinda get my drift. If Johnny Depp’s turn as a drag queen in Before Night Falls qualifies, he’d be great, too. However, Viola Davis would be my top choice, even though she might be too perfect for the part.

I like very much the idea of you being a ghost, which you also say on your statement. However, a ghost is someone ‘present in absence’, in the form of a memory or a supernatural force. But you are, if you will, ‘absent in presence’. You are there but you are not you, —but the actress that plays you. What kind of ghost are you?

I think ghosts are a manifestation of our desire to see what we want to see. The Donelle with whom you’re interacting and the Donelle with whom someone else might interact are different. I don’t think I’m “absent in presence,” if I understand what you mean by that statement. But perhaps others do feel that way. I often have to contend with invisibility, even though I’m always sure I’m there.

Donelle Woolford

How necessary are you for the art world?

 I think we’re all only just beginning to learn the language of perception as it relates to social space. Our vocabulary is quite narrow, actually. For a recent show at White Flags Projects in Saint Louis I created a piece based on Piaget’s theory of the conservation of volume. This theory deals with development and perception: at a young age, people associate volume (size) with shape, regardless of what they might have previously known or seen to the contrary. At the opening, I got to experience (and experiment with) reactions that I attributed to shifting perceptions of my portrayal. Throughout the opening, I would periodically change out of character whenever I climbed onto one of four risers built for the occasion that were of slightly different heights. Although my portrayal changed back and forth throughout the opening, my physical form remained unchanged. Some people had a hard time dealing with that because, like the Piaget experiment, they were not able to apply knowledge from previous perceptions of Donelle to the situation of Donelle in the present. Others just rolled with it and played along. It felt pretty important. The performance challenged notions of provenance. It challenged my audience to reckon with what they think I am and what they’d like me to be. If that’s an experience we need to have as an audience, then I guess I’m necessary for the art world.

I remember I went to see ‘Double Agent’ at the ICA almost three years ago but I completely missed the point of your work. You were not in the gallery in that particular moment and I didn’t even know you were an ‘avatar’,  so my experience was reduced to the sight of an empty studio. What happens with Donelle’s agency when the viewers fail to grasp her true essence? Is it diminished or, on the contrary, multiplied?

The unknown is always more promising than the known. My agency is quite vast when you don’t know anything about me, but the more you learn the tighter and smaller my realm gets. However, just when you think what you know about me will annihilate your curiosity, the fact that I am portrayed by many actors who are empowered by their portrayals flips the whole premise on a point, like light passing through a pinhole, and my agency expands again. My existence is kind of like a solar eclipse. I’m best seen inverted, projected, indirectly.

Donelle Woolford's 'Return' exhibition, at Wallspace, New York

‘Double Agent’ was a very interesting show in that it addressed situations wherein artists use others to make their work. Have you ever felt exploited in an artistic working relationship, like for example with Joe? And, have you ever felt guilty of exploiting someone yourself?

I’d like to point out that exploitation has two meanings: to make productive use of something generally, like a skill or a natural resource; and to make productive use of something specifically, for one’s own advantage. I can’t name an artist who doesn’t want to be exploited in the first sense, and I can’t name an artist who hasn’t been exploited in the second. It’s funny that people are so fixated on my exploitation, but I think that’s more a function of their politicized perceptions of me (and of Joe) than it is of the work. It’s also disrespectful, somehow, to assume that I would wittingly allow myself to be used. After all, the show was called ‘Double Agent’, not ‘Agent and Sub-Agent’.

Donelle Woolford with Claire Bishop and Mark Sladen, curators of 'Double Agent'.

At the end of the day, what is more important to you: your work in itself or the debate around the questions of gender, race, and authorship that it generates?

The work.

I was thinking about African-American art institutions and museums and wondering if your work has ever been included in any show in that kind of context. What do you think of these institutions and in what way do you feel they open up or narrow the dialogue around an artist’s work?

Joe told me something that happened at the opening of a show he had recently in New York City, where he displayed his archival recreation of David Hammons’ Blizzard Ball Sale. That’s the performance where Hammons sold snowballs on St. Mark’s Place in 1983, alongside all the other Sunday morning flea market participants. Anyway, a curator from MoMA asked him if he was particularly interested in black artists. And Joe thought, you know, I’ve made works derived from Bruce Nauman, Robert Gober, Rachel Whiteread, Mike Kelley, and a whole museum exhibition that was an hommage to Sol LeWitt. Not once did someone ask me if I was particularly interested in white artists in response to any of those works. But with David Hammons it was different. The question wasn’t asked in a malicious way at all, it was just a normal, rote thing to say by someone working at one of the most prominent museums in the world. If we weren’t all racially affected in some way, institutions like The Studio Museum or El Museo del Barrio in New York, to name two, would not need to exist. I think the commonly held notion is these places are exclusionary and narrowing. However, they exist to achieve exactly the opposite goal: to overturn the narrow question that Joe heard at his opening. We have yet to reckon fully with our perception of “the norm,” and until we do, we have to have institutions for the rest of us.

Detail of Donelle Woolford's studio

This interview was published on the 5th of October 2010 in the issue # 1 of THE LAST POST, the free weekly newspaper and incremental catalogue of The Last Newspaper exhibition at the New Museum, New York.

OUR LONDON CORRESPONDENT LORENA MUNOZ-ALONSO CAUGHT UP WITH “THE LAST NEWSPAPER” ARTIST (AND OSCAR WINNER) PIERRE BISMUTH ON A CAFE TERRACE IN BELLEVILLE, PARIS

You are taking part in ‘The Last Newspaper’ at the New Museum in New York with several of your pieces from the ‘Newspaper’ series that you made between 1999 and 2001. Is the series still ongoing?

The ‘Newspaper’ series is definitely an ongoing project. I actually never finish a series; I never close a period, which is kind of complicated because it is somehow like having lots of children and having to be a good father to all of them. I still have a newspaper piece that I need to do, and I very often buy two newspapers because I feel there is always the potential for a piece there.

So tell me a bit about the principle of the series

The ‘Newspaper’ series is all about the duplication of the image. Duplication is an important method because I think it completely warps the moment of understanding. The images do not refer anymore to reality but they refer to each other, as if one image was copying the other. As a viewer you tend to forget they are addressing some real matter, you just wonder, why are there two of these? So it is a short circuit in your head.

Pierre Bismuth, First human embryo is cloned, say scientists (2001). Courtesy: The artist and Bugada & Cargnel, Paris

Does this isolation of the image from reality account for why you always focus on really iconic social or political news, like the Sarah Payne murder or the first clone of a human embryo, for example? Is it to make even more blatant this rupture with understanding?

The reason why I started to do this series was that I was at a moment of my life when I had been doing lots of film and I really wanted to stop using video or film for a while, even though I still wanted to explore the idea of duration, of time-based work. So I thought, okay, if I put two images together, I am addressing the idea of duration as well. Two images are frames, anyway. I like this idea of suspending a moment.

At the same time, I think that this series very openly tackles recurrent concerns of your practice, like issues of perception, how we perceive and process information and how to complicate those paths.

Agreed. At the same time I realized, in a more formal kind of way, that one image on top of other refers to a sequence in a film, and one image next to the other refers to stereoscopy. The sequence is the idea of the same moment with a fraction of second of difference. Stereoscopy is the same moment with a slight difference in angle.

Also what excited me a lot about this work was having to look at reality, having to have contact with it, because when you are an artist you tend to live very much in your own world. So to me this series is also the perfect excuse to keep in touch with what is going on in the world. And when you look at the work, it also gives you information about the context in which the piece was made, and I find that very interesting.

‘Newspaper’ series ready for hanging at the New Museum. Photo: Latitudes

It becomes a sort of time capsule, which is something that interests me a lot, the idea of preserving and retrieving time. But speaking of time, you started this series in the late 1990s, when the internet was not used on the same scale as nowadays. We can definitely say that the way we access and consume information has changed due to the internet, and because the New Museum show is called ‘The Last Newspaper’, I am wondering if you think the newspaper as such is in decline?

Do you think the curators have titled the show like this, implying it is in decline?

I am not sure about that, I am just wondering…

I don’t believe it is the end of an era for newspapers, I don’t think they will be that quickly replaced. It seems that the internet it is killing television at a faster rate, because I think somehow that newspapers will always do a different job at informing people than a website. Did television kill the newspaper? I don’t think so.

You might have a point there. But going back to your practice, why is the idea of repetition so important in your work?

I see repetition as a disappointment device that forces you to deal with what was already there. I’m fighting against this idea that artists have to present something new every time.

And why are you so interested in disappointment?

Because I think it has a real potential for emancipation. When you stop believing that something is going to save you from something, you have to start dealing with what you have and making something out of it, rather than thinking that something is going to come and change everything for you.

That is quite interesting because as an artist this anti-idealist attitude pretty much puts you in the position of questioning everything. The agency of art, to begin with.

True, but is that a bad thing?

Pierre Bismuth, New ground in battle (2001). Courtesy: The artist and Bugada & Cargnel, Paris

No, I don’t think so.

I just don’t like art that tries to take you somewhere else. I have a problem with art that aims at providing entertainment and dreams. People don’t need art to dream. Everyone is dreaming already. Everyone is already creative. The artist doesn’t have the exclusivity of being creative in society.

So what is the privilege of the artist then?

The artist has a special way of addressing questions with a special ability with form. Even if contemporary art has moved on from appraising technique like it was in the Classical period, I still think that an artist is someone who knows how to deal with things formally. An artist is someone who knows how to do things. An artist has to make questions about reality within a particular historical and artistic context. And an artist also has probably a particular logic and irrationality in the way he or she addresses his or her own questions about reality.

So which would be your own set of questions?

How to extract freedom from systems that seem to be closed and regulated? How to find room for manoeuvre in situations that seem already determined?

Your newest work, presented at Bugada & Cargnel gallery, in which you copy the gallery desk and put it on a stage, is that some form of institutional critique?

Yes, in a certain way it is.

Are you interested in Institutional Critique?

Well, I was interested the some of the artists that were doing it back in the days, yes.

How successful do you think it was, and I am thinking of Hans Haacke or Michael Asher for instance, in terms of gradually being co-opted by the institution itself?

Well, I recently read an interview with Pete Townsend where he was being asked about political music and songs, and if they’d had any practical effect, and I really liked his answer. He said, “I am not sure how successful it was in terms of actually changing things, but the music was definitely reflecting the fact that people had those issues”, and I think it is exactly the same with art. It’s already good enough if art can simply show that some people have some problems with some issues. It records the fact that a problem was addressed at a certain time, which is quite something already.

Repetition and questions of perception are concepts very often employed in music theory. Is music a discipline you are interested in?

Music was my first love. I should have been a proper musician. I think I didn’t study music early enough in life. But when I am not doing art most of my time is devoted to listening to music and reading about music. And I think that popular music has not been historicized to the same degree as contemporary art, so there is lots of room there for research and discussion. It is not an overcrowded territory.

Pierre Bismuth, 500 Marines (2001). Courtesy: The artist and Bugada & Cargnel, Paris

Yes, definitely, and there is also lots of links between the two fields, like all that happened in New York in the 1960s, with Fluxus, John Cage, Tony Conrad…

Yes, fantastic! I love that entire scene.

Are you working again with film? [Pierre Bismuth won an Oscar with Charlie Kauffman for the script of ‘Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind’]

Yes, I am working on a film right now, but it is difficult to find the right people to work with. Are you sure your machine is working? [Pointing at the digital recorder]

Well, I hope it is. I love this recorder. It’s new and works great.

I have one as well. I use it to record my wife’s dreams. She has amazing dreams and, moreover, an amazing and funny way of remembering them and telling them. I myself have two strange recurring dreams. One happens when I am sleeping in hotels but I think-dream I am at home. I wake up and, because I don’t recognize the room, I think someone has changed all the furniture while I was asleep.

That sounds like one of your works!

Yes! And the other dream is exactly the other way around: I sleep at home and I wake up being sure I am somewhere else and that someone has recreated my very own room while I was asleep. There is always this moment in which I wake up and I marvel about the whole repetition. Again, it’s all about repetition, the repetition of my own space. And it is also funny how the brain works. If it looks like home, why do you have to think it is somewhere else? But you do. It is extremely complicated.

It’s like when you travel a lot and for a minute you don’t know where you are when you wake up the morning. It is quite disturbing. Let’s wrap up by talking about patterns. Your practice seems to be very focused on patterns, somehow imposing on yourself a set of instructions, restraining the options, if you like.

Yes, I don’t like having to make choices. I prefer when there are limitations. It’s probably because I don’t know what I want. What I surely know is that, on an ethical level, I don’t want to be part of the culture industry. It seems that nowadays art is more and more considered as a form of leisure industry, which is not at all why I started making art. If I can avoid that, even ending by doing an extremely boring exhibition, I will be happy to do that. It is not my job to amuse you.

–

The Last Newspaper is on view from the 6th of October 2010 till the 9th of January 2011 at at the New Museum, New York.

THE LAST POST is edited by Latitudes

Pierre Bismuth’s exhibition at Bugada & Cargnel, Paris, continues until the 6th November 2010.