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POST SCRIPTUM – A – Anti-Capitalism Katharina Schendl and Ingela Johansson: Rainer Ganahl: We all live in an economic order that requires financial sandwiching but we should not allow financial witchcraft with sand, as we had it with the recent subprime mortgage crisis to name just one obvious example. Banking that serves people is necessary but rogue banking that privatizes profits and leaves losses and bailouts to the general public is unacceptable. Some aspects of my work as an artist address these issues but I try to refrain from taking positions: I just observe and replicate the language used in it, be it political or financial. Currently, I’m doing CREDIT CRUNCH MEALS informed by daily financial news that are often obscene and hideous. I find it necessary to cope with this often obscene economic injustice with real effects on people’s lives and ad some of mine made of perishable food – a very direct way to counter the abstract world of high and not so high finance and politics. Now, does the fact that I deal also with capitalist or anti-capitalist aspects make my work capitalist or anti-capitalist ? It is really up to the beholder. People can read it the way they want but the moment somebody buys something from my CREDIT CRUNCH MEAL SERIES (let’s say a patatoe in the shape of a misshaped dick with a life span of 5 to 15 days, depending on your tolerance for rotten food) we would enter capitalism. If the collector waits to the end of the show, he could eat it or have it moulding in the fridge. These food pieces are given away for free, are made for consumption or for 1 day display only. Franz West wanted my Lenin carved into a piece of Bergkäse from my MAK performance. He stored it for some months in his freezer but eventually I had to rescue it in a pretty dire state. I am not even sure where it is right now, but I asked my Brussel gallery – where we showed it deformed after 4 month over the due date without refridgeration – not to trash it. Its is now in some kind of do it yourself Mausoleum in various bags and canister if not cleaning person trashed it unauthorized. But since I don’t want to cater just to anti-capitalist forces in our society who sympathize with one way art – meaning : immediately disposable perishables – I also have some of my veggie-stars rendered immortal with porcelain. (https://ganahl.info/crunchporcelain.html) These sculptures are made for the table and are to stimulate participation by the host and all dinner guests. You are free to recombine and sculpt everything around them, most preferably money symbols, company logos or business news headlines. Katharina Schendl and Ingela Johansson: Rainer Ganahl: Katharina Schendl and Ingela Johansson: Rainer Ganahl So in short, concerning the art world – or lets say the art village or art enclosure - there is nothing to run away from for the majority of artists and there is really no big impact to have in case someone becomes megalomaniac and wants to change something. The fact that nearly everybody runs after the same few artists at a relatively short-lived given moment is something that no artist can change. Independent of whether this effect is called fashion, herd instinct or something more colloquial, it is wide spread and indeed is not anymore limited to local borders but is global. If somebody really wants to have an impact in this world one has to resist these systems, ignore them. To sum it up in a very naïve but illustrative and pedestrian way: If you go to an opening, you feel stupid; if you stay at home, they feel stupid.
Katharina Schendl and Ingela Johansson: Rainer Ganahl: When does somebody become great at something ? When real love and intrinsic interest and relevance in something enters the game. Why are you really dealing with art ? Katharina Schendl and Ingela Johansson: Rainer Ganahl:
POST SCRIPTUM – B – When attitudes become curating Katharina Schendl and Ingela Johansson: Rainer Ganahl: Of all that stuff, NOTHING, really nothing sold. I do still have the entire production scattered all over the place and pay for storage. Some of that stuff has also been taken hostage by the court system (I won the process after 6 years in court), some by a gallery that doesn’t want to return it and some by the elements (badly stored). Some of the paintings are rolled up and blocking my way to the bed and I pump in every evening and every morning. It was my choice to engage in this excess and I enjoyed it a great deal. Did I compromise my autonomy as an artist and committed the crime of commodification of objects ? I don’t think so neither, since it all was purely made to communicate and not to sell. The results were unfortunately on my side: nobody in the end purchased anything. This is may be a good example to explain my logic of “moderate failure” as the best recipe for success because had I sold works at the time I might really have produced much more and that could have been really traumatic and kept me from moving on. Look, now with my self-financed porcelain stuff: I have to pay it myself and only make what I really want and love and what I can afford and not for any market demand. Thus, things are kept in cheque. Post-Fordism is of course our ‘condition humaine’ wherever we look whether we like it or not. For the records, the artist almost never was a Fordist producer even though some Asian artist tried to proof the opposite. Katharina Schendl and Ingela Johansson: Rainer Ganahl Now, the relationship between curators and artists is already well defined in your question: the curator invites and sets up the framework in which the artist does his/her work. Now, there is no linear system that tells you this is art and this is context and of course, contexts define works. But the fine line has to be negotiated before hand and during the work. If an artist complains badly one should start listening, and vice versa. If a curator complains the artist also better listens. Money and general resources too are issues that always cause tensions. It is a good idea to negotiate upfront those limits and get an idea whether the artist’s intention might fit or not. But sometimes, some people just don’t get it. Needless to say, the best curatorial work is the one that makes the impossible possible, that encourages solutions that seem out of the budget, out of time, out of reach. There is also a need for curators who are flexible when it comes to last minute changes. Fixed minds on standard results can often be intuitively crossed by artists while installing for better outcomes. Once on the place the situation might change and it is of so much help if a curator tries to understand what the alternative is instead of insisting on previous plans that might not even really work. Due to previous misunderstandings – which as such is not a problem - this said Baerbel Vischer got wrong numbers on the placement of three windows; Once I was in Vienna, I immediately corrected the positioning of the new windows but the lady simply refused as if it would be technically impossible, as if it would cost most more money, as if I had nothing to say. The carpenter in place and ready to go, she made such a huge scene – including screaming and yelling at me - that they nearly cut it on some non-sense level. Only once I got a minute to explain it to the carpenters, who immediately also opted for my placement directions, was the worst solution avoided. From that moment on, nearly every decision became a big problem and I was working with a woman who wanted to cross me on every corner. Needless to say, the catalog, part of the contract with the MAK, was finally made impossible and the working relationship was poisoned throughout the process. Substantial additional money and help which I organized for a 200 page catalog was not able to flow to the production of the publication directly but was supposed to go to the MAK’s internal catalog devision creating almost no difference on their proposed 60 page version. The resulting conflict of that ended with no publication and most of the support money lost. When Noever for whom Vischer worked and who she turned against me, finally was kicked out of his job due to corruption I knew what they were talking about. A curator who used the best and most spacious room a museum has to offer as only his office – an office of the size of the Reichskanzlei on the bell etage – had to pack his things up and leave in shame. Katharina Schendl and Ingela Johansson: Rainer Ganahl: But lets first focus on the structure of compensation which lets art making be much better financed for less actual work. If writers (and even curators) don’t find ways to get paid with artworks, they are awaiting a poor life even if they are successful. The golden parachute is of course the nearby university or the museum or Kunsthalle since I don’t want to speculate on the attractiveness of fine minds for better-off partners – also a way to find compensation for theoretical work. If somebody still wants to erase the differences between theory and art then just lets look at the income gap between a successful international artist and a successful international writer or theoretician. Any more questions ? OK, lets be a bit more precise: I myself belong to one of the earliest Kuenstler-creatures who practiced work with the pure mind and wanted to sell it as dirty art work. By the way I still keep doing so. But I understood very early on, that I needed to drop out of my PhD progamm in philosophy and write for magazines if I wanted to be taken seriously as an artist. So meanwhile it is part of an academia of young artists who incorporate readings, writings, talks and other forms of knowledge products into their practices. They love to be coached by theoreticians and implant them like trees right into their works. Books in German contemporary art is what once chairs represented: the ideal artistic prop to be meditated upon, the perfect muse to be found in nearly all group shows in the last couple of years. And so do curators. The next documenta tours as publication event, with the curator as editor in chief. We get 100 notebooks from a spectral mixture of fine minds that serve like street lights for something bigger to come. In art school too, a theoretical turn has taken place and introductory classes must include now theory as well as nude drawing and human anatomy. On the more perverse end we see now PhDs made in fine art, the academization of a practice that by definition never wanted to be a “Doctor of Philosophy” but rather its sick hallucinating patient. In Holland entire art schools turned into research labs engaging with vocabularies that made you wonder whether art was still on anybody’s mind. In all this happiness with cross overs the basic formal for definitions and distinctions still remains that one offered by a simple speech act: This is …. Or this is not …. I accept it as art, or as theory if I am told so but in spite of its eloquent uttering or less eloquent stuttering it is again up to the beholder, reader, listener, or consumer and purchaser to decide whether its good art or good theory we are encountering, or engaged with. So what is the relationship between art and theory: It is what it is, it is what it wants to be, it is what it claims to be. But only one really one of the two walks away well paid. Only one gets into the platinum and diamond mileage programs. Only one gets the saying when I comes to plastic speech. And usually it’s the loud voice with less content that tries to instrumentalize the other and not so much the other way around. One of my first topics I seriously was studying when I entered university was that between theory and practice by the Adorno, Horkheimer, Marx and Habermas. It was a very important topic and our self-interest sympathized with the fusion of these two in order to look like workers, in order to minimize the gab between the classes and in order to get a voice that can be heard across divisions. Marx’s eleventh Feuerbach thesis: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.” was like a coronation, an ecstatic light at the end of a tunnel. We too are part of the working population, and we recognize the theoretical aspect in any kind of work, independent of whether it is lapidary or not. But somehow, in the current climate of theory and art exchange I want to more focus on the differences and insist on them. I am almost more interested in keeping the divide for real and not pretend that it doesn’t exist. Whenever I meet a real critic, writer or curator who is without an institution and outside the machine and outside school for more than 10 years, my respect grows exponentially, if they keep it up, if their criticality is still vibrant and lucid. I don’t want to see them in bed with silly artists and project managers. Katharina Schendl and Ingela Johansson:
Katharina Schendl and Ingela Johansson:
Rainer Ganahl
Katharina Schendl and Ingela Johansson: Rainer Ganahl I don t know what you mean with “materialisation
Katharina Schendl and Ingela Johansson:
Rainer Ganahl Well,you see this in a correct way. "Please, teach me ... " was not only a about an impossible request, a sollicitation for help but also an enunciation, an indexical reminder of a practice of mine, that is superimposed with practicality and meaning, learning and art. But you are only partially right in your second assumption concerning collecting. Giving something away for free doesn't guarantee that someobody really keeps the stuff received. In many cases they don't. A payment structure is a better guarantor for a presence in a collection than something that doesn't come at a cost. I do have some collectors but not many. Ghislain Mollet-Vieville is a man I really appreciate and we did work together on a couple of projects but I wouldn't look at him as a collector of mine since he never bought anything of mine. Unfortunately, I have very few collectors and they haven't really played a role in the production and distribution of my work. There are only two exceptions: Generali Foundation, Vienna and the Uni-Credit collection, Milan / Vienna. Both have works of mine in their collections and have extended invitations for exhibitions that led and have let to much more than just a work for sale. Only galleries or institutions have been playing that role for me.
Katharina Schendl and Ingela Johansson: Rainer Ganahl Institutions are not things that exist as such, they also have to be negotiated and re-established anew once protagonists change and they are in perpetual change. The mobile is the basic structure of anything we are involved with. Today, you might be just the moister of one of the hanging weights but in a couple of years your situation might transform an entire arm. In fact it will, it has to change and your time will come. Viel Glueck !!
November 8, 2011, New York
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