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
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,
prepare dinner or whatever else you'd like to be doing and listen to myself and my guests conversing.
And yeah, we look forward to the conversation. So let me introduce this week's guests.
Professor Anthony Gardner, who is professor of contemporary art history at the Ruskin School of Art here at the University of Oxford,
and as it happens, a fellow Australian. Although we only first met in Oxford as it happens now.
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.
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.
Why the digression into law? Why this sudden change of direction?
AG: The short answer would be a bad life decision - for me anyway.
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.
I did two degrees at the same time.
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.
So I thought I'd hedge my bets and do both.
And I quickly realised about a month into the courses that I was a really dreadful law student and a pretty good art student.
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.
I stuck it out and I stuck it out for the next however many years, feels like a tenth of my lifetime, probably.
But in the interim, I had done the BA,
I'd done an M.A. and one of the things that I'm really grateful for, I guess,
about doing the law degree, apart from the analytical thinking that brings to my own capacities,
was that at the time it set a really great negative example for me of what
it is that I don't want to do compared with what it is that I do want to do.
And so my love of art history just kept getting richer and richer and richer the further along the courses that I went.
GB: So you're thinking that your law studies enhanced your analytical capacities,
but I was also going to ask you how the fact that you're an Australian, how do you think that is mediated
the kind of art history you've gone on to do. Can you discern an Australian strand or character to your work?
Yeah, I think that I mean, I was deeply influenced by somebody who was a teacher and
a mentor at the time has become a radio colleague, Charles Green,
and he had published a book in the mid-1990s called Peripheral Vision, which was a history of Australian art from 1970 to 1994.
And this notion of a peripheral vision of sort of seeing things from the edges looking askance, looking awry
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,
that is the position. Very embedded positioning of himself as an artist and an art historian.
It was incredibly attractive and it persists, I think,
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,
the sensitivities.
and also a kind of resistance to the parochialism of the North Atlantic kind of thinking, which coming from Australia,
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.
But actually. Coming from a context that was inherently and sometimes very problematic early on, colonial and post-colonial,
coming out of settler colonialism meant that would have to have a very broad,
much broader sense of what was possible within the worlds of art and history and worlds of thinking.
So, you know, I think this actually have a large bearing to play.
And also, I think the fact that I then emigrated from that to a so-called supposed centre of the North Atlantic and
bringing that resistance to the parochialisms that I still find are very powerful here in the UK has been an important.
tracing, I guess, with my own academic politics with that.
GB: I would have thought - just looking at your career so far - that this interest in the margins,
so to speak or speaking from the margins, it's evidenced in maybe two ways that I can see.
One is - we'll talk about it in a minute -your interest often in places, geopolitical places that are not in the centre,
but the other is that you seem to have a persistent focus on what I'd call installation out or perhaps installation or art,
even to the point where you have made a bit of a career about writing about large scale
exhibitions almost as if they are examples of what might otherwise be called installation art.
Now does that mean that you have come to the conclusion that kind of art making,
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?
Do you feel that this kind of work actually has a critical capacity beyond, say, paintings or photographs or other more traditional art forms?
AG: Not necessarily. Again, a really interesting question, is to what extent -
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
of experimentation and possibility for creating like a world within worlds almost like within quotation marks.
I've had a very strong resonance in certain parts of
the material I was looking at was in Europe and particularly communism was communist,
but it also spoke to other kinds of contexts in terms of what might be possible,
what might be experimented with, even if it's very briefly but still to give life and inhabitation to that.
But I found that I still love writing about painting and drawing.
I did an essay on an artist from - now I'm from Melbourne,
well, a couple of years ago, my uncle Tom Nicholson, who - he does, drawing, a lot of his ideas come out of line.
And this idea of what it means to have that gesture, the touch,
the context with the page or the paper or the surface and the tracing of things and
what that can still offer in terms of a different but related set of possibilities.
I think it's still very, very powerful and very strong to a large extent.
I find it really exciting still, and sometimes also a little bit easier to write about -
Painting, Drawing, say photography Geoff, some of these other contexts, which they become so huge
and so amorphous, that even trying to get one
you know, thinking with one aspect of it doesn't do the entirety of, say,
an installation or an exhibition any kind of justice, but that I think is the burden of the other story in any way.
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?
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.
Coming out of the Ruskin, being in an art school, is thinking about process and methods and,
you know, whether it be in the studio or in the gallery space.
But that sense of how something happens and the methods and the decisions and surprises that come through that has been really consistent,
focussed throughout, and that's perhaps also connected then with what it means to move through an installation
or an exhibition or a gallery is that sense of process and proper reception.
And the decisions and ruptures become these really fascinating gesture.
I think that's really important for my thinking.
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.
And you have co-written a book with Charles, which I want to talk about.
But let's just talk about how the hell do you write a book with somebody else?
There must be tensions and eruptions in that process, as well as productive things.
I'm just interested in how pragmatically you actually did it. Did somebody write a draft of one chapter
and then somebody edited. Or did you get together and like Lennon and McCartney,
were just writing together. You know, how does it work?
AG: It changes from person to person, experience through experience and transformative collaboration with a lot of people over the years I've seen.
And I'm a thankful collaborator in that sense, but with Charles, because I've known him for so long,
going right back to the 1990s, we had a great rapport and trust in each other's thinking.
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',
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.
So my Web takes up, takes a lot longer to build up.
And when we were doing that particular but also some of the other essays that we've done together,
it was almost like an exquisite corpse of sorts to do something.
And then I would tweak it through my voice and add extra bits and then he would tweak that through his voice.
And to that extent, it was sort of mirrored, actually.
Another book that he's done called The Third Hand,
which he where he looked at collaborations and conceptual postmodern world and this emergence of a different kind of figure.
I don't think that we're necessarily like that.
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.
But it was nonetheless sort of an interesting set of experiences that it becomes not just sets of translations and vocalisation,
certainly not ventriloquisms, but also allowing for things that we don't necessarily agree with in each other's work.
And I think that's actually where the real interest for me kind of lies, is
when you don't necessarily agree with the way that somebody has approached,
the other person has approached the material or an idea or the mode of writing.
And yet you have to engage with that in some way. GB: You don't suffer from a yearning to write it yourself
when you're faced with those moments, though? AG: No, because you recognise that it's a different
genre of writing, but also that collaboration demands a limit on that kind of desire for mastery.
GB: But then why, if there are these moments of difference, why squeeze them into a single, writerly voice.
Why not actually have it apparent? You know, visually, if you like when you're speaking and when he's speaking?
AG: Yes, sometimes that happens, too. So I recently did a text with Bokaro Andrew, an artist, writer and curator.
again from Australia, and it was very much about having our distinct voices and presences,
but it wasn't necessarily clear who was which handwriting or anything like that.
And so this even with that sort of distinction,
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,
because that becomes a bit gossipy. And that's not that interesting.
Whereas when you agree to do a collaboration,
there's kind of an ethics or politics about agreeing to a kind of writerly contract in the sense,
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
really fascinating points of exploration and tension that allow for different kinds of dialogues
and perhaps set up the next text or the next chapter or the next article that you might want to explore.
And in that sense, it has been a very productive
set of processes. GB: so your book with Charles is basically a history of biennales and similar kind of mega exhibitions.
And I have to say it's part of a kind of wave of recent books about the history of exhibitions.
Why? Why this sudden turn to exhibition histories, do you think? AG: In general or for me?
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.
I think we were talking about you have had a longstanding interest in the installation as a kind of world within itself.
And obviously, these mega exhibitions are almost worlds unto themselves anyway.
But yeah, I'm interested in why you think that the field has taken a turn to looking at exhibitions.
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,
and one of the major exhibitions in Australia was the Biennale of Sydney, which started in 1973.
And that certainly in my imagining,
my formation was a very significant institution for thinking about different kinds of practises from different parts of the world,
by different practitioners with different curatorial voices.
That is incredibly important for Australia.
I was also like a curatorial lackey. Back when I was working for the one and only Melbourne International Biennial in 1999,
when I was still trying to work out what I was going to do with my art history degree.
And that sense of this being a really significant exhibition format for different kinds of dialogues that could be regional,
national, theoretical, personal, artistic.
All of that was came from that rootedness within place within my information in terms of the the disciplines.
A number of reasons, of course, one being the significance of the curator as an authority or artistic voice or presence,
and how the exhibition is probably still the main manifestation of a curators ideas and discussions and dialogues
and collaborations and curatorial studies being this kind of application of art history as something we've seen it.
And therefore, needing to think very carefully about what that means,
especially as programmes develop and cohorts then released into the wilds of the world and what
that might mean and what our own relationship is to that is as teachers become significant.
But there's so much money, of course, invested in exhibitions, whether it be in terms of civic boosterism.
That's where the humanities often play a significant role.
Or suggesting different kinds of practises allowing for different ways of thinking about how and what doesn't just operate sui generis,
but is always relational in some way through through constructive dialogue intention,
and the exhibition becomes one of the major manifestations for that.
Maybe the art history lecture back in the day was another form of that, but now it's the exhibition first and foremost.
And also that there are really extraordinary histories behind this genre of engaging with and learning new ideas,
both as a as a viewer and as a as a curator, I guess.
And that's, you know, to explore those histories, provides a different
I guess cultural sense, social art history in terms of the kinds of art histories that we might have been trained in
to give you an idea GB: I was going to ask you because you had written that,
you know, we need a counter to the artist centred art history or something to that effect.
And I think you imagine your book as being one of those counters. What's wrong with the artist centric history?
What's the advantage then of an exhibition centred one? AG: I don't know that there is necessarily.
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,
and it's actually something that I have a lot of debate and discussion with
other people who are looking at exhibition or 12 districts is that I want to take
very seriously what it is that a curator or exhibition maker might be bringing.
As an aesthetic or multi-sensory information of ideas and publications so that if you endorse ideas or features back in 1972 about Zaman
taking over the role of the artist, actually. I don't have a problem with Zaman's positioning in that.
I have much more concern about [INAUDIBLE] much more egotistical paranoia about that kind of position.
So what happens when we think differently about the histories of art in terms of its displays,
the way that it's displayed might transform the way it's made.
How it shifts and changes are put into context and space and architecture and everything else, how each experience is going to differ.
GB: Isn't there a danger here, Anthony, of just shifting from an artist centric history to a curator centric one? AG: Possibly.
But I think that's always going to be. You know, in a sense, if you don't have the material at play,
Maybe more so than the authorship of a particular figure.
Well, you know,
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,
although I'm really interested in that too, because I don't think that that's being done substantially yet, perhaps still to come.
But that, you know, the work is going to provide different kinds of questions, challenges,
as I said before provocations than thinking through an identity or an individual or reinforcement of an authority or kind of voice.
So the exhibition is itself effective agent in that regard, just as the artwork is or can be.
GB: You're obviously really into, you're a fanboy of exhibitions.
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?
GB: But some people go to say the Venice Biennale.
I mean, I've never actually been to tell you the truth, but they come back exhausted and it's like overwhelming.
It's a bit like being in front of a Gursky photograph.
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.
In a way, it pacifies you, and I do wonder whether people who go to the Venice Biennale who come away never having seen
everything or indeed almost anything because they're so overwhelmed by the the experience, they're
overloaded so quickly that in a way, this kind of exhibition stultifies critical capacity
rather than encourages, it in a way, that you as a fanboy are trying to persuade me actually work.
AG:I think that's true of any kind of exhibition or maybe even any kind of artistic experience in that sense.
I wouldn't say pacification necessarily or even sort of perfection. There's a big difference between natural and exhaustion, perhaps.
And one of the things that I think something like a Venice Biennale can do is
that people go to the opening parties and that's when the pacification happens.
Instead of actually going for the exhibitions, for the artworks, for those kinds of experiences, something can happen.
That's very important and very interesting, just as it happens with durational performance or traditional film.
When you have those kinds of exhausting sets of experiences which an exhibition can have,
they can actually be very challenging and enriching, rewarding both short and long term.
I mean, I'm thinking that somebody like Okwui Enwezor, for instance,
who would create these Leviathan experience is to the point where you couldn't actually see, experience works in full,
the exhibition in full, during the time that the exhibition was opened.
But that then, it's sort of it prevents kind of again,
mastery or feeling like you had mastery over the work that you are engaging with or
seeing that shift, in that subject positioning, that positioning becomes
a very important strategy for you to like in order to challenge some of the
presumptions that we might be bringing to artworks and then trying to not extract.
We're trying to explore or engage with even one thing in an exhibition.
I think this is something that I've come to to appreciate more and more is that
every exhibition can still offer, even if it feels like it's exhausting or pacifiers don't fly.
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?
Including, why the hell are you so exhausted and not wanting to see that really amazing work that's over there in the corner?
I'm thinking about how that is going to be an important part of
the experience of seeing work and what that means in terms of your relationship to artworks, to other people, to other makers,
to other thinkers becomes a very interesting set of dialogues about who it is you are and
what it is that you're doing and what you presume others should be doing to you.
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.
Do you try to persuade us that there have been three waves of biennalisation - hard word to say -
What are those three waves and why are there three?
What is the causal dynamic that has created three different waves, in your view?
AG:Well, now I would say that we're probably well and truly into the fourth wave, which may be at the end,
which a lot of people have been saying the same way that people have been saying the paintings because of photography.
We'll see if that happens. But I do wonder whether the last 18 months in particular have transformed the way that
we think about how these exhibitions are constructed and our own attendance at them.
But in terms of the three waves, it's fairly.
I mean, to some extent, it's always going to be fairly reductive,
but nonetheless there was some kind of set of parameters that became very clear as we were doing research.
So we're deducing this from the subject matters that we were looking at and Biennial start in 1895 in Pittsburgh and Carnegie.
And they raised a particular set of questions and demands and desires which were about philanthropy is very top-down.
It's about nation.
It's about bringing the so-called best of the international world to a local that international engagement.
And we see that then as we see the Whitney Biennial, we see it even I'd say in Sao Paolo in 1951,
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,
whereas I see it as kind of very firmly within this first wave because they found was that
precisely he wanted to bring the Venetian model to Sao Paolo and to kind of connect instruct with
the local art scene in what was happening elsewhere in the world and doing that through a mix
of his own money industrialist and Rockefeller money from New York. With the second wave,
as we called it. It was much more aligned with what was the purpose of these exhibitions and who was creating them.
So if the first wave was often a fairly capitalistic sort of frameworks or national sort of frameworks,
as with the Bennison and Sao Paolo. With the second wave, it was coming out of a different set of state sponsors.
So often the government was the sponsor of these exhibitions,
and often those governments were in of countries that were recently independent or seeking independence due to colonisation movements.
This is from Bandung, in particular, the East Africa Conference in Bandung in 1955 and afterwards.
So we're looking very carefully at why is it that so many of these exhibitions are happening in what was
explicitly calling itself the Third World or non-aligned countries, between 55 and probably the late 80s,
mid to late 80s? And what were some of the characteristics that informed that?
And even somewhere like Sydney formed in 1973,
there was quite a socialist leaning government in Australia at that time under Gough Whitlam or funded by the state,
but also funded the Australia Council for the Arts at the same time to give money and support to artists and theatre practitioners.
And there are always going to be exceptions to that,
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.
But with 89 and the obvious changes that emerge from that point on,
at least in terms of if we go by that notion of a year zero rupture, internet, neo-
liberalisation of so much the world etc etc and seeing biennales as part of that formation,
which is to a degree, true. It's also not true,
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,
but actually that second wave history completely complicates that presumption that biennales are,
as we call them, handmaidens to neoliberal globalisation.
And if we take a more complex view of these histories as, of course, at hisitorians, we should things get a lot murkier.
Which is not to say that they are a great exhibition format.
They aren't necessarily. But I don't think we can lay blame or overly celebrate the ontology of this exhibition form.
Well, but as historians, we do have to attend to some of the greater complexities.
GB: When is the third wave? Is 89, the turning point for the third wave and also that that period after 89?
AG: I don't think 89 itself is actually a very good marker.
It's an easily blurred and fudged marker.
But there are a number of changes that happened in the early to mid 1990s that kind of start to snowball
into a different set of exhibition structures in terms of funding of them in terms of supporting them,
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.
But then of course, with 2008 when the financial crises that happened.
And it's not just because of that. I think again, that's a fake origin of sorts.
But it becomes a kind of a useful device in some respect.
There are other changes that happen and the exhibition format starts to become very self critical.
People start doing talks as biennales. People look back on that second wave history.
GB: One of the distinctive characteristics of the third wave
if these divisions hold up is that by the time we have this, like mid 1990s,
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,
you know, the established way of doing it. So in a way, he's already working against the established set of conventions and discourses.
I mean, maybe that's something that marks the third wave is sort of a self consciousness of their own identities or something.
AG: yes and no. GB: I mean, creating these platforms, making them multinational almost enterprises, multi curatorial enterprises.
There are few things that happened around that period that are a different.
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.
Of course, we can look at the multiple curators involved [INAUDIBLE]
which was in {INAUDIBLE}, Kabul and a couple other places, as well as in Kassel in Germany.
And with Okwe there's a fine line sometimes between, as you said,
that kind of multinationalization, kind of outsourcing curatorial model and what a lot
of people talked about is this kind of decolonising of of the biennale structure.
They become uneasy bedfellows, but you can easily see it's the way you can read the same kind of practise,
by the way, or perhaps in both ways at the same time.
And I think he was very candid about that he didn't have to necessarily present a position one way or the other.
But actually, it's the complications and implications between those frameworks that are about the trade routes of curating.
Certainly, by the time of the mid-1990s, when he started to take off as a curator.
GB: So let's let's go back to 1989, if you like,
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,
you mentioned it before 'Politically unbecoming: post socialist art against democracy"
I bet your publisher loved that, already a provocation in the subtitle.
As you mentioned, the book focuses on.
Art practises that emerge in that transition between Communist state and capitalist ones.
So I guess my first question is why that particular geopolitical location?
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?
Yeah. What drew you to that? I mean, I guess there's two questions what drew you to those states?
And do you think there's something particular about the stress that those states
have to go through in their transformation from one form of being into another?
That makes them a particularly interesting sort of focus for study?
AG: Firstly, don't ever call the Slovenians Soviet or Post-Soviet.
So I started the project.
I mean, because that was the PhD I started that in 2004.
And actually the basis for that was thinking about how the term democracy and democratisation was being deployed.
And after 2001, 2002 and this resistance I had to the idealization
of democracy and democratisation as being framed through particularly
illegal interventions in West Asia and in Afghanistan and Iraq , in particular.
Okay, well. What about this: if democracy and democratisation become a kind of cultural arm of
interventions that clearly have other kinds of intents as well. How are cultural practitioners responding to this and have they responded to this?
And when I was in Paris, I was, well, you know, I was in an by this Swiss born,
Paris based artist Thomas Hirschhorn, and I had absolutely no idea what was going on.
And so from this sort of state of confusion, these questions, it was very clearly a work that was engaging with the
relationships between democracy rationality as it was being framed so significantly at the time
through a rhetoric of relations, that the discussion was being dragged into, was money and looting.
Inebriation, the whole range of things,
pornography that was deeply confusing and at the core of it was Hirschhorn talking about what the media was saying,
what on Earth, apart from kind of a set of formal relationships maybe. What on earth do {INAUDIBLE} have to do with this?
And so was from those questions and then some discussions with Hirschhorn
himself that things started to spill out in really pretty active and confusing ways.
And so the more I was engaging with communism,
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,
connected in one sense with similar later questions that I've been having with artists
and writers and others in Australia in terms of post colonialism and anti-colonialism. But.
we're being framed through works that's I was very,
very attracted to and sort of really rich mix of the conceptual, the historical, the more receptive, the spatial.
And the political in curious ways.
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
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?
GB: Why don't we define it? Or I'd be interested to hear how you would, how you define it?
I mean, are there any functioning democracies in the world today? I mean, what is democracy?
Yeah. Perhaps you could start with that. AG: Well, I think this is where the term happens.
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.
So rather than trying to provide something that [INAUDIBLE] the French political
philospher does as well. He doesn't try to define democracy, but he recognises that it's kind of this this empty signifiers.
So it's not necessarily about trying to fill this term. It's about, well, why is this term being filled?
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.
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.
I mean, is there in fact a thriving democracy somewhere?
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?
AG: Well, it certainly was being used in some of those ways.
and that was something that came through the research that I was doing and thinking with the artists in the
works that I was engaging with was that it wasn't just about what was happening in Iraq or Afghanistan after 2002.
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.
Democratisation was being deployed for a great financial purpose, a term that was being, a line that was used by Forbes magazine as [INAUDIBLE]
These countries, as you know, extractive sites and resources.
But even if you go back before then, how democracy was this kind of framework of desire, impossibility in 1970s into the 1980s?
And that was sort of the framework of something like [INAUDIBLE] this kind of disillusionment that emerges,
but also a recognition that none of these political philosophies and ambitions actually have that kind of cohesion or coherence.
GB: How do we how do we imagine an immense emancipatory politics, a better world, if you like,
if we don't project for ourselves an ideal democracy somewhere at the end of the rainbow?
AG: But this was the thing that is and that since the point of that book was that the artists
were trying to present their own kind of idiosyncratic mythologies to political frameworks,
at least for thinking about their works and what their works were trying to do.
I don't think that any of them would aspire to be able to have a broader remit.
And I think that's why it's so fascinating is that it did and indeed had a very
significant socio political role to play within Yugoslavia and in Slovenia.
But in a sense the limitations of art are also to the possibilities of art for learners to think, OK,
what does it mean to have in the case of the Kabakovs, emptiness as a way of thinking about the politics of art?
GB: So I think we better explain it. I'd be interested because I read about it,
but I'd like you to explain to me what Kabakov's idea or notion of emptiness means I know you
argue that this is a bit of a mis translation anyway that perhaps you can explain it.
Why is it a good concept to work with? AG: Well, he was making the work in the 1970s,
the 1980s and the ideas that he was having with a lot of other artists in Moscow.
One was in relation to their presumptions about [INAUDIBLE] philosophies
and this kind of resonant emptiness that can still be very enriching, very full,
and you actually have to transform your sensitivity to what it is or your expectations
of what it is that you're engaging with in order to actually be able to be engaging with that.
work, with that material more fully, in a sense, on its terms, not on one's own terms.
So that means kind of turning oneself inside out.
In order to get a better sense of what it was that you had thought this emptiness around you,
but is actually something that's very resonant and very full of already very active. So that was one part of it.
But there's something very significant in terms of a very repressive state situation in Moscow by the late 90s, early 1980s,
which is trying to find a kernel of something that is opaque that is still a frame of rupture or possibility of rupturing,
even if it's just on that kind of small scale lived basis of friendship that there is another world that is still possible.
But it seems like it's not being taken into consideration by the state or by others.
And so for Kabakov and Monastirski and some of the other practitioners in Moscow at the time,
there was this notion of emptiness, that could provide
a way of thinking through those, of thinking with that.
GB: Can I ask you, Anthony? So is this is this an idea specific to Moscow or the Soviet empire?
Or is there something we could learn about from Kabakov for us?
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
and recognises that actually some of the expectations of him as an artist and perhaps of him as a as a Soviet citizen,
as he still identified right through the 1990s, even after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Well, those expectations.
And the weight of sometimes even the suffocation of culture and art by political discourse or political exploitation or other
kinds of negative hysteria and presumptions is maybe not too dissimilar from some of the ideologies that play back in the day.
So he writes a text in the late 1980s that's published in English in 1994, while the Goodwill Games in Seattle,
which is about emptiness and he actually talks about his ideas in relation to - its very oblique - links to the United States.
And what it means, then to transpose that from the presumption that it's all about the Soviet Union,
it's all about Moscow in the 70s and 80s, which is still what a lot of people presume about Kabakov
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,
he's writing this in relation to the land from sea, the shining sea as he talks about politics,
history and what that means that in terms of his positioning.
As the Soviet dissident artist extraordinaire just started to unravel a whole other set of ways of thinking about what the term meant,
but also what it meant for him to transpose that, to migrate this and then to migrate that,
but not necessarily to translate it, that it still can be [INAUDIBLE]
Not a word that most people necessarily understand,
and therefore what it means to have untranslatability at the core of this kind of intercultural engagement.
GB: So Anthony, is this your own political philosophy too now?
AG: That's an ever shifting terrain because it's impossible on the one hand.
I mean, at the moment, you try to bring any of these utopian ideas into fruition that becomes -
GB: This is the point. This is, I guess, where I might, why I'm asking, because where is the utopia in this?
Yes, it sounds actually somewhat melancholy in that one is empty and full.
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.
AG: I think it's about, you know, maybe it is very melancholy.
Maybe that sort of Russian myth is very true, at least in this particular instance.
But it's also about undercutting any sense that that utopia can take that information, become an actualisation,
which historically, at least for a lot of these artists, has brought with it trauma and violence and despair.
So how do you still have hope, still have possibility, but at the same time, it's still allowing for limits and kind of,
again, sort of go back to that notion of unthinking or unravelling mastery so that if something else is possible,
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.
And I think that's something that does persist through what I'm trying to explore at the moment.
And I'm really taken by the way, the term adjacency is being used at the moment.
By people like [INAUDIBLE] in a discussion with Terry Smith, which is not about just about allieship or affinity or anything like that.
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.
But the themes can still be in that kind of oscillatory position and therefore perhaps still a possibility, rather than just melancholy.
GB: I do want to ask you more about this, but I'm just reminding people that we've got about 10 minutes left.
So if you have a question for Anthony beyond the ones I've been asking him, please, now is your time to interrogate him.
Get him down. Let me just ask, so do you,
are you confident then, that working and living within Oxford this is a place that one could engineer these kinds of tensions?
Or imagine these kinds of utopic, non-democratic futures?
I could I could turn the question the other way: how does one turn the situation you and I are in, for example,
how does one do it? How can one do it in a place like this?
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,
that coming out of a very particular and very stressed situation and one understands
the tensions that would lead to these kinds of ideas and these kinds of practises.
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
back when I was offered the job actually nearly a decade ago, here. And so I was speaking with Christian Thompson,
an indigenous Australian artist who was here at the Ruskin and doing his DPhil at the time:
'Why here? We both come from this kind of set of positionings where we resist colonial thinking as much as we possibly can,
whether it be from an indigenous or set of perspectives or backgrounds. Why here?'
It's the heartland of both colonialism and Christians
response, amongst others, was that it's also the heartland of a certain kind of anti-colonial thinking.
It was like, yes and no, of course. But to presume that this place and I think certainly what's happening and has
happened with that the Rhodes statue was kind of been fascinating in terms that it
is both a smothering place and also a place of allowing very different kinds of
of possibilities to emerge and discourses to emerge that have to be present.
And if that is comforting for some people, then that's even all the more important.
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.
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?
AG: Yes and no, but I wouldn't want to romanticise the art schools as one thing or another,
just as I wouldn't necessarily want to romanticise - even though I do -
History of art as one thing or another, either, you know, the discussions aren't necessarily less or more open
because of the presumed types of practises that are being nurtured in that environment.
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.
On occasions there can be some tensions between the two disciplines that you obviously find it a productive space for work and the thinking.
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.
The tensions are certainly there. They persist. And yet, at the same time, some of the best writing I've ever encountered in art
history have come from students at the Ruskin, and I'm talking, not just student writing and talking about writing in general.
And I don't know again that that's necessarily about the fact that it's an art school,
it's also about the fact that these students are brilliant writers for which I'm deeply thankful
that it has transformed my thinking in many respects it making me think much more clearly.
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.
GB: Now we've got a question from last week's guest, a visiting scholar from Denmark.
She says, What are your thoughts on the concept of [Lanban?]?
If I'm pronouncing that correctly, chosen by the Ruingruppe group for the next Documenta 15 and its focus on collectivity sharing collaboration,
is this the next wave and a way to rethink the mega event?
AG: That's a really interesting question.
For the things that are prospective like that are usually reserve judgement or reserve too much thought on that.
It was certainly the case with the previous documents or two in advance of that.
What I will say is that Ruingruppe is a really fascinating group of practitioners whose works,
whether it be through the freedom of artistic practise or curatorial practise,
all of their writings collectively, individually has been so significant,
especially in Jakarta and through Southeast Asia and into Australia.
But I think it's one of the things that is really exciting about what might happen with the next Documenta
is to sort of engage with how they - not just how do they respond to the heft of this mega institution,
but how they respond to the disruptions of the last 18 24 months because they are
usually so sensitive as practitioners and they are dispersed across the world.
So some of them are still in Jakarta, some of them are in Kassel and some of them are in Japan.
So those dispersals and how that then informs their thinking will be really fascinating to see not only where it works,
but maybe where it doesn't, how they think it works and how they think it doesn't.
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.
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.
GB: Speaking of dispersals, I've noticed you've been a visiting professor in a lot of dispersed places Estonia,
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?
What's the difference between being a visiting professor in Estonia and one in Taiwan, just to take that example?
AG: Humility.
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
piercing and deservedly so.
And I kind of love that the questions and the frameworks like the three waves, that they get sort of challenged,
corroded, torn down, rebuilt and done in different ways that it was about informed by localised histories that are always outward looking.
They're always much more than just parochial localism.
And that's it sort of reinforced my belief, not in kind of global art history,
but in terms of translocal, of needing to be, of having a sense of what's embedded within that locality,
even if it's one section of a city or one town, one region that embeddedness,
and all the histories that inform that disallow the kinds of abstractions and smoothness that a globality might otherwise aspire to.
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,
to engage with and to learn from through those kinds of experiences, which I hope very much continue.
even after the pandemics, because there is still so much to learn and to do and hopefully more collaborations to happen,
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.
GB: So you're on leave at the moment. And I know that part of it is just recovering.
But what are you working on now? What's the future?
Part of it is as well,
of course, as well, is the thinking about what it is that we want not just as professors and teachers,
but as people with families who are on the other side of the world who are maybe not in the best situation.
So the city that I'm from, Melbourne has been in the most horrific state of states of lockdown across the last 18 months,
and that's brought a lot of anxieties, concerns about family and friends. So that's been a really important part of this period.
But slowly finding a way of thinking, Okay, well, what might still be feasible as a set of research projects?
I had wanted to do this this big historical project on particular curatorial
episodes in different parts of the non-aligned worlds from the 50s to the 80s,
which requires a lot of primary research and archives and travel and meeting people.
And that's of course, not feasible. So what becomes feasible instead?
And so having to rethink that, I'm really excited by actually trying to work out what it means to write about what
curatorship and curating really are.
I was amazed by, you know, no wonder nobody's doing it is because it's really,
really hard. GB: I know you've said that there's insufficient documentation, especially in many of these important pioneering exhibitions from the 50s.
They put a lot of effort into putting them together, but not that much effort into documenting them and when they did,
the documents haven't survived in very good shape. So curating is a nebulous thing to find evidence for sometimes, you know,
but it also sort of reinforces our frameworks as art historians whereby, you know, what are we doing? Well, we're telling stories,
and that includes telling fabrications, of course, that's part of the fun, that fine line between the story and history.
So it allows for that. And then actually, curators and arts have been champions
in thinking about the storytelling capacities of history, writing , historiographies all the way through.
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.
GB: Well, that's a nice, provocative way to finish. Well, thank you so much, Anthony, for, you know, coursing through your career.
I know it's just an hour and we could talk for several more, I'm sure,
but I'm hoping that your audience has heard enough to know that if they want to talk about certain topics
Anthony Gardener is the guy, you can track him down. There's a lot to say.
Thank you so much, Anthony, for talking with me today. Thank you to our audience for listening.
And just a reminder that next week, I'll be torturing another guest, Lena Fritsch, curator of Tokyo, at the Ashmolean.
So we'll talk with Lena about that project and other projects she's been involved in.
But in the meantime, just thank Anthony again, and hopefully I'll see you all in a week.
Thanks, everyone. Thanks, Geoff.