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That's the way, bravo!
silk screen on paper, 59cm x 84cm,2009
© Copyright the artist |
It doesn’t seem often that a curator asks an artist to interview them on their practice and research, but as the first part of a two-part commission for Supercream magazine I invited the artist Jenny Moore Koslowsky to help me with the task of unpacking my practice. This was an invitation that arrived through a presentation I had done on my practice within the Open Call meeting held every Monday between MFA Art Practice, Curating, PHd and the new MFA Art Writing. What ensued throughout the presentation and beyond was thought provoking to say the least, but above all it provided myself with the necessary glitch to see things from a position outside of what was fast becoming a self-preserving tautological rhetoric.
Since my BA in Fine Art and subsequent MFA In Curating I have been investigating and researching an ideological framework which time and time again shatters back onto the word bureaucracy, spanning institutional critique, thematic representation and the problematic of how to represent the essence of something which is unfelt yet victim to connotation, this is something which defines my research and starts to wonder how best to describe bureaucracy without totalizing it. On meeting her almost two years ago Jenny Moore Koslowsky has been an artist I am increasingly interested in fundamentally through the way she seems to architecturally navigate her practice and build on a variety of different concerns and associative relativities, these were at first outlined to me in her work ‘Seriously, now’ in 2008.
SR: So Jenny, all this debate about bureaucracy and I'm still as lost as I was six years ago when I began this research. Saying this the decision to moot (I like this word) an investigation into bureaucracy away from practitioners who deal directly with bureaucracy could be a good objective starting point. I mentioned my new tool of affirmative critique, but it was all such a rush to get my thoughts out. It might first be interesting to hear what you thought about critique in relation to this research, then I can see if any of it made any sense or not.
JMK: Sophie, you have a tricky, curator's way of passing a tough question onto an unsuspecting victim. That being said, I see your project as something less typically curatorial, in that you are trying to look past the point of assembling a roster of artists whose work fits nicely into titles and P.R. packets; I think you used the term 'exhibition management,' which has become the job of many a curatorial fish in the art-ocean. While we can talk about bureaucracy as an all encompassing, inescapable, and abstract thing, which pervades the western world, I do wonder where / how critique can manifest itself visually without ending up as specifically institutional critique, a one-liner, or visual pun. I
guess what I'm saying is critique feels deflated or predictable when it comes to this topic (in my opinion this is especially true in British Art), and maybe that's why you suggest affirmative critique as a way out of this predictability.
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Boom Boom
wood, steel, cardboard, tape dimensions variable approximately 4.5m x 1m x 1m), 2008
© Copyright the artist |
SR: 'Visual pun,' this I like a lot, wrestling with something such as bureaucracy has sent me into a tale spin which concludes my own research for me. I think the term 'bureaucracy' in itself is so incredibly loaded, but then again a lot of themes or ideas which are reflected on within current critical art discourse tend to have an unnecessary affliction of coming with gags and negative pauses which halt any kind of positive visual criticism or progression. I like the idea of bending people’s expectations. Coming from a Fine Art background my practice has been one with a lot of pauses and exacerbations. It's often hard to physically 'get out' what I want to communicate, but I don’t know if either as an artist or a curator I could do that with a term such as bureaucracy. It's almost stultifying to think of the many sleepless nights and stop-starts this project has had. I've been thinking of ways out of this cyclical problematic, something which won't succumb to being a manipulative curatorial sweeping statement, but moves more ecologically. I used the word exuberance today in a tutorial and that comes back to me once more, maybe as a way to find joy in this bogged down epistemological project, to see beyond my own nose so that I don't shoot myself in the foot and become a slave to the predictable, the deflated, the one-liner, the visual pun.
JMK: Would you say this is true? That you need an'out'? That there has to be more ways of exploring this than through (negative) criticism? And how do you think the forms of presentation / exhibition you choose to use as a curator can support / influence this? I heard a lot of people trying to pare down and (unfortunately) really simplify the concepts you were working through in your presentation today. For example, one suggestion was that your appreciation of a 'conservative' exhibition rivalled your investigation of bureaucracy (therefore declaring that bureaucracy is conservative at its core?), while another questioned the possibility of your research questions being answerable at all, as if it was too big a task for a curator to tackle. What do you think about this?
SR: Well, I know that this is definitely something worth pursuing in great depth. That maybe it could arrive in the word via smaller interruptions, the idea of sifting this word through a filter or different manifestations, testing bureaucracy against other forms of visibility, testing it against itself, or against the grain of work of practitioners which may never have thought of comprehending bureaucracy within their practice could be another filter. As I’ve been thinking this through I'm drawn to your practice, the towers which you construct have been described as extensions of yourself, but I like to think of them more loosely. As I've been unpacking bureaucracy over the last six years and within this discussion, I've started to realized that it's not necessarily about a beastly manifestation of the word but seeing bureaucracy as a family of ideologies, which have been tested and written about throughout critical art debate, philosophy, art history, mathematics, sociology and beyond. On encountering your towers several ideologies pushed to the forefront of my mind, the idea of trust and authority. I have been exploring these ideologies through bureaucracy and can see a link to your practice, I hope you don't mind me calling them 'your towers.' I think the command they aspire to holds true to some sense of authority, especially recently witnessing them at 176 Project Space, but also I think they have another essence to them which is this case of trust. The fact that they come to such a hand made visibility makes me very aware of their authoritative impact, they are obviously stable within the space (we hope) but in saying that, how do we know? When I first came across them I had an impression of them marching over London, but almost independently of yourself, which begs the questions who is the authority within them, or can they / do they express their own authority? Obvious references to the Tower of Babel and Kafka's 'The Castle' aside, I also think they are fairly lonely creatures. Standing in the non-place non-inhabited by the humans discovering them. This loneliness looks back onto my exploration of bureaucracy, as not just the curator within the mass of the project but the reality of our own present-ness being one which is fixed within the condition of its own making, we are almost helpless to our own 'habitus,' to use a 'Bourdieu concept'.
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song structure #3
graphite drawings on paper, 118.9 x 84.1 cm each,
2008
© Copyright the artist |
JMK: I like the idea of ideological families – especially because families are so dysfunctional, contradictory, and yet genetically and historically linked, which is true of many philosophical, critical dialogues that we run into in art practice (and many other disciplines, I'm sure). I also think you're onto something with your reading of 'my towers.' As they have grown into a body of work, I've learnt to think of them more loosely, unwilling to settle on a precise metaphoric or illustrative resting point. In fact, I've been questioning this idea of their authority; who is in charge? What is the cause of this leader? While their command and authoritative presence is essential, I hope it is simultaneously undermined. Perhaps this is where your idea of trust comes in, albeit I've never thought of it in those terms before, as their 'source,' their 'function,' their 'integrity' cannot fully be trusted. I don't necessarily see this lack of trust as a negative thing – it's more slippery than that – maybe they are doubtful of a trustworthy subject (their artist included!)? I agree that they have obtained a life of their own, away from me, which begs the question: what world do they belong to? I like walking this fine line between pictorial space and physical 'real' space (if you'll allow me to use that contested word 'real'), where an object undulates between being a picture of a thing and the thing itself. When describing my work at 176 Project Space to my mum a few weeks ago, I stumbled over jargon and over-conceptualization, making a right fool of myself until I finally blurted out, "I'm trying to make something that looks powerful but is having a hard time standing on its own two feet." Here, I might adopt your phrase that 'its not necessarily about a beastly manifestation of the word' (I like how evangelical this sounds) to describe the open-ended relationships I see between my sculptures and modes of power/structure/social revolution/identity – all
catch phrases which I could easily prescribe onto my work for the sake of some funding application or artists statement. But why would I ever want to do that, if I can avoid it? After all, once we say 'this is it,' we lose 'it' all together, don't we? So we must somehow hover between the tangents of 'it,' and 'it'. To follow the tangents completely is dangerous because they crack open the big wide world and leave us wandering around in this territory without a map, but the guided tour also disappoints because of its reality TV-type banality.
SR: In the words of Picasso 'I don't seek, I find' - I picked up on this motif though Professor. Adrian Rifkin, this level of indeterminacy details the kind of sensitivity which I think needs to prevail within this project. Shifting it from theory to visibility without prescribing it, fine tooth combing and striping it of any unique quality. Remaining slightly ignorant of its potential whilst accurately veering myself in all research can find. I don't want to find myself becoming complicit to the project, exclusive to its demands: the ultimate hope for any curator is that the project sprouts legs and becomes something in itself, away from my cognition. This outcome is probably the beginning of the affect of the project. The fact that we are starting to debate its relevance, and nurture through these lines its theoretical construction makes me believe that there is an optimistic presence which affirms that this is a 'something' whilst not detailing what that 'something' is.
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Seriously, now
wood, steel, modified microphone stand, fanfare horn, found hardware, dimensions variable (approximately 4 m x 1m x 1m),2008
© Copyright the artist |
JMK: Try this out: If bureaucracy is integral and fixed in our capitalist society and we are, as you stated, involved in a certain 'present-ness' of this established system (which I do believe we are), then does that not open up your research to involve almost anything that we encounter or experience in the whole world, seeing as it is all completely filtered through this lens?!
SR: Yes, is my answer to this - well, on account that it will be hard to make and mend a project from this conundrum of bureaucracy by opening it up too ecologically. A certain sense of holding back has to come from this project otherwise something which starts out as an exploration into bureaucracy, could either fall fowl to institutional critique as an example of the 'anything' you mentioned, or it could become victim to a passage which side-steps bureaucracy so much that the visibility in itself could become a non-cohesive conclusion to a fairly insightful research project. It's largely a tipping point, a way of making references or hints at bureaucracy without saying 'this is it.' The visual aspect of this project will be its making, the detail needs to be very well versed with enough room for people to go off on a tangent and become wildly associative as with many good shows, events etc, but so that those associations can some how come bouncing back to this family of ideological associations based within reaching distance of the core theme of bureaucracy. You see, cyclically I have come to think again that bureaucracy might not just be the right word, that, as I used it, Bourdieu’s 'habitus' may be more becoming of the project, but counteracting this, I think that it could be genuinely unique to express bureaucracy in a way that previously has been to marred with such a cynical and negative brush stroke. The case now is how to take this and make it unique and possibly more expressive than it, at first looks. To challenge its preconceptions away from its preconceptions.
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