Dica de leitura de domingo: Hans Ulrich Obrist sobre entrevistas e movimentos artísticos.
In some kind of way, the interview always goes in two directions. On the one hand it goes into depth, and on the other hand it goes into a broader reality. It goes into depth by speaking to people again and again. It can go on and on for many decades and you still have always a completely exciting, new conversation. That’s the great thing about David Sylvester talking to Francis Bacon. These in-depth conversations are more vertical. Then, obviously, there are the more horizontal conversations, which is when an artist tells me about a scientist, an architect, a composer — that’s this moment of going beyond the art world into other disciplines. When the vertical moment comes to a standstill, we make it horizontal again, it’s a push and pull between those two.
We were interested in this question: are there still movements in our time? That’s also what the Manifesto Marathon addressed. At some point in the historic avant-gardes and in the neo avant-gardes there were all these movements from Dada to Fluxus, sometimes with a manifesto, sometimes without. In our times, when I speak to young artists, they have a lot of collaborations and dialogues but less movements — it’s more atomized.
When I was a kid, and started to be obsessed by art in the 1980s, the art world was in this polarity Warhol/Beuys, Beuys/Warhol. Both expended the notion of art extremely but in very different ways. Beuys was co-founder of the Green Party, and for me, as a teenager, I was really interested in this idea of him being a political activist. Warhol extended the notion of art more within art itself, but Beuys was blurring art and life. Then Beuys died, and Warhol was hugely more influential over the last 20 years than Beuys. But one can observe right now younger artists connecting to Beuys, so that might be a partial answer to your question.
For art, slowness has always been very important. The experience of seeing art slows us down. Actually, we have just founded a movement with Shumon Basar and Joseph Grima last week called posthastism, where we go beyond haste. Joseph Grima was in Malta, and he had this sudden feeling of posthaste. Shumon and I picked up on it and we had a trialogue, which went on for a week on Blackberry messenger. Posthastism. [Reading from a sheet of paper hastily brought in by his research assistant] As Joseph said: “Periphery is the new epicenter,” “post-Fordism is still hastism because it’s immaterial hastism, which could lead now’s posthastism.” One more thing to quote is “delays are revolutions,” which was a good exhibition title.
