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When an idea begins
to cast a shadow
What happens
to ideas in time? Jan Verwoert wonders together with Jonathan Monk
at the opening of his retrospective exhibition "Yesterday Today
Tomorrow etc." in Kunstverein Hannover.
JV: In a number
of your works you play on motifs, methods and ideas that relate
to specific art works or artists from the Conceptual and Minimal
Art of the late 1960s and early 1970s. How do you find these ideas?
How do you get inspired?
JM: I think all of these ideas come from books. The inspiration
for "Unrealised Realised" (2003) for instance came from
reading just a short passage of text in the catalogue to a recent
retrospective of David Lamelas' work. There he talks about a work
he did in Paris in 1970 called 'Interview' with Marguerite Duras.
He filmed Marguerite Duras, facing the camera being interviewed,
and took photographs of her while filming. The film and the photograph
were then shown together with the transcribed interview. But in
the text he talks about the idea that he had initially also wanted
to go and film a fashion designer and a politician. He thought about
doing this but never got round to doing it. So when I was invited
for an exhibition at the gallery Yvon Lambert where Lamelas had
originally shown the piece, I decided to ask a fashion model, film
her and take photographs and present the work in a similar way.
So that particular work actually was made from two lines of text.
JV: Realising the unrealised or fulfilling an unfulfilled wish is
a way of reliving a moment of potentiality, right? I think that
going back to these historic moments for us today seems so important
because it was then that the art discourse as it is today was created
through the introduction of new concepts. It's the beginning of
what we still live with, but a beginning that we haven't experienced
directly because we are too young for that. Our experience of art
today is shaped by a moment we didn't experience. That's why we
have this desire to go back to a point before our time. Or do you
think it sounds to romantic to formulate it like that?
JM: No, it's not too romantic. I think this is what we are all,
at least I can say it for myself and maybe a number of others, try
to do, to think back to a time before. This moment could have to
do something with art but it could also be any other historical
event in the not so distant past that may have shaped how we talk
or think now. But I don't think that it is so difficult for us to
feel connected to things that happened just before we were born.
In the same way our parents didn't necessarily go to Woodstock but
they read about it.
JV: So you wouldn't say that these moments give you a sense of melancholia?
JM: No, because I think there are things that we may not be doing
but are for sure witnessing now of which 30 years time people might
say: What happened way back in Glastonbury festival was a really
important moment which shaped the music etc. etc..
JV: But do you get a positive feeling of possibility out of re-visiting
these moments in your own work?
JM: Yes, it may be only as much as looking through a book about
the time will make you think: "Look, 1965 that was made, it's
incredible, it still looks like tomorrow". At the same time
it is great to know, after looking at Lawrence Wiener or Robert
Barry for instance, that it is possible now to just put a text on
the wall or release some gas in the desert and that as long as we
can talk about the work you don't really have to visualise it because
there is nothing to see anyway. But you only have to know that once
to know that anything is possible.
JV: But the a primary reason for making a work, or the function
of the work, is to capture this initial moment of inspiration and
possibility?
JM: Yes, this was certainly the case with the Lamelas piece. A work
I did in relation to Sol LeWitt came much slower. It's called "A
cube Sol LeWitt photographed by Carol Hueber using nine different
light sources and all their combinations front to back to front
forever" (2000). I had worked with the idea of making an animation
out of flipping through a book and realised that, even if it won't
necessarily make sense, you can turn any book into a flip-book and
then into a film. Then I found this Sol LeWitt book "A Cube"
published by Walther Koening in 1990 with photographs by Carol Hueber
of a white cube.
So I made an animation on 16mm film in which you see all the pages
of the book one after another, repeated endlessly in a loop. In
an animation things that look almost the same appear to be moving.
So in this case the shadow produced by the different light sources
wanders continuously on and around the cube.
JV: I like the shadowplay on the cube very much because for me it
captures that feeling of an event of which you only experience the
afermath, its consequences, its shadow. So to invoke that event
you re-play its shadowplay. Another aspect of the work I find interesting
is that by turning the images into a film you place the work in
time. I believe that this is quite significant because Conceptual
Art in a sense was often presented in the form of timeless gestures.
A work was understood as a one-off idea, a sudden stroke of genius,
that is not related to the contiuous time of working in a specific
artistic practice. So the question that Conceptual Art cannot -
or doesn't want to - answer is: How do you get from one work to
the next? What is the time that passes between two ideas? I think
by re-situating the work in time, by showing the time that passes
as an idea begins to cast a shadow and that shadow changes its shape,
you ask the unasked question: What happens to ideas in time?
JM: In relation to this question I currently find it interesting
to look again at what happened in the period from 1975 to 1985 in
the work of people like Sherrie Levine or Richard Prince. During
my art-school time this generation of New York artists was what
we were reading about without realising that their work was post-conceptual
and a reference to what had been happening before. When you think
about how one idea can go to the next idea, you can see with this
generation of post-conceptual artist that most of them were able
to make that step. Richard Prince, for instance, has managed to
continually re-invent himself. There are these artists who are still
ineresting but whose work is not what it was. Still it was them
who did that work. So whatever it is they are doing now, it is still
important if you see the trajectory of how it got to what it is
today.
JV: How do you get from one idea to another?
JM: I think how I manage to do that, whether I will be able to continue
to do so, I'm not sure, is that I work with a bunch of people who
help me realise projects. I tend to leave a lot of the organisation
and even the visual side of the work up to someone else. So I can
work with someone in New York and at the same time make a slightly
different piece in another city. This way everything somehow continues
to go forwards. Being involved with these different people keeps
the excitement up. Sometimes the outcome of a project is not exactly
how I would have liked it to be but then I just accept it.
JV: So the movement from one context to the next makes continuation
and variation possible?
JM: Sure, I think that is the only thing that allows it to go on.
JV: I remember in a conversation with the Glasgow based artist Roderick
Buchanan he said that he felt he belonged to the first generation
of Scottish artists that benefitted from cheap air travel. People
in Italy for instance could afford to as well invite someone from
Glasgow as from somewhere nearby. And that this created a totally
new environment for producing art.
JM: Could be true. But it's also interesting to look at where someone
like Robert Barry did projects in the early 1970s. He would do a
show in Milan followed by a show in Turino and Cologne all within
a few months. He came once from New York, then got the train and
did five shows at a time. But when all that you do is project a
slide or put a text on the wall, it's possible. It may be similiar
to the situation, Roddy, me and other Glasgow artists were in in
the beginning of the 1990s. We didn't actually make anything that
needed to get from point A to point B apart from what you could
easily put it in your pocket. So they would just have to pay the
air-fare to take you to the site of the exhibition where you put
in the DVD or pinned up the picture that you carried in your pocket.
I think this may relate to why Conceptual Art was important: because
it allowed you to travel and do work in different contexts.
JV: But this was also part of the politics of Conceptual Art, that
by choosing not to produce traditional artifacts like paintings
or sculptures you decided against a certain economy in which your
work would otherwise be circulated - like maybe today you would
decide against making Jeff Koons sized extravaganzas...
JM: Oh yes (laughs)
JV: Or would you like to?
JM: I would never have the patience. I don't know how he manages
to control a studio of 30 people making big oil paintings or some
giant puppy made of flowers. I would get bored or frustrated at
the whole bureaucracy of that and just do something else. But I
don't discount that it could happen. I have never said that I am
not going to make a particular thing. Of course, I have taken conscious
decision about what I will present but that doesn't mean that next
year I won't be doing oil paintings. I think such choices are only
interesting if they make things a bit more confusing.
JV: So conceptual choices always depend on a particular context?
JM: Sure.
JV: And what are your criteria?
JM: The criterion mainly is that if someone can do what needs to
be done better than me and quicker, then they might as well do it
better than me and quicker.
JV: I once did a talk with Vito Acconci in which I asked him how
he understood his practice as a Conceptual Art and he said: "I
don't have any particular skills but I know how to use the Yellow
Pages." He described this as a statement against the belief
in the artist as a skilled professional. Do you feel indebted to
this spirit?
JM: Yes, this is also my teaching philosophy: Do not learn how to
do anything. It just gets in your way. If you are really good at
painting you are going to use it more often than something that
you can not do.
JV: Particualr artistic skills and the commitment to a specific
medium were traditionally understood as the basis for the continous
development of an artist's work. "I am a sculptor, I do sculptures
until I die." How do you relate to this moment of continuity
in your work if not through a medium and particular skills?
JM: Some of the work is continuous. There are, for instance, postcards
that I send to a collector in Italy ("Time Piece"). Pictured
on each postcard is a different time, as seen on a clock face that
documents the moment the original picture was taken. I send them
at random and the collectors then put them in order in their collection.
This could go on continuously. One work that eventually came to
an end, although it could have been endless, was a work in which
I tried to guess the name of the collector's mother ("Name
Guessing Piece (mother))". Every week I sent him a letter that
read: Dear so and so. Is your mother's name - then I typed the name,
question mark, signed it, sent it. This work could have gone on
endlessly or it could have only lasted a week. Finally, it took
me three years to guess the name, totally by chance. That's how
I see the continuity.
JV: Does the term 'medium' then have any meaning for you? Is your
medium in this case writing postcards? Or Conceptual Art?
JM: Not really. Maybe art - in general.
JV: How do you relate
then to the people that you address in a work or the artists that
you dedicate a work to?
JM: "Untitled and Unfished (Afghanistan)" (2004) is a
work that relates to Alighiero e Boetti's wish to, after his death,
have his ashes scattered on a particular mountain in Afghanistan.
It turned out that, sadly, Italian law forbids the burial of their
citizens to take place on foreign soil. I read this in a book "Shaman/Showman"
that Boetti's wife Annemarie Sauzeau Boetti wrote. So I sent a Super
8 camera to someone in Kabul and asked them to go to this mountain
range and record the journey. When I showed this project at the
British school in Rome I met Boetti's wife. She was so enthusiastic
about the work that images from the journey are going to be published
in a new edition of her book, the book that inspired the work. It
felt great but also slightly scary when ones work becomes included
back into the history it explores.
JV: This reminds me of an idea Derrida introduces in his book "Specters
of Marx" (1994). He speaks about an ideal conviviality with
ghosts, an ethics of learning to live with ghosts - that could work
as an alternative to a generational model where each generation
has to kill their fathers to proceed. But summoning ghosts is something
you cannot try out in theory. When you call up a ghost and it arrives
you have to deal with it. You cannot say, hey look I just practiced,
go away. Being caught up in the ritual you started is a bit like
becoming entagled in the history you write. I guess you have to
learn to live with the ghost then.
JM: It's about accepting what you ask for. I make that experience
every day in Berlin when I ask for something with my terrible German.
I always have to accept what I'm getting. Normally, it's much better
than what I wanted. I also like it when the character of a work
changes when I talk about it to you, you talk to someone else and
so on. So what people believe the work to be in the end may become
something altogether different. The problem is that this doesn't
happen too often. Today everything is so well documented that we
already think we are writing history. I read in the paper today
that they think they might have found a Michelangelo in a church
somewhere in Chianti. Possibly it is one. Possibly not. They are
not sure. And I think that's great.
Published in Piktogram No. 3, spring 2006.
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