Art/School, Confidential
alex gartenfeld interviews anton vidokle
Anton Vidokle is an artist very much interested in the way information is distributed. He is the founder of e-flux, the Web service that announces international art events and has opened special projects such as a pawnshop for artists, Martha Rosler Library and e-flux video rental. Vidokle was born in Moscow but moved to the Lower East Side in 1981. On the last weekend of January, Vidokle launched a new project, “Night School,” at the New Museum, on a Lower East Side very different from the one in which he came of age. “Night School” is a work of art consisting of seminars held on the last weekend of each month for the next year. It is the second incarnation of Vidokle’s school projects: the first, “Unitednationsplaza,” was held in Berlin from 2006 to 2007. “Night School” is free with the cost of museum admission.
How did Night School, or its first incarnation, Unitednationsplaza, begin?
Basically it started when I was invited to develop the curatorial program for Manifesta 6. Manifesta is a European biennial of contemporary art. It was going to be in Cyprus, in Nicosia. The situation there is very complicated: it’s divided into a Turkish section and a Greeks section. They are separated by a UN administered peace keeping force, and there has been a lot of ethnic tension there since the 60s. When Manifesta first decided to go to Cyprus it was a very hopeful moment for the island because there was a major push from the United Nations and Secretary-General Kofi Annan to develop a political unification plan so that both parts of the island could enter European Union as one country. But the plan was rejected by the Greek Cypriot side and immediately, as we were a year into the program, the political situation began to deteriorate rapidly—I’d never seen anything like it in my life. It’s this feeling of all the doors suddenly closing in your face and you don’t know why this is happening. Shortly thereafter the officials who had invited us cancelled the biennial and fired us. And that was after about three years of research and work.
And from there?
After the cancellation I spoke with my immediate collaborators: Liam Gillick, Walid Raad, Jalal Toufic, Boris Groys, Martha Rosler and Tirdad Zolghadr to see if we should just forget about the project or try to continue in some way. All of us felt that it was an important idea and we’d already put so much thought and time into it, so we decided to continue and realize it as an independent project. I think for me it was just really crucial to see if it actually works: you can make the most interesting plans that completely fail once realized, so it was really important to see if this exhibition as school idea would be productive if realized.
Why did you choose Berlin?
Actually what happened is that I was there for a weekend to visit a friend (as all this Manifesta craziness was happening) and I just realized that if there is a good place to do this experimental project, Berlin is the perfect place. Like London or New York it has a vast cultural community, but unlike other big cities it is very inexpensive and very very open. It is also very centrally located, making it easier for participants from Eastern Europe, Turkey or the Middle East to come. Of course Berlin has this amazing tradition of self-organization dating back to the fall of the Berlin Wall – so such an independent project as unitednationsplaza was in a very sympathetic context there: people just naturally knew what to do with it.
Do you believe New York to be a viable place for critique?
Yes and no. On the one hand there is also a tradition here for serious critical practice and projects dating back to the 60s and 70s. But this type of activity has been so marginalized by the market and institutions in New York, that nothing much happened in this respect in decades (of course I realize that I am oversimplifying things a bit here.) You know a lot of really really interesting people live and work here, but everything is so fragmented somehow that it feels that there is just no space at this time for a critical mass to gather. I suppose this is why I am really interested to try to do this project here at the New Museum: to see if such a space can be created.
What is your pedagogical approach?
I don’t have a pedagogical approach. I hate pedagogy.
What do you see as the approach of Night School?
It’s something we’ve been talking about for a while, this idea of exhibition as school. There is something very interesting about public art exhibitions, in the way that they’re so accessible to public, so radically open and temporary. With such a model you can have a school without students, where everyone is a participant in production of an exhibition without display or representations of art: a school as an art work in itself.
One of the problems that I find with academies is that so often they’re structured in such a way that each successive generation cannot be very different from the generation before: as a student, by the time you comply with all the tests, requirements and bureaucratic procedures, you are remade in the image of the institution and the generation above you. Schools are all supposed to be about experimentation, innovation etc., but somehow the actual structures deployed in schools almost prevent this from happening… I think one of the ways of undoing this is by making the school a temporary one.
Also there is something that Paulo Freire, the great Brazilian Marxist educator, has written about in the late 60s, early 70s. He was very critical of situations that create an illusion that knowledge resides in a closed structure – like a university, and everything outside of it is devoid of knowledge, and everyone outside is ignorant. So this is something we want to work with: how to do this project in such a way that it does not become a kind of an elite, closed circle but a much more open, expansive structure capable of almost infinite inclusion of people and ideas.
Will you be lecturing at Night School?
I do not lecture in this project and actually I try not to talk too much. I don’t think that’s my role here. Similarly to unitednationsplaza, Night School is an artwork of course. So I do think a lot about my role as an artist, and what kind of a footprint such a figure should have. You know one of the historical precedents for a school as an artwork is the academy Joseph Beuys started in Germany in the early 70s (I think he even exhibited this school as his contribution to one of the Documentas). His figure was this sort of larger than life artist/shaman, so the school was basically The Joseph Beuys academy, where he was the sole speaker all the time. Sometimes he would take the microphone and bark like a dog for hours at a room full of people… I find all this terribly uninteresting, or maybe it was interesting in 1973, but just does not make sense at this time. So I mainly see my role as that of an enabler, facilitator – someone who creates a space for people to come together, brings an interesting group of people together, initiates an activity, etc etc.
I wonder if you see potential for downtown New York? Viability of that neighborhood?
You know actually the Pawn Shop project that we now have at e-flux storefront is a kind of a playful de-gentrification strategy. It’s really amazing how fast the Lower East side is being cleaned up. I grew up there and it’s slightly unnerving to see this rapid transformation into yet another luxury neighborhood. E-flux opened there about four years ago, so we are also complicit in this process… So we were joking last fall that a pawn shop, being what it is, could start bringing down property values and rent prices on our street, and maybe scare some of the investors away…
But in general I really don’t think that real estate creates new ideas. The Lower East Side is a little cheaper than the rest of downtown, so it allows some of the more interesting people to start projects there which are maybe slightly less commercially oriented… In this sense I really like to be located there – I mean imagine going to Chelsea everyday? That would really be a nightmare…
What was your educational experience?
My educational experience was a bit complex – I started taking private art lessons still in the USSR when I was about 13 years old and then went to all sorts of art schools here in New York, from the Art Student’s League to SVA. In retrospect one thing that was really weak in all of this was that studio classes almost completely replaced study of history, philosophy, literature, etc etc. So it was really lopsided education. I think the really important part started actually after I finished school, in a reading group I joined for about 4-5 years – I think this was the most important “educational” experience and it was totally self-organized and voluntary.
Is there a taboo today on directly political art?
Is there such a taboo? From what I see, the look of political art is really in right now… Just think of all the re-appropriation of images of political protests with reference to 68, the 70s, all the re-enactments, etc.
Of course what is disturbing is that most of this new work is most often about the look of something: aesthetic gestures. Its almost as though we lost the ability to act and can only re-enact.