“Instead of a hermeneutics, we need an erotics of art.” This is how Susan Sontag concluded her essay “Against Interpretation” (1964), in which she alluded to the need for all commentary on art to make the works – and by analogy, our personal experience – more real. A good way to achieve this is to listen to the artists’ own voices explaining their motivations, interests, references or the processes that have led them to that specific idea or project.
The interview is a good format to access that personal story of the artists and Hans-Ulrich Obrist is a good representative of the art of conversation, having conducted hundreds of them, of a transdisciplinary and transgenerational nature, which have become books, have been kept in oral recordings or video records, which bring us closer to the thoughts of artists, filmmakers, writers or architects, among others, who relate in a very close way, what has been important for them and what has not, who inspired them in their beginnings and how they develop their work. Profiles as varied as Björk, Miranda July, Matthew Barney, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Fischli & Weiss, Merce Cunningham, Richard Hamilton, Doris Lessing, Michel Houellebec, Rem Koolhaas and Zaha Hadid, among many others, have appeared in Obrist’s notebooks, tape recorders and videos.
An image that sums up the spirit of these interviews is the video in which the duo, Gilbert and George, dressed in their traditional classic style, open various cupboards in their studio in London and, with great care and affection, show small models that reproduce the distribution of their works in the different exhibition spaces in which they have shown their work while sharing anecdotes and experiences.
Videos and documentaries about artists are another good way to get closer to their work and thinking. In this sense, FILAF stands out, a festival dedicated to film and artist books that has been held for six years in Perpignan. This year’s edition brought some great things to the table, such as “Malpartida Fluxus Village” by María Pérez, a journey through the present and the past, accompanied by various testimonies, through the experience of the museum founded by Wolf Vostell in Cáceres; “Troublemakers, the history of land art”, by James Crump and Ronnie Sassoon, naturally told by some of its main protagonists; or “Eva Hesse” by Marcie Begleiter, which approaches the late artist through her personal diaries.
Precisely, the most intimate and personal voice appears in literary code in “Germà de Gel” by the artist Alicia Kopf, in which research on explorers and polar expeditions form an exceptional story that is the basis of Kopf’s artistic research and, at the same time, constitutes the basis of a story about her place in the world, within her family, art and society.
[Article published in Bonart, 2016]
