Der Nichtsehrwunderblock: A brief chat about a future project
Matt Cianfrani – who is currently in Bern as an artist in residence (residency.ch) – met Curator Laura Gati for lunch. This is one of the things they talked about.
| Matt | Now we’re talking about me. |
| Laura | Don’t say you didn’t expect it. That’s what being interviewed is all about. |
| Matt | You’re right. |
| Laura | That’s the really nice thing about being an artist, you get interviewed. It’s all about you. So, I’m going to you ask you questions. |
| Matt | Personal questions? Are you going to ask me about my relationship with my parents? |
| Laura | Sure, if it’s relevant to your work. |
| Matt | I don’t think it is. I mean, art is not therapy for me. |
Matt Cianfrani, Hard Labor, 620 x 620 px, gif, 2012.
| Laura | So, what do you think about this Death of The Author idea? |
| Matt | Well, it’s problematic to me because I think a lot of artists rely on that… that their audience is so engaged that they’re going to invest themselves heavily into something that doesn’t immediately reveal itself. Then there is the other side, where some artists rely on the fact that an audience will engage itself (why else are they there?), so that creates a type of laziness on the part of the artist. |
| Laura | Because you expect the audience to investigate why you did it. |
| Matt | Completely on their own. I think there are artists that have worked this way historically and there was probably a necessary context for that. But then, we all go to art school and we all learn this history, and we just kind of use these tropes to produce art. Then you really have to worry about the artists’ intentionality. |
| Laura | I just find the intentionality problematic because it just makes of the artwork this kind of clue… |
| Matt | Glue? |
| Laura | No, clue… but yeah you can think of… |
| Matt | I know, that kind of works too. |
| Laura | It wasn’t how I intended it… |
| Matt | But that’s how we’re writing it because it sounds better. |
| Laura | Oh my god, that’s so Derrida. But in any case; it really reduces the artwork to this thing of, it can not stand on its own because you’re always looking for the connection to the person. |
| Matt | Me. |
| Laura | Yeah, let’s get back to you. I’m wondering about that in connection to your ideas about the hard-drive. This archive, as you perceive is this physical entity, a physical extension. You suggested this idea of positioning the hard-drive as an extension of you and posing that as interesting for the viewer. The hard-drive is in a way a documentary of you or how you perceive. Implicitly, this is something the viewer will be interested in? Access to your person? |
| Matt | Sure. But I don’t want to say that I assume the viewer will be interested in having access to my personal experiences. I think that it’s more to do with having access to one’s personal experiences as a general concept. It’s a strategy or mechanism that I’m putting forth that any body can use. There might be somebody with a much more interesting life that has a much more interesting hard-drive associated with that life. What’s interesting is that, we are archiving our experiences. Anybody who engages with a social media platform, any body who takes photos of their family vacation or whatever is doing this. Then it’s about distribution, or functionality for that archive. To what end are we collecting all these corrupted and carefully curated versions of our experience. To what end are we distributing this data through these secondary filters? With putting the hard-drive on display, I guess what I’m proposing is something that we are already doing through social media platforms. But I’m suggesting that a hard-drive, distinct from a profile or account, is something more personal where the less filtered data can be accessed. |
| Laura | Would it be part of the work that one could really look at the contents? Or is it just a gesture? |
| Matt | I mean obviously, you would have to trust or not trust, and that’s open, to what degree the artist affects the content. So, in that way there is a bit of a closed position, a wall that you inevitably encounter when you’re dealing with another person. But, in a general sense, it really would just be the viewer rifling through the contents. I’ve even played with the idea of… how do you interface with this? Is it a private screen where the way you move through the material is undisclosed? Or, is it projected for an audience? Then it becomes an event that makes both the viewer and the artist vulnerable to judgment. Judgment is normal for an artist. But the viewer might not be so comfortable. I might have some dirty stuff on that hard-drive. |
| Laura | So art is therapy for you. |
| Matt | Uh… |
Veröffentlicht unter Gastbeitrag, residency.ch
Schlagwörter: Interview, residency.ch
