Interview: Janus Høm & Martyn Reynolds

Modeling Agency, Installation shot

In this show you claim to be curators but that’s not exactly what you’re doing, what do you think you’re doing here?

Janus Høm: A good place to start is perhaps the critique you and Martyn had in Vienna with Heimo Zobernig. Zobernig was talking about your Mariah Carey video, and gave the perspective that all appropriation reflects a critical engagement with that being appropriated. Both at the critique and afterwards, we talked about how, from our perspective, artists today appropriate with a sort of non-critical, apolitical attitude towards things - just using things plainly as material.

Martyn Reynolds: So we asked for people’s artwork with the condition that we could do whatever we want with it.  We could manipulate and change it, edit it, collage it with other artworks or pop culture ephemera; cut pieces off them - whatever. To use this material attitude to all cultural production.

Naturally this raises questions concerning autonomy, originality and the personal investment of the artist. But you as curators actually invest a lot throughout the process. I wonder how you deal with this investment of agency.

Janus Høm: To mention just one example, we considered Documenta 12 where the curatorial vision was criticised for subsuming the individual artworks. In lots of cases, we are quite familiar with that; but we were interested in pushing further into those areas. For Martyn and I, taking on the role of a curator was in a sense a hyperactive activity - with a lack of ethics regarding the autonomy of the artist and all that stuff.

Martyn Reynolds: So taking that to a conclusion: the schizophrenic or ego-maniacal curator, who really just wants to see their own vision expressed and to make this concrete. You can see this in a collage we made with Nora Kapfer’s work, a photo of classic modernist architecture collaged with a painting by Alexander Marchuk, which is this very nostalgic twenties' constructivist painting. And then we added an audio clip with headphones attached to the collage. The audio clip is from the latest Woody Allen movie, Midnight in Paris. The two characters in the film are talking about a bygone aesthetic era that expresses their ideals better than anything in their present. Both Janus and I love Nora's and Alexander's work, but for us their attitude towards their work is nostalgic. So we really wanted to push that into the faces of the audience. You could say that all the other nuances of their work are subsumed by our desire for it to be this nostalgic statement.

Nora Kapfer Allmanshausen: 1 2011, lamda print 115×161 cm. Alexander Marchuk: Tracks 2011, oil on canvas 120×80 cm; Woody Allen: Midnight in Paris 2010, audio clip 23 sec

So in this sense, curating becomes a liberated space for pedagogy and to highlight certain aspects of an artistic practice, which the artists cannot do themselves.

Janus Høm: I think it’s more precise to say we are accentuating aspects of the works rather than explaining them. If we look at another example in the show; in Vienna we heard Michele Pagel present her work and found her incredibly interesting. Although this is not explicitly a part of her practice we made a mini-documentary with her talking about her work, standing in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, and added the video to one of her sculptures.

Michele Pagel: El Calzone, 2011. 170 x 80 x 15 cm. Blanket, ceramics, documentary video of Michele Pagel describing her work

I must say after seeing the show, what caught my attention was what you did to the works rather than the works you selected to be in the show. You have said that these actions were unscrupulous, but I think that's an exaggeration. What I want to talk about is your attitude to the juxtaposing of works, making new layers with audio and video clips, subtitles and collages and so on. Maybe you can say something about those actions - not so much how but what - are there any connections, is there any common denominator in your work?

Martyn Reynolds: In most cases we just added a bit of American pop culture, basically.

Janus Høm: Haha, that’s pretty much true.

Martyn Reynolds: Since we started working on the show this juxtaposing and editing had been pretty intuitive, but in the last 24 hours installing the show we stepped back, and realized, “Hey! We just added a bit of American pop culture to everything”. And I don't really know what that's about. Why did we do that?

Janus Høm: Well, American pop culture is so all over the place so once we start thinking about pop culture in general, ninety percent of it will be American. And there's something very subjective about that, which perhaps moves away from the pedagogical thing - we are really just free-styling.  And that was good, because we didn't want the curating to be objective; whatever that means. We are modeling agency, and agency involves subjectivity, so that was important.

So how do your national backgrounds feature in this? As you say, you have a very subjective approach to the alterations, but you guys are from Denmark and New Zealand.

Martyn Reynolds: Both are small countries that don't produce much culture.

Janus Høm: At one point I suggested we involved a man called Sidney Lee, a Danish reality show star who is quite interesting for his dedication to elaborated dumbness. But the idea faded because Martyn had no knowledge of him. So for us to work together we needed to have a common frame of reference. That being the artists on the one hand, and - perhaps largely American - pop culture on the other.

Take the Coca-cola can for instance. It’s as much Norwegian to me as it’s American. To be honest, I don't really care that it’s American.

Martyn Reynolds: When I drink Coca-Cola here in Denmark or in Vienna it makes me think of drinking Coca-Cola with my friends in New Zealand… wow, a check from Coca-Cola should land in my hand right now!

Modeling Agency, Installation shot

This brings us to our international digital community which is, from what I know, your common playground for exchanging references, ideas and material. It's a platform very capable of reshaping cultural ideas, but what I am missing from your answers is more precisely what could be the consequences of what you are doing.

Martyn Reynolds: I got this text from a Vienna writer, Christoph Bruckner, the Theory of Referentiality. I wanted to use the text in the show as an artwork. It wasn't originally intended to be an artwork although Christoph makes art as well. We ended up writing one of the points from the text on my hand, then took a picture of me standing by the window holding a can of Coca-Cola with the text visible. The text on my hand reads: "References are like a civil code: they count even when you don’t know them". There are things going on at several levels here. The subject and the object are confused. Is the reference meant to be the can of Coke, because of it's ambiguous presence, or does it spill out beyond the photograph and refer to the whole show? Does the reference then relate to the artwork as the photograph and the viewer that is looking at it? And I think this relationship between subjectivity and objectivity and the relationship between ideas and materials - all these things slide around. This especially applies to artists working with found cultural material. Trying to get a handle on that thing is terribly difficult and it was wonderful to have an opportunity to play around with those things. And maybe that’s the thing about Modeling Agency, where to model agency in all these different ways enables us to get a handle on that. But it is very slippery.

Documentation of curator drinking coke with text on hand. Christoph Bruckner: Theory of Referentiality, 2010. Text (dimensions variable); can of Coca-Cola held by Martyn Reynolds; photograph and frame 20×20 cm.

Yes, this is the real muddy water for me. There is a personal investment that makes me aware of your willingness to play around and not be conceptually constrained. But then you are moving into a place which is not so easy to talk about – a bit of a quagmire. It’s a very common practice today: sharing references via the Internet, clips on Youtube or documentation of some obscure moment in history or even other artworks – and then to materialize new versions. But perhaps, as with your proposition, we can’t really grasp what the consequences are, we don't know to what extent it will alter our relation to actual events and original pieces of cultural material.

Martyn Reynolds: Maybe it's a little tacky to say it's because of the Internet, but it’s also decades of globalized popular culture that surround us; and the degree to which the arts are embedded in that environment. In the middle of it it's hard to see the implications.

Janus Høm: Yeah, I don’t know if we are fully aware of all that. We kept on forcing ourselves not to understand the show too well - we just threw ourselves out there. It might be a cliché, but understanding what you do too well, you are going to end up with something too well-rounded. From the very beginning R. Kelly’s Trapped in the Closet was the paradigm for our approach. For us he really embodies a subjective creativity in which it is totally unclear whether the conceptual underpinning of his masterpiece was really constructed, or if he just free-styled it. When you are not fully certain of what you are doing, I think things come about in wonderful, unexpected ways. When we went for the Woody Allen idea, we just said yes; we didn't sit down for an hour-long conceptual discussion about it.

Martyn Reynolds: It just involved a lot of jumping, high-fives and hugs and stuff. Some of the decisions in the show are very conceptually grounded and others are really like pop culture fever dreams.

Björn Westphal: Alle wollens keine tuns, 2010. 75 x 73 x 35 cm. Sculpture painting: found table legs, exhibition information poster, glass plate

Philipp Timischl: Man of Science, Man of Faith, 2011. 118 × 70 cm. Painting and screen, video 2 min, X Art Teenagers in Love 2010, video clips 9 sec