Other Art Monthly events
I am hoping that this conversation will allow some reflection on the art history that has been made in this area. I would also be very interested to hear what Seth Siegelaub has been doing since his strong involvement - which has been written up by art historians such as Alexander Alberro and others - in the moment of Conceptual Art. There are many 20th-century figures who have made exemplary exits: Lubetkin, for example, after making some great architecture, went off and spent the last 20 years of his life raising pigs and living in a medieval farmhouse. Seth Siegelaub has made, as far as I know, an exemplary exit from the art of his time and continued his work in other areas, in scholarship, in political research and activism and in the area of artists' rights.
Putting Pavel Büchler and Seth Siegelaub together was matchmaking on Art Monthly's part. They don't know each other but we perceived certain points of common interest, notably an interest in the professionalisation of the artist and in the productive and substantial doubts that Conceptual Art introduced. Pavel has always been somewhat ambivalent in his commitment to the idea of 'being an artist', it is part of his project; and Seth has, as I have explained, left the art world. Pavel Büchler: I remember reading in an interview that initially the projects that you were involved in were done for friends.
Seth Siegelaub: When someone makes a work of art they are addressing a relatively small group of people who share their interests, their excitement, their philosophy, and sometimes, their house. You can't address a person with your art without having commonality, shared cultural heritage and so forth. But I do think that the works that were done in my generation, about 40 years ago, had shared a common aspiration to get out of the limited context of what was then the art world.
However, it is important that you understand that the art world has changed so dramatically, qualitatively and especially quantitatively, so that you are talking about a completely other world. When you speak about projects addressing only a few people, you could actually say the art world then consisted of less of everything as it was much smaller: fewer artists, fewer collectors, fewer art restaurants, fewer art bars, fewer art schools. It was very different and much more, for a lack of a better word, it was a type of ghetto. Even this relatively small group of people were divided into clans and groups, stylistically, politically and so on. But one of the fundamental aspirations of my generation was to produce an art that went beyond the confines of the territory of the art world, which was the underlying concern leading to an attempt to deal with concepts, materials, new modes of communication. This didn't just include what is now called 'Conceptual Art', it included graffiti, it included street activities including guerrilla art on the streets. There were many attempts to break out of the standard assumption of a formalised space painted white.
It should be remembered that the mid- to late-1960s was a tumultuous period both in terms of the general political environment, particularly the Vietnam war, and more generally in the academic environment. Perhaps even more important was the philosophy and success of theorists like Marshall McLuhan: 'The medium is the message' was all over the place.
Much of the art, in part because of its lesser materiality - I won't say immaterial because it wasn't entirely that - was attempting to get the essence of a work of art to people without going through the machinery - formal hangings, spatial conditioning etc - which the art world was limited to by traditional paintings and even sculpture. I agree that artists of that generation spoke to people who were sympathetic to them. They shared ideas and worked together on projects, and this took on an added political character because of the resistance against the Vietnam War. But the primary motivating factors were to get beyond the limited frame of the art world, and to open up the art-making possibilities intellectually and to get away from the small coterie. People of all professions tend to hang out with others in their profession which, while perhaps necessary, was not particularly interesting, especially during the late 1960s.
PB: This is partly where my generation, subsequent to yours, back in Czechoslovakia and I think in the rest of Eastern Europe, misunderstood the message of dematerialised art, and those processes, practices and attempts to break the bounds of the art world. We had a different set of constraints - in fact the last thing that we were interested in was that anyone would notice what we were doing. This idea that a photograph of a reel-to-reel tape deck on a trestle table is art was incredibly liberating. The only thing that we could understand was that it was OK to make art that was not painting or sculpture, which really was helpful, because what the hell do you do with a painting or a sculpture in a society where you can only show it in an environment that is totally regulated not by the art work, not by commercial interests, but by the political apparatus that controls everything else?
Something other than painting was needed. And so what those paradigms freed us to do, was to pursue a kind of aesthetic: poetic experimentation as a means of keeping art going until we were able to breathe more freely - if that ever happened. Something other than painting was needed. Whether it was seen or whether it was not seen, or whether we just discussed it in a café didn't really bother us too much.
Interestingly this was done in a very tiny network of relationships, a few friends who then told somebody else, who told somebody else, that's how things got around. But at the same time there was something which I think was quite unique: these things actually happened in the public eye except that nobody knew that they were happening. That was almost the whole idea. People were doing happenings, performances, interventions, all kinds of things like that in the public realm, because we understood that art needs this public moment or there is no art. These works did have a public moment but since the society we were in had no art world there was no discussion by any media, there was no criticism, no newspapers, no magazines, nobody was saying: 'But is this art?'. Everything was in full view but nobody knew what it was. I think that's how wires got crossed, we got confused. We saw what we were doing as - well now I would say as a genuinely political activity but then I wouldn't have used that word - a form of engagement, a form of protest against the political reality that was around us. But we certainly were not thinking of liberating ourselves from the existing terms of art or of the existing forms of distribution because they didn't exist.
SS: It's not that far away from what we were doing - the two different societies have their own specificity but there are certain characteristics in the practices and the creation of these works of art that are extremely important in opening up to a more general public. We questioned certain formal aspects and opened up the possible types of materials involved, which made it possible for anybody to be an artist. You didn't have to buy a stretcher or canvas, which in addition could be very expensive to buy and to store. The nature of uniqueness in art, of property values in art were also questioned. Those two things were particularly revolutionary and threatening to the logic of capitalism.
Now, of course there has been a 'sell-out' of these artists, but over and above what one may think of a given artists' trajectory in the capitalist art world, that had to do with the evolution of the art world itself, it didn't necessarily have to do with the work that was being created. During that period, the art world was a pimple on the arse of capitalism, but since then it has become part of that system, it has absorbed its values, its excesses, the type of staging and presentation of art. The lifestyle too, has changed. Fundamentally, in my opinion, art has simply become another profession. I'm not saying that an artist can earn a living all the time but it's now possible. When I was around no artist thought of himself or herself as a being a professional activity. It was more like a calling, something that they had a profound desire to do. This extended beyond the so-called radical artists to anybody painting anything, even a portrait of the Queen, was considered a bohemian, some type of weird or strange person. The image of the artist has evolved dramatically, both by a general public as well as the self-image of the artists themselves.
PB: But isn't this part of the professionalisation of everything? In fact you can look at it the other way and say that the art world is the last remaining unregulated sector of capitalist enterprise. It is really the most ruthless business, there is no OffArt, the office of whatever where you complain when you buy a rogue work of art, when you were misled by the title. Nobody defends the customer's rights. Nobody regulates the prices. You could say that it is the least professionalised zone of activity. Unlike many other fields of human endeavour where we can talk about professionalisation whether it be law, medicine, science or education, which is thoroughly professional, there still is a sense as an artist that you are doing something that nobody asked you to do. It is not completely driven by supply and demand. It is lagging behind, no doubt it will become professionalised just like education, where you need a licence. At the very least you still don't need a licence as an artist. But there is that kind of convention, the convention of artistic licence where you are expected to perform in a certain way - as though you are not a professional. Artistic licence is a metaphor and it is founded on the idea that the freedom of the artist stands for and tests the freedom of the wider society.
SS: I don't think that you can quite say that any more because I don't recognise that freedom. For example, education: most artists are now young professionals coming from educational institutions, whereas in my generation they were more like a species of dropout or hippy. They wanted to make are because they wanted to do it, and maybe the family had money, maybe your wife (or more rarely, a husband) worked to support you. But now it has become different. There are so many art schools now which legitimatise, authorise and support the production of a certain type of 'artist', and, even if they aren't handing out MBAs in fine art, it's the connections and friendships one makes which count. Things are not the same.
When we were growing up the principal immediate model for the art world was rock music. Rock music was well on the way to becoming a very successful industry and the successful artists were being treated in that way, as so-called 'stars'. Dance was also on the rise, but to a lesser degree because it was probably more expensive, more communal. More recently art has been snuggling up to both design and fashion: annual, semi-annual shows, monthly shows, Fall season, Spring season, and so on. You are absolutely correct that the art world has been a little bit slow to take on fully capitalist values but, I am sure it is doing its very best to catch up...
PB: ... No, I think the capitalist values are there, for better or worse - I would say for worse - but it's not just professionalisation. It is something to do with the administered character of economic, political and social culture, which is becoming more tightly controlled day by day. Politicians over the last decade seemingly believe in progress through prohibitive legislation. You don't hear of them decriminalising anything, or saying go out and enjoy yourselves, do something. They say do something as long as it is within these parameters. Over the last ten years in this country more than one thousand new criminal offences were defined. Who would have thought we would need them all? Rape, murder, burglary, theft, what more do you need? One thousand new offences, imagine that. No artist has an imagination great enough to come up with that. This is happening in society at large and the art world is trying to stay away from it - there is a parasitic use of artistic licence, it is trying not to submit to regulation. The values of rampant capitalism are very much there.
You talked about rock music in the 60s, and that is really interesting because it could never be the model now. The art world has been academicised, through critical discourse. The relationship between the educational system, the industry and the art market is partly founded on such concepts of research. All of that moves it far away from the idea of rock music.
SS: But the internalisation of many of these values is also very very strong and has been pointed out a hundred years ago about journalism, about progressive journalists working for Beaverbrook. You didn't have to tell them what to do, where the line was in the sand that they couldn't cross. While it's true that in a legal sense the art world is still unregulated, there are a number of unwritten rules. There are certain things that you do to be successful. Young artists today have strategies for inserting themselves into the art world history, following a line. I have the impression that to be an artist today is a much more conscious activity.
IH: Wasn't that in a way part of what your involvement with a particular group of artists dramatised? You were revealing some of the mechanisms of the profession.
SS: In certain aspects of the art, and maybe the most important aspects of the art, we were trying to make the processes more transparent, to take more responsibility. To take a banal example, most artists paint or sculpt a work and then put it out into the world and say 'my job is over' and let the world deal with it in any way they can or want. There was an attempt by artists to take responsibility for these kinds of issues - the presentation, on exhibition, and the sale of a work, and especially with works which had a high degree of immateriality, and attempted to deal with the mechanics of the sale or use of artworks. These were clear issues, and my personal history in dealing with them is only one aspect of a very broad series of issues concerning the production of contemporary art. Furthermore, the context was very different between the United States and Europe, not to speak of the rest of the world, which I personally had almost no contact with.
PB: The problem maybe is not that artists have strategies to try and succeed. The difference is in the tactics not in the strategy. For instance the idea that the artist has some kind of responsibility to the work after it has left the studio - that is a strategic position. The question is how you go about it. Art of course is all about tactics. Art is a tactical preoccupation. You are right there is a shift - I see a lot of people, a lot of young artists trying to make it in the art world - the shift is to things like: how you write your CV, how you get sponsorship, how you place yourself, how you get this residency or that research funding. The tactical tools, or the instruments that are tactically used to pursue those strategies, might have shifted. I think the artists of your generation where just as strategic, it is only that the tactics were was different.
SS: I don't think so - and I'm not saying that there weren't Machiavellian intentions in some of them in some ways but it was a less conscious part of what we were doing. We were still living a pivotal period which was like a hinge between the end of the old 19th-century idea of art making - contesting and reacting against the values of the previous generation - and something else unknown, still coming in the future. Art has become much more cerebral. Artists seem to know today that they have a short and shorter 'use-by date' in which they have to get it 'right' very quickly, to claim their aesthetic ground and to get it out to a public. This type of pressure was something we hardly didn't have. Our generation still thought they they could do something now, and later something else, and 10 or 15 years later, they could evolve - for better or worse - like Frank Stella or Picasso. I don't think the art world affords the possibility for artists to work through a whole series of changes, or even stylistic developments, today. Today artists, like boxers for example, have to get it right first time and hope that they can pay the bills for the rest of their lives.
PB: If you want to succeed in the art world you can't have a career without having a practice, but you can have a practice without a career. I agree with what you are saying to the extent that there are things that the artists has to do now - conditions of 'making it' in whatever the art world or whatever the sector is. I started as an artist for two reasons. One was that I was far too lazy to get up in the morning and go to work in an office somewhere - but, mind you, in Czechoslovakia the working day was not 9am until 5pm, it was 6am until 3pm which is really horrible, especially when all the bars stay open until 3am. Being an artist is pretty much the only profession where you could claim the right to stay in bed. The second reason, which is more serious, is that I realised that someone has to do it, particularly in a place where only a few people are doing it. I think those motivations are still what drives people now - not necessarily that they are going to make a living, and not just lying-in in the morning - But that they are living a kind of lifestyle that has freedom and is seemingly independent. Of course it is not independent but it feels independent. There is a job to be done and the job description keeps changing all the time. Every generation tries to rewrite it or reread it. And when you look at those kind of motivations, 'Why is it that I get up every morning and do something as useless and as futile as making art in a studio?' I think then the things that you must do to succeed appear differently. You don't have to make art, you don't have to be successful. You can have some other job, or some other kind of income. When you look at it that way I think that the changes you are talking about are actually different. They are changes in motivation, or they are changes in how we understand what the job of the artist in society is.
IH: What might have happened to the possibilities for solidarity as a result of this changed relationship to art?
SS: It is difficult to say. I think there could be today a much greater inter-relationship and, for lack of a better word, 'feedback' between what an artist is doing and the public. There is a lot of potential here. When I say that the art world has become more integrated into the values of capitalism, this cuts both ways; it also has a dialectical side. It also can affect those values much more. It can really kick arse if the moment is right - but don't ask me what that moment might be. But it is certainly possible that art and the artist is more vulnerable and perhaps more powerful because they are is so attached to the 'real world'.
PB: I am not quite sure what you mean when you say 'solidarity', are you talking about solidarity within the project of art or solidarity of the artist with the world?
IH: I am interested in those areas of solidarity that artworks can convey, where the audience is included not as a consumer but as a part of the making of meaning. In relation to the explicitness by both of you, in different ways, on the presentation and the afterlife of artworks and their contracts and so on. There is another contract which is the most fundamental of all: how an audience is addressed or recognised. At the moment we have a potential space within which audiences can be recognised and another one that is based on the mechanism of publicity which is 'here is my work'.
PB: I don't have difficulty with the idea of solidarity in the internal relations within the project of art, those internal relations of course can improve audiences, participation, viewership and so on. But I am not sure that solidarity is the kind of word that I would use. I am just trying to think whether you can have solidarity without ideology. I'm not sure you can. I think that there has to be an ideological or philosophical framework for solidarity to be a meaningful term. I know what you mean, forms of participation, for instance, become the forms of expression and communication. They become constitutive, say, of a piece of work, though it is still 'here is my work, you can complete it' or 'here is my scenario'. Those are formal relationships. Even in extreme cases like Allan Kaprow - I had the privilege of seeing his great retrospective which is touring at the moment - even at its best, at its craziest, it is his. It is still Allan Kaprow's work. It is still the artist getting you to do something, maybe for your own good but it is still him getting you to do it.
SS: I think if you had to look at it perhaps in a more simplistic way it would just be that somebody, somewhere, somehow just began to pick up or to respond to a critical project and transform it into their life.
IH: The way in which art is circulated - and this is something that you have both been involved in, forms of publication and distribution and so on - has had at some points the possibility of becoming something different, a very different kind of relationship with the purchaser.
SS: It may have been illusory. We had the idea that we would be selling what is now called 'artist's books' at train stations and so on but I don't think that really happened. A lot of the formalistic aspects - that art is not necessarily tied to individual ownership - were to do with making you think about what's going on all around you, who could make art, and if you really needed a licence. These were the barriers which were broken down. It wasn't about a mad genius sitting in a studio, but the possibility for anyone to get out and to be able to do something. This had some influence. People began to think, 'if that guy can get away with that, well, me too'. Obviously the constraints of the formalised art world - the business of the art world - condition the number of people whose work can be seen, but it's exactly like the possibilities of the internet: anyone can do anything they want but only a few will be really be heard. The idea that anyone can get up and do what they want is definitely something to aim for, all the same.
IH: Seth, could you briefly speak about some of the other areas that you have been involved in?
SS: My interest in the art world lasted from 1964 to 1971. I left the art world and the United States in the spring of 1972. My personal history had to do with being involved with a small group of artists and gradually expanded into cultural-political concerns involved with more general social problems. I gradually withdrew from the art world. Eventually in the early 1970s I was involved in trying to do a left news agency/newspaper, which eventually evolved into doing research on the history, theory and practice of leftwing communication. Due to personal circumstances I went to live in Paris. I was very struck by what Pavel was saying about getting up early in the morning. I get up early, I get up at seven o'clock, but I like the illusion of liberty of having the freedom to decide what time I get up. And if there is one lesson that art and artists have taught me personally is that it is possible to live under the illusion of freedom.
There is also another thing I should mention in passing about one's personal history, one's voyage through the world. One of the reasons that I left the art world was because there is certain model of success that must be followed if you are not to be considered an idiot and it is that you always have to grow, you have to get a bigger space, more artists, the floors have to be cleaned better, you have to get two secretaries, then you have to get four secretaries, you have to get a branch in Los Angeles and so on. So there is a certain kind of logic, and if you don't want to follow it you really have to leave. If one has a certain success, one is faced with this choice: do I want to become a caricature of myself or not; do I want to continue doing the same thing forever? My solution to this problem was doing different projects which interested me for one reason or another, that take 10-15 years each and to try to make a living from them. After I left the art world I went into publishing and published political books, set up a media research centre, and then somewhere in the early 1980s I got involved in textile research, especially its bibliographic history. What particularly struck me about textile research, and the history of textiles, was the more anonymous and collective nature of textile art within that history. I continue working on this up until now and I have recently started working on researching a project involving certain aspects of physics. I allow myself this kind of possibility to explore and to try learn about and investigate a subject, to try and do something which has not been done before - it takes a few years to figure that out - and to be able to that to my satisfaction. And then I move on.
Audience question: How has the notion of quality changed from the 60s until now?
SS: I thought then and I think now that quality is a battle to be fought. It is something that you have to fight for and impose. It has something to do with the social consensus. There are certain very ugly business mechanisms that enter into this fight but the most important aspect of quality in art is how it influences other artists, especially younger artists - the next generation. I am speaking as someone who was around art and who was involved in its exhibition. In a cynical way, there are certain steps that one has to go though, to get something appreciated and included in the history of art, because if the work is not seen and understood as part of a given historical moment at a certain point it gets lost.
PB: Art is really concerned with the definition of quality. Every artwork is trying to define what you mean by quality. And it's one of those contradictions that the privilege of art is to be totally useless. It's amazing. You can get a social license and everybody respects you. You can behave in a slightly odd way, in a way that would be totally unacceptable outside the art world, why? Because you are this guy who is doing this useless thing, which precisely because it is useless is the most difficult thing to do.
With quality it is the same thing. You cannot have any criteria that are fixed. They are like chewing gum or something. The criteria of quality are never a priori. It is true that artists compete against themselves, against history, but there are no rules for that competition. To answer your question - well I can't answer it - but to address your question about the shift in quality, there isn't one. They say you can measure the greatness of an artist by what his or her work allows other people to do. But that is only applicable historically, so if one is talking about a recent shift it is very difficult - you need a couple of generations to work it out.
SS: And if you think otherwise, you are living in a Candide ' like best of all possible' worlds, where the best artists are the most well-known artists, those who are shown in the Museum of Modern Art (pick your own important museum) because the Museum of Modern Art is the best museum. You get a circular logic that always has to be questioned, though after it gets to a certain level of historical acceptance, it is very difficult to get rid of. People may retrospectively be deemed important, but establishing a work of art is always a fight.
Seth Siegelaub and Pavel Büchler in conversation, chaired by Ian Hunt
This Art Monthly event took place at Spike Island in Bristol on October 27, 2007. The conversation was chaired by Ian Hunt. Ian Hunt: Seth Siegelaub is well known for his work in promoting and presenting early Conceptual Art in New York, notably the grouping of Robert Barry, Douglas Huebler, Joseph Kosuth and Lawrence Weiner. Pavel Büchler, as an artist working in Czechoslovakia, followed this work, among that of others; I remember him saying once that when he first saw, in Paris, how big works by Kosuth actually were, he realised he should not have spent so long back in Czechoslavakia making tiny little things.I am hoping that this conversation will allow some reflection on the art history that has been made in this area. I would also be very interested to hear what Seth Siegelaub has been doing since his strong involvement - which has been written up by art historians such as Alexander Alberro and others - in the moment of Conceptual Art. There are many 20th-century figures who have made exemplary exits: Lubetkin, for example, after making some great architecture, went off and spent the last 20 years of his life raising pigs and living in a medieval farmhouse. Seth Siegelaub has made, as far as I know, an exemplary exit from the art of his time and continued his work in other areas, in scholarship, in political research and activism and in the area of artists' rights.
Putting Pavel Büchler and Seth Siegelaub together was matchmaking on Art Monthly's part. They don't know each other but we perceived certain points of common interest, notably an interest in the professionalisation of the artist and in the productive and substantial doubts that Conceptual Art introduced. Pavel has always been somewhat ambivalent in his commitment to the idea of 'being an artist', it is part of his project; and Seth has, as I have explained, left the art world. Pavel Büchler: I remember reading in an interview that initially the projects that you were involved in were done for friends.
Seth Siegelaub: When someone makes a work of art they are addressing a relatively small group of people who share their interests, their excitement, their philosophy, and sometimes, their house. You can't address a person with your art without having commonality, shared cultural heritage and so forth. But I do think that the works that were done in my generation, about 40 years ago, had shared a common aspiration to get out of the limited context of what was then the art world.
However, it is important that you understand that the art world has changed so dramatically, qualitatively and especially quantitatively, so that you are talking about a completely other world. When you speak about projects addressing only a few people, you could actually say the art world then consisted of less of everything as it was much smaller: fewer artists, fewer collectors, fewer art restaurants, fewer art bars, fewer art schools. It was very different and much more, for a lack of a better word, it was a type of ghetto. Even this relatively small group of people were divided into clans and groups, stylistically, politically and so on. But one of the fundamental aspirations of my generation was to produce an art that went beyond the confines of the territory of the art world, which was the underlying concern leading to an attempt to deal with concepts, materials, new modes of communication. This didn't just include what is now called 'Conceptual Art', it included graffiti, it included street activities including guerrilla art on the streets. There were many attempts to break out of the standard assumption of a formalised space painted white.
It should be remembered that the mid- to late-1960s was a tumultuous period both in terms of the general political environment, particularly the Vietnam war, and more generally in the academic environment. Perhaps even more important was the philosophy and success of theorists like Marshall McLuhan: 'The medium is the message' was all over the place.
Much of the art, in part because of its lesser materiality - I won't say immaterial because it wasn't entirely that - was attempting to get the essence of a work of art to people without going through the machinery - formal hangings, spatial conditioning etc - which the art world was limited to by traditional paintings and even sculpture. I agree that artists of that generation spoke to people who were sympathetic to them. They shared ideas and worked together on projects, and this took on an added political character because of the resistance against the Vietnam War. But the primary motivating factors were to get beyond the limited frame of the art world, and to open up the art-making possibilities intellectually and to get away from the small coterie. People of all professions tend to hang out with others in their profession which, while perhaps necessary, was not particularly interesting, especially during the late 1960s.
PB: This is partly where my generation, subsequent to yours, back in Czechoslovakia and I think in the rest of Eastern Europe, misunderstood the message of dematerialised art, and those processes, practices and attempts to break the bounds of the art world. We had a different set of constraints - in fact the last thing that we were interested in was that anyone would notice what we were doing. This idea that a photograph of a reel-to-reel tape deck on a trestle table is art was incredibly liberating. The only thing that we could understand was that it was OK to make art that was not painting or sculpture, which really was helpful, because what the hell do you do with a painting or a sculpture in a society where you can only show it in an environment that is totally regulated not by the art work, not by commercial interests, but by the political apparatus that controls everything else?
Something other than painting was needed. And so what those paradigms freed us to do, was to pursue a kind of aesthetic: poetic experimentation as a means of keeping art going until we were able to breathe more freely - if that ever happened. Something other than painting was needed. Whether it was seen or whether it was not seen, or whether we just discussed it in a café didn't really bother us too much.
Interestingly this was done in a very tiny network of relationships, a few friends who then told somebody else, who told somebody else, that's how things got around. But at the same time there was something which I think was quite unique: these things actually happened in the public eye except that nobody knew that they were happening. That was almost the whole idea. People were doing happenings, performances, interventions, all kinds of things like that in the public realm, because we understood that art needs this public moment or there is no art. These works did have a public moment but since the society we were in had no art world there was no discussion by any media, there was no criticism, no newspapers, no magazines, nobody was saying: 'But is this art?'. Everything was in full view but nobody knew what it was. I think that's how wires got crossed, we got confused. We saw what we were doing as - well now I would say as a genuinely political activity but then I wouldn't have used that word - a form of engagement, a form of protest against the political reality that was around us. But we certainly were not thinking of liberating ourselves from the existing terms of art or of the existing forms of distribution because they didn't exist.
SS: It's not that far away from what we were doing - the two different societies have their own specificity but there are certain characteristics in the practices and the creation of these works of art that are extremely important in opening up to a more general public. We questioned certain formal aspects and opened up the possible types of materials involved, which made it possible for anybody to be an artist. You didn't have to buy a stretcher or canvas, which in addition could be very expensive to buy and to store. The nature of uniqueness in art, of property values in art were also questioned. Those two things were particularly revolutionary and threatening to the logic of capitalism.
Now, of course there has been a 'sell-out' of these artists, but over and above what one may think of a given artists' trajectory in the capitalist art world, that had to do with the evolution of the art world itself, it didn't necessarily have to do with the work that was being created. During that period, the art world was a pimple on the arse of capitalism, but since then it has become part of that system, it has absorbed its values, its excesses, the type of staging and presentation of art. The lifestyle too, has changed. Fundamentally, in my opinion, art has simply become another profession. I'm not saying that an artist can earn a living all the time but it's now possible. When I was around no artist thought of himself or herself as a being a professional activity. It was more like a calling, something that they had a profound desire to do. This extended beyond the so-called radical artists to anybody painting anything, even a portrait of the Queen, was considered a bohemian, some type of weird or strange person. The image of the artist has evolved dramatically, both by a general public as well as the self-image of the artists themselves.
PB: But isn't this part of the professionalisation of everything? In fact you can look at it the other way and say that the art world is the last remaining unregulated sector of capitalist enterprise. It is really the most ruthless business, there is no OffArt, the office of whatever where you complain when you buy a rogue work of art, when you were misled by the title. Nobody defends the customer's rights. Nobody regulates the prices. You could say that it is the least professionalised zone of activity. Unlike many other fields of human endeavour where we can talk about professionalisation whether it be law, medicine, science or education, which is thoroughly professional, there still is a sense as an artist that you are doing something that nobody asked you to do. It is not completely driven by supply and demand. It is lagging behind, no doubt it will become professionalised just like education, where you need a licence. At the very least you still don't need a licence as an artist. But there is that kind of convention, the convention of artistic licence where you are expected to perform in a certain way - as though you are not a professional. Artistic licence is a metaphor and it is founded on the idea that the freedom of the artist stands for and tests the freedom of the wider society.
SS: I don't think that you can quite say that any more because I don't recognise that freedom. For example, education: most artists are now young professionals coming from educational institutions, whereas in my generation they were more like a species of dropout or hippy. They wanted to make are because they wanted to do it, and maybe the family had money, maybe your wife (or more rarely, a husband) worked to support you. But now it has become different. There are so many art schools now which legitimatise, authorise and support the production of a certain type of 'artist', and, even if they aren't handing out MBAs in fine art, it's the connections and friendships one makes which count. Things are not the same.
When we were growing up the principal immediate model for the art world was rock music. Rock music was well on the way to becoming a very successful industry and the successful artists were being treated in that way, as so-called 'stars'. Dance was also on the rise, but to a lesser degree because it was probably more expensive, more communal. More recently art has been snuggling up to both design and fashion: annual, semi-annual shows, monthly shows, Fall season, Spring season, and so on. You are absolutely correct that the art world has been a little bit slow to take on fully capitalist values but, I am sure it is doing its very best to catch up...
PB: ... No, I think the capitalist values are there, for better or worse - I would say for worse - but it's not just professionalisation. It is something to do with the administered character of economic, political and social culture, which is becoming more tightly controlled day by day. Politicians over the last decade seemingly believe in progress through prohibitive legislation. You don't hear of them decriminalising anything, or saying go out and enjoy yourselves, do something. They say do something as long as it is within these parameters. Over the last ten years in this country more than one thousand new criminal offences were defined. Who would have thought we would need them all? Rape, murder, burglary, theft, what more do you need? One thousand new offences, imagine that. No artist has an imagination great enough to come up with that. This is happening in society at large and the art world is trying to stay away from it - there is a parasitic use of artistic licence, it is trying not to submit to regulation. The values of rampant capitalism are very much there.
You talked about rock music in the 60s, and that is really interesting because it could never be the model now. The art world has been academicised, through critical discourse. The relationship between the educational system, the industry and the art market is partly founded on such concepts of research. All of that moves it far away from the idea of rock music.
SS: But the internalisation of many of these values is also very very strong and has been pointed out a hundred years ago about journalism, about progressive journalists working for Beaverbrook. You didn't have to tell them what to do, where the line was in the sand that they couldn't cross. While it's true that in a legal sense the art world is still unregulated, there are a number of unwritten rules. There are certain things that you do to be successful. Young artists today have strategies for inserting themselves into the art world history, following a line. I have the impression that to be an artist today is a much more conscious activity.
IH: Wasn't that in a way part of what your involvement with a particular group of artists dramatised? You were revealing some of the mechanisms of the profession.
SS: In certain aspects of the art, and maybe the most important aspects of the art, we were trying to make the processes more transparent, to take more responsibility. To take a banal example, most artists paint or sculpt a work and then put it out into the world and say 'my job is over' and let the world deal with it in any way they can or want. There was an attempt by artists to take responsibility for these kinds of issues - the presentation, on exhibition, and the sale of a work, and especially with works which had a high degree of immateriality, and attempted to deal with the mechanics of the sale or use of artworks. These were clear issues, and my personal history in dealing with them is only one aspect of a very broad series of issues concerning the production of contemporary art. Furthermore, the context was very different between the United States and Europe, not to speak of the rest of the world, which I personally had almost no contact with.
PB: The problem maybe is not that artists have strategies to try and succeed. The difference is in the tactics not in the strategy. For instance the idea that the artist has some kind of responsibility to the work after it has left the studio - that is a strategic position. The question is how you go about it. Art of course is all about tactics. Art is a tactical preoccupation. You are right there is a shift - I see a lot of people, a lot of young artists trying to make it in the art world - the shift is to things like: how you write your CV, how you get sponsorship, how you place yourself, how you get this residency or that research funding. The tactical tools, or the instruments that are tactically used to pursue those strategies, might have shifted. I think the artists of your generation where just as strategic, it is only that the tactics were was different.
SS: I don't think so - and I'm not saying that there weren't Machiavellian intentions in some of them in some ways but it was a less conscious part of what we were doing. We were still living a pivotal period which was like a hinge between the end of the old 19th-century idea of art making - contesting and reacting against the values of the previous generation - and something else unknown, still coming in the future. Art has become much more cerebral. Artists seem to know today that they have a short and shorter 'use-by date' in which they have to get it 'right' very quickly, to claim their aesthetic ground and to get it out to a public. This type of pressure was something we hardly didn't have. Our generation still thought they they could do something now, and later something else, and 10 or 15 years later, they could evolve - for better or worse - like Frank Stella or Picasso. I don't think the art world affords the possibility for artists to work through a whole series of changes, or even stylistic developments, today. Today artists, like boxers for example, have to get it right first time and hope that they can pay the bills for the rest of their lives.
PB: If you want to succeed in the art world you can't have a career without having a practice, but you can have a practice without a career. I agree with what you are saying to the extent that there are things that the artists has to do now - conditions of 'making it' in whatever the art world or whatever the sector is. I started as an artist for two reasons. One was that I was far too lazy to get up in the morning and go to work in an office somewhere - but, mind you, in Czechoslovakia the working day was not 9am until 5pm, it was 6am until 3pm which is really horrible, especially when all the bars stay open until 3am. Being an artist is pretty much the only profession where you could claim the right to stay in bed. The second reason, which is more serious, is that I realised that someone has to do it, particularly in a place where only a few people are doing it. I think those motivations are still what drives people now - not necessarily that they are going to make a living, and not just lying-in in the morning - But that they are living a kind of lifestyle that has freedom and is seemingly independent. Of course it is not independent but it feels independent. There is a job to be done and the job description keeps changing all the time. Every generation tries to rewrite it or reread it. And when you look at those kind of motivations, 'Why is it that I get up every morning and do something as useless and as futile as making art in a studio?' I think then the things that you must do to succeed appear differently. You don't have to make art, you don't have to be successful. You can have some other job, or some other kind of income. When you look at it that way I think that the changes you are talking about are actually different. They are changes in motivation, or they are changes in how we understand what the job of the artist in society is.
IH: What might have happened to the possibilities for solidarity as a result of this changed relationship to art?
SS: It is difficult to say. I think there could be today a much greater inter-relationship and, for lack of a better word, 'feedback' between what an artist is doing and the public. There is a lot of potential here. When I say that the art world has become more integrated into the values of capitalism, this cuts both ways; it also has a dialectical side. It also can affect those values much more. It can really kick arse if the moment is right - but don't ask me what that moment might be. But it is certainly possible that art and the artist is more vulnerable and perhaps more powerful because they are is so attached to the 'real world'.
PB: I am not quite sure what you mean when you say 'solidarity', are you talking about solidarity within the project of art or solidarity of the artist with the world?
IH: I am interested in those areas of solidarity that artworks can convey, where the audience is included not as a consumer but as a part of the making of meaning. In relation to the explicitness by both of you, in different ways, on the presentation and the afterlife of artworks and their contracts and so on. There is another contract which is the most fundamental of all: how an audience is addressed or recognised. At the moment we have a potential space within which audiences can be recognised and another one that is based on the mechanism of publicity which is 'here is my work'.
PB: I don't have difficulty with the idea of solidarity in the internal relations within the project of art, those internal relations of course can improve audiences, participation, viewership and so on. But I am not sure that solidarity is the kind of word that I would use. I am just trying to think whether you can have solidarity without ideology. I'm not sure you can. I think that there has to be an ideological or philosophical framework for solidarity to be a meaningful term. I know what you mean, forms of participation, for instance, become the forms of expression and communication. They become constitutive, say, of a piece of work, though it is still 'here is my work, you can complete it' or 'here is my scenario'. Those are formal relationships. Even in extreme cases like Allan Kaprow - I had the privilege of seeing his great retrospective which is touring at the moment - even at its best, at its craziest, it is his. It is still Allan Kaprow's work. It is still the artist getting you to do something, maybe for your own good but it is still him getting you to do it.
SS: I think if you had to look at it perhaps in a more simplistic way it would just be that somebody, somewhere, somehow just began to pick up or to respond to a critical project and transform it into their life.
IH: The way in which art is circulated - and this is something that you have both been involved in, forms of publication and distribution and so on - has had at some points the possibility of becoming something different, a very different kind of relationship with the purchaser.
SS: It may have been illusory. We had the idea that we would be selling what is now called 'artist's books' at train stations and so on but I don't think that really happened. A lot of the formalistic aspects - that art is not necessarily tied to individual ownership - were to do with making you think about what's going on all around you, who could make art, and if you really needed a licence. These were the barriers which were broken down. It wasn't about a mad genius sitting in a studio, but the possibility for anyone to get out and to be able to do something. This had some influence. People began to think, 'if that guy can get away with that, well, me too'. Obviously the constraints of the formalised art world - the business of the art world - condition the number of people whose work can be seen, but it's exactly like the possibilities of the internet: anyone can do anything they want but only a few will be really be heard. The idea that anyone can get up and do what they want is definitely something to aim for, all the same.
IH: Seth, could you briefly speak about some of the other areas that you have been involved in?
SS: My interest in the art world lasted from 1964 to 1971. I left the art world and the United States in the spring of 1972. My personal history had to do with being involved with a small group of artists and gradually expanded into cultural-political concerns involved with more general social problems. I gradually withdrew from the art world. Eventually in the early 1970s I was involved in trying to do a left news agency/newspaper, which eventually evolved into doing research on the history, theory and practice of leftwing communication. Due to personal circumstances I went to live in Paris. I was very struck by what Pavel was saying about getting up early in the morning. I get up early, I get up at seven o'clock, but I like the illusion of liberty of having the freedom to decide what time I get up. And if there is one lesson that art and artists have taught me personally is that it is possible to live under the illusion of freedom.
There is also another thing I should mention in passing about one's personal history, one's voyage through the world. One of the reasons that I left the art world was because there is certain model of success that must be followed if you are not to be considered an idiot and it is that you always have to grow, you have to get a bigger space, more artists, the floors have to be cleaned better, you have to get two secretaries, then you have to get four secretaries, you have to get a branch in Los Angeles and so on. So there is a certain kind of logic, and if you don't want to follow it you really have to leave. If one has a certain success, one is faced with this choice: do I want to become a caricature of myself or not; do I want to continue doing the same thing forever? My solution to this problem was doing different projects which interested me for one reason or another, that take 10-15 years each and to try to make a living from them. After I left the art world I went into publishing and published political books, set up a media research centre, and then somewhere in the early 1980s I got involved in textile research, especially its bibliographic history. What particularly struck me about textile research, and the history of textiles, was the more anonymous and collective nature of textile art within that history. I continue working on this up until now and I have recently started working on researching a project involving certain aspects of physics. I allow myself this kind of possibility to explore and to try learn about and investigate a subject, to try and do something which has not been done before - it takes a few years to figure that out - and to be able to that to my satisfaction. And then I move on.
Audience question: How has the notion of quality changed from the 60s until now?
SS: I thought then and I think now that quality is a battle to be fought. It is something that you have to fight for and impose. It has something to do with the social consensus. There are certain very ugly business mechanisms that enter into this fight but the most important aspect of quality in art is how it influences other artists, especially younger artists - the next generation. I am speaking as someone who was around art and who was involved in its exhibition. In a cynical way, there are certain steps that one has to go though, to get something appreciated and included in the history of art, because if the work is not seen and understood as part of a given historical moment at a certain point it gets lost.
PB: Art is really concerned with the definition of quality. Every artwork is trying to define what you mean by quality. And it's one of those contradictions that the privilege of art is to be totally useless. It's amazing. You can get a social license and everybody respects you. You can behave in a slightly odd way, in a way that would be totally unacceptable outside the art world, why? Because you are this guy who is doing this useless thing, which precisely because it is useless is the most difficult thing to do.
With quality it is the same thing. You cannot have any criteria that are fixed. They are like chewing gum or something. The criteria of quality are never a priori. It is true that artists compete against themselves, against history, but there are no rules for that competition. To answer your question - well I can't answer it - but to address your question about the shift in quality, there isn't one. They say you can measure the greatness of an artist by what his or her work allows other people to do. But that is only applicable historically, so if one is talking about a recent shift it is very difficult - you need a couple of generations to work it out.
SS: And if you think otherwise, you are living in a Candide ' like best of all possible' worlds, where the best artists are the most well-known artists, those who are shown in the Museum of Modern Art (pick your own important museum) because the Museum of Modern Art is the best museum. You get a circular logic that always has to be questioned, though after it gets to a certain level of historical acceptance, it is very difficult to get rid of. People may retrospectively be deemed important, but establishing a work of art is always a fight.
