The Adventures of ART

June 28 1997 - March 22 1998

 

Barry Schwabsky

Questions for Martin Bigum
Exchange conducted by fax, New York - Copenhagen, May 1997

Barry Schwabsky: Are you serious?

Martin Bigum: I suppose one can say that I am as serious as reality allows me to be. What is interesting to me, however, is how much of the seriousness of reality can be perceived. I have this particular relationship with reality that I must be able to give it back what it gave to me. I perceive it as a decidedly consciously entity paying attention to how I handle my life - and through that reality itself. Also, it refuses to begin a dialogue, it will not allow itself to be overpowered - or decoded. And there it is that I have art, right where the space of freedom appears, where I can assert my own self and am not all that easy to stop - because here I am the one establishing reality. Whenever my artwork is most successful I achieve this joyous feeling that I surprised reality, came on to it from behind or overtook it in the inner lane - naturally, this applies temporally as well, since my art turns into artworks that, hopefully, will be here for a few years still to come. For quite some years during which reality itself is repeatedly submerged by its own rapid development. Then the static rigidity of my works remains: the hint of a definite personal dimension, a frozen moment in time, the notion of autonomy, the blind angles in an art work throwing a light on some universal basic conditions of humankind. What is interesting is this: is reality really serious, or does it merely test us? The rest is up to me - or to the individual.

A commentator on your work once adduced a quotation from Picasso: "I do not find, I seek". I remember the line differently; according to my recollection, Picasso said just the opposite: "I do not seek, I find". The one who seeks is in earnest, is engaged in a quest, in a quasi-religious sence, but never sure of having reached the goal. The one who finds, on the other hand, believes in luck, that is, in his own luck - in the fact that he has already been chosen to stand at the center of art. One is an unhappy consciousness, the other a happy one. Which are you?

Both - by necessity I must be both. To find something in art can only be compared to finding an interesting new lead to explore - a lead that from then on is incorporated into the pure process, until one, say, "finds again", at the time when what was found before is all used up and has produced new mind stuff - or layers of meaning. After all, to find - not only in art but also in life as a whole - does not exclude additional seeking. Neither does the idea of seeking obstruct that of finding. It is a necessary dialectic leading the curious individual into other aspects, other understandings, of what life really is. Still, it is always good for an artist to define whether he or she is process- or work-focused, as well as form- or content-focused. In my own case I am so obviously work-focused through and through moreover, to me form and content can not be separated - to attempt that would be like clapping with one hand. I am work-focused, because the process to me is something rather private - or it is rooted in something that is craftmanship, pure and simple. And as Aristotle said, "craftmanship is just a tool to art". The artwork is the interesting, definitive gesture. As for the schism existing between form and content, to me the form is merely an innate part of the artist, in and by itself it is insignificant. What is interesting, however, is the undefinable, individual sur-
plus needed to venture the content. In other words, the form merely serves as a basis for the real expression, which is the content - and the content is something outside oneself and can only be reached through the artwork, although, paradoxically enough, the artist has to live through and experience the content 500 percent. To anyone alive it is obvious that life is good and evil, cursed and ecstatic - the happy one seeks, the unhappy one finds and vice versa. The artist's option for holding on to this experience presents itself in the artwork.

Does "modernism" still mean anything to you? Or "postmodernism", for that matter?

No - just as I am sure the isms will vanish completely during the next millenia, or rather I hope so. I believe in the personal dimension. I believe in the standard of aesthetics involving an ethical approach to the world at large. And which from there reflects back to the individual's moral disposition towards reality. And to me aesthetics is - since it is treated within the concept of an autonomous artistic space - non-dogmatic, non-standardizing, and it is not leaning against a sense defined by others. Art is not illustration; art is not ideology. Actually, in the 90'es the art field is completely free from ideologies, systems and other pitfalls having as their primary aim to dictate to art. And it should not be dictated to - it cannot. In fact, artistically speaking, the 90'es represent the best position from which to venture out, no matter how shoddy, opportunistic, many-headed, effect-chasing the art scene may seem. I once said that "the 90'es are the decade of individualism" - perhaps that is why these years feel like water flowing out on the floor, and nobody knows where it flows to. For that is the seeking individual's condition. Also,there is no sociolo-
gical or ideological framework to establish rules. When I said this I was still harboring hopes for independence. But it is pointless to have ambitions on behalf of others, and certainly not for more than my own art's sake. One can say that I have had to content myself with living my own life according to this premonition. The philosopher Felix Guattari claimed that Modernism merely is, or was, a stage in an as-yet uncompleted Romanticism, and I agree with this. However, with respect to my awareness of the new factual knowledge produced during this century, and of its blind alleys, and because I am living in a decade that is transitional, to say the least, and also decisively final, I will describe my project as expressing a kind af hyper-modernity. Or a pure and undilutedly classical honest seeking, if you prefer.

You show paintings, photography and video together under the umbrella of a single artistic project. You also write poetry, but until now it has not been presented together with the rest. How would you articulate the distinction between these two projects, visual and literary? Does the fact that you are now including poetry with The Adventures of ART mean that these projects are coming together, or that your understanding of their relationship has changed?

During the past few years I have experienced a coalescence of the various media I work with. Suddenly they merged to form a clear-cut, coherent outline and a unitary whole. And every time this happened I felt shocked, because it was only after subsequent reflection that I was able to see that this was indeed what had happened. It is an awe-inspiring factor in art that there is not only an unconscious consciousness speaking up for itself, but also a conscious unconsciousness.
Whenever you experience this process intimately - this merging together and its being revealed through reflection on the process you just passed through, yes, then the seriousness of what you are doing really begins to dawn you. In fact, it is not a matter of choosing, rather it is a calling. As for my poetry and my painting I think I can say with reasonable conviction that they will never merge completely. And this I base on the craftmanship involved, the form of my caricatural drawing method has nothing in common with the images, or visualizations, you find in the poems. But still, both fields draw sustenance from the experiences gained from the other, and yet their content might very well be the same - although my poetry is much more raw and more vulnerable than my painting project, which contains so much irony and serious criticism of the art concept - its image and institution. When the motifs in my paintings are most subdued, silent, then they also contain a mysteriousness that draws its sustenance from the very best moments in my best poems. Similarly some of my other poems draw their sustenance from my most expansive paintings - here the ornamental and spiraling drive can expand into extented, broader poems. But their form and the purely formal differences between these two media prevent them from merging completely.
Where I have experienced distinct mergers during the last few years, however, is between poetry on one hand and photography, video and installation on the other. With the photos it is the frozen moment in time that is vital, and that alone - since their message contains the same indecipherable collection of factors as in a good poem: the very last line in a poem that just swept the table clean. It is the voyeur's snapshot, the intimate and the remote, as seen through the eyes of an individual; it is documentation. And they serve as a marvelous diversion if, for a while, I wish to get away from my way of drawing and painting that demands so much time and energy. The scope of the videos is even greater, both in the narrative and temporal sense; here I can deal with a deluge of impressions which would be impossible to contain in a painting or a poem. But nevertheless they contain the poems' atomistic method of description. Let me mention one such merging experience: In 1996 I published a collection of poetry entitled Overmorgen (Millennium) (Day After Tomorrow (Millennium)). I had been working on it since 1992 and did not, during the four intervening years, realize that its content would be the individual and global friction around the "fin de millenaire". it was an understanding that had simply come to me through my own writing. In poem after poem it became crystal clear that this was indeed its aim. Simultaneously, while this process was beginning to take shape, I began in my field of visual arts to draw up the storyboard and take the first shots for the video Runner (Millennium). Neither of these actions was in any way defined as turning around the same axis. But the essence of this video is the same as the one found in the collection of poetry. When this became obvious, Runner was finally shown in the exhibition Millennium in 1996, which at that time had an entire collection of poetry as its basis, or pendulum - it was published six months earlier. I could almost hear the two media exult that they had shared such a prominent position in my universe. And that I did not discearn it before then!

The installations are entirely physical poems in which words are replaced by materials serving as allegories. And with the installations it is like with the pictures, poems, videos: they are not completed until they are inside the observer's mind.

In The Adventures of ART you find three poems from Overmorgen (Millennium) accompanied by music and sung by me with string instruments and all. This is a second version of the video Runner, which for the time being has been equipped with a new soundtrack. And whatever the poems mention, the words I sing, you can almost literally see on the screen. If the poem says "a warm, warm glowing oily sky / above a wintry landscape", yes, then that is precisely what you see. And the best part is that it is no coincidence at all - I merely discovered it by coincidence! It is a correlative relationship having nothing to do with me, but I am the one chosen to record it.

I'm curious about your obsession - is that the right word? - with the idea of the millennium. Don't you think that, by the time it arrives, the millennium will have already become passé? That is, ins't it one of those events whose interest is exhausted in its anticipation?

Are you serious?

Barry Schwabsky is a New York-based
art critic who writes regularly for Artforum,
Art in America, and other publications.
He is the author of The Widening Circle:
Consequences of Modernism in Contemp-
orary Art (Cambridge University Press,
1997), and co-author of Jessica Stockholder
(Phaidon Press, 1995).