Critical Perspectives:

If there would exist only one camera in the world, who should own it? Have the freedom to “own” that one camera for the rest of your life.

The following conversation with Johannes Maier took place as part of her participation in the Critical Perspectives at Teesside University Fine Art. Johannes Maier’s work documents events in which he collaborates with people and institutions such as interpreters at the European Commission and a newsroom picture editor at the BBC. The focus of Maier’s work, intentionally positioned at the boundaries of art, documentary and media, is a critical engagement with televisual forms. His work has been shown internationally in group and solo exhibitions, as well as in film festivals including: New Contemporaries, East International, the Short Film Festival of Oberhausen, and Kunstverein Bielefeld. Johannes Maier lives and works in the UK, he currently teaches film at the University of London. His film portrait about the curator Hans Ulrich Obrist is in production.  For the entire interview, please go here.

Critical Perspectives: I was wondering if you could talk a bit about the lineage of the work you are doing and how you approach it or see it within a broader context of art making?

Johannes Maier: My work is critically concerned with televisual and cinematic forms. I often collaborate with people in my work, with individuals, with institutions. The methods I use are aligned to those of documentary filmmakers, journalists, perhaps visual anthropologists. I cannot associate myself directly to anyone of those trades and therefore remain, I suppose, an artist.

CP: You made a remark in passing about the difference between art students and film students in general and I was wondering if you could talk about this a bit?

JM: I can’t remember what I remarked in passing. Perhaps let’s answer your questions in this way. The majority of art students, from my experience, do not know why they do, what they do. This might be a good starting point for being an art student. The majority of film students don’t know what they do, but they think they know why they do it. The reason for knowing relates to some vague career plan.

CP: So instead of doing the more traditional talk as part of this instalment of Critical Perspectives, you opted towards a series of workshops. Could you speak about what you intended and the shape of these, or how they finally came together?

JM: I am selfish here. I am curious. I was interested in trying out a short, but intense workshop, without knowing whether it would be successful or not (‘success’ remains to be defined here). I did not want to know the outcome from the start. Art students (at least in the UK) are trained to ask questions or give answers in tutorial based situations. The same goes for artists or lecturers giving presentations and answer questions afterwards. I often feel I know the outcome, whether I am the one in the audience or ‘on the stage’. It is a vague outcome. In Teesside I was not keen on vagueness. I wanted to be ‘hands on’ with the students, and I wanted the students to be ‘hands on’ with me. If we talk about ‘critical perspectives’ here, then the uncertainty, the dynamic, the communication between the students themselves and between them and me were critical throughout. Let me be provocative; running tutorials as an art tutor is a rehearsed task. Talking as an artist about oneself and the work also, unless one prefers not to. I was not interested in excluding these forms of ‘teaching and learning’ but integrating them into the unrehearsed workshop.

CP: How does this fit in with what you are doing in your own work or your interests in general?

JM: I quote from above: “I often collaborate with people in my work, with individuals, with institutions.” For example, I understand this workshop as making, raising curiosity and not necessarily knowing the outcome.

CP: One of the questions we have been posing through these Critical Perspectives artist talks is around what is contemporary. There’s a quote from Simon Critchley and it has to do with the idea of contemporary referring to something very specific when it has instead become a catchall for many practices. He observes, ‘The problem with contemporary art is that we all think we know what it means and we don’t.’ (http://www.brooklynrail.org/2012/08/art/absolutely-too-much) How might we think of these practices in regards to this, but also for understanding our contemporary moment?

JM: I think I require more time to think about the contemporary, about history, in order to reflect on it. By that time, time will have passed.

CP: Since you have a bit of history and connection with Teesside University, what might be appealing to artists about a place like Teesside? Why might it be more likely that these sorts of ideas and approaches might emerge from an environment like this as opposed to someplace like London or New York?

JM: I am curious why you ask this question? I am not too familiar with the ‘current cultural climate’ in Middlesbrough, but I have noticed a shift in MIMA’s internal and external socially engaged forces. When I visited Teesside for the first time in 2009 a retrospective of Gerhard Richter’s work was on display in the galleries. This time, in early 2017, I was eating a soup on the ground floor. The restaurant, I heard, is partly conceived as a research project by an artist from Teesside. Gerhard Richter’s work made me hungry for soup. The soup made me hungry for remembering Richter’s work.

CP: On a separate note, there seems to be a rethinking around art school or its significance, but maybe it has parallels to what we were just discussing? I’ve also been talking with a lot of artists about the idea of art school or art education in general—I see it as at a bit of a crossroads, but in the positive sense. As an artist, I wonder what are your thoughts or what exactly art school is for or what do you see as the opportunity that this presents in the current situation?

JM: I have been thinking with friends and colleagues for a long time about art schools and their significance. So much so that I worked on one myself (ARTSCHOOL UK) with my close friend and artist John Reardon in 2010. Art education in this country reveals many unanswered questions. They exist in other countries too, but here, they seem most urgent. I think your question is relevant and summarises this urgency quite vividly. If I have the answer, I will let you know.

CP: In this sense and in light of the current cultural climate, what might we better understand this and its significance? Or as a follow-up, if we were to think about what is essential or necessary about art school (or artmaking for that matter), what would that be?

JM: I can only return to your previous question here, and highlight it in a different way. Participants in art schools – whether they are named students, tutors or professors – will need to ask themselves again and again what they think they are doing here (in the art school).

CP: Do you have any advice you would give art students in general or for artists or people working with film just starting out?

JM: This goes with any kind of tool, media or practice. If there would exist only one camera in the world, who should own it? Have the freedom to “own” that one camera for the rest of your life. Practice with it and learn to “play this instrument” for at least 7 years. If you use the computer to appropriate and re-use moving images, ask the same questions. Who in the world should own the only existing computer that can access to the Internet? Then own it, but don’t forget to look out of the window occasionally whilst putting the tool or instrument aside.

CP: So what are you excited about at the moment? In the world? In art?

JM: Spring time is close on the northern hemisphere. I saw an excitable exhibition by the artist Lucy Raven and I remember a conference contribution by Gustav Metzger some ten years ago. He played back “Diamonds are the girls’ best friends” and spoke about Damien Hirst. On the 1st March 2017 – exactly one week ago – Gustav Metzger died in London.

CP: Where do we go from here?

JM: With Gustav Metzger in mind, we will go ‘from here’.

The Critical Perspectives series presents artists and thinkers from across disciplines, offering artist talks, mentoring, lectures, workshops, and tutorials at Teesside University. Simon Critchley observed, ‘The problem with contemporary art is that we all think we know what it means and we don’t,’ and that has been our jumping off point. With an international focus and interdisciplinary approach, Teesside University Fine Art’s Critical Perspectives challenges us to rethink our location within an ever-evolving community of artists in the twenty-first century.

The following conversation with Graeme Durant took place as part of his participation in the Critical Perspectives at Teesside University Fine Art. Durant’s work work was the subject of a major survey exhibition at Baltic, Newcastle, UK and at Bloc Projects, Sheffield. For the entire interview, please go here.

Critical Perspectives: Graeme, one of the things these artist talks and workshops allow is for there to be a bit more of a cross-generational conversation between artists working at different levels along with students—to give students access to these other voices and approaches. A number of students contacted me after your talk and said that it was particularly helpful as you had been a student more recently, but were now getting higher profile shows like the one at Baltic. For them, it made you more relatable and perhaps helped them see a bit of a path they might apply to their own approach. How is this for you? How does it work from your perspective as I remember you mentioning that you were usually a bit hesitant in these sorts of talks?

Graeme Durant: I always really struggled with talking about my work, to tutors and other artist. Still kind of do. People tend to ask me what I make and m

y reply is mainly just “stuff”. I am slowly coming to realise what I do and why, and have a passion for the concepts I’m playing with, so can openly talk about them more.

Things like these talks help a lot! They add a good amount of pressure and seriousness to make a person open up more.

I have taken part in these residential retreats the past two years that have also helped me talk about what I do/have done. They took place in Cumbria a

nd Cornwall, and on them you live with 15-20 other artists/writers/dancers/thinkers and you discuss your practice or area of interest to one another. Its been really helpful to me so I am going back again in February!

CP: You mention that you are a bit resistant to theory, which I think scepticism is really healthy, but then a lot of your work self-consciously references work by other artists such as Baldessari or Brancusi, but also pop culture with references to people like Tilda Swinton. What’s interesting to you about this sort of in-between place/approach?

GD: Not really sure how to answer, I’m still on the hunt for the answer myself. I guess I make for myself, as an average entertainment or as banal distraction.
Whether it is commenting on popular clichés or historical subjects the work becomes a DIY drama—a place where crude/slapstick/impotent art and precocious/sensitive/emotive art all exist as predominant characters.
The work is habitually self-critical; I am the zombie drawn to the colourful, moving thing. Dragging my feet until some flesh and bones appear giving me a hint to understand my actions.

CP: One of the students asked me to include a question about your interest in making copies or knock-offs rather than pressing the real thing? For instance the skewed Kurt Cobain guitar or keyboard made from an object lying around studio or your arch?

GD: This is something that has only appeared to me recently, or should I say I’ve come to understand that I’m doing it. I would say I build fast visual associations between objects and conjunctions.

The idea of realising a thing you want or want to see by making it is crucial to developing and mirroring existing emotions and concepts outside the realms of language. I want it, I could buy it, I’m not, I’ll make it. Guess this has connections with kinaesthetic learning. Doing/making the thing makes you long to understand it.

I think this is one of the concepts I’m toying with a lot at the minute. I think there is something interesting about how, found objects and ready-mades have done a sort of full circle in the art world and are heavily used throughout college and beyond. Not that it is a copout but more of a natural progression, like how in school you copy a bowl of fruit, then you do a self portrait, then you have to choose an artist and make your work in their style. This follows a lot of artist around after graduating and it does make some interesting viewing. I saw a really nice piece of work in London and it was a book a guy made of all of his paintings of Leona Lewis (the pop star who rose to fame in X Factor). He had (or what I understand) no real necessity to contextualise his stuff, he just was a fan/artist which has appeal too.

CP: There is also a really nice casualness to the objects you make as well as your painting. Do you see any parallels to this approach to the work above?

GD: I’m not sure casual is the right word; it comes across as something ‘cool’. I would say it had a sense of constant improvisation. A conversation with heavy or phallic forms prevail for instance, and presenting them through a twisting of conventional and unconventional materials and painterly surfaces that are simultaneously flat and textured may be read as casual but they are all deeply considered. I always allow for mistakes, errors and follow different directions within my practice therefore encouraging experimentation.

CP: There is a show that has gone around called Supermarket of the Dead that is about the traditional Chinese practice of burning paper money or objects as a sort of offering to the ancestors in the afterlife. It started with really simple objects, but now it seems obsessed with creating paper status objects like ipads, Prada shoes, designer clothes, cars, paper lingerie. I think these sort of cultural translations and copies are really interesting, but I’d like to hear your thought in relation to what you do? http://www.skd.museum/en/special-exhibitions/archive/supermarket-of-the-dead/index.html

GD: I’m quite interested in when this tradition took hold and became modernised by making ipads and other commercial goods. I’ve heard of burning paper money before. There must have been some progression in traditions. I guess this it what I’m aiming for with my new endeavour with the bonsai and scholar rocks. To change/challenge/adapt traditions and conceptions of what they are for.

This article is really good: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/nov/24/paa-joe-ghana-fantasy-coffin-artist-casket-funeral its about Ghanaian coffins. So they basically jazz up the coffin to put the fun into fun-erals, excuse the pun. I saw these in real life at the British Museum a few years ago and was totally blown away!

People have a tendency to embellish things and make light of certain situations. I guess this has parallels with the question below, I make deadpan associations with the titles I pick, to allude to certain information that I wish to divulge.

CP: Along with the resemblances that some of your object take (copies or replicas) you also seem to build a lot through resemblances of words or even tenuous similarities in words that add another level or visual pun to the work. How does this come about and what do you attempt with it?

GD: The titles come about from pulling in info from all areas, conversations, books, internet journals, memes, you name it! I just write the things that jump out to me down and go back through my notes and delve into them more. Some get so lost that I cant even remember writing them down. For example… my top three favourites…(taken direct from my notes)

• you mean you want me to rush the rush job I’m rushing to rush
• deadliness of leisure and the uplifting effects of industry
• you left the door open so the cat ate the doughnut.

Some are pretty obscure and I have no clue why I wrote them down…

• pool noodle
• le phoque
• I’ve seen better bands on a cigar

So yeah that’s a bit random but I guess that’s how it goes sometimes.

CP: What is exciting to you at the moment (art or otherwise)?

GD: Land rovers/unimogs/oxyacetylene/local history/flat eric/the sea

CP: What kind of advice would you offer to students or artists just leaving art school?

GD: Think I’ll keep this one uber simple…just keep making!!.. it sounds silly to say but my years at uni were the highest achieving years, think there were seventeen1sts handed out. And I can only think of one person who got a first that is still actively making work. Quite sad really as some people were great and had potential but lost interest and faded away because the lack of support goes and you get a bit deflated. I didn’t get a first by the way. I got a 2:1 and was pretty chuffed!

CP: Whose work/ideas are you interested in lately? Why exactly? Any collaborations?

GD: No collaborations, but hoping that 2017 will bring some!

CP: What is appealing to artists about a place like Teesside or say Newcastle? Why might it be more likely that these sorts of ideas and approaches might emerge from an environment like this as opposed to someplace like London or New York?

GD: This is hard to answer… having lived in Newcastle for 30 years come January I always question the pull of London and other big cities have to artists… I can list things that are great about the areas in the north but wont as they are so obvious. But there must be reasons for moving south. Money I guess… sad to say. People get more funding and opportunities.

CP: If that’s the case then where do we go from here then, or where might it be important to go?

GD: Stay put? Follow the sheep? Move all of the interesting people you know to a small town and put it on the map?

The Critical Perspectives series presents artists and thinkers from across disciplines, offering artist talks, mentoring, lectures, workshops, and tutorials at Teesside University. Simon Critchley observed, ‘The problem with contemporary art is that we all think we know what it means and we don’t,’ and that has been our jumping off point. With an international focus and interdisciplinary approach, Teesside University Fine Art’s Critical Perspectives challenges us to rethink our location within an ever-evolving community of artists in the twenty-first century.

The following conversation with Kevin Hunt took place as part of his participation in the Critical Perspectives at Teesside University Fine Art. He is an artist and curator based in Liverpool and was a director of The Royal Standard, Liverpool between 2007 and 2011, currently co-curates MODEL, a flexible, experimental and research based platform for artist- led activity, development and sales in Liverpool and recently curated good things come… a group exhibition featuring sculpture by seventeen artists tackling scale and time at The Gallery at Plymouth College of Art, Plymouth. You can read the interview in its entirety here.

Critical Perspectives Teesside: You mentioned a bit about your role as both an artist and a curator, as well as about your approach to artist run initiatives—could you talk a bit about how you approach this and a bit of background?

Kevin Hunt: I guess I fell into the curatorial side of things, becoming part of and subsequently running The Royal Standard for three and a half years, and relocating it meant me (and a group of 5 other young artists) were suddenly in charge of a brand new gallery complex, and the programming was up to us, I relished in that task. I used to see making art and organising exhibitions separately but eventually found this to be quite unhealthy. I think the two straddle my interests as an artist and I wouldn’t really know what to do without the other, I need both now. Aside from curating the more recent artist-led projects and initiatives that I’ve been involved in, they have mostly centred around providing much needed advocacy and agency for artists practicing in Liverpool and strengthening professional development opportunities, but still my curatorial interests play out through everything I do, even making sculpture.

CPT: What are the strengths to this sort of approach? Or pitfalls?

KH: I guess its easier to talk about the pitfalls, spreading yourself too thin, never having much time, easily running yourself into the ground, opening up room for un-useful criticism (‘oh he curated himself into his own show’) and often getting yourself involved in things that are (at times unknowingly) distracting to your main agenda. I think it’s a very careful balance you have to straddle and more recently especially I’ve learnt to say no quite a lot. Turning down opportunities I think is vital to really understanding what it is you want to do.

CPT: As you said you have been instrumental with the gallery Royal Standard, what do you see your role in relationship to this and also what might it mean with a project like that and especially as it moves to a new site and developed?

KH: The Royal Standard is the place I’ve had my studio just about the entire time I’ve lived in Liverpool as an artist (since graduating in North Wales in 2005). It was set up in an old pub by four recent graduates looking to fill a gap in the Liverpool scene dominated by institutional activity and very young DIY projects in 2006. I was the first artist to take a studio there. In 2007 I became a director of the organisation and over the next 3 years it changed my life even more. It was my masters programme that I didn’t even know I was on, it was my peer group of artists that constantly grew and changed and that I was able to decide upon, it was the space for me to experiment as an artist with the critical support of others around me but with a professional and increasing reputation of support from outside too. Since I stepped down as a director in 2011 I’ve kept a studio there and watch the place grow and grow, taking on totally independent project spaces (like CACTUS) along the way. For the last year I’ve been part of a ‘relocation steering committee’ made up of current and former directors to enable the next phase of the organisations transition. It’s tricky, I have no real desire to programme exhibitions or manage studios anymore, but still being part of the organisation you can never really step back fully and the last year has been tricky financially, legally and logistically and needed several of us to come back and assist with that. We finally got keys this week and today I’m moving my stuff into my freshly painted and heated studio so all the blood sweat and tears (there has been some) now seem worth it!

CPT: Yes, this fits in a lot with what we have been trying to foster with the Practicum projects that are now part of the course at Teesside. It is this sort of learning by doing and exploratory learning that comes to the forefront when you take on the challenge of running a gallery or developing artist run initiatives as you said. It’s hard to teach in a traditional environment, so something more is needed and this is exactly what we are talking about. A lot of your work also seems to approach the relationship between sculpture and painting, as you said, or sculpture behaving like painting. This idea of one approach or discipline behaving as another is intriguing. What appeals about this tactic?

KH: Hmmm, It’s totally difficult to try and sum this up fully, I guess the making of works like this is part of the process of learning why I’m interested in it (does that sound like a cop out!?) but I suppose there is a realisation that every ‘thing’ in the world makes us think of something, something often outside of what the thing itself is, so for instance if we look at a plastic necklace, we don’t just see it for what it is now in front of us, we relate to that object on so many levels, our past connections to similar objects, our projections of what that kind of object might mean etc. this becomes more complex when something like a necklace, or a plastic puzzle or something like that is deconstructed, so smaller parts of a greater thing are only there to talk to us. We don’t recognise these parts as their bigger whole anymore and something else comes into play, our brain conjures images in our head as to what these things might be and I guess I’m really interested in that, especially playing with it with myself and the works work best for me when I look at them and struggle to have a clear understanding of what image/object I’m looking at anymore. I also feel a bit like this when I look at abstract paintings!

CPT: One of the ideas we have been trying to untangle through this Critical Perspectives series is an idea or assumptions about what contemporary art is or means. There’s a quote from theorist Simon Critchley, and it has to do with the idea of contemporary referring to something very specific when it has instead become a catchall for many practices. He observes, ‘The problem with contemporary art is that we all think we know what it means and we don’t.’ You spoke a bit about time in relation to your work, or even a slowness, or in terms of contemporary, but how do you see this?

KH: I think currently, like right now (and its important I emphasise the right now part!) we digest the world at such a speed and we don’t even realise it that we don’t really understand things anymore like we used to. This is at once liberating and terrifying I think. Instagram is a strange beast, I think it offers an instant platform for anybody to tell you anything and seemingly everything about themselves. But what in fact is happening is mediated totally by all kinds of processes and we actually curate our lives on there. In terms of the impact on art, Instagram is FULL of art, and full of thousands of images of the same art again and again. I think this becomes some kind of secret validation that something is great by the amount of images strangers post of it or how many ‘likes’ or views it gets and the who is who of who is doing those things. It seems to validate the work on a level of time, if an image is posted and isn’t likable much, pretty soon it may be taken down (I know people who’ve done this!). I think I’m going off on a tangent here but maybe that’s useful in terms of the question because the tangents are far more accessible these days because of the internet and procrastination is not only more available at our finger tips, it’s endorsed. I don’t think we really know or understand how things in the world are made anymore because we often never encounter them in the flesh, but we feel we know or understand how things in the world are made because we can look at them at 3am in the morning under the duvet on our phones… I find that idea quite unnerving and liberating all at once, I’m confused by it.

It’s funny, I often find myself not having enough time to post on Instagram. Is that some kind of post-internet oxymoron? Probably not…

CPT: Yeah exactly, but in that sense, what is contemporary when it comes to art? Do we need to understand this or is it more of a portmanteau for convenience sake? I was even reading an article that was referring now to post-contemporary art?

KH: In terms of Instagram what is contemporary is only what is posted today (like I said above ‘right now’). What somebody was talking about last week is gone, it’s passed, it’s history and in terms of art making its very odd to suddenly be thinking of ‘art history’ as something that was made last week. There isn’t the time anymore for gestation and to allow art to make more sense in the world as the world runs by around it. Imagine now making a painting and not really wanting to show it for 10 years or so until you really knew how you felt about it, nobody would allow it.

CPT: Interesting. Not sure if you want to talk about this, but we spoke briefly about a recent Hito Steyerl interview where she was discussing an idea of contemporary being about a flattening out of the moment and stuck in a perpetual present, but that she used the example of how people are always on their phones, disengaged or somewhere else, and how this idea is a myth—looking at trying to sync technologies or new apps or even a phone with a different computer and how it is not in sync ever or we disengage from the moment to look at a feed from an hour ago. So that if anything, the contemporary is more of a fracturing of the moment?

KH: Maybe I’ve answered this above? I’m reading (or trying to read) the e-flux journal at the moment called The Internet Does Not Exist that Hito writes in, it’s a good if bamboozling read, maybe you should suggest this to the students too?

CPT: So what are you excited about at the moment? In the world? In art?

KH: Haha abstract paintings and painters I find at 3am under the duvet on Instagram!

An unsettling exhibition I saw last week in Cardiff in an amazing unused part of a still functioning casino in the city centre by a Czech artist called Roman Stetina has also been on my mind a lot. Also recently discovering yoga! (but I’m not sure how much that has to do with my practice)

CPT: Do you have any advice you would give art students in general or for artists just starting out?

KH: Think big, believe in yourself, take advice (even if it is difficult to hear) from those you respect and travel! You have to see the world to know how to respond to it…

CPT: I’ve also been talking with a lot of artists about the idea of art school or art education in general—I see it as at a bit of a crossroads, but in the positive sense. As someone who has come through art education, I wonder what are your thoughts or what exactly art school is for or what do you see as the opportunity that this presents in the current situation?

KH: I think it’s kinda means to an end really, especially when you are so young (thinking of most undergrad students being between 18-22 etc) IF you know you are creatively inclined what else would you do? I think going to art school is really important, it changed my life in so many ways but of course these days it’s a gigantic financial implication that will also have lasting effects on your life in the future (more so than it did for me…) I think with post graduate education and wider life long learning there is more scope to think outside the typical educational frameworks to further your learning, especially now with so many alternative programmes. This is something I am currently looking at developing in Liverpool, watch this space!

CPT: If we were to think about what is essential or necessary about art school (or art for that matter), what would that be?

KH: I think its defiantly not the qualification as such. Yeah I got a first class honours when I graduated but really not one thing has happened to me in my career because of this grade as far as I’m aware, it was just a nice thing (especially for my family). I think the longer period to understand the world and how you feel about it whilst being immersed in three years of critical dialogue is amazing though, that’s the point of it!

CPT: Where do we go from here?

KH: Umm… I’m going to Marrakech on Friday, I’ll probably post some images on Instagram. :/

CPT: Thanks again for being a part of Critical Perspectives. It was lovely to meet you and talk a bit about all this and I heard positive things about your tutorials and the conversations that came out of them.

The Critical Perspectives series presents artists and thinkers from across disciplines, offering artist talks, mentoring, lectures, workshops, and tutorials at Teesside University. Simon Critchley observed, ‘The problem with contemporary art is that we all think we know what it means and we don’t,’ and that has been our jumping off point. With an international focus and interdisciplinary approach, Teesside University Fine Art’s Critical Perspectives challenges us to rethink our location within an ever-evolving community of artists in the twenty-first century.