Preorder your copy now of Issue 29 of Hans Ulrich Obrist's conversation series with international art star Carl Andre.
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In this traditional paperback, renowned critic and curator Hans Ulrich Obrist teams up with Dutch avant-garde architect and paradigm-shifting intellectual, Carl Andre, for a discussion of Andre's work in China, his designs for Prada, architecture as metaphor, and the development of urbanism in the slipstream of globalization.
HUO: ???
Carl Andre: The thing I found interesting about the DO IT project was that implicitly the people receating were given permission to “become me.” Whatever they made was to become mine, a work by Carl Andre, copyright and all, however they interpreted it, was a "Carl Andre" work. That’s a radical power to give to someone else, to actually become you for a brief moment, to give yourself to them. How erotic. What if some poor stupid misguided art student-type thinking it was an interesting project to try and pretend to be me, actually did it.
On the website for DO IT, all images were given credit to the Famous Artists, though they had never seen, approved or touched it. What if one of the workers had made of bunch Klan drawings under my name, or some other respectable artist.
And even though all the works are contractually obligated to be destroyed at the end, they too live on in the image realm.
HUO: etc.
Carl Andre: It’s something that fairly radical premise of someone like Bruce High Quality, who claims a anonymous collective, that someone could just start acting like it. It’s not actual, but someone could try. Set up a website, proclaim yourself as Bruce, starting issuing eminences. Or Start a franchise of the BHQF school, but it’s a hard labor camp. How would this anonymous collective decry your franchise, without finally coming out and stating it was 6 boys from Cooper Union doing it.
Carl Andre: I prefer the first definition, ‘symbols of "a deeply corrupt campaign finance system riddled with loopholes", with Americans seeing them as recipients of the "perks of power", but able to "buy access, influence policy and even veto appointments."’
Endosymbiont, the internalized Venom, a dress worn like another’s flesh while you spread in reproduction. A conversation between with Hans Ulrich Obrist and Carl Andre.
HUO: etc.
Carl Andre: No one placed any limits on the power of the artists-doing-the-recreating. What if one of them got confused, didn’t realize there were limitations, and continued the project as if it was still contained with the original permissions. Like their interpretation of the project expanded into this alternate universe, like a comic or something.
HUO: etc.
Carl Andre: Well obviously in a gallery setting its highly controlled, and no one is going to pass off my work without the certificate of authenticity so necessary to sale today. You know Hansie, I charge collectors a fee of two one-ounce Canadian gold Maple Leaf coins for the re-issuing the first statement of authenticity. Look at my website it’s there.
http://www.carlandre.net/Certificates.html
But on the internet author-certification is non-existent. It’s like that old saying, a fave of mine, that on the internet no one knows you're a dog.
* * *
Carl Andre: It’s something that fairly radical premise of someone like Bruce High Quality, who claims a anonymous collective, that someone could just start acting like it. It’s not actual, but someone could try. Set up a website, proclaim yourself as Bruce, starting issuing eminences. Or Start a franchise of the BHQF school, but it’s a hard labor camp. How would this anonymous collective decry your franchise, without finally coming out and stating it was 6 boys from Cooper Union doing it.
Seems like a real funny laugh of a project.
* * *
Hans Ulrich Obrist: etc
Carl Andre: Art often puts one in a position of speaking, but only so long as that speaking is done in vernacular, Art, of an Art language. Which seems, if not neuter, “neutral” to the point of neuter.
HUO: etc.
Carl Andre: Curation is most definitely a form of speech. and insidious becuase it appears as though others are speaking.
HUO: etc.
Carl Andre: You get brought to the home of the collector, you are given the exhibition, knowing that you are speaking in a “safe” form. Calling out the collector would be breaking the 4th wall of art which is, like, the most unacceptable thing you can do. Oscar Murillo actually did it at performance in upstate NY at the same time I was writing the banner. Did you read about this? People in the audience flipped out. Someone in the audience actually yelled, “You need to go back and re-read Marx.” at him. Can you imagine? You’re at some country club, you’re an invited artist, and you’re given the opportunity to speak, and you point out that every one of the servers/janitors/staffers is a minority and everyone holding champagne is white, and someone, someone holding champagne, dismisses you by telling you to re-read Marx.
* * *
HUO: etc.
Carl Andre: I think its a rarity.
HUO: etc.
Carl Andre: When things get to a certain level, its okay to let “art” take a back seat to speaking to its material conditions.
I was at the Glenn Ligon retrospective, at the Whitney in NY, and every single guard is black, and every single Whitney goer is white looking at a black artist’s work. And its like every other museum where you pretend like the guards don’t exist and it was the most dissonant weird experience I had for a long time. At a certain point Armond White’s criticism that some art is made for white audience’s self-congratulation, seems apt.
HUO: etc.
Andre: I had no idea whether or not you would see it, nor is the banner really addressed at you.
HUO: etc.
Carl Andre: A fatcat of symbolic capital.
HUO: etc.
Carl Andre: We’re going to get into a semantic argument of whether all wealthy, or all capitalists, are fatcats.
HUO: etc.
Carl Andre: I prefer the first definition, ‘symbols of "a deeply corrupt campaign finance system riddled with loopholes", with Americans seeing them as recipients of the "perks of power", but able to "buy access, influence policy and even veto appointments."’
Endosymbiont, the internalized Venom, a dress worn like another’s flesh while you spread in reproduction. A conversation between with Hans Ulrich Obrist and Carl Andre.
