This is the second of two parts. Read the first part of the interview here.

Ana Janevski: And so you decided to start using tape as a way to go beyond painting?

Jaime Davidovich: Yeah.

AJ: But it seems that very early on you also became interested in videotape. Because in the drawing of the Tape Wall Project that’s part of MoMA’s collection, it looks like you’re already thinking about the TV screen that should be on the wall.

JD: Yes.

AJ: Very early on, you had a clear idea of how would you like to use technology and, in particular, television.

JD: Oh, sure. I wanted to embed the television, to make the screen even with the wall. I didn’t want it to be a three-dimensional, bulky object—like TVs were at the time—I wanted it to be flat.

AJ: Hmmm . . . like a flat-screen.
JD: Like a flat-screen, yes. And then I started doing work in New York, in the places

that had started to show video. And I was very active.

AJ: Your first video work was Road, from 1972.

JD: Yes, yes. My first “tape period” was 1965 to 1975. Ten years. Ten years of tape. Actually, I have the first collage with adhesive tape in my possession and it’s dated 1965.

AJ: And when did you discover video? JD: Video . . . I discovered video in 1970.

AJ: 1970, and then you immediately made the connection between videotape and adhesive tape.

JD: Sure. And also, it’s the word. It’s videotape. The videotape in those days literally was tape. People today, especially young people, don’t know that a videotape is a roll of tape. I started a whole series about art as tape and tape as art—a series that combined the two. It was a pretty natural connection.

AJ: Another thing that is interesting in both your tape interventions and your video works is the way you use the architectural space . . .

JD: Well, that’s a very important thing, very important. I was not interested in covering a wall in an exhibition space with tape. I was interested in using spaces that were not considered appropriate frameworks for an artwork—for instance, in doing a tape project on a sidewalk, which is a public space, or on a billboard . . . I also wanted to have pieces in museums but not in the traditional exhibition spaces, but rather in the elevator or staircase. In the case of the Whitney Biennial, when Marcia Tucker asked me what I wanted to do, I said, “I want to do the largest piece ever shown at the Whitney Museum.” And so I ran tape from the top floor all the way to the basement.

Then, I was invited to do a show at the Bykert Gallery. There, I didn’t use the traditional exhibition space but rather a platform they had, where all the lights were inserted, and I covered it with tape. Like what Brian O’Doherty was proposing at that time, I was arguing that art should not be shown in the beautiful, pristine white cube. I wanted to say that art should go out of the museum and into the general life, into the general public, to show the contrast between the work and the space. And you know, I think that Minimal art should be shown at Macy’s and Bob Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning Drawing should be shown at Walmart. Instead of taking the Brillo

box from the supermarket and putting it into the gallery, taking what is in the gallery and putting it in the supermarket.

AJ: And is this what you tried to do with television?

JD: Yes. In 1975 I came in contact with this new technology that made a huge revolution in the way we see television, and it was cable television. And I was very interested in that—in the possibilities of cable television, of doing things at home and putting them in a context that is not supported by an institution. There’s no distinction. Cable television was presented as a subversive alternative to what you were seeing on commercial television. And that’s when I started working with Cable SoHo and then the Artists’ Television Network. This started in 1975 and ran until 1985—for another ten years.

AJ: And what were you doing at Cable SoHo?

JD: Well, the idea of Cable SoHo was very ambitious, and many decades ahead of its time. Cable SoHo’s concept was to create an independent television channel based in SoHo. We wanted to incorporate the activities that were happening in SoHo, and to cablecast them to the rest of the city or to the rest of the country. Because at that time, in SoHo, we had all the alternative spaces in New York—and in the United States. We had The Kitchen, Anthology Film Archives, Artists Space, Franklin Furnace . . . And the idea behind Cable SoHo was to dedicate one day to Artists Space, another day to Anthology Film Archives . . . Every night, we would go to The Kitchen and videotape the performance and cablecast it live . . . We had a van with all the necessary equipment, the transmission and reception equipment, and we’d take it to these different locations and cablecast from there.

AJ: Were there other artists working with you? JD: Yes. Doug Davis, Bob Stearns . . .
AJ: And how was it transmitted?
JD: From the truck.

AJ: From the truck?

JD: From the truck, because cable television in New York City came from the New York City Hall. And the main cable was underneath Broadway. So for SoHo, it was very easy to get a hookup to that main cable and have a line of direct transmission to the cable television station that, at that time, was called Manhattan Cable Television. At that time, there was no cable in SoHo. The only cable in New York was between 14th and 55th Streets. So it was very limited service.

AJ: What was the difference between the Cable SoHo and the Artists’ Television Network?

JD: Cable SoHo was creating a discrete system. We were not able to raise funds, because the idea was too farfetched for the funding organizations—and the cable company did not see the potential. Actually, there were dozens of channels with nothing to broadcast. They would broadcast bulletin boards, because they had no product. Nobody was producing anything. Financially, we could not do what we wanted. So we had to either forget about the whole project or make a deal with the cable company to get a channel. Because, again, they had nothing to show.

We would take the channel and broadcast programs that we had already produced. There were a lot of video artists at the time. We would organize the shows into series, like commercial television, that ran for thirteen weeks. Thirteen weeks is the magic number. We would organize a thirteen-week series, using the cable-station channel, and then we would take these shows to people’s homes and they could watch them from there. However, at that point, a lot of artists disagreed with the idea, because they thought that they were not gaining anything specific from it. Others said, “This is an opportunity of a lifetime, but the artists have to get something out of it. A fee, something.” So I went to the National Endowment for the Arts and had a long talk with Brian O’Doherty, who was the director of visual arts there, and I explained to him the situation. He was 100 percent behind the idea. And he said, “I’ll give you the initial funding to start operating.” And with that funding, Cable SoHo changed its name to Artists’ Television Network—a network of very experimental work, with new formats, new standards, and work that had never before been imagined on television.

The series was called SoHo Television Presents. It was 1977 and we showed work by Nam June Paik, Laurie Anderson, Boghosian, Juan Downey, John Cage . . . many, many artists. And then in 1978, I had another idea: a live show.

AJ: And this was your own show?

JD: That [The Live! Show] was my own show. Live from the TV station in Manhattan. It was later distributed to different cities and countries. It ran until the middle of 1984 or 1985. 1985 was a year of major change in the art world. Before, since 1975, was like the golden years of SoHo. Everything was happening there, outside museums and mainstream galleries. There was a whole movement focused on taking elements from popular culture and putting them into the art world, and vice-versa. At that time, we called the artists working in this way crossover artists. Laurie Anderson was a typical crossover artist. Cindy Sherman was a typical crossover artist.

AJ: How was your work read in Latin America? Was it discussed at all? JD: No, no, not at all.

AJ: The first time you had the opportunity to show the Tape Wall Project was in the Bronx Museum, right?

JD: Which show?
AJ: The “Latin American Spirit: Art and Artists in the United States, 1920–1970.”

JD: Yes. And that was an important show, in part because it was focused on Latin America, but more because it was a creative force in the international art movement.

AJ: But you had been doing tape installations since the 1970s . . .

JD: Yes, in 1971, I did very similar things—video installations, tape installations. I did one piece covering the whole coastline of Latin America with tape. A lot of Conceptual pieces, at the CAYC [Centro de Arte y Comunicación (Center for Art and Communication)] in Buenos Aires.

It was not the first time. But within the context of Latin American art and anthological shows, I was never involved. I’m still not. But that’s a Latin American issue; they have their own set of guidelines. But I think that’s changing, because people are traveling, people are studying in different countries, and they’re realizing what’s going on in other places. One thing that is very good about the Internet is that you cannot lie. You have all the materials right there. You have the documentation right there.

AJ: Did you ever exhibit in other Latin American countries?

JD: I was in the São Paulo Biennial. I think it was in ’85 or ’83. But not as a representative of Latin America. No, no . . . rather as a representative of the new artists using new technologies. But as part of Latin America? No. No, I never showed in any other Latin American city. No. No. So my career basically . . .

AJ: Is here.
JD: . . . is here. . . Those things, yes, those things happened. All right. Anyway, we

should finish now, I have to be someplace else . . .

This is the second of two parts. Read the first part of the interview here.

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Ana Janevski/Sarah Lookofsky: A prescient place to begin would be with the final chapter of your book Comradeship, published last year. Titled “My Post-Catastrophic Glossary,” it is a kind of science fiction account of the aftermath of some unknown but cataclysmic event that has destroyed all material culture, including buildings and objects, with only memories left in its wake. You write: 

These days we meet and talk in underground chambers, beneath the ruins of our former institutions; all we have left are our human resources. (…) No museums, no careers, no Documenta, no Venice. No competition over prestige, no funding, no government. Just a bloody fight for survival, with no hypocrisy or masquerades. I recognize now that this struggle did not start with the catastrophe. My years at the Moderna galerija were already a battle, one I hardly would have survived without a community held together not just by family ties or personal friendship but by a cause bigger than any of us as individuals. Through war to peace, through socialism to capitalism, from the Yugoslav dinar to the Slovene tolar and finally to the euro. The last moment, remember, when Slovenia joined the European Union, was somehow meant to signal the end of the great social transition! How ironic, then, that this transition was accompanied by the election of a right-wing government in Slovenia and, we feared, a new era of fascism. But that bad future didn’t last. The living memory of civil society from the 1980s was too strong. That spirit reawakened and answered the threat. A spirit of collectivism lives on, too, in L’Internationale, the international confederation of institutions launched in the very place where Nika and I sit now. Our museums are gone, and we don’t meet as often since we can no longer travel by plane. But our friendship has only grown stronger. Cynical reason having lost its purchase, there is now even greater idealism among us. The senses of solidarity and shared humanity once left in the dustbin of history are in the new light of aftermath being revived and redefined. I think we will survive this disaster. My friends are alive and I can hardly wait to see them roar again like young lions—to sit down with them again in some ruin and start planning a renewed world.

It is incredible to think that you published this last year, with a launch in New York, where we saw you. One could argue that version of what you described then has now come to pass: a global virus has ravaged countries around the world, with many institutions reeling as a result, some may not reopen. With this peculiar collapse of past and future, fiction and fact, can you talk about your thinking and planning as COVID-19 became a reality that demanded your institutional response?

Zdenka Badinovac: I believe two things I predicted in My Post-Catastrophic Glossary have come true with this pandemic: just as I had imagined, it took a disaster of planetary proportions to derail us, and we had to find ourselves without our museums, standing on their ruins as it were, before we could change our thinking. True, we were only left without access to our museums for two months, but the experience was quite sobering. Working from home taught us a great deal, lessons we may well revisit time and again. Clearly, museums will have to be thought about differently for quite some time; the epidemic can strike again at any moment, which is one of the reasons why planning costly exhibitions has become just too risky. Many of my colleagues working in museums want to show solidarity with others, it’s something we have discussed also within our confederation of museums L’Internationale—all of our member museums are ready to work differently now, to seriously consider redistributing funds to projects that could involve precarious artists and other external collaborators. Solidarity has become a key issue, not as an expression of our goodness, but as a condition of our collaboration in general, since otherwise prosperous institutions will only be able to collaborate with other prosperous institutions, which does not allow for the production of new knowledge. In the case of our institution, MG+MSUM, the situation is pretty dire: it was a low-budget institution even before this crisis, now things are bound to only get worse. I see a possible solution in diverse local and international agents coming together for projects that are sustainable, meaning that they involve care for others and a different economy of solidarity not based exclusively on market economy, but potentially involving also direct exchange of services and goods… Of course, people cannot live without money, so more than that has to be done; there is a lot of talk about public works, which might provide a source of income for artists, at least for a while. The state should provide funds for weathering this crisis both for artists and the sphere of culture in general. At MG+MSUM, we have decided to prioritize purchasing works from living artists, the dead can wait. A sustainable museum must lean on its constituents, forging various temporary alliances with them, alliances that are configured and reconfigured. We are probably about to face a time of major changes in institutions, which will assume a greater social role rather than follow the logic of cultural industries. Just like health care and education, culture and art also need to be predominantly publicly financed, as this corona crisis has proven.

AJ/SL: The opening essay of the book is your catalog essay for the exhibition “Body and the East,” 1998, which was the first international survey of the art performed in Eastern Europe from the 60s until the 90s. It included artists and researchers from fourteen Eastern European countries. You said that by putting body art at the center of the first EE survey about post avant-garde art coming from the East, you wanted to emphasize how body art incorporated important social experience and to discuss the representational character of “Eastern art.” Your interest in body art and performance is not engaged with the metaphysics of presence, but open-ended, social and mediated. COVID-19 has put the body at the center of attention: physical proximity is marked as potentially lethal; the representation of sick bodies is strangely rare despite the immensity of the global death toll; and new technologies of both tracking and digital interaction are precipitously advancing. How are you now thinking of the contemporary status of the body and whether it still involves any kind of geographic differentiation?

ZB: In my text for the Body and the East catalogue I wrote that Tomislav Gotovac streaking through the streets of Zagreb and Belgrade probably did not differ in action from other artists doing something similar in the streets of New York or London in the 1960s and 1970s. What was different, what is different is always the perception of the environment. In Yugoslavia during socialist times, such actions were automatically seen as political provocations. But then, they are also seen as provocation today. This week, two Slovene performers stripped in front of the building of the Ministry of Culture in Ljubljana in protest against the current cultural politics, and it was clear to everyone why they did it. A naked body may always look the same everywhere, but in reality it is not, nudity is always situated in the context of a specific socio-political moment and it is also interpreted as such. Another thing the coronavirus pandemic did was remind us of our mortality; our civilization had relegated death to the margins, but now the significance of rituals is being discussed again, saying goodbye to departed loved ones, mourning and grieving. I am currently working on an exhibition dealing with the notion of heroism, with the question of what we are actually prepared to die for. This is a very important question since it concerns freedom. With the numbers of authoritative state leaders increasing, freedom is in jeopardy, and the pandemic has contributed to this considerably. In body art, artists have often pushed themselves close to death in order to feel free. As we witness thousands of people dying of the coronavirus today, we naturally put empathy first, but that does not make the issue of freedom any less important.

AJ/SL: “Care: ‘relations [that] maintain and repair a world so that humans and non-humans can live in it as well as possible in a complex life-sustaining web.’ – Puig de La Bellacasa, 2017” is the opening line of a statement that the network of museums that you co-founded, L’Internationale, has issued during the coronavirus lockdown. Care and sustainability have been central to think about our present and future. You mentioned several times in your writing that an art institution should not merely respond to the context but create context or be a “revolutionary subject” of the time we inhabit. In her essay, Lockdown Theatre (2): Beyond the time of the right care: A letter to the performance artist, the writer and theorist Bojana Kunst quotes Puig de La Bellacasa and makes an interesting distinction between the “right care,” which follows norms, and “care with” that involves a knitting together of systems and processes of co-survival and support. Are there any recent examples of “caring with” that you can think of?

ZB: Art institutions can serve as the place where micro- and macro-politics can come together. This pandemic has brought “care” to the foreground as a key word that must be used with precision. Both Bellacasa and Kunst know what they are talking about and both have radical forms of care in mind. But I also think that this word gives emphasis to something that has long been inherent to art, and partly also to art institutions. Socially critical art always strives for a better world. It is simply a matter of not being indifferent, of caring about what goes on around us. And, having worked for an art institution for thirty years, I see it as essential that all these micro-efforts and experiences should be incorporated into the structures of education, culture, urban planning, etc. Sustainable solutions cannot remain confined to micropolitics, but can and must be protected by systems, and here is where museums can play an important role. They can at least enact something that the state should organize on a much larger scale. Because of the pandemic, museums lost many of their external collaborators and workers, such as museum attendants, educators, designers… Most of our museum attendants at the MG+MSUM are students and artists. When our museum buildings closed and the staff working from home, our external coworkers were suddenly out of work. In response, we launched the “Fill Two Needs with One Deed” action, employing our museum attendants to look after sick artists and pensioners by doing their shopping, talking to them on the phone or over video chat, etc. Not all who found themselves out of work were involved in this, but I nonetheless feel that this project was an important symbolic gesture of what an institution can do and that an institution should always take a stand and clearly express that it cares.

AJ/SL: There is a lot of discussion about whether there is a return to normal or what will be a “new normal.” In former Yugoslavia, there is an experience of the process of normalization after the war and then, following EU integration, a normalization through cultural integration, in which “culture” was more or less explicitly understood as a means of integration, of bringing Eastern Europe closer to standards of Western liberal-capitalistic order. The call for the online exhibition that the museum initiated in response to COVID-19, Viral Self Portrait, ends with “The future is either corona capitalism as the next stage of cognitive capitalism or else a corona rebellion against this standardization – and this is where art can play a major role.” We know you can’t predict the future but do you hold out hope that rebellion might prevail over normalization?

ZB: Today, we see people protesting all over the world. In Europe, they are rebelling against autocratic leaders and corruption, as is currently the case in Slovenia, Serbia, Hungary to name a few; in the United States, there is a veritable rebellion against racism; and soon there will be more and more fired workers in the streets around the globe. Until recently, progressive artists and theorists in the territory of former Yugoslavia looked back to the positive experience of socialism in their work, to a society of solidarity that no longer exists. While such revisiting of the past frequently bore a nostalgic note, this pandemic has forcibly pushed to the foreground the issue of the public healthcare system, as countries with predominantly privatized healthcare had great difficulties and high numbers of casualties. Where matters were not organized on the national level, people self-organized within their communities to help one another; we could see all manner of civil initiatives taking place. Care came alive in myriad micro-relations, and now it’s up to the large systems to learn from them. The experience of care “from below” is crucial in this moment; if macro-politics were to incorporate it, this would be a huge historical leap forward. There are still two possible outcomes before us: an even more ruthless form of capitalism or a society of solidarity.

The post Post-Catastrophic Museums of Care appeared first on post.

Read a review of the publication at Hyperallergic.

Ana Janevski: How do you understand the term and notion of “Eastern Europe” from the perspective of today, almost thirty years after the end of socialism?

Sanja Iveković: To give a definition of Eastern Europe is a difficult or almost impossible task because it’s about a social and cultural construct. I looked at the English-language Wikipedia and found the following sentence: “There are almost as many definitions of Eastern Europe as there are scholars of the region.” What we all know is that at the beginning of the ’90s, the term “Eastern Europe” encompassed all the European communist countries. Although Yugoslavia was not officially part of that bloc, my definition (based on my own experience) includes Yugoslavia as well. After the collapse of the communist regimes, the picture of Eastern Europe completely changed. It became a phantom both for those in the East as well as in the West or, perhaps more apt, a phantom limb. As in the case of that fascinating medical phenomenon when people feel pain in limbs that are not there anymore, today many suffer from nostalgia. [Slavoj] Žižek has the best answer to that: “One should not consider what current time has to say about communism but what the communist idea has to say about current times.” 

AJ: You have considered yourself a feminist artist since the ’70s, and the first feminist conference held at Belgrade’s Student Cultural Center in 1978, under the title “Comrade Woman: The Women’s Question – A New Approach?” [“Drug-ca Žena. Žensko Pitanje – Novi Pristup?”], was very important to you. It was the first autonomous second-wave feminist event in Eastern Europe, specifically Southeastern Europe, and it is considered a turning point in Yugoslav history. It paved the way for feminist theory to begin to inform the social and cultural discourse of Yugoslavia, but the new research did not include the visual arts. The feminist reflection of your work came only later. When and how did that happen?

SI: Generationally I am part of the group of Croatian artists that was formed in the ’70s and made a radical break with the local artistic tradition, yet it was still a “male scene.” I encountered feminist art for the first time at the first exhibition of European video art, Trigon ’73 in Graz, which included works by VALIE EXPORT as well as by American artists such as Lynda Benglis, Joan Jonas, Trisha Brown, and Hermine Freed. The following year in Lausanne at the second international exhibition Impact Art – Video Art, I saw works by Eleanor Antin, Martha Rosler, and Yvonne Rainer. And in international art magazine such as Flash Art, Artforum, and Avalanche, I had the opportunity to read about feminist art. I found it all very inspiring, so at my first solo show at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb, in 1976, I showed works that problematized the position of women in society, representations of women in the media, and my own position as a woman artist within the art system. This was two years before the well-known international conference in Belgrade. I started with the practice; the theory came later. I started to educate myself in feminist and gender theory at the “Woman and Society” meetings, which were organized within the Association of Sociologists by a group of feminists who, at the time, were producing a great number of theoretical texts and magazine articles, but who did not recognize visual art as a part of that discourse. Feminist art critique and critical texts from feminist art theory appeared only in the ’90s. The Center for Women’s Studies [Zagreb] had an important role in promoting feminist theory and practice on the local scene. It was founded in 1995, and it is led by feminists, scientists, artists, and women with experience in women’s and civil activism. I was one of the founders, so I taught for several years on the subject of feminist artistic practice. The center has launched a magazine, Third, which also deals with feminist art. The first feminist text about my work was written by Bojana Pejić under the title “Methonimical Moves,” and it appeared in the catalogue for Manifesta 2 published by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb. Yet even today there is no systematic research of the feminist artistic scene, and still some of the women artists don’t want to be called feminist artists, mostly it seems because they think that this “label” would narrow the perception of their work and the meaning of their practice. We should not forget that the myth of art with no gender is still present, and that the [postcommunist] transition brought a remasculinization of society. 

AJ: Your socially critical practice has continued until today, and in the last twenty years you have often worked collaboratively with activist groups and civil society initiatives, in Croatia as well as around the world. Why do you find such collaboration important in your practice? And how does the collaborative practice translate into exhibition practice?

SI: I consider the work I do with women’s NGOs an important part of my education. Women’s groups have had a crucial role in the process of building a civil society in Croatia, because they have promoted new organizational models and different ways of articulating their own interests from those in the mainstream or as defined by traditional social rules. I would agree with the argument that women’s groups were fundamental to the process of democratization in the region. Namely, women’s groups were the first autonomous initiatives to organize themselves outside of the existing institutions, like the socialist groups or the unions. My own collaboration with women’s groups was a very precious experience as I started to change the methods and content of my work. The biggest value of the collaborative projects is that the work with other women makes me feel that I am participating in something that is bigger than I am, that has not only a personal but a larger political importance. I was not so familiar with the issue of violence towards women when I started the project Women’s House in 1998; this subject was not so present in the art world. My work has changed since then, everything around us has changed, the borders are fluid, the enemies are more and more invisible, and since I don’t belong to the generation that formed itself in the society of spectacle, I still stubbornly believe that resistance is possible. What concerns me is that today art functions as a place for the discussion of all burning political questions, but this reflection remains within the art system; it doesn’t reach the streets or parliaments. 

AJ: You are one of the pioneers of new media, performance, and video art. What are the strategies for effective feminist work today? 

SI: I don’t have a prescription for an effective feminist work today. I think that it’s important to abandon the idea that feminism has to deal only with women. In my work, I have always wanted to deal with real problems in society, no matter whether they are about the position of women or the Roma people, marginalized workers and all the other “others.” I always try to critically reflect my own position, my role in the art system as well as what happens to me as a citizen. I think that the strength of the artistic act is not only to reflect social reality but to actively participate in the creation of the collective and social imaginary. It is the role of the artist to find each time a new model to deal with the difficult issues, one which enables the viewer to reflect upon contemporary society and to rethink his or her place in it.

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Ana Janevski: 1989 is not only considered a pivotal year in the reconfiguration of the world political order, it’s often seen as a threshold for all sorts for interrelated social and cultural transformations, the “turn of turns,” as it were. To wit, in your book Too Much World [2014], you take 1989—specifically the Romanian uprising that year, when protesters invaded the state TV studios—as the symbolic beginning of a new visual order. Tell us more about the connections you see between those events and today.

Hito Steyerl: After following the Romanian revolution on TV, Vilém Flusser developed the concept of images that do not record a given situation but which project an expected situation. In 1990 he wrote, “It is the image that now triggers events.”¹ Since then, it has become clear that images do trigger politics, especially images on TV and social media, where formatted data attract followers and create momentum. We neglect this aspect at our own risk: it has been a potent mechanism for populist forces lately. Whatever is circulated on monopolist social-media platforms is, to a certain extent, formatted by algorithms that privilege certain kinds of “content,” creating zones of visibility and invisibility. It is interesting right now to compare the discourse around “fake news” on social media and some TV networks with the memory of state propaganda TV in socialist Romania. I am not saying this is the same—obviously, it is definitely not. But contemporary forms of media are also creating a new set of major social problems in relation to propaganda, censorship, and disinformation, this time on a much wider scale. So will anyone storm Facebook, VKontakte, or Weibo as they stormed the state TV studios during the Romanian revolution? If so, who? Putschists? Protesters? The organized right wing? It is extremely interesting to rewatch [Harun] Farocki and [Andrei] Ujicǎ’s Videograms of a Revolution from this perspective today, because it clearly shows that the storming of the Romanian TV studios was an extremely conflicted event on many levels.

AJ: What about the era before the turning point of 1989, specifically the experience of socialist internationalism—is that important for the current moment, whether in terms of solidarity, people’s struggle for decolonization, alternative routes of cultural exchange, or . . .?

HS: Socialist internationalism was tied both to Industrial Age ideas of workerism and, in most places, to authoritarian top-down modes of governance. Thus, in order for it to make any sense today, it needs to be completely reimagined. It’s like asking: do we still need boats after the Titanic sank? Sure, people do need some sort of flotation device, or some might literally drown, but to build the Titanic anew will not help. Spare parts have been discontinued, and the factory itself turned into a launch support for the oligarch-financed colonization of Mars, staffed by robots.

Roxana Marcoci: Eastern Europe, of course, is part of the global contemporary art scene, perhaps now more so than ever. Given the technological conditions of globalization, would you say that the constant, often undiscerning production—of images, soundbites, texts—leads to further accelerated consumption, in a trajectory we can trace to the late seventeenth century, or are we now in a different place entirely, within an entropic bazaar where the cultural consumer can no longer assimilate culturally or discerningly engage sociopolitically, thus foreclosing the utopian side of commodity production?

HS: If the contemporary art world were a bazaar, that would be great. It would be a market woven by human relations in which people from many walks of life talk to one another and communicate. I would love it if the art world were similar to a čaršija or a souk, and in some parts, it is. But the situation you describe relates to a different part of the art world, which works more like an entropic mall, now constituted to a certain extent by postdemocratic govcorps (government-corporations). Another aspect of this is the mega art fair, with only corporation-size galleries left, booths soon to be manned by bot attendants and stupid AI’s—thus completely eradicating the type of bazaar where traders actually talk to people and the market is created through such human interaction. But cultural consumers will remain, albeit as unemployed populations who need to be pacified through entertainment. And there will always be something interesting, even if it’s not called art, because, after all, humans are curious and imaginative beings.

RM: In nearly all its operational spheres, art in the global age remains defined and prescribed by white masculinist hegemony. Do you find critique, and especially social critique (the art not governed like that, according to Michel Foucault), still an effective way to challenge authorial authority?

HS: Critique is fine, as such; negativity is necessary. But clearly the para-academic habit of “critique” has, within the past few decades, turned into ritual nagging, without any consequences except infighting and division. Let me explain: in specific environments with specific social rules, critique might actually do something. It might act like a contract or software that sets certain actions—change or improvement—in motion. But this environment does not exist (if it ever existed). Critique only becomes active if it is embedded into some kind of social relations that could enforce or at least encourage consequences. This clearly does not apply to most power structures today, which simply couldn’t care less.

So as a kind of dystopian substitute, the habit of critique has, in many cases, deteriorated into shaming and blaming, creating constant purging and fragmentation. Since this type of critique is powerless in relation to power, it starts punching down or sideways. It sometimes manifests as a self-victimization that reeks of entitlement, like a vicious derivative of guilt-driven puritanism. Social media are playing a large part in this development. I think that the most radical and unusual step would not be unlimited further critique, but if for once a couple people agreed on something and focused on building structural agreement among one another.

RM: You ended your text Kobanê Is Not Falling [2014] with a question: “What is the task of art in times of emergency?” What does it mean to be an artist today—in the context of increasing isolationism (Brexit, “America First” foreign policy), the global resurgence of far-right movements, reprisals against minorities, and a relentless drive to expand global capitalism?

HS: In the text you mention, I never answered my own question for a reason. Many of the so-called solutions put forth by the art field during the last twenty years or so, all the big proposals and pretentions, mainly led to grotesquely bloated corporate shows and the “blockbustering” of permanent failure. This is a dead end. Maybe first of all one could just scale back exaggerated expectations and realize that art, after all, is not that important. Maybe what art can do now is what it is best at: look, listen, and interpret with precision, imagine without compromise or fear. But also without being instrumentalized to ever more grandiose ends. This just leads to endless frustration, toxic moralizing, and deadlocks. Deflating art’s pretentions, its blockbusterism, its megalomaniac delusions about its own power would be a first step.

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Reflection by Ksenia Nouril, C-MAP Central and Eastern Europe Fellow

After weeks spent busy organizing the second C-MAP Central and Eastern European Group trip to Moscow, I found myself on the nine-hour flight from New York, wondering what to do with a brief moment of respite. Running through my mind were the intricacies of our densely packed schedule of meetings with artists and curators, tours of historic cultural sites, visits to museums, and the grand opening of the first Triennial of Russian Contemporary Art at the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art. There is always so much to do and so little time in a metropolis like Moscow, a city I have come to love dearly through my many visits as an independent scholar and then C-MAP fellow for Central and Eastern European art at MoMA.

I was reminded of Moscow’s entrancing effect when I decided to spend my inflight time re-watching the classic Soviet film Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears (1981), which tells the story of three young women who have moved to Moscow from the provinces in the 1950s to learn about life and love, often the hard way. The film’s opening credits roll on the backdrop of a bird’s-eye view of Moscow. In the city’s skyline, one can spot the many bridges that cross the Moscow River, a few of the tiered-cake-like buildings known as the Seven Sisters, its wide boulevards, and the vast network of housing blocks that encircle the city center with micro-neighborhoods for the proletariat. Moscow has the reputation for being synonymous with Russia. It is the largest city in the largest country in the world, making it the de facto center of Russian politics, economics, and culture. Moscow monopolizes the country’s and the world’s imagination; however, there is so much more beyond it, spanning a Russian Eurasian landmass from the Gulf of Finland in the west to the Bering Sea in the east.

Yet, Moscow continues to be a major crossroads for people, places, and things traversing the globe. The Garage Museum of Contemporary Art actualized this by bringing more than sixty artists from about forty cities to Moscow for the first Triennial of Russian Contemporary Art. This was no easy feat—the result of many months of travel to places with varying languages and customs, in several different time zones. My further comments will focus on just a few artists—both included and excluded in Garage’s Triennial—who caught my attention because of the ways their works navigate complicated geographies.

Based between Dagestan, a republic in the North Caucasus region, and Moscow, Taus Makhacheva mines the histories of her family and her country in multimedia works that engage the viewer through impassioned narrative and performance. Makhacheva screened several films for the C-MAP Central and Eastern European Group, including Tightrope (2015), which most recently was exhibited in the main pavilion of the 57th Venice Biennale. Delving deep into personal archives, the artist researched the lives of tightrope walkers and aligned their previously invisible history with that of the precarity of the art collections in the underfunded and underappreciated regional museums across the former Soviet Union. In the film, a tightrope walker individually carries one of several dozen works from the Dagestan Museum of Fine Arts, named after P. S. Gamzatova, across a sizeable gap between two cliffs. While the elevation goes unstated, it is clear that he is performing a feat of epic proportions. Seemingly futile, the tightrope walker’s action metaphorically points to the urgent need for “keepers” of cultural histories, as Makhacheva herself dedicates much of her work to questioning the parameters of such histories and the role of the artist in their preservation. The film is often accompanied by a performance entitled On the Benefits of Pyramids in Cultural Education, Strengthening of National Consciousness, and the Formation of Moral and Ethical Guideposts, in which acrobats, hired locally at the site of the given exhibition, restage this symbolic movement of paintings in a gymnastics routine.

Sergey Sapozhnikov is a photographer based in Rostov-on-Don in southern Russia, not far from the Ukrainian and Georgian borders. When Sapozhnikov is not shuttling back and forth to Moscow, where he often exhibits, he is photographing his hometown and the cities beyond. His book The City, published in 2016, is composed of black-and-white photographs of freestanding houses, apartment complexes, garages, commercial buildings, and other similar structures in various states of disrepair in Rostov-on-Don; Samara, in the Volga region; and Vladivostok, in the far east of Russia. On the one hand, the photographs document the everyday in Russia today. On the other hand, they also capture an absence, as the figure—human or animal—is conspicuously missing. Unfortunately, the C-MAP Central and Eastern European Group was unable to meet with Sapozhnikov on this trip—having met him on our first trip to Russia in 2015—since he was home in Rostov-on-Don, working on his next project. However, we visited his exhibition The Drama Machine at the gallery at the Udarnik Cinema with Teresa Mavica, director of the V-A-C Foundation, which has supported Sapozhnikov’s work in the past. Through both color and black-and-white photographs, the photographs in The Drama Machine capture the Maxim Gorky Drama Theater, designed by the architects Vladimir Shchuko and Vladimir Gelfreikh in the early 1930s in the Sapozhnikovs’ native Rostov-on-Don. The Constructivist-inspired building itself figures in only a few of the photographs, along with some archival materials, but it serves as inspiration for the artist’s own constructions, namely, images of what appear to be found or partially staged heaps of garbage—wooden pallets, metal crates, bolts of fabric—on and around which actors and dancers—his acquaintances—play in a phantasmagoric mise-en-scène.

Upon hearing his life story, one can say that Haim Sokol is a professional migrant. Born in the northern city of Arkhangelsk to a displaced Ukrainian-Jewish family, Sokol lived in Israel for sixteen years after the fall of the Soviet Union before relocating, in 2001, to Moscow, where he still lives and works. Thus, it is not surprising that Sokol’s work is preoccupied with the topics of dislocation and self-identity. For his film I am Spartacus (2012), the artist hired economic migrants to reenact the iconic scene from Stanley Kubrick’s 1960 Hollywood classic Spartacus. As in the original, these men, who come to Moscow from Central Asia for better yet still low-paying manual-labor jobs, join forces in claiming to be Spartacus, the slave who led the uprising against the Roman Republic around 111 BC. They are stronger together than on their own. The two-minute-and-seven-second film is short but powerful, as the viewer is swept away in solidarity. In keeping with his nomadic lifestyle, Sokol was between studios earlier this year, and so we met him in the Garage Education Center, where he screened his films and shared his installations and works on paper with us. We previously met Sokol on our 2015 trip to Moscow, when we saw his work Well (2013) in a group exhibition at the Moscow Museum of Modern Art. It comprises hundreds of photographic portraits that Sokol had collected over the years, which are laid inside a large, open-top structure that invites the viewer to peek inside and contemplate the histories and fates of these anonymous subjects.

Reflection by Sara Bodison

A few days before our trip to Moscow, the C-MAP Central and Eastern Europe Group had a chance to meet with artist and human rights activist Victoria Lomasko. She was in New York promoting her new book Other Russias and drawing a site-specific mural for an exhibition of her work Unwanted Women at Ortega y Gassett Projects in Brooklyn.

Other Russias is the first collection of Lomasko’s graphic reportage, a body of work that she produced between 2008 and 2016. It features drawings she made directly from life, capturing everything from protests and political trials in Moscow to people she met during her travels across Russia—everyone from school teachers in small villages to sex workers in dying industrial towns to juveniles in a drawing class she taught at a detention center. She said she allows her subjects to review and approve their own words, which she uses as captions. Lomasko explains that by documenting her subjects through drawing, rather than through photography or video, she aims “to break through to a more direct grasp and reflection of the reality around me.” Beginning in 2012 Lomasko curated The Feminist Pencil, a series of exhibitions (and related publications) showcasing socially engaged graphic art by women—from manga to graffiti. When we were in Moscow we met with her co-curator for the exhibition, Nadia Plungian, a historian, artist, and activist whose current research focuses on LGBT history in Russia and queerness and masculinity of female figures in Soviet socialist realism.

We also saw sixteen of Lomasko’s drawings of protestors demonstrating for and against Pussy Riot (among other issues) featured in the inaugural Garage Triennial of Russian Contemporary Art in Moscow. They were on view in a gallery devoted to one of the exhibition’s thematic vectors—“Art in Action”—featuring eleven artists and collectives who “intend to be catalysts for social change.” At the center of this gallery were four sewing-machine stations, where Shvemy sewing cooperative performed 12-Hour Workday, re-creating and critiquing a real workday at a sweatshop, on opening weekend. Over the course of the long day, they worked rapidly in an assembly line to produce fanny packs, taking just three bathroom breaks and a fifteen-minute lunch break, and speaking only of work. The next day they sold the packs, which they had emblazoned with the phrase “Made in Slavery,” for forty-four rubles each—the average sum a Russian worker is paid per garment. The collective takes the sweatshop as the subject of its work because they believe it is “the main place where poverty is propagated today, as well as being a place of subjection to the powers that have created and maintained such labor conditions.”

An adjacent vector titled “Personal Mythologies” featured the work of Gentle Women group, who examine gender issues through the “complex of myths, ideas and common beliefs about what women are. . . .” The video Bread and Salt shows a woman salting the sea, remnants from another performance, archival images, and a visitor’s review, which states: “This is exactly what a woman should do, something that looks beautiful, but is in fact pretty useless. Spending time and energy on salting the sea but forgetting to salt her own soup.” Other works explored aspects of the body and childbirth including a video of a woman squeezing breast milk at the camera.

The last day of our visit we met with Taus Makhacheva, whose work (including The Way of An Object, which was featured in the Triennial) draws inspiration from her native Dagestan. I was particularly delighted to hear her speak about the work of her “colleague and alter ego Super Taus,” who wears traditional clothing and lives in the mountains with her family. In one performance Super Taus carried a giant sculpture on her back through the galleries of Centre Pompidou, stunning passersby. In another, seemingly impossible act, she walked from Dagestan to Moscow carrying a monument. And in yet another she spent nine minutes pushing a giant boulder to clear the road, all captured in a dashcam video circulated on WhatsApp in hopes that it would go viral—heroic indeed!

These diverse works by women artists and collectives—whether drawn, sewn, thrown, or pushed—help to give voice to voiceless citizens, make visible invisible labor practices, and heroicize unsung heroes. The varied perspectives, strategies, and forms of their works offer new insights (and in some cases, much-welcome levity) about many of the most pressing social and political issues facing Russia today.

Reflection by Roxana Marcoci

In March 2017, the C-MAP Central and Eastern European group traveled to Moscow to attend the opening of the first Triennial of Russian Contemporary Art organized by the art museum Garage with works from across Russia’s eleven time zones. The exhibition included 68 artists and collectives and was organized by a six-person curatorial team around seven vectors: “Master Figure,” “Art in Action,” “Fidelity to Place,” “Personal Mythologies,” “Common Language,” “Local Histories of Art,” and “Mythologies.” The exhibition maps Russia today as a place grounded in multiple heritages (Russia comprises two hundred nationalities)—from Siberia to Chechnya—construing a prismatic montage of the different cultures from within its borders. One of the thorny issues surrounding the Triennial was the inclusion of Crimea —the Ukrainian territory that was annexed by Russia in 2014. The curatorial decision was to address the artistic life in the region but also to critically tackle its political underpinnings through a series of actions: a performance by Simferopol-based Free Dance Lab group; a discussion about Crimean artists working in Crimea, Ukraine, and Russia; and a presentation of Chto Delat’s Safe Haven (2016), a film about Crimean filmmaker Oleg Sentsov, who is currently imprisoned in Russia for protesting the annexation.

2017 marks the centennial anniversary of the Russian Revolution, and although exhibitions celebrating the event abound across museums from New York to Chicago, London, Paris, and Venice, no institution in Moscow seems to mention this political milestone, which buttressed the rise of Russia’s first artistic avant-garde—as if the word “revolution” in itself could stir unwanted political discontent. The Garage Triennial may be the exception. A cross-generational exhibition, it includes works that have been made since 2012, the year of the last Russian presidential elections, which brought Vladimir Putin once again to the helm of the Russian Federation. In particular, the section “Art in Action” features urgent, politically charged work by fringe feminist collectives and activists such as Shvemy sewing cooperative, Victoria Lomasko, Urbanfeminism, and Nadenka creative association, who address issues including domestic violence (recently decriminalized in Russia) and the repression of LGBTQ rights (public displays of homosexuality are illegal), as well as sweatshop labor.

The section “Fidelity to Place,” which focused on associating sociopolitical themes with the landscape and broader environment, was particularly well curated. It included various works from Taus Makhacheva’s marionettes, with their emphasis on the traditional, the ethnic, and the modern; to Aslan Gaisumov’s display of recovered house numbers from his partially destroyed hometown of Grozny; to Vladimir Seleznyov’s Metropolis. Nizhny Tagil, an immersive installation filled with empty milk cartons, sardine cans, shoeboxes, and other discarded items that the artist had gathered from his Ural hometown.

Additionally, Garage’s Rem Koolhaas–designed facade was topped with an Ugo Rondinone rainbow sign. As part of the museum’s inclusivity program, children from across the country were invited to collaborate, contributing some 1500 pictures of their own rainbows, which were hung on a wall in front of the museum’s entrance.

With the idea of furthering international exchange, Garage Museum awarded travel grants to ten international curators—Riksa Afiaty (Indonesia), Çelenk Bafra (Turkey), Lizaveta German (Ukraine), Jarrett Gregory (United States), Albert Heta (Kosovo), Li Qi (China), Joanna Sokołowska (Poland), Polly Staple (Great Britain), Chen Tamir (Israel), and Diana Ukhina (Kyrgyzstan)—who were able to visit and reflect on the exhibition.

Reflection by  Ana Janevski

After two rich days in Moscow visiting many museums, seeing historical and contemporary shows, and engaging in stimulating conversations with artists, curators, and peers, we attended the opening of the first edition of the Garage Triennial of Russian Contemporary Art on Wednesday evening, May 9. The opening was very festive, gathering most of the artists presenting works, Moscow’s principal art figures, and several of the ten international curators who had been awarded travel grants, offered by Garage, to visit the exhibition.

What we learned about the Triennial before attending was that it included sixty artists from across the country selected by six members of the Garage curatorial team. The Triennial was commissioned and conceived by Kate Fowle, chief curator of Garage. Overseen by Fowle, Katya Inozemtseva, Snejana Krasteva, Andrey Misiano, Ilmira Bolotyan, Sasha Obukhova, and Tanya Volkova traveled throughout the country, visiting “forty cities and towns, crossing eleven times zones, in climates that range from the subtropical to the subarctic.” Later I learned that there are nearly two hundred nationalities and one hundred distinct languages spoken in Russia.

The two floors of the overall space were broken down by individual curators into seven “vectors,” or thematic groupings, including “Master Figure,” “Personal Mythologies,” “Street Morphology,” “Common Language,” “Fidelity to Place,” “Art in Action,” and “Local Histories of Art.”

Although an opening is not usually an ideal moment to thoroughly view an exhibition, I had a chance to join Snejana Krasteva’s tour, which she gave together with Maria Lind, director of Tensta konsthall in Stockholm, and Zdenka Badovinac, director of the Museum of Modern Art in Ljubljana, Slovenia. I joined them on the first floor, in “Master Figure,” where Krasteva was talking about Andrei Monastirsky, one of the founders of Moscow Conceptualism. Monastirsky was presenting four new videos in a series entitled Four Walks (2017). All walks started in the same place, which was significant to the history of Moscow Conceptualism, but each one ended at a different Moscow landmark. The other artists represented in this vector were Pavel Aksenov, Dmitry Bulatov, Ilgizar Khasanov, Anatoly Osmolovsky, and Dmitri Prigov. Each one of these artists, in his own specific way, has had an impact on the younger generation of artists across the huge territory of Russia. We asked Krasteva why there were not any women artists represented in “Master Figure.” She said the curators were aware of the strong presence of male artists in this section, but that there were no equally influential women artists of this same generation. While this explanation left me and my tour companions a bit perplexed, the next vector, entitled “Art in Action,” presented a very different situation, with a dominating number of female artists, whose work seemed to reference other “master” figures.

The path of the overall exhibition was pretty fluid, with open space, but some of the vectors were more delineated—as was the case with “Art in Action,” which occupied an entire gallery. The evening before, together with my colleague Laura Hoptman, a curator from the Department of Painting, and Viktor Misiano, a well-known Russian curator, we had talked about the important and controversial performances in the nineties by Alexander Brener, Oleg Kulik, and Avdei Ter-Oganian. We ended our conversation by discussing the generation of artists who have followed in their footsteps. “Art in Action” seemed to start exactly where our discussion had ended, by bringing together collectives and artists whose works focus mainly on critiques of social and political issues, and intend art as a catalyst of social change. They often consider themselves more activists than artists, practicing social work, journalism, or political activism, as is the case with Artem Loskutov, the organizer of the annual happening “Monstration,” or Katrin Nenasheva, whose public actions bring attention to the system of “corrective” psychiatry. The artistic collectives from the beginning of this decade, such as Voina, Pussy Riot, and Chto Delat, had a very strong influence on these younger artists, some of whom attended Chto Delat’s School for Engaged Art in St. Petersburg. Special attention was given to feminist issues, including domestic violence and emancipation from patriarchal society and institutions, through the works of collectives such as Shvemy sewing cooperative, a clothing manufacturing cooperative and collective who performed 12-Hour Workday, in which they re-created a factory workday at the opening; Nadenka creative association, who presented embroidered everyday objects and clothing with slogans that address the position of women in Russian society; and Urbanfeminism, who organized, among many other initiatives, self-defense classes for women and also published zines that were distributed in exchange for donations to a center for victims of sexual assault and shown in the gallery.

A few of the other artists represented in this gallery also had very personal and specific ways of dealing with the country’s salient political issues: Victoria Lomasko’s drawings refer to the prerevolutionary tradition of visual reportage. In Chronicles of Resistance (2011–12), she documents the Moscow demonstration from 2012 with direct quotes from participants. Alexey Iorsh’s project Art Activism in Comics (2012–ongoing) champions comics as a tool of activism. Anastasia Potemkina’s Bruise (2014) turn traces of physical violence into aesthetic images using the traditional medium of watercolor, while Alisa Yoffe’s large-format works in black and white present images with revolutionary potential.

The day after the opening, when we returned to the Triennial, we had a tour with another of its curators Andrei Misiano. It was interesting to follow the path of a different curator and to get his perspective on the overall exhibition. I went back to “Art in Action” to confirm that the challenging task of presenting this kind of work, mainly through its documentation, has been well resolved. The display presented a variety of media and was testament to a very vital and engaged artistic scene, one that is responsive in many different ways to current local and international social and political issues.

Reflection by  David Platzker

Myths and religion are the building blocks of art and art history. Artists, artisans, commissioners, collectors, historians, and curators have long reveled in portraying, possessing, and presenting stories of biblical, political, historic, personal, and otherwise divine sagas.

In this very traditional sense, the purest roles of art are that of storytelling, chronicling, interpreting, and messaging narrated moments—as slices of a feed if you will—to audiences as facts, morals, or parables. In eras long before photography was the primary tool of disseminating truths to a public audience, where literacy of images was often greater than that of written language, pictures—chiefly paintings—conveyed the majesty of ideals, since seeing encouraged believing.

In the early years of the twenty-first century, in the post-photography, post-video, post-internet, post-fact world, the art of telling stories has evolved to suit our times. Belief has become restructured by a cynicism that what we see in any medium—whether static imagery, video, aural, or textual—and is strained by an erosion of confidence that what is being conveyed is an objective-based reality. The power of a story solidified as a still image in any medium is tempered too by the locus of the delivery system by which one experiences a captured moment. Here, context drives experience, with perceptions shifting based on where and how an image is presented as much as on what the image is of. The question herein is whether the presentation in the context of a museum or a reputable newspaper connotes a definitional environment—an authentic place of faithful engagement, one that is greater in value—as a substrate for understanding that is the same, or as effective, as if it were presented on the screen of a cell phone without broader contextual surroundings.

Contemporarily tinkering with authenticity and with the crafting of new personal mythologies is the medium for artists Taus Makhacheva (b. 1983) and Evgeny Antufiev (b. 1986), who were featured in the Garage Triennial of Russian Contemporary Art and also made individual presentations to our C-MAP group on March 10, 2017. Rephrasing history and fashioning unique fictional narratives are the subjective materials of both artists, who take divergent, often intentionally humorous approaches to constructing chronicles that teeter between personal and colloquially regional experiences. Makhacheva, who is based in both her native city of Makhachkala, Dagestan, and Moscow, spoke to us about her work and alter ego—a character named Super Taus, who is a nondescript, ethnically clothed woman with the superpower of great physical strength tempered by utmost modesty. Deployed by Makhacheva, Super Taus appears in video works the artist has shared with the public though social media, confusing the underlying interpretation of the works as factual documentation of real feats of strength, as humor, and/or as a product of an artistic process. Equally challenging is whether such differentiations are even necessarily good or an indispensable prerequisite to an appreciation of the endeavor. It can be viewed here.

Falling short of starting his own religion, Antufiev discussed how his sculptures and installations reflect a desire on his part to craft objects that can be read as depicting alleged deities and the their accoutrements in a way that feels ancient formally and materially—conceivably as freshly unearthed artifacts rather than as contemporary works of art. As Antufiev spoke of his activities, it was clear that he has an inherent, contagious sense of humor, which left some of us wishing for more.

In Makhacheva’s and Antufiev’s presentations, we heard from artists who recognize that deploying regionalism and unique cultural identities, and parlaying the ethos or mystique of a nondominant culture within the space—such as a museum in Moscow or a cell-phone screen—enhance a deliberate ideal of separation from cultural dominance toward a fuzzy sense of romanticism of “the other.” This appeal is, in fact, a subversive return to a genuine simplicity predicated on the removal of the layered necessity to understand artworks as composites of the history that backs their places in an expansive, logical march of progression, wherein one form of art owes its existence—or interpretation—to prior works, and how they have become contextualized in word and presentation by their interpreters, such as historians, critics, curators, and educators, to the public.

Reflection by Jon Hendricks

Beautiful Moscow! I was so happy to return and to be embraced by its extraordinary art and architecture, and especially by its people. We have made many friends on our two trips to the city, and it is really unfair to single out just a few to write about. In 2015, we saw Sasha Pirogova’s work in Berlin at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Kreuzberg, and I had the very special treat of sitting with her during a luncheon in the garden. She is an absolutely brilliant artist and thinker. This March she presented her work—a large-scale projection of choreographed waiting, anticipation, the not-yet-seen, the unknown—in the Garage Triennial of Russian Contemporary Art. Deceptively simple, and even seemingly trivial, this work is a profound metaphor for the future: What will it be? Who will be a part of it? Who will be excluded? It is about the inevitable . . .

Pirogova also gave our group a private presentation of her work the day following the opening of the Triennial, showing us several video works, and talking about her concepts and approaches to her practice. This year she will be one of the representatives of Russia in the Venice Biennale and so is in the process of preparing a new work, which we all are eager to see and experience. Pirogova is one of a small group of the new generation of artists around the world who has the ability to perceive the direction of our time and to open our eyes to it.

Another artist our group met in 2015 in Moscow, and whose work I have been very impressed with, is Alisa Yoffe. She was represented in the Triennial by a stunning wall of brutal drawings—stark and ominous in their direct confrontation with viewers. They have anger and, at the same time, anxiety, as well as convey Yoffe’s concerns about the world around her—temporal, fleeting, meaningless, seeking. We were very fortunate that she and three of her friends, Veronika Aktanova, David Ter-Oganyan, and Phillip Hulamhanov, could join a few of our group in the rooftop lounge of our hotel, following the opening of the Triennial, to talk and drink some delicious vodka. I think that this informal, spur-of-the-moment gathering was an important interaction with these young Russian artists—giving us unscripted insight into their work and thinking—something that I hope will happen more frequently in the future.

I also want to say how important I found our meeting with George Kiesewalter. He gave us a brief presentation of his work as part of Collective Actions group and also of his amazing photographic documentation of the Moscow avant-garde. I so hope that we can meet with him again in Moscow, and spend an afternoon talking and looking at his work. I think that this will be essential to our deeper understanding of this very vibrant and significant period in Russian art.

Of course, there is so much more to talk about. There was the fantastic exhibition at the New Tretyakov Gallery, The Thaw. At the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, the very stimulating exhibition Facing the Future: Art in Europe 1945–1968, curated by Peter Weibel, places Russian art in the context of other European art of this time—and we were fortunate to have Weibel talk with some of us about the works as we looked at them. And yes, I did like the NAÏVE . . . NO exhibition at the Moscow Museum of Modern Art, and the Sergei Eisenstein exhibition at the Multimedia Art Museum.

Reflection by Erik Patton

Midway through the trip, after a visit to the Foundation of Vladimir Smirnov and Konstantine Sorokin, the group found its way to the soon-to-be V-A-C Foundation’s new Moscow site, GES-2, a former power station (built in 1907) that is being re-envisioned as a major site for contemporary art and culture. The Renzo Piano Building Workshop has been commissioned to revive and redesign the GES-2 main building and the surrounding area on the banks of the Moskva River. At the center of the newly imagined site is the institution’s commitment to performance (a large performance and theater-like space will take up a sizable footprint), which V-A-C has prioritized in recent years as made evident in its V-A-C Live programming with Whitechapel Gallery in London.

In fact, Moscow-based artist Evgeny Antufiev, with whom we met later on for a group-on-one studio visit (Antufiev’s work is also included in the Garage Triennial of Russian Contemporary Art), performed as a special guest at CABARET KULTURA with V-A-C Live (in September 2016 at Whitechapel), a series of experimental events inspired by Russian early twentieth-century avant-garde theater that took place in Russian artist Sergey Sapozhnikov’s site-specific stage set. For his performance, Antufiev created an absurdist and humorous lottery game featuring his objects-as-gifts in a playfully dark performance Dead Nation: Bingo Version.

Antufiev’s work in the Garage’s Triennial continued his interest in active mythmaking, the absurd, and his commitment to collecting and studying materials on Russian history and culture, including a monumental wooden sculpture in the tradition of the Scythians or the Etruscans. Other reliquaries on view referenced his personal history and family lineage (his grandmother’s teeth had found their way into his work).

At and around Garage MCA by Michelle Elligott

Reflection by Juliet Kinchin

Around the world there has been a rash of exhibitions and publications responding in some way to the centennial of the Russian Revolution, including MoMA’s own A Revolutionary Impulse: The Rise of the Russian Avant-Garde, which gave us all the chance to wallow in the riches of the Museum’s Russian avant-garde works from the years 1912 to 1935 while in the process of planning and discussing our Moscow trip. Yet evidence of a comparable Russian interest in this centenary was conspicuous by its absence from our Moscow itinerary. A couple of our Russian colleagues suggested that in the current political climate, the authorities have been reluctant to draw attention to a time of seismic revolution and a violent overthrow of the status quo. Instead there seemed to be a citywide focus on a less traumatic period of technological modernization and cultural cross-fertilization—the years of the “Thaw” after Stalin’s death in 1953 and before the “Stagnation” of the 1970s. The largest and most ambitious of these exhibitions was The Thaw at the New Tretyakov Gallery, which presented a nuanced view of the period’s achievements and conflicts, addressing the shadow cast by hidden histories of wartime suffering and Stalinist internment camps, as well as the triumphalist rhetoric of land reclamation, space exploration, and technological progress. The exhibition was organized like an urban plan, the thematic sections’ skillfully integrated displays—of paintings, sculpture, prints, photography, and film, with architectural models, samples of industrial design, household objects, and popular magazines—radiating out from an evocation of Mayakovsky Square. There was a wealth of mesmerizing design material: photographs of Kalinin Avenue under construction in the 1960s; an experimental electronic-music studio; abstract printed textiles; a 1967 “Saturn” vacuum cleaner; a scary-looking 1965 model of a mobile nuclear power plant; Hula Hoop, painted in 1968 by D. I. Blokhintsev, head of the Institute for Nuclear Research and world authority on quantum mechanics; and the intriguing discovery that a woman, Galina Balashova (b. 1931), designed the interiors of the Soyuz space capsule in 1964.

An exhibition on the design of everyday life, Moscow Thaw: 1953–1968 at the Museum of Moscow was less coherent in both concept and installation, an impression not helped by the minimal, Russian-only labeling. It was interesting, nevertheless, to see materials from little-known archives and collections being documented and brought together in a public display for the first time. At the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, curators chose to lead off from Ossip Zadkine’s sculpture The Destroyed City in their wide-ranging survey of fine-art trends in Eastern and Western Europe after the war, entitled Facing the Future: Art in Europe 1945–68. Art from the Soviet Union was combined with that of seventeen other European countries in a series of telling juxtapositions, such as Hungarian Béla Kondor’s Phenomenon and Constant’s New Babylon (1967), challenging the conventional binary narrative of West = Abstract Expressionism versus East = Socialist Realism. Alongside familiar paintings were many I had never seen before, including Picasso’s Massacre in Korea (1951) and two Leipzig artists’ responses to the Hungarian Revolution: The Dead Dove (1956) by Harald Metzkes, and White Terror in Hungary (1957) by Werner Tübke.

An exhibition of photographs from the 1980s by Igor Mukhin was the Multimedia Art Museum’s contribution to Fashion and Style in Photography 2017, part of the 10th Moscow International Biennale. Compared to Moscow’s Garage Triennial of Russian Contemporary Art, this biennale did not seem to have a high profile. It was interesting to see Mukhin’s photographs of crumbling Soviet sculptures, part of his Monuments series (1988), after visiting Muzeon, the park of similarly uprooted and toppled sculptures next to the New Tretyakov Gallery. Many of the images were reproduced as attention-grabbing floor-to-ceiling wallpapers rather than as vintage prints. Some of the music-based alternative culture Mukhin captured in the 1980s I had encountered last year in the excellent Notes from the Underground: Art and Alternative Music in Eastern Europe 1968–1994, curated by Daniel Muzyczuk and David Crowley at Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź. Also, at the Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow, there was an exhibition that took a deeper dive into the films, drawings, designs, and photographs of Sergei Eisenshtein. Eisenshtein’s film and visual ideas drawn from the time he spent in Mexico, and his 1931 drawing of Saint Veronica as the patron saint of photojournalism remain among my favorite memories of this trip.

Reflection by Maria Marchenkova

One of my favorite things about Moscow is its panoply of architectural styles—medieval churches, audacious Stalinist skyscrapers, and gaudy post-Soviet, postmodern developments, to name just a few—and the dramatic history they evoke. In Moscow the past seems especially strongly imprinted on the urban environment, because the country’s sharp breaks with its own history have repeatedly involved drastically, even violently, reshaping the landscape, with seemingly little regard for its value.

I was reminded of this during the C-MAP trip when I picked up an issue of the Moscow Times that contained an article about the city’s plans to demolish eight thousand local Khrushchevki, five-story apartment buildings named after Nikita Khrushchev, who initiated their construction on a vast scale in the 1950s in response to the country’s postwar housing shortage. Granted, these buildings have few defenders: they are not considered architectural gems and are generally in bad shape. But even structures that are esteemed by scholars and experts around the world, particularly those designed by the Soviet avant-garde, have generally not fared well. The Melnikov House (1927–29), designed by Konstantin Melnikov, might qualify as a rare success story, but even its long-awaited opening as a museum in 2014, after years of legal battles over ownership, was controversial, with architects and other experts protesting that proper renovation work hadn’t been done. Most historic avant-garde work has fared much worse. The iconic Shukhov Tower, by Vladimir Shukhov, for example, which was completed in 1922 and transmitted the first radio and television signals in the Soviet Union, has been mired in disputes about its conservation for years. Sadly, the official attitude toward the city’s rich modernist architecture seems to range from ambivalence to hostility.

There are, however, a number of individuals and organizations advocating for awareness and preservation of these historic treasures. One of them is Natalia Melikova, who founded The Constructivist Project, a website that contains invaluable research, documentation, maps, and news, in 2010. Having recently discovered this resource, I was delighted when Melikova agreed to join the C-MAP group on an unofficial architecture tour. On our last day in the city, we set out to look at some early twentieth-century avant-garde buildings. The first stop was a bit of an outlier: Le Corbusier’s Centrosoyuz headquarters (1928–36). Although designed by an architect from outside the USSR, for our group, this building, the only one by the modernist master in Russia, was a must-see. We also visited the Zuev Workers’ Club (1927–29), designed by Ilia Alexandrovich Golosov. One of many such projects executed by the Bolsheviks to provide spaces where workers could be entertained and educated in line with socialist values, the club now houses a theater; its exterior has remained largely intact even as its interior has sadly been altered.

And we were fortunate enough to be able to get inside what is perhaps the most famous surviving example of Soviet avant-garde architecture: Moisei Ginzburg and Ignatii Milinis’s Narkomfin building (1928–30). Commissioned to house employees of the finance ministry, Narkomfin was originally conceived as a four-building complex where private quarters would be mixed with shared amenities, including a library, fitness center, laundry, and nursery, thereby facilitating a new communal mode of living. Although it was never completed as planned, it is nevertheless exemplary of a brief period when architects of the young Soviet Union were deeply engaged in a radical experiment in housing and had some official support. As the well-known story goes, that period quickly came to a close, as the state, under Stalin’s leadership, clamped down on the avant-garde. For a building that has been extensively studied and continues to be admired as an incredible expression of the Constructivists’ vision, Narkomfin is in a shocking state of disrepair. As our group wandered the halls of the six-story apartment block and visited several units, the beauty of the entire scheme and of the double-height apartments was still evident despite the decades of neglect. It was a privilege to see this historic site, whose future is still uncertain.

Reflection by Samantha Friedman

Many things struck me on my first trip to Moscow—also my first trip with C-MAP—from the imposing width of the streets to the incisively personal nature of much of the art we saw, at a time when international production can seem increasingly characterless. One of the things that left an especially strong impression on me, as we zipped from venue to venue, was something between architecture and the art itself, namely the presence of highly visible, anything-but-neutral exhibition design. Perhaps this should not have been surprising in Russia, a country whose avant-garde (which continues to haunt the contemporary in myriad ways) included a deep commitment to the design of all aspects of art and life. Seeing Gustav Klutsis’s radical designs for radio orators and propaganda kiosks at the New Tretyakov Gallery reminded me of this tradition in which the mechanics of display are as fully imagined as the message:

The lineage of this practice was visible just a few rooms away, where Kazimir Malevich’s Black Suprematic Square—Moscow’s art pilgrimage site par excellence—was guarded by a barrier of very particular design. At MoMA, we adopt bland metal stanchions (or, even better, sparkle tape on the floor) to avoid competing with the work itself. But here, the spirit of a Stenberg brothers’ spatial construction was incorporated into the institutional identity of the gallery:

From there it was on to Moscow’s Multimedia Art Museum, where an extensive exhibition on Sergei Eisenstein was the main attraction. The artist and filmmaker’s revolutionary theories of montage were expressed not only within the film excerpts on display, but also in the exhibition design. With a dizzying mix of large hanging projections, smaller wall-mounted screens, and framed drawings and photographs, the gallery space itself fulfilled Eisenstein’s call for “an idea that arises from the collision of independent shots.”

Something more roughhewn, if no less idiosyncratic, awaited at the Moscow Museum of Modern Art’s NAÏVE . . . NO exhibition, which sought out “historical and stylistic parallels between naïve art and primitivism of the 20th and 21st centuries.” Galleries were organized thematically—under such rubrics as “Childhood” or “Labor”—and each had a corresponding mise en scène, from painted white wood plinths for the former to tall grasses for the latter:

At the Museum of Moscow, the exhibition Moscow Thaw: 1953–1968 explored the material culture of that post-Stalin period. Fine art, as well as design objects, graphics, fashion, and cinema were arrayed across a white skeletal structure, vaguely reminiscent of the exhibition design for the Russian room of the 1929 Film und Foto exhibition in Stuttgart:

Finally, while the overall exhibition design of the Garage Triennial was relatively straightforward, certain of its artists seemed to reference the tradition of avant-garde display structures in the works themselves. In their 1.5 x 1.5 SCHOOL, the Zip Group set up an apparatus containing multiple “schools”—“The School of Collective Actions and Debates,” for example, and “The School of Rave and Performance.” Each operated as a laboratory for visitor participation—whether to converse, to draw, to exercise, or to nap—and all were encompassed within an overarching, crudely Constructivist architecture. Welcoming and exuberant, providing both a place of culture and a place of rest, this work harnessed the best of the spirit of revolutionary Russian exhibition design.

Reflection by Paulina Pobocha

The New Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow houses an extraordinary collection of Russian art, with an especially strong selection of work from the early twentieth century. Its holdings include terrific examples of work by the greats: Alexandra Exter, Natalia Goncharova, Alexei Jawlensky, Vasily Kandinsky, Gustav Klutsis, Mikhail Larionov, Lyubov Popova, Aleksandr Rodchenko, Varvara Stepanova, Vladimir Tatlin, and many others. Malevich’s Black Suprematic Square (1915) casually hangs in a gallery sparsely populated with visitors but richly contextualized by other paintings and a selection of sculptures by the artist, made both before and after this iconic work of the Russian avant-garde. The galleries that lead up to Black Suprematic Square and those that follow insist, by virtue of the collection, on the local (national) history against which it should be read. The relationship between Malevich’s radically reductive abstractions and Russia’s rich tradition of folk art and religious (Byzantine) painting becomes paramount to an understanding of the latter and its broader milieu. In this context the artist’s stated desire for “a renovation of life through artistic form” seems less utopian and almost nearly attainable. Though we all know it didn’t turn out that way, the Tretyakov can make the case for what could have been in a way impossible for any Western museum. It is also uniquely equipped to show what followed: decades of Socialist Realist genre paintings, heavy with symbolism and propaganda. Though not uninteresting, they extinguished the promise of the Revolution with every committed comrade depicted. After seeing rooms of paintings and sculptures of mothers, farmers, soldiers, bureaucrats, and even astronauts meticulously and idealistically rendered as though out of time—in staunch defiance of reality, for all their realism—the need for Gorbachev’s twin policies of glasnost and perestroika felt almost as urgent as they must have been. They resound across the art produced in the 1980s, vibrantly on display in newly installed galleries devoted to Sots Art, where work by Erik Bulatov and Ilya Kabakov joins that by Yuri Albert, Ivan Chuykov, Nest (Gndezdo) Group, Boris Orlov, Leonid Sokov, and others to reintroduce a desperately needed critical perspective and an as-urgent dose of humor. Above all, and in contrast to that which had immediately come before, it felt unequivocally of its time. Our aim at MoMA is to expand the story of modernism that we are able to tell. To do so meaningfully depends on a deep knowledge of art historical contexts at far remove from our own. The Tretyakov presents precisely this—from its holdings emerges a rhythmic and episodic narrative that tells a story of the twentieth century, narrow in geographic focus but rich in texture, nuance, and detail, critical to any serious understanding, let alone future research.

Reflection by David Senior

Since I had never been to Moscow before, everything was of interest to me as we took in the city, its layout, and the architecture while being toured around the city center. Often, we had extra time to take it in as we sat in Moscow’s traffic.

When we arrived at the New Tretyakov Gallery, I sprinted past most of the special exhibits on my way to the Russian paintings, sculpture, and prints from the historical avant-garde, which make upthe core of the permanent collection. It was especially thrilling, of course, to land in front of Kazimir Malevich’s very cracked Black Suprematic Square (1915). It was quiet in the galleries and I lingered for a while, going back to the works that were most surprising and making note of the names of artists I didn’t recognize. A few smaller galleries held framed prints, collages, and examples of book cover designs. These galleries led to a reconstruction of an interior of a workers’ club, which was originally designed in 1925 by Aleksandr Rodchenko for the Soviet pavilion at the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes. The clubroom features a long reading table, newspaper racks, and a curious photo-viewer with a lever that when cranked allows one to scroll through photographs affixed to a cylinder. It’s an exciting room to stumble upon—and to see again. I have a vague memory of its re-creation at a Rodchenko show at MoMA in 1998.

My eagerness to linger in the permanent collection caused me a bit of dismay later, when I eventually made it into the temporary exhibitions, which included The Thaw, a survey of art, design, and material culture of the postwar Soviet period, and also a large, chronological survey of Soviet Nonconformist art from the 1960s to the 1990s. Both of these shows demanded more time. The Thaw was especially of interest in its positioning of visual-art experiments with artifacts and other visual evidence of advances in Soviet science, technology, and industrial design in the 1950s and 1960s. In The Thaw, the kinetic or Op art experiments by Russian artists of the 1960s associated with the Movement Group, like Lev Nussberg, Rimma Zanevskaya, and Francisco Infante-Arana, seemed to be inevitable partners in terms of their design and materiality to the new ways of visualizing space, particles, and sound associated with the technological advances in cosmic and atomic research. At the same time, fresh from viewing the legion of Constructivist forms from the permanent collection, it was hard not to also project onto these kinetic experiments the lineage of applied abstraction and to affirm them as a kind of Neo-Constructivist practice. The last layer from the Treytakov, in regards to these particular artists, was their presence in the beginning of the display of Nonconformist art. In this narrative, the work of these Movement Group artists was presented as reflecting one of several originating tendencies in the timeline of the so-called Nonconformist practices in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and elsewhere.

Having no real expertise in these particular art historical matters, but eager to know more, I was pleased to run into more works by Nussberg, Zanevskaya, and Infante-Arana, and the work of another Movement Group participant Vyacheslav Koleichuk, at the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, which was our next visit. These works were in Facing the Future: Art in Europe 1945–1968, a traveling exhibition organized by Eckhart Gillen, Peter Weibel, and Danila Bulatov, which had just opened at the museum. At the Pushkin Museum, the work of these artists was featured in a constellation of postwar art from East and Western Europe. One aspect of this broad curatorial assemblage of European art from the 1950s and 1960s was to put the kinetic and optical experiments of the Moscow scene alongside works by Otto Piene and Heinz Mack of the Zero Group; Julio le Parc and François Morellet of Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel (GRAV); and Yugoslavian designer/artist Ivan Picelj. These international groupings suggested a more expansive kinetic and Op art map than is usually presented.

In retrospect it was an interesting encounter with a condition of exhibition-making, of how works can be used to push a curatorial narrative. In each case, the Movement Group works were used to promote a different set of curatorial ideas. The works by Nussberg, Zanevskaya, Infante-Arana, and Koleichuk were characteristic of a Soviet postwar imaginary, driven by cultural and political promotions of new technologies in communication, space exploration, and atomic science. As examples of Nonconformist art, they challenged former modes of artistic expression and opening up new spaces for artists to occupy in the face of an entrenched social and political reality. And in the context of a new postwar Europe, they were a part of a broad trend of experimenting with sense art and how perception can be challenged through the design and production of light images and sound environments. All of these ideas might be true, and either way, I was more than happy to experience these works in this new setting and to learn about these artists and this scene in Moscow that I hadn’t known about before.

More photos from the trip:

The post Memories of MoMA in Moscow appeared first on post.

This interview complements two newly translated texts by Partum, available here.

Translation provided by Karolina Majewska-Güde. With special thanks to Ewa Partum and Galerie M + R Fricke, Berlin.

The post Ewa Partum in Conversation with Ana Janevski appeared first on post.

For subtitles, click on “CC” at bottom right within the video and select “English”.

The post Mladen Stilinović in Conversation with Ana Janevski appeared first on post.

This is the first of two parts. Read the second part here.

ANA JANEVSKI: Jaime, one of your works, Cincinnati Tape Piece (1972), was part of the MoMA collection since some years ago. Recently, Tape Wall Project (1970/1988) was also acquired and is now part of the Media and Performance Art collection. Tell us a little bit about it and also about your practice, your arrival in New York City, and how your experience in the US has influenced your production.

JAIME DAVIDOVICH: I came to New York at the end of 1963. The first thing I did . . . the first thing I did in the city—I stayed with my sister in Queens—was to go to MoMA to see Guernica. At that time it was on extended loan to the Museum. And that was my first chance to see it. Before that, I had only seen it in reproductions. But seeing the real Guernica? That was a major, major event. After seeing the Guernica, I tried to contact some of the other Latin American artists living in the city. I didn’t speak much English. My English was very rudimentary, and so I wanted to meet other Latin American artists living in the US, to have some kind of contact with them. I wanted to see what they were doing. At that time in New York, there was an American woman, a critic and art historian named Jacqueline Barnitz who was very interested in Latin American art. Later on, she went to Texas University in Austin, and became the head of the Latin American art department there. She wrote the seminal textbook on twentieth-century Latin American art and has organized many exhibitions of Latin American art. But back then, once a week, she would open the doors of her very small studio apartment in the Upper West Side and host a sort of salon that was attended by every Latin American artist in New York City. You could go there, talk, have a glass of wine . . . new people would introduce themselves, and you would make connections and share ideas. And that was important for Latin American artists, because at the time we had no idea about how the New York art scene worked. We were very familiar with France, with Paris. Paris was the ideal place for the majority of Argentine artists. They would go to Paris to study at the André Lhote Academy. That was considered the place.

AJ: And so you were supposed to go to Paris?

JD: Yes, I was supposed to go to Paris. But instead of going to the André Lhote studio, I was planning to go to the studio of a new artist, a young artist named Pierre Soulages. He was one of the most prominent contemporary artists after the war. I had been corresponding with him and he had invited me to come and work there in his studio. But things didn’t work out for political reasons, and so I pursued a grant to come to New York instead. But then I was not at all prepared for the environment in New York.

AJ: Who else was at the salon?

JD: In terms of artists, the first person I met was an Argentine artist from Córdoba: Marcelo Bonevardi. Other artists there were Jose Antonio Fernández-Muro, Sara Grillo, Fernando Botero, Omar Rayo, Carlos Mérida, Fernando de Szyszlo, and Kazuya Sakai. But as a group, we didn’t have much in common with each other.

AJ: Apart from being Latin American.

JD: Yeah, our origins were Latin American. But I was not interested in Latin American art. I was more interested in Duchamp; I was more interested in the Dada artists; I was more interested in Picabia; I was more interested in Morandi; I was more interested in the things that artists were doing in Europe, in Group Zero—or in the things that artists had started doing in Japan, in the Gutai group. So I had another focus, another view. I didn’t have anything in common with these other Latin American artists. So anyway, I went to Jaqueline’s a couple of times but then stopped going. Luckily, I was able to get a job in Greenwich Village, in a publishing company that was dedicated to the distribution and promotion of Latin American art and literature—of anything made in Latin America. This was 1964. President Kennedy had created this organization called the Alliance for Progress, which promoted greater contact with the Latin American countries, and sponsored all kinds of exchange programs. One of the things they did was to collect all the books written by Latin American writers and published in Latin America. They had representatives in every country in Latin America, who would buy every single book written by a Latin American writer and published in Latin America.

AJ: That’s very ambitious.

JD: They would buy a few copies and send them to this place, to this publishing company called Hafner. Then, Hafner would distribute the books to major US institutions like the Library of Congress, the New York Public Library, Harvard University, the University of Texas. There were many universities and institutions that were part of this program, and I was hired by Hafner to be the archivist and cataloger of all the Latin American books. Hafner was located on 10th Street and Broadway, which also happened to be a very important area for American art. The 10th Street artists were the pioneers—before SoHo. And they had opened cooperative spaces called the 10th Street galleries, where they showed people like Mark di Suvero and the second–generation Abstract Expressionists—artists like Philip Guston. Also around there… Rothko had his studio in the Bowery, de Kooning had his studio on 11th Street. They would all go to the famous Cedar Tavern on University Place and spend time with people like Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, the Beat Generation. The 10th Street galleries were alternative galleries. They were not like the bigger commercial galleries in New York at that time. The center of that gallery world was the Upper East Side, from 57th Street to 77th Street. On 57th Street, you had the Pierre Matisse Gallery and the Kootz Gallery, which represented Picasso. And then you had the Martha Jackson Gallery on 68th Street, which represented foreign artists like Fontana, Tàpies, and Goldberg. And at the end was 77th Street was where the Leo Castelli Gallery was located.

Then, on Third Avenue and 10th Street, there were the alternative galleries, the alternative spaces. You know, the very raw spaces, where the walls were unfinished, and the exhibitions were very, very . . . unpolished. I was working one block from there, and I would go to those galleries at lunchtime and think, “Hey, this is the place that I have more things in common with, that I’m more interested in.” And so I started going to those 10th Street–Third Avenue galleries more regularly. And then a few years later, a gallery opened on LaGuardia Place and Bleecker, which is just a few blocks from 10th Street and Third. And this gallery was the Park Place Gallery. Later, galleries slowly started moving to the Bowery, into SoHo, and I got more involved with that scene. Basically, I lost contact with the whole Latin American group. They were living in another area, and had different interests. There were very few Latin American artists who shared my interests—there was Juan Downey, who came to New York in 1970, and Rafael Ferrer, who was friends with Robert Morris and Richard Serra . . . Marisol, another Latin American artist, had her studio on 10th Street and Broadway. She was doing Pop art and was part of the Castelli group. There were very, very, very, very few Latin American artists. And then I got more involved in the neighborhood. And in the early seventies, I became part of the SoHo scene.

AJ: And what was your practice during that period?

JD: I was interested in what I was doing when I was in Argentina, in the last pieces that I had done there: large paintings of segments of a landscape with no beginning and no end. I would take one wall in a gallery and I would do a huge painting that would show the landscape—like a night landscape, but with only one horizon. Later I did another series of paintings that were all white—of the horizon line during the day. I did those works on burlap, or on Masonite. And I showed them in several places. I was a member of a group of abstract artists. I was friendly with Greco, who was one of the few artists to return to Argentina in the early sixties. He had ideas about this German style of abstract art called tachisme, which corresponded to late Abstract Expressionism in America. And also we were in touch with some of the new Spanish artists like Canogar and Tàpies. I had been doing monochromatic work, and I continued doing that when I moved to New York. I would unroll the canvas and paint these infinite landscapes, and then I would take the canvas, without stretchers, and hang it on the wall. If somebody came, I would just hang it on the wall. I used pushpins or little nails for hanging. And then, around 1965, I decided that I didn’t like the way the pushpins looked and so I started using tape. That is when I started the tape projects. The tape became part of the composition of the work, which I started showing privately—not through a gallery or an institution, just to friends.

In 1970 I got a part-time job in Cleveland, Ohio. There, I discovered this new technology called videotape. And videotape was not available. Well, except for the Portapak, which became available in 1965—but it was only black-and-white, and it lasted only twenty minutes. The television studios, however, had very sophisticated equipment. And at the time, I was able to get to a hospital in Cleveland that had state-of-the-art equipment with color cameras and tapes that are not half inch, like they are in the Portapak, but one inch. I was able to start working there on videotapes and began using adhesive tape. In those works, like in my paintings, there was no starting point, no ending point; they would just continue and continue… This work is now at MoMA: a tape project that includes videotape and adhesive tape. When I started doing this work, I started getting attention.

AJ: Was your first tape work an installation? The work that we have at MoMA is from 1972.

JD: Yes.

AJ: So you spontaneously had this idea of taping half of the wall and then, on the other half of the wall, installing a screen that would show you doing the taping?

JD: Yes. That’s correct. In 1972 a lot of things changed. It was then that I had the first invitation to do a video-and-tape installation at the Akron Art Museum.

AJ: But didn’t you do another tape installation in Cleveland before that, in the staircase?

JD: Well, yes, I did a lot of tape installations. I started doing these in 1969. I worked a lot in galleries, in museums, on the street… But the inclusion of video was in 1970, and the first exhibition of video and tape, of adhesive tape, was in a museum in 1972.

AJ: But you did the first one, the one that is part of MoMA’s collection, in 1972, no?

JD: So here’s the thing. Historically, this is the context: How can you do that kind of work in what is basically a small town, outside the centers of the avant-garde? Because in Cleveland, I was not living off my art… But when I got there, two things happened: First is that I got in contact with a hospital that had state-of-the-art equipment that I was able to use. Then second is that Nina Castelli, who is Leo Castelli and Ileana Sonnabend’s daughter, opened a very small gallery called the New Gallery in an old house in Cleveland. It became a focal point for art activity. All of Nina’s artist would come to Cleveland: Oldenburg, Jasper Johns, Richard Serra… and then she would select some local artist to “merge” with the New Yorkers. So that’s how I became a member of the gallery.

AJ: How were you financing your stay in Cleveland, and how long were you there for?

JD: It was maybe a year and a half and I was working in graphic design. And when I was there, doing those tape shows, I got a lot of publicity. I was doing things on the street, in staircases, on big walls .. Somebody came from Artforum… things were very good. Then, a curator from the Whitney Museum came to Cleveland, and she selected me to be part of Whitney Biennial. At that point I said to myself, “I have to go back to New York. I have no choice.” And so I returned to New York. I think it was 1973. I got a few grants, which helped me buy my video equipment, and I became a very active member of the video art community in SoHo.

AJ: Did you have a show at Nina’s Gallery?

JD: Yes, I had several shows at the New Gallery. Nina also introduced me to some people. It was an incredible experience. In hindsight, I think about the pieces that she had and couldn’t sell… Oh my God! It was like a thousand dollars for a Richard Serra or a Joseph Kosuth. Original pieces… And then Nina, too, came back to New York and she created this organization that is still very active: Independent Curators International.

AJ: In Cleveland, then, was where you first used tape . . .

JD: Yes, yes, Cleveland was first. And then I started doing [it] in New York, where I was also doing drawing and collage. In New York, I had a bigger studio–three thousand square feet—and I was working full-time on my art. That was a big, big difference. It was the beginning of the time when museums and some alternative spaces became interested in video. It was the time when MoMA started their video program, when the Whitney started the New American Filmmakers, when the Kitchen opened, when Anthology Film Archives opened. It was the early seventies.

This is the first of two parts. Read the second part here.

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