Interview: Will Bradley

Lillian Schwartz & Ken Knowlton: Googolplex, 1972. 5:30 min. 16 mm black & white.

What’s the historical backdrop for the theme of the show?

Well, the title of the show is Fragments of Machines and what is behind that for me is a story of rebellion in 19th century England, organized attacks on the new, industrial weaving machines by a loose group of people who called themselves luddites and invented a fictional leader, King Ludd. The introduction of the machines was aimed at changing the form of life of a whole class of artisans, turning their work into mechanical activity and them into industrial labourers. The title of the show refers to the breaking of the machines as its starting point, and also refers to a text by Karl Marx that deals with industrialization and technology. This text is a set of notes for a more complete treatment of the subject and is often referred to as “The fragment on machines.” Still, it has served as an inspiration for much theoretical work since, particularly since the 1970s, as a basis for thinking about the effect of technology and industrialization in terms of Marx's critique of political economy.

And the artists in the show are they some sort of neo-luddites?

Ah, no, and I think that this is very important – with the possible exception of Travis Meinolf. I've brought together works by artists who each have an intelligent relationship to new technology in their work, but whose own positions are quite diverse. Perhaps it's only me who can really be described as a new luddite.

But yes, Travis Meinolf has written that he is working on a personal industrial revolution. His work is explicitly anti-industrial and handmade. He is maybe part of a wider recent cultural moment, a craft revival and an increased interest in do-it-yourself approaches which, of course, can shade sort of uncomfortably into the panacea of organic farming and new-age middle-class ecology. But Travis is both an enthusiast and a purist, and is well aware of the traps and contradictions.

What does he do?

He is a weaver. He builds his own looms and weaves textiles, cloth blankets and such by hand, but his practice is also much more than that. It is social and educational in the best sense. He organises communal production, workshops and guerrilla interventions, where he brings his loom into public places or private buildings and gives spontaneous weaving demonstrations for the people that he meets. He is very much concerned with questions of individual freedom and of unalienated labour, the ideals of pleasure in one’s own work, ownership of the means of production, and uncommodified distribution.

Travis Meinolf: Untitled, 2010. 193 x 150 cm. Cotton, hemp, wool yarn.

And the other artists?

The other artists in the show are all pursuing different ends. This is certainly not strictly a theme show, where all the artists are doing research into the central subject. But there are relations that reflect on the central subject in one way or another.

Lillian Schwartz, for example, is far from being a luddite. She seems to be very much a technical utopian. The work seems to talk about a connection between technological and biological being, and an ecstatic or almost ritual state that might be achieved. She began working at a time when Buckminster Fuller and Marshall McLuhan’s utopian ideas, the synthesis between cybernetic or virtual networks and some sort of imagined primitive tribal culture in a 'global village' seemed a possible and good thing.

Yeah, so that’s very strange. Lillian Schwartz makes kinetic patchworks with computer graphics that she tops with African tribal chant. In her work the future is the past in some way?

Yes. In a sense, yes. In this idealised reading, media technology offers the possibility to reclaim, or renew, authentic experience.

So how do the other works relate to each other?

There is a narrative that I can give you that very closely relates the works to one another and the central theme. But also, what I hope – and perhaps this is a strange thing for a curator to hope for from a themed exhibition – is that the works also do not necessarily easily relate to one another. In fact, there may be some kind of disjunction caused by trying to fit the works into one continuum. For example, I imagine that to see Googolplex by Lillian Schwartz alongside a small kitchen knife that has been painted with watercolor paint by Hayley Tompkins and could be a mysterious and possibly puzzling conjunction.

Having said that, there are connections that can be spelled out. Lillian Schwartz’s film was made while she was employed by the phone company AT&T to do artistic research, to use their technology and try to figure out what else it was capable of, that it was not designed for. And Hayley talks about her work as a process of “optical research”. She deals with the question of technology in her treatment of the knife, or the mobile phone, that has had its function, and our relation to it, changed or bypassed by painting. So in a way Hayley’s and Lillian’s works are both attempts at grasping the contingency of these technologies, but from different viewpoints.

Craig Mulholland: Free Radicals #9, 12, 17 & 18, 2008. Each: 71 x 70 cm. Framed polycarbonate and thread on etched and drilled aluminium.

Craig Mulholland is presented with a series of paintings referencing smashed factory windows. Is he an example of an artist who is engaged in a critique of capitalist industrialization?

Craig’s amazing video opera, which is also part of Fragments of Machines, is about a dialogue between a camera and an operator, and refers to Foucault's redescription of the panopticon. The panopticon becomes not simply a method of visual surveillance, but a metaphor for a society with a loose but all-encompassing level of technological surveillance which requires our own participation in order to function. But Craig’s work is less an explicit critique than a way to dramatize this situation, to make it visible, and to expose it emotionally, in a new way.

Tauba Auerbach has said in an interview that she earlier on felt like a luddite, but less so now. How do you view her way of dealing with technology?

Tauba Auerbach is represented in the exhibition with an altered typewriter that has been painted but, unlike with Hayley Tompkins’ knife and mobile phone, the painting over doesn’t destroy its use for the purpose intended, it's the sign of an underlying change. The typewriter has been remixed, so the characters it produces no longer correspond to those printed on the keyboard, so that it is almost impossible to produce meaningful text. Instead, it produces a code. You could see it as referring to the famous German Enigma code machines, which the mathematician Alan Turing worked on breaking during the Second World War, a process which led to the creation of the first digital computers.

Marshall McLuhan’s ideas about the primacy of the alphabet as a technology also come to mind. We are taught in school that it was the road that was the Romans’ big idea, the technology which allowed them to build their empire. But McLuhan proposed that the Roman alphabet was more important, because what can be send down the road is not just soldiers but also specific, precise information that allows you to not only build an empire, but control it.

Haley Tompkins: Tele and Data, 2010. 12 x 4,5 cm. Mobile phone, watercolour. Claire Fontaine: Passepartout München, 2009. Hacksawblades, bicyclespokes, keyrings, paperclips, allenkeys, safety pins, hairpins. Unique.

So you’re using the word “technology” in a broad sense?

Yes, perhaps in the same way McLuhan proposes the alphabet as a technology, to reflect on the hidden technologies of capitalism. In connection to Claire Fontaine’s work, for example, you could think of the idea of property itself as technology. Claire Fontaine’s Passepartout is a sculpture, an object - a pleasing object, I think. It’s a key-ring, or a lot of key-rings. Then when you look at the keys you see that they are not actually keys but lock-picks, home-made from hacksaw blades or hair grips, in every possible form. So it's a technological response to a particular technological enforcement of private property, the invention of the lock.

There is an op-art feel to a lot of the works in the show... What is your fascination with this sort of op-art that many people consider a purely retinal and thus physiological and thus – pardon my English – literally brain-dead phenomenon?

(Laughter)

There is a retinal-kinetic thing going on in Lillian Schwartz’ works. Many of her works aim at producing a physiological sensation, and in terms of the show as a whole, maybe that kind of encounter represents a proposal about the mechanical nature of the human body. But if some of the works seem to be linked by grids, repetition, serial switching of colors and so on, this is because somewhere underneath it all I was thinking about weaving when I was putting the show together. The historical origins of the digital computer in the punch-card programming of the 19th century Jacquard loom, the question of pattern and order and its disruption.

Lillian Schwartz & Ken Knowlton: Googolplex, 1972. 5:30 min. 16 mm black & white.

Why did you agree to do a show at IMO?

I think IMO is a very interesting proposition. I think the way the gallery is structured around artists is a really interesting experiment. I like the idealism mixed with pragmatism that it represents. I like the fact that the space is run by artists who are not only interested in promoting themselves and their work. And it is always nice to have the opportunity to invite artists whose works you admire to exhibit and I have been really happy to come here in Copenhagen.

And what are your up-coming projects?

I should have said this before, but another reason why I am curious about IMO is that I’m in the process of establishing an art space myself in Oslo. A different kind of thing – a non-profit exhibition space. It won’t represent artists or sell work. But this is the big project I’m involved in at the moment with a Norwegian curator. And if all goes well, we will start off in the summer and open the space with programming in September.

So I see that there’s a similarity between your interest in how artists organize themselves and your interest in how technology organize people…

You’ve got it. It is all the same question. It is a question of liberty at the end of the day… I hope you’re not recording that because that is a fucking appalling pretentious thing to say.

Well, that’s ok with me…

No, we can’t … I … Turn off the machine so we can talk about that….

Ok, Thanks!

Tauba Auerbach: Ambo Dextra, 2005. 32 x 27 cm. Reconfigured typewriter, enamel Unique.