John Menick Blog | Archive for ‘Artist Interviews’

© Patrick Killoran. Lost & Found (Tierra del Mar), 2003.

We’ve heard about these places, micronations, tiny republics of one, whose borders are not quite legal and whose leaders are madder than the norm. Stories circulate about a country founded on a sea-surrounded gunner platform or a desert colony of hippies living in a network of crumbling domes, and we might even believe these stories, believe in the radical self-sufficiency they describe. Whether or not the stories are true doesn’t worry anyone. We know, unconsciously, that micronations don’t mess around much with the real, that they are content with being obstinate fantasies, just as we know that these micronations are not aimed inward at a short-lived mental utopia, but outward, towards us, towards us as an us, a missive about ourselves to ourselves sent from that electrified no man’s land between mass delusion and private pathology.

Micronations are not what initially drew me to Patrick Killoran’s public project, Lost & Found (Tierra del Mar), an artwork which, on the face of it, seems extremely remote from the shut-in world of first-person states. In fact, the initial interest came about because of the work’s jumble of civic-minded and self-denying gestures. Lost & Found (Tierra del Mar) takes the form of a lost wallet, or wallets, which have been purposefully scattered, or “lost,” throughout various international cities. A few might be found and returned, but more likely they would be riffled-through and tossed, or maybe tossed and that’s it. But if you did find one, then you would experience the work, and if not, past tense summaries are about as close as you’ll get.

Before you get the wrong idea: Killoran’s work wasn’t a test of public morality in that painful and highly questionable candid camera sort of way. The wallet was a delivery device, and returning it was a bit of problem, mostly because the home of the wallet’s owner wasn’t exactly a real place, and even more confusingly, the owner didn’t exist either. The man is Thomas Swallow, who is supposedly his fifties, and who, upon closer examination of the ID in the wallet, bears an uncanny resemblance to Walt Elias Disney. Alongside receipts from local restaurants and business cards, a discoverer of the wallet finds something else: money from the “Reserve Bank of Tierra del Mar,” an obviously fictional country, and here we return to micronations.

But my interview with Patrick began with my initial interest, in the work’s complex and paradoxical relation to publicity and privacy:

John Menick: Although Lost & Found is a work that exists outside of the gallery space, and can be considered a work of public art, its main themes seem to be discretion and secrecy. Our wallets are among our most private possessions, even more precious than a purse or backpack, and here that privacy is put at risk. Can you describe what led you to make a work that is so much about the exposure of privacy?

Patrick Killoran: I was included in the 1998 Biennale of Sydney, and part of my duties for the show included being on a panel at the Gallery of New South Wales. It was one of those classic art world moments where there were way too many speakers and the event had gone on for hours; but there I was sitting on stage having to look enthralled. The audience looked exhausted — like a zombie convention. When my turn to speak finally came, I could not imagine going through an explanation of all of my work. So I took my wallet out of my pocket and threw it into the audience.

The gist of what I said after throwing the wallet had to do with breaking the power relationship between audience and speaker by throwing something so personal. I recall feeling very uncomfortable watching the audience look through my wallet. It was all very dramatic and silly and I cringe because I must have seemed like such a brat. However that initial gesture left a deep impression on me. It planted the seed of what would become Lost & Found (Tierra del Mar).

Jonathan Watkins was the curator of that Biennale. Five years later, I found myself proposing Lost & Found (Tierra del Mar) to him for Ikon Gallery’s offsite program. Over that five-year period, I had mainly employed a strategy of modifying objects that people recognize from everyday life. All of those works dealt with private space and how we filter out other people. Like the interior of a car or a letter, the wallet’s interior is really reserved for one person. Allowing someone to go through your wallet is quite intimate. The wallet was a form I wanted to work with but it took a long time for me to decide how to do it. However, Lost & Found (Tierra del Mar) also represented a shift in strategy. It introduced a type of narrative and imagery that did not exist in my work previously.

In Sydney you acted alone, the relation between you and your audience was very one-to-one. However, in Birmingham you are involving an institution in your gesture. How did Ikon initially react to this shared responsibility? What was the process like while developing the project?

Performance art has a tendency of using the artist’s body as the “source” of the work. This concept of the artist as source is something I wanted to avoid. In most of my works, I have deferred that experience directly to the audiences’ bodies. In the project Lost & Found my tactic was to generate a fictional character as a way of removing myself as a source. Although I am the one “losing” the wallets, what the finder contends with is the fictional character I have created.

In terms of completing the project, the fundamental decisions were made at the meeting with Jonathan. I had completed a rough version of the wallet. It was really the craziest idea I proposed that day and I was shocked when he chose it.

The discussion that followed orbited the fact that I wanted to make it impossible for the wallets to be returned. Almost everyone suggests placing a note inside “if lost please return” with the address of the institution. For me, this was too much like an advertising technique. It had been done before as guerilla marketing. Plus, having the wallets returned would create a sort of relic, which I also wanted to avoid. All these strategies were “conceptually tight”. This was the sort of tactic I was taught in school. It had to go beyond that, to a new place. After many games of pool, Jonathan agreed that this was the core of the work. We had to lose an object that had nowhere to go.

Once I lost the wallets, the police freaked out, the heads of precincts began to show up at Ikon. They were infuriated. In the UK most lost wallets end up at the police station. I guess if dozens of identical wallets begin to turn up it is a bit unnerving. Debbie Kermode who ran the off-site projects bore the brunt of the police hysteria, while I watched from the rafters, again feeling like a brat. As time went on, the police wanted to disassociate themselves from the piece and I suspect it was because they realized that it did not warrant such a reaction. When the other incarnations of Lost & Found would appear in New York, Vilnius, and Chicago, the police did not even blink and eye.

But in your question I sense something deeper about the involvement of the institution. Ikon provided more than logistics, press and funding. For many, institutions provide the framing of what is and is not art. I wanted to see what would happen if I used the institution to make an event that was meaningful but was not framed as art. The wallet was not displayed in the gallery. The institutions I have worked with seem to look at the project as one big experiment.

It’s funny to think you had inadvertently designed a piece whose ideal audience was the Birmingham police department. Although, in a sense, the work turns everyone into a kind of amateur detective, especially when one considers the actual contents of the wallet. But before speaking about the contents, I wanted to ask you to describe the responses to the work in the different cities.

I am not sure we can gauge the reaction. It was not observable, because of the work’s scale and how it was disseminated. It was my intention to make a piece that would produce hundreds of outcomes. Yes, the police reacted and threatened to arrest me, but that is only one reaction. At best, I can only say that I have watched people find the wallets and I have watched people ignore them. But this all seems opaque. The police in Birmingham said that people were removing the fictional money and trying to change it into British pounds. In New York and Chicago, it was virtually a non-event and the only accounts were coincidental. For example, in Chicago someone attending the opening at Hyde Park Art Center said that she had witnessed group of people trying to get a wallet that was behind a fence. They were using a stick to try and slide it close enough to them to grab. I remembered throwing one wallet between the bars of a fence. I should point out that Chicago’s wallet, Lost & Found (Shangri-La) drew from a different narrative based primarily on the imaginary country of Shangri-la.

In some instances, other people help me lose wallets. For example, when I could not attend the group exhibition 24/7 in Vilnius I had accomplices lose the wallets. As you can see, these accounts are all just fragmentary, so I am not sure I can make definitive conclusions about the audiences’ response.

However, I must confess that the wallets are designed with a narrative in mind, or at least a sequence. I have always assumed that at first people believe the wallet is real and for a short time they react accordingly, but then when they study the contents they realize that that the wallet is fake. Your comment about amateur detective is interesting because the finder first tries to solve the problem of how to return the wallet. Like any good mystery it brings them into a story that is far more complicated. Who would go to all this trouble? What is this wallet?

Continued

© Patrick Killoran. Lost & Found (Tierra del Mar), detail, 2003.

And who is this guy from Tierra del Mar? And why does he resemble Walt Disney? Not only does it become apparent that there’s a fiction being told, but also that everything in the wallet circles back to some form of utopianism. I know it’s hard to gauge, but what kind of reaction do you think this utopian narrative would instigate from a member of the public?

This fellow’s name is Thomas Swallow, named after a British utopian author. His photo on the ID is Walt Disney. The money and any official documents found inside the wallet are fabricated. These articles are mixed in with real items from the cities where the wallets are lost.

Thomas has a religious charm and fortunes displayed in the front window of the wallet, but in the back pocket you will find a card to a strip club and a condom. Thomas is a man of contradictions. He is a citizen of Tierra del Mar, which is a reference to a “country” that Ernest Hemingway’s brother attempted to create on a large raft in the Caribbean. Needless to say, this micro-nation failed. I imagine that when someone scrutinizes the wallet’s contents, they find an entire world, something that has detail and unfolds endlessly.

As I said earlier, I did not want the wallet to be “the artist’s wallet.” In addition, I wanted to make it impossible to be returned. So when I asked myself, where is a place that we cannot go? Utopia was the answer. What I am instigating is an event where the finder goes from doing a practical task of returning (or stealing) a wallet, to suddenly discovering an imaginary world. The inside of the wallet is imaginary, while the outside was material and tangible. The intimate space houses our aspirations and desires. I like very much, that the discovery of this imaginary world is the same moment the wallet becomes immobile.

However, I should say that this is only one way Lost & Found is experienced. There are some people who never look inside or who happen to see multiple lost wallets as they walk through the train station or park. All of these experiences are valid. Still, I do not think I have answered your question: what am I instigating? I should go back to the idea of the amateur detective. The wallets are clues or evidence. At first, the case appears easily solved but after further investigation the case changes. It shifts from a practical problem to a metaphorical one. Whose wallet is it? Now the wallet is theirs.

One of the most complex qualities of the project is how it embodies the contradictions of utopia: namely, how it stresses that utopia always has a boundary over which someone can never cross. Utopias are always exclusionary. For example, I think Disney represents a utopian vision – I’m willing to give it that – but it’s not a utopia many have a place in. Utopias are, in a sense, like Hemingway’s micronation. Micronations are often designed for a select group – add outsiders, and it would collapse. To come back to my initial question, I’m wondering if this uneasy mixture of extreme privacy and utopia is an attempt to assess critically contemporary utopianism?

There is a tension between the lofty ideals of the world represented inside the wallet and the ethical decisions facing the wallet’s finder. I am trying to differentiate between actualizing utopia and acting on your ideals. The choice to return a wallet is not utopian because utopia exists within the imagination. Returning a wallet is not a fantasy, but it is an ideal one can actually negotiate. Utopias are utopias precisely because they are unattainable. Like the fortune cookie slip in the wallet says, “Utopia is always far away.”

© Mario Garcia Torres. What Happens in Halifax Stays in Halifax, 2004-2006.
Courtesy Jan Mot, Brussels.

In certain circles, the visual arts program of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (NSCAD) in Halifax, Canada achieved a near-mythic status. Not unlike 1920s Frankfurt for students of cultural studies or 1960s Berkley for the American left, NSCAD’s 1960s and 1970s program is known by generations of artists for the works it produced and for the pedagogical community it fostered. To list the school’s visual arts faculty from the period is to name-check a lengthy list of postwar international artists — Robert Barry, Joseph Beuys, John Baldessari, Dan Graham, Hans Haacke, Sol LeWitt, Claes Oldenburg only begin a partial list. The school’s press, begun by curator Kasper König, published close to thirty books, each contributing inestimably to our understanding of North American postwar art.

One course in particular, David Askevold’s Project Class, greatly added to the school’s reputation. For the class, Askevold asked several artists to send instructional works to the students in order for them to produce a collective work within the given parameters. Many artists from across North America and Europe contributed proposals, including the New Jersey-based Conceptualist, Robert Barry. His work, faxed to the school in the fall of 1969, asked the students to decide upon a “shared idea” that would be kept secret from Askevold and Barry. As Barry wrote: “The piece will remain in existence as long as the idea remains in the confines of the group.”

Like many conceptual works from the period, the Barry project’s documentation is scarce and any follow-up is scarcer. A number of questions are begged: Did the students participate in the work? If so, were they successful in keeping the idea from the teacher and the artist? More generally, and perhaps more crucially, how did they feel about a class so obviously devoted to erasing their own authorship and replacing it with a number of artists who were enjoying increasing success in the contemporary art scene?

Close to forty years later, Mexican artist Mario Garcia Torres became interested in the work’s incomplete storyline. In 2004, he set about trying to track down what effect this work had on the students of the 1969, and his research culminated in the work What Happens in Halifax Stays in Halifax. The work, a reunion of the 1969 Project Class as well as an installation of 35mm slides and text, was created on the occasion of the IX Baltic Triennial, and showed most recently at the Venice Biennale. Recently, I was able to speak to Mario about this work via email.

John Menick: How did you first learn about the Barry piece? What made you select that work, as opposed to other social and conceptual works from the period?

Mario Garcia Torres: I first learned about the piece from the gallerist Jan Mot. He casually mentioned it to me because I had done a few works that were somehow related. Like the Barry piece, my project also lacked a preconceived conclusion, and was based on not knowing (or seeing) what the finished work was going to be. I didn’t know about Barry’s piece, I guess it’s rather obscure. For some time, I wondered if the secret existed, and, if so, what happened to it. That’s why I started trying to locate the students who were present in the class. In a way, I didn’t really choose to make a project about the Barry piece until later. I was also really doubtful at the time whether doing research about something so unknown, and about which you are not allowed to ask, could have a publicly presentable form.

Your doubt seems to be an intended byproduct of Barry’s work. His piece is obscure — not just as a little-known work in art history, but also because the students’ idea is impervious to historical research. Do you think obscurity was a way for Barry to frustrate historicization?

I guess he was indeed interested in re-thinking the art object, and in that way he probably saw his work as an everyday negotiation. He probably did not intend the piece to be written down, at least in a linear and genealogical way. That was one of the most interesting things for me while researching the piece: how to think and talk about a series of connections and subjectivities that all together might illustrate the actual work. Later on, when I went to the class reunion of the students and Askevold, I found it impossible to speak about this one piece in isolation, because most of the students’ memories were linked to other activities and persons. This piece was not the one they remembered the most, because Barry was not at the school then. During those days Barry was producing a series of works that had a certain amount of definition without showing or giving away the actual subject of the work. I think this is what makes this piece so interesting: to be on one hand a very concrete work, but on the other, to have an incredible amount of variability.

Several times in your correspondence with the classmates you referred to yourself (somewhat facetiously) as a “detective.” At other times you work more as a historian, then as a social connector, and, ultimately, as an artist. How do you see yourself in relation to Barry’s work? How did you negotiate these different roles?

When I started contacting people, I figured out some of the information I was getting did not coincide. I also found some people were not really willing to give information out. That is why at one point I mentioned feeling I was doing some sort of detective job. I was trying, at the time, to match up pieces of information from here and there. At one point I thought maybe there was something even darker to the story that nobody wanted to say.

In one way, yes, I am interested in history, and in rethinking the construction of history. But in another way, I knew I wanted to go first to the people who were actually an essential part of the piece in order to discover what they specifically remembered about it. I was also interested in discovering what lasted over the years and why. I guess from that perspective the Barry piece is incredibly interesting. To respond more directly to your last question, I think he did not intend to frustrate historicization, but he managed to configure a set of parameters that gave the piece larger resonance and greater ambiguity.

I hope my approach to the matter could be seen as a critique of the way history, and art history specifically, is constructed. I often found that while reading about historical works the information is superficial, and then that information is just passed on from text to text. I guess historians sometimes are more concerned with projecting a thesis on the work and creating some sort of genealogy, rather than thinking about the impact it has on the people who might be in close relation to the work.

Now, I want to say, I am not intending to write history. I am trying to call attention to some interesting marginal stories that I think could be relevant today, but I don’t want this piece in specific to be read as a definitive account of the work. I guess my project could be seen as an account of Barry’s piece today. Maybe if somebody were still interested in Barry’s work in 20 years, it would be a different story from the one in my work. Hopefully it will. That is why I finish my presentation by saying that the story I told is the one of my research, not the one of the piece, and that there might be others, the ones “I was looking for.” In that regard, I feel like my piece is not necessarily about Barry, about Barry’s work – at least it does not intend to create links between his works or analyze his context, etc. It is a story about the group of people that happened to be part of a work of art.

Although your work seems to be more about the classmates, and not the artist and his work, was there ever an attempt to contact Barry during the research? If not, would you be interested in doing so now?

Yes. I did contact Barry, but later on in the research. It was actually quite a strange situation, since during the time I was exchanging letters and emails with the students and Askevold, I think Barry sort of knew somebody was doing this – or I want to believe so. I was in contact with people who where talking to him, and indirectly I got some clues from him that allowed me to bring in new issues to the work. Barry was the one that mentioned that there had been a problem with the piece; that it was not carried out properly; and that was what led Askevold to confess he had bugged the conversation. When I finally spoke to him, I basically asked him questions regarding how he saw the aftermath of the piece and if that was relevant at all to the work itself today. I knew he kept showing the piece as an instruction, even though he knew that maybe the secret was not a secret anymore. For me, the piece was what had happened in Halifax and not the instructions by themselves. In that telephone conversation he denied knowing exactly what had happened and told me he was interested in doing a second part of his piece. Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s a really great piece and I really respect his work, but, for me, the most interesting thing about the research is how the instructions become just the beginning of a story way more complex than one can imagine at first sight. I think it’s the potential of the story that makes the work to be so appealing, don’t you think?

Definitely. There is an unacknowledged oral history circulating around conceptual and social works, one that is filled with urban legends and rumors, and, in a way, I feel like the most compelling works are those that contribute to this history. As you say in your correspondence, your work has a lot to do that hard-to-document subgenre of oral history: rumor. What is interesting is that rumor is often seen as a degraded version of “real history.” It’s lumped together with hearsay, conspiracy theories, paranormal sightings, etc. It’s regarded as sub-literary fiction, always barred from entering official history.

In this work, though, you don’t really debunk rumors with the documentarian’s voice of authority. Instead, Konrad Wendt suggests your method early on in your research when he asks, “What is reality but an event that at least 2 people agree on?” The documentarian Errol Morris, whose work relies heavily on interviews without narration, has a similar theory of truth that he calls “psychological triangulation.” In his theory, a more cohesive picture emerges if one builds up enough subject points of view. Do you think this is the case with your work? And has Wendt’s suggestion guided you in other projects?

Konrad’s commentaries led me a lot in my research. When I started, I really did not have a clue as to what I would find. I think I was searching for a story, one that could keep the work circulating, and not necessarily the truth. I guess as an admirer of those conceptual art stories, probably unconsciously, you seek the stories around the works. Hopefully, by getting those you understand better the real impact that these works could or probably still can have. A lot of those early 60s works are really cold, and they limit themselves to a list of information, but when you dig in, you discover there are actually people behind them, memories mixed with their subjectivities and the context in which they happen. I am interested in how a bunch of facts, memory and subjective readings of facts, and probably the real story, collapses. In that regard, Konrad’s commentary did illuminate my view a lot while talking about the piece. Since the beginning of the research there was still the feeling that this was an almost impossible task, to find the students. I imagined there were thirty of them, which was not the case, so I was already resigned to gather a few stories and not make an exhaustive investigation. This would have created my version of the facts.

Actually, during that time, I found a couple of people that I felt did not want to participate. Someone else consciously mentioned she did not wanted to participate in my research because she felt somehow betrayed and used by the school and the way the rules of the piece had been set up. So, in a way, the work is a certain reality on which at least three people agree. In this specific case, I am also betting they are the ones that still feel a certain sympathy for the work, and are the ones that are still able to carry the secret or the details of the story.

On the other hand, my project is influenced a lot by contemporary documentary thinking, and in that sense, Errol Morris plays a big part, although I am not seeking a specific truth. I do like Morris’ work a lot. The Thin Blue Line is a film that I appreciate, not just because it is one of those works that actually had an immediate impact on society, but also because of the way he uses reenactment, something that was seen skeptically at the time. What Happens in Halifax Stays in Halifax, pretended to be some sort of reenactment, to try to bring the participants to the place where everything happened in order to see if this would help recreate the story.

Not to bring the issue up again, but its funny that Errol Morris was a detective for sometime, just before doing The Thin Blue Line…

Since you mention this former student who did not participate, I wanted to change the subject slightly for my last questions. Why did she feel “betrayed” by the school? And what are your thoughts on NSCAD’s pedagogical program at the time of Askevold’s Project Class?

She was one of the last students I was able to contact. She had changed her name, so I contacted her quite late in the research. Apparently, people had told her I was looking for her, but she didn’t want to deal with it, so I only got one email from her. She felt the class, and more precisely the Barry project, was an imposition that had little to do with them as students. She felt the work was “precious and tiresome” and that she was being “used.” She was also in disagreement with the then new administration of the school. I wish I knew the exact details, but as I understand it, there was also a feeling of the school being taken over by a group of US faculty. I think this last feeling could have been true of other students as well. As I understand it, there was not only new faculty, but also some students they brought with them from the US, at least in the beginning.

Nevertheless, I think it was a great program that really understood teaching and school administration from a different perspective. It seems the Project Class was very different from other classes. I think there were still other more technical classes being thought about, while the Askevold class was more the hang-out-together kind of thing. Instead of hiring more faculty, the new administration led by Garry Kennedy and Jerry Ferguson spent part of their budget on bringing visiting artists, and this program created in the school an open space where conceptual practices could flourish.

It’s really interesting to talk with the Askevold students, since they did, or where closely involved in, a series of works that now are presented as key conceptual art works of the period. Richards Jarden shot Dan Graham’s From Sunset to Sunrise and participated in several other works. One that stands out, is a project by Ian Baxter, Trans VSI Connection NSCAD-NETCO Sept 15 - Oct 5, 1969, which was another long series of instruction works, this time using the then new communication devices like the telex and telecopier. The Baldessari work I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art was done there a couple of years later, as well as Bas Jan Ader’s Thoughts Unsaid, Then Forgotten. They were all instruction-based and made specifically for that educational context. On the other hand, most of the students would say, they just happened to be there. They didn’t really know this would become something of such relevance. I think it was definitely a very interesting way of thinking about a school, more as a platform for things to happen, especially taking into account the kind of work that was being discussed at the time, and more so since it all happened in a small institution in a faraway place.