For the artist Yang Jiechang (b. 1956, Foshan), there is a certain similarity betweencontemporary artists and China’s Red Guards of the 1970s: namely, their performance of arbitrary tasks. In this conversation, Yang talks about his “art education” during the Cultural Revolution, when he served as a Red Guard in a small village, and describes how…
Inherent to sound recording and distribution technology is not only the possibility of storing and reproducing any given acoustic event, but also a correlating tendency to make incidental and accidental elements—those which are not considered part of the music recorded—constitutive elements in the sound of a recording. This paradoxically essential surplus, as David Grubbs observed…
Yu Youhan (b. Shanghai, 1943) is widely considered the father of abstract painting and Political Pop in China. A longtime teacher of art in Shanghai, Yu has no wish to pursue an interdisciplinary or international practice, as many artists of his generation do. In this conversation, he talks about his life during the Cultural Revolution…
Read the english translation here.
In this interview, conducted when Jarosław Kozłowski visited MoMA to meet with C-MAP Central and Eastern Europe, the artist speaks about the past challenges of communicating across the Iron Curtain, his continuing fascination with language as an art medium as well as what he sees as the danger of a solely political reading of art.
Renowned Chilean critic Adriana Valdés visited the Museum in April 2015 to speak to the C-MAP Latin America group about the Chilean art scene and the work of Eugenio Dittborn. During her visit, she generously agreed to record a video interview and share her thoughts and memories of the Chilean art world before and after…
“Let’s convert all the systems into poetry and visions.” Felipe Ehrenberg, Telegraphic Work, 1970. In this text, Zanna Gilbert explores the Work Secretly titled Upwards and Onwards…whether you like it or not by the Mexican artist Felipe Ehrenberg, considering how mail art works continue to provoke even years after their inception. “Let’s convert all systems into poetry”…
The mail art network connected hundreds of artists around the world, heralding art forms based on communication systems rather than objects. In 1981 in Mexico City, the artists’ group Colectivo 3 initiated Poema Colectivo Revolución in Mexico City in 1981 and drew upon the international mail art network, some of whose members had been exchanging artworks and…
With a healthy dose of humor, the Brazilian artist Antonio Dias explores the challenges and absurdities of his artistic career and comments poetically on his life’s work. Now in his late 60s, Dias generously shares stories of his early years in Rio, Paris, and Milan; his surprise at the dearth of women in Milan’s art…
How can art disrupt and transform the status quo? How can art and the everyday be reconciled? What is the artistic significance of train rides, urinal cleaning, and fabricating fake banknotes? What is the sense of a musical performance that can be heard by no one but the performers? What is the purpose of art…
