18/09/2023
Graham Hamilton: Where are you?
Stefano Faoro: I'm at my brother's place in Bologna. I'm gonna stay here this week, then I'm going to my hometown to work a little bit in the studio. At my parents' place, I have a basement where I have some basic things, and I need to work a little bit on things there.
G: Do you have stuff already in the basement there? Is it kind of a steady studio?
S: I have some colors. I have all the brushes. I have stuff that when I go there I know there are things. It's also my storage space. It's like their garage - it's a room they never use and I kind of took over. It's very ambivalent, because on one side it's nice to be there–I’m completely isolated from everything else–and on the other side upstairs there's my parents. So (laughing) It's not the best. My parents have this thing of when I'm there they're a little bit excited about the studio so they just come in, even without knocking on the door, because, I don't know - it's their room, so they go: "Hey," and I'm like: "What!?"
G: It's like that meme, "Are you winning, son?" You're standing there in front of a projector and a blank canvas - or it has two green marks on it or something. "Are you winning son?" and you're like: Yes, No.
S: My favorite is this guy on YouTube watching: "Noam Chomsky vs. Michel Foucault” and then the message from his father "How's the job search?".
G: Like it's a screenshot with the text.
S: Yeah, yeah, it's so good, and this famous speech that is kind of useless, totally incomprehensible, French against America… How's the job search going? Really good… Ay yay yay!
G: So you are going to go there to your parents and work on the Oslo work?
S: Not really. I mean, kind of, but I have this plan for Oslo, which is probably going to be to remake a work that I have already done. The work is these paintings that are not paintings. I mean they are paintings because they are stretched, but there's no paint on them. And they are attached to the wall, and they look like bunk beds.
G: Like these blue ones that I saw. And what is the fabric?
S: So the blue ones were the first ones I've done. I did them in Vienna actually, but then I took them and showed them there, in Oslo. And they are actually made with inflatable mattress stuff. Like you know this sort of plastic, and this came about very organically in the studio. I had stretchers and I was playing around. I had this inflatable mattress that lasts very shortly, with this plastic and it's impossible to repair and you don't know what to do with it. So I was just stretching them and seeing what I could do and somehow it turned into a bed. I started hanging them perpendicular to the wall, instead of attached to it–instead of flat on the wall.
G: like shelves?
S: Yeah, exactly. One in Oslo was angled like shelves. And it's a work that I really thought was interesting, but then I didn't do it again for a while. Then in Italy some years after I did it again, and there I used some bed sheets-which was this very dumb way of exploring this idea. And now I feel this need to go back to Oslo four years after and almost do exactly the same show. Also because the room–I think it will look good in it–and I didn't have a studio for so long, and I don't feel ready at all to make something new. In my mind, I really don't have the material, and I can't do anything new that I feel like could be made into a solo show.
G: Is it the same room?
S: No, it's a different one, and I think it's even better than the first one-which was like an apartment, and this one is an old building in the center of Oslo that is going to become a student house, a dorm, or something like this. So, I bought some blankets. I still have to see them, but I bought these blankets that in Italy are used in hotels and hospitals and they are made of wool. They look like they're made of wool, and I think they are made of wool, and they are fireproof. I feel like, if I'm not going to make the paintings, at least I'm going to make the image of a painting, which is probably the room. The room will turn into a painting, with all these paintings. Since it's all very conceptual in my mind, because I can only write about it, I thought maybe the material could have meaning. Then I found this fireproof material, that to me gave a sort of a layer of meaning-this language, because it's just language in the description of the object, for example the title would be "bunk." The title of the show is probably going to be "Students." Which I think could be like a fine title. It was the title I suggested for Melissa for the Staedelschule graduation.
G: Which would have been really good, because I think if you can have a level of poetic abstraction, but then also a kind of materialism to it - not practicality, but this reality or something, to pin it down.
S: Exactly, I really like one word titles. When you find it you're like, oh, yes, it should be this.
G: You pin it down, and then in the specificity of that word, you can open up the thing that's already there. "Students," how is this a state, or a group of people, and how does it inform or how are we informed by it? Or how does it inform the show?
S: I didn't know it was going to become a student place before I thought about “Students” as a title. It's a very–I'm telling the truth–it's like a lucky coincidence. I don't know if it's so lucky, it's just a coincidence. For me the boring thing about coincidence is that in the curatorial discourse it always adds value to something. People get very excited about coincidence. I find it very unsexy. Like, okay great, you found your little treat you can tell yourself to make something better.
G: And why do you think that is? Why does it add value: coincidence? It's a type of magical thinking, and so it relates to the narrative in a certain way.
S: Yeah, I think so. I think it relates to narrative. Oh sure there's something avant-garde-ish about it, maybe this idea of chance and this idea of things that happen to the thing you're doing. If you allow something to happen it's already a form of making. Also it's a very gimmicky language trick. It definitely creates some kind of value, but also an image or something that you can have a tiny laugh about. You can be: "ha ha, funny.” It's proof that comes from nowhere.
G: There's something magical about it. I think the myth is there is a hidden logic to the world and art helps to reveal that.
S: I think resonance is a key word here. I think this idea of the artist as somebody that reveals something, it's always present, it's also very embedded in Western religious thinking about making art, as a way to reveal forms of the divine, to visualize something that it would be impossible to visualize otherwise. But then this goes directly into a more ideological idea of art and politics. Art: as revealing a political condition of some kind of subject, and then this is enough to act politically. It's as if you just have to reveal certain conditions and that's already like: okay, great. I think resonance is this importance, this weight, that meaning acquires, and content acquires, gathered into the object - into the artwork that you're making. If you're able to have the artwork resonating through language applied to it, then you give this extra layer of some sort of intelligence–this awareness of being something more precious, or more important, or more valuable for some kind of discourse. This goes completely against ideas of art being just dumb and material which I'm more attracted to.
G: Dumb?
S: "Dumbness" as the opposite of being always: smart. I don't know it's not very well put, but how can I put it, you know what I mean?
G: I think it's interesting to define dumb. For example, how it is or isn't technological is interesting. One thing I was thinking of, when you were talking, is that when things relate to discourse in a certain way, they become didactic. I feel like you're talking about the expectation to have a take away or something like that. It's like a parable form. I think today that a lot of art is preoccupied with speaking in parables. Like there is a lesson that has been made available only because of this art piece, with all of it aleatory magic or whatever. I think that would be something you're very not interested in–where there's a lesson–and by parable I mean like a biblical parable. Jesus only taught in parables. I was also thinking of Western Christian Esoteric thinking that is more and more popular - the belief in the secret meaning of things. I think it's totally related to that, especially in this curatorial impulse. There's a lesson to be learned from the work and then work aspires towards the logic of teaching, but teaching in these kind-of metaphors.
S: It's always interesting how this is also ambivalent to face. It's revelatory in a way, but it's also incredibly non-revelatory. In order for you to be in front of something revealed you need to have this certain knowledge of how to perceive certain kinds of content. So it's both ways that I think makes the whole sort of parable of the work, or the whole existence of the work, very ambivalent. Like: you do something and you give meaning to it, you attach meaning to it, you put the content into something, but all this content is only there to be understood by a very specific kind of group of people–a very specific group of autonomous subjects that deal with the same content over and over and over again. Then if you sort of repeat that you acquire–okay–the work finds a position in the world that is acceptable, and then can be commodified, can be talked about, can exist in many different forms and different shapes. I think with dumbness or like with works that don't ask so much of that, or that exist on a different plane, or exist as something else; then the attempt is to sort of step a little bit away from it–of course, it's almost impossible–it contains the same level of utopia in a way, it's a reaction, it only exists as a reaction to something. It's very difficult to separate the two.
One artist that for me was very important when I was thinking many years ago about "dumbness" was Mike Kelly. Mike Kelly is interesting for this because he is definitely an incredibly well read guy. Everything in his work is referential and everything relates to very different forms of intellectual thinking in relation to art or popular culture in America, folk culture, and psychoanalysis, and structuralist philosophy, and structuralist paintings, and expressionism of different kinds. But then I always liked the way he was doing it, the way he was sort of treating all that material and content in a very unpretentious and superficial way, and sometimes making it look incredible–I can only say dumb…
G: Apparent?
S: Apparent, and sort of stupid. Sort of half asleep and everything looks a little bit drunk or dragged. I was always very attracted by this paradox. I don't know–paradox is not the right word but the other one doesn't come now–a kind of contradiction. I think with my work, I havent had a studio for a very long time, and like we were talking about before, there was way too much thinking in all that I was doing. Maybe one way to stop that was now in Oslo to redo the same show and to change just one thing and repeat, repeat. To avoid the idea of pushing yourself down, reading, finding references, making them into some kind of work. I'm just going to repeat, repeat, repeat, which is completely common. This is probably very banal, but it's a strategy that we find to avoid a stagnating way of producing. You were saying something like this before about when you were doing your show in New York. You were saying: okay, I'm just going to go and - no thinking - and do everything, if I remember right?
G: Yeah, I remember I went into that show and I thought: no concept, no metaphor. Which is I think not true, at all, like in the work. But it was my approach and so was true I guess in the way you kind of present yourself and that's interesting. I think with press releases or the language around work–which is what we're talking about with these anecdotes–this kind of anecdotal way of relating to work and magical coincidences–I think it's worth it to be really careful about which language you invoke in relation to the work. Not just in order to allow a viewer to have their own way in, but to allow that ambivalence which you were talking about. And that's one of the things I think I wanted firstly, or mostly, to talk to you about and to let emerge: firstly about ambivalence and then about ambiance. But I think that the ambivalence you're talking about is this tension, this kind of natural conflict of things, that is I guess dialectical. Can you tell me more about ambivalence in relation to your work?
S: I thought about it because you mentioned it to me before in text messages through the summer, and then I had time to sort of try to come up with not an answer, but to think about things that happened to me that I felt definitely ambivalent about, or when I felt there was ambivalence in the room. For instance–I was thinking about it this morning–and especially the works that I've done for the show in Nürnberg and these portraits, paintings that I've done. The portraits (in Nürnberg) are of different kinds of people, some of them are people I know, some of them are people I have taken from the Internet, and the way I was making the portraits came directly from my very ambivalent experience in the residency in Nürnberg. Which was on one side, the luxury of it being a very interesting and well-funded and well-organized residency, and having the possibility of producing, thinking, being there–all the luxury of the artist in residence. Then on the other hand–because of conditions of the institution that I was in and I was invited from–finding myself most of the time alone in the city of Nürnberg, which is a very complicated city in relation to history, and especially in relation to the history of German culture. So the portraits–as every portrait is, not a self-portrait–contains some of my own feeling of being there, which was incredibly ambivalent.
It was this way to deal with the context, with the contingencies, and the way this is visible in the work is–and I think you asked me about it before, you asked me: “do you think you are detached from these people? Are you ironically dealing with the subject of painting, and then with the subjects in the paintings, or are the objects-the paintings and the subjects portrayed in them ironic? Are they represented with irony, or detachment?” It was a very difficult question for me, and I think it was the question that I asked myself many times, because all these subjects, all the people portrayed in the work, are subjects that somehow find themselves in a sort of place where they realize there's something not fair or not well or something dangerous in their surrounding living environment, their ambiance or whatever, let's say living environment for now. So they exist in a position of danger in a way, and - which was a little bit like how I was feeling, even though mine was not life threatening danger, but was more a feeling of dealing with this kind of heavy past, this heavy European culture - the leftovers of the 20th century.
The interesting thing was also the paintings themselves–not only what was portrayed in the paintings, but also the objects themselves–were inserted, like exhibited, in the Kunstverein which is a building from the 20's that then became a Nazi building and a big wall of it was covered by this Nazi propaganda realist mural. So: the paintings themselves are in this position of being exhibited finally in kind of a big institution, one of the most interesting places for them to be shown, but also this place is a place of very threatening ambivalence in a way. This precise problem or this precise feeling was something that I was very into. I was trying to sort of get into it and trying to live within the ambivalence, living within these two feelings of acceptance and abandonment, and resisting. You can always accept the reality and abandon yourself to it, or resist towards it. For me, this ambivalent position of the artist, which can be applied to every subject in society that goes through life, through different institutions. We always find ourselves in this strange and very ambivalent position of surrounding ourselves with institutions, because the institution provides certain benefits. The school or the hospital or the art institutions or the swimming pool, any kind of institution provides for you with something. But the way you abandon yourself, the moment you abandon yourself in it or to it, you immediately give up certain aspects of your own subjectivity or individuality and there's always this kind of back and forth of resisting and abandoning yourself in an institution. When I was there I was trying to deal with this issue, which for me is also maybe what I have been interested in for a long time. Of course the work, the bunk beds in the dormitory, or this kind of representation of a painting as a bunk bed - as a dormitory bed, is exactly about that. It is a very ambivalent position, but I sort of enjoy this ambivalence. I think this is a space that needs to be dealt with, so it’s interesting to work with.
So your question was very good, and this morning I was looking at this big museum in Germany, it’s called “the Cultural History Museum of Germany.” In there, there's a tiny room at the top that is of course not as bombastically presented as maybe the other rooms are, which is Nazi Realism from the 20th century. The paintings that were accepted by the Nazi regime. They are all Realist paintings, most of them depicting farmers or villages, but a lot of them portray like bourgeois adolescence. So like, very young blonde Germans, twenty year old teenagers or old people, and all of them are portrayed as–there's something very kind of violent about it. You have these two types of Nazi propaganda: one for the masses, which is always somehow a hero, is always winning a war: an agricultural war, industrial war, a war war, and is always very strong and muscle-y and powerful and looking at the future, building a new society, being, destroying the world to make it all look like Bavaria. This was made more for the masses and the working class in Germany. But then you have these paintings, which were made for the more bourgeois collector or bourgeois character, and these operate in a very completely different way. They portray always a weak subject; these teenagers have something incredibly melancholic. They communicate this idea of Germanity being an identity always in danger, something that is being threatened by racial identities. The jews of course are always a major enemy in Germany at the time. So in one propaganda you have the heroic subject. Then in the other you have these incredibly ambivalent–the first one is not ambivalent at all and the second one, the bourgeois one, is incredibly ambivalent. Because, it contains strength, but their strength is all contained in this melancholic way of looking at the painting. There's a very beautiful one, a young teenage girl putting on socks. The way she puts on socks, you're like, this woman really embodies the suffering of Germany. It's so kind of violent and powerful, while portraying a very–not a not a powerful subject–but not a classically powerful subject.
When I was looking at this and thinking of my work, I was like, why do I feel attracted towards these teenagers? Why do I feel some compassion? It's incredibly kind of evil–not evil but functional–this ideological use of painting. It functions exactly because of the way that it's ambivalent. It's incredibly ambivalent and it's incredibly not one thing. It contains its own contradiction.
G: You touched on this thing, which I can't fully recount here, but we both listened to this podcast: Why Theory. They have this really good episode on political enjoyment. One of the things that they talk about that the Right does really well is to create this image that is a contradiction–this impossible reality that somehow allows for a different kind of empowerment or enjoyment in the way that people relate to themselves. For example: the immigrant works harder than you and is going to take your jobs, and also that they're weak and they're just stealing all your money through welfare or something. Do you remember this? So this motivation of the contradiction to a lie, to an ideological myth, is really interesting to bring back up.
What's also interesting is in this depiction in the mural - the mural is ambient in a way, right? You have this figure - but it's in a surround? So the identity is holistically expressed in the conditions. So I was thinking about–because you sent me this T.J. Clark text “Painting at Ground Level”–and he talks about working with “the surround.” I thought that was really interesting, in relation to this, because the other part of the Nuremberg show was this video you made. Which is very much not a painting, but is very much like a portrait of the surround in which you're working. I think this ambivalence you feel–or loneliness you felt there–allows you, and I think this is also something artists do–or artists stranded in Germany, because I experienced this–is to really immerse yourself in the ambient. And ambivalence and ambience, or ambiance, or the ambient, go kind of hand-in-hand in that way and if you can exist so ambivalently in a landscape, you can become attuned to all the vibrating contradiction that makes up a really dynamic and vast cultural historical landscape. That's what that video teased out. Can you say something about that? Or I can ask a more pointed question about it, too.
S: No, I can. I think that's exactly what it was. I mean, of course, I didn't have it in mind when I started making the video. But when I started making the video there was this feeling of: I'm here for six months, I got to do something every day. This urge to take something, to record whatever the place you're living in, like keeping a diary for yourself, but also you think, hey, I'm sure something will come out of it. It started exactly like this, but slowly it became exactly that. Slowly I was really thinking, okay, this is exactly the opposite of what I'm doing in the paintings. If the paintings are portraits that exist without any context–this void, this absence of ambience or context–I'm filling it up by doing this other completely other thing, which is the recording, literally, the moment, the place, my life in Nurnberg for six months. A lot of it came from T.J. Clark because this text was very interesting for me with this idea of the materiality of the ground. These bodies that are really–there's this Bruegel painting where these men are literally lying on the dirt and they are so full of food that they’ve–you know, they're also looking very dumb–but they are so dumb that they have become one with material. They become one with the place they're in. They become one with their context, which is the land of Cockaigne (Pays de Cocagne). Yeah, it sounds like cocaine in English, but I'm not saying cocaine.
G: Clark translated it as “the land of cooking.” Where cooked food falls from the sky, which is just a crazy, wonderful way to explain it. But yeah “dumb,” they're lying there and they're practically one with the ground, but they're stupefied by their satiation…
S: Exactly. I think this stupefying–these people in a stupor–was something that I was very attracted to, like okay, how can the ambient create this, this relation like you were saying, this vibrating with it. In the end you become so part of it you almost give up your own ability to be an active agent. You sort of go with it and you become it in a way. This question of context and environment was of course also very interesting to think about in relation to these kinds of paintings that I was talking about before: these teenagers, these old men, this rightwing representation. It constructs a subject that is free from contingencies. It exists as a sort of pure dynamic will that builds its own future, which is then very much translated into our neo-liberal ideologies of being self-made, or being yourself at the maximum; the un-existence of society and the way you give up this idea of existing in a context and go by yourself.
This fever dream that If you go as much as possible by yourself, everybody would be fine, this utopian capitalism. This connects a little bit with the text that I sent you about Howard Hawks which is of course something completely else. But I was attracted by this text. I was thinking a lot about ambiance while reading this text because Robin Wood talks a lot about the use of the desert in Hawk’s movies, as a way to construct the American mythology of the incredibly solid utopistic solitary individual. John Wayne, as somebody that has no link with society, is himself in the desert and creates his own way of living. The desert before Los Angeles, “The West,” becomes the perfect place to build this image, this strong American geological mythology. I found it as a representation–to cancel the background, to sort of get rid of what TJ Clark calls earth or ground or soil–you get rid of it through the desert, which is of course full of dirt, but it's a place where you can imagine somebody that navigates above everything.
It's a very interesting question I think. Also in terms of painting and a western dialectical idea of understanding representation, which is always about the background and the foreground. Something in the foreground is more important than something in the background, and something that happens in the background has less importance. I think this use of the word in English is very telling of how we understand this detachment of the subject from the contingencies that the subject lives in.
I also really like what you were saying about this way of living in Germany. I completely agree. I was talking about it yesterday with my brother. I decided to move back to Italy now and we sort of are kind of serious about it. My brother was like: why? Why don't you think about going to Berlin for your career, your friends or whatever. But I don't know, this strange feeling when you are in some places like Berlin–and there's nothing wrong with Berlin–but it's this strange condition of “tuning into it,” that is a very complicated thing to do. And when it happens, at least what it does to me, when I was alone in Frankfurt, walking alone, you feel like: okay there's a moment of being tuned in, being exactly there, you and the environment are like in the same note, it’s almost scary. It's pleasurable, but it contains a lot of–this love and fear go together. Like: what's happening to me?
G: I think we both have freshly come out of this experience again of living in Germany. I think we didn't even touch on it, but even just starting this conversation with bedsheets, there's a whole legacy of bed sheets and painting as material and ground in a way to unpack these things that is just totally German, people who situate themselves really in relation to a German painting tradition. Germany seems to me like a place where a certain type of successive thinking with painting really continues or that continued in a way. That there were things that happened in a tradition that follow other things. Like Polke is making paintings on bed sheets and then Merlin Carpenter and Michael Kreber are unpacking that patterned ground and the whole implication of bodies or whatever and the whole thing that we're talking about.
But what I think is really interesting about how you jumped from this German mural and the feeling you have in Nuremberg, to the to this Wild West film thing of: man, cowboy, whatever, standing, at dusk or sunrise on the horizon, and the ideological idea of the cowboy “winning the west”–it's really about conquering the surround. They built forts and that was a way to undo the surrounding–this whole thing of boundaries and sovereignty.
I think something in Germany that is complicated to me is there seems like a sense of the oneness or wholeness of the society. So this context where you situate your individuality, that's what produces this kind of tension you're talking about, or that scariness. The attempt to assimilate to it and also to be kind of unable to. I don't know how to tie that back into this work exactly, but I think maybe I was thinking about your paintings then in the Nuremberg show–being a sketch of a figure in a background–they're so barely there because in a way they imply that the context is constitutive.
S: Yes, absolutely. When I was talking about it there (in Nürnberg) and they asked me why did you choose portrait paintings; I was always saying because I wanted to highlight the context. Which seems like a very contradictory way of thinking, but I think in the end it works. It's function is a contradiction. When you make a portrait it’s in order to show where this person–where this painting is.
Something happened to me recently. It's kind of one of these coincidences, anecdotes, but I'm going to tell it anyway - it's funny. So I'm now going to contradict myself and tell one of the stories and feel very good about it. But, I was in Bari, I had some small stretchers and I had a bedsheet and I started stretching things and painting on them, very kind of summertime activity. I had these bed sheets that I bought somewhere before. Once I was stretching it, I found the label of the bed sheet, which I didn't know before–I didn't see before the label–but the brand of the bed sheet was “Blue Bayou.” Which is this southern American way of calling like a lagoon or something, from what I know? Blue Bayou. Of course it comes from the idea of cotton coming from Louisiana or whatever, and white cotton coming from Louisiana. I was like, fuck yeah. I was thinking a lot about Cameron Rowland’s show, thinking about Germany, about the cotton and the linen and all these textiles, and this western tradition of using these materials to then add value through exploitation. Then I found myself sort of having a good afternoon, finding myself exactly through this. This sort of haunting feeling of, okay, my white bed sheet which is like a normal bed sheet that you would use in any kind of Western institution–has to be white in order to transmit cleanliness. Then I'm going to use it for painting because it's white, because it's cotton, because it's cheap, and then it's called Blue Bayou. I was like, wow well, it's kind of inescapable, the history. Just an anecdote.
G: It leads us into another article you sent me “Art Nouveau, Art of Darkness: African Lineages of Belgian Modernism” by Debora L. Silverman, about the history of Belgian art Nouveau in relation to the Congo. That the wealth allows this style, and all these art nouveau styles are very nationally specific - so they're also really interesting in this way because they're national styles and they're competitive in a new way, in a new kind of industrial circulation situation of art goods. But the whole Belgian Art Nouveau explosion had to do with this explosion of material wealth from the Congo, and all the forms of that style directly depict the raw material, and place that it's being exploited, not Horta only but also Vandervelde–it's all elephants and rubber vines. Then you look at it and you're like oh my God. Then the essay closes with this really nice quote about Vandervelde saying: our work will be the whip that cracks the back of culture and wakes it up. It’s such a great article, but then I was thinking, something about this type of scholarship is interesting for now, because you read it and it's like you solved it. Like you read it and you’ve solved a detective novel and you're like: oh yeah, it was dispossession all along. But you knew that. I mean, that type of education is so important. To attach these myths of artistic creation to the historical conditions of dispossession, is an important and important scholarship. But in a way, it's like: but you could have known that all along. You know, that these things are related, it's in the work and it wasn't a mystery to the contemporaries of the work. In a way what was interesting to me to think about, was that it probably was really, really apparent that these were elephantine forms, to everyone. And that was like celebrated, and in a way that is a really well synthesized art piece that it invokes the material condition of its production and it's transmogrifies it. It’s really immoral, if that can even apply. But that was interesting to me that this just wouldn't have been a mystery at the time.
S: You said first about the importance of these kind of texts in contemporary education, which I completely agree with. I was teaching last year and I was teaching this stuff. When I found this article, because in Italian classic history of art texts Art Nouveau is always presented as Nouveau, like something new as an attempt to make a new form; it’s described as something that either comes from nature or comes completely from the imagination, as if these artists were able to imagine shapes that nobody else had thought before. Which is completely idiotic, doesn't make any sense. It’s a very detached form. Then you find this article and, like you say, it tells you that's not true, these things didn't come out of nothing. These thing came out of something with a capital S, came out of the biggest genocide on the African continent. So it comes out of something that is incredibly present.
G: And the total expropriation of that culture, not only its material wealth, but it's cultural wealth.
S: Yes, everything. But then the second part of what you were saying, it seems like people were aware. And I think that becomes interesting, because I think this article made me think a lot about, and this is going to sound funny, but it was around Christmas when I read it, and Melissa and I were going through movies of our childhood. We were watching movies that we were watching when we were children, like Speilberg and stuff and one of them was Jumanji. If you remember this Robin Williams movie. Jumanji is a very simple idea. Through a table game, the jungle comes to you and invades a town and it's dangerous and it's full of lions, and elephants that stampede and whatever dangerous animals. There are also plants, they conquer all the houses and they can kill you. When I was watching it, I was like, this is exactly what happened to Brussels during Art Nouveau times, because together with the shapes and wealth came also something that probably felt unconsciously dangerous, and this danger was somehow appealing. That this very far away colonial jungle of the Congo would arrive into the city through the ports of Antwerp and would literally conquer every wall of the city. The plants and the elephants will appear everywhere, which is, of course, exploitation and appropriation. But there's something also incredibly powerful in this movement, which I repeat, to use this psychoanalytic terminology. I think it also happened very unconsciously, like you realize maybe all this stuff, all these shapes, the way they arrived and the way they were produced and the way they were perceived, by the people of the time, absolutely related to what was happening in Belgium, which was a country of farmers became the biggest economy in Europe through colonialism. Probably people immediately thought that this was colonialism, but it was a very unclear thought. So again, this kind of stupor of the environment you live in was probably: we find ourselves in a jungle now, full of money–it must have been insane.
G: And then you mistake, like Vandervelde does: this powerful change has happened and it's related to my agency. Or it’s like a motor and I use it to reinvent art. Now also somehow we're back to this thing about hidden meanings. If there is a logic that's buried, and how people relate to the motors that drive things and the meanings behind things and the way the aesthetics of things are telling–or secretly telling–the truth about what's happening, or what's happened.
S: When I was living in Brussels in a residency, one of the people that was tutoring me–they don't like to be called tutors–but one of the people running the residency, had a very interesting way of doing studio visits, which for me was very formative. He would enter the room and he would see artworks by me or anybody else, and he would look at them and then he would be like “interesting.” Then he would say: now let's try to understand why a person “like you” would do something “like this” today. Which I thought was incredibly interesting as a form of critiquing art. You don't think about the biography of Graham, making work because his father was a welder and he makes metal sculptures. You don't invest in that, you invest in like: I'm thinking of you as somebody, and there a lot of people like you, and all of you are doing something like this, and I kind of want to know: why? I was like, okay, this is very compelling. I don't know if this is the secret meaning, but it’s looking for this layer of understanding hovering around things you sort of have no real control of. You kind of can have–but on the other hand you have to give it up mostly. He also used to say another thing which was very funny. He used to say “artworks always tell what we want them to tell, but they tell it backwards.” Maybe it’s true, whatever you want to say with an artwork, it's going to be said by the artwork but the other way around, mirrored. Which means it is probably impossible to understand, if you mirror something, a sentence, it’s more difficult to read.
G: Or if you said it backwards it comes out straight. That's the other part of it. And that's where you get kind of the magical revelation or the expectation of it.
S: Yeah, but I'm thinking a lot about what you were saying about this kind of meaning, especially now that I've been writing some, not reviews, but texts about shows. I don't call them reviews because there's so many implications that they cannot be perceived as reviews. But I always try to keep this in mind. I'm not going to follow what is written in the press release. I'm not going to follow what's the manifest intention. I'm just going to try to have a take on this more contextual intention: the way that work exists, and the way that work transmits some sort of content through, what you call secret meaning or what somebody would call the unconscious. I think for me as a writer, when I write–let's say, not as a writer, but when I write–I try to go there more and more, like, okay let's see if I can try to write something about that. I don't think it's easy. You always end up in some sort of personal interpretation, but that's not a problem. I mean this is what we are. It's fine. I don't even have this kind of avant garde idea of negation, or negating interpretation, or a negating form of dialectics. I think it's just different forms of understanding that sort of coexist and try to understand how to balance all that and where to put the importance or how to navigate this thing.
G: How to facilitate the encounter, as the artist and as the interlocutor.
S: Well, interesting talk. Well, it's, I’m phew!
G: Yeah! I think that's wonderful. I think that was a really, really good Stefano. That was really cool.
S: I'm very happy–this was very good to talk about this. If you want to talk more?
G: I don't. I think that's perfect. We did an hour, exactly. Now, so… Thank you!
S: Okay. That's good. Pretty good. Yeah.