contemporary art magazine issue # sixteen december ... - Karyn Olivier

MOUSSE / CURATOR’S CORNER / PAG. 36
has to be re-named so that it has sense again, because right now
it has become desementized because of excess of use.
CF: Your projects do not follow a linear temporality. They take
place in the past or the future, even both simultaneously. You
have commissioned proposals for Documenta that could take
place at any place in time. More recently, you collaborated with
Francesco Manacorda to propose “1972: A Proposal for the 6th
Berlin Biennial – Spring 1972”, in which 1972 is conflated with
2010. Can you explain your interest in time-travel, temporal
intersections, and simultaneity?
RM: I love Ray Bradbury.
MP: You recently led a seminar called “Kaleidoscope Room” at
the California College of the Arts. How do the mechanisms and
Dora Garcia, What a Fucking Wonderful Audience, 2008 - photo: Greg Weight
histories of the kaleidoscope inform or complicate how we can
perceive vision? How can this tool be used to view and describe
certain forms of cultural practice?
RM: I cannot remember that seminar. But a kaleidoscope is
probably good to imagine how a fly sees the world.
CF: (laughter) Yet the forgotten seminar relates to your upcoming
“Paper Exhibition” at Artist’s Space in New York. Is it a process of
recollection and reconstruction? Can you tell us about this show?
RM: No, I can’t. It is a secret. You’ll know when you are ready for it.
CF: Everyone seems to call you a curator but yourself. You resisted
defining your practice. Do you see the gap between this and that,
those and them also as a space you straddle or navigate?
RM: I am an artist.
MP: Do you think exhibitions should make sense? Traditional
conceptions of curating involve the illumination and explanation of
information, particularly putting works of art into context so that
something makes more sense than it had before, and differently.
Do you feel your practice is a reversal of this process, one of
obfuscation and complication?
RM: The difference between reality and fiction is that fiction has
to make sense. Reality has no obligations. I am an artist.
CF: Do artists have investments in that divide?
RM: Yes, artists and art don’t have to make sense either and to
force sense in them should be punished.
CF: Your art practice often assumes the form of what is generally
understood as curating. For example, you recently had an
exhibition on display in Rome at Galleria 1/9 Unosunove Arte
Contemporanea entitled, “One of These Things Is Not Like The
Other Things”, which used exclusion rather than inclusion as its
premise, as well as “Sesame Street”. What were the results? Did
any viewers figure out the One Thing?
RM: Yes, we had some pretty smart people seeing the show.
MP: Many of your projects involve inverting or tampering with
the structures and tenets of exhibitions. For example, you’ve
written a curatorial essay as a libretto with Aaron Schuster for
Loris Greaud’s “Cellar Door” exhibition at Palais de Tokyo. Would
you say that the curatorial field – increasingly defining itself as a
discrete discipline with its own histories, dogmas and clichés –
generated a need for its own inversion?
RM: Yes.
CF: Does it now depend upon its inversion in order to exist?
RM: Honestly, I just said yes because I did not understand the
question.
CF: This also seems to relate to Black Market Worlds, The IX
Baltic Triennial, which you curated at the Contemporary Art
Centre in Vilnius with Sophia Hernandez Chong Cuy and Alexis
Vaillant. How did you end up in the shadows and how did you get
out? What do you think draws artists to these non-spaces?
RM: Artists are by nature abyss-observers.
MP: What are artists looking for in this void?
RM: For their chances of surviving if they leap into it.
MP: We’ve talked about An Evening With Joseph Cornell, in
which medium Valerie Winborne channels the artist from the
dead and then Anne Walsh and Chris Kubick lecture about him.
You’ve spoken a lot about Robert Barry’s Telepathic Piece and
you recently held Hypnotic Show at Silverman Gallery, where the
audience, hypnotized, created an artwork in their minds. How
does the medium’s incantation complicate the ideas of authorship
and agency? Who are we speaking to?
RM: Rosabelle, believe! - last words of Houdini to his wife before
he died. He wanted her to believe that he would communicate
with her from the dead, but according to Rosabelle, he never did.
Perhaps she did not listen carefully enough, too busy dilapidating
his inheritance. I cannot say I believe, but I love observing people
who do. Authorship, as well, is a matter of belief.
CF: During the “Kaleidoscope Room” seminar you also once
showed us Theatre de Poche by Aurelien Froment on loop twelve
times and asserted that it was one film that repeats differently
each time, which it definitely wasn’t, yet somehow was. How do
fakery, conjecture, incredulity and doubt relate to possibility?
RM: I just hope we don’t end up in a Paul Auster script.
CF: You are also a former television star. Yet fortunately you
didn’t go to jail like Willis and Kimberly Drummond.
MP: One of the most interesting things about CAC TV – the
television program you produced for CAC in Vilnius, broadcast
regularly – was that every show was a pilot and every episode
was the last show. Can you explain?
RM: Ever seen the pilot episode from M.A.S.H., the TV series?
Then you could still believe it was going to be something and
that Alan Alda could be a believable Hawkeye. Pilot episodes are
by nature, potentially, the last show (because most of them do
not meet the expectations of the audience), but also, they still
make you believe the next episode will be good… that magic
evaporates with the second episode.
MP: In what ways does the collapse of the beginning and the end
provide for an alternative form of content-generation?
RM: Did you see the last appearance of Sarah Palin on SNL when
she passes by Tina Fey? I thought that was brilliant. I liked as
well the actor playing Todd Palin in snow bike attire.
CF: You are also a former model. Are amateurs really
professionals? Can these distinctions be made any longer?
RM: We were amateurs but were forced to become professionals.
No, you cannot make that distinction. It is just a matter of how
much time you have left to read.
CF: Is the art world too professional and productive these days?
Even the terminology seems to reflect this: “Art production,”
“Cultural Producer,” “Practice.”
RM: Yes, it is a bore. You can read between lines: “we do not
want indolent lazy bastard sexually degenerate artists”. That
efficiency is terrifying, or worse: it is a bore.
MP: How high above the ground do you think we are now?
RM: About 500 meters.
CF: Maybe we’ll see Michel Fournier parachuting from outer
space! I don’t know why the press made such a big deal of his
recent failed attempt, when his balloon floated away without him.
In terms of world records, art, anything, what do you think is
most interesting – potential, failure, or success?
RM: Potential.
CF: How does your interest in potential correlate to the “the
missing masterpiece?”
RM: Your question contains the answer.
MP: I heard you once sent a papier mâché surrogate to attend
a conference in your place. Was this about the potential of your
presence or were you more present in your absence?
RM: I saw it in a Simpsons’ episode. Bart Simpson creates a latex
replica of himself to sit at his school bench.
CF: Was that gesture also related to space being asphyxiating, or
just conferences?
RM: It just allowed me to be in different places at once.
Sometimes you could not tell the difference between the
surrogate and myself, especially at parties.
CF: Are you Raimundas Malašauskas?
RM: No, I am Dora García.
Dora García (Valladolid, 1965) studied Fine Arts at the University of
Salamanca, Spain, and the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam, Holland.
She lives and works in Brussels, and her particular field of interest
deals with the creation of situations or contexts that serve to alter
the traditional relationship between artist, artwork, and spectator.
Recently she had presentations at the 16th Sydney Biennial, Tate
Modern, and the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London.
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ENEL CONTEMPORANEA.
L’ENERGIA CHE FA NASCERE L’ARTE.
A ROMA E VENEZIA, TORNA L’ENERGIA CREATIVA DI ENEL.
Da sempre, arte ed energia hanno in comune la capacità di guardare avanti e di cercare nuove
fonti di ispirazione. È questo l’obiettivo della seconda edizione di Enel Contemporanea, il progetto
di arte pubblica sulle forme dell’energia. In 3 luoghi simbolici di Roma e Venezia, 3 artisti
internazionali renderanno l’energia protagonista delle loro opere per parlare alla città con
nuovi linguaggi. Enel Contemporanea produce energia creativa. www.enel.it/enelcontemporanea
ASSUME VIVID ASTRO FOCUS, ROMA, LARGO ARGENTINA. A12, VENEZIA, VIALE DEI GIARDINI
PUBBLICI. JEFFREY INABA, ROMA, POLICLINICO UMBERTO I°, DAL 13 NOVEMBRE AL 13 FEBBRAIO.