SOUND
BYTES.
selecection
from the interviews
(transcripts)
Some
of the 23 interviewed persons wished to remain anonymous so
that the readers could not connect them with their statements,
and this is why I decided to leave all the statements anonymous.
In the gallery installation of the piece, these interviews are
audio recordings without the image of the interviewee. The images
on the video are written texts in the language of the country
where the exhibition is held.
70
ties
[Artist]
-A.K.:
…Can you tell me about the differences of the art of the [19]70s
and today, can you explain to me the energy or the feeling or
the way of functioning?
-Interviewee: There are people you can talk to who were
much more a part of it than I was…In general Soho was a dark
place, there were few street lights, there were two or three
bars. “Food” was still operating in the mid-70s, which
was a cooperative run by artists and Gordon Matta-Clark, etc.,
etc. I remember that there were a handful of galleries
to go to; cooperative galleries, particularly even for women,
like AIR gallery was a very meaningful place in those days not
just for women artists but for artists in general because there
was a lot of exciting work they’d show.
And I think it was very relaxed in terms of the galleries
that were there, they were all young dealers, except for maybe
two or three. These are
my memories, so I’m trying to remember it…I’m leaving things
out, but, I think this shows what was raw.
The galleries were raw.
A pin would drop in a gallery and there was hardly an
audience other than artists and a few collector people. I don’t think the museums (with the exception
of maybe a couple places) were involved in really contemporary
art. And MoMA was not involved in contemporary art,
they did one or two shows a year, if that much.
-A.K.: It was not object driven in that time,
not commercial, I guess, like today.
I guess that’s a big difference, no?
-I: No, no. You know, it was also motivated
by people’s social positions and positions about art making…and
there were many of them, many different positions, I think because
it was kind of the age of the anti-object, in a sense.
They were always simultaneous.
-A.K.: Yeah, coming, going, coming, going…
-I: Or at the same time. They overlapped, they exist together, so I remember…oh,
I can’t remember her name now, she had something called the
$100 gallery, where artists brought their work and it was sort
of like what Pirogue does with the flat file now, I guess, but
costs a little bit more money I suppose…but this was dedicated
only. It was called the
$100 gallery and it was in somebody’s house and the work was
up and you could buy anything for $100.
Young artists would go there and ring her bell and she’d
be sitting there at her typewriter, and it would be her home,
and Poppy Johnson was her name.
Poppy Johnson’s $100 gallery. The East Village experience is more what I…that
was like the first thing…the Soho galleries were really pretty
great because it was like raw space that no one wanted, so it
was very cheap. There were a lot of artist run shows, there
were gallerists who were just beginning to “cut their teeth”,
and I think there was a great deal of generosity, amongst artists
and people who wanted to get to know artists because they thought
artists would kind of assist them in understanding something
about art. Artists were
not bad people, they weren’t just needy and competitive, you
know, it was like a very relaxed attitude.
300,000 dollars
[Commercial gallerist]
-Interviewee:
I’ve heard stories that Mary Boone is offering these young artists
at the Greater New York show now, one of whom we met with who
I’ve been following, who’s work is actually a little bit political,
$300,000 to just come to show with her.
Artists as Football Players
[Art dealer]
-Interviewee:
This collector from Hamburg, he had this analogy where he was
saying that artists, young artists, today, the really successful
ones, that they have careers very similar to football players,
or soccer players. Where they’re at the prime of their youth, and
they try to make as much money as possible, possibly try to
make a few million dollars within five years or something like
that. Get as much sort of celebrity, etc., in that
short amount of time and then after a period of five or six
years, because that kind of celebrated success is hard to maintain,
they go to the Academy to teach, and get a really good position
as an Academia. And for soccer players, because they can’t maintain
like, physically, as a player, they can only maintain that kind
of success for five or six years as well.
After that, they become coaches, you know.
Art based of commodity
[Commercial gallerist]
-Interviewee:
In New York, it’s very visual.
And that’s also linked to the fact that it’s a collector
based milio so that means that you know, the galleries in Chelsea,
in particular, are falling over themselves to put something
on the wall that’s going to sell.
So that means that the whole thing is based on commodity.
Art fairs – vicious circle
[Commercial gallerist]
-Male
interviewee: One of the real problems with art fairs is that
it’s a kind of vicious circle.
That it’s a total reflection of the elitism and the hierarchy
of the art world, so, although the best ones are seen to be
a engaged of what’s new and what’s the best thing in the contemporary
art, when you look at the selection committees, often there
are the same people in say the Armory Show and Frieze. And
when you look at them closely you find that a lot of them represent
the same artists, so it’s very much an incestuous closed family
thing, which makes it extremely difficult for new galleries
to get into there, to get into that level.
So it really is a vicious circle because it’s extremely
competitive, it’s kind of political and hierarchal, and so many
other things. But it’s
such an important resource for making money, it’s very important
to be there, it’s seen as being very important, it means that
you’re a good gallery, so the whole thing is a really difficult
vicious circle.
-Female interviewee: And the other thing is
that the reason that the art fairs are so important now is that
the collectors can go to one place and see lots of galleries
and lots of artists. And that’s supposed to be some kind of snapshot
of the art world, which it totally isn’t. I mean, it doesn’t reflect what’s being made.
Art fairs – worse way to see art works
[Commercial gallerist]
-Male
interviewee: It’s very strange because it’s become such a huge,
hugely important thing, this circuit of art fairs that collectors
all go to. But in a way it’s the worst way to see art work,
and the way it functions is basically a very big space, full
of temporary walls, and each gallery has a small box space,
and they put their merchandise on the walls.
-Female
interviewee: And you make an application to get accepted to
this art fair, and you pay a lot of money.
-A.K.:
How much is it? Like
for Freeze in London, how much is it for example?
-Male:
Freeze is about $10,000…
-A.K.:
And then you have to pay tickets, and to ship the artwork, so
I guess it could go up to $20,000 or $25,000, no?
-Female:
You could easily spend $20,000.
-Male:
And other fairs are even more expensive, Basel and Colon
are both very expensive, like $20,000 for a small space.
-A.K.:
For a week? Or for five
or six days?
-Male:
It’s usually an extended weekend, so you know, usually there
will be an opening preview on the Thursday night and it will
run through Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday and that’s it,
so it’s very short.
-A.K.:
And the money come back?
-Male:
Yeah, I mean, it has to. And
it is, in fact, at this point it's an easier way of making money,
in spite of the expenses, than selling work in a gallery.
And certainly many Chelsea galleries, for example, make
most of their proceeds from art fairs rather than from selling
in the gallery.
Art Forum
[Editor]
-Interviewee:
I mean, Art Forum is definitely the most important international
art magazine, I would say, in the world.
There’s Frieze and there’s Flash Art, but in terms
of the intellectual and progressive art, interest in progressive
art…of course it’s connected to the art market, I mean, because
it’s a private magazine, it’s not funded by anything but…well,
it’s funded largely through the advertisements of the museums
and galleries and things. But
I feel like they run a very, very, very, very clean ship. They really do. And the new editor there I think is fantastic.
Art Forum – Ads
[Editor]
-A.K.
There are a lot of payed ads in the Art Forum and also
some names pop-up with big letters and, you know, somehow when
you go through you will remember these names as well as the
names from the review, no? So what’s with that? This seems a little bit
unfair, no?
-Interviewee:
That is the way it is. I
don’t know if it should be accepted, but I mean different people
read Art Forum differently, you know.
-A.K.:
Well, I talk about the
average people, you know, who will just go thorough it ..
-Interviewee: I mean what can I say .. I mean somebody who reads the Art Forum
will know that the advertisements have been paid for and that
the reviews have been not paid for.
Art should be shown in a certain way
[Commercial gallerist]
-Interviewee:
One’s sense of coming into the gallery and leaving the gallery
is that one has had sometimes a much larger exhibition experience. I also am a firm believer that art should be
shown in a certain way. And
if a work of art needs a lot of room around it, then that’s
the way it should be shown. People will think that that’s a waste of space,
but I think that that’s maybe the proper way of seeing the art. And so we tend to install in a very large way,
with a lot of space around the art.
Many times you go into galleries and you see in smaller
spaces just by definition and by being pragmatic, that they’ve
put the number of paintings close together just to get them
all in. That’s fine,
I’m not criticizing it, but since I have the space I’d like
to show it in a way that benefits the art.
There’s a certain way that we like the way the art looks,
you know, it’s about a certain feel that you have.
Is there too many paintings on that wall?
Would it be better with one less painting, with one more
painting? Would it be better if we put that darker picture
there, or that lighter picture there?
These are all questions that we discuss and we really
discuss in a way maybe closer to a way that museums install
their shows but maybe closer in the way that we install our
own homes, which is something about how will it look?
Will it look best that way, will it look best this way?
How will it look? And so these are the ways that we do it, it’s
something that we do with a great passion, and I guess that
we do it with a repeated style of installation.
Collectors on auctions
[Commercial gallerist]
-Interviewee:
When we sell a work of art to a collector and the collector
decides that they no longer want it, we hope that the collector
comes back to us and says “would you sell it for me?”. Hope
to get more money, and we’ll make some money again.
That’s the best way. When they decide to put it on auction, and you
can remember that it was something as a big favor to sell them
the work in the first place, what can only happen, is an awkward
feeling about the transaction.
-A.K.:
Why do you think it’s a favor to sell it to them?
-Interviewee:
Oh, because somebody says “Oh I really want it” and I say “Oh
I am sorry, I promised it to another person”…in other words,
when people fight for a work of art, they fight for a work of
art.
-A.K.: Do you have this list of your collectors
who you work with and of people who you really do not work with,
or a kind of a waiting list?
-Interviewee: We know people who are interested
in certain artists and when we get certain works in by those
artists, we know who to approach.
I mean, we don’t act passively by saying, “Oh, we’ll
put it up and see who’s interested”.
We know who’s interested in our artists.
Crash on the market
[Commercial gallerist]
-Interviewee:
It’s not a good time in the art world, I have to say, and people
are talking about the impending crash here.
-A.K.:
What do you mean?
-Interviewee:
In the [19]80s, we had the crash, basically.
What that means is there were an awful lot of people
buying art, not just what I show, but more like you know, major
contemporary artists, Mauricio Catalan, for example.
All the auctions are next week here.
That means Sotheby’s, Christy’s, Phillip’s…and if you
look at their catalogs the work that’s in there…people are selling
right now. Because people
are buying because you can’t invest in the stock market, you
can’t invest in certain things, so it’s all about real estate
in art, basically. The
problem, it’s not so much that the Cindy Sherman’s are going
for millions and millions of dollars (which is another issue
in the blue chip world), but the problem is when you have young
artists of his generation, where the paintings are out of school
for two years, and the prices are mid-career artist prices. I’m not doing that, but there’s an awful lot
of younger dealers…
Head Hunting
[Commercial gallerist]
-Interviewee:
It’s very hard to find good artists right now.
All the dealers, even the young galleries…there’s so
many young galleries right now.
I never had a problem until the last couple of years
to get artists to come on board. You have to understand that it’s not so much
the…you probably know, in Chelsea, Chelsea Guide, you used to
open it up and fold it, now it’s a staple like the gallery guide. Everybody from Williamsburg has moved here,
and the older galleries, the Metro Pictures, 303, Mary Boone,
even Barbara Gladstone, all of these galleries may have their
signature artists but they need fresh blood, they need new,
fresh artists. So it's a ...
-A.K.:
Head hunting.
-Interviewee:
Beyond what you can imagine.
The collectors are going to the Universities, people
are looking at BFAs, undergraduate, not even graduate.
How to get in the gallery
[Commercial gallerist]
-Male
Interviewee: We can end up being really angry at having to spend
a lot of time looking at work where the artist clearly has no
knowledge of what we do, a waste of time and money for everybody.
All the artist has to do is look at the website and they
would see within two minutes that their work…there’s just no
way that it would fit here.
Not only that, if we’re getting that work, lots of other
galleries must be getting that work so they must be making hundreds
of slides and packages and send them out blindly to galleries
where it’s never going to work. And that’s the most depressing
way for anybody to try to get anything.
-Female:
And I completely understand when I hear artists say “You can’t
penetrate the gallery system”…it just has to be done in a completely
different way.
-A.K.:
What’s the way?
-Male:
The first thing is really making sure that where you’re taking
your stuff is a good possibility for your kind of work.
And we’ve taken artists like that, so it’s not as if
it’s impossible. We’ve shown artists and we represent artists
who’ve just sent stuff in, although it’s rare, cause it’s a
very small percentage. The
other thing I always say that you should have the principal
that an artist, you yourself, is never the best person to promote
your work. You know,
how can you say, “This work is amazing, it’s great, and I made
it.” Nobody’s going to believe you. So that means that the next important principal
is that you’ve got to have somebody else to do that, even if
it’s a friend. The other
kind of logical part of that is that you need to try to find
rather than it just being a friend, try to find somebody who
has some connection with the gallery, who can be an intermediary,
who can recommend you. Which
might be another artist, it might be an artist who’s already
in the gallery, or if it’s possible it might be a critic, or
whatever.
-Female:
And you do that for someone.
I mean, because as an artist you’re in a network already,
I’m hugely enthusiastic about a lot of my friends’ work that
I would never show here, but I can talk to other people and
I can say “You really need to look at this, you really need
to look at what this person is doing”.
It’s a bit flip when people say, “Oh you just have to
know somebody” but actually it’s how that knowing happens.
A lot of our artists that we have really strong relationships
with and have had relationships with for several years will
come to us and say, “You know you really need to look at this
person’s work”. And we
take that really seriously.
Because they know who we are, they know what we do, they
know what we show.
-Male:
It’s kind of weird because making art tends to be a solitary
pursuit and it tends to be undertaken by people with pretty
big egos and because of that, they’re trying to help themselves,
rather than help anybody else. But if all the artists who sent out a hundred
packages were helping each other they would all get much further
down the road a lot faster.
So it’s almost that the problem of artist’s egos gets
totally in the way of what they’re all trying to do with those
egos.
It is all about discovery and gambling
[Commercial gallerist]
-Interviewee:
It’s two things, I mean here now, you always have these collectors
that’s very interesting in my field right now, who want to be
there first. Which means they want to be in the artist’s
studios at school first, so they’re buying directly. And they encourage certain dealers to take on
certain artists because they’ve discovered them. It’s about discovery here, it’s very American.
It’s not about verifying something; it’s about finding
them first. The people
involved in the contemporary art scene, I mean like now, 2000,
not [19]80s or [19]90s, it’s about many very powerful people
involved, business people, because it’s like gambling, you know? It’s like you find somebody…you can buy 15 artists,
it doesn’t matter, $10,000 here or $50,000 here, so what? In ten years one of them has to be successful. It’s nothing for these people.
It is kind of like the Wild West
[Editor]
-Interviewee:
I think New York should be seen as a place to use or to like
come and give and take energy from and then leave and go back
home, or go elsewhere, go to Europe.
It’s not humane, really. It’s opportunity based, I mean it’s kind of
like the Wild West.
Printed Name in the Press
[Editor]
-Interviewee:
I guess in New York and I think probably in Western Europe in
general, there’s such a high number of artists and a high number
of galleries and institutions and everything.
Simply being registered in a form that many people see
is important. So it’s
really not even about, frankly, the content of what is said,
but it’s actually about the print, your name physically being
printed on a piece of paper that people will look at.
It’s a very very kind of physical fact based.
Private Grants
[Commercial gallerist]
-Interviewee:
There’s things like the Pollock-Krasner Grant and the Guggenheim
and they are very competitive and we know so many artists, this
is a whole community of artists.
You know, 98% of the people we know don’t get anything.
Provincialism
[Commercial gallerist]
-Interviewee:
I think there are many galleries in New York that do that, they
just show New York artists.
I find that problematic, I mean, it’s okay for them to
do that obviously, but some of those galleries are really promoting
themselves as being significant international galleries and
in fact they’re provincial local galleries.
And that’s a problem the New York has because it thinks
it’s the center of the world.
And therefore anything that happens here is already international,
and for me, that’s a problem.
Ultimate artist revenge
[Artist]
-Interviewee:
Well you know I done my commercial gallery, and I’m at a point
now where whatever was happening to me in the late [19]80s/early
[19]90s, for me to reach that point again would be like a fantasy,
just to get where I was is a fantasy.
-A.K.:
Does that mean that it’s going up and down?
-Interviewee:
Yeah, you’re hot for a while and everybody’s buying your work. I’ve had pieces slowly come back to me over
the years as collector’s have died and they were in storage,
you know I’m slightly cynical about the art world, my economics…I’ve
been fortunate that I’ve put together these buildings.
I have two galleries as tenants, which means the ultimate
artist revenge. People talk about what they’re doing, and I
say, well what ever they doing, all I know is I go down on the
1st and the checks are there.
Unwritten Rules
[Commercial gallerist]
-Male
Interviewee: If we make the decision that we’re going to represent
somebody, we expect them to honor that, which means we don’t
expect them to sell work to collectors from their studio without
us having that commission because it really goes both ways.
So, there’s no contractual agreement, it’s completely
on trust, which I think makes for a better relationship with
an artist, really. We’re
really trying hard to do our work and to represent them and
because of that energy and investment, they need to respect
that and it’s common sense what they have to do.
-A.K.:
What do you mean by representing an artist, is that one show
in one year or every second year, for example?
-Male:
There’s nothing strictly written down, it means that they’re
not going to show somewhere else, at least in New York.
But then it’s a dialogue with the artist about whether
they’re ready for another show, whether that corresponds to
what we’re trying to do, and so on.
But it’s not going to be, “ok now we represent you, you
will have an exhibition every 18 months, and if 19 months have
gone by we don’t represent you anymore”.
-Female:
With us, it’s a very fluid thing, so when we represent somebody,
it means that we’re going to put this energy into helping promote
their career. And that can mean getting them other shows,
bringing them to art fairs, and expecting something in return
from them in terms of a level of commitment, that they’re going
to acknowledge the fact that we put all this time and energy
into nurturing their career. And often that can mean “Yes, we want to do
a solo show with you, when you’re ready”, not just for the sake
of doing a solo show, and in fact, that’s probably one of the
best things…
Very local
[Commercial gallerist]
-Interviewee:
There’s a lot of artists who’ve been here forever and never
do anything elsewhere. They
think…they kind of psychologically they persuade themselves
that everything’s fine because they’re in New York, but they
are small time local artists. If they were in Zagreb or something, it’s the
same thing.
What is art – by a commercial gallerist
[Commercial gallerist]
-Interviewee:
Art is something that we grow.
I think we get better from the art that we have around
us. We get more complicated, we get more multi-faceted,
we get more informed, we get more puzzled, we get more concerned,
we get better.
Who else buying the works
[Commercial gallerist]
-A.K.:
Why did you change from non-profit?
-Interviewee:
Very clearly because I’m very interested in putting out works
that is engaged to people with power. The
value of things is absolutely connected to the sale and commercial
success of things, here, in this country.
I think, you know, to create another non-profit would
not give the work the kind of marketing or access to being recognized
as having a contribution both in the media in terms of the collectors
and the terms of museum curators. It isn’t like Europe here. The curatorial aspect…there are very wonderful
curators here but a lot happens based on the patrons of an institution
and collectors support certain artists or are involved in certain
institutions, the curators work with them.
It’s a much closer relationship.
In Europe a collector will ask you, “Which curator is
supporting the work and what institution has this person show?”. Here it’s like “Well who else is buying the
work?”. It’s all about
that.
You just have to have a talent
[Commercial gallerist]
-Interviewee:
What is talent? How long
does talent last? How
do artists take their talent and sometimes work against it,
sometimes work with it? Sometimes promote their talent by enhancing
it, and sometimes undermining it?
Sometimes they want to have a really easy life so they
start turning out things that are like Flamanc.
I wouldn’t go around thinking that it’s specifically
endemic to this day and to this group who happened to come out
from this year in Colombia. It’s very unfair to all the other failure.
It’s hard having talent. It’s great having youth, it’s great having a
vision, it’s great having a presence.
There’s something that we, in our society, are in love
with youth. We are in love with the questioning and the
in-your-face, just listen to the music that people like to hear,
the clothing that people like to wear, the combinations and
things like that. And that gets wrapped up with an artist with
talent. It’s not that
they no longer have the youth, but where is the vision?
Where is the particular vision that is interesting enough
to make them want to always fill up a blank canvas?
Because for me, the most terrifying thing in this entire
discussion is the blank canvas.
Ivo
Martinoviæ, Project Assistant
Andreja
Kulunèiæ'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.
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