Friday, February 9, 2007

When did you start being involved with art? Was it when you moved to New York?

I had a deep love of music and painting as a child that later became ‘professionalized’ you might say. So my involvement in art is both discursive and affective—I’m interested in art as a fusion of the notional and sensuous, to paraphrase from Hegel, while also as a specific kind of phenomena in the post-Fordist economy. This is why I was drawn to aesthetics as a discipline, as a particular way of conceptualizing the kinds of understanding and experience that arise from art and literature, as say opposed to scientific rationality or metaphysics—but from a simple awe of this very experience as a child.

I mean that while scientific thought claims validity for a specific type of knowledge for example, art is implicitly concerned with the horizon of human experience. Without getting too technical, this arises from a particular philosophical lineage, and out of a need to articulate the place of sense experience and the emotive—that is, what’s left out of the rational project—or as Cartesianism put it, to “naturalize” it. The inception of the term ‘aesthetic’ is an attempt to do just that, to domesticate affect, in terms of rationalizing as a ‘science of sense experience’ what reason supposedly leaves out of it scope, or cannot contain. That was the very experience of art I had when I was four or five—with Bach and church music for example—this seemingly ineffable experience.

That’s made me interested in how art, in this sense, can reveal the possibility of a shared understanding—and this Hegelian idea of art as thought externalizing itself. So the aesthetic as a distinct modality—I’m being general here.

I’ll give you an example: take the “baker transformation” or baker’s map, in physics. It’s based on a chaotic map generated by a simple square shape, which is stretched and then ‘cut’ in half. Stick one half on top of the other, and then continue to alter it again—like kneading dough. With enough change, any two points in the original square will end up in different halves. Now, that has significant implications for a mathematician concerned with probability and determinist chaos, but you can find these very same implications handled in an intuitive, non-mathematic way—through form and narrative---in the films of say Alain Resnais, or in what’s loosely called the postmodern novel. I find that kind of mutual resonance, or confluence, fascinating, and I don’t attach any primacy of one form of articulation over the other—but I am interested in the highly specific, provisional and mediated ‘truth’ that the aesthetic represents in such terms. Say in the sense of moral imperatives gained through literature, or the cathartic function of theatre. Take Huckleberry Finn as an example: the novel, or rather the formal devices of that novel allow us to enter into the psychological world of a slave-holding society, into part of its sociological fabric, and to make us understand the irrationality, inhumanity of that experience—I would argue that it captures the pathologies of that society better than mere historical description, and through the very formal construction of the novel.

In the end it’s what Plato would not tolerate, these claims to knowledge that art should not make. But then again the Platonic frame has already been turned upside down hasn’t it? It’s science that’s concerned with appearances today, not art or metaphysics.

This has a broader implication in terms of the function of the aesthetic as part of a deliberative ethics or of providing for a shared sense of value—which is basically part of what Heidegger argued for. This is one of the most powerful things about art and aesthetics in general. The classic example comes from Kant: In arguing about the beauty of a particular flower, you and I will catch ourselves saying a myriad of things about what we believe the world to be, or should be like. The aesthetic can thus raise an abstract particular to a universal. And in talking about beauty, we are actually talking about justice, etc…

For example, take David’s painting of the Lictors and Brutus----the shared sense of stoic civic duty embodied in that painting and the relevance of this ideology to Republicanism. It’s all there, and would have been unambiguous to a contemporary viewer. And it says scores about the French Revolution that mere prose could not---a lot about its political make-up, but distinctly through painting. That’s something that I could not make sense of until I was older, but it’s what I think I’ve understood about art since childhood.

How is politics implied in the art world today and vice-versa?

That is a really important question---and one that I think is muddled by an inherited, and largely accepted division between politics and aesthetics that I think is false. This is certainly not true for the David painting I mentioned, nor for a lot of Russian art—post-October art, I mean. I’ve alluded to my rejection of this division a bit before—this function of art as providing a shared sense of understanding. The division that’s so easily accepted by a lot of critics is not so clear in the history of philosophy. In fact, one can be seen as directly interrelated with the other, from explicitly, as in Plato’s rejection of poetry within the political community, to indirectly, through say Hanna Arendt’s understanding of the performativity of self-disclosive speech. But what’s really caught up in this distinction are issues of political agency and activism, which I think are misdirected. The political function of art is much deeper than this----even Trotsky, who tried to deduce the revolutionary focus of a proletarian art arising out of bourgeois conditions, understood this.

Rather, it has to do with making visible the complicities between power, ideology and social control—including what I would call our own ‘internal fascism’, our need or willingness to be led and cede authority---and the seemingly autonomous realm of cultural production. Take the political function of twelve-tonic music for Adorno. He saw in it an example of the way art might break the pattern of how society sustains itself, that is how it remains resistant to radical change through co-opting resistance as a false negation. The devices of art can thus be used to deal with the nature of social reality, to dismantle the very contradictions that ideology works to conceal. In helping see through these established patterns, any work that punches through this ideological web of familiarity is political.

Both politics and beauty, in this sense, involve a dialectic rather than an opposition, that is they open up ideas about what kind of things should be done, included, excluded etc, within a particular community. In this way, art can inspire collective experience in a way that I think our political life no longer can, to get to the vice-versa part of your question.

Politics itself only becomes a possibility with the institution of a community, where a community itself begins with something in common, some shared logos. What is needed for political action is a shared site, a place where politics becomes a possibility. This is what makes art political in our era—the possibility of this space. Russian artists today understand this firsthand----it’s perhaps one of the only realms of real political discourse. Or take the use of Abstract Expressionism in the cultural wars against communism. The question is thus not about the opposition between aesthetics and politics, but whether we are creating the conditions for this space of appearances, to use Arendt’s terms, of the political or not. I think the most pressing political concerns in the art world today is in fact the same of early political theory: who is represented, and how?

Do you keep updated on the Portuguese art world? What’s your opinion on the artistic scene over there?

Very much so. I’m particularly interested in the diasporic condition of Portuguese artists, and the relationship of contemporary art to the projections of national identity—the governing myths that set up a singular political identity in the face of the common European project. Of course there is also the longstanding experience of immigration that relates to the condition of Portuguese artists today---this idea of going abroad to study or to exhibit. I’m an émigré and write in a language that was completely unfamiliar to me while until I was in my teens, and a language not tied to any of my formative experiences culturally speaking---so this condition is something which I relate to. I look at Portuguese art through this cracked glass, to use Joyce’s metaphor for Irish culture.

What is it to curate? Do you think of it as art?

I often want to answer that question in purely pragmatic terms: to curate exhibitions. But even that simple answer is so tautological that it simply doesn’t mean anything…I certainly do not think of it as art at all---and the journalistic tag about the “curator as artist” phenomenon seems to me a symptom of the collapse of the old divisions of labor in a metastasizing art world. This is also related to the decreasing place for criticism in the era of user-generated content and opinion. I say that as someone who works as a critic for a newspaper, and who has a real respect for that public sphere—but nonetheless, it’s true.

It is strange how the curatorial function is actually privileged by the choice-governed ethos of information-capitalism---the mass-democracy of taste where having an opinion is now analogous to having the authority to express it. The same person who makes the content is the one who passes judgment—something that Nietzche desperately argued for actually: aesthetics of the maker rather than the spectator. This supposed technological democracy—the blogger, YouTube type of democracy—creates a pluralistic conversation that levels opinion into consensus.

But the logic of curatorial practice is actually supported by this democratization, because it’s not about having an opinion but selecting, editing, and presenting ‘content’ from within a seemingly endless array or profusion of things. Aggregation is both a business and a conceptual model. So this ‘curator function’ is actually part of a larger pattern of how information and media is now consumed and also produced. But few people remember that there was supposedly a ‘crisis,’ a well theorized one actually, in curatorial practice in the 1980s…which is where this badly appropriated ‘auteur’ theory comes from. The scale of the art world today muddles divisions of labor further, to make matters worse.

Actually, all that is part of the history of the term—the curator as cultural broker is not a new phenomenon at all. It’s always been related to the larger function of safeguarding, contextualizing, and presenting art. But the origin of the curator, under the Roman Empire I mean, was that of being in charge of public projects, or maintaining a kind of civic order----this becomes largely religious in the Middle Ages.

I’m much more concerned with practical limitations and taking risks---following an unpredictable path through what artists are making and doing, and open to the possibility of productive failure. But I always try to bring to an exhibition a sensitive understanding of an artist’s work, a responsible, articulated understanding of practice, and put that into a context. My biggest fear is of being stuck in the temptation of the new. I think one of the defining things about curatorial practice today is the idea of thinking in this future anterior mode, the “what will have been,” in historical terms. It’s a way to be continuously seduced by the present, by the new—which is a trap. Rather, I’m interested in the spaces of mediation, and in fact, in mediators---as in collaborative frameworks and multidisciplinary methodology. An exhibition is always a site of exchange.

I also think that it entails thinking critically, or reflexively, about history and the nature of exhibitions and art-making, rather than about the function of the curator in some ahistorical way. I mean, the institutions that show art have to do with the growth of urban wealth that gave rises to the idea of artistic labor as a productive activity subject to market competition----from the Middle Ages on. So being a curator involves addressing the spaces this entails, I mean institutional, creative, financial, theoretical, and public space as well as literal. But first and foremost, I think it’s about bringing to bear a certain visual acuity and contextual thinking, a sense of history and of space, which for me all entails a sincere dedication to what artists are doing. My committed curiosity really extends to that and what this can say about what art is or can be----so my answer is to curate exhibitions.

Can you talk about Dice Thrown (Will Never Annul Chance), the show you recently curated in New York, at Bellwether Gallery?

That show is the perfect example of what I was just trying to articulate. It arose from thinking about how the history of photography had been constructed, and what I saw as a rupture within that accepted narrative, particularly in terms of photography in post-conceptual practice. Both modernism and conceptual art have dominated the critical discussion of photography, while largely missing the actual character of contemporary photography as it actually exists. I saw artists making work that bypassed much of this ground----something that happens a lot. So I followed their lead, try to make sense of it and put it together, while keeping the concerns of each artist distinct. There was no totalizing theme, nothing to cut short what each practice was involved in---simply a heuristic based on their own work, their own practice, but that had not been articulated by them collectively nor by curators or critics, at least in my understanding. So it was a show about the break from the way conceptual artists relegated photography to architectonic uses, but also amending the accepted shifts in moving photography away from modernism and of the loss of an empirical, objective relationship with reality. It was about a conceptual space specific to photography as a medium.

What are the responsibilities of the art critic now, in NY? What is your opinion on the relation between the art market and the art practice, being the artistic also deeply interconnected with the curatorial practice?

I think a lot of art criticism today is bogged down by a normative fallacy. Many critics today are neurotically trying to establish a domain of influence, trying to stake out a claim, say by articulating how criticism should be effective against the market, rather than articulating their implicit project. Why is it that now that we so openly talk about the collusion of art and business is when we want criticism to have its most avant-garde function?

In any case, a lot of critics fall prey to at least one fallacy as result, in believing criticism is null. What’s implicit in that idea is basically a refusal, a normative fallacy revolving around the idea that the work of art, or the art market, should be other than it is, or that it can and should be corrected somehow through criticism---as if the critic stands outside of these operations. Do you see what I mean? It’s a kind of refusal, or resistance to dealing with art on its own terms, or this belief that something went wrong in the making that is to be corrected in the critical act. This dissatisfaction is why there much more description that interpretation; interpretation involves actually enclosing the object of inquiry, while description falls prey to the empiricist fallacy, as if the work exist merely as a series of facts to be described, contained in language, and thus assimilated. It makes art immanent to consumption, subject to the heresy of paraphrase.

I find that troubling---as much as the belief that the work of art is some form of expressive psychology to be decrypted, for example. As a critic, I might be interested in the possibility of a difference, in the possibility of a meaning beyond what a form or a gesture pertains to be---as Nietzche put it, what we’re hiding when we say what we say---but not as corrective. I mean, for example, to what extent are Cezanne’s apples all that concerned with being accurate depictions of apples? Like Barnett Newman said, they’re not apples, they’re cannon balls! Moby Dick is a really poor book as far whaling books go and Leibnitz’s theory of monads won’t help you figure out how to program your TiVo exactly, even if it’s about instructions----you see what I mean? Even if my examples are getting increasingly perverse…

I’m interested in resistance and criticality to be sure---but I don’t see an effect on the market as a barometer of either one of those things. I think that’s to badly misunderstand the fact that art has always been in dialectical, and ultimately, creative tension with whatever economic reality it arises in. In the end, that’s hardly the horizon of human experience.

It’s about publics, not markets. We should be trying to deal with the decreasing public sphere, not convince the market that something isn’t valuable enough to circulate. That’s bad Keynesian economics. Our real threat is probably informationalized mass entertainment, not the art market, although it does have a way of kind of shifting focus, like the Mercator projection on a map----maybe not a bad metaphor actually.

I suppose honesty and clarity are the pressing responsibilities in my opinion—certainly not being enamored of the new constantly, and not to write as if only for one’s peers. That’s the real threat to critical relevance.

Who decides what art is? Is it true, like a former Tate director once said, that a career can be built through actual and consistent encouragement?

I’m not an essentialist, which normally weighs the question to the side of pluralism, which I’m not an advocate for either, so I don’t have a definition for what art is in those terms, or of who gets to decide. …but I don’t think anyone is deciding---- I have a problem with the way that question is formulated most of the time, because it implies centralized authority and a definition----neither are true. Heidegger suggested that an event could just as easily be as work of art as the Winged Victory of Samothrace. Ask an art advisor and you get a very different answer.

Having a successful career is not synonymous or interchangeable with making relevant or even interesting art, so I don’t understand the relationship of your two questions necessarily.

Young artists as businessmen and businesswomen. Should there be college formation on that area too, in fine arts, skills for dealing with a tough market? Today many artists are into real business ― some showing devotion for rentable formulas, instead of the free and ever changing practice of a lifework in art.

Now where getting somewhere! I think that the professionalization of the art world answers your question about who is deciding what art is: no one. Since there is no objective criteria in a metastasizing, pluralistic art world with a ‘ineffectual’ critical sphere, so the story goes, degrees are a new standard bearer. There’s been an intense period of growth in the art world, which has been concomitant with the rise of the professionalization of art. It’s like the French Revolution, it’s hard to tell when it started to go wrong…There are a lot of mitigating factors for this---an economic picture which I don’t want to detail, because the bond market and Bush tax cuts are too boring to talk about here----but it has created a collapse of value, or rather an emphasis on specific value, like an MFA degree. Money is the great equator right? Well perhaps it can help launder privilege into authority.

I think more important is to address the logic of artistic labor in the supposed self-determining, post-Fordist global market. What does it mean that artists, or for that matter curators, are given rights, such as that of circulation, denied to other political subjects? Even artists who aren’t business minded are still positioned within this remapping of labor....What do we do with that?....it’s an inevitable political existence.