[Art Since 1900: Discussion I (kaleidoscope VI)] "History of the future"
Q: It seems to me when you are talking about text books, there is always go through machines which we can call historicism. Do you feel that you've expunged that when you put your book together?
YB: Why would textbooks and historicism be connected necessarily.
Q: Well, in my way of thinking, there is a certain kind of transparency, or fiction of the authorless author or the ideologically free author that textbooks have traditionally presented.
YB: OK. We specifically did book against that idea. We are, you know, four writers. We have written a quite a lot about with fairly specific ideas about history, you know, of art of the past hundred years. I think we have fairly at least publicly known positions of where our works, so it was clear that we are not going to be objective, neutral and so forth on the contrary, we insist that we are going to write a book about our view of the century and not a kind of statistical average which, I think, voids the notion of which you are talking about, kind of neutral, advance, pseudo agent and so forth. So, do I answer your question?
Q: Yes, I think I've raised it. I'm not sure if we have some adequate terms to deal with this, kind of phenomenon you are talking about, "continuity". Continuity within the sense of disruption and breaks as way of looking at history as in a way four authors coming together but also the sense of consequentiality or inevitability. And I was particularly struck by the way you discussed with Adrian particularly interpreted appearance of later within earlier, as a way telegraphing, a particular movement or frame or paradigm or history and I am wondering if it occurred to you that collection or aggregation of these moments of consequentiality might in some student's mind, perhaps some lecturer’s minds add up to something like a flow of history that has something more of inevitable to it that you have preferred.
YB: Difficult question to answer like that. I think that we address constantly issues of genealogies but those genealogies are often matters of choice and illogical choice on the part of artists and also our part. So I think that the appearance of inevitability is probably inevitable itself. And if you consider that nothing is ever produced does not have a future, or does not have a past, what we do though, I think, I hope, we reduce, succeed is making clear several genealogies are not necessarily we moving together in some kind of pure magnificent core that several trends that are parallel sometimes, contradictory sometimes, but nevertheless creating current up-stream and down-stream without regard to the time. Going back to the past and going to the future.
(01:45:00)
AR: Yes. I think what you ought to do is going back and read this book. Something if you want to read if you will as write as art as another form. That's I think is the beginning but what kind of text it is.
RK: That's wonderful.
AR: And that's what you have to settle in. Appropriate question. I myself didn't imply these would be fixed genealogies. But, there is a strange textuality to the book. As I owe you two to come back this and then learning to read ourselves that way might be the one. We might all not have hysteria we hope we have, in one way or another.
RK: One thing I could say in answer to what you are asking would be that insofar as 20th century art has to be seen in a part as the history of the avant-garde. The avant-garde really conceived itself as having a kind of a utopian dimension, which is to say kind of concentration on the future. And insofar as the time to tell you a story as concentration on the future, somehow not only do you have to kind of relate the past and the present then to the future, but also you have to find a way to write as a history that isn't just the history of the past, but also as a history of the future and, I mean, which is to say a kind of movement toward the future are harder to do and to sort of figure out what form that would be. And that is a sort of the imagination of the future presumably would be a fiction, a form of a fiction, which is not something most historians think of themselves are doing.
AR: Another.
Q: Hello. I am just starting study art history and I am lucky people teaching us have encouraged us always look at the art and the period in relation to the philosophy, and the psychology of the people who are the key thinkers at that time. And that seems to me to apply not just art history but all sorts of people who come later and then write about what their understanding is. And I just like to ask the authors here whether that's the forefront of their minds they are writing and selecting.
RK: Could you repeat that? I couldn't understand and hear what you are saying.
Q: Right. Basically I'm asking you if you are making selections in the various parts of the book, was it influenced by your understanding of philosophy of ideas that were taking place at the same time as the art that was being produced. AR: In a sense this is evident if I can speak for them. I ask you but I need to speak for them. I would say if you saw the exhibition of these two authors did in Paris, "L'informe : mode d'emploi, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, 1996", yes this is a living art or something that Batille foresaw we wouldn't need to live out or didn’t foresaw but generate the trait.
(01:50:00)
That's part of what we cannot help doing. If we are really doing we have to give in to that to a certain extent. It's called living art or over-determination which if we are lucky. I think that's the form of the question. I didn't have a right to comment on that.
YB: We are at the begining of the 21 century. We speak about artists sometimes going back to the very, very beginning of the 20th century. So, you know, we are people of our time now. So I am not going to, off course we are deeply “influenced” I am usually ban this term from my vocabulary, student uses FFF in my class, because I don't believe in the concept, but deeply worked by the concept that has been produced history of philosophy and so forth past 100 years. So this book is reflection of that as well. I don't if is that answer to your question?
Q: Yes, I was interested because I’ve read some New York University books. And the reason I bring this up at this points is because I as a new student found the approach very helpful. I was particularly interested in your re-post to these people in front me. Seems to be the kernel of the some of the discussions we need to have.
RK: Although Adrian pointed out in relation to Bataille, we really feels that Bataille’s work and his ideas are tremendously important and so we chose certain dates and subjects related to those dates that would allow us to write about Bataille and the same time, I felt it was very important from since the simulacra also really crucial to 20th century art that we need to bring in the work of Roger Caillois. So we chose dates that allow us to that. So indeed the answer to what you are asking if I understand it is that, there was a kind of sub-history of ideas that controlled and directed the dates and subjects, the table of contents if you will.
AR: I think you are the last one. Because, then we'll progress to tea. So we'll take the last one.
DW: OK, thanks. It might be transition to next bit actually. I was little bit less thinking somehow recalling in the earlier in the book, some discussion about your own influential periods, the arts and ideas that formed you. And I wanted to ask you in the way in which that inflexed the way that hall of the 20th century is presented. I guess I think that is a sort of the sense that the way in which intellectual center of gravity of the project is in somewhere between 1965 and 1980 and this rest of the book, I guess that's the period influenced you initially, the rest of the book is somehow written out of the influence of that period?
YB: Listen. There is no historians, there are some historians believe they can write a objective history that has nothing to do with the present but they are tend to be very bad historians. They tend to have a very wrong concept of what the fact is and what an even is. We always write from a point of view from the present, you know, even if I write a book about Canada, imagine I am an Egyptologist, I am not. You always discover historical facts from a point of view that is yours even if you don't know you do it. Even if you believe that you are completely objective I'm nothing to do with. You are completely embedded in the system. It's better trying to be conscious about it. Imagine that you are kind of a little cloud of the objectivity above the galaxy of the world. We, I think, indeed all the four of us slightly different dates maybe but our tastes were formed, you know, in the 60's and 70's.
And so, you know, I'll give you an example. The example is Mondrian. I'll give you an autographical example. Mondrian was the first artist I liked. I was a teen-ager. At the time, I discovered this work. I discovered also a book before I see this one of those rare cases art history book. But, you know, I was living in South of France, there is not a lot of Mondrian there. There was in fact no Mondrian in Paris at all. The first Mondrian is in French collection were in 78.
RK: It was a fake.
EB: No, No, No. Well, they tried to buy a fake but it owns not true. And it came actually from Ben Nicholson amazingly after the one which is in Beaubourg. So, when I got this book, I saw the book about Mondrian. I dreamed about the book for a long time. I asked my grand father to give me a gift for my confirmation. And we still have this copy. I read this book written by Michel Seuphor completely bad. I mean really bad history. But a full a lot of information it was the only big thing it was. The interpretation of Mondrian at that time was this kind of neo platonic monk. You know, we were doing this kind of pure grids in his minds and all that. And the result of that is that the interpretation of Mondrian is a kind of designer. A monk designer, whose work has nothing to do with texture with any kind of I just have Mondrian in mind. I've met first T. J. Clark, he told me it's completely ridiculous. Mondrian was all about destructions and not at all about the essence of ideas and about ideal stuff. This is completely ridiculous. In Brazil, we have this, well, that's what it is. She was completely right but, you know, at that time it's startled me quite a lot. I was 16 at that time so it was quite something. And then, I started working with Mondrian quite slowly, you know. Learning Dutch and all this horrible thing you have to do when you do art history.
And around that time, I was speaking about 10 years later, that was when I finally decided eventually tried to become an art historian. I took a little detour、because art history was so bad in France that I couldn't bear doing it. That was around the same time I discovered Robert Ryman. So my Mondrian so to speak which I worked a lot, first frame was T. J. Clark who said he is about destruction not about some ideal conception of Platonic beauty. That was standard noisier designer but it has to do with paint and texture all this kind of things. I produced another Mondrian but that's the Mondrian of today. That is not the Mondrian of 1940 or 1950. Is that answer to your question?
RK: I would like to say this moment is that are, four of us, we are all critics, and therefore, working critics, and therefore our working whatever we do as historians first and foremost, our historical work passes through our experiences as critics, at least I know that mind us. And my feeling that Richard Serra is the greatest living artist and probably one of the greatest artist of the 20th century that affects what I am going to do as a historian. Is that answering your question?
Q: Yeah, in a way. I was just saying that at all thinking that you could not have any stand point from which is writing a book. I guess I was just asking how the standpoint from which writing affects what you've written what you've done. And I think it does bring us a question about the representation of the contemporary art which is for after tea.
AR: Thanks. Probably, you all know a good old Dickanian dictum, one as accompany, two as a crowd. So, whether this book is a four legged monument or four headed monument, it is very complex and something that complex is emerging so we should look after that after tea. Thank you very much.
[Art Since 1900: Discussion I (kaleidoscope)]
