11
MINUTES VIDEO TRANSCRIPT .
FROM THE ROUND TABLE DISCUSSION
.
Date: Tuesday,
May 31, 2005
Location: Art in General, Gallery/Floor 4, 79 Walker Street,
NYC, located between Broadway and Lafayette Streets
This
round table brought together artists and arts professionals
in New York with a topic of relationship between New York as
the centre of power and the smaller artistic scenes, such as
Croatian one.
-Sofia
Hernandez: So, Andreja Kuluncic who most of you have met
already because of the residencies and Branko Franceschi are
here designing the program.
-Branko
Franceschi: Basically now I am going to tell you something
from the Croatian point of what our goals in residency programs
in the U.S.A and so far I was involved mostly in the PS1
international studio program which I liked for two reasons:
it enabled artists to spend one year in New York, and people
from PS1 didn’t care for the artists, so they was let on their
own and I kind of had the impression that maybe that will bring
out the best in artist, this kind of power and force that will…basically
needed as you perceive it from various parts of Croatia.
-Andreja
Kuluncic: My guide for dummies, it’s sort of a cynical thing,
it’s not that I think that you have to go here and be a star,
that’s not the question. And also it’s not how somebody can
come here and become like, an important artist, but it’s more
like how we can initiate a kind of dialogue between Croatia
and New York, that is what I would like to raise.
-Holly
Block: It takes three things happening simultaneously. I
mean, I would say that we’d be incredibly bored out of our minds
if it was just marketplace, we’d be incredibly bored out of
our minds if it was just museum, and incredibly bored if it
were just only non-profits. Whatever the hybrid space, or whatever
the unit space is, what’s important is to combine all these
different things.
-Irena
Kovarova: I thought that one important part of all these
programs are the different…it’s really great that there are
various ways how the artists are chosen for participating in
this residencies because I’ve been…I know the reactions of the
artists once if they’ve been selecting from America and the
other way when they’ve been selected by the local organizations. And I like both.
-Christian
Rattemeyer: One problem that I see I think in general, that
applies to the US as well as to any other place on the globe
in a way, is how to be locally specific and meaningful, how
to be internationally intelligible, and at the same time not
nationally categorized in a way. I am so tired to hear about
another Croatian artist as I am tired to hear about another
African American artist.
-Allun
Williams: We do represent more foreign artists than US artists
and the crazy thing is that most of the interest and coverage
we get from the shows that we do at the gallery tends to be
overseas. And we’ve exported
some really monumental shows to venues in Europe.
And that seems kind of crazy because we feel as if we’re
doing…some of those shows are really significant shows but people
just don’t seem to notice them here.
-Lea
Freid: One of the things is when I look for an artist or
even a critic, I look for someone that’s on the cusp.
Someone who’s just about to explode, who’s talented and
interesting and I think…I mean basically you’re providing an
insiders guide. There are people obviously in New York, one
of the things we haven’t talked about, you know we can say New
York is provincial. There’s
a huge amount of galleries, there’s a huge amount of non-profits,
I can’t imagine someone coming and trying to negotiate all that. So I think you do have to plan a network of
people, obviously, some of us who are here, who know where Croatia
is, who has a sense of what’s going on on the map, who are interested
in having some/hearing some information about the artist.
Even though we’re all busy, there are those of us obviously
who are going to take the call.
-Monika
Fabijanska: What makes you choose the artist? I was thinking, which Polish artist was the
most successful here in the last few years that I have promoted
here. And there were many of them and each story is
different of course but there’s one particular example of Dominik
Lejman, I don’t know if any of you are familiar with this particular
artist, and moreover he studied in Great Britain.
So first of all, he speaks perfect English, secondly
he knows how to speak English, no matter if it’s perfect or
not, how to communicate, how to behave.
-Gregory
Volk: The 1997 Istanbul biennial curated by Rosa Martinez;
that’s what attracted a lot of attention here and elsewhere. It was the work itself and that I remember the
reaction of people and that is more than anything else that’s
what brought him into huge consciousnesses here and in London
... Kutlug Ataman. One doesn’t have to have a program for breaking
into the New York art world. If the work is there and it is
very good and you are meeting the right people, the right people
are seeing your work that can happen anywhere, that can happen
in Moscow it can happen in Istanbul.
-Christian
Rattemeyer: Do we need to talk about class in that context?
Just given the fact that Kutlug Ataman comes from a very wealthy,
well-off Turkish family who studied in Los Angeles and lives
in London rather than is not from a well-off country, not from
a well-off family…I’m just sort of interjecting here because
that’s something that sometimes gets lost when we talk about
people from far places.
-Andreja
Kuluncic: The question is not how you can be a star in New
York, that’s not the question because I don’t think that Croatian
artists at all consider it as something interesting because
for us that does not exist. There are no “stars of art” in Croatia
as it is in NY.
-Christian
Rattemeyer: Chances are I’m going to see more art when I
travel to Croatia then when I go to Chelsea.
That’s one thing.
-Sofia
Hernandez: If you even get the chance to go to Chelsea!
……………
LAUGH ……………….
-C.R.:
If I even get the chance. Exactly.
-A.K.:
What to be developed? How
to open this kind of dialogue?
-G.V.:
Well, I can answer that, just to speak very personally, because
so much gets lost in the art world’s talk. The really personal
response is to bring a couple writers or one or three and a
couple curators that you know about, that you’ve read. Read
their work, know who they are, and just bring them in. Make
some possibility to bring those people there.
-A.W.:
It’s so important to get over that New York is extremely provincial. I was sent by Enlgland Foundation to Kenya and I found myself pushed
out on stage in the National Museum of Art with an amphitheatre
full of artists, and practically they were saying, “so tell
them how to be successful.”
What the African artists thought was that all you have
to do is find a way to get to New York. I spent my whole time saying that in fact for
artists there’s a huge population of artists in New York who
think they’re okay because they’re in New York, but in fact
they are not. They need to be getting out also, they need
to be…and that comes back to Gregory’s point that artists have
to leave where they are, they have to get themselves out.
And that is totally about money.
-H.B.:
It’s heavily government funded, the artists themselves do not
want to represent an official point of view for the country,
we no longer are interested in national identity shows, and
at a place like us, I’m not interested in receiving crates.
I just give you that kind of point; you know pop art,
crate art. It just provides
a different sort of area. So whether you like a fair in a hotel or not,
I think that the idea is to really think about the possibilities.
-Allyson
Spellacy: But also those possibilities include a larger
perspective, not just a perspective of how things are run from
the incredibly provincial New York art world, but to use the
things that are already in place in Croatia and to apply those
as well. We could learn
a lot from government funding in situations like that in this
country. So part of it is to use what you have already
and to apply that without just homogenizing the entire system
because who knows how long this art fair bubble will actually
be successful anyway.
-S.H.:
It’s very evident that there’s a type of anxiety for productivity.
Meaning this idea that you have to produce something, or that
there’s an immediate outcome, and there’s both a resistance
but more than that like an anxiety, I mean I personally feel
this and I know that we’ve had experiences here that you know,
you are sponsored by the state or by an individual or someone
to travel and when you are expected to present a proposal immediately
after your travel, it’s like, “What a disaster”.
There is an instrumentality of it that the activity or
the experience cannot be fully thought through.
I think that things happen in the long run.
-B.F.:
Many times by presenting Croatian art I had experienced that
everything what the foreign curators, when they would come,
trying to find whatever already fits the idea that they had
before they arrived.
-A.K.:
We have this kind of historical, geographical map were we can
go and have exhibitions. I
think a lot of artists in Croatia would like to break this.
-S.H.:
I find that the work that cultural institutions, both non-profits
and museums and galleries and so on can do is really try to
tackle with that as a potential audience.
Because if you are able to intervene the circuits, it’s
a better chance that there is going to be a long standing relationship
between you could say Croatia, you could say this audience or
so on, the idea of introducing them is essential.
Ivo
Martinović, Project Assistant
Kalim Armstrong, Video
Andreja
Kulunčić's residency at Art in General is made possible by the
generous support of the Trust for Mutual Understanding and Heathcote
Art Foundation/FACE Croatia Program. Additional support has
been provided by the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of
Croatia.
<
BACK