Interview with Julian Stallabrass

Q: In your book ‚Art Incorporated‛, you quote Adorno: ‚absolute freedom in art,

always limited to a particular, comes into contradiction with the perennial

unfreedom of the whole.‛ In a complex society that is informed by free trade, what

does a term like ‚free art‛ stand for? What is its current potential or would you

rather argue for a change in concept?

A: The book is arguing that we need a change in the concept of free art, of the notion

of a free art lies deep inside the art world and its relationship to other elements of

society. It is a deeply unexamined ideal of free art as offering a repository for our free

subjectivity and human agency both as artists and as viewers, as followers of art.

And that ideal is deeply under pressure in various ways, particularly as museums

become more commodified and branded spaces. Also because, as we have seen over

the last five years or so, contemporary art has become the most extraordinary

business. There are many people who move into it for purely instrumental reasons

such as investment. The state also looks to art for various tactical and instrumental

gains including the attempt to civilize the socially excluded … When art is plainly

turned to use, the ideal of its freedom becomes more fragile and also perhaps more

visibly absurd. So, I wanted to take a cold look, I suppose, at the ideal and what its

current state of health is and also to argue that to hold on to that ideal in these

circumstances is to play along with one of the ideological cloaks that the system uses

to conceal its operations.

Q: What would be alternatives? If you say that free art is something we have to think

about and work out a different concept if the relation between free art and free trade

is very fragile and free art as a symbol does not work anymore. Do you see an

alternative way?
A: I think there are certainly alternatives. One kind of alternative is found in what is

broadly called ‚tactical media‛, particularly with collective online groups of art

workers making interventions together. But there is no pretence there that the

interventions are of a highly mysterious or ineffable kind. They are playful, tactical

interventions in a mobile, changing field of business. Those groups that emulate and

undermine corporate models, such as etoy and RTmark are examples. Another kind

in an extremely different field would be, say, Sebastiao Salgado’s work for the

landless peoples’ movement in Brazil, the MST. At that point, Salgado very much

placed himself to the service of the movement and made work in large print editions

that he sold to raise money for it. So he placed his very considerable photographic

skills not to make an art of individual subjectivity but into making things which are

very complex form of propaganda.

Q: When we look at these practices and the people involved—especially when it

comes to new media, digital and documentary forms—it seems that many, if not to

say the majority of proponents aren’t artists really. Actually, they don’t call

themselves artists and don’t want to be called that way. So, what is the role of the

artist in this respect? Do we need art at all, what is the necessity of art here? And

somehow contrary to that in Salgado’s position, if it wasn’t for the brand, the

celebrity status of the artist, what would happen in this case? What does this tell us?

A: That’s a very good question. I think a lot of the early net artists in particular

played with their art status. Many made works that were certainly not for the art

world and not seen in art-like spaces in that time. There was a great deal of debate

about what it would mean, especially as the dotcom boom got going and museums

became more and more interested in these kind of works. What would that

appropriation into the art world of this material might mean? You find that there are

many artists or online workers who are ambiguous about the art world and about the

term ‚artist‛. So someone like Vuc Cosic would say to you simply something like
‚Well, I use the term because girls like it‛ or ‚I’ll show in museums because it

pleases my mother,‛ as a way of trying to say that he doesn’t assign too much

importance to it. Such practices lay somewhat within and without the art field. And

maybe the part which lies outside the art field is in a way the more important part.

Those who make such work use the art world as a way of getting invitations, get

their work shown, online and in the gallery.

Q: So can we see the art world as an institution? If you don’t see yourself as an artist

you could still use the art world as a global system to actually transport what you

want to say, to make people aware of it, they use the structures of the exhibition, the

museum, of magazines, etc.?

A: Yes. In some way yes. Let me just go back a moment. I heard Geert Lovink talk

about tactical media and professions for such artists recently at an art fair. And one

of the things that was interesting, was that he was still very much attached to that

ideal of free play and free expression and free subjectivity. So, we shouldn’t

underestimate the degree to which—although the ideal is under pressure—it is still a

powerful attraction to many people. It offers a model of unalienated labour and still

has much power.

Q: Is the art world as a whole becoming an institution?

A: It isn’t singular—you can look at the huge national differences, those between

localities, how different art institutions are even in the same nations and the same

city, and look at the personalities that run these institutions. But I do think that is it

important to take one step back and look at the broader picture, especially as the art

world has become more global in many striking ways in the last twenty years or so,

and to ask what the broad tendencies are.

Q: Uncertainty is a very central concept to modern society. It relates to freedom and

free art, in playful ways, in contrast to its relevance for game theory and economics.

So, there are these two traits. Does the economic and financial realm today succeed in

transforming this ‘last bastion of playfulness’ into a game, a set of rules to be played

by?

A: Part of the answer to that question might take you into Boltanski and Chiapello’s

‚The New Spirit of Capitalism‛ (1999) where they say that capitalism takes on very

seriously the kinds of critique that were mounted against it as a part of the events of

1968 and becomes rather more creative and art-like in response. And indeed, the

interest of many corporations and businesses in contemporary art may be seen as a

way to inculcate in their workers some of the values of the field of contemporary art.

Playfulness and free play of creativity and self-fashioning, too, would be very much

a part of that. I guess that one of the uses of that book that it allows one to get a

handle on it why it is that celebrity culture is so prevalent now: it’s all about making

yourself and re-making yourself from moment to moment in order to accommodate

to the rapidly changing circumstances and uncertainties you talked about.

Q: When we look at the fact that more and more corporations are collecting art and

that this happens on a global level, it seems obvious that they don’t collect the way

an individual person would, by choosing what they like. They need ‘slots’ –

definitions, strategies, roads that are paved. In your view, is there something like

standardisation developing in art and the business of art?

A: The whole post-conceptual consensus about what is taken as an art object forms a

standard. Fairly recognizable forms and symbols are recombined in familiar ways

that allow the viewer no easy analysis. A lot of the standardisation that you

suggested in your question depends on the destination of those art works. Are they

destined for millionaires’ living rooms? I think we are all very familiar with the kind
of spectacular, slightly extreme conversation pieces that meet that need. And then

there is the standardisation that comes about as nations are branded in the global art

marketplace, so that artists have to perform their nationhood on the global stage.

Q: We talked about alternatives before. Do you see developments that artists and art

movements proceed in a ‘useful’ way – in contrast to the uselessness of art that you

wrote about? Is there a need for a use, a function? Are we witnessing such

developments today, such as a new kind of applied art or other more virtual forms?

A: Certainly, some of the products that came out of recession in the past showed a

move towards applied and decorative arts. That was true for the Great Depression in

the 1930s in this country because a lot of the middle class was less affected, and many

of them had new homes that they wanted to be decorated in a more modern style,

and artists started to cater to that need. The market for high art was also part of the

investment bubble and fell apart entirely in the 1929 crash. So artists had to make

knick-knacks for middle-class homes. So that may happen again. I guess the huge

thing that has changed is what has been called Web 2.0, and the idea that not only

the means to create cultural products but to publish them, to network them and

comment on them and get into dialogue with others has become available to most

people in developed nations. And that seems to offer a huge arena for – I wouldn’t

say cost-free but a relatively cheap and dematerialised light form of art production in

which nevertheless you can do interesting things and have an audience for it. Also,

in some of the art schools, there is some thinking about environmental issues in the

arts which I think has very profound implications for the way the art world operates.

So much of what the art world does has to do with creating large, expensive, rare

objects which are flown around the world to be shown or sold to people, and has to

do with creating events, artists interventions but also the presence of people that

have to travel there, and this is not even to talk about the collectors and the major

curators who fly around in private jets to Basel and Kassel and Beijing. So, what you
arte talking about there is on one level catering to the superrich and this kind of

culture club of culture consumers and one which is deeply environmentally

damaging.

Q: In a simplified way one could say that we see iconic, very polished, simplified

objects and works of art to be sold and on the other hand there is this highly complex

situation of dematerialised, democratic, communicative approach to art. Is there any

path that connects these kinds of art production, that brings them together? A

combination of dematerializing and materialising productions, so to say?

A: One of the paradoxes of contemporary art production is that an increasing

amount of it is essentially dematerialised. A Gursky photograph, a Matthew Barney

video—these are data. They might be materialised in certain ways but fundamentally

they are data. Both of them are very popular artists and there is something about that

popularity that goes way beyond the restricted products the artists end up selling.

So, Barney for instances makes a version of Cremaster 3 that is 30 minutes long and

has sold it as an unlimited edition on DVD. But you can’t get the whole thing

because that’s restricted to collectors who are willing to pay for it. But you can find

Barney videos circulating on peer-to-peer systems, and this is obviously illegal, but it

is also the place where they should be. And also, these things are dematerialised but

then they take a materialised form in a particular display mode. So you could say

that the display of a particular Gursky photograph on my monitor at home is a form

of materialisation of that image. As many people have more large screens at home,

the demand for and high definition files of paintings, photographs will increase. The

control of these data files is going to be a very interesting issue, as it has been for

music and film.

Q: Is this comparable to music and pop culture? Such as, if you have a large screen

you can buy a collection of all kinds of paintings and other works of art of the last

3000 years and zap to whatever you like. Might there be hit parades one day?

A: Yes, there are very profound and interesting implications. One may also think of

the model of just-in-time publishing, of printing one-off copies of books for sale and

more generally the whole idea of the long tail as well. Things which used to be

commercially unviable to produce become viable.

Q: To stay with the example of music, where even radical approaches, e.g. in hip-

hop, play with the genre and its reality as a market, where there are hit parades not

only for the very commercial styles but also for other forms of music – can we see

such a multiplying of proliferation where many market situations evolve, where

many new forms of communication that are, dependent on their agenda, more

market and money related or less will flourish? Is this an option, a road that art

might be going?

A: Absolutely, and I think it is a very interesting one. In the pop world now there are

plenty of bands that are making a quite considerable sums of money without ever

been played on the radio, without a record contract, without going through all the

usual procedures of getting established. And this might relate to art.

Q: Is art then becoming a mass culture?

A: Well, it could be when it is not tied to mechanisms which assure its exclusivity. I

suppose the interesting thing here might be to break the link between some of the

determinants of how we recognise something as art how it is written about and the

mechanisms of institutional assurance of what we’re looking at as art, to greatly

broaden the kind of cultural products that we are prepared to treat in an art-like way,
and within that broader frame, to see the regularities as much as the oddities, the

mass as well as the individual.