[23. juni 2004]
Interview

Chris Gilbert

Interview: Chris Gilbert
Interview with curator Chris Gilbert, during his visit to Copenhagen. By Khaled D. Ramadan, Chamber of Public Secrets
 
Chris Gilbert is Curator of Contemporary Art at The Baltimore Museum of Art. His recent writings have appeared in Mute, Oxford Art Journal, and Trouble. During a visit to Copenhagen, Malmö, and Hamburg this April, we met for the first time at Charlottenborg cantina and the second at Venter VOVO. Chris had a lot to do during his visit but he has a great deal to say too. I talked to him about what he was seeing around Copenhagen and how he felt about it. I wanted to share some of our conversations with Kopenhagen.dk’s readers and also give him a chance to reflect on his visit.
 
In short, tell us more about you? And what brings you to Copenhagen?
In fact, I came here for work-related reasons. There were two specific purposes - to meet with Henriette Heisse and Jakob Jakobsen of Copenhagen Free University, who have a residency in Hamburg this April, and to look at a work by Olafur Eliasson that was recently built here in Hvidovre. Yet, of course, I wanted to see what was going on more generally. I visited Copenhagen in February last year, so this time I could plunge in a little more deeply - and take a second look at some things as well. Happily, the weather is much better now.
 
Olafur Eliasson was somehow the focus of your visit. Would you like to talk more about your motives and motivation with regard to Eliasson?
The completion of the work by Olafur - a steel pavilion with kaleidoscope effect inside (not unlike the work shown in Venice last summer) determined the timing of my visit. I’ve been in dialogue with Olafur about this work since the fall, and I was deeply gratified to see the result. The work is simpler and, in my opinion, more elegant than the one in Venice. The feeling inside, when I saw it yesterday, is quite mysterious actually. Terms like “wonder” and “awe” come to mind - all words that I would normally associate with the romantic sublime. I’m particularly interested in the sublime in its relation to political agency. The early romantics, you know, believed that such experiences served as reminders of human efficacy. Hence, they could be seen as training for a kind of activism, though it’s not a word that they would have used.
 
For the time being you are curator at The Baltimore Museum of Art. Would you like to share more about the Museum, its views and practices?
I’ve been at the BMA for the past six months. Shortly before I was hired, the museum went through a strategic planning process in which it was decided that contemporary art would be one of two major foci. Of course, that was a key reason for my wanting to join the museum and head up its contemporary department. At the museum, the program that I’m forming in contemporary art has to do with, on the one hand, an interest in creating a discursive space under the umbrella of contemporary art (primarily in exhibitions) and, on the other, trying to negotiate a meaningful relationship between that exhibition practice and the museum’s collection, which is quite strong on the art of the 60's and 70's including Minimalism and practices that could loosely be defined as conceptual. In fact, many of the ideas about a discursive space are inspired by Charles Esche’s work at the Rooseum, though I suppose there’s a significant amount of mistranslation involved insofar as the propositions have to function differently on the other side of the Atlantic where, as you know, the basic tenets of democracy are not just threatened - as they might be here in Europe - but are actually fully routed, or driven underground.

Chris Gilbert
 
You managed to meet with some independent curators, artist run spaces, gallerists, artists, and to see a bit of the local visual culture initiatives. What are your reactions? Would like to elaborate on the Danish art scene?
Certainly I wouldn’t care to play instant expert on the Danish art scene, yet perhaps taken for what they are, my hasty impressions are worth something. I should begin for saying that I’m really impressed by the level of self-organization on the part of artists here. I understand that this has emerged because of the lack of institutional support, so I should refrain from seeing it as wholly positive. Yet I have to say that compared to the east London scene and the minimum of self-organization that exists in New York, the level here in Copenhagen, project-for-project, is very high. I suppose that has to do with the specter of the marketplace that haunts and frames even the alternative scenes in Britain and the United States. It’s kept more at bay here. As far as a set of common interests is concerned, there do seem to be a number of artists here who are investigating what could be called the production of subjectivity and the articulation of strategies of resistance to forms of social control. This thread could be seen to link, say, a group like N55, whose work is both architectural and theoretical, to the more abstract and speculative refusals of Copenhagen Free University. Even Lars von Trier, in a film like The Idiots, can be read as a manual for resistant subjectivity. That film is so important because capitalism has such use for the figure of the idiot. On the one hand, it’s the idiot that is claimed to be excluded, and on the other hand it is idiots who are the secretly imagined visitors to the shopping mall, the sports game, or the museum. Hence, by occupying this heavily mythologized position--fleshing it out as it were--von Trier is taking a stance in a way by giving presence to a figure that is both needed and excluded. In capitalism the idiot is really an impossible figure, whose very impossibility is one of the cornerstones of our present social configuration.
 
From your angle, how do you see the changes and the challenges in the United States, Europe, and the rest of the world? Any predictions on what we are going to witness?
Of course, in the big world everything does look very dark to me. Yet I suppose that I’m truly an American in that I can’t help but be optimistic. Actually, I’ve been walking around with a line from Hölderlin in my head: “Where danger is, there also grows the rescuing power.” Silly, I know, but I’ve also been rereading Toni Negri and in principle I reject a lot of what he says, thinking that it’s a Christianization or perhaps a Hegelianizaton of Marx. You know how Negri, despite his protests to the contrary, does seem to posit an almost metaphysical machinery that will make things better - call it the salvation machine. I’m deeply skeptical but, on the other hand, there do seem to be a lot of initiatives emerging around the globe, including many in the Nordic countries, that you could read as he does as singularities, as points of resistance that might come together in the vertical way that Negri describes. More important, this does seem to be our best hope, and so I’m willing to cast my lot with it, in the manner of Pascal.
 
Do you think you would like to visit Copenhagen or the Nordic region again in the future?
Visit? No, live! My grandmother was from a Norwegian immigrant family. It’s pathetic, but Americans always seem to follow an inevitable trajectory that leads to exploring their “roots.” In twenty years I’ll probably develop a taste for pickled herring and look for a homestead outside of Bergen. Joking aside, I’m sure to be back. As you know, I’m a great admirer of many of the artists and curators working here. I also think that socialism, what’s left of it, and particularly on the Swedish model, is a fine idea.

Khaled D. Ramadan is an artist based in Copenhagen. He is a curator and PhD Cand. at the Department for Cultural Studies and the Arts, Copenhagen University. He is an external lecturer specialized in visual and mobile aesthetics. He has curated and coordinated several projects for Nordic Institute for Contemporary Art, NIFCA: “Clockwise”, “Art Error Ism” and “Under Construction”.
Published several articles in international art magazines, latest a “Special Dossier” in ATLANTICA, Nr 35 - 2003. He is the editor of the anthology “Peripheral Insider” forth coming by Museum Tusculanum Press, Copenhagen University.
Founder of “Chamber of Public Secrets” a mobile space and network apparatus based on collective art practises, which organized TERROR-ISM, the debate with Sarat Maharaj, Max Ryhannen and Anders Michelsen. The Chamber also organize “Beyond Visual Experience” a debate with Mona Hatoum, Bülent Diken, and Maria Hirvi, April 2004 Charlottenborg Copenhagen.