1 00:00:04,511 --> 00:00:17,651 I'm Geoff Batchen, our host, and as you know, every week I speak with eminent scholar about the art historical practises, and the idea is exactly that 2 00:00:17,651 --> 00:00:23,411 you should treat this like radio. You can sit back and have a cheap glass of wine or make yourself a cup of tea or, you know, 3 00:00:23,411 --> 00:00:29,848 prepare dinner or whatever else you'd like to be doing and listen to myself and my guests conversing. 4 00:00:29,848 --> 00:00:34,738 And yeah, we look forward to the conversation. So let me introduce this week's guests. 5 00:00:34,738 --> 00:00:42,748 Professor Anthony Gardner, who is professor of contemporary art history at the Ruskin School of Art here at the University of Oxford, 6 00:00:42,748 --> 00:00:49,138 and as it happens, a fellow Australian. Although we only first met in Oxford as it happens now. 7 00:00:49,138 --> 00:00:56,698 Anthony, let me first ask you a little bit about your own history because I notice you got a B.A. and then and M.A. in art history back in Australia. 8 00:00:56,698 --> 00:01:04,678 But then for some reason you went off and got a degree in law before you then came back and did a doctorate in art history again. 9 00:01:04,678 --> 00:01:10,118 Why the digression into law? Why this sudden change of direction? 10 00:01:10,118 --> 00:01:18,628 AG: The short answer would be a bad life decision - for me anyway. 11 00:01:18,628 --> 00:01:27,178 In Australia, the situation is slightly different from how it is here in the UK or in the states or a lot of other places. 12 00:01:27,178 --> 00:01:29,158 I did two degrees at the same time. 13 00:01:29,158 --> 00:01:43,838 An arts degree and law. I wasn't sure in the slightest what it was that I was going to do or what my future might hold. 14 00:01:43,838 --> 00:01:46,318 So I thought I'd hedge my bets and do both. 15 00:01:46,318 --> 00:01:59,278 And I quickly realised about a month into the courses that I was a really dreadful law student and a pretty good art student. 16 00:01:59,278 --> 00:02:10,228 But being a stubborn person, I guess not wanting to to quit or to to withdraw and thinking, well, maybe it's just a momentary thing. 17 00:02:10,228 --> 00:02:16,888 I stuck it out and I stuck it out for the next however many years, feels like a tenth of my lifetime, probably. 18 00:02:16,888 --> 00:02:20,758 But in the interim, I had done the BA, 19 00:02:20,758 --> 00:02:25,258 I'd done an M.A. and one of the things that I'm really grateful for, I guess, 20 00:02:25,258 --> 00:02:33,298 about doing the law degree, apart from the analytical thinking that brings to my own capacities, 21 00:02:33,298 --> 00:02:39,238 was that at the time it set a really great negative example for me of what 22 00:02:39,238 --> 00:02:43,408 it is that I don't want to do compared with what it is that I do want to do. 23 00:02:43,408 --> 00:02:51,118 And so my love of art history just kept getting richer and richer and richer the further along the courses that I went. 24 00:02:51,118 --> 00:02:55,558 GB: So you're thinking that your law studies enhanced your analytical capacities, 25 00:02:55,558 --> 00:03:00,598 but I was also going to ask you how the fact that you're an Australian, how do you think that is mediated 26 00:03:00,598 --> 00:03:09,268 the kind of art history you've gone on to do. Can you discern an Australian strand or character to your work? 27 00:03:09,268 --> 00:03:15,558 Yeah, I think that I mean, I was deeply influenced by somebody who was a teacher and 28 00:03:15,558 --> 00:03:19,138 a mentor at the time has become a radio colleague, Charles Green, 29 00:03:19,138 --> 00:03:29,878 and he had published a book in the mid-1990s called Peripheral Vision, which was a history of Australian art from 1970 to 1994. 30 00:03:29,878 --> 00:03:38,128 And this notion of a peripheral vision of sort of seeing things from the edges looking askance, looking awry 31 00:03:38,128 --> 00:03:51,268 was something that deeply affected me as a reader, as a thinker and a lover of art and art history in the way that Charles presented, 32 00:03:51,268 --> 00:03:59,758 that is the position. Very embedded positioning of himself as an artist and an art historian. 33 00:03:59,758 --> 00:04:02,518 It was incredibly attractive and it persists, I think, 34 00:04:02,518 --> 00:04:12,988 in terms of the kinds of work that I like to think through and think about. The kinds of frameworks that I'm coming from, 35 00:04:12,988 --> 00:04:14,728 the sensitivities. 36 00:04:14,728 --> 00:04:28,078 and also a kind of resistance to the parochialism of the North Atlantic kind of thinking, which coming from Australia, 37 00:04:28,078 --> 00:04:36,928 we're very much indebted to North America frames of discourse, whether they be art, historical or political or social or whatever it might be. 38 00:04:36,928 --> 00:04:46,338 But actually. Coming from a context that was inherently and sometimes very problematic early on, colonial and post-colonial, 39 00:04:46,338 --> 00:04:51,078 coming out of settler colonialism meant that would have to have a very broad, 40 00:04:51,078 --> 00:05:00,108 much broader sense of what was possible within the worlds of art and history and worlds of thinking. 41 00:05:00,108 --> 00:05:03,648 So, you know, I think this actually have a large bearing to play. 42 00:05:03,648 --> 00:05:12,978 And also, I think the fact that I then emigrated from that to a so-called supposed centre of the North Atlantic and 43 00:05:12,978 --> 00:05:24,378 bringing that resistance to the parochialisms that I still find are very powerful here in the UK has been an important. 44 00:05:24,378 --> 00:05:30,768 tracing, I guess, with my own academic politics with that. 45 00:05:30,768 --> 00:05:36,048 GB: I would have thought - just looking at your career so far - that this interest in the margins, 46 00:05:36,048 --> 00:05:41,448 so to speak or speaking from the margins, it's evidenced in maybe two ways that I can see. 47 00:05:41,448 --> 00:05:50,028 One is - we'll talk about it in a minute -your interest often in places, geopolitical places that are not in the centre, 48 00:05:50,028 --> 00:05:56,688 but the other is that you seem to have a persistent focus on what I'd call installation out or perhaps installation or art, 49 00:05:56,688 --> 00:06:02,388 even to the point where you have made a bit of a career about writing about large scale 50 00:06:02,388 --> 00:06:08,478 exhibitions almost as if they are examples of what might otherwise be called installation art. 51 00:06:08,478 --> 00:06:13,698 Now does that mean that you have come to the conclusion that kind of art making, 52 00:06:13,698 --> 00:06:23,568 let's call it installation or immersive or environmental, not in the eco sense, but in the sense that one walks completely into the artwork? 53 00:06:23,568 --> 00:06:32,658 Do you feel that this kind of work actually has a critical capacity beyond, say, paintings or photographs or other more traditional art forms? 54 00:06:32,658 --> 00:06:41,928 AG: Not necessarily. Again, a really interesting question, is to what extent - 55 00:06:41,928 --> 00:06:49,038 You know, I was doing my PhD, which then became the book politically and becoming this idea of the installational space, as kind of a space 56 00:06:49,038 --> 00:06:55,818 of experimentation and possibility for creating like a world within worlds almost like within quotation marks. 57 00:06:55,818 --> 00:07:02,418 I've had a very strong resonance in certain parts of 58 00:07:02,418 --> 00:07:06,288 the material I was looking at was in Europe and particularly communism was communist, 59 00:07:06,288 --> 00:07:11,778 but it also spoke to other kinds of contexts in terms of what might be possible, 60 00:07:11,778 --> 00:07:21,108 what might be experimented with, even if it's very briefly but still to give life and inhabitation to that. 61 00:07:21,108 --> 00:07:24,918 But I found that I still love writing about painting and drawing. 62 00:07:24,918 --> 00:07:30,268 I did an essay on an artist from - now I'm from Melbourne, 63 00:07:30,268 --> 00:07:37,158 well, a couple of years ago, my uncle Tom Nicholson, who - he does, drawing, a lot of his ideas come out of line. 64 00:07:37,158 --> 00:07:40,018 And this idea of what it means to have that gesture, the touch, 65 00:07:40,018 --> 00:07:47,538 the context with the page or the paper or the surface and the tracing of things and 66 00:07:47,538 --> 00:07:54,258 what that can still offer in terms of a different but related set of possibilities. 67 00:07:54,258 --> 00:07:58,308 I think it's still very, very powerful and very strong to a large extent. 68 00:07:58,308 --> 00:08:06,168 I find it really exciting still, and sometimes also a little bit easier to write about - 69 00:08:06,168 --> 00:08:15,798 Painting, Drawing, say photography Geoff, some of these other contexts, which they become so huge 70 00:08:15,798 --> 00:08:20,608 and so amorphous, that even trying to get one 71 00:08:20,608 --> 00:08:25,918 you know, thinking with one aspect of it doesn't do the entirety of, say, 72 00:08:25,918 --> 00:08:34,108 an installation or an exhibition any kind of justice, but that I think is the burden of the other story in any way. 73 00:08:34,108 --> 00:08:43,708 GB: So when you wrote about these drawings, did you write about them as you know, as an exhibit or as individual objects, as a process? 74 00:08:43,708 --> 00:08:52,888 AG: Actually, I think this is one of the things that is a consistent thread through what I do that is also connected with the work that I've done. 75 00:08:52,888 --> 00:08:58,138 Coming out of the Ruskin, being in an art school, is thinking about process and methods and, 76 00:08:58,138 --> 00:09:00,598 you know, whether it be in the studio or in the gallery space. 77 00:09:00,598 --> 00:09:13,408 But that sense of how something happens and the methods and the decisions and surprises that come through that has been really consistent, 78 00:09:13,408 --> 00:09:19,768 focussed throughout, and that's perhaps also connected then with what it means to move through an installation 79 00:09:19,768 --> 00:09:25,888 or an exhibition or a gallery is that sense of process and proper reception. 80 00:09:25,888 --> 00:09:33,658 And the decisions and ruptures become these really fascinating gesture. 81 00:09:33,658 --> 00:09:37,798 I think that's really important for my thinking. 82 00:09:37,798 --> 00:09:45,508 GB: But let me ask you about the process of your own art history, because you mentioned Charles Greene a moment ago, Melbourne based Australian scholar. 83 00:09:45,508 --> 00:09:48,538 And you have co-written a book with Charles, which I want to talk about. 84 00:09:48,538 --> 00:09:53,678 But let's just talk about how the hell do you write a book with somebody else? 85 00:09:53,678 --> 00:09:58,678 There must be tensions and eruptions in that process, as well as productive things. 86 00:09:58,678 --> 00:10:03,418 I'm just interested in how pragmatically you actually did it. Did somebody write a draft of one chapter 87 00:10:03,418 --> 00:10:08,558 and then somebody edited. Or did you get together and like Lennon and McCartney, 88 00:10:08,558 --> 00:10:12,098 were just writing together. You know, how does it work? 89 00:10:12,098 --> 00:10:23,588 AG: It changes from person to person, experience through experience and transformative collaboration with a lot of people over the years I've seen. 90 00:10:23,588 --> 00:10:31,028 And I'm a thankful collaborator in that sense, but with Charles, because I've known him for so long, 91 00:10:31,028 --> 00:10:40,008 going right back to the 1990s, we had a great rapport and trust in each other's thinking. 92 00:10:40,008 --> 00:10:51,118 We're very different kinds of writers. I often think of this like spiders spinning a web, and he just has this kind of intuitive 'zip', 93 00:10:51,118 --> 00:11:01,748 he creates the first web very quickly with it, and he sort of reconstructs it, whereas I'm a much more methodical, much slower kind of writer. 94 00:11:01,748 --> 00:11:05,648 So my Web takes up, takes a lot longer to build up. 95 00:11:05,648 --> 00:11:11,318 And when we were doing that particular but also some of the other essays that we've done together, 96 00:11:11,318 --> 00:11:15,578 it was almost like an exquisite corpse of sorts to do something. 97 00:11:15,578 --> 00:11:22,178 And then I would tweak it through my voice and add extra bits and then he would tweak that through his voice. 98 00:11:22,178 --> 00:11:28,088 And to that extent, it was sort of mirrored, actually. 99 00:11:28,088 --> 00:11:30,788 Another book that he's done called The Third Hand, 100 00:11:30,788 --> 00:11:36,788 which he where he looked at collaborations and conceptual postmodern world and this emergence of a different kind of figure. 101 00:11:36,788 --> 00:11:38,708 I don't think that we're necessarily like that. 102 00:11:38,708 --> 00:11:49,438 I think you can still tell whose writing is whose within the text - if you want to be bothered with going into that kind of detail. 103 00:11:49,438 --> 00:11:57,728 But it was nonetheless sort of an interesting set of experiences that it becomes not just sets of translations and vocalisation, 104 00:11:57,728 --> 00:12:04,888 certainly not ventriloquisms, but also allowing for things that we don't necessarily agree with in each other's work. 105 00:12:04,888 --> 00:12:08,938 And I think that's actually where the real interest for me kind of lies, is 106 00:12:08,938 --> 00:12:12,358 when you don't necessarily agree with the way that somebody has approached, 107 00:12:12,358 --> 00:12:18,418 the other person has approached the material or an idea or the mode of writing. 108 00:12:18,418 --> 00:12:27,628 And yet you have to engage with that in some way. GB: You don't suffer from a yearning to write it yourself 109 00:12:27,628 --> 00:12:35,038 when you're faced with those moments, though? AG: No, because you recognise that it's a different 110 00:12:35,038 --> 00:12:43,768 genre of writing, but also that collaboration demands a limit on that kind of desire for mastery. 111 00:12:43,768 --> 00:12:50,908 GB: But then why, if there are these moments of difference, why squeeze them into a single, writerly voice. 112 00:12:50,908 --> 00:12:56,218 Why not actually have it apparent? You know, visually, if you like when you're speaking and when he's speaking? 113 00:12:56,218 --> 00:13:02,578 AG: Yes, sometimes that happens, too. So I recently did a text with Bokaro Andrew, an artist, writer and curator. 114 00:13:02,578 --> 00:13:08,518 again from Australia, and it was very much about having our distinct voices and presences, 115 00:13:08,518 --> 00:13:14,878 but it wasn't necessarily clear who was which handwriting or anything like that. 116 00:13:14,878 --> 00:13:17,548 And so this even with that sort of distinction, 117 00:13:17,548 --> 00:13:28,468 I think it was a lot of fun in that instance to maybe allow for productive confusion or lack of clarity about who's done what, 118 00:13:28,468 --> 00:13:33,418 because that becomes a bit gossipy. And that's not that interesting. 119 00:13:33,418 --> 00:13:38,188 Whereas when you agree to do a collaboration, 120 00:13:38,188 --> 00:13:46,738 there's kind of an ethics or politics about agreeing to a kind of writerly contract in the sense, 121 00:13:46,738 --> 00:13:54,148 if I can put it that way, whereby you still have, you still have to agree with what you're saying overall, but there are always going to be these 122 00:13:54,148 --> 00:14:00,448 really fascinating points of exploration and tension that allow for different kinds of dialogues 123 00:14:00,448 --> 00:14:07,408 and perhaps set up the next text or the next chapter or the next article that you might want to explore. 124 00:14:07,408 --> 00:14:11,228 And in that sense, it has been a very productive 125 00:14:11,228 --> 00:14:19,328 set of processes. GB: so your book with Charles is basically a history of biennales and similar kind of mega exhibitions. 126 00:14:19,328 --> 00:14:23,948 And I have to say it's part of a kind of wave of recent books about the history of exhibitions. 127 00:14:23,948 --> 00:14:30,038 Why? Why this sudden turn to exhibition histories, do you think? AG: In general or for me? 128 00:14:30,038 --> 00:14:36,248 GB: Well, both, if you like. I mean, I'm interested in why you think the field is suddenly taking such an interest in the history of exhibitions. 129 00:14:36,248 --> 00:14:44,018 I think we were talking about you have had a longstanding interest in the installation as a kind of world within itself. 130 00:14:44,018 --> 00:14:48,408 And obviously, these mega exhibitions are almost worlds unto themselves anyway. 131 00:14:48,408 --> 00:14:55,568 But yeah, I'm interested in why you think that the field has taken a turn to looking at exhibitions. 132 00:14:55,568 --> 00:15:02,798 AG: Well, let me start off with me, because it sort of goes back to your earlier question about coming from Australia and writing from Australia, 133 00:15:02,798 --> 00:15:09,938 and one of the major exhibitions in Australia was the Biennale of Sydney, which started in 1973. 134 00:15:09,938 --> 00:15:13,548 And that certainly in my imagining, 135 00:15:13,548 --> 00:15:24,488 my formation was a very significant institution for thinking about different kinds of practises from different parts of the world, 136 00:15:24,488 --> 00:15:29,708 by different practitioners with different curatorial voices. 137 00:15:29,708 --> 00:15:33,518 That is incredibly important for Australia. 138 00:15:33,518 --> 00:15:42,738 I was also like a curatorial lackey. Back when I was working for the one and only Melbourne International Biennial in 1999, 139 00:15:42,738 --> 00:15:47,438 when I was still trying to work out what I was going to do with my art history degree. 140 00:15:47,438 --> 00:15:59,288 And that sense of this being a really significant exhibition format for different kinds of dialogues that could be regional, 141 00:15:59,288 --> 00:16:02,978 national, theoretical, personal, artistic. 142 00:16:02,978 --> 00:16:16,408 All of that was came from that rootedness within place within my information in terms of the the disciplines. 143 00:16:16,408 --> 00:16:26,668 A number of reasons, of course, one being the significance of the curator as an authority or artistic voice or presence, 144 00:16:26,668 --> 00:16:35,308 and how the exhibition is probably still the main manifestation of a curators ideas and discussions and dialogues 145 00:16:35,308 --> 00:16:45,008 and collaborations and curatorial studies being this kind of application of art history as something we've seen it. 146 00:16:45,008 --> 00:16:49,628 And therefore, needing to think very carefully about what that means, 147 00:16:49,628 --> 00:16:57,008 especially as programmes develop and cohorts then released into the wilds of the world and what 148 00:16:57,008 --> 00:17:04,388 that might mean and what our own relationship is to that is as teachers become significant. 149 00:17:04,388 --> 00:17:10,308 But there's so much money, of course, invested in exhibitions, whether it be in terms of civic boosterism. 150 00:17:10,308 --> 00:17:14,858 That's where the humanities often play a significant role. 151 00:17:14,858 --> 00:17:22,718 Or suggesting different kinds of practises allowing for different ways of thinking about how and what doesn't just operate sui generis, 152 00:17:22,718 --> 00:17:30,248 but is always relational in some way through through constructive dialogue intention, 153 00:17:30,248 --> 00:17:35,018 and the exhibition becomes one of the major manifestations for that. 154 00:17:35,018 --> 00:17:41,438 Maybe the art history lecture back in the day was another form of that, but now it's the exhibition first and foremost. 155 00:17:41,438 --> 00:17:53,018 And also that there are really extraordinary histories behind this genre of engaging with and learning new ideas, 156 00:17:53,018 --> 00:17:57,068 both as a as a viewer and as a as a curator, I guess. 157 00:17:57,068 --> 00:18:07,108 And that's, you know, to explore those histories, provides a different 158 00:18:07,108 --> 00:18:12,838 I guess cultural sense, social art history in terms of the kinds of art histories that we might have been trained in 159 00:18:12,838 --> 00:18:17,938 to give you an idea GB: I was going to ask you because you had written that, 160 00:18:17,938 --> 00:18:22,438 you know, we need a counter to the artist centred art history or something to that effect. 161 00:18:22,438 --> 00:18:29,248 And I think you imagine your book as being one of those counters. What's wrong with the artist centric history? 162 00:18:29,248 --> 00:18:34,498 What's the advantage then of an exhibition centred one? AG: I don't know that there is necessarily. 163 00:18:34,498 --> 00:18:43,018 This might be one of the tensions and channels. I'm not sure. I'm not sure there is necessarily something wrong with the artist centred approach to art history, 164 00:18:43,018 --> 00:18:47,218 and it's actually something that I have a lot of debate and discussion with 165 00:18:47,218 --> 00:18:50,758 other people who are looking at exhibition or 12 districts is that I want to take 166 00:18:50,758 --> 00:18:57,928 very seriously what it is that a curator or exhibition maker might be bringing. 167 00:18:57,928 --> 00:19:09,508 As an aesthetic or multi-sensory information of ideas and publications so that if you endorse ideas or features back in 1972 about Zaman 168 00:19:09,508 --> 00:19:16,408 taking over the role of the artist, actually. I don't have a problem with Zaman's positioning in that. 169 00:19:16,408 --> 00:19:24,298 I have much more concern about [INAUDIBLE] much more egotistical paranoia about that kind of position. 170 00:19:24,298 --> 00:19:30,838 So what happens when we think differently about the histories of art in terms of its displays, 171 00:19:30,838 --> 00:19:34,888 the way that it's displayed might transform the way it's made. 172 00:19:34,888 --> 00:19:41,988 How it shifts and changes are put into context and space and architecture and everything else, how each experience is going to differ. 173 00:19:41,988 --> 00:19:51,088 GB: Isn't there a danger here, Anthony, of just shifting from an artist centric history to a curator centric one? AG: Possibly. 174 00:19:51,088 --> 00:20:03,438 But I think that's always going to be. You know, in a sense, if you don't have the material at play, 175 00:20:03,438 --> 00:20:08,478 Maybe more so than the authorship of a particular figure. 176 00:20:08,478 --> 00:20:09,138 Well, you know, 177 00:20:09,138 --> 00:20:16,458 that's really going to be the key focus is what is the material that you're looking at instead of necessarily looking at a particular curator, 178 00:20:16,458 --> 00:20:26,208 although I'm really interested in that too, because I don't think that that's being done substantially yet, perhaps still to come. 179 00:20:26,208 --> 00:20:34,968 But that, you know, the work is going to provide different kinds of questions, challenges, 180 00:20:34,968 --> 00:20:44,468 as I said before provocations than thinking through an identity or an individual or reinforcement of an authority or kind of voice. 181 00:20:44,468 --> 00:20:52,008 So the exhibition is itself effective agent in that regard, just as the artwork is or can be. 182 00:20:52,008 --> 00:21:01,488 GB: You're obviously really into, you're a fanboy of exhibitions. 183 00:21:01,488 --> 00:21:08,148 AG:That's the thing, isn't it? It's about why would I be in this field? Why would I do art history if I wasn't a fan of the field? 184 00:21:08,148 --> 00:21:10,588 GB: But some people go to say the Venice Biennale. 185 00:21:10,588 --> 00:21:16,578 I mean, I've never actually been to tell you the truth, but they come back exhausted and it's like overwhelming. 186 00:21:16,578 --> 00:21:19,038 It's a bit like being in front of a Gursky photograph. 187 00:21:19,038 --> 00:21:27,018 The one thing that you come away with is the sense that mega capitalism is just too big and overwhelming for any individual to make a difference. 188 00:21:27,018 --> 00:21:32,748 In a way, it pacifies you, and I do wonder whether people who go to the Venice Biennale who come away never having seen 189 00:21:32,748 --> 00:21:38,868 everything or indeed almost anything because they're so overwhelmed by the the experience, they're 190 00:21:38,868 --> 00:21:45,828 overloaded so quickly that in a way, this kind of exhibition stultifies critical capacity 191 00:21:45,828 --> 00:21:53,488 rather than encourages, it in a way, that you as a fanboy are trying to persuade me actually work. 192 00:21:53,488 --> 00:21:58,288 AG:I think that's true of any kind of exhibition or maybe even any kind of artistic experience in that sense. 193 00:21:58,288 --> 00:22:06,508 I wouldn't say pacification necessarily or even sort of perfection. There's a big difference between natural and exhaustion, perhaps. 194 00:22:06,508 --> 00:22:13,108 And one of the things that I think something like a Venice Biennale can do is 195 00:22:13,108 --> 00:22:17,938 that people go to the opening parties and that's when the pacification happens. 196 00:22:17,938 --> 00:22:25,018 Instead of actually going for the exhibitions, for the artworks, for those kinds of experiences, something can happen. 197 00:22:25,018 --> 00:22:31,138 That's very important and very interesting, just as it happens with durational performance or traditional film. 198 00:22:31,138 --> 00:22:37,768 When you have those kinds of exhausting sets of experiences which an exhibition can have, 199 00:22:37,768 --> 00:22:44,758 they can actually be very challenging and enriching, rewarding both short and long term. 200 00:22:44,758 --> 00:22:47,428 I mean, I'm thinking that somebody like Okwui Enwezor, for instance, 201 00:22:47,428 --> 00:22:55,438 who would create these Leviathan experience is to the point where you couldn't actually see, experience works in full, 202 00:22:55,438 --> 00:22:59,498 the exhibition in full, during the time that the exhibition was opened. 203 00:22:59,498 --> 00:23:05,968 But that then, it's sort of it prevents kind of again, 204 00:23:05,968 --> 00:23:11,488 mastery or feeling like you had mastery over the work that you are engaging with or 205 00:23:11,488 --> 00:23:19,018 seeing that shift, in that subject positioning, that positioning becomes 206 00:23:19,018 --> 00:23:26,068 a very important strategy for you to like in order to challenge some of the 207 00:23:26,068 --> 00:23:32,748 presumptions that we might be bringing to artworks and then trying to not extract. 208 00:23:32,748 --> 00:23:40,438 We're trying to explore or engage with even one thing in an exhibition. 209 00:23:40,438 --> 00:23:47,628 I think this is something that I've come to to appreciate more and more is that 210 00:23:47,628 --> 00:23:53,388 every exhibition can still offer, even if it feels like it's exhausting or pacifiers don't fly. 211 00:23:53,388 --> 00:24:04,308 It was to all of us something. What is that thing and why is that being the thing that is resonating for you, or challenging few or disruptive for you? 212 00:24:04,308 --> 00:24:10,198 Including, why the hell are you so exhausted and not wanting to see that really amazing work that's over there in the corner? 213 00:24:10,198 --> 00:24:14,918 I'm thinking about how that is going to be an important part of 214 00:24:14,918 --> 00:24:22,728 the experience of seeing work and what that means in terms of your relationship to artworks, to other people, to other makers, 215 00:24:22,728 --> 00:24:27,188 to other thinkers becomes a very interesting set of dialogues about who it is you are and 216 00:24:27,188 --> 00:24:31,728 what it is that you're doing and what you presume others should be doing to you. 217 00:24:31,728 --> 00:24:39,098 GB: I mean, in the book, you and Charles imposed some kind of order on what it sounds like a creative chaos the way you talk about it. 218 00:24:39,098 --> 00:24:46,988 Do you try to persuade us that there have been three waves of biennalisation - hard word to say - 219 00:24:46,988 --> 00:24:51,158 What are those three waves and why are there three? 220 00:24:51,158 --> 00:24:57,398 What is the causal dynamic that has created three different waves, in your view? 221 00:24:57,398 --> 00:25:04,448 AG:Well, now I would say that we're probably well and truly into the fourth wave, which may be at the end, 222 00:25:04,448 --> 00:25:09,788 which a lot of people have been saying the same way that people have been saying the paintings because of photography. 223 00:25:09,788 --> 00:25:15,788 We'll see if that happens. But I do wonder whether the last 18 months in particular have transformed the way that 224 00:25:15,788 --> 00:25:21,128 we think about how these exhibitions are constructed and our own attendance at them. 225 00:25:21,128 --> 00:25:27,558 But in terms of the three waves, it's fairly. 226 00:25:27,558 --> 00:25:29,778 I mean, to some extent, it's always going to be fairly reductive, 227 00:25:29,778 --> 00:25:37,798 but nonetheless there was some kind of set of parameters that became very clear as we were doing research. 228 00:25:37,798 --> 00:25:50,898 So we're deducing this from the subject matters that we were looking at and Biennial start in 1895 in Pittsburgh and Carnegie. 229 00:25:50,898 --> 00:25:59,478 And they raised a particular set of questions and demands and desires which were about philanthropy is very top-down. 230 00:25:59,478 --> 00:26:00,378 It's about nation. 231 00:26:00,378 --> 00:26:10,828 It's about bringing the so-called best of the international world to a local that international engagement. 232 00:26:10,828 --> 00:26:17,148 And we see that then as we see the Whitney Biennial, we see it even I'd say in Sao Paolo in 1951, 233 00:26:17,148 --> 00:26:23,158 and that's where Charles and I do have a point of difference. He said Sao Paolo was part of it of the second wave, 234 00:26:23,158 --> 00:26:28,248 whereas I see it as kind of very firmly within this first wave because they found was that 235 00:26:28,248 --> 00:26:36,098 precisely he wanted to bring the Venetian model to Sao Paolo and to kind of connect instruct with 236 00:26:36,098 --> 00:26:39,918 the local art scene in what was happening elsewhere in the world and doing that through a mix 237 00:26:39,918 --> 00:26:46,698 of his own money industrialist and Rockefeller money from New York. With the second wave, 238 00:26:46,698 --> 00:26:55,338 as we called it. It was much more aligned with what was the purpose of these exhibitions and who was creating them. 239 00:26:55,338 --> 00:27:06,528 So if the first wave was often a fairly capitalistic sort of frameworks or national sort of frameworks, 240 00:27:06,528 --> 00:27:13,398 as with the Bennison and Sao Paolo. With the second wave, it was coming out of a different set of state sponsors. 241 00:27:13,398 --> 00:27:16,908 So often the government was the sponsor of these exhibitions, 242 00:27:16,908 --> 00:27:26,538 and often those governments were in of countries that were recently independent or seeking independence due to colonisation movements. 243 00:27:26,538 --> 00:27:34,068 This is from Bandung, in particular, the East Africa Conference in Bandung in 1955 and afterwards. 244 00:27:34,068 --> 00:27:42,558 So we're looking very carefully at why is it that so many of these exhibitions are happening in what was 245 00:27:42,558 --> 00:27:50,928 explicitly calling itself the Third World or non-aligned countries, between 55 and probably the late 80s, 246 00:27:50,928 --> 00:27:55,158 mid to late 80s? And what were some of the characteristics that informed that? 247 00:27:55,158 --> 00:27:57,438 And even somewhere like Sydney formed in 1973, 248 00:27:57,438 --> 00:28:05,448 there was quite a socialist leaning government in Australia at that time under Gough Whitlam or funded by the state, 249 00:28:05,448 --> 00:28:12,138 but also funded the Australia Council for the Arts at the same time to give money and support to artists and theatre practitioners. 250 00:28:12,138 --> 00:28:13,908 And there are always going to be exceptions to that, 251 00:28:13,908 --> 00:28:20,778 and there's always going to be overlap between the first and second and third waves, and that's part of the fascination with them. 252 00:28:20,778 --> 00:28:26,838 But with 89 and the obvious changes that emerge from that point on, 253 00:28:26,838 --> 00:28:34,608 at least in terms of if we go by that notion of a year zero rupture, internet, neo- 254 00:28:34,608 --> 00:28:43,038 liberalisation of so much the world etc etc and seeing biennales as part of that formation, 255 00:28:43,038 --> 00:28:48,048 which is to a degree, true. It's also not true, 256 00:28:48,048 --> 00:28:55,788 but it's one of the reasons why biennales have been the bugbears for so many people is that they have presumed the biennales start in the 1990s, 257 00:28:55,788 --> 00:29:01,998 but actually that second wave history completely complicates that presumption that biennales are, 258 00:29:01,998 --> 00:29:05,298 as we call them, handmaidens to neoliberal globalisation. 259 00:29:05,298 --> 00:29:12,198 And if we take a more complex view of these histories as, of course, at hisitorians, we should things get a lot murkier. 260 00:29:12,198 --> 00:29:17,658 Which is not to say that they are a great exhibition format. 261 00:29:17,658 --> 00:29:27,258 They aren't necessarily. But I don't think we can lay blame or overly celebrate the ontology of this exhibition form. 262 00:29:27,258 --> 00:29:33,168 Well, but as historians, we do have to attend to some of the greater complexities. 263 00:29:33,168 --> 00:29:42,378 GB: When is the third wave? Is 89, the turning point for the third wave and also that that period after 89? 264 00:29:42,378 --> 00:29:46,658 AG: I don't think 89 itself is actually a very good marker. 265 00:29:46,658 --> 00:29:50,898 It's an easily blurred and fudged marker. 266 00:29:50,898 --> 00:30:01,548 But there are a number of changes that happened in the early to mid 1990s that kind of start to snowball 267 00:30:01,548 --> 00:30:08,298 into a different set of exhibition structures in terms of funding of them in terms of supporting them, 268 00:30:08,298 --> 00:30:18,388 but also some of the artists who have been brought in. So that would be the third wave, is closely tied with that notion of globalising the two. 269 00:30:18,388 --> 00:30:22,318 But then of course, with 2008 when the financial crises that happened. 270 00:30:22,318 --> 00:30:28,348 And it's not just because of that. I think again, that's a fake origin of sorts. 271 00:30:28,348 --> 00:30:34,388 But it becomes a kind of a useful device in some respect. 272 00:30:34,388 --> 00:30:40,998 There are other changes that happen and the exhibition format starts to become very self critical. 273 00:30:40,998 --> 00:30:45,488 People start doing talks as biennales. People look back on that second wave history. 274 00:30:45,488 --> 00:30:49,538 GB: One of the distinctive characteristics of the third wave 275 00:30:49,538 --> 00:30:56,258 if these divisions hold up is that by the time we have this, like mid 1990s, 276 00:30:56,258 --> 00:31:05,378 the biennales have a kind of set of conventions that people recognise and have repeated such that Okwui Enwezor comes in and tries to disrupt, 277 00:31:05,378 --> 00:31:12,168 you know, the established way of doing it. So in a way, he's already working against the established set of conventions and discourses. 278 00:31:12,168 --> 00:31:18,508 I mean, maybe that's something that marks the third wave is sort of a self consciousness of their own identities or something. 279 00:31:18,508 --> 00:31:29,648 AG: yes and no. GB: I mean, creating these platforms, making them multinational almost enterprises, multi curatorial enterprises. 280 00:31:29,648 --> 00:31:33,558 There are few things that happened around that period that are a different. 281 00:31:33,558 --> 00:31:40,928 AG: Yeah. But I think that's one of the the striking things about Okwe's work is not only does it not come out of things like this alone. 282 00:31:40,928 --> 00:31:49,538 Of course, we can look at the multiple curators involved [INAUDIBLE] 283 00:31:49,538 --> 00:31:56,588 which was in {INAUDIBLE}, Kabul and a couple other places, as well as in Kassel in Germany. 284 00:31:56,588 --> 00:32:01,058 And with Okwe there's a fine line sometimes between, as you said, 285 00:32:01,058 --> 00:32:08,498 that kind of multinationalization, kind of outsourcing curatorial model and what a lot 286 00:32:08,498 --> 00:32:14,768 of people talked about is this kind of decolonising of of the biennale structure. 287 00:32:14,768 --> 00:32:24,638 They become uneasy bedfellows, but you can easily see it's the way you can read the same kind of practise, 288 00:32:24,638 --> 00:32:27,008 by the way, or perhaps in both ways at the same time. 289 00:32:27,008 --> 00:32:35,888 And I think he was very candid about that he didn't have to necessarily present a position one way or the other. 290 00:32:35,888 --> 00:32:43,658 But actually, it's the complications and implications between those frameworks that are about the trade routes of curating. 291 00:32:43,658 --> 00:32:48,908 Certainly, by the time of the mid-1990s, when he started to take off as a curator. 292 00:32:48,908 --> 00:32:53,078 GB: So let's let's go back to 1989, if you like, 293 00:32:53,078 --> 00:33:00,158 but only as a way to turn to your own solo book project or your most recent solo book project. We'll just repeat the title, 294 00:33:00,158 --> 00:33:05,498 you mentioned it before 'Politically unbecoming: post socialist art against democracy" 295 00:33:05,498 --> 00:33:09,908 I bet your publisher loved that, already a provocation in the subtitle. 296 00:33:09,908 --> 00:33:16,538 As you mentioned, the book focuses on. 297 00:33:16,538 --> 00:33:22,238 Art practises that emerge in that transition between Communist state and capitalist ones. 298 00:33:22,238 --> 00:33:27,098 So I guess my first question is why that particular geopolitical location? 299 00:33:27,098 --> 00:33:36,738 I mean, after all, you are Australian, so why are we talking about Slovenia in these kinds of marginal Soviet states or emerging post-Soviet states? 300 00:33:36,738 --> 00:33:41,438 Yeah. What drew you to that? I mean, I guess there's two questions what drew you to those states? 301 00:33:41,438 --> 00:33:45,968 And do you think there's something particular about the stress that those states 302 00:33:45,968 --> 00:33:50,588 have to go through in their transformation from one form of being into another? 303 00:33:50,588 --> 00:33:54,828 That makes them a particularly interesting sort of focus for study? 304 00:33:54,828 --> 00:34:01,628 AG: Firstly, don't ever call the Slovenians Soviet or Post-Soviet. 305 00:34:01,628 --> 00:34:05,828 So I started the project. 306 00:34:05,828 --> 00:34:09,158 I mean, because that was the PhD I started that in 2004. 307 00:34:09,158 --> 00:34:16,418 And actually the basis for that was thinking about how the term democracy and democratisation was being deployed. 308 00:34:16,418 --> 00:34:25,298 And after 2001, 2002 and this resistance I had to the idealization 309 00:34:25,298 --> 00:34:31,478 of democracy and democratisation as being framed through particularly 310 00:34:31,478 --> 00:34:37,208 illegal interventions in West Asia and in Afghanistan and Iraq , in particular. 311 00:34:37,208 --> 00:34:48,168 Okay, well. What about this: if democracy and democratisation become a kind of cultural arm of 312 00:34:48,168 --> 00:34:56,868 interventions that clearly have other kinds of intents as well. How are cultural practitioners responding to this and have they responded to this? 313 00:34:56,868 --> 00:35:09,348 And when I was in Paris, I was, well, you know, I was in an by this Swiss born, 314 00:35:09,348 --> 00:35:14,568 Paris based artist Thomas Hirschhorn, and I had absolutely no idea what was going on. 315 00:35:14,568 --> 00:35:23,358 And so from this sort of state of confusion, these questions, it was very clearly a work that was engaging with the 316 00:35:23,358 --> 00:35:29,418 relationships between democracy rationality as it was being framed so significantly at the time 317 00:35:29,418 --> 00:35:41,988 through a rhetoric of relations, that the discussion was being dragged into, was money and looting. 318 00:35:41,988 --> 00:35:43,668 Inebriation, the whole range of things, 319 00:35:43,668 --> 00:35:55,758 pornography that was deeply confusing and at the core of it was Hirschhorn talking about what the media was saying, 320 00:35:55,758 --> 00:36:04,188 what on Earth, apart from kind of a set of formal relationships maybe. What on earth do {INAUDIBLE} have to do with this? 321 00:36:04,188 --> 00:36:09,108 And so was from those questions and then some discussions with Hirschhorn 322 00:36:09,108 --> 00:36:17,298 himself that things started to spill out in really pretty active and confusing ways. 323 00:36:17,298 --> 00:36:21,318 And so the more I was engaging with communism, 324 00:36:21,318 --> 00:36:30,888 socialism and some of the challenges that had been emerging through the 1990s and from my own as having gone to some of those countries in the 1980s, 325 00:36:30,888 --> 00:36:36,798 connected in one sense with similar later questions that I've been having with artists 326 00:36:36,798 --> 00:36:43,248 and writers and others in Australia in terms of post colonialism and anti-colonialism. But. 327 00:36:43,248 --> 00:36:46,668 we're being framed through works that's I was very, 328 00:36:46,668 --> 00:36:57,148 very attracted to and sort of really rich mix of the conceptual, the historical, the more receptive, the spatial. 329 00:36:57,148 --> 00:37:02,098 And the political in curious ways. 330 00:37:02,098 --> 00:37:10,828 And so it sort of started from those trajectories and questions that the works of the artists and others were posing to me and wanting 331 00:37:10,828 --> 00:37:19,948 to explore them in relation to the question that I still had at the core of why is democracy this term that's just being deployed? 332 00:37:19,948 --> 00:37:25,498 GB: Why don't we define it? Or I'd be interested to hear how you would, how you define it? 333 00:37:25,498 --> 00:37:31,498 I mean, are there any functioning democracies in the world today? I mean, what is democracy? 334 00:37:31,498 --> 00:37:38,428 Yeah. Perhaps you could start with that. AG: Well, I think this is where the term happens. 335 00:37:38,428 --> 00:37:45,928 I think Stuart Hall put it in one of the documentary 11 platforms that it's both too empty and too full at the same time. 336 00:37:45,928 --> 00:37:54,578 So rather than trying to provide something that [INAUDIBLE] the French political 337 00:37:54,578 --> 00:38:00,758 philospher does as well. He doesn't try to define democracy, but he recognises that it's kind of this this empty signifiers. 338 00:38:00,758 --> 00:38:08,528 So it's not necessarily about trying to fill this term. It's about, well, why is this term being filled? 339 00:38:08,528 --> 00:38:15,578 GB: Don't you think it's interesting, Anthony. I mean, we live in a country that has an unelected head of state and an unelected house of parliament. 340 00:38:15,578 --> 00:38:23,798 I lived for 25 years in a country where 50 percent of the citizens don't vote, and yet both of them claim to be thriving democracies. 341 00:38:23,798 --> 00:38:29,288 I mean, is there in fact a thriving democracy somewhere? 342 00:38:29,288 --> 00:38:39,038 So, so you think it's a kind of rhetorical figure that justifies certain kinds of, I don't know, military adventurism apart from anything else? 343 00:38:39,038 --> 00:38:41,828 AG: Well, it certainly was being used in some of those ways. 344 00:38:41,828 --> 00:38:47,348 and that was something that came through the research that I was doing and thinking with the artists in the 345 00:38:47,348 --> 00:38:53,558 works that I was engaging with was that it wasn't just about what was happening in Iraq or Afghanistan after 2002. 346 00:38:53,558 --> 00:39:03,308 But if you looked at what was happening after communism came to an end, it was brought to an end in many different countries across Europe. 347 00:39:03,308 --> 00:39:15,608 Democratisation was being deployed for a great financial purpose, a term that was being, a line that was used by Forbes magazine as [INAUDIBLE] 348 00:39:15,608 --> 00:39:20,288 These countries, as you know, extractive sites and resources. 349 00:39:20,288 --> 00:39:31,328 But even if you go back before then, how democracy was this kind of framework of desire, impossibility in 1970s into the 1980s? 350 00:39:31,328 --> 00:39:38,678 And that was sort of the framework of something like [INAUDIBLE] this kind of disillusionment that emerges, 351 00:39:38,678 --> 00:39:47,558 but also a recognition that none of these political philosophies and ambitions actually have that kind of cohesion or coherence. 352 00:39:47,558 --> 00:39:53,588 GB: How do we how do we imagine an immense emancipatory politics, a better world, if you like, 353 00:39:53,588 --> 00:39:58,988 if we don't project for ourselves an ideal democracy somewhere at the end of the rainbow? 354 00:39:58,988 --> 00:40:04,538 AG: But this was the thing that is and that since the point of that book was that the artists 355 00:40:04,538 --> 00:40:09,368 were trying to present their own kind of idiosyncratic mythologies to political frameworks, 356 00:40:09,368 --> 00:40:12,458 at least for thinking about their works and what their works were trying to do. 357 00:40:12,458 --> 00:40:21,858 I don't think that any of them would aspire to be able to have a broader remit. 358 00:40:21,858 --> 00:40:26,408 And I think that's why it's so fascinating is that it did and indeed had a very 359 00:40:26,408 --> 00:40:33,278 significant socio political role to play within Yugoslavia and in Slovenia. 360 00:40:33,278 --> 00:40:40,808 But in a sense the limitations of art are also to the possibilities of art for learners to think, OK, 361 00:40:40,808 --> 00:40:49,248 what does it mean to have in the case of the Kabakovs, emptiness as a way of thinking about the politics of art? 362 00:40:49,248 --> 00:40:52,958 GB: So I think we better explain it. I'd be interested because I read about it, 363 00:40:52,958 --> 00:41:00,128 but I'd like you to explain to me what Kabakov's idea or notion of emptiness means I know you 364 00:41:00,128 --> 00:41:06,548 argue that this is a bit of a mis translation anyway that perhaps you can explain it. 365 00:41:06,548 --> 00:41:14,918 Why is it a good concept to work with? AG: Well, he was making the work in the 1970s, 366 00:41:14,918 --> 00:41:22,798 the 1980s and the ideas that he was having with a lot of other artists in Moscow. 367 00:41:22,798 --> 00:41:28,618 One was in relation to their presumptions about [INAUDIBLE] philosophies 368 00:41:28,618 --> 00:41:32,848 and this kind of resonant emptiness that can still be very enriching, very full, 369 00:41:32,848 --> 00:41:38,668 and you actually have to transform your sensitivity to what it is or your expectations 370 00:41:38,668 --> 00:41:45,688 of what it is that you're engaging with in order to actually be able to be engaging with that. 371 00:41:45,688 --> 00:41:52,888 work, with that material more fully, in a sense, on its terms, not on one's own terms. 372 00:41:52,888 --> 00:41:57,228 So that means kind of turning oneself inside out. 373 00:41:57,228 --> 00:42:02,268 In order to get a better sense of what it was that you had thought this emptiness around you, 374 00:42:02,268 --> 00:42:07,248 but is actually something that's very resonant and very full of already very active. So that was one part of it. 375 00:42:07,248 --> 00:42:15,438 But there's something very significant in terms of a very repressive state situation in Moscow by the late 90s, early 1980s, 376 00:42:15,438 --> 00:42:25,878 which is trying to find a kernel of something that is opaque that is still a frame of rupture or possibility of rupturing, 377 00:42:25,878 --> 00:42:34,098 even if it's just on that kind of small scale lived basis of friendship that there is another world that is still possible. 378 00:42:34,098 --> 00:42:39,978 But it seems like it's not being taken into consideration by the state or by others. 379 00:42:39,978 --> 00:42:44,478 And so for Kabakov and Monastirski and some of the other practitioners in Moscow at the time, 380 00:42:44,478 --> 00:42:50,988 there was this notion of emptiness, that could provide 381 00:42:50,988 --> 00:42:57,498 a way of thinking through those, of thinking with that. 382 00:42:57,498 --> 00:43:05,448 GB: Can I ask you, Anthony? So is this is this an idea specific to Moscow or the Soviet empire? 383 00:43:05,448 --> 00:43:09,888 Or is there something we could learn about from Kabakov for us? 384 00:43:09,888 --> 00:43:17,568 AG: Well, this is what I was just about to say actually is really interesting and complicated when he migrates to New York in 1988 385 00:43:17,568 --> 00:43:26,478 and recognises that actually some of the expectations of him as an artist and perhaps of him as a as a Soviet citizen, 386 00:43:26,478 --> 00:43:30,828 as he still identified right through the 1990s, even after the collapse of the Soviet Union. 387 00:43:30,828 --> 00:43:34,038 Well, those expectations. 388 00:43:34,038 --> 00:43:42,648 And the weight of sometimes even the suffocation of culture and art by political discourse or political exploitation or other 389 00:43:42,648 --> 00:43:51,148 kinds of negative hysteria and presumptions is maybe not too dissimilar from some of the ideologies that play back in the day. 390 00:43:51,148 --> 00:44:00,328 So he writes a text in the late 1980s that's published in English in 1994, while the Goodwill Games in Seattle, 391 00:44:00,328 --> 00:44:10,648 which is about emptiness and he actually talks about his ideas in relation to - its very oblique - links to the United States. 392 00:44:10,648 --> 00:44:16,758 And what it means, then to transpose that from the presumption that it's all about the Soviet Union, 393 00:44:16,758 --> 00:44:22,678 it's all about Moscow in the 70s and 80s, which is still what a lot of people presume about Kabakov 394 00:44:22,678 --> 00:44:31,738 or the Kabakovs - to recognising that there's something else going on because he's writing about this, not in relation to the Soviet Union, 395 00:44:31,738 --> 00:44:37,338 he's writing this in relation to the land from sea, the shining sea as he talks about politics, 396 00:44:37,338 --> 00:44:43,548 history and what that means that in terms of his positioning. 397 00:44:43,548 --> 00:44:53,238 As the Soviet dissident artist extraordinaire just started to unravel a whole other set of ways of thinking about what the term meant, 398 00:44:53,238 --> 00:45:00,078 but also what it meant for him to transpose that, to migrate this and then to migrate that, 399 00:45:00,078 --> 00:45:04,638 but not necessarily to translate it, that it still can be [INAUDIBLE] 400 00:45:04,638 --> 00:45:07,368 Not a word that most people necessarily understand, 401 00:45:07,368 --> 00:45:16,158 and therefore what it means to have untranslatability at the core of this kind of intercultural engagement. 402 00:45:16,158 --> 00:45:23,208 GB: So Anthony, is this your own political philosophy too now? 403 00:45:23,208 --> 00:45:29,838 AG: That's an ever shifting terrain because it's impossible on the one hand. 404 00:45:29,838 --> 00:45:37,938 I mean, at the moment, you try to bring any of these utopian ideas into fruition that becomes - 405 00:45:37,938 --> 00:45:42,878 GB: This is the point. This is, I guess, where I might, why I'm asking, because where is the utopia in this? 406 00:45:42,878 --> 00:45:48,438 Yes, it sounds actually somewhat melancholy in that one is empty and full. 407 00:45:48,438 --> 00:45:55,488 That one's emptiness is full, but one's fullness is empty. It's a bit hard to know where to go forward from that. 408 00:45:55,488 --> 00:46:00,678 AG: I think it's about, you know, maybe it is very melancholy. 409 00:46:00,678 --> 00:46:05,478 Maybe that sort of Russian myth is very true, at least in this particular instance. 410 00:46:05,478 --> 00:46:14,688 But it's also about undercutting any sense that that utopia can take that information, become an actualisation, 411 00:46:14,688 --> 00:46:23,388 which historically, at least for a lot of these artists, has brought with it trauma and violence and despair. 412 00:46:23,388 --> 00:46:37,038 So how do you still have hope, still have possibility, but at the same time, it's still allowing for limits and kind of, 413 00:46:37,038 --> 00:46:43,078 again, sort of go back to that notion of unthinking or unravelling mastery so that if something else is possible, 414 00:46:43,078 --> 00:46:52,458 they can still stay in that state of process and dialogue and tension so that other things can come in that can challenge those, those terms. 415 00:46:52,458 --> 00:46:57,078 And I think that's something that does persist through what I'm trying to explore at the moment. 416 00:46:57,078 --> 00:47:03,678 And I'm really taken by the way, the term adjacency is being used at the moment. 417 00:47:03,678 --> 00:47:14,118 By people like [INAUDIBLE] in a discussion with Terry Smith, which is not about just about allieship or affinity or anything like that. 418 00:47:14,118 --> 00:47:25,708 It's not about speaking for, speaking over. It's about speaking with meaning from but not having that sense of bringing into a finalised formal stage. 419 00:47:25,708 --> 00:47:34,428 But the themes can still be in that kind of oscillatory position and therefore perhaps still a possibility, rather than just melancholy. 420 00:47:34,428 --> 00:47:38,368 GB: I do want to ask you more about this, but I'm just reminding people that we've got about 10 minutes left. 421 00:47:38,368 --> 00:47:45,888 So if you have a question for Anthony beyond the ones I've been asking him, please, now is your time to interrogate him. 422 00:47:45,888 --> 00:47:49,458 Get him down. Let me just ask, so do you, 423 00:47:49,458 --> 00:47:58,968 are you confident then, that working and living within Oxford this is a place that one could engineer these kinds of tensions? 424 00:47:58,968 --> 00:48:07,538 Or imagine these kinds of utopic, non-democratic futures? 425 00:48:07,538 --> 00:48:13,958 I could I could turn the question the other way: how does one turn the situation you and I are in, for example, 426 00:48:13,958 --> 00:48:16,938 how does one do it? How can one do it in a place like this? 427 00:48:16,938 --> 00:48:24,258 Because the thing about these aritsts that come out of the Soviet empire - we can we can argue about whether Yugoslavia is in it or out of it, but is, yeah, 428 00:48:24,258 --> 00:48:30,918 that coming out of a very particular and very stressed situation and one understands 429 00:48:30,918 --> 00:48:35,508 the tensions that would lead to these kinds of ideas and these kinds of practises. 430 00:48:35,508 --> 00:48:47,078 But what about here. Here and now? AG: It goes right back to a question that I ask myself, but it was also asking people whose opinions I trusted 431 00:48:47,078 --> 00:48:55,508 back when I was offered the job actually nearly a decade ago, here. And so I was speaking with Christian Thompson, 432 00:48:55,508 --> 00:49:01,598 an indigenous Australian artist who was here at the Ruskin and doing his DPhil at the time: 433 00:49:01,598 --> 00:49:11,408 'Why here? We both come from this kind of set of positionings where we resist colonial thinking as much as we possibly can, 434 00:49:11,408 --> 00:49:16,368 whether it be from an indigenous or set of perspectives or backgrounds. Why here?' 435 00:49:16,368 --> 00:49:19,508 It's the heartland of both colonialism and Christians 436 00:49:19,508 --> 00:49:25,778 response, amongst others, was that it's also the heartland of a certain kind of anti-colonial thinking. 437 00:49:25,778 --> 00:49:36,458 It was like, yes and no, of course. But to presume that this place and I think certainly what's happening and has 438 00:49:36,458 --> 00:49:41,228 happened with that the Rhodes statue was kind of been fascinating in terms that it 439 00:49:41,228 --> 00:49:48,168 is both a smothering place and also a place of allowing very different kinds of 440 00:49:48,168 --> 00:49:54,968 of possibilities to emerge and discourses to emerge that have to be present. 441 00:49:54,968 --> 00:49:57,888 And if that is comforting for some people, then that's even all the more important. 442 00:49:57,888 --> 00:50:03,668 GB: I wonder if that's because you happen to be teaching in an art school rather than, say, in the history of art department. 443 00:50:03,668 --> 00:50:11,678 I mean, I wonder if you find that it's a bit of a more open space for this kind of thinking than other types of disciplines at Oxford? 444 00:50:11,678 --> 00:50:15,458 AG: Yes and no, but I wouldn't want to romanticise the art schools as one thing or another, 445 00:50:15,458 --> 00:50:18,758 just as I wouldn't necessarily want to romanticise - even though I do - 446 00:50:18,758 --> 00:50:26,858 History of art as one thing or another, either, you know, the discussions aren't necessarily less or more open 447 00:50:26,858 --> 00:50:35,708 because of the presumed types of practises that are being nurtured in that environment. 448 00:50:35,708 --> 00:50:42,698 GB: I was just wondering whether, I mean, I guess I was going to ask you about your role as an art historian in an art school. 449 00:50:42,698 --> 00:50:52,178 On occasions there can be some tensions between the two disciplines that you obviously find it a productive space for work and the thinking. 450 00:50:52,178 --> 00:51:00,038 AG: It certainly has prised open a lot of important questions and rethinking of what it is that I'm doing and why I'm doing it. 451 00:51:00,038 --> 00:51:08,498 The tensions are certainly there. They persist. And yet, at the same time, some of the best writing I've ever encountered in art 452 00:51:08,498 --> 00:51:18,448 history have come from students at the Ruskin, and I'm talking, not just student writing and talking about writing in general. 453 00:51:18,448 --> 00:51:22,448 And I don't know again that that's necessarily about the fact that it's an art school, 454 00:51:22,448 --> 00:51:30,388 it's also about the fact that these students are brilliant writers for which I'm deeply thankful 455 00:51:30,388 --> 00:51:36,688 that it has transformed my thinking in many respects it making me think much more clearly. 456 00:51:36,688 --> 00:51:49,088 I hope it much more cohesively about the practises of research that I'm engaging in, and not just what it is that I want to spew forth onto a page. 457 00:51:49,088 --> 00:51:54,838 GB: Now we've got a question from last week's guest, a visiting scholar from Denmark. 458 00:51:54,838 --> 00:51:57,868 She says, What are your thoughts on the concept of [Lanban?]? 459 00:51:57,868 --> 00:52:06,718 If I'm pronouncing that correctly, chosen by the Ruingruppe group for the next Documenta 15 and its focus on collectivity sharing collaboration, 460 00:52:06,718 --> 00:52:12,288 is this the next wave and a way to rethink the mega event? 461 00:52:12,288 --> 00:52:14,318 AG: That's a really interesting question. 462 00:52:14,318 --> 00:52:23,358 For the things that are prospective like that are usually reserve judgement or reserve too much thought on that. 463 00:52:23,358 --> 00:52:27,228 It was certainly the case with the previous documents or two in advance of that. 464 00:52:27,228 --> 00:52:35,388 What I will say is that Ruingruppe is a really fascinating group of practitioners whose works, 465 00:52:35,388 --> 00:52:38,508 whether it be through the freedom of artistic practise or curatorial practise, 466 00:52:38,508 --> 00:52:45,528 all of their writings collectively, individually has been so significant, 467 00:52:45,528 --> 00:52:49,758 especially in Jakarta and through Southeast Asia and into Australia. 468 00:52:49,758 --> 00:52:55,518 But I think it's one of the things that is really exciting about what might happen with the next Documenta 469 00:52:55,518 --> 00:53:06,738 is to sort of engage with how they - not just how do they respond to the heft of this mega institution, 470 00:53:06,738 --> 00:53:11,898 but how they respond to the disruptions of the last 18 24 months because they are 471 00:53:11,898 --> 00:53:18,018 usually so sensitive as practitioners and they are dispersed across the world. 472 00:53:18,018 --> 00:53:25,368 So some of them are still in Jakarta, some of them are in Kassel and some of them are in Japan. 473 00:53:25,368 --> 00:53:35,658 So those dispersals and how that then informs their thinking will be really fascinating to see not only where it works, 474 00:53:35,658 --> 00:53:40,128 but maybe where it doesn't, how they think it works and how they think it doesn't. 475 00:53:40,128 --> 00:53:47,688 So it's some of those ongoing discussions that I'm looking forward to, and I think that's part of Ruingruppe's is practise in general. 476 00:53:47,688 --> 00:53:59,578 But also it seems to be how they've thought about the selections of those participants thus far and what might be emerging through that format. 477 00:53:59,578 --> 00:54:06,418 GB: Speaking of dispersals, I've noticed you've been a visiting professor in a lot of dispersed places Estonia, 478 00:54:06,418 --> 00:54:17,828 Taiwan, Romania, of course, Australia and the UK. But what I mean, what have you learnt, do you think from those kinds of visiting spots? 479 00:54:17,828 --> 00:54:27,738 What's the difference between being a visiting professor in Estonia and one in Taiwan, just to take that example? 480 00:54:27,738 --> 00:54:32,348 AG: Humility. 481 00:54:32,348 --> 00:54:45,318 What have I learnt in general is that, you know, I come with a set of questions, but also a positioning as a professor at Oxford that is ripe for 482 00:54:45,318 --> 00:54:46,848 piercing and deservedly so. 483 00:54:46,848 --> 00:54:56,628 And I kind of love that the questions and the frameworks like the three waves, that they get sort of challenged, 484 00:54:56,628 --> 00:55:06,258 corroded, torn down, rebuilt and done in different ways that it was about informed by localised histories that are always outward looking. 485 00:55:06,258 --> 00:55:12,108 They're always much more than just parochial localism. 486 00:55:12,108 --> 00:55:16,068 And that's it sort of reinforced my belief, not in kind of global art history, 487 00:55:16,068 --> 00:55:23,448 but in terms of translocal, of needing to be, of having a sense of what's embedded within that locality, 488 00:55:23,448 --> 00:55:32,868 even if it's one section of a city or one town, one region that embeddedness, 489 00:55:32,868 --> 00:55:43,668 and all the histories that inform that disallow the kinds of abstractions and smoothness that a globality might otherwise aspire to. 490 00:55:43,668 --> 00:55:51,348 And so that's been one of the things that I've learnt along the way, is just how much more there is to know, 491 00:55:51,348 --> 00:55:58,038 to engage with and to learn from through those kinds of experiences, which I hope very much continue. 492 00:55:58,038 --> 00:56:10,608 even after the pandemics, because there is still so much to learn and to do and hopefully more collaborations to happen, 493 00:56:10,608 --> 00:56:18,228 let's go back to that point at the start. It's nice that you used the phrase after the pandemics, but we'll talk about that some other time. 494 00:56:18,228 --> 00:56:23,598 GB: So you're on leave at the moment. And I know that part of it is just recovering. 495 00:56:23,598 --> 00:56:27,348 But what are you working on now? What's the future? 496 00:56:27,348 --> 00:56:32,748 Part of it is as well, 497 00:56:32,748 --> 00:56:37,638 of course, as well, is the thinking about what it is that we want not just as professors and teachers, 498 00:56:37,638 --> 00:56:43,418 but as people with families who are on the other side of the world who are maybe not in the best situation. 499 00:56:43,418 --> 00:56:50,058 So the city that I'm from, Melbourne has been in the most horrific state of states of lockdown across the last 18 months, 500 00:56:50,058 --> 00:56:56,838 and that's brought a lot of anxieties, concerns about family and friends. So that's been a really important part of this period. 501 00:56:56,838 --> 00:57:02,238 But slowly finding a way of thinking, Okay, well, what might still be feasible as a set of research projects? 502 00:57:02,238 --> 00:57:06,918 I had wanted to do this this big historical project on particular curatorial 503 00:57:06,918 --> 00:57:11,868 episodes in different parts of the non-aligned worlds from the 50s to the 80s, 504 00:57:11,868 --> 00:57:16,458 which requires a lot of primary research and archives and travel and meeting people. 505 00:57:16,458 --> 00:57:21,108 And that's of course, not feasible. So what becomes feasible instead? 506 00:57:21,108 --> 00:57:30,318 And so having to rethink that, I'm really excited by actually trying to work out what it means to write about what 507 00:57:30,318 --> 00:57:35,868 curatorship and curating really are. 508 00:57:35,868 --> 00:57:39,118 I was amazed by, you know, no wonder nobody's doing it is because it's really, 509 00:57:39,118 --> 00:57:48,988 really hard. GB: I know you've said that there's insufficient documentation, especially in many of these important pioneering exhibitions from the 50s. 510 00:57:48,988 --> 00:57:53,968 They put a lot of effort into putting them together, but not that much effort into documenting them and when they did, 511 00:57:53,968 --> 00:58:02,398 the documents haven't survived in very good shape. So curating is a nebulous thing to find evidence for sometimes, you know, 512 00:58:02,398 --> 00:58:12,418 but it also sort of reinforces our frameworks as art historians whereby, you know, what are we doing? Well, we're telling stories, 513 00:58:12,418 --> 00:58:22,678 and that includes telling fabrications, of course, that's part of the fun, that fine line between the story and history. 514 00:58:22,678 --> 00:58:28,758 So it allows for that. And then actually, curators and arts have been champions 515 00:58:28,758 --> 00:58:34,078 in thinking about the storytelling capacities of history, writing , historiographies all the way through. 516 00:58:34,078 --> 00:58:42,828 So we've got a lot to learn, which is why being in an art school is actually really central to thinking about the futures of art history really. 517 00:58:42,828 --> 00:58:50,388 GB: Well, that's a nice, provocative way to finish. Well, thank you so much, Anthony, for, you know, coursing through your career. 518 00:58:50,388 --> 00:58:53,388 I know it's just an hour and we could talk for several more, I'm sure, 519 00:58:53,388 --> 00:58:58,638 but I'm hoping that your audience has heard enough to know that if they want to talk about certain topics 520 00:58:58,638 --> 00:59:02,958 Anthony Gardener is the guy, you can track him down. There's a lot to say. 521 00:59:02,958 --> 00:59:08,748 Thank you so much, Anthony, for talking with me today. Thank you to our audience for listening. 522 00:59:08,748 --> 00:59:16,588 And just a reminder that next week, I'll be torturing another guest, Lena Fritsch, curator of Tokyo, at the Ashmolean. 523 00:59:16,588 --> 00:59:22,278 So we'll talk with Lena about that project and other projects she's been involved in. 524 00:59:22,278 --> 00:59:27,798 But in the meantime, just thank Anthony again, and hopefully I'll see you all in a week. 525 00:59:27,798 --> 00:59:37,557 Thanks, everyone. Thanks, Geoff.