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Pay For Your Pleasure (reprise):
Phillip van den Bossche interviews Joe Scanlan

Phillip van den Bossche (1969, Brussels) is an art historian and curator at the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, The Netherlands, where he has realized exhibitions with Tomma Abts, Manon de Boer, Vincent Fecteau, Jef Geys, Douglas Gordon and Tino Seghal, among others, as well as Pierre Huyghe and Philippe Parreno's No Ghost Just A Shell. This interview first appeared in 2003 in Journal no. 4, a series of catalogues published in conjunction with the Van Abbemuseum�s solo project exhibitions.

Phillip van den Bossche: How and when did you start with the idea of "Pay For Your Pleasure (reprise)"?

Joe Scanlan: Mike Kelley's original "Pay For Your Pleasure" was exhibited in 1988 at The Renaissance Society. I lived in Chicago then, and when I was invited to make a show ten years later at the Museum of Contemporary Art there, I thought it would be interesting to make a follow-up to Kelley's piece, but from an opposing point of view. Where the "pleasure" to be paid for in his piece is anarchy and evil, the pleasure in my piece is democracy and altruism.

Mike Kelley's piece is a series of portraits in six basic colors: red, orange, yellow, green, blue and purple. In my "reprise" I kept that color scheme but added the color white. I call it a reprise because there is one quote, by Plutarch, that appears in both pieces. He says: We admire the work, but despise the workmen. I repeated that phrase in order to draw an explicit link to Kelley's piece, but also to reiterate Kelley�s contention that good and evil are not so easily differentiated.

PvdB: Do you have devices for installing the work? What are the things to keep in mind? Are there rules to follow?

JS: There are no strict rules for displaying the banners, just some general guidelines. I prefer that the piece be shown attached to some kind of obviously temporary structure. In Chicago, this was done by mounting plywood panels on the gallery walls, as if they were a circular kiosk. At L'Insitut d'Art Contemporain in Villeurbanne in 2002, we installed a kind of curtain rod that circled the perimeter of the gallery that the banners were hung from. The piece can really take any shape necessary, just so long as it gives the appearance of a continuous surface of information–a kind of seamless argument.

PvdB: In Chicago the work was presented with a pair of Nike Air Jordan basketball shoes; in France with DIY, a construction manual for a coffin that you designed from standard IKEA products. Here you have chosen an AK-47 assault rifle. Why such a loaded object? And what is the idea behind changing the object at the center of each installation of the piece?

JS: I want the "centerpiece" to respond to the situation that each installation presents. I like the idea that an index of popular objects could develop in relation to the constancy of the banners. Already it is an interesting list: Air Jordans, IKEA Bookcases, AK-47s. I first became interested in the Automatic Kalashnikov six years ago, after I had completed Pay For Your Pleasure (reprise) and was mulling over some lingering thoughts I had about culture and democracy and power. I was very skeptical of the notion that anything that is popular must also be good, and I began thinking about things that were popular but not good for people at all.

In this regard the AK-47 is unsurpassed. It is also an amazing technical achievement. At the time, I published a short statement about it in frieze magazine. When the opportunity arose to show Pay For Your Pleasure (reprise) here in Eindhoven, I immediately thought that it would be interesting to display an AK-47 in the same building as so many El Lissitzky works. Both are stunning examples of Russian modernism and, in their own ways, both are very beautiful and innovative and violent. It was only afterwards that I learned about the gun in Joseph Beuys' installation, and the fact that every director of the Van Abbe Museum must obtain a gun license in order for the museum to own that piece.

As it turns out, the museum's El Lissitzky "Praun Room" dates from 1923, and the Beuys installation from 1971. The Automatic Kalashnikov was invented in 1947, the exact midpoint between these two dates. So, there is an eerie symmetry, a mathematical inevitability, to these three things all existing under the same roof.

PvdB: I think you did far more than a new application of Kelley's original piece. Could you tell me something more along those lines?

JS: I tried to make my piece the opposite of Kelley's in every way. For example, his is handmade; mine is computer generated. His is site specific; mine is site arbitrary. The form of his is fixed (all the banners must be shown in a single uninterrupted corridor of predetermined proportions); the form of mine is flexible (any or all of the banners can be shown in any configuration whatsoever). The content of his is modern (ideological, critical, avant garde); the content of mine is postmodern (relative, complicit, mainstream). In a word, his is sacred; mine is profane.

PvdB: In this context I like what you stated in an interview: "I had to go about it in a backwards way, to make it seem too good, to have all these people from history step forward and be so positive about the marriage of art and commerce that viewers would think 'Wait a minute, maybe this can be problematic.'"

JS: Current events would suggest that it's hard to tell which motivation does more damage to culture, purity or corruption. For all the evil and destruction in Kelley's piece, I think the altruistic content of mine is far more dangerous for art. Mike's piece is safe, in a way: we know that a majority of society doesn't want anarchy, so anarchy is an easy attitude for artists and intellectuals to embrace because there's little competition for it. On the other hand, if artists and intellectuals embrace democracy and popularity and commerce, these are things that most people want. Therefore, entering into them presents the risk of being destroyed–if not by the competition of stronger forces then by the consumption of the masses.

Basically, my piece proposes that Michael Jordan and Ingvar Kamprad (the founder of IKEA) are scarier monsters than John Wayne Gacy. But, unlike Gacy, Jordan and Kamprad are popular monsters. That's an important difference.

PvdB: Kamprad is on one of the banners: 'Once and for all we have decided to side with the many.... What we want, we can still do. Together. A glorious future!' His words are shocking when you think about it, when you consider his position but also in combination with the other banners and the art context in which it functions now. How did you go along selecting the different historical and contemporary figures and quotations?

JS: This was a long and luxurious process, since it required me to read works by so many great authors. But I had different goals with different people. Given my general topic of altruism, I wanted to have some humanists in the piece, so that was a matter of reading Erasmus and More and Rousseau and selecting the most useful observations. Others were more accidental, like listening to George Clinton or watching an Orson Welles movie and suddenly noticing a great lyric or comment. Others were harder. I knew I wanted at least one notable economist in the group, but I didn't know the field, so this part of the research was an unknown expedition, reading and reading until somebody said something I could use. In the end, Gary Becker, a Nobel Laureate who has radically transformed the concept of human capital, provided me with a good and very basic observation: why should art become "prostitution" when it seeks monetary gain?

PvdB: Side by side, some of the combinations lead to confrontational and ironic results: for example, Miguel de Cervantes and Cher alongside Mikhail Kalashnikov and his AK-47. The different quotations seem to circle around art and market issues, the ambiguous position of contemporary art and its potential viewers.

JS: You have picked two of my favorite people from the whole piece. Their remarks are central to my thinking. Can we ever have too much of a good thing? And: do each of us, as individuals, invent ourselves to whatever extent our imaginations allow?'

The first question, asked by Cervantes, cuts to the core of contemporary art's obsession with being good for us, no matter its spirit or content. If contemporary art happens to be frivolous, or dumb, or consumable, or mean, or covetous, or downright hostile–which it often is–I don�t understand why we need to spin those very human traits into some form of enlightenment in order to accept them as art. Who among us cannot regard mankind's less flattering aspects in an artwork and smile at the pleasure, the accuracy, of them? Who can�t look at an artwork and take comfort in the fact that, however contemptuous or vile it may be, it is still an artwork and therefore merely a representation, a proposition?

In many ways we have become slaves to the productivity and utility of protestant capitalist. Even the most wasted and pointless forms of art are rescued by their own inner goodness, exorcisms performed on the public's behalf in order to secure the necessary funds.

PvdB: What do

DEATH AND CAPITALISM: BARBARA KRUGER and THE COUNTESS CASTIGLIONE
by Donelle Woolford

It is both an impressive achievement and an overdue banality that women artists currently are enjoying unprecedented levels of success. From Amy Sillman to Rachel Harrison, Kara Walker to Roni Horn, todays woman artists are much less burdened by the stereotypes that constrained Anni Albers, Lee Krasner or Louise Bourgeois. Indeed, for todays women artists, feminine stereotypes are more often an opportunity to be exploited than a mantel to be shed, to the extent that the qualifier "woman" no longer limits our appreciation of their art. This enlightened development has increased interest in those women whose pioneering works have helped to make it possible, and major exhibitions of the work of Valie Export, Anna Goncharova, Lee Krasner, Agnes Martin, Bridget Riley and Martha Rosler occurred in one year alone, a modest precedent for the contentious success of WACK! at MOCA this spring. Now Barbara Kruger, best known for her politically charged red and black photo montages, and the Countess de Castiglione, a politically ambitious noblewoman who made elaborate photo portraits of herself, can be added to the list.

At first glance, it would seem more reasonable to align Castigliones highly theatrical self portraits with the work of Cindy Sherman -- the contemporary artist whose fictionalized photographs have turned the representation of women in art on its head. However, the simultaneous occasion of a show of Castigliones photographs at The Metropolitan Museum in New York with Barbara Krugers retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art makes for a more biting and unpredictable comparison, one that sharpens the pathos of Castigliones narcissism as well as the bathos of Krugers diatribes.

Born Virginia Oldonini in 1837, The Countess Castiglione assumed her title through her marriage to the Count of Castiglione, Francesco Verasis, in 1854. The following year, in order to drum up support for the unification of Italy, King Vittorio Emanuele dispatched the Count and Countess to Paris where he hoped his wiles and her beauty would help garner the support of the French emperor Napoleon III. Little did King Vittorio know how persuasive the Countesss beauty could be, when, only months after meeting Napoleon III, the Countess became part of an international scandal when she disappeared with him for several hours at a garden party. Not long after, the Countess made her first visit to the photo studio of Pierre-Louis Pierson. It is still not known whether the 400+ photographs they produced together over the next forty years were intended as personal trophies or illicit propoganda. Inspired by the heroines of literature and the stage as well as by the highest fashions of the day, Castigliones photographs were made for private viewers only or to satisfy her own colossal vanity. And even though most of her character references and costumes are now profoundly dated and illegible, over the years her prescient faith in the power of appearances and her exploitation of the tricks of the trade have helped turn her amateur obsessions into art.

Vengeance (1963-1967), for example, shows the Countess as the scowling Queen of Etruria, a fictional character apparently based on an obscure Spanish queen and the founding myths of the Roman Empire. Made in response to one of many marital bouts concerning her spending practices and scandalous behavior, the Countess commissioned the portrait and sent it to her husband with the note "to the Count of Castiglione from the Queen of Etruria." (Nearly bankrupted by her extravagances, he eventually divorced her.) In a sweeter vein, Elvira (1861-67) shows the Countess seated in a ball gown of exceeding ridiculousness, with her naked head and shoulders visible above a mound of frothing silk, like a cherry perched on top of a ice cream sundae. Nonetheless, the stunning harmony of the stiff pose, the elaborate dress and her "la Lamballe" coiffure (layered pleats of hair piled high and dotted with pearls) is due in no small measure to the Countesss ability to pull it off.

For all her deluded grandiosity, however, her most moving photographs were made in the final years of her life, when her failing beauty and bruised vanity led her to assume the self-imposed life of a hermit. Having moved to a small, barricaded apartment where mirrors were banned and which she had painted floor to ceiling in black, the Countess nonetheless had the courage and self-awareness to memorialize her decline as works of art. The Foot, the Amputation of the Gruyère (1894) is the most self-deprecating from this period, showing a view of Castigliones feet as if she were lying in her own coffin. Similar in mood (but less macabre) are the St. Cecilia and the Rachel series, where the Countess assumed a number of veiled, langorous attitudes depicting melancholy and mourning. At one time supposedly having had a hand in the Unification of Italy and the Franco-Prussian War, the death of the Countess of Castiglione only confirmed her status as a first-rate femme fatale, one whose brash and elegant sexual politics live on in her images today.

Depictions of women as the victims of their own vanity or as the passive subjects of male desire are anathema to Barbara Krugers work, and I suspect she would loathe Castigliones self-abnegation regardless of her political conquests. Nonetheless, their goals are the same: to challenge and gain access to the masculine halls of power all the while demonstrating their independence from them. But where Castiglione gained her influence by sleeping with her allies, Kruger gains hers by sleeping with her enemies.

In our media-saturated world, where visual cliches and catch phrases get processed and reprocessed in a perpetual regurgitation of information, Barbara Kruger has accomplished no small feat: anytime you see red and white sans serif type pasted over a grainy black and white image you immediately think of Barbara Kruger. Through her surgical reconfiguration of mainstream media images and words, Kruger has carved her idiosyncratic style out of the monolith of consumer capitalism, turning its soporific jingles into jagged slogans eviscerated by their over-sharpened hype. Krugers work is relentless, and her unflinching confidence over the years has been even more influential than her style, to the extent that you dont really think of individual works by Barbara Kruger as much as an overall philosophy and tone of voice. The philosophy is attack! and the tone of voice is aggressive.

Her retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York is an all out assault on the mind, an anti-aesthetic of fractured images and forked tongues spewing all the classic, acerbic Krugerisms: I Shop Therefor I Am. Its A Small World, But Somebody Has to Clean It. Your Gaze Hits the Side of My Face. Central to Krugers approach is her splintering of the apparent complicity of consumer society, a false contract that magazines and televsion suggest everyone is perfectly happy with. By turning the "we" of the mainstream media into "you and I" and "us and them", Kruger demarcates a position for her work outside the male-dominated ramparts of Hollywood and Madison Avenue. At least that was the case in the 1980s, when such confrontational dissent still held a flicker of promise left over from the 1960s. Twenty years later, coming home to the same Madison Avenue she has railed against her whole career, Krugers guerilla warfare seems oddly heartwarming, even quaint, like Dadaist pranks nestled safely in vitrines or a wizened Johnny Lydon recounting the story of God Save The Queen.

Krugers work is better geared for the street, where it functions as pure information unencumbered by the material concerns of preservation and value. In other words, the sheer monetary value of art as property can overwhelm whatever message it might convey, and if Krugers method has a blind spot it is in regard to the fact that the economic forces responsible for the propagation and consumption of her work are largely beyond her control. An interesting irony, then, is that wherever Kruger has been willing to relinquish control to economic forces is precisely where her work is most interesting as art. The best part of her show at the Whitney by far is the final room of the exhibition, where her trademark cut-and-paste emblems are displayed on a numbing array of media and merchandise: T-shirts, ball caps, newspapers, TIME magazine covers, watches, mouse pads, paperweights . . . it goes on and on.

Thus, what for most other artists would be a populist nightmare for Kruger is the fullfilment of her wishes, the achievement of a powerful and independent voice within the power structure that that voice sets out to critique. And although it could be argued that Krugers brand of mainstream defiance has become a clich³ in itself, Kruger earns my respect for being able to accept her death by capitalism with the same aplomb that the Countess of Castiglione accepted hers: with dignity, a little irony, and a cold hard stare into the maw of her all-consuming adversary. That willingness attests not only to Krugers personal strength but also to the place she occupies for women artists. Like the dynamite that disappears as it blows a hole in a barrier, Kruger has sacrificed herself so that others may rush in. the concept of the "benevolent dictator" as a model for this scenario? No, seriously, do you have the impression that the context of art or the meaning of some quotations has changed since 1998?

JS: Dave Hickey, a very smart American writer, is fond of noting that the majority of people in the film and music and fashion industries do not fret over the greater good of what they do. The reason is that their customers do not care about such anxieties. In the art industry, however, those of us who don't care whether art is good for us or not–who comprise contemporary art's most loyal fans–have been forsaken for a shell game in which the appearance of contributing to the public good covers for the desire to garner major funding. This shell game stems from the fact that, unlike other culture industries, contemporary art's fans and its customers are usually separate entities. The more this split gets exacerbated by fiscal realities, the more the art we get to see will be determined by the people who actually pay for it–in other words, by the paying customers rather than the viewing customers.

I don't have a problem with that. I just think it represents a mistaken perception of where the power really lies. Money might support art but it doesn't sustain it–word of mouth does. No matter how big the blockbuster or how broad the publicity, the word on the street is what determines the exchange value of a given artist. Just ask Matthew Barney.

PvdB: Art and commerce, Art and criminality, Art and the everyday. . . How would you respond to Mike Kelley's remark: "I have a problem with the terms high and low - I prefer allowable and repressed, as they refer to usage, whether or not a power structure allows discussion–rather than to absolutes."

JS: I can agree with that. But it depends on where you are standing and what context you are talking about. If Mike Kelley wants low culture to be less repressed and more allowable, he only needs to leave the art world and turn on his television. In any case, I would argue that his idea of low culture is much more acceptable in the realm of art than is my idea of commerce, because no matter how debased Kelley's work is–or Kippenberger's, or Orozco's, or Delvoye's–it can always be formalized and therefore turned into a safe discussion–one rooted, by the way, in the very absolutes Kelley is trying to subvert.

Commerce is the ultimate repressed evil in the art world, Mike Kelley included. I could not say whether I am for or against commerce as art, but I am certainly attracted to the idea of it as the ultimate good (funding, survival, leisure time) and the ultimate evil (idiocy, common denominators, endless pursuit of gain). Deleuze and Guattari wrote that in order for capitalism to be overcome, it must not be curbed but accelerated. I agree. But in that I am in the minority. The art world's take on capitalism is still dominated by people like Rirkrit Tiravanija whose approach to creating a better society through art boils down to it not mattering what happens, just so somebody else pays. The best utopias are always the ones where somebody else pays.

PvdB: In your most recent text, "Pay Dirt: A Manifesto" (published by IKON Gallery, Birmingham, 2003) you write the following conclusion:

"Just as Marshall McLuhan observed that people didn't know they wanted televisions until televisions were invented, how can the audience for art know what it wants until we, as artists, invent it for them? And, given that opportunity, how can any of us believe it's in our long-range interest to go on appropriating a popular culture that our customers already know and have? In the end, and quite ironically, a âdifficult� artist like Agnes Martin is a much more profitable role model than her more agreeable counterparts could ever be. Her arcane skills and restrained production methods epitomize such concepts as personal branding, value adding and inventory velocity, state-of-the-art business innovations that she and the likes of On Kawara and David Hammons have never gotten credit for.

"Until now.

"The avant-garde lives! Not because it's more meaningful or radical than any other activity, but because it fills a legitimate market niche."

David Hammons is quoted on one of the banners as saying "My key is . . . abandon any art form that costs too much. Insist that it's as cheap as possible is number one, and also that it's aesthetically correct. After that, anything goes." And in your work in the collection of the Van Abbemuseum, "DIY (AnnLee)", you appear to embrace IKEA's ideology. Could you tell me something more about your idea of commerce in relation to popular culture but also craftsmanship?

JS: That is a great question. I have been asking myself that for fifteen years. My first artworks in the 1980s were very design-oriented. Not just because I was interested in design, but also because it was the most efficient way of getting what I wanted. For example, I wanted a bookcase that would be solid and hold all my books but that would also be flexible and portable due the likelihood that, as a renter, I would live a transient life. The only options that the market presented were disposable, generic, DIY furniture like IKEA–which I didn't care for–or a custom one-off fabricated to my specifications–which I couldn't afford. Art became a way to devise an object that would perform exactly the way I wanted at the level of quality I desired and at a cost I could afford. That's how the Nesting Bookcase was born, out of a mix of desire and necessity and free time. The only catch was that I had to teach myself woodworking and make everything myself. But this wasn't too hard, since I like to work and learn new skills and my time is free.

PvdB: Tell me if I am wrong, but the "Nesting Bookcase", a personal product and a series of works you have been working on for more than a decade now, is probably at the origin of all this and a very interesting way to deal with these (and other) issues?

JS: Over that time a very interesting evolution has occurred between myself, the Nesting Bookcase, how it gets made, who it is for, and the status it might have from place to place. In the first several years, I only made as many as I needed. Each time I did, my skill level - and the design - improved. However, when other people started seeing them and wanting them, different questions arose. When I was making them for myself craftsmanship had no relation to monetary value, since I did not have to buy the bookcase from myself. Or, more accurately, I purchased it with my own human capital, which was exactly equal to the labor value of the piece. Outside demand puts pressure on craftsmanship because most people cannot afford to have things made well by one person, and one person cannot reasonably make hundreds of the same thing, one at a time. Uniformity and modularity become the only means by which the Nesting Bookcase could be made and still be affordable. And without affordability, the object would never have the degree of circulation and use it needs in order to be interesting as a work of art, in order to actually be an indeterminate object that gets defined through various systems of exchange. I went through a period of several years where the idiosyncrasies of the design were smoothed out and made more interchangeable. In a funny way, I went through a miniature industrial revolution–mechanization, specialization, alienation–right in my living room! And, just like in the industrial revolution, this was good for the consumer but not so good for the producer. Unlike Warhol, I am not interested in being a machine.

In that sense, the Nesting Bookcase embodies a paradox that seems very appropriate to our time: one the one hand, it is an object that I invented and that, to a certain extent, is exclusive to me and is an extension of my identity. On the other hand, once it leaves my studio it's fate is determined by private ownership and popularity and word of mouth. It gets used in all kinds of flattering and dismissive and mundane ways that have nothing to do with me at all, except for the fact that I created the object that set the desire for it in motion. That, I believe, is my job as an artist: to create desire through objects.

Anyway, that is a very long way of saying my basic aesthetic belief lies in the profound effect that economics have on art. I think economic pressure creates the most fascinating, infuriating, desperate kind of beauty, and that's what I'm after.