Nowiswere Issue 12

Cover

by Amy Yoes 2013

Nowiswere was founded by Veronika Hauer and Fatos Ustek in London in January 2008.

Copyrights of the magazine are the property of Veronika Hauer. All rights of the contributions are the property of their contributors.

Impressum: Editor: Veronika Hauer Editorial Board: Adeena Mey, Margit Neuhold, Martina Steckholzer.

Layout: Veronika Hauer Webdesign: Erwin Schober Contributors to this issue: Shezad Dawood, Kathi Hofer, Barbara Kapusta, Antje Majewski, Margit Neuhold, Jacek Niegoda, Andr茅a Picard, paula roush, Ghalya Saadawi, Sylvia Sleigh, Jaro Straub, Magda Tothova, Tanja Verlak, Dorota Walentynowicz, Julita W贸jcik, Amy Yoes.

Thanks to Mary Jane Miltner for her editorial comments and proofreading.

Contact us: info@nowiswere.com www.nowiswere.com

IN CONVERSATION

Seventy-eight revolutions per second: The persistence of vision Ghalya Saadawi and Shezad Dawood ....................................................................................... 4

Jaro Straub Fault Lines # 6, 2013 .....................................................................................31

Antje Majewski talks to Sylvia Sleigh A visit to the ”Alte Nationalgalerie” .....................................................................................11

Pleasure - Seeking An Interview with Andréa Picard by Barbara Kapusta .....................................................................................34

Kathi Hofer Untitled (Christmas Ball #1), 2012 Untitled (Christmas Ball #2), 2012 .............................................................................21/22

Artist Unknown Dorota Walentynowicz meets Julita Wójcik and Jacek Niegoda .....................................................................................46

Triple A: Artist, Author, Amateur Kathi Hofer and Margit Neuhold in conversation .....................................................................................23

| Excavation Thrill | In conversation paula roush and Tanja Verlak .....................................................................................56

Magda Tothova now is when 1 - 3, 2013 .....................................................................28/45/55

Contributors .....................................................................................63

Brion Gysin and William Burroughs used to write letters to each other. They were friends and accomplices across time and place. The cut-up, permutations, the dream machine and other very influential and radical practices were born out of their collaboration. They mutually infected each other. Here, we let them parasite us, infiltrate our speech and our ideas. We channel them and their histories in order to try to performatively/structurally better understand/relay the dream machine project and l’air du temps. A version of this exchange was first published in Shezad Dawood’s artist monograph Shezad Dawood: Piercing Brightness (London: Koenig Books/Modern Art Oxford, 2012).

4

Seventy-eight revolutions per second: The persistence of vision Ghalya Saadawi and Shezad Dawood

‘To and for all our collaborators at all times third minds everywhere.’1 W.S.B. & B.G.

Tangiers or Paris or New York, 1960 and later

Dear S., How are you? You left a pair of glasses and your navy and maroon scarf when you were here last. I’ll send them with J. I’ve been thinking about our conversation. That trip down to La Ciotat still has me dizzy. Along the warm beach one morning during my sitting and walking meditation, I had another mystical experience after the one last December in France. It was barely dawn. I took a blanket, a towel and a torch and walked down to the seashore along a dark starlit dirt path lined with soft green banana leaves.

At five in the morning the world sleeps; fish, cats, humans, birds. Only the sea roars and I walk. At the end of the night I find a spot on the moist fresh sand, plant myself in a silent, immobile, committed position with silent, still, immobile eye, inside ear on rhythmic breath, on froth of waves. I incarnate an antenna, I stop confusing myself with the world. Until the unconscious perception of the first ray of light. Before dawn the air is icy, the sand wet and cold, my bare feet tucked under my knees. I face the sea to the West, my back to the East. At dawn the rising sun, slow lifting of the dark sheet of night, oranges, yellows and reds are imagined in the back of the head and the front of the eyelids. Subtle but visible currents, waves, vibrations of warm air are felt on the back of the head, the hips, warming the spine with its wavelength, incandescent, sweet ochre glow. Dawn’s arrival is like the emergent movement of great music, violins guitars drums pipes, gradual progressive slow deep rising. Dawn came to me with its warm glow, but also with the first autumn rain. Big cold droplets descended on my 1 William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin, The Third Mind, The Viking Press, New York, 1978.

5

face, my bare feet, waking me, returning me, making me shudder in a sort of ecstatic moment. I had my eyes closed. I had my eyes closed, S. Looking at the horizon without opening my eyes I could see the sun warmly peeking behind me. Like a rapture.

The possibility of keeping the eyes closed. Have you thought about it? The enlightenment is over, S. We have the weapons to beat it. To beat the inundation of images – the incessant flood of images, the great programme of vision. I am making a dream machine that will hold all of human history and none of it. The history of St. Paul, Jan Pukinje, William Grey Walters, the angel of history, magic lanterns, zoetropes, all paintings ever painted and never painted, Hindu Swamis, the Jajouka musicians and the fire of worship. I will make that machine of dreams that will operate on the mind by producing waves – eyes closed, as if asleep – like that inexplicable virus you talked about when your archive was proliferating, the mind will generate images, animal processions, hoards of travellers, nomads, figures, visions, patterns, colours, things that could never have been foreseen. It will flicker. The grid and the anti-grid. It is the quoting, tranceinducing machine, visionary device par excellence. This is our way out of visuality and symbolism. Back to the Real. Our way out of producing objects, sculptures, paintings.

What for? This is the anti-art object, the anti-television. The readymade that always was the mind. Let us reproduce it infinitely, market it. Hell, all the better. Let people have the plans for it and remake it. Everyone should have this machine. Like cutting (up) was a way, a technology, a methodology to reproduce the spontaneity of chance, collage into writing, the dream machine is an intersection, a way for us to make things other.

It’s an old question, S. Ian is in. He will do it. Genesis calls me Master. I laugh out loud. She’s so intent on changing the world, and I wonder, change it into what! For her, society is now intent on suppressing imagination. That trip with Brian and Ornette is so misunderstood, they have no idea. ‘Magic, practiced more assiduously than hygiene in Morocco, through ecstatic dancing to the music of the secret brotherhoods, is, there, a form of psychic hygiene. You know your music when you hear it, one day. You fall into line and dance until you pay the piper.’

(I just re-watched J. L. Godard’s Sympathy for the Devil. Black Power, SoVietCong... Brian looked so young). When you write, make films, appropriate, capture patterns, hijack, do you see what world appears with your eyes closed? Have you thought about repetition, negation, cuts and omissions? The dream machine holds an immanent experience.

It’s the reversal of all that’s been reigning. Not a transcendence using tools out there; a reversal. This machine will activate an inside, alter waking consciousness without drugs (except kif!) – but charged by them like horses dragging a chariot. An Inner Space to be conquered in complement with Outer Space. This kinetic object – because it’s more than sculptural, it’s really a machine of production – will produce and be this imma6

nence. Let’s rub out and cut off all relations to traditional producing, painting, writing, as we’ve known them thus far. Everything outside, all art and signs outside, has already been seen. Perception with this thing is possible with eyes closed, like in Tarab, sound poetry, permutation, repetition and abstraction like futuristic liquid, like in the Dream Machine. An immense gesture to close the eyes, yet maintain vision (unlike the BBC audience ratings this time!). The persistence of vision, paradoxically. You see, it’s the thing AND how to make it, the how-to and the work itself. I’ll send the plans with J. Tell me what you think, S. Next time you return let’s sit around the flickering light and the cut shades and watch as something else happens.

In friendship and disprairie, I leave you, G. PS. I still have to laugh when I think about that failed operation to get rid of the old woman near St. Michel and the Vietnamese boy who found the prize... Oh, if we had gone to the bottom of the rainbow! Maybe we wouldn’t have done all that we did to language...

Salé, the pirate Republic; or Queen Elizabeth, the fair, 1974 Hi G., The sounds echo like the bare bones of my knuckles click-clacking on my typewriter. I was up dreaming of your machine again last night; for a moment I was in Tangiers rather than London – do you see what I mean about the cut-up extending to time and space? The line that blurs the boundaries between bodies is more fluid than you might like to think. Something to do with re-volutions and repetition kept bringing me awake, rather like a cinematic cardiac shock. Do you think we die if we realise the true meaning behind the structure of things? This leads on to my curiosity about magic and how Islam and animism began to take shape in Africa. In Search of The Invisible Man, have you come across it? It’s a great book by an old friend, Toby Green. There’s a nice overlapping between fiction, travelogue and philosophy, really the only way we should be writing, in this kind of syncretic mode, but people will be people. So how to break with all that is? Perhaps that is why I’m less bothered about whether I’m working in film, installation or ‘painting’; I’m more concerned with root causes, those synaptic pathways that link us to the Third Mind. If it’s all just electricity, it matters even less which is the medium or the message.

7

I guess I’m thinking of endings & beginnings, of Alpha and Omega. If we see The Process as a mode of penetrating the skin of ‘things’, or objects, to reveal the structure or meta-structure behind appearances, then we are perhaps thinking along the same lines. Then it matters little whether we begin with Aristotle or take our cue from Crowley, appropriate ol’ Hasan Sabah as the progenitor of causes (and those magical effects of colour and pattern that you love so much). Whether machine, magic or mind, we start to see the swirling patterns that outline our fate, like some gargantuan ouija board on which the Archons play chess, while spiking it to dreaming humans they pull out of a trance, to serve Yage at their gay dinner parties. And you mustn’t forget that like Saturn and all those dirty bastards, they love a fragmented narrative – the Gods are neither kind nor partial, but Jimmy Dean was too well-hung to understand that, a 2-bit six-gun put paid to him, as it did to my erstwhile wife. S what comes of hiding your liking for hustlers and studs beneath an intravenous feed of junk?

Reminds me of the time in London in 1989, with my friend Chris Kavanagh from Sigue, Sigue Sputnik; we dropped Mescaline on the 19th floor. Years of Castaneda hadn’t prepared me for the flashing lights, and colours/frames/patterns, and there was the great lord Mezcalito, stern and forbidding, like the secret of death itself.

Mixed with 2000 AD and the dark judges of mankind. Something about Synaesthesia... did you know I used to co-run a cooperative called Synaesthesia in London back in the 1990s? We used to do cross art form kinetic nights, one of which got closed down by the police in Brixton on health and safety grounds. I guess in a way all these early experiments continue to feed into The Process. Unlike earlier phases when I’ve denied or wished away earlier iterations, there seems to be a widening of the boundaries of self/other to encompass all that ever was/is, and so we’re back to Alphas & Omegas... ‘I Am Dying, Meester?’

Do you remember when I headed out to the rainforest in search of ayahuasca in 1954? The telepathic properties I was looking for were already there, embodied in the methods I have since been exploring. If I take a bit of Jack’s writing, or A’s, and mix it with fragments of my own poor scribbles, something starts to happen beyond either. Guess that’s what you were trying to say with the paintings. How are they coming along by the way? Any closer? That language, formal trade-off: writing without words, or eyes open sounds like a way, but you always had one foot here, and one foot there... Some of us are bound to the repetitiveness of words, and perhaps in their contrapuntal formations they’re telling us something. I feel I’m getting closer to seeing not just language as virus, but all human activity as viral in some form... d’you know what I mean? Film might be the best option of realising and manifesting our ambitions, as it combines all the others, or at least can do.

8

So how’s the Machine panning out? I’m really interested in your proposition to take it back to Tangiers, which, after all, is its ancestral home. The whole issue of publishing the plans without copyright, is this because we discussed they were part of a larger unconscious? The orgone generator that the Venusians gave to Reich... prompting a series of psychedelic happenings and sex orgies that were diluted versions of ancient alien technologies masquerading as the Counter-culture, like some of my old man’s photographs of The Jefferson Airplane. That time when everything was spiked at the Back Bay Theatre, even the dog food: the walls started crawling with spiders, and cracking open like in that Polanski flick. Anything that can be done chemically can be done by other means.

I always felt you were onto more of a literary analogue than a visual one; you can’t re-invent the wheel you know, dearest G. (you left a scarf too, must be unconscious pot-latch or pot-bellied pigs)... say hi to M., And till next we meet, Fondly S.

9

10

Antje Majewski talks to Sylvia Sleigh A visit TO the �Alte Nationalgalerie�

July 2003 *

I have an appointment to pick up Sylvia Sleigh from the Intercontinental in my car and find the way blocked by the annual bicycle marathon that cuts through half the city. After impossible sidetracks I finally arrive in her suite, nearly an hour late, shaken. But part of it is sheer excitement over spending an afternoon in one of my favourite museums with one of my favourite painters.

Sylvia Sleigh was born in 1916 and is therefore 87 years old, but rests only once during our four-hour stay in the Alte Nationalgalerie. Her eyes sparkle with delight whenever she discovers something that pleases her.

Sylvia Sleigh, 1916-2010

11

Josef Danhauser, Liszt am Flügel, 1840

Sylvia Sleigh: He must have been fun—Liszt!

Cheerful, yes!

Antje Majewski: I think he was very theatrical …

SS: Oh yes, that’s what was fun! (Laughs.) I read a lot of stories about him and about George Sand, you know? They had a good time. That might be George Sand.

AM: Which one? This one? That’s true, it could be a lady.

SS:Well you know, she used to wear men’s clothes. As men all had long hair, you could do that.

AM: And she also smoked cigars, didn’t she?

SS: Yes, she did. Good writer, I read one of her books and I thought very highly of it.

AM:Yes, me too.

SS: Socially also very advanced.

AM: I think she was quite a glamorous or glamour loving woman and at the same time chose to write about—

Caspar David Friedrich, Mondnacht am Strand mit Fischern, ca. 1817

12

SS: —she had a great deal of charisma, you know. I don’t think she was a beauty, though. I think she was fascinating.

SS: My grandfather was a soldier. And I could already write, draw, paint, saw and everything with my left hand—he made me change. It was a very bad idea.

Because it slowed me down in every way. It made it impossible for me to do sports. Because by the time I thought which hand to use I fell over.

AM: My husband is also left handed, but he can write with both hands. Which hand do you use now, for painting?

SS: My left. I use my right for minor work. I can use my right, I think. I can write rather slowly.

They had a nice show of Friedrich at the Met. He’s a fascinating painter. I only think he had one flaw. He did often paint the same scene again. I suppose his most popular.

AM: I think what he did was to do drawings and then used the drawings in his studio, so maybe he used the same drawing several times.

SS: He probably did. Well, I suppose if people like to repeat …

AM: What do you think about this one?

SS: I think it’s rather nice. I think: poor Psyche, she won’t get very far on those wings.

AM: They are a bit short.

SS: It’s sort of similar in a way to beauty and the beast. Because the sister of Beauty told her that she shouldn’t be with a monster. And a friend or relation of Psyche said probably Amor was a monster.

AM: But he looks very pretty.

SS: Yes, but she didn’t know. He only came to her at night.

AM: Oh, did he?

SS: Oh yeah. She did receive him for a long time, but he only came at night and she never saw him. And so then she went to look at him with an oil lamp and dropped some oil, so he woke up and flew away.

And then Venus gave her all sorts of horrible tasks to perform before she could see him again.

AM: And she fell in love immediately when she saw him?

SS: Yes, and they were happy in the end. They lived happily ever after she had done all these nasty tasks.

AM: Have you ever felt tempted to paint Amor and Psyche?

Reinhold Begas, Amor und Psyche, 1854-57

SS: No. AM: No? Why not?

SS: Oh, well, you see, the problem is getting two people who would take that part.

AM: But you did get two people for Venus and Mars1, for example.

SS: Yes, that’s happened. It can happen. Well, actually Paul Rosano had a very attractive girlfriend, she wasn’t exactly beautiful but tremendously glamorous, there was something very very special about her, and I asked if they could sit for me, and she was rather impatient. And she said she would, but for a great deal of money, because she was used to doing commercial photography. And that’s very different, in commercial photography you have your photo taken quite quickly and it’s probably used a lot, so you get paid because it’s used a lot—but I can’t do that, so I said: ‘I’ can’t’. Well, and Paul said, he wanted more money, too. And I said: ‘I give you more money’, but it became less fun.

AM: And do you think for Amor and Psyche, would you have needed two people who were actually in love with each other?

SS: Well, if I could I would of course, that would be ideal. In this case it might have worked. Because they were. But it was a sad story. They lived together since they were in College. He had this band, you know, he was a singer, he sang beautifully, 1 Sylvia Sleigh, Venus and Mars: Maureen Connor and Paul Rosano (1974) Maureen Connor was an artist friend; Paul Rosano was Sleighs model for many paintings. Like the Pre-Raffaelites she is so affected to, she used mainly two different models for her portraits of naked or semi-naked male youths: Paul Rosano and Philip Golub, son of the painter Leon Golub.

and they moved to New York and had an apartment and so on, and he tried to get work with music, which is almost impossible. You know what New York is; there is so much competition. And he had a best friend also as well as a girlfriend, who was in the band. And he was helping his best friend to put a loft together. In the meantime his best friend was having an affair with his lover.

Oh my god, this was so terrible. I have never seen anyone so … so … wounded. It was awful. It was painful even so see him. He didn’t speak to people a long time after that—well, not that long. And even then … I was so sorry.And then of course I think she wasn’t happy either …

AM: But he never went back.

SS: No, of course, if you’re hurt that much, you can’t.

AM: Hm. SS: Love is strange and very tender for you.And I mean things like that can kill it right then. A relationship is …

AM: One always has to take great care with it, I think.

SS: Oh, I think so. Yes. Certainly, one should. If you have a good relationship, it’s an extreme folly to do anything that spoils it. Because it’s so rare. I don’t know, there aren’t many people you can feel close to in your life.And if you find one, you shouldn’t take any risk. It’s actually a wonderful thing when it happens.

It’s the best thing in the world. The nearest thing to paradise. (Both laugh).

Well … what have we now?

AM: I think there’s some Courbet round the corner.

SS: Let’s see.

John Constable, Higham Village on the River Stour, ca. 1804

13

AM:When we were looking at the Constable I thought, the countryside in England looks so familiar even to me, it looks as if it was my childhood country side, I don’t know why— SS: Well, it’s Europe!

AM: Yes, but it is different from Germany. Somehow the fields are smaller …

SS: The German fields are much bigger, aren’t they?

It’s true.

AM: —and maybe that gives me the feeling it’s made for children. It’s a different size.

SS: Oh yeah? How do you mean, made for children?

AM: The size of everything, the trees are not so tall, and the fields are not so big …

SS: That’s true; it’s a sort of a gentle landscape.

AM: And clouds are always like clouds in a children’s book.

SS: Oh yeah? Well, you see, it’s so damp that everything does very well; flowers, roses and things do very well in a mild, damp climate. It’s more difficult to grow things in New York. I mean, it has a climate more like Seattle, very damp, mild.

In a way I’ve always felt rather rejected in England. I’d rather be somewhere where they think better of me.2 Especially as the people I thought were friends are no longer … anyway I’ve had some quite nice reviews, you know? But, I mean, nothing happened, I didn’t get a gallery and nobody bought anything after my show, so after that, I didn’t feel it was a great success.

(Laughs.)

AM: The landscape in your Invitation to a Voyage3 is American: lots of space that stretches out. But the Woodside looks very intimate, very much at ease. In the beginning, were there as many people? I mean, was it a big party that went down the Hudson?

SS: Oh, yes, let me just think how many couples there were. I have forgotten, I have a photograph of them all.

I now think there were about five couples, but not all of them were there the first time.

Laurence and I staid the night with Betty Parsons, not with her, she wasn’t there, but in her apartment,went out to dinner with Barnett Newman and his wife 2 Sleigh was born in England and moved with her second husband, the critic Laurence Alloway, to New York in 1961, returning to London to have her second solo show, Statues in the Crystal Palace Garden in 1962.

3 Sylvia Sleigh, Invitation to a Voyage: The Hudson River at Fishkill (1979-99), is her most ambitious painting.

It is an installation, consisting of two parts: Waterside and Woodside.

14

Annalee, and it was my first air-conditioned restaurant, we were frozen to death. Outside I think it was 108, and inside it was about 54 (it probably wasn’t, it felt like that). Anyway, then afterwards we went to Birdland and heard Ornette Coleman, it was very exiting. We had had his record before, but we never heard him in person. Barnett knew him, so we were introduced! It was very exiting. Years later, I met him again.

Anyway, so then the next day we took the train up the Hudson, quite a long way, and Barnett Newman said, there might be seats on the left side, then we get a room with a view. And when we got to Garrison, and he saw this castle, which reminded me of a Claude—you know, he did a painting called The Enchanted Castle? It was actually in England for a long time.

AM: By whom? By which painter?

SS: Claude Le Lorraine. And this looked to me like that. I said:‘I absolutely have to paint this!’ And I took twenty years before I could. And I could because I was teaching at the New School and one of my students was Warren Perkins and he was a very engaged person, very nice. I told him about this.

‘Oh’, he said, ‘we can manage that. I have this van, I’ll take you! And any time—you can help me with my painting.’ I said: ‘That would be absolutely fine!’

So we used to go down there and he was rather a good cook. We used to have extraordinary lunches, because we always rivalled with one another to see who could make the most delicious lunch. So we had a jolly good time.

The only thing was that we had to go down there rather early because otherwise the castle became a silhouette. So we had to paint hard first and then have our lunch. Finally what happened was, I fell so much in love with it and I wanted to do this big painting, you see. I didn’t really think how big I was going to do it. It got bigger! (Laughs.)

Anyhow, what happened was, we went down in his van, and I made a very nice lunch, chicken breasts in sauce and champagne, cheap champagne (Laughs), bread and cheese and grapes, you know, all that, and it was very very nice and we had great fun. I wouldn’t have anybody eat before I had photographed them because of the light. (Laughs.) And we took lots of pictures. Then, luckily, John Perrault came. Well, he took loads of more pictures when we were having a

Eduard Daege, Die Erfindung der Malerei, 1832

picnic. I didn’t. So I used his photos for the Woodside.

Because I hadn’t thought I’d do that. But he gave them to me, and I thought: ‘I’d better do the other side’, and I did. So that was the story of that.

I used to photograph but I always sort of got people to come to the house and pose, so I could paint a portrait of them. With photos you don’t have enough information mostly to do a good portrait of someone, the colours are always difficult. But I couldn’t possibly work on that great painting outdoors, no way! For a great deal of what I had to do, I had to stand on steps. And than there were all these leaves and all these stones. Actually, some friends of mine, for my first showing of it, were very sweet; they came in and helped me. A young playwright who needed a job did some stones, too. He was the best person, really, because he did what I told him. As he wasn’t a painter, you see. Few painters like to do what you tell them, they do what they do. (Laughs.) So I had to redo some of this. But at least it covered the ground.

AM: Were you happy with the result?

SS:Yes, it was fine!

AM: Because I can still not imagine … of course it would save some time if I could use an assistant, but I can’t really see someone else working in my painting, I’m sure I would have to paint over it.

SS: I would have liked to have done it all myself, but even—it’s not bad, I looked at it now and I can’t remember which one I did so it must be all right.

(Both laugh.)

AM: I think this man looks like Paul Rosano, especially his mouth. But the way he looks in the interview, in the film about you4, not in your paintings.

SS: When we were doing the film, he brought his wife and sons and they were so beautiful, the three of them, the wife and the two sons, I wished so much I could paint them. But of course they lived too far.

AM: It doesn’t happen to me a lot of times that I see someone, and think: I really want to paint this person.

SS: I often—well, not often—every now and then I think I would like to paint someone; then when I get to know them a little bit, I don’t think I do. (Laughs.)

I do think he looked great, but … because, actually if a person isn’t sympathetic to what you’re doing, I 4 „Look Here!“ A portrait of Sylvia Sleigh. A Documentary Work-in-Progress is a documentary film by Paula Ewin and Diana Sutherlin (Oweeno Productions), started in 1998 and still to be finished.

15

think it’s much harder to paint them. Of course a lot of especially male painters, they don’t care. They look upon a person as an object and they can do what they like, but I don’t. I like to have a rapport with the person.

And so that I feel I understand them somewhat and they are sympathetic to what I’m doing. Otherwise it’s not very pleasant.

AM: And what about the female artists that you portrayed? You did a lot of portraits of your female artist friends, didn’t you?

SS: That’s always easy.

AM: That’s easy?

SS: Yeah. There’s no problem there. Because I know them well usually. Not always. After all, I am a feminist, so I get on fairly well. Of course some of them aren’t and then I don’t. I have an older friend who I’m very fond of, but we disagree about many things. She doesn’t believe that women have a bad position. She thinks it’s lovely! I didn’t understand that at all. But I think she refuses to see what really happens. She loved her husband very much and, you know, I think he was quite unaware of anything like that and so she goes on with his idea.

AM: And was she an artist as well?

SS:Well, she gave it up for him, of course. I don’t know if she would have been a very great artist or anything like that, but she used to paint. I nearly did give it up for my first husband, too.

AM:You did, really?

SS: Almost, not quite. He did his best.

AM: And did he want you to?

SS: Well, he wouldn’t have said so. But I think he did all he could to prevent me. He made jobs for me, you know, that sort of thing. I made all my own clothes and painted the house and all that sort of thing. Upholster the furniture. So, you know, I had very little time to work. And you see the point was that I think he was so envious because until lately I never had any trouble painting, I just never had blocks or things like that which he did. So there was I, painting away, happy as a sandboy, and he wasn’t. (Laughs.)

AM: And he was a painter as well?

SS: Yes. But I think he was a drawer, a draftsman, because I don’t think he had a feeling for paint. I mean his pictures all looked as if they were made out of linoleum. I think. But his drawings were lovely, and he was much more skilful than I am. I never was a very good draftsperson.

16

AM: I wouldn’t say so.

SS: My whole trouble is, you see, when I was in art school, they made up their mind that I was no good at anything and they told me they couldn’t think why I was taking it up if I had no talent. That went down very badly with me and I lost a lot of self-esteem. I really hated drawing because that was what I mostly did with them, you see. I taught myself drawing in the Dramatic Society, that was fun. When I left school I gave it up. Well, I said to myself, I have no talent at all; it’s stupid to go on with it. But then I was so miserable, you see, I needed to go on with that, no matter if I had talent or not.

AM: What a good decision.

SS:Yes, it was. But you know, you only stand so much negation.

AM: I think it could even be better to have not so much talent in the beginning, to have to work harder.

SS: That’s true, that’s what my husband said, he said ‘You’re lucky, you didn’t really have to unlearn what they taught you at school’. Because most artists who are teachers try to make you work like them. I taught quite a bit and I was very careful to keep my mind open, because it’s a shame to spoil their creation. So that was another thing that made the marriage not very good. Especially not very good for me. We had known each other for a long time. I knew him when he was seventeen and I was nineteen, you see. I told him at the time: ‘You’re too young for me’, and he said: ‘No, no, I’m very wise.’

AM: So you were married for more then ten years, then, in your first marriage.

SS: Twelve years. I mean, the last six years really, we were married, but we weren’t involved with one another. He went to work to Cambridge and I was in the country.

AM: And you already knew Laurence.

SS: Yes, yes. We were very much in love. (Laughs.) I think that annoyed him very much. At first he didn’t sort of care, because he didn’t really want me very much, but then of course, you know how people are, they want what they can’t have. And as I said to you, how can you love someone if they really wound you badly.You can’t really go back to them at all.You can, but not quite in the same way. —Which is sad.

Well, not in that case it was sad. I think, the sooner I got rid of him the better. But I mean, Laurence was

tremendously supportive, although he never wrote much about me, about my work.5 But he always would sit for me and all that sort of thing. Even if he was sometimes jealous a bit I think! He said: ‘You’re so lucky, you can hang your work up on a wall’ and I said: ‘Yes, but very few people see it, whereas if you write for a magazine hundreds of peoples see it.‘ AM: That’s true. But then a lot of people might read it just like that and forget about it.

SS: But on the other hand, he was very pleased—we were in Pittsburgh, soon after we came to America, and he was on a Jury, to choose a show there, and a nice man came up to me and said: ‘Do tell your husband that I so much look forward to all his articles and you know, I’ve read them all’ and so on, and Laurence was certainly pleased, because he said: ‘When you send the work out like that, it sort of goes into the blue and you don’t know what happens, or what people think.’ It encouraged him. But I always think if two people are artists of any kind there is a sort of rivalry, a little bit.

AM: Hmm. SS: No? One gets on more than the other.

AM: I sometimes think maybe Ingo is the better artist and then I get jealous, a little bit.

SS: Well, there you are. But I mean, that’s natural. It doesn’t mean anything bad.

AM: I just think he can understand everything about my paintings, I maybe cannot understand his books fully.

There remain parts of what he is doing that I don’t understand, I don’t understand how it is possible for him to arrive there.

SS: Don’t you ask him?

AM: He doesn’t answer!

SS: Oh! (Both laugh.) Oh dear! Perhaps he doesn’t know?

AM: He doesn’t like to talk about his work while he is working so I never get to see his books while he is still writing them.

SS: Oh, I see. People are like that. But Laurence, that was nice, it was the way he asked me about things … I enjoyed his ideas very much. That was fun. But we had a pretty good relationship as far as our work went; only occasionally there was a bit of jealousy.

5 Laurence Alloway was a very important critic of Pop Art, a term he coined. He had been Deputy Director of the ICA in London and became Curator of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York 1962–66.

And of course I don’t think I thought jealous of him because he was a writer and I liked his work very much. He was wonderful to exchange ideas with.

Sometimes I even could, you know, make a suggestion that was useful occasionally. But of course, I wasn’t so well read as he was and if you have a household to look after you don’t have that much time for reading, so in a way, that was not good, then. I should have been able to read more and be more up to date with him. Well, nothing is perfect, so … But on the whole I think it was very nice.

SS: What’s going on?

Adolph Menzel, Ansprache Friedrichs des Großen an seine Generäle vor der Schlacht bei Leuthen 1757, 1859-61

AM:This is a painting by Menzel, the one I talked about before, the small painter, and it’s a scene from the wars of Friedrich the Great of Prussia, and evidently he hasn’t finished it— SS: Yeah, I see! These ghosts … He was an interesting person; not very nice!

AM: This is his painting of workers in a factory.

SS:Yes, I see. What kind of factory is it? Is it steel?

AM: I think it is a steel factory. Oh, it’s an ‘iron-rolling mill’. Have a look.

SS: Aha. I don’t think I’ve ever done any workers.

AM: I have. I’ve done a very classic worker in a blue overall.

SS: Are you cold?

AM: Yes, I think it’s cold in here. I should have taken a jacket.

SS: How curious! I’m not! But than I’ve got a woolly on.

GONG 17

she moved a lot …

SS: —yeah, I think so. She did a very nice portrait of Goethe, they were close friends at one point, but he didn’t like it. I think it was just being antifeminist.

AM: No, he was very proud of his looks.

SS: But she made him a very nice portrait. I think he didn’t think it was masculine looking enough.

Adolph Menzel, Das Eisenwalzwerk (Moderne Zyklopen), 1872–75

SS: Oh! I suppose we should leave.

AM: Time passed by very quickly! God, we’ve been in here for a long time!

Loudspeaker: Sehr geehrte Besucher! Das Museum schließt in wenigen Minuten! The museum will close in a few minutes!

SS: Oh, we shall miss the postcards!

AM: There’s one last painting that I would like to show to you. She’s a German painter from the last century, not very well known and I always liked it very much.—Finally one woman in the whole museum.

SS: Is that all?

AM: I think so.

SS: Didn’t we see one other one?

AM: Maybe upstairs, somewhere.

SS: Oh, no perhaps it was the portrait of one.Well, but that’s nothing new, is it.

AM: No, it isn’t.

SS: I think it is much better, I must say, the Met has about six eighteen century ones. I mean, not six different women.

AM: But the Met is such a big museum.

SS: I think there are only actually three women, and like six paintings. I think they’re all French, too. Vigée Lebrun.

AM: Oh yes.

SS: And then there is some Angelika Kauffmann. Well, she’s German.We were asked to give at a women’s school a talk on neglected artists, and I gave a talk on Angelika Kauffmann. And someone said: But she wasn’t neglected, what are you talking about?—and I said: No, she wasn’t, but she’s now. Well, you know, people think she’s sweet and weak – not true!

AM: No,Angelika Kauffmann was a very strong person, 18

Sabine Lepsius, Selbstbildnis, 1885

* The conversation between Antje Majewski and Sylvia Sleigh was first published in: Neue Review, Nr.2, July 2003, p. 30-35

19

Kathi Hofer Untitled (Christmas Ball #1) Untitled (Christmas Ball #2) 2012 glass painting / mixed media

20

Triple A: Artist, Author, Amateur Notes on Artistic Production and its Value Kathi Hofer and Margit Neuhold in conversation

Margit Neuhold: In your latest exhibition “Craftivism” at the MAK1 in Vienna your work, in various ways, unfolded structures that seem to determine production conditions of contemporary art practise. To me, your project succeeded in making these working conditions productive rather than lamenting about precarious late capitalist conditions. Together with Maurizio Lazzarato one could say that the artist today acts as a prototype of the immaterial worker: executing “activities, that are not normally recognised as ‘work’”. An observation that holds particularly true for your project—but let’s start with the framework and the show’s mode of operation.

Kathi Hofer: I was invited to “New Look“, an exhibition series in which four artists have been commissioned to work with the MAK Study Collection (which will close in autumn 2013 and reopen in 2014).

Together with the collection’s custodians I discussed what type of objects would be of interest to me. I then had a closer look at particular items from different parts of the vast collections: glass, ceramics, metal, furniture and woodwork, textiles and carpets as well as the Asia collection. Hence the installation on display presented a segment of objects that were already pre-selected by the MAK custodians according to my preferences.

I would refer to these as well as to my own artwork as “material” and understand the installation as one piece—an approach that conflicted with the common 1 “Craftivism” by Kathi Hofer was shown at the MAK – Austrian Museum of Applied Arts / Contemporary Art from 19.12.2012 to 3.3.2013.

museum practice of dating and labelling objects. In order to reflect my specific interest in the objects’ production histories I instead took “group photos” of the collection pieces which were then printed as foldout posters with the corresponding inventory numbers.

These posters appeared twice in the show: in the installation and in an accompanying publication placed in a reader’s corner. So, by following the numbers, the objects could be researched individually. I like the idea of offering two ways for reception: an immediate, visual one within the show, and a contextual one that is provided by the book.

MN: So as spectator one did not immediately know, who the author of a specific object was. Nor which object you made yourself or which was commissioned. Included in the installation were two shelves that you needed for your apartment and which were produced by the MAK. How did you get these?

KH: I actually commissioned two pieces of furniture that I needed: a small shelf and a TV-rack. I asked the museum’s in-house carpenter how he’d realise them, in order to be stable and beautiful. I was the author delivering sketches but decisions on size and form were made rather pragmatically, since they had to match the necessities of my apartment.

MN: Would you refer to those items as pieces of furniture or as pieces of art?

KH: I would say they are both. If a collector would want to buy these works I would sell them for a gal23

lery price. Currently they are at my home, and my telly sits on the TV-rack, yet I would exhibit them again. To me this gesture felt also somewhat roguish: In having two pieces of furniture produced by the MAK, I wanted to point out that the museum provides no artist fee, only a budget for production. So I thought, if the MAK grabs my resources and ideas—as I also work for their upcoming project, the reorganisation of the study collection—I want to use their infrastructure, working time, financial capacity as a way of producing items for my private space.

MN: Along with this notion of the ‘private’ is your investigation into domestic activities. It seems that the entanglement of the two might have the potential to withdraw from the art world’s predominant idea of value. Against the backdrop of the third wave of feminism and next to your scrutiny of today’s position of domestic work, what was your particular interest in domesticity?

KH: I wanted to implant different modes of domestic creativity into a highly professionalised and public setting. For my show, I worked exclusively in a decorative manner, e.g. painting glass balls or candles for an Advent wreath. The idea was to produce decorations and during this production process, art works emerged. For instance the gift boxes, cartons wrapped in Christmas paper are objects to me and I would exhibit them again. I used wrapping paper from the MAK Design Shop. For instance a black wrapping paper with a flower pattern developed by Dagobert Peche.

MN: I would assume that this pattern designed by Dagobert Peche had a different function before. Now that it’s been printed on wrapping paper it represents a common “commodification” process using popular artists and their work. However, each of the exhibited objects from the study collection in your installation opens a whole set of questions.

KH: Well, another gift box became the plinth for a very interesting object by Herbert Januj, who is a precision engineer by profession and works as a safety inspector at the MAK. In 2008 as part of a Christmas event an auction took place at the museum for which all in-house technicians produced artistic works. The

24

former MAK director Peter Noever bought Januj’s work, which was the only one in my show that was labelled: It had a golden plaque with title and name of the producer, “H. Januj /Arbeit ohne Wert” (“Work without value”). This title reveals a certain self-conception. How the craftsman seems to evaluate his own work is very interesting to me, as it gives an entirely different idea of the value such a piece has for one person and the value it might hold for another, or the art market. Perhaps this perception of value comes from a different system of payment. In working as a craftsman, one gets paid per hour. Possibly it does not occur to craftsmen working under the current conditions, that they produce something which can have a symbolic value beyond the material value.

MN: I think you posed this question slightly differently in the publication that accompanied the show.

There you gave two separate indexes: One naming and describing the authors and another one naming and describing the producers of the objects featured in the show. But is it really possible to make such a distinction and if so, what are the criteria?

KH: I don’t think one can draw a dividing line between the two, yet to me it is important to address the issue: To find out what is the work done by an author and where does immaterial labour come to an end. It is much easier to define an object by its material than by its immaterial parameters. Keeping this in mind, I looked at different objects and tried to discover the underlying type of labour that ‘produced’ them in the first place. Hence, in these indexes all contributors who added ideas, drafts or content (i.e. the curator Janina Falkner or the custodians who provided expertise) are listed as “authors”. On the other hand, the persons who contributed physically (i.e. carpenters, technicians etc) I categorised as “producers”. Of course you can’t draw a strict line but to me the attempt is important. In the publication’s index you’ll also find people listed in both categories, for instance Benvenuto Cellini was both author and executor of an exhibited work. The publication kicks off with these indexes in order to show the number of people working on a show or on a single work of art. In the case of the art work, it is only the artist who is named, but still there might be a frame maker, a printer etc. working behind the scene.

Kathi Hofer Untitled, 2012. Foldout poster accompanying the publication Kathi Hofer. craftivism. Courtesy: K. Hofer, MAK/Katrin WiĂ&#x;kirchen

25

MN: You said once that for this project, two ideas were important to you: the emancipation of the amateur on the one hand and the questioning of creativity on the other.

KH: Let me start with the figure of the amateur. During my research I found that avant-garde and neoavant-garde artists have already been interested in the amateur for various reasons. Their practices and collaborations have been intensely discussed by John Roberts among others. Yet these ideas do not serve as my direct point of reference. My proposal is—even though I don’t know if it will hold up—that Amateurism in a positive sense could act as an exit strategy, leading away from professionalised work which is, nowadays, unlimited and traverses all aspects of life.

The notion of the amateur includes that one is occupied with a given practice in a deeply passionate but strictly non-professional manner and therefore doesn’t identify with this practice a 100 percent but rather sees it as an extension of ones personality. I would say, that this way of working is somehow less exploitable. Preparing my show I performed practices that I usually don’t exercise: For the first time I made an advent wreath myself, and even though I do not consider myself as a painter I painted glass balls. In this case the applied practices do not require major skills. Perhaps they came without pressure since I didn’t claim to deliver perfectly handcrafted objects but rather to enact an alternative relationship to “work”. To allow myself to conduct for a museum show these activities that I personally always found appealing but never felt the ambition to learn or master strangely gave me a feeling of sovereignty, a strong confidence that I won’t fail.

MN: The meaning of “amateurish” might also include that in such manner no mass consumption goods are being produced. It is a rather socially and ecologically compatible production method and as you said I am also not sure, to what extent the capitalist system can benefit from it. So Amateurism may be a method of subversion, which reveals its potential in self-produced handcrafted works.

KH: The project is named Craftivism and the political notion of the term activism resonates in the title. Yet the project serves different fields, beyond conceived 26

stereotypes: I exhibited my handcrafted works, which have been allowed to be pretty. But I think that they have a political core: Their amateurish surface hints towards political and ecological consciousness since they re-use waste materials, or follow a certain mindset as knitting on public spaces … actions in which cheap or easily available second-hand materials are used and processed.These handmade processes show a way to slow down, embrace the domestic, subvert producers of mass manufactured goods, or to support other communities through self-made items.

MN: But let’s come to the other point of interest you mentioned,“Questioning creativity”.The term creativity is quite ambiguous since it is strongly used within neoliberal ideology and terminology, and its adjective has been inflated to the point of its meaninglessness.

Think of creative industries, creative cities, creative economies, creative therapies …

KH: I agree it is a complex and overused term. That’s why I tried to tackle it in an entirely applied manner.

When I painted the candles for the Advent wreath, I tried to refrain from creative decisions and used colours and forms that were already there. So the black and white candles corresponded with the black and white chairs that, for their part, I painted along the lines of a famed design by the Italian designer Gio Ponti. I like the idea of spending time with creative activity that is ritualised to some degree and where there is no need to legitimise what you are doing or search for a deeper meaning. Yet, I see these as practices not devoid of meaning at all, but rather meaningful in a sense of being more vital or holistic. To put it in other words: Pleating the Advent wreath added a lot to the fun factor of the project.

27

Magda Tothova now is when 1 2013

29

Jaro Straub Fault Lines # 6, 2013 (Les Enfants Touche’) 31cm x 63cm newspaper, ink on record cover

30

PLEASURE-SEEKING On our fascination with arts and the cinematic image An interview with AndrĂŠa Picard by Barbara Kapusta

August and After, Nathaniel Dorsky, 16mm, 19:00 min, 2012, Video still Image source: http://tiff.net/filmsandschedules/tiff/2012/augustandafter Ladybug, Joan Mitchell, Oil on canvas, 1957 Image source: http://artmatters.ca/wp/2011/04/the-painting-is-just-a-surface-to-be-covered/ mitchell-for-blog/

The images chosen to accompany our conversation are not mere illustrations to our conversation. Rather we attempted to start a dialogue in pictures.With some we simply enjoy their texture and colour, others stand for works of artists that astonish us because of their precise, beautiful, courageous and spirited practises. BK

34

Barbara Kapusta Andréa, you work as a curator of the Toronto International Film Festival’s Wavelengths program.You see a lot of films and constantly discover new artist’s works.

About a year ago Viennese artist Katharina Aigner and I started to curate small film and video programs in varying exhibition settings. As video artists our motivation really is to actively show work we enjoy and to participate in a dialogue about film and video practice and discourse. During the process of conception, Katharina and I talk a lot about the different ways we want to research and select artworks. Sometimes we are fortunate and discover beautiful and stunning works just by chance, but mostly we work with what surrounds us. That means that sometimes there is a point when suddenly you realise that moving away from and showing work that are outside your own canon can be quite difficult.

How do you get in touch with filmmakers who for example do not have distribution? And what importance does collaboration and the sharing of films and artistic ideas take in your work as a curator?

Andréa Picard Film festivals are showcases for new work, and the best ones are looking forward as much as back over the history of cinema and art. Wavelengths, the section that I curate for the Toronto International Film Festival, began thirteen years ago in homage to Michael Snow, and not simply to his 1967 masterpiece, but to his multi-disciplinary focus and talents. As a musician, sculptor, filmmaker and installation artist, Snow embodies the ethos of the program, which seeks out visionary and experimental films and videos that are often in dialogue with other disciplines. Every year, a few restorations are included in the section but the focus is largely on new work.We put out a free and open call for submissions, send inquiries and solicitations to artists, galleries, curators, distributors, and rely on generous word-of-mouth and support from an engaged and enthusiastic international community. At the same time, it’s a constant challenge to attempt to represent the diversity of work being made around the world, especially by artists who are working remotely quite apart of any distribution or exhibition channels. I’m a firm believer in veering from the beaten path, and I can’t quite decide if the Internet is helping or hindering in that regard…

35

Each year, I’m amazed by how much serendipity shapes the program. I’m fortunate to travel to film festivals and attend a certain number of exhibitions per year and try to meet with as many artists as I can. But so often, distractions or derailments from my schedule lead to great discoveries. And when you’re looking for work that is relevant and urgent, the notion of chance can indeed be narcotic.

BK: How do you conceptualise film programs for exhibition spaces and art institutions and is there a difference to your curatorial ideas for the film festival? Obviously there is a great difference between a cinematic space and a museum or a commercial gallery regarding the conditions provided to the artists and the work. I always enjoy film programs that will both present the works of visual artists and that of filmmakers.

At the same time, I appreciate seeing works produced for a cinematic context in an exhibition space and experiencing my perception of the work being influenced by its spatial set up: Being able to move while watching a film or to leave the room and come back again.

exhibitions when that visibility is so compromised?

I’ve been frustrated by so many poor film installations— not the works themselves but the rogue ways in which they are displayed in certain spaces. Like a Paris gallery that recently showed Peter Watkins’s brilliant six-hour La Commune (2000) on a monitor washed out by sunlight, or jackhammers drowning out the monologues from Bouchra Khalili’s Speeches (2012). The conditions of exhibition are so different in art spaces than they are in cinemas and, to paraphrase Michael Snow, our contract with the work is different. Last year during Wavelengths, a young visual artist was visibly shaken after the screening of his video. It was extremely well received but, until then, he had only showed it in galleries.What rattled him was the intensity of the silence and the power of communal viewing by 200 people sitting together focused on his work. There’s a reason why so many visual artists want to see their work projected in a cinema, especially in our age of distraction and deficiency disorders…

We go to museums and galleries for experiences in the AP: Film is art. It may be banal to say so, but it’s a senti- flesh, and much of that has to do with texture and an ment that guides much of what I do, whether curating original encounter. We can invoke Benjamin’s notion of for a gallery space, or for the cinema. It even forms aura here despite film’s paradoxical plight, its reproducmy approach to programming narrative feature-length ible nature. Even the ultimate art of reproduction can cinema. The art of film (a term I stubbornly stick to, command a powerful effect when physically encoundespite really implying the gamut of moving images) tered; film is an art of illusion, as much as it is material. is as broad, varied and encompassing as is the field of Thus, my starting point when putting together shows painting. Yet its unique relationship to the viewer is a often stems from texture, as well as form, colour— mediated one, by a projector or a monitor. When the the aesthetic and material properties of film and, inconditions and context of presentation aren’t right, the creasingly, video whose own aesthetic properties can art inevitably suffers. Far worse than when a painting is be exciting, as seen in the work of T. Marie or Michael poorly hung or badly lit.

Robinson, which maximise the medium’s visual potential (i.e. altering the light values of a pixel, or deft video Aiming for museum-quality presentation both inside effects, respectively.) Which is not to say that content and outside of the cinema is tantamount. More and is less important, but a work of profound beauty or more artists want to experiment with both situations formal fascination can best convey a message, however because the experience and the audience can vary furtive and mysterious. I want the experience to linger dramatically. It is regrettable, however, that so many and resonate, to continue to reveal itself over time, works of celluloid are transferred to digital for projec- not to be blatant and brash. Film and video harbour tion within galleries and museums –for obvious finan- tremendous subliminal power and I try to draw upon cial and logistical reasons­–because there is a significant that as much as possible. loss of image quality, and an inevitable flatness despite increasingly powerful video projectors.Which begs the Texture is especially crucial at this point in time as question: what is museum-quality and who sets these we move further and further away from materiality. If standards? Can artists refuse the visibility afforded by one looks to the history of experimental cinema (or 36

The North Capital, Stephan Lugbauer, 16:9, Color, Sound, 40:00 min, 2013, Video still Above: Speeches, Bouchra Khalili, 04:00 min, 2012, Video still Image source: http://www.veralistcenter.org/engage/event/567/bouchra-khalili-invisible-roads/

37

film art), much of its evolution is based on the tactility of the medium. Thus, when I am thinking through a program in my head I very much have an idea or fantasy about textures evoked on screen as opposed to in a museum space, where the conditions are often not as specific and rigourous. I think film and video installations are most effective when they engage the space in a sculptural way (like in the work of Lonnie van Brummelen and Siebren de Haan, Rodney Graham or Neïl Beloufa, to cite a few examples). I experience great pleasure in curating for the cinema because I can (hopefully!) rely on complete darkness, sound insulation, a conscientious projectionist. A beautifully projected show can enhance the work’s impact. And that impact can be exceedingly physical and emotional, and evoke all kinds of desires, not unlike an encounter with a Cy Twombly, Joan Mitchell or Blinky Palermo, whose physicality melds with the ineffable. A similar experience can be had watching Bresson, Michael Snow or Chantal Akerman; the spectrum is broad and rich, categories be damned! Moving images also connote the spaces in between those very images and this provides 38

View from the Acropolis, Lonnie van Brummelen & Sieb 2012, Film still. Image source: http://www.motivegallery.n

Above: an archived causality, looped, Neïl Beloufa, Insta

bren de Haan, 35 mm, B/w, Sound, 16:00 min, nl/?page_id=6870

allation view, Saprophyt, 2011

great creativity in shaping group programs. Discoveries are to be found in gaps, fragments, collisions, in between, outside of the canon, outside of language, in the unexpected, or the misunderstood. In a world run rampant by moving images, the challenge is to create a contemplative time and space for the great ones to emerge unencumbered. Maybe this is an anti-conceptual approach! Themes and subjects provide convenience but I’m convinced that something more subconscious will endure. In praise of unintentionality, seems to say the instability of the medium.

BK: Let us talk about collecting and the institution as a place of preservation and support. It seems widely agreed that a physical art collection embedded within an institution can provide support to artists when their work is to be purchased by the institution. What can and does the film festival as an institution provide in terms of support and preservation for filmmakers?

AP:This is a complex and important issue, which gets to the heart of a festival’s mandate. Should they be about glitz, should they be pedagogical, should they focus on history and dialogue? Each is different and provides diverse platforms of visibility and varying levels of engagement. Some are industry-focused (the equivalent of an art fair, for instance where commercial sales are the goal) and some are devoted to public and community engagement, and a genuine celebration of film artists and their achievements. And some do indeed have collections, which emerge from an extension of their advocacy work. I’m thinking specifically of the inspiring film historians and curators Erika and Ulrich Gregor who founded the Forum at the Berlinale. Their radical and refreshing approach ensured that films they supported were not only shown at the festival but went into a Berlin-based collection now stowed at the Arsenal Institute for Film and Video Art, which acts as a distribution arm for the Forum. This is an exceptional case set up by exceptional individuals for whom legacy and the history of cinema informed their very discerning curatorial commitments.

BK: This is a very good example, it is a question of care and support. How to show and preserve moving images? But also one should ask, what kind of working conditions prove fruitful for filmmakers and video artists?

Is it assured financial support and/or the creation of an 39

adequate environment to project their work publicly?

To me this matter seems to be one of financial support as well as one of promotion: taking chances on small films that have no commercial viability.

AP: Yes, and, frankly, legitimization, although I wince at how that sounds. This is where organizational clout plays a key role. Within this framework, Wavelengths has built up an imprimatur for a certain kind of cinema and moving image art. Its success is owed to its artists, and to the public and critics who have supported it. A glance over the list of films from the last twelve years reveals not only a certain curatorial taste (always a thorny issue too often ignored) but also a charting of the changes in the field and the discovery of new talent.

The participation of visual artists has significantly increased over the past few years, just as filmmakers have increased their foothold in the galleries and museums.

Wavelengths began as a sidebar for experimental cinema but has grown into a broad yet discerning forum for film and video art, which includes experimental cinema, moving image works by visual artists, essay films, and innovative feature-length fictions and documentaries.

It attempts to present a selection of the year’s most exciting works of film and video, whether they are one minute or 5 hours long.

The great majority of festivals do not have collections, but their histories speak to an immaterial collection, to a list or log that contributes to canon-formation. One of the most crucial roles provided by festivals is that of visibility, especially in a time of financial instability where there are fewer and fewer art-house distributors who can afford to take risks on non-commercial films. The international festival circuit has become a de facto distribution circuit fueling the lifestream of many of the best films of our time. Selections are also parsed online and these catalogues become a source of knowledge sharing for curators, artists, scholars, critics and cinephiles.

As a festival curator, I am keenly aware of the dueledged privilege-burden that attends the role. The visibility that accompanies selection can be of utmost significance to an artist’s career and the spaces are so few relative to the artists submitting work. It’s as daunting as it is exhilarating.

Vienna, February 2013 40

Slave Ship, T. Marie, USA, 2010, DV, Color, Sound, 04:00 min, Video still Image source: http://www.filmfestivalrotterdam.com/en/films/slave-ship/ Above: Dolores, Jenni Tischer, Wallhanging (eleven Drafts), Aquarell on paper, 2011

41

Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, Chantal Akerman, Color, 201 min, 1975, Film Still Image source: http://www.docsurgrandecran.fr/film/jeannedielman-23-quai-du-commerce-1080-bruxelles Above: Dating Jess, Katharina Aigner, DVD PAL, Colour, Sound, Loop 60:00 min, 2009, Video Still

42

Andréa Picard is a writer and curator based in Toronto and Paris. She curates “Wavelengths” for the Toronto International Film Festival and writes the “Film/Art” column for Cinema Scope magazine.

Barbara Kapusta is a Vienna based visual artist. In 2008 she founded the Saprophyt exhibition space in Vienna with the artist and filmmaker Stephan Lugbauer. Along with the Vienna based artist Katharina Aigner she puts together film and video programs.

43

Magda Tothova now is when 2 2013

44

Julita W贸jcik, Jacek Niegoda, Kopiec Nieznanego Artysty, Nieznanej Artystki (A Mound for an Unknown Male Artist, Female Artist), 2012 Krakow, 漏 Julita W贸jcik, Jacek Niegoda

46

Artist Unknown Dorota Walentynowicz in conversation with Julita Wójcik and Jacek Niegoda In the summer 2012 on a hill overlooking the city of Cracow, in the vicinity of the historical Mound of Krak and Mound of Kosciuszko, the artist couple Julita Wójcik and Jacek Niegoda erected a temporary memorial: Kopiec Nieznanego Artysty, Nieznanej Artystki, (A Mound for an Unknown Male Artist, Female Artist). The mound reached the height of 2 meters; the earth from which it was composed, had been collected from all around Poland: artists, institutions, but also occasional passersby participated in this process.

After three months the mound had to be removed. Local conservative politicians felt offended by this construction, claiming it desecrated the historical sight and did not allow for the permit to be extended. What remains is a stone that had crowned the mound with a dedication: ‘To the Unknown Artists’.

Dorota Walentynowicz meets Julita Wójcik and Jacek Niegoda in a small coffee house in Wrzeszcz, the suburb of Gdansk where all three live, to talk about participation, social pyramid, culture’s status in Poland and about what ever happened to all these unknown artists …

Dorota Walentynowicz [DW]: You built your Mound for an Unknown Male Artist, Female Artist as a temporary memorial next to the prominent historical mounds: that of warrior Kosciuszko, and that of the legendary Krakus. I assume you improvised—how much of your action was an experiment, and how much was planned?

Jacek Niegoda [JN]: Acting in public space is always a form of experiment—one can never be confident about the end result. We started with certain assumptions: we assumed that we would build a skeleton of “The Mound”, put some earth around it, and then try to persuade people to join us. But we had no idea whether we would succeed and collect enough earth to have “The Mound” grow up to 2 meters height as we hoped for. We tried to distribute empty bags with the project’s logo to places we know and encourage other people to fill the bags with soil and return them back to us.

Julita Wójcik [JW]: We could not foresee the individual reactions – and especially not that the local councilors would show up and protest against the project. In such projects you need to be ready to respond to a living structure, to the unexpected. But it’s not that we waited for to happen—we did not intend to provoke a protest or cause a riot. Though the fact that this protest unexpectedly occurred added another level of meaning to the initial intention of the work. It appeared that the preference of one location over another—a vicinity of historical Krak Mound and Kosciuszko Mound—can propel the work to another level, in this case: a strong reaction of local national activists.

DW: Did you who chose that specific location yourself?

JW: Actually not. It was the local culture institution which had invited us that proposed the location. I did have my doubts about it, but then I thought: “Let’s 47

Julita Wójcik, Jacek Niegoda, Kopiec Nieznanego Artysty, Nieznanej Artystki (A Mound for an Unknown Male Artist, Female Artist). 2012 Krakow, © Julita Wójcik, Jacek Niegoda

take advantage of it!” Obviously this was the most favorable location for our mound and I had never expected we would get it. It was an offer we simply could not refuse: such a location, in the vicinity of oldest Polish monument, a prehistoric Mound of Krak!

I felt a great historical respect for this place, for this primitive human activity, which centuries ago collected and formed a mound of Krak that remains in the same shape up to this day. At the same time however it was an extremely provocative location, though none of us had realised what emotions it would raise.

DW: You strengthened and fortified the foundation of “A Mound for an Unknown Male Artist, Female Artist” and from there the process of building went its way. People kept bringing bags with soil, the mound grew…. Until the unexpected happened.

JW: On the second or third day, when we came to watch the progress, we found the job was on hold and the place filled with men in suits and we could feel a great tension. When I introduced myself to the men, they immediately attacked us. It appeared they were the Pogorze district councilors, both members of local 48

council and right wing politicians. They had already notified the prosecutor’s office about us desecrating the Mound of Krak.

DW: Was a dialogue with national history intended to be part of your project? Did you think you would start a discussion on national tradition?

JW: No, we did not. We had no idea that our intervention on this piece of land would trigger such protests from the local council. They were very disturbed by our intervention: they felt that it desecrates the other historical mounds.

JN: The Kosciuszko Mound, for example, is decorated with huge Polish flags. Obviously our “mound” had a different character then the other historical mounds, although it launched from a similar idea, namely the visible appreciation for certain contributions to the Polish society.

DW: But the difference, one could argue, is that some seem to deserve a more prominent location in public space than others.

JN: Out of experience I can say that contemporary art

Julita Wójcik, Jacek Niegoda, Kopiec Nieznanego Artysty, Nieznanej Artystki (A Mound for an Unknown Male Artist, Female Artist), 2012 Krakow, © Julita Wójcik, Jacek Niegoda

in Poland is not always accepted in prominent public places. It’s much easier for most of our society to accept it when it happens somewhere in poorer areas.

The moment it is exposed in some central location, it evokes social resistance. This is what we experienced too.

JW: I agree, they prefer to put us in some ruins and use artists to “revitalise” difficult suburbs.

DW: I take it that the most obvious form of commemoration would be a memorial, and yet you chose to build a mound.

Why? Is that because a mound offers the possibility to be added to?

JN: Yes, on the one hand because a mound is formed by adding, and on the other hand, because the pyramidal form was conceptually very important to us. Creating this project started out with the assumption that the structure of the art world takes on the form of a pyramid: Meaning the base being formed by a large number of the least known, then higher up things get narrower and narrower and at the top there are the most famous ones. Obviously this peak cannot exist without the base.

DW: Sure, you cannot place a pyramid on its tip JN: Or you could argue that the tip itself is so tiny no one would ever take notice of it. The tip of this structure is a single person standing on top of a collective effort!

Truth be told, the formation of culture, the emergence of new ideas, arises from a whole pyramidal structure.

And actually, most of cool and interesting ideas are generated as a result of experiments on the ground level.

DW: This is where they get tested …

JN: Right. There are two scenarios: either one of those experimenting artists manages to succeed or—more often—the results of experiments executed on lower levels are copied and used by those artists having the public’s medial attention. It’s a form of a feedback loop, none of these levels function without each other.

JW: There is also another important aspect: with this project we wanted to highlight the fact that in our society artists exist without social legitimacy. Society is another pyramidal structure, a much bigger one, in which artists operate without health insurance or

49

pension fund. For many it would be easier if artists remained unknown, because their situation is a specifically difficult one for the authorities.

DW: Have you been carrying on this notion for a long time, or did it intensify during this very period? I do not recall any other works of yours to relate precisely to this topic.

JN: In a way this is a topic that lingers in your mind permanently. While experimenting with art and its implementations in public space, one constantly needs to consider the relationship between the artist and the audience - and thus society – and to reflect on your position: whether you are creating, or co-creating, or maybe educating? More generally: whether you want to draw people into your art or not?

JW: At some point you begin to see things more clearly and such topics somehow automatically find their way into your work.

JN: For me that happened during the Congress of Polish Culture in 2009, when discussions about artist’s living conditions intensified. The atmosphere got tense with the declaration of economist Leszek Balcerowicz, who infamously claimed that the structure of Polish culture still sits deep in the socialist Polish People’s Republic, and that it would need DW: Capitalization?

JN: Exactly! Balcerowicz then argued that our culture needed to open up to the market and its mechanisms.

His statement unleashed a debate whether culture should be liberalized, or whether culture needed to be firmly anchored and supported by the state as a factor that will create values that do not always have strong financial and commercial dimensions and that might not sell as easily as a pair of shoes. How can their capital gain be converted and calculated? Such economic thinking cannot easily be applied to culture.

At this point many artists began to think more intensely about their place in our society.

DW: I guess most Poles - still fascinated by conspicuous consumption - feel that private money means private goods.

However they don’t realise that in the so called “west”, that we so look up too, where free markets have operated much longer than in Poland, private money is not only used to consume but largely also to support art, culture and science.

JN: Our society is still stuck in that stage, where

50

Julita Wójcik, Dokarmiaj niebieskie ptaki, 2004, Zacheta National Art Gallery’s bird table, Warsaw © Julita Wójcik

money seems to be solely and exclusively spent on the so-called “needed” things—and art is not one of them.

Though it seems to me that things are changing, that the next generation is making more conscious choices: for example to chose to not buy a good car in favor of more active participation in cultural life of the city.

DW: Is “A Mound for an Unknown Male Artist, Female Artist” your only work in which you address the position of the artist in the society?

JN: There is also a work called “Dokarmiaj niebieskie ptaki” (Feed the Heavenly Birds) which Julita realised some years ago.

JW: I made a series of bird feeders, shaped after various public galleries and museums. First one of these was placed in front of Zacheta National Gallery in Warsaw

in 2003. It was followed up by a whole network of feeders, with which I traveled to various cities in Eastern Europe. It was an interesting experiment for me to set off into a world where art is not made for money. Later on all of these feeders, which make up the “Feed The Heavenly Birds” series, were placed in the back garden of Kordegarda Gallery in Warsaw, which happens to be right in front of the building of the Ministry of Culture. The name “heavenly birds” referenced the common name to address artists – blue birds, free spirits, freelancers. So I did touch upon the topic before. However within the last two years I have focused more on it.

DW: Is it because you grew impatient, for after all these years something should finally change in the situation, and yet the change is still not coming?

JW: Turning 40 I felt I grew more competent in making a statement about the conditions I live and work in as an artist. I realised I should act, not only for myself but also for other artists, that I should make a statement, which would carry the message higher to also reach officialdom. I really don’t think anyone in the Polish Ministry of Culture is going to act on behalf of the artists out of his own will. So it must be the artists themselves, who have to make the move and make their problems visible—problems, are still a result of the transformation of the system in 1989. Our generation lived the experimental life, experienced the change of the system from socialism to capitalism, and now I think is a moment for another experiment, and I am pretty sure that the officials also realise that it is time for another change.

DW: Do you sense any solidarity regarding this problem in your artistic environment?

JW: Last spring the “Civic Forum for Contemporary Art”1 association organized a nationwide strike for one day, which resulted in over 50 galleries and museums staying closed in act of protest against artists’ poor social condition. The association “Civic Forum for Contemporary Art” was formed in Warsaw, as a part of the “Citizens of Culture” movement, which in 2010 encouraged the “Pact for Culture” to be signed

by Minister of Culture and local authorities in most Polish cities.

DW: Sounds highly glorious to me. You have read that “Pact for Culture”—what did it say?

1

JN: It contained provisions to protect cultural institutions from political pressure. Before 2010 directors of cultural institutions in Poland were subject to political nomination. In 2010 a law was passed, which governed their employment: not anymore from a political nomination but on so called manager contracts, which would guarantee the culture institutions to stay outside of political influence.

JW: However the “Pact for Culture” did not mention artists at all! That’s why the “Civic Forum for Contemporary Art” was founded to fight for better social condition for artists. We cooperate closely with the “Civic Forum”, to create a proposal which would incorporate artists into the general social insurance system.

DW: Why is it so difficult to make such a change? Could that be because society still sees the artist as a parasite of the state’s social system? And the other question that comes up: Were does society want to place the artists?

Seems that—as you mentioned—they only need us to enable the revitalization of difficult post-industrial areas so that the property developers could buy land cheap and sell expensive.

JN: Such mechanisms become more and more common. I once did a project about this issue, called “Safety Revitalization Rules and Methods” [shown as part of “Political Designers” exhibition in Wyspa Art Institute in 2011]. The project related to an experiment I participated in 20 years ago, when we were establishing the Laznia Center of Contemporary Art in the Lower Town of Gdansk. Artists who were involved in the founding of Laznia hoped to help the Lower Town, to improve the living conditions of its citizens. Only years later I realised that Laznia Center of Contemporary Art played a role in process of Lower Town’s gentrification. Now it appears that families who live in the area have no right to the properties they’ve inhabited for years.

DW: This means that they will be forced to move out, so that their flats can be sold expensively to people who have a better income and create a more attractive social fabric. Gentrification turns into gentri-fiction. I remember a conference on that topic, where the question was asked as to how artists could be so naïve as to be manipulated by this process.

JW: True—looking at it objectively one can really get

http://forumsztukiwspolczesnej.blogspot.com

51

Jacek Niegoda, Poland - Europa. Towards Security and Cooperation, 2005. Š Jacek Niegoda

52

that impression: the property development company settles the artists in the area to attract attention, the artists change the area, so that the investor can benefit from it, then the artists move out—actually yes, you could say that artists let the property developers take advantage of their practices.

DW: You do indeed have years of experience in participation in the process of shaping of the public space.

JN: This is where the “A Mound for an Unknown Male Artist, Female Artist” project stems from. It’s not like it was a one-off idea, a rabbit out of the hat.

DW: In the manifesto accompanying the erection of “The Mound” you explicitly mention three artistic positions: an “anonymous creator of utopia”, an “unknown provincial promoter of great ideas”, and a “yet undiscovered genius amateur”. Does each of these dedications have its specific prototype?

JN: I would say that each represents a certain attitude towards art, life and the place dedicated to art in one’s life. These are notions we know from our own working experience: In 1995, together with six other artists, I established an artistic group C.U.K.T. After several years the group dissolved, but only three of us stayed in Gdansk and are still involved in artistic activities. Out of the others - one is now breeding turkeys on a farm near Olsztyn, another one was in the music business in Warsaw for some time, but then disappeared somewhere near Szczecin, one is now working in the IT business in London, one became a punk and is now in the squat scene in Portugal.

DW: Did the other four leave Gdansk with the intention to continue their artistic career elsewhere, only things went other than they hoped they would?

JN: Here is an example for you: that second mate of mine left Gdansk and moved to Warsaw because his wife got a job at Ikea. At some point they got a child and his wife pressured him to work. Later on they got divorced and he left for London. Now he lives there, working a regular job, writing books and making music in his spare time. The peculiarity of his case is such, that he has composed 10 LPs which he keeps on his computer, hoping that at some point a producer will show up at his door and offer to publish them. And not only does he have the compositions ready—he has the LP titles and the covers ready. Everything. He even knows how the video clip to each of the music

Central Office for Technical Culture (CUKT) Action for city Bytow, 1996. © CUKT

pieces should look like. He has it all perfectly ordered in his head, but he has never sent it to any label! Of course he tells his friends who come and visit him, how it should all look like, what should happen in the video et cetera - he has the production planned to the last detail. He would never make the move himself, but maybe someone from a record company will show up at his door, he even knows how much money he would give up all his output for.

DW: Do you think that moment will ever come?

JN: No idea. Who knows? It’s a question of choice and that’s his. I know other artists, who just don’t want to have anything to do with galleries and culture institutions, and that’s why they don’t want to make their work public. They see it negatively—since these institutions are subsidized by the city and it’s politicians who decide on their budget. So when exhibiting you are caught up in a state system, or a similar system structure, which for them is an oppressive structure.

For those artists getting a fee for participating in a show, or selling works to a collection means again participating in the commercial system, which they will not accept.

DW: You talk about the “unknown artists”. Doesn’t the artist have to be known in order to survive?

JW: One needs to find the right hierarchy of values. I have already come to terms with the fact that only a small amount of people are interested in art. And for me it is sufficient satisfaction in being noticed in this environment, however small.

53

the task becomes a kind of work, and the focus shifts to the action of carrying the bag more than on the actual monument. They could have brought that earth from their garden for example – and this automatically changes the hierarchy of the monument - the fact that it is your soil, from your garden, your particle ... When we started we put up a sign saying people could leave earth at this site; the next day we noticed different colors of the earth, all small piles of soil which people dumped next to it.

DW: You also mention “unknown provincial promoters of great ideas”.

Julita Wójcik, My Garden, New York 2003, as a part of Architectures of Gender Contemporary Women‘s Art from Poland; © Julita Wójcik

DW: So you know your point of saturation.

JN: Yes. This comes with a certain consciousness about our profession. Julita often said that she sees her art making as regular work. She distances herself from assuming any elitist position—exalted on a pedestal, looked up to. She avoids this situation. We make our art without expecting that we should be adored for it.

JW: If I placed myself on a pedestal, I could never speak freely with people on the street, with my audience, talk to them in a way that interests me artistically. I couldn’t run the project “My Garden” [2000] like I intended to. The conversation with people passing by was one of the works main components, and if I were famous, maybe people would never have the courage to approach me. In all my works I try to even out these differences, level them, to underline the equality between my profession as an artist and all other professions.

DW: That was also the case in the “A Mound for an Unknown Male Artist, Female Artist”. At first it made me think of Horace and the need to build a “monument more durable than the brass”, which is quite pathetic. But you managed to avoid pathos in your project.

JW: The fact that we encouraged people to get involved in the process by bringing soil to us was a way to demystify this monument. I mean, when such an everyday action is involved—carrying a bag filled with soil, you don’t think of pathos anymore: suddenly

54

JW: These are for example all the ladies sitting at home knitting and crocheting … Our manifesto reads like this: “A loser, because earning a living, he created art after hours as a hobby. A winner, because not caring about her pension fund contribution, her lack of health insurance, on the margins of the social insurance system, against all odds, she creates art. A loser, because she fell anonymously in the art battlefield.”

DW: Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better—to say it with Samuel Beckett.

JN: In Poland we have a big tradition of worshiping fallen heroes: we commemorate lost insurrections and lost battles. With Julita we thought it would be worth to commemorate the lost creators, those who have fallen in attempt to create culture.

JW: I see this act in relation to the future, to the possibility of potential defeat—that also we will disappear.

DW: But you are surely not unknown artists!

JW: And that legitimizes us to built this “Mound”. For if it was built by someone who really is an unknown artist himself, this action could come forth as a cry of despair. A position of being somehow known allows us to do this act for others, not for ourselves.

JN: It is not so much about us in particular, more about the structure of culture in general. I do not want to identify where in this pyramid we place ourselves— whether we are higher, lower, or right in the middle.

Wherever we are in this structure– we need the cultural environment to exist.

paula roush, Flora McCallica, found photos and herbarium, part of dreaming through-on and into the exotic, paula roush & maria lusitano, curated by Maria M. Kheirkhah at the 198 contemporary art & education, 2013

56

| E x c ava t i o n Th r i l l | I N conv e rsation pau la ro u sh and Tanja V e rlak

paula roush, Bowville, locative media performance and installation, commissioned by SPACE London, 2004. Foto: arzu altin

From its beginnings, photography has had to carry the burden of being an objective art, mainly due to its technical capability of capturing the visual world.

Reality is thus equated with the visible world, which is in contradiction to the fact that a photograph exposes ideas, values and concepts, and is constantly finding itself in the phenomenological world. What, in terms of human judgement, is objective? And, what is a fact? According to Nietzsche “facts are precisely what is lacking, all that exists consists of interpretations. We cannot establish any fact ‘in itself’”1. The Found Photo Foundation/FPF, under the patronage of paula roush, deals with visuals suitably named ‘orphan photographs’ and explores this very possibility of walking the line between temporal and spatial domains, where the empirical and the surreal grow surprisingly close. The FPF can also be read as an artistic experiment that twists the document value of an archive beyond its proverbial linearity of causes and consequences. As the connection to the real is often lost, the project is above all a platform of invented space that suggests taxonomical methods of artistic research deep into generations and the unknown.2

1 Nietzsche, F., 2008. The Will to Power – An Attempted Transvaluation of All Values – Vol II, Books III and IV: 2, Read Books, p.

12.

2 Verlak, T. An Attempt at Exhausting an Archive. In: Schmidt, E., Rüttinger, I., Wann, J. (eds.), 2012. Dear Aby Warburg What can be done with images? Dealing with photographic material, Museum für Gegenwarts Kunst Siegen, Kehrer Verlag, p. 278

Tanja Verlak: paula, your research through art touches upon a variety of disciplines. Some of your works are based on a sensory perception and a further processing of information, like Bowville, for instance. What does the use of a certain medium mean for your working method? Is the media platform a part of the conceptual frame itself and shall we read it as such, or do you use the chosen medium as a suitable dissemination of a piece of work? paula roush: I am very interested in what is known as the post-medium condition. In my projects I intend to explore the tension between the medium and its obsolescence. It was art theorist Rosalind Krauss who suggested that in many contemporary art practices ‘medium specificity’ (characterised by a focus on crafts and the medium’s physical substance) has been replaced by what is best designated as ‘technical support’ or more general a ‘support structure’ (that could be defined by conceptual and discursive practices). In my work too, I find this shift has happened in terms of a more investigative approach, where what Kraus describes as ‘technical support’ is the subject matter. This subject matter will either be the historical period I research, or the collaborative method I use. It seems to me that to many artists of my generation artistic practice is not necessarily 57

paula roush, SOS:OK (save our souls: zero killings) community intervention, exhibition, archive and emergency kit/publications, 2004-2006 A commission presented as an exhibition at the Coleman Project Space, London and touring to Pavel Haus, Austria, gallery P74, Ljubljana, and Sparwasser gallery, Berlin integrated in the exhibition Public Services curated

by Tadej Pogacar

paula roush, Found Photo Foundation, installation with photography archive and publications, part of the exhibition: Dear Aby Warburg: What Can Be Done with Images? Dealing with photographic material, curated by Eva Schmidt at the Museum f端r Gegenwartskunst Siegen, 2013

58

attached to the specificity of a medium. When we want to understand what characterises this post-medium attitude, we need to accept the shift towards the performative and discursive sites of photography.

As you said, Bowville, commissioned by Space (London, 2004) to be part of their platform on wireless public technologies, is an example of my own works taking this shift. In Bowville my ‘technical support’ was extended research on the political economies of photography as a means of identification. This work brought together the history of photographic surveillance and its present implications for social stigma and deportation, such as police’s use of electronic tagging to keep non-European immigrants under surveillance. Photography served as one of the main vehicles for this project but the medium was questioned, and integrated in the form of converging multi-layered mechanisms of new and old technologies (geo-locative media, wireless video stream, archival photography, fictional biography, performance with characters) that make the unitary identification of the work’s physical support impossible. The confrontation of photography and technologies of fear was made manifest in the work’s structure, bringing together a timed performance, a publicly sited investigation bureau, a detective story sometimes mimicking the police’s own investigation methods and the participation of the public.

aesthetics’, took this urbanization of artistic experience to read cities as sites of encounter between people and the artwork. I am interested in these urban interstices in more than one way. I am interested in art that produces sociability and promotes encounter. When I created an emergency biscuit distribution platform at the Coleman Project Space gallery for SOS:OK, the piece addressed the history of the site (a former biscuit shop) as well as the recent history of the area, formerly known as Biscuit Town. I worked with former employees of the Biscuit factory (now unemployed due to the factory’s closure) paying them from the money I received from art funding; we produced a new biscuit for the area. People came to the gallery for free tea and biscuits. When we distributed biscuits and the publications for free in the streets, art was being inserted into the social and urban fabric.

T. V.: I would like to touch upon the notion of the archival. The way I see it archive can never be completed and therefore not be reduced to its definition. It is false pretense giving you an overview of the archived field, yet the very decision of what to archive is a selection on its own. Eugene Atget’s photographs are exemplary archival; his approach was to photograph what was about to disappear. Christian Boltanski, on the other hand, deals with archival material in a more direct manner, whereas Aby Warburg‘s approach to the archive is a category of its own… Your recent interest concerns the archival too and photography seemingly embodies the notion well. Could you T. V.: Your work could be read as part of a say more about the archive and its strategies? broader emotive and intellectual discourse of contemporariness, of predetermined societies. p. r.: Rather than trying to define an archive, it Critics attribute your work to an interesting might be fairer to speak of a variety of archival art research category, namely “the urbanization of art practices that constitute a relationship between practice”. Could you elaborate on this? What does history and traces of reality. These artistic archival urbanization of art mean to you and what would practices might use various historical methods: you define as its antidote? Is it connected to the creating new archives as the artwork itself, working very means of technology? How do you apply the with existing archives and, more to the point, notion of ‘urban’? rethinking the materiality of the archive itself.

When working with photographic archives and p. r.: The ‘urban’ here relates to the relation of particularly with found photographic archives, the work of art, to the realm of sociality and their a complex relation to the real comes into play, contexts beyond the confines of representation. oscillating between documentary and fictional Nicolas Bourriaud, when defining ‘relational modes of representation. The found material always 59

paula roush & maria lusitano, Faux-to-zine, artists’ (maga)zine for the ipad, issue 01

60

points to the ‘original’ production context and to the ethnographic other. But when that origin is lost, we lose any claim to authenticity and authorship.

Some of these concerns echo in my ongoing project The Found Photo Foundation (FPF) initiated in 2007, which was set up to rescue work produced by professional, amateur and anonymous photographers. The piece focuses on footage found in flea markets and car boot sales from Lisbon and London, whilst adding additional photographs found world-wide. The photographs are all organised in informal thematic archives opened up to the public in workshops, which make the archive’s contents available for non-destructive editing, re-printing and electronic publishing.

The participants are free to mix this material with other originated in their own archives, further displacing these images’ relationship to the ‘real’, under new intertextualities, such as headings, captions and additional documents. These could be thought of as transcultural hybrids or manufactured “secondary documents,” but I think we can look at them in a different way too. As Dipti Desai and Jessica Hamlin write in ‘Artists in the realm of historical methods’: “Artists are establishing new primary sources and create works that could be considered primary documents in their own right as they collect the stories of marginalized, unconsidered sources.”

T. V.: Listening to you I realise that the penetration of art into receptive environments is a rather important part of your practice. You are embracing new technologies with ease but have adopted a classic form ­– an artist’s book. Besides it being a practical, affordable and intimate means of re/ presentation, would you like to remind us on something else when talking about a book-form?

of display and mediation in contemporary art practices, where publishing provides a crucial platform to produce, exhibit and circulate art work. The mobile formats translate the blurring of boundaries that currently exist between the art work, digital files and publishing. Once a project is digitised, the post-production in InDesign allows me to output it for the paper printing market as a .pdf-x file or alternatively (with a few modifications) to publish it as an .epub for ipad and easily convert it to .mobi for kindle. So these paper-digital publishing practices are already closely connected in the interfaces of the computer.

In 2007 I published my first photobook for the ipod (no official buildings no local people no oil facilities). Last year I launched Faux-to-zine, an ezine that deals precisely with issues of (re) production in the work of art. What distinguishes it from most other artists’ serial publications is the digital platform, as it is an artists’ (maga)zine for the ipad. Each edition repurposes discarded/found paper publications through sampling, collage, remix and drawing, existing as paper special edition and as an e-book available for e-readers.

The book provides intertextuality and a time-space matrix to explore the relationships of image and text that is very convenient for those of us working with multiple layers of information. Lately, the publication has acquired a third meaning in my practice, as a space where I can show my work independently of an exhibition. With content being developed primarily for the book, this is further made available in multiple formats from unique hand made editions to print on demand and ebooks for the ipad and other electronic readers.

p. r.: Publishing has always been an integral part of my projects, both in the form of book-works that were integrated in a wider installation and as multiples that outlive the time-space of the exhibition and start to circulate autonomously.

The moniker “msdm” under which I have operated for more than a decade relates to mobile strategies 61

paula roush, Flora McCallica, found photos and herbarium, part of dreaming through-on and into the exotic, paula roush & maria lusitano, curated by Maria M. Kheirkhah at the 198 contemporary art & education, 2013

Tanja Verlak is a PhD candidate at the Royal College of Art in London. Her research focus is the representation of shock and the phenomenon of magical in photography. She holds a BA and an MA degree in documentary photography from FAMU in Prague and an M.Phil. from the SAA, Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi.

62

paula roush is an artist, a writer and an educator born in Lisbon and based in London. Her work is conceptually placed between social and public and formally embodies both, new and traditional media.

She focuses on archives and orphan photographs, which contextualize such tangible material through negotiable agencies and subjective memories. She is a Fulbright alumni and a lecturer at the London South Bank University.Â

Contributors

collaboration. Her approach is anthropological, looking at our relationsship to space and time, life and death, love and sexuality, community/society, urban space Shezad Dawood (b. London 1974) trained at Cen- and nature. Art means for her the participation in an tral St Martin’s and the Royal College of Art before open field that is alive. Majewski has shown widely. undertaking a PhD at Leeds Metropolitan University. Solo exhibitions include Villa Romana, Florence (2012); Dawood works across various media, and much of Kunsthaus Graz (2011); Kunstverein Salzburg (2009), his practice involves collaboration, frequently working Kunsthalle Basel (2001). She is represented by neugerwith unique networks around a given project or site. riemschneider, Berlin. Since 2011 she has been a proThese networks map across different geographic loca- fessor for painting at the Muthesius Kunsthochschule tions and communities, and are particularly concerned Kiel. Antje Majewski is a founding member of the femiwith acts of translation and restaging. Dawood’s work nist collaborative group ƒƒ. www.antjemajewski.de has been exhibited internationally, including as part of ‘Altermodern’, curated by Nicolas Bourriaud, at Tate Britain, the 53rd Venice Biennale (both 2009), and the Margit Neuhold is a writer, curator and educator.

Busan Biennale (2010). Recent projects include a solo Since 2011 she is editor of Camera Austria International touring exhibition that opened at Modern Art Oxford and in 2011 and 2012 she held seminars at the Instiin April 2012, and an upcoming solo exhibition at Para- tute of Contemporary Art at the Technical Universisol Unit, London (2014). Shezad has been nominated ty in Graz. lives and works in Graz. She studied Art for the Jarman Award 2012. He currently lives and History in Graz (1997-2002) and Contemporary Art works in London, where he is Senior Lecturer and Re- Theory at Goldsmiths University London (2007-2009). search Fellow in Experimental Media at the University As an independent author she has published internationally and as a freelance curator she has curated the of Westminster. following projects: “UPON ARRIVAL. SPATIAL EXPLOKathi Hofer is an artist and writer based in Vienna. RATIONS” at Malta Contemporary Art Foundation, She holds an MA in Philosophy from the University Valetta (2010) and “AN EXHIBITION OF A STUDY of Vienna and an MFA in Art & Photography from the ON KNOWLEDGE” at Forum Stadtpark, Graz (2012) Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Her practise involves among others. photography, installation, bricolage and research. Recent exhibitions include: ### with Kathi Hofer, Philipp Jacek Niegoda is an author of video works and arMessner and Florian Auer, Lothringer13_Laden, Mu- tistic actions and interventions. His works are characnich 2013, craftivism, MAK-Gallery,Vienna 2012/13, Al- terised by a high content of humorous elements, which ter, Situation!, Galerie der Stadt Schwaz 2012, Wanna in surprising and critical manner comment our everycome over and, you know ... read a book?, Praterstraße day reality. In 2005, he received an honorable mention Berlin 2012. She has contributed to springerin, Texte zur at the 11th International Media Art Biennale WRO 05 Kunst, Camera Austria International, among other publi- in Wroclaw. Jacek Niegoda was one of the founders of the artist group Central Office of Technical Culture cations.

(CUKT). In 2000, the group realised the project “VicVeronika Hauer, born 1981, is an artist and writer toria Cukt” which confronted Poland with a virtual based in Vienna. She holds an MA from the University candidate for the presidential elections. He participatof Applied Arts, Vienna and an MA from Goldsmiths ed actively in the creation of the most important art University of London. She founded Nowiswere, together institution in Gdansk: Wyspa Progress Foundation and Open Atelier (later transformed into Laznia Center for with Fatos Ustek, in 2008. www.veronikahauer.com Contemporary Art). He lives and works in Gdansk.

Barbara Kapusta is a Vienna-based visual artist. In 2008 she founded the Saprophyt exhibition space in Vienna with the artist and film-maker Stephan Lugbauer.

Along with the Vienna based artist Katharina Aigner she puts together film and video programs. www.barbarakapusta.net Antje Majewski /ƒƒ is a Berlin based artist, who creates images: painted, filmed or performed, often in

Andréa Picard is a writer and curator based in Toronto and Paris. She curates “Wavelengths” for the Toronto International Film Festival and writes the “Film/ Art” column for Cinema Scope magazine. paula roush is an artist, a writer and an educator born in Lisbon and based in London. Her work is conceptually placed between social and public and formally embodies both, new and traditional media.

63

She focuses on archives and orphan photographs, which contextualize such tangible material through negotiable agencies and subjective memories. She is a Fulbright alumni and a lecturer at the London South Bank University.

Ghalya Saadawi is an independent writer and phd candidate at goldsmiths university of london. she lives between london and beirut, where she teaches parttime at the american university of beirut (AUB) and the st. joseph university (USJ).

Sylvia Sleigh “Although widely over-looked in the field of modern and contemporary art, Sylvia Sleigh was a realist painter who became an important part of New York’s feminist art scene in the 1960s and beyond. She was particularly well-known for her explicit paintings of male nudes, which challenged the art historical tradition of male artists painting female subjects as objects of desire. (...) Sleigh trained in painting at Brighton art school at a time when female art students were, as she recalled, ‘treated in a second-rate fashion’. Despite having a solo exhibition at Kensington Art Gallery in 1953, she received little public recognition until her move to New York in the 1960s. There Sleigh and her husband, the art critic and Guggenheim curator Lawrence Alloway, together created a home that welcomed artists, writers and musicians, many of whom Sleigh painted.” (Quoted after: www.tate.org. uk/whats-on/tate-liverpool/exhibition/sylvia-sleigh) www.sylviasleigh.com Jaro Straub is a visual artist living in Berlin. He studied fine arts in Berlin and Vienna (1996-2001) and was a visiting artist at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, Los Angeles (2002-2003). His recent collage work involves a layering of information, merging found images, painting, texts, photographs and books into dense ‘sound’ structures. Along his solo works he has frequently collaborated with other artists such as the collective Komplot based in Brussels. Selected solo exhibitions include: Fault Lines, Spor Klubu, Berlin (2012), Chip Chunk Hannah Hannah, Galerie Sonnenberg (2011) and Dead Reckoning, Altonaer Museum Hamburg (2010).

Magda Tothova is an artist living and working in Berlin and Vienna. www.magdatothova.com Tanja Verlak is a PhD candidate at the Royal College of Art in London. Her research focus is the representation of shock and the phenomenon of magical in photography. She holds a BA and an MA 64

degree in documentary photography from FAMU in Prague and an M.Phil. from the SAA, Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi.

Dorota Walentynowicz is a visual artist working in the field of photography, sound, installation and video. She studied at the University of Gdansk, PL, the Academy of Arts in Poznan, PL, and the Royal Conservatory in Den Haag, NL; She exhibited in Poland, Germany, the Netherlands, Austria and France. In 2009 she created a monumental light projection for the inauguration of the “Narracje” festival in Gdansk.

In her artistic practice Walentynowicz conceptually engages with philosophical determinants behind the mechanisms that support the industrialization of modern culture. Much of her work is concerned with refunctioning of the photographic image. As a free-lance curator Dorota Walentynowicz is associated with PF Photography Gallery in Poznan, PL. She lives and works in Gdansk and Vienna. www.dobrze.nl Julita Wójcik is a performer - an initiator of artistic actions in public spaces; she completed her art studies in the Sculpture Department at the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdansk in 1997. In 2013 she won the Polityka Passport Award for Visual Arts for her installation piece “Rainbow”, situated in the centre of one of Warsaw’s busiest roundabouts. In her works Julita Wójcik makes use for the most part of simple, everyday home activities, usually attributed to women, and transforms them into artistic activities. Her first major performance piece “Peeling Potatoes” was presented in the Zacheta National Gallery in Warsaw in 2001, and has has been widely discussed. During the performance, dressed in an apron, the artist peeled potatoes while engaging in conversations with gallery visitors and giving interviews to journalists.

Amy Yoes works in a multi-faceted way, alternately employing painting, photography, installation, video, and sculpture. An interest in decorative language and architectural space permeates all of her work. She responds to the formal topologies of ornament and style that have reverberated through time, informing our mutually constructed visual and cultural memory. Adding to this multileveled aesthetic unfolding, Yoes’ work plays in the realm of human connectedness. She grew up in Houston and in Chicago, where she attended the School of the Art institute of Chicago. She lives and works in New York City. She is currently working with fellow artist Mark Dion on Above/Below Ground, a collaborative project for the Siena Art Institute in Italy. www.amyyoes.com