WHAT IS WHERE? Where is inside. What does inside mean?

Inside means inside my car. What is my

car doing? It is traveling along its own

particular road. What is inside my car? I

am inside my car, I cannot perceive

anything outside my car until it enters my

point of view, which is inside. Thus we

can say that not only am I inside my car,

but in fact, everything is inside my car -

the road is inside my car, The Conversion

of St Paul by Caravaggio is inside my car,

and my grandfather who built my car is

inside my car. Does my car have

windows? No, it is a windowless car,

because how could it have windows

when everything is already inside? In fact,

there is no outside, there are only more

windowless cars. Each one speeds along

its own particular road. Each one

contains everything else, including its own

particular road and all the other

windowless cars. But each everything

inside has a certain pattern of emphasis,

of clarity and obscurity, depending on the

car’s specific speed, direction and point

of view. In this way there are different

everythings. Each car comprises a

different everything. We are not speaking

of closure, but of infinite convergences.

The convergence of all the windowless

cars of my body andmind comprise the

windowless car of myself, in which

everything happens. But not every

everything, only my particular everything.

So this is not to say that there is nothing

outside of myself, but rather that every

everything is inside of itself and every

other everything, including me.

Good Design like good

painting, cooking, architecture, or whatever you like

is a manifestation of the capacity of the human spirit to transcend its limitations

it enriches its maker through the experience of creating

and it can enrich the viewer or user

who is equipped to respond to what it has to say

LawrenceWeiner

Space of Containments

Jenny Holzer

John Cage

Lorna Simpson

Joseph Kosuth

Martha Rosler

early style

favoriteoneliner

writer

most used lines

travelritual

morning

routine

whatson her walls

fantasy career

belovedfamily

memento

fitnessroutine

favoritepiecein collection

favoritehousehold

chore

wheninspir ation

struck

I wanted to be an abstract painter, but I was rotten at it. I was looking at Mark Rothkoand Barnett Newman. I couldn’t measure up.

Confucius. Gustave Flaubert wrote some stinkers, which is surprising. He thought he was good at it.

It’s a tie between “Protect me from what I want” and “Abuse of power comes as no surprise,” I would guess. I don’t have Nielsen ratings. I have no stats.

Worry about it in advance, which is stupid, because I travel all the time. Pack too much, though I should know better. Carry a really heavy briefcase around with me wherever I go.

I get up about four times a night and go back to sleep, or not. Then I swill tea around 8 a.m. I answer e-mail, while I stall thinking about whatever scares me.

I seldom have my stuff up unless I’m testing it. If I’m worrying about a painting, I put it up and see if I detest it quickly or slowly. Other-wise I have things by other artists. I have works by Kiki Smith, Nancy Spero and Louise Bourgeois.

To be a divine artist, as opposed to a workmanlike one.

And to save the world.

I have my dead brother’s stuffed animal. My mother had saved it in a Ziplock plastic bag. My brother’s

name was Fritz, and he died on his motorcycle... As he lived. He was

21 or 22 when he died.

Righting myself when I trip.

I have two Alice Neel drawings, one of which might

be fake. They are of the dead Che Guevara.

She did them darkly, beautifully and sincerely,

assuming she did the second one. They are in

my house office.

I really like doing the laundry, because I succeed at it. But I

loathe putting it away. It is already clean.

I moved to New York in the 1970s and started writing when I was at

the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program. The epiphany for me was that I wasn’t a writer, and I had to do something with these

texts. I put them in the streets as posters. I did a lot of skulking

around downtown with a bucket of wheat paste and a roll of posters

late at night and would occasionally get caught. Holzer

Jenny

Holzer

I stopped using my own words in my work around 2001. I’m a half-baked writer at best and find the process painful, and I wanted to be able to include a greater range of subjects and emotions and all those good things than I could muster. In short, I like the art part better.

Reasons shestopped writing

I work almost all the time; if I don’t work, I become anxious. About the only thing I do when I am home that isn’t work is a barn check, to make sure the horses aren’t stuck in corners. The horses are relaxed and happy to see me. I come bearing hay.

Work Routine

Her Doppleganger There’s someone pretending to be me on Twitter. At least they’re using my stuff. I wouldn’t tweet. I like when my work is anonymous and public.

At age five she wanted to be

There’s someone pretending to be me on Twitter. At least they’re using my stuff. I wouldn’t tweet. I like when my work is anonymous and public.

Right now I am making paintings from declassified government documents. I read hundreds of them, find the right one, then Iwork with my friend who paints backgrounds. Then the documents are silk-screenedonto the background.

How She Makes Art

I work mostly in my bedroom or in an office in my house. I have a couple of offices. I have a former corn crib that is an office, a little farmhouse and my basement.

Office Space

Artist She Liked To Be

The list is long, and most of the best ones committed suicide, but I would have liked to have been Francisco de Goya or Fra Angelico.

Artwork She Covets

An all-black Ad Reinhardt would match my heart.

“The Future is stupid” favorite line at the moment

In the late ‘50s in a series of interviews with Georges Charbonnier, Claude Lévi-Strauss said that he had a feeling that music has always been much more ‘avant-garde’ than other forms of aesthetic expression. He continued by saying that the music composed at the time of the Impressionist movement was more adventurous musically than Impressionism was pictorially...

Really? That’s very curious. I have the feeling that visual arts are more advanced than music. It seemed that way to me; it seemed that music follows visual art. For instance, I was born in 1912 and it was then that Duchamp was using chance operations. When I saw him in Venice many years later in the late ‘50s I said, ‘Isn’t it strange Marcel, I’m doing now what you did when I was born.’ He smiled and he said, ‘I must have been 50 years ahead of my time.’ His mathematics weren’t perfect, but the idea was there. I think people admire music and

Philip Glass?

I think that music is, as everyone agrees, very popular, and it’s because of its repetition. I like some of it very much but I don’t think it’s an advance. It’s not just discovered, it’s something that has been known for some time.

Do you feel that the distinctions that you drew in the late ‘50s between European and American music still apply today?

For me not quite as much, at least they don’t strike me now as they did earlier. What strikes me now is a correspondence between say the work of Walter Zimmermann, who is living in Cologne, and a recent composition of mine for two pianos, Two2, which I wrote last summer. When I heard Zimmermann’s piece it gave me an experience similar to the one which I had when I heard my own music-a kind of placelessness. I didn’t know where I was whenI was listening to either his music or mine, and I had no sense of going anywhere. I did have a sense of movement, not thinking of it as you would in Philip Glass, as a staying, but of moving but not knowing where I was going. In the ‘50s I suggested there was a great division between music that talks, and music that acts or does-music which carries out a process, and which isn’t talking but is doing. That still strikes me very much, and it’s something that I’m still concerned with.

The differences between Europe and America are sometimes very clear, but sometimes they’re not, and sometimes they appear to be the same so that in spots, as it were, we’re coming to one place and we don’t know what that place is. For instance, I went to two concerts last night; I went to the rehearsal of one of them and the actual performance of the other. I enjoyed them both very much and they were both, of course, American. But it seems to me that there could have been, for instance, music by Walter Zimmermann or certain European musics, and I would have enjoyed them equally and almost in the same way-I might have. What I’m trying to say is that the times are changing and the distinctions between Europe and America are less immediately noticeable. And I hope that we get to be, all of us, in the same world, not that we all do the same thing, but that there’s not one place but rather many places where we can enjoy the art, just as we do the nature in all the places.

Buckminster Fuller’s vision is certainly becoming more of a reality, but today do you find anything problematic in this optimism in technology?

I’m not sure technology changes things that much; it changes them if we are concerned with what the results are. But if we deal with the new technologies as closely as we have dealt with the old ones, then we will come to appearances that aren’t superficial. What I hope won’t happen is that we are quickly satisfied with technology itself. What is to be hoped for is an interaction of people with technology, rather than a quick acceptance of what technology does. There’s so much button pushing now, and the results are so spec-tacular that there’s a temptation, which I hope is avoided, of just taking what the technology gives and not doing anything with it.

think that it is abstract-perhaps that’s what Lévi-Strauss was refer-ring to. But if you’re involved in music, the ideas expressed it are frequently unadventurous, in the sense that chance operations were used in painting before they were used in composi-tion. Work like that of Malevich is perhaps just now conceivable in terms of music-that extraordinary simplicity. It’s conceivable today that someone might be-or is-doing something like Malevich. I think of La Monte Young.

Much of your earlier work developed through a disregard for the distinctions between art and life. Do you feel there has been progress made since first formulating those ideas?

I think this is one of the familiar aspects of art, that it opens our eyes to things in what we call nature or environment that had escaped our notice. In paying attention to art your observation of nature changes. There’s a strong action in both directions, between our experience of environment and our experience of making things, of doing things.

Given your position in regard to art and life, did you ever feel that your work was anachronistic?

It’s a curious and interesting question... I guess we get carried away and so does our work.

Carried away in the work? And structure?

Right. Carried away in paying attention to it. As we get involved in the work, in art so to speak, then things could be happening in nature around you which would escape your notice, because your attention is being placed on your work-so then the difference is striking. At the same time the use of the work will be to carry you back to the absence of work and just to the environment. It’s very curious. It’s actually a question of the movement of attention, so that your attention is placed on the work that you’re doing and then once the work is done your attention moves, without any trouble, to not working, in other words, environment. However, I don’t think I would say the same things about what I’m doing now.I have the impression in my work that things that I was avoiding formerly, I now no longer avoid. One thing that remains of greatest importance to me is non-intention.

It needn’t be structure, it can just be process. I think of a structure as something having parts and I think of a process as something not having parts. You could now have something not having parts that nevertheless begins and ends. The thing I think of as being something I used to avoid, and which I no longer do, is something like harmony. Now it seems to me that harmony happens no matter what we do. It’s like melody; if you make a number of sounds you automatically have melody, and now if you have several sounds together they automatically produce harmony.

Most of my life I thought that I had to find an alternative to harmony, but the harmony I was thinking about was the one that had been taught at school. Now I see that everything outside of school is also harmonious.

Given your position in regard to art and life, did you ever feel that your work was anachronistic?

A changed definition of harmony; one that doesn’t involve any rules or laws. You might call it an anarchic harmony. Just sounds being together.

Lorna Simpson

In the early days of her career, Simpson began to receive attention for photographbased work that challenged traditional narrative styles and expectations about identity with revealing juxtapositions of images and text.

She has maintained similar interests throughout her career, while progressing through a variety of media: from large-scale felt works to film and video installations to her most recent photography series.

Lorna, as a native New Yorker does having this show arrive at the Whitney feel like a homecoming of sorts?

It feels as though I am showing in my hometown certainly, and that’s exciting. But I’ve been showing a lot here in terms of having gallery shows in New York, so some of the work has been seen by a local audience.But I think because it’s at the Whitney, it will have a broader audience of visitors than the smaller Chelsea gallery audience.

How involved were you in selecting work for the retrospective?

I’ve worked closely with Helaine Posner, who’s the curator from the American Federation of the Arts [who organized the exhibition].I don’t see it as a retrospective, but more of a survey of work over a period of time. In being under 50 [laughs]—or I should say late 40s—it doesn’t really feel like a retrospective, because I feel as though it is not the majority of the work I will do—but certainly a selection of it.

Was it difficult to choose favorites, like choosing from among your children?

Because the work has a broad range of mediums—there are two-dimensional photographic works, works that are silk-screens on felt, there are video works and some installations—I wanted to do a balance of early work from the ’80s, but also cover all these different areas that I’ve explored.I was, kind of, trying to get a variety of the work that I had done and the different genres that I have touched throughout that time.

Juxtaposing images is a consistent and essential formal strategy in your work. Does seeing individual pieces juxtaposed with your entire output change the way you understand them?

A lot of times the work was conceived in suites, particularly the two-dimensional work. They were kind of done in concert. It’s rare that there’s a work that is really a one-off, meaning that there is just one work of a particular sort.

I kind of do, over the course of maybe a couple of years, work within [separate] bodies of work. I think maybe I hadn’t had the opportunity to see all of those related works all together in one room—for in-stance, the felt works that are presented. There are a lot of serigraphs on felt that appear in the show. And those, I’ve seen maybe seven or 10 at a time in a room, so it’s really nice to see many more of them all at once.

Were there any surprises for you when you saw all the work togethers?

No, not really, but I might have had a different answer last year.

The Whitney will be the third venue, so I might be just a little jaded. [laughs] There might have been a surprise, but now it has certainly worn off completely.

In the exhibition, are you aware of the social or political implications of your work changing over the decades?

I don’t think it has in terms of my relationiship to it. Rereading reviews and things that were written, it’s interesting how the tone and categorization of the work changed over periods of time—I guess, a 10-year period.I wouldn’t say that my relationship to the work has so much changed, but it’s certainly clear there are different agendas with which it has been written about. So when I look back at the work, I don’t think my sociopolitical or artistic relationship to it changes. The world around changes a bit more.

African American women tend to be central in your work. Looking over the survey, can you chart changes to that identity as a political condition over the past 20 years?

Generally speaking, outside of my work completely, the world has changed in many ways and hasn’t in many other ways.Race is a very charged subject in the United States. Me as an artist, any work that I would do that would just present a black figure, regardless of subject, has a particular charge in this country because of its history and relationship to race. And that is a condition that is out-side of the work and me, so it’s more about the reception.I think I tend to think about the work in that I make it for myself, and the agendas in it are self-driven.I try to navigate through the work in such a way that it doesn’t monolithically represent a particular group; it more uses a central figure that is black. But I know that I live in a culture where that is a very charged statement, and therefore, that statement in itself polarizes people in the way they think about that figure.

What about personal changes? It’s often claimed that there are biographical elements in your work. Do you see your own personal development in the exhibition?

Well, I do not appear in any of my work. I think maybe there are elements to it and moments to it that I use from my own personal experience, but that, in and of itself, is not so important as what the work is trying to say about either the way we interpret experience or the way we interpret things about identity.

But I see differences in terms of my interest in narration and text and the way that they operate—in the works that contain physical text in them, or in video work where there are open conversations and different levels of narration. Those things have shifted over the course of time.

What new projects are currently in the works?

I just completed a video that contains footage from a psychiatric institute in Wichita, Kan., that was filmed in the late ’50s.It has raw stock footage from un-put-together promotional material for this particular institution, and it is edited together into a panoramic series of small frames within one big image.And then from that, I made drawings. The footage has some interesting, very stylized sequences in it, in terms of lighting and positions of the subjects, so I embarked on making portraits out of this film,because that’s kind of the way they appear in the film.It has been interesting to use found footage and to also to make drawings, which is something that I haven’t done since I was a teenager.

How does it fit in with your past projects?

I think it fits in with regard to ideas of presentation. This particular footage from the late ’50s is very gender specific, very stylized in terms of femininity and also presenting oneself as being a mother or a young woman—and the visual mores in and around that.

I’d say that that’s in keeping with the work and my interest.

JosephKosuth

Which practice in the history of art is or was the strongest influence on your work?

This question presumes that it was one. In fact it was a sort of bouquet as you say of influences, both internal, in terms of my own problematic I was trying to resolve, a view to art history which I realized quite recently, quite shortly thereafter which was essentially the collapse of modernism, but I quite saw this in artistic practical terms, initially. And on one hand those were what we said the internal aspects. Externally it was a variety of – first my second interest was always philosophy and looking for a resolution and the fact that I was really interested in art, in art there was a fantastic potential to address certain things that I had when I was a painter and couldn’t answer. And how could you make art that wasn’t painting when in fact the conception of art was painting and sculpture as it is in modernism. I couldn’t paint anymore I didn’t believe in it but in the same time I wanted to make art. It was really the investigations of Wittgenstein, which I found very very useful. Also very formative was... I was given a typescript, a translation of Walter Benjamin, before he wasn‘t really published and known in the States and this was influential. The Argentinian writer Borges in a certain relationship with taxonomy I found also extremely useful and enriching. Within art itself, I was...

the two artists I was most interested in on the one hand Marcel Duchamp and on the other Ad Reinhardt, and I was trying to find a resolution between these two artists. I was very interested in aspects of Pop art, aspects particularly of Rauschenberg’s and Warhol’s use of photography, but at the other hand, the issues of the collapse of modernism for me it came out of Jasper Johns, that idea that we had inherited an idea that the painting was really a window to another world and there was this fictive space that one entered. And when he painted the ”Flag” and ”Target,” all of a sudden he made a he made a peg at that window. Because the question – you looked at that flag and you said: is that a window to another world – the flag is in –, or is that a flag that’s an object – in the room I’m in – . This act made the language of painting – which must be transparent to be believable as all language must opaque. And in that point you put the project in Frank Stella they were painted objects in the room you were in, he pushed it right over the line. Resolutions there you found in Judd, because Judd, who had been a painter, found his resolution of painting problems was to make objects which, this is very important, I think, were not sculpture at all. He spoke very clearly that they weren’t sculpture. It was not a painting nor a sculpture. Later the market decided they were sculpture and they had a cultural life as sculpture, and he gave up the fight, which is the sad part of Judd I think. He left the market define the meaning of his work in the way I think was very judgmental in fact. The generation that preceded me, the Minimal artists, that’s why one can really see that it was the last modernist movement, they resolved the end of the mess that Greenberg made where a painting really became a kind of necktie for over the couch; the Minimalists did their best. But I think that it was really up to my generation, my working context to raise the issues of language and context. The language is always there, the question is whether you deal with it critically at the frontdoor or if you let come it in uncritically through the backdoor – I realized that. The only way of taking political responsibility for the production of meaning was to deal with the language from the front door, critically, and use it, put it up front, deal with language issues. But I don’t know, was that an answer to your question?

Sure. That was really really bringing to the point.

From the very beginning, these distinctions weren’t so necessary. There was a lot in art I found useless, bankrupt, used up, no longer relevant and that I inherited, just a truckload of this like every artist did, so one had to escape that. And you still heard artists talking about forms and color and space. Fine, let them; it has a life in the art school, it’s the past, we should know the past. Art school is where you can still paint meaningfully as a study. So that was for me... Give me your question again, sorry.

Beyond that, do you say that the favorite for you is more from literature or philosophy or the favorite is more art?

Your favorite: More literature, philosophy or art?

Well the thing was that I wanted... Once you realize that art is not about forms and colors, it can be, of course, in the production of meaning but that’s the point: it’s about the production of meaning. And without that, artists have no political life and no real cultural life. You have to understand that. And if once at that point then you realize that in the realm of ideas all is usable, all is informative, and those are the materials. For me, using language – whatever form it takes, from philosophy and literature to more banal

understandings – I mean the use neon came out of kind of advertising, then it was not a varified medium to find art. It didn’t say: I’m art, because it came from bigger signs, it came from bigger signs and things - when I first did it. So I used typefaces that weren’t normally used, I had done transformatory things but still the reference was to a kind of discourse, that was a public, advertising one. So one can use all kinds of language but... And you can take from all sorts of arenas, but me and you understand that your

responsibility as an artist is the production of meaning. What is significant about that is that this is... people liked to say, Conceptual art is not art or radical. The truth is what Conceptual art did was, if you, like many people, see Conceptual art as the beginning of post-modernism. What we did, we returned art back to what it was before modernity – which was - whether you worked for the church or whatever, you were in the vocation of the production of meaning. What modernism was, was a focussing on the language of

art itself; and all those movements is the increasing capacity and analysis of the languages of art. A brilliant, phantastic project modernism was, but by the time you go to the end of it – a painting can speak so loud a priori, no individual artist can say anything. The fact that your aunt and uncle in Bielefeld who know nothing about art, they see a painting and know it’s art, that prior knowledge blocks the possibility of an artist to say something. So that is their own way of making art. So that when I spoke, then somebody understand what I’m saying and they don’t

have the institution of painting between me and them. And of course sculpture is the same; you can use an object in art – we all use objects – but it’s not the same as being a sculpture. Sculpture is part of the ideospace of modernity; if you think of it as sculpture, then you’ve lost the fight. You can employ anything. Right now I‘m making noises that affect your middle ear. It’s a physical thing – speaking. But the point is not that. The point is the meaning. So this thing about materializiation, dematerialization was a real misunderstaning; Lucy Lippard who came

out of Minimalism, that was her experience of it in the beginning, she was very valuable, but it put it off really where the focus was, because the focus really is this thing about the process of significa-tion. And so it’s not about more materials or less, it’s about the context of meaning; we all have to employ some way to communicate, that is... it’s gonna be a physical aspect. That isn’t the point. It’s really really a shift in the basic sea; there is a sea change about how we were producing art. That I think makes a very valuable contribution.

Can you say what your aim is with your practice? Is it possible to say something like that?

Well, there are general ones... In some ways, of course, all art is expressionistic, but all with a small ”e”, not an institutionalized capital „E.“ So in that sense, as you live your life and you learn things and thing interest you, it gets pulled into your work and it gets utilized in a way. But I mean other than my mother, why should anyone care about my personal biography about it re-ally? It should have some relevance in terms of a relation to the world or the way in which one is looking at what is meaningful about life in certain issues. For me, I’ll make it very clear – one of the things I got from philosophy when I was young is that religion had really collapsed, in a sense. That with the beginning.. – preceding modernity we really increasingly didn’t go to the priest or the rabbi, the minister to tell us about the re-ally important things about life. From an anthropological point of view, our religion is science. We go to the family doctor, we go to the physicist, we go to the engineer. And the web of reality is constructed by science. Science as religion is very impov-erished in answering big questions about life. So, increasingly we had a meaning crisis I think in modern society. I found it very fascinating how contemporary art has always been seen as elitist, specialized etc. Meanwhile, more and more museums of contemporary art are built, the numbers of people who see exhibitions get larger and larger. When I was young, it wasn’t even considered as a... profession, parents‘ worst nightmare if their son or daughter would say, I want to be an artist. Now it’s a legitimate career; we have more and more artists and massively more artists than ever in history. The reason for that is that taking from Ludwig, that in fact art has ability to answer certain questions we once concerned philosophical without doing it in a speculative way; they no longer are systems built of philosophers like Hegel or Kant; you have theory, like French theory; nobody wants to really call it philosophy; there is cer-tainly a philosophical enterprise in that engagement, but, in fact, art which is increasingly made from the horizon of mass culture that forms all of our consciousness, rather than with issues had been previously, which had to do much more with formal... you know forms and colours kind of issues, which ended up making it really like a necktie over the couch and that’s meaningless.

So the artists had to re-assert their control of the meaning-making process. What is bankrupt about the art of the 80s – wild painting, transavanguardia – is the fact that the artists lost control of the meaning making process and the dealers pretty much took over. And the artists made references to the past to get validation so it looked like high modern art. And there is... at least in America – the important artists of the 80s are not going to be seen as Schnabel and Salle, they are going to be seen as men making big phallocentric paintings, they are going to be seen as women essentially who made photos, like Cindy Sherman, for example. So there was a real shift. One of the - I think realy important thing too, which is related to all this, is – we have internalized as an idea of art that the artist – and this is the expressionist, monographic tradition – they don’t say anything they just act, and then they make the nature, so the art historian can make culture from it. Some people like we came along, we really did not get a very warm reception from the art historical establishment, it took younger people to embrace what are ideas because we went against the whole art historical market complex in that regard. But essentially the idea of the expressionist artist is the prize figure, it’s the shaman, it’s the magic maker. And this is a male idea, the idea of a female expressionist painter just doesn’t work. But what Conceptual art did – because for my generation, as a New Yorker, we internalized the ideas of feminism in a pro-found way; we realized that it was not just about the liberation of women, but also about the liberation of men. And one of the interesting things about what Conceptual art initiated, it was the idea that... it was ideas; you know the ideas are either in-teresting enough, it doesn’t matter if a man or a woman made them. And if you look back you began to see more and more women be taken seriously and to make important contribution and it begins with post modernity and Conceptual art. To the point that now, that I would say more than half of the most interesting new artists are women. And I think, politcally speaking, it’s one of the... I’m proud of that liberating process that we initiated. Because you no longer had to have a man being an artist for it to be believable. Any questions after that?

I’m doing a lot of projects. At some point, I realized I could really live anywhere, I didn’t want to live in New York anymore. It’s the whole community of artists that lived there are gone; it’s really a big shopping mall, restaurants for the suits. And Europe for me, some years – before 9/11 – Europe just became more and more interesting, there just was more support for contemporary art and just a lot more going on. And I simply... as I got older I just preferred to be in Europe; I still have a studio in New York and a small staff there, and I go there when work necessitates it, but I live in Rome. There I have eight assistants and... you can fly out to Rome or you can work anywhere, because I’m working really all over the world. So Italy is my favourite country and Rome is my favorite city there; I’m quite happy; I‘m living on an island in the middle of the Tiber; and it’s a 16th century space, all arches and I hear the river at night when I sleep. I have two studios on two islands; one is Manhattan, the other is Isola Tiberina. My staff arrives at 10, I’ve got to up by 10 no matter what, no matter if it’s in the evening. And so there’s a certain structure. I have two daughters, 8 and 11, and they are a very important part of my life, and in Rome I see them a lot. We don’t live together, I‘m separated from their mother, but friend. My life is organized really between/I try to keep a balance between work and play, which makes you very healthy to do that, but I’m a bit of a workaholic. I’m an extremely lazy workaholic. So I don’t know. Somehow it works out. I get quite a bit done; as the years go by and I look back I feel that I have accomplished quite a bit. So we hope we can keep to do that as long as possible.

yes yes yes.I think the next question is in relation to that what you just said. Do you think that the conceptual paradigms are still in function

or can they be renewed? Well the paradigms are that they are transformatory. So yes, but they are not prescriptive, that’s the important thing. I mean, one of the things – what I had to fight for, what people, painters were tried to beat me up in bars in the 60s because I was run-ning art and to be really on the battle line... I mean, people said: ”Why do you care that Dan Graham did his work four years or five years after you? But this point is almost, it’s all the same time. And I said “well the point is that Dan, who made some of the most interesting video work at that time, pioneer of it really, it’s quite a different thing than the magazine ads which were done not as artworks – that’s an ontological, ethical issue here as an artist. And they were dated from the time he wrote them, but that wasn’t the time they were conceived as art etc.. So for me it is all (...), because we did the fight, I took actual death threats and things in fighting for this body of ideas. So five years at that moment in history – by the time I convinced Lawrence Weiner to stop painting, by the time I did all this, which means I hated me for the rest of the life, but meanwhile I gave them a career.

So we have to acknowledge that being at the beginning does matter in this kind of things; it matters also because if you want to understand how things developed. Even as art historians are very important, and the problem with the October crew and Buchloh and all them, they are not doing it anymore, but at one moment they felt this need to re-write this history for their own candidates, and this, I felt, from a scholarly point of view was really a shame for everybody, not just for those of us who were having our history changed for other peoples‘ career reasons. But that’s all settled now, and I think that people are being much more accurate about really “who did what when” and all that. But there was a lot, it was quite upsetting to see people messing around with this. But the thing is that what’s interesting so I had to give a name for it, I had to fight for that other idea of art, and also I wanted to make a distinction between that and modern art essentially that preceded. And the thing that’s so great – and this is true if you look at all international exhibitions like documentas or what ever – artists don’t have to call it Conceptual art anymore; it’s just art. So in that sense, what we fought for 35 years ago, in some sense it’s a kind of victory to understand that artists can use language, can deal with issues of context, installation, use of photography, all the things that I had battles with to tragedy at the beginning, now are accepted ways of working. It’s a problem for me as an artist of course, because I don’t want somebody to carry around the baggage of my history, I want to do new, relevant work. So it makes it much more difficult. I mean there’s always a certain resonance between what you have done and what you are doing; that’s understandable, you end up in your own context when you are an artist who has been working as long as I have. It’s a different kind of challenge certainly. Within art itself, I was...

How would you describe your typical daily work as an artist?

Yes sure. So thanks a lot.

You are welcome.

The media that you use- video, photography the postcard, and so on- are all cultural forms that are directed towards popular intervention and yet at the same time, they always end up in the gallery space. Do you regard that as a contradiction?

How do you see your use of these ‘impure’ and ‘de-aestheticized’ forms like postcards or video?

On the other hand, the work doesn’t only appear in galleries. It would be nice if the audience for my work were a combination of activists, artists and ordinary people, but there’s probably no such thing, at least not in my country, and probably not in yours. You have to build an audience, and you can always use the gallery space as a platform, to accomplish a number of things- not the least of which is to present a divergent view of art. I don’t think, though, that one gives up on putting one’s work elsewhere

“Yes I do. But I think the art world is made up of contradictions.”

I see them as thumbing their noses at what is fashionable. I don’t mind covering my work - and, I suppose, myself- with the mud of commonness, if that is whats required.

MarthaRosler

Would you say something about your teaching, which is obviously an important part of your work? Recently, you talked about the rejection of documentary by your students.

Teaching means exploring with future artists and others what the possibilities are for “art’ in the widest sense. Teaching means that you have to go over the significance of various practices, their orgins and interconnected-ness, their relation to the larger culture. I learn a tremendous amount from students about how people see the world, how they respond to our culture. I use that knowledge in developing teaching strategies, but it also tells me a great deal about what life appears to be about, which I guess is what lies behind my work.

It’s interesting that although the broader culture does still have room for documentary, it is becoming less transparent, less a matter of advocacy, and more sensationalized or surrealistic, a kind of masquerade. I find that students have little interest in the concept of documentary as a moment of revelation in which real social relations are pictured; that’s totally flattened for them. They see the world as being made up of a vast sameness of interactions, basically rooted in the cash nexus.

I always begin my course on the documentary tradition by asking the students to define or explain documentary.

In the past, students led with the ideas of reportage and objectivity, the effort to communicate to readers or viewers something that happened ‘out there’. Eventually someone in the class was likely to challenge that con-ception, but not until it had been presented in some depth. In the past few years, though, students have consistently led with a negative: ‘Of course, there’s nothing without a point of view; everything has a bias.’

I won’t suggest they are wrong, but their at-titude, its cynicism, does define a loss. They are in no mood to be convinced about much outside their own lives- not that they are totally selfish; they are perfectly capable of empathy and of anger at injustice. They just feel powerless to affect very much. Many of the Rutgers students have to worry about where their tuition or photo supplies are going to come from, and that seems to dampen their enthusiasm for what they percieve as other people’s battles.

Your work ‘The Bowery in two inadequate descriptive systems’, which problematizes the conventional representation of the ‘down and out’ has been seen as an attack on documentary form. Is that how you conceived it?

I saw it as a being about inadequate representation. When I did that work- and later wrote the essay ‘In, Around, and Afterthoughts: On Documentary Photography’ to accompany it- documentary was reductive because it wasn’t socially embedded in the milieu of its representations. It had become a frozen practice, ritualized; a series of images and perhaps some isolated texts. It had had its birth in a different historical moment, when it was a highly invested social practice, but had been transformed into mean sort of decor, a coffee table form, used to confirm the bourgeois viewer in his or her superiority. In other words, it was social complacency masquerading as investment in change. It was anti-militant, it was dispiriting. Photography and its viewers were ultimately complicit in their support of no-change.

That doesn’t mean that photography and, in particular, documentary, can’t work in a project of social change, only that the photography’s role has to be rethought. Just going out on a foray to assemble a collection of street trophies about this or that running social sore can’t be effective- and never was. This vision of documentary is easy to reject

My first question is: What do you consider as the strongest influence in your artistic practice?

That’s a very strange question because probably the most important influence in my artistic prac-tice was having discovered art. (..) I come from a background where art existed but it was not an integral part of existence. And once I was able to determine – probably through the public library and through public museums – that there was a thing called art and I saw that it was able to deal with certain questions I became involved in it. And that is the strongest influence.

Would you say that there is a specific artistic influence from the history of art?

Yes. My initial attraction to art was based upon my initial decision that I was going to interact with the society which in most general terms comes off as so called “political” but everything is basically political. When I discovered that people from the Russian Constructivists from Mondrian to Cezanne were dealing with the same issues, and dealing with them as a form of perception and presentation in the world, I began to become involved in the romantic idea of becoming an artist.

It allowed me to step outside of the one part of the praxis of art that I found uncomfortable, and that was the imposition of an expressionist, almost, as opposed to existential presence of the person who made it. I wanted to find something that could step outside of people believing that it was special what I made when in fact it wasn’t special, it was useful. And language lead me into that. But language comes along after a point of trying to find other means of presenting the same kind of a concept.

Would you say that the decision for language is also a decision to interact with the public?

Yes,

especially that art itself, sculpture is not signage sculpture is not an icon. You present things within the praxis that form a logic structure, that breaks us under the logic structure that was based within the society. From that logic structure you create a mise-en-scène; that mise-en-scène builds the result or the endproduct of art, which in fact is ambience.

Now I have a question which is maybe a little bit different to the others.… What is the aim of your practice? Can you say something like that?

Everything you said can be put in relation to Conceptual art and the field of Conceptual art? I have to say maybe that I’m not fixed on a Conceptual art ? like it was from the… Seth Siegelaub Gallery. I like to see it in a bit broader field. So that is my understanding of Conceptual art. Do you think that the conceptual paradigms are still in function…?

I wish I knew what they were. I don’t understand. I make art. The other people whose work I find interesting make art. Conceptual was a term ... it’s the same problem as the Abstract Expressionists, the action painters. I began to find out what it means. Every piece, work of art is conceptual. You can’t make a painting without having an idea of what you are doing. I don’t know what the purpose of differentiating my practice from the practice of Cy Twombly, my practice from the practice of Robert Ryman is, but somehow or other they are values(?) in the world that shows art has to make this break. I don’t know.

If you speak of Conceptual Paradise – that I understand, that makes sense, that’s the use of a word in a manner that makes sense to me. There is no concept of paradise therefore a conceptual paradise is of interest to me. When you say Conceptual art – no. The stuff I make is real, turn off the lights, in the old words of Ed Reinhardt, you can trip over it, you can fuck up your life – that’s not very conceptual, it’s a material reality. So I don’t really, I’m sorry … I can’t tell you where it fit in. They use it, I know what they mean, so why should I make a lot of time saying, but I am, I’m not ... I am, no. If somebody wants to be a Conceptual artist – more power to them! I’m really quite content being an artist.

I don’t think I’m precise. It’s just that I’m a grown person. I’ve … Because of my class I’ve been a grown person since I was quite young, meaning I had to worry about survival which means that I have to every morning decide what am I going to do with my life and why. And I made decisions through my life in fact that I am part of the public. But I am the part of the public that doesn’t work for the man. That’s fine, that means that you have to really pay a little bit of attention.That’s not concise; … it’s less about me than it is about the malevolence from outside that one tries to build, that one can still function within.

You are so precise that I think we can do it in ten minutes.

So actually my last question is exactly about your daily practice. Is it possible to say something about what is or what would be an ideal typical daily work ...?

I wish I knew what they were. I don’t understand. I make You mean like conceptual paradise – what I would like as an artist at this stage of my life. It would be very nice to spend periods of time where the economic implications of one’s existence did not come in and at the same time one would just work. Because my ideal praxis is to be involved in processes and involved in ma-terials, and be working on body of work and have somebody offer me a place to show something, and that’s the body of work that gets shown at the moment. It’s never site-specific, it’s what my activity is.

At this particular moment I’m very involved in trying to objectifying desire – in a non-romantic manner! We have gesture, we have things, processes – how can you in some way objectify desire and what does that constitute.(..) And it constitutes of course a simple thing; it’s the changing of the status of the plinth, the thing that supports something. It’s the changing of the “the” to a “a”, and how to take the universal, and turn the universal into a specific and then you essentially would be in a position of at least objectifying a desire to the extent that you can present it.

Yes. That’s the basis that I try to do with building any sculpture. You can take what is a universal material, and instead of ascribing to it all the universal traits that you would give, you try to find the trait that at that moment fulfils your needs and desires, and specify it, put it within a context that another person coming along can say: Oh, I can take this universal and put it in a context for me. The purpose of art is for other people, it’s not just to make something, and it’s certainly not to express oneself. It has to do with you having discovered something and determined something that you are convinced is worth telling somebody. And in doing that if you can lead them in a manner that allows themselves to see certain things they previously never thought of as a material reality, they can adapt that and use it for themselves without you having to give them a metaphor and tell them what to do. So, it’snot very heavy at all, it’s complicated and it’s not very easy but it’s not very heavy. And remember - and as I said I’m not a doctor writing a script, and I’m not a pilot with 400 people dependent upon my life: If I make a mistake, I make a mistake – mea culpa.

Do you want to continue on this very heavy and complex term of how you come from the “the” to the “a”?

What is your reception of the reception of your work? Do the people see the writing on the wall, drawing on the wall still as a provocation?

I don’t know who the people are, you would have to talk about a people and you would have to be specific. There is a book coming out in Berlin of a compilation of whatever they found, but it’s a lot of stuff by ? and Gregor Stemrich, and it’s from 1986 to 2003, and it’s rather amazing, especially the newspaper things they found. They ask the same question always. So I don’t know what a public or the public would really say.

Franklin Gothic extra condensed which was an attempt for me to find a non-authoritative sans-serife face that when presented has a certain elegance, but it had an elegance by virtue of itself rather that by virtue of association with a modernist movement ... After a while I began to notice that people were seeing it as something to do with me, and it was becoming a signature, and I decided to find a typeface that carried the same feeling at the moment. I’m not obligated to stay with a typeface; it’s the Inhalt, the content of the words that I’m dealing with. […] I started to design a stencilled typeface because I had always stencilled things before, and I was working and working … and I’m not a formed designer, but […] it takes quite a bit to design a decent typeface. And all the way I didn’t have the time, I had to do an exhibition, a project and was getting impatient, and I simply asked my assistant if she would be kind enough to go onto the internet and start looking through for something that would strike her in the stencilled typefaces that I would look at. (..) Nothing, ? through a couple of weeks we looked it up –you couldn’t believe how many stencil type founds there are ... -. Then one day it was: “Lawrence, would you like to take a look at something?” And then I looked. And my god, somebody had gotten it right! And we looked at it. And I decided ok, and we bought it and I played with it for a while. You know, you buy it from the typehouse; and I played with it for a while. And I became quite excited about it, and I’ve been using it; maybe tomorrow morning I won’t be.

I realized that some years ago you changed your typo. Maybe you want to say something about that. Before you used Franklin Gothic?