Interview: Mark Sladen

Using this quote by Kennedy (but not for its immediate patriotic point), I would like to ask: “What can you do for art?”, but also “What can art do for you?”

Working with artists is what makes me get up in the morning. It’s what motivates me, and what I do is to help artists achieve their ideas. That’s my role, really.

What are your own specific interests, and how might they figure in the shows you’ll put up at Charlottenborg?

I’ve pretty broad interests. I certainly wouldn’t say that there’s any one media or style that interests me in particular; I’m always trying to stretch my knowledge. At the moment I’m looking a lot at artists from the Middle East. But apart from fine art I also have a wider interest in visual culture in general, including design.

What's your interest in art from the Middle East?

There’s a really interesting generation of artists from the Middle East that has emerged internationally within the past decade – Walid Raad for instance, with whom I worked at the Barbican. And at the ICA I did an exhibition called Memorial to the Iraq War, a project in which I asked artists to make proposals for war memorials – that show involved a number of artists from the region. So I’ve been developing my experience in this area over the last few years, and I’m very interested to consolidate that. I still don’t know what shape such a project might take, but I know I would like to work in partnership with a curator from the Middle East.

What about design?

I haven’t yet decided how this might find a place in the programme, but I think it could be appropriate for occasional projects, especially focusing on designers who are working at the boundary between the art and design worlds, or designers who have had an influence on artists.

To me this border seems somehow fixed since design by its nature must be focussed on some kind of practical application in the so-called real world, whereas art is dealing more freely with experience, knowledge, form, history, or whatever.

I was at a seminar at the Royal College in London last week, talking about the difference between design-themed exhibitions and art-themed exhibitions. I was arguing that the distinction is not so much in the nature of the work – or in what I find interesting about the work - but mainly comes from the boundary between different industries or institutions. And I think it’s important not to be too bound by those kinds of rules.

Is there any particular set of experiences you bring along with you to this new position?

In terms of actual job experience, my last two full-time positions were at the Barbican and, most recently, at the ICA. The Barbican is an institution where you get to do really big projects, including international loan-exhibitions, and shows which need to speak to a broad public. Whereas the ICA is a smaller, more experimental institution, where one is often working with emerging artists, and with new work.

I guess Kunsthal Charlottenborg is somewhere in between?

Both kinds of projects should be manifest here, so I believe these different kinds of institutional experience are equally relevant. I’ve also worked in Scandinavia a number of times: most obviously on Momentum, of which I was one of the two curators in 2006; but I’ve also collaborated with institutions such as Malmö Konsthall, which co-produced the Rosalind Nashashibi exhibition that was at the ICA last year. In general I’ve much experience in building up institutions, and in fundraising, and I think that’s going to very important. Plus I do have a large international network, with many contacts and friendships that I hope can feed into the programme here.

Poor. Old. Tired. Horse – a show you put up at ICA last year – was a historical survey featuring text-based art in relation to the near-dead tradition of concrete poetry. To me this seems a somewhat heroic endeavour given the economy of infotainment that characterises contemporary museum structures.

That was a project I really loved doing. I believe it showed that there’s still a lot of relevance in the concrete poetry movement, and it was great fun to make an exhibition that was able to stretch from Carl Andre, with his text pieces from the sixties, through to Karl Holmqvist, who gave a performance at the opening. “Infotainment” as you call it isn’t really something that interests me, so I think I’ll leave that to other people. But I think you’re right that this phenomenon is starting to creep into museums, which can be a real problem. It is dangerous to underestimate the public.

Like how?

I think institutions often underestimate the intelligence of the public, and too often they lump people together with a “one size fits all” approach. To bring this back to Charlottenborg, I would say that we need to be speaking to a number of different publics within the city. I would like to create a programme with several strands, so that, yes, we can do these big exhibitions appealing to a general art-interested audience; but we can also do smaller projects, shows that address more specialised groups, including the network of younger artists in the city.

You might not find it that easy. Within the village pond of public funding you’ll be facing politicians without even the slightest interest in so-called avant-garde art, but who are very vigilant about how taxpayers’ money is spent.

I’m still learning about the Danish art system, so I don’t want to make detailed comment. But art does have its own specialized discourses – including its more experimental discourse – and I would always hope that funders respect this.

How do you conceive of Danish art in relation to the international art scene?

What I experienced while researching Momentum was that the Scandinavian countries have art scenes that are small but very active – and that are also truly international in their outlook. That’s a great combination, and it’s something I want to work with at Charlottenborg. The programme here should have very strong roots in the local scene, but with this international focus as well. Ever since I did Momentum I’ve kept my eyes open for a more permanent position in this region, and now I have one. Obviously I appreciate that the different Scandinavian countries have different characteristics, and I’m still learning about the specifics of the Danish art scene, but everything I’ve seen makes me very positive about the job.

At the ICA you created a six-month season called Nought to Sixty, a large and ambitious programme presenting sixty emerging artists based in Britain and Ireland. Would you like to do something similar here in Denmark? We could sure use a little help from a friend.

That was an amazing experience. It had this incredible pace and rhythm to it, with these week-long exhibitions, as well as many performances, screenings, talks, and so on. But it was a one-off experience! However, one of the main reasons I did it was because I was very keen on building a community of artists around the ICA, and this is something that is relevant to Charlottenborg as well. The recent market boom worked to deemphasise notion of community within the art world, and one of the things I’m hoping for with this recession is that we’ll see people cherishing this idea of the art community again. The social aspect of institutions is something that really interests me, and I would like to help build the community around Charlottenborg, and to further strengthen the art community in the city.

Looking back in a couple of years, what would you like to have accomplished, even in your wildest dreams?

Well, going back to what I’ve just been saying, I would like to see a whole range of publics having a sense of ownership of this building, from the community of younger artist through to that more general art-interested public. And I would like to see Kunsthal Charlottenborg take its place in the top group of contemporary art institutions in Europe – I see no reason why that shouldn’t happen.

Obviously that must be the goal of any serious institution, but how are you going to accomplish it?

By the quality and ambition of what we do. I think Charlottenborg has this amazing range of positives: it has these grand and beautiful spaces; it’s right in the centre of a major European capital; it has a great team of people working for it; and it’s an institution for which many people in the city feel a lot of affection. This is a great combination of factors, so I really think we can do something incredibly strong here.

How would you determine the criteria of success?

Well, it’s not about how many visitors, or which star artists, and it’s not about column-inches in magazines. It’s all about doing something of quality, something that really contributes to a discourse. In fact, there are several discourses within which we have to participate, and our contribution has to be top quality within each of those. I’m very ambitious on behalf of this institution; I didn’t come here to rest on my laurels.

Given the somewhat turbulent past of this place, what would be the worst thing that could happen?

As much as I like to anticipate problems, I don’t think it would be clever to talk about them in advance.

Could you mention at least one show that you would really like to do in the near future? I’m not going to hold it against you if it doesn’t come true.

A big group project with artists from the Middle East. That’s something I would very much like to see happen. However, I only begin work on Tuesday, and although I have lots of ideas for projects I would like to do, I really want to test them out more before announcing anything publicly. What I can do is outline the strategy that I have been working on. I would like to make a multi-strand programme, one of the strands being these large shows in the North wing – major group shows, thematic exhibitions and retrospectives. The smaller South wing I see more as a mixed-use area, including smaller shows where we would work with single artists on exhibitions of new work and new commissions. I would also like to see strand of archival displays looking at aspects of the history of Charlottenborg, and of the art scene in Copenhagen – helping put our programme into context. Finally, I’m really keen on having a strand in the programme that involves the students from the Academy. I think it’s a great that the Kunsthal and the Academy are neighbours, and I would very much like to strengthen the dialogue between these two institutions.

Thank you.