[spectre] PANDILOVSKI IN CONVERSATION WITH HOLUBIZKY 1/2

[EAF Director]

MELENTIE PANDILOVSKI IN CONVERSATION WITH IHOR HOLUBIZKY 1/2

MP: For the past twenty-five years, you've assumed the roles of an 
art critic, curator, gallery director [for the private and public art 
sectors], performance artist, musician etc. You started out in 
history and political science, but have specialised in art and 
technology. It reminds me a bit of the situation in Australia, where 
people frequently wear numerous hats. In your case, was this because 
of survival or the absolute inner need to express yourself in 
different roles?

IH: The many-hat scenario was of the times, a personal, formative 
period, as everyone has a coming-of-age or consciousness. For the art 
and cultural scene in Toronto [Canada for that matter], the 1960s was 
a 'heady' time [the centenary of nationhood was in 1967] and had 
resonance into the 1970s. I was still in high school in the 1960s. 
[You make choices, learn to live with them, make something of them, 
otherwise you live in denial.] I studied political science and 
history at university, with an emphasis on non-Western histories and 
the development of the Labor Union movement-because of 'the times'. 
If you didn't chose a career path, or were not an outright slacker, 
you lined up on the side of social change, believing that change was 
necessary and that things could change. The Vietnam War had a lot to 
do with the radicalisation of that time, as did the Civil Rights 
Movement in the USA. These were not just 'American Problems'. Opinion 
was galvanised-you took a position  everywhere in the world. The 
[Vietnam] War had a particular resonance in Canada as a de facto 
border nation with the United States. Large numbers of American draft 
dodgers and war resisters [that is, not exclusive to men avoiding 
military service], found asylum in Canada and naturally, artists. The 
latter has a history that has not been written. There was a cultural 
impact, feeding upon what was already in the air, such as Marshall 
McLuhan's presence. Here was a Canadian who was recognised 
internationally as an important cultural thinker. Prime Minister 
Pierre Trudeau also had an impact upon the Canadian consciousness in 
the late 1960s. More than a politician, he was an intellectual; 
erudite and witty-he touched a social nerve, he had style, he was an 
adventurer. He was NOT Richard Nixon. 

Many hats were and could be worn, the rule rather than the exception 
[and perhaps the same for Australia at the time]. I was disillusioned 
with the empirical side of political science. It's why I leapt into 
art and technology-it had all the hallmarks of an adventure, which 
happened to attract minds from many disciplines. There was optimism 
[it was the pre-Bill Gates world].

Iain Baxter was one of the Canadian artists of the time, daring and 
radical, a key figure in the conceptual practice. He too had a mixed 
and many-hatted background-born in England, educated in the USA 
[degrees in Zoology, Education and Fine Art] and studied in Japan. 
Baxter formed a collective-corporate approach in the mid-1960s with 
his N.E. Thing Co [the 'anything company'] and later incorporated it, 
emulating corporate language with a difference. The charter stated 
the following: 
i. to produce sensitivity-information
ii. to provide a consultation and evaluation service with respect to things
iii. to produce, manufacture, import, export, sell and otherwise deal 
in things of all kinds

There wa no use of the word 'art'-no strategic end or endgame. It was 
open-ended, anything and everything-so too for other artists in 
Toronto [Baxter was based in Vancouver at the time]. Michael Snow had 
a huge presence in the Toronto art scene, beginning in the mid 
1950s-a musician, filmmaker, painter and sculptor-still mixing it up. 
Don Jean-Louis mounted one of the first interactive television-video 
installations in a private Toronto gallery under a 'corporate' aegis. 
The 'statement' for his 1969 The Nature of the Media is to Expose was 
concerned with the identity, nature and function of any given number 
of people, products, things, colours and sounds at any rate of speed 
and their interrelationship under given conditions-scale considered. 
In the 1970s Jean-Louis worked collaboratively with people in the 
film and music industry. They made a short sci-fi feature [receiving 
awards] and managed the seminal Toronto punk band The Viletones. He 
also worked in the television graphics department at the Canadian 
Broadcasting Corporation, as did other artists. They learned about 
television and applied it to 'non-television solutions'.

Intersystems was a mid-1960s Toronto collaboration with electronic 
composer-musician John Mills-Cockell [he went on to form the 
synthesizer band Syrinx and then to compose music for theatre], 
artist Michael Hayden [who now lives in California] and poet Blake 
Parker. They released an album, staged 'electro-happenings' and built 
audio-kinetic sculptures. Norman White, an American expatriate who 
had studied biology, arrived in the late 1960s. He was making 
electronic/artificial intelligence sculptures and installations and 
then taught at the Ontario College of Art in the new Photo-Electric 
Department, which became the New Media Department, when I arrived as 
a sessional instructor in the mid-1980s. General Idea was the 
stepchild of these early artist collaborations and actions-they added 
sexual politics to the mix, engaging and collaborating with other 
artists, designers, performers and musicians in their 1970s events, 
publishing FILE magazine and starting Art Metropole [publication and 
distribution of artist books, editions and videos], which continues 
today.

I spoke to Baxter in early 2005. We discussed that formative 1960s 
period. He admitted-not that he ever denied it-that he was following 
his intuition, being in and of the times, working in every corner. 
I'm not sure if the issue of survival was that much of a factor. As I 
noted, this was a sense of optimism, which could and did have a 
critical side to it, an engagement with society and culture on many 
levels and much more than making things to charm the collectors, 
critics and curators.

My over-narration of the Toronto scene is not to promote it above 
others, but to illustrate that there are galvanising 
moments-everywhere-and at different times. When they happen doesn't 
matter, but historians, even theorists, are hung up on who and what 
came first. Art and culture is not a horse race, yet there ARE a lot 
of jockeys with whips.

For myself, playing music was a way of knowing something 
else-learning and participating. It seemed more real than sitting 
through unreal university classes. When I began working in the 
gallery world, I had to broaden my skills again-they had to be real 
and applicable. That's still the case for small staff organisations, 
but not so for large public galleries. I've worked at both ends of 
the gallery spectrum. Over the past twenty-five years I have 
witnessed the rise of a professional class. They're not necessarily 
specialised, but departmentalised. I joked with a colleague that a 
skills test for curators should be assembling an IKEA bunk bed 
against the clock, then disassembling it, and reassembling it. You 
can muddle and mutter your way through the assembly, but in order to 
reassemble you have to be paying attention-'be in touch' with the 
materials and the function-be able to visualise the outcome. 

MP: You are currently preparing your PhD, whose working title is 
'Radical Regionalism, Art and the Modern Age'. Your interest in the 
directions which modern art takes outside the Eurocentric model has 
led you to research particular issues of nationhood in Latin America, 
Russia/Ukraine, the United Kingdom and Australia. You have taken as 
case studies Juan Manuel Blanes, David Burliuk, Tarsila do Amaral and 
Ian Fairweather. How many of these specific developments of modern 
art outside the centre are researched within the canon of modern 
arts? What is the importance that is given to them?

My approach to art history follows the IKEA analogy, except the bunk 
bed is already made. It looks a bit creaky and doesn't seem to fit 
well in the room. In taking it apart and reassembling, it may look 
the same but it has to be usable and in the process I will know more 
about it. However, as anyone who has IKEA furniture knows, it 
requires maintenance. You may have to replace or substitute parts, 
keeping in mind that it was never meant to last. Ongoing repair and 
reconstruction turns the cheap-and-cheerful modern into a 
Frankenstein. At that point you have to decide on its future and you 
still need to replace the bed. What to do-buy another IKEA bed? There 
are other solutions to the need for sleeping, but raised-platform 
beds are the Western convention. Then it's a matter of taste and 
style preference-and budget.

To return to the question. Marginalised artists can be canonised. 
Frida Kahlo is an apt [and extreme] example, but it wasn't that long 
ago when the mention of her name would have furrowed the brow. Who 
the hell is Frida Kahlo and why should I care? In some respects she 
has been cut out of Mexican art history in order to fit a 
'liberalised' canonical history. The cult of Frida Kahlo doesn't help 
the legion of under-recognised Mexican artists. To be pragmatic, it's 
better than nothing.

I did not select the four artists [Blanes, Burliuk, Amaral and 
Fairweather] as case studies to privilege them, but to acknowledge 
them, to cut away the deadwood of art history. There could be forty 
others, four hundred, four thousand! Burliuk was in 'the game' with 
Kandinsky, Blaue Reiter and the Moscow avant-garde prior to 1920-the 
year he left for Japan and then the USA in 1922. There is 
rehabilitation afoot to claim him as the 'father of Russian 
futurism,' because it is acceptable for the post-Soviet Russians to 
celebrate their early avant-garde. At the same time, Ukrainian 
revisionists are claiming him as part of the formative Ukraine 
avant-garde, even to claim that Burliuk's avant-garde-ness in the 
Ukraine precedes that of his Moscow endeavours. The Americans, on the 
other hand, don't care about Burliuk-he doesn't fit any of the 
national canonical agendas. He's not 'Ashcan', 'Social Surrealist', 
'American Scene,' nor strictly speaking an American regionalist. 
Tarsila do Amaral popped up in the Body Nostalgia exhibition at the 
National Museum, Tokyo, in 2004, a Brazilian-subject exhibition. She 
served as a starting point, with Lygia Clark as the 'halfway point' 
to the real focus, contemporary artists, so no need to deal with her 
in a broader canonical context. I'd love to see someone do so, but 
like Burliuk in America, it wouldn't further existing agendas. 
Fairweather interested me, because his story as encoded in Australian 
art history, has too many gaps and too many assumptions-the 
aspirations of Australian art projected onto someone who was, in my 
view, not that interested in Australia. An artist then in his sixties 
was an odd choice to be made into a modernist hero. Blanes is too 
historically remote for anyone outside of South America to care. He 
died in 1901. There is a story yet to be told about early regional 
modernists and the rise of modern nationhood-literally 
postcolonial-independence was declared in 1828. Blanes wanted to 
paint the national psyche, but also for the Americas. How do you do 
that? You have to 'generate' the signs. These signs feed mythologies. 
But the national mythology is part and parcel of the work. Once you 
remove the object-the painting-from place and context, it's an exotic 
and puzzling footnote at best-IF we adhere to the 
generalist-generalising canon.

I'm still pondering all this and the 'adherence'. An example: Mary 
Anne Staniszewski's Believing is Seeing, Creating the Culture of Art 
[New York: Penguin Books, 1995], has a radical revisionist tone and 
chastises the American cultural scene for lacking in its resolve to 
integrate cultures. Yet she writes in her introduction: "[The book] 
is meant to be a supplement to the canonical texts that shape art and 
humanities course curriculum. I am not, however, suggesting getting 
rid of our culture's collective aesthetic memory. In fact, I have 
gone to great lengths to use the most powerful and famous images of 
what has been called our 'museum without walls'."

Is this a strategic fight-fire-with-fire? Another canonical 
questioning is that of Matthew Baigell and his postscript to the 
Artist and Identity in Twentieth-Century America [Cambridge 
University Press, 2001]: "Someone could write a first rate history of 
American art as one long essay about identity politics'. Further on 
he discusses how European Americans had to 'invent' native Americans 
and African Americans in order to distinguish themselves from the 
Others; how these Others has to 'reinvent' themselves in order to 
find out who they were on their own terms. Otherness is a two-way 
street. Does this sound familiar-the 'inventing Asia' discourse, that 
Asia is an invention of Europeans or of the Antipodes? So who 
invented Europe? There are many other such questions within regional 
and national histories. Perhaps it is too complex, too demanding a 
task. 

However, I'm not trying to interject yet another category. Radical 
regionalism is not a movement, it is a way of modelling, a way of 
getting past less-useful, but oft-repeated truisms that impress the 
diminutive on art histories and artists. The categorisation of Tony 
Tuckson is an oft-repeated example, "Tony Tuckson... later recognised 
as one of Australia's finest abstract expressionist artists". [Museum 
of Contemporary Art, Sydney, Vision & Context, 1993]. One could have 
a field-day 'deconstructing' this interjection because the prime 
topic is not Tuckson as an artist, but Tuckson as a curator and in 
the MCA publication context, within a section titled "Australian 
Aboriginal Art". That is, his role as a curator, yet the sentence 
ends, "openly indebted for inspiration to the abstract languages of 
Aboriginal and New Guinean art". It doesn't take a screaming 
revisionist to figure out what's wrong with this sentence, but at the 
same time, I'm not taking the writer to task. It is the 
Australian-canonical summation.

Look at Robert Hughes' take on Ian Fairweather in The Art of 
Australia [1966 and 1970], when Fairweather was still alive: "What 
does the word 'great' mean in the context of Australian art... but I 
think it is at least arguable that [he] is the most gifted painter 
who has so far appeared in Australia; though even this kind of 
statement involves one in a distasteful role of tipster". Is 'gifted' 
the anointment, or does the artist provide 'the gift'? When I listen 
to Rahsaan Roland Kirk's album Volunteered Slavery, I am always 
struck by his comment [recorded live at the Monterey Jazz Festival] 
in tribute to John Coltrane: "Here are three songs [he] left for us 
to learn." It's all well and good to pay tribute to visual artists, 
even to canonise them, but do we learn anything from this? It's 
all-too-easy to shuffle past in mute admiration and accepting 
'greatness'. I confess that I've never been a great fan of Jackson 
Pollock's canonisation because it is difficult to filter out from the 
work itself. In watching the Ed Harris director-commentary for his 
2000 film Pollock, I took note of his 'methodology' [it is a 
'methodology']. To get 'into' the character, he had to learn how to 
paint, not simply imitate or mimic the action. That's a difficult 
lesson, but necessary for what he described as "an emotional 
journey", not an art history film. But there were many other 
characterisations in the film that were equally important and equally 
problematic-they were not on screen as much and not so known. Film is 
a language, so if we take on Roland Barthes' assertion, it is a 
language of myth. But this analogy has its limits, because only a few 
art emotional journeys will be made into a film-myth-Van Gogh, Frida 
Kahlo, Basquiat. Not Ian Fairweather. The reasons are 
self-evident-the cost is high and the market is small. [Pollock cost 
approx $6 million to make, but only made $10 million at the box 
office.]

  MP: In a context that is not too distant from your research, the 
Slovenian art collective IRWIN has positioned through their project 
EAST ART MAP the notion that East European Art practices have not 
been validated appropriately in the context of the Western Art canon. 
How do you feel about this notion?

Following on my comments above, I know enough about some 
national-regional histories to know that they have not been 
validated. I have hope. Hans Belting does acknowledge the art of 
'Eastern Europe' in his 2003 book Art History after Modernism [AHM]. 
He would not have done that twenty years ago. I think we're at the 
starting blocks sorting out histories, but applying yet another 
hierarchical sorting would be counterproductive. I am reading the 
Belting book at the moment and struck by his [new-found?] candidness 
and doubts, hence other quotes to follow.

MP: Do you see the experiment within arts as alive, and is it today 
only technological by nature?

I think that all compelling art has an experimental aspect. It 
doesn't need to have a technological component. McLuhan commented on 
the relationship of artists and technology in his 1969 film Picnic in 
Space-their role as social navigators, opening up visual worlds and 
raising ethical questions that never really go away. I knew that it 
wasn't all social navigation when running a private gallery that 
specialised in art and technology. Some of it was technological 
effect, another way to produce a pretty and pleasing thing. Nothing 
wrong with that, but that's all it was. One artist I worked with in 
the mid-1970s was American Lew Alquist. He had a sly subversive 
streak in him, which is what I expect [but not 'demand')] from 
'social navigators'. He was demystifying and then generating new 
mysteries for us to ponder and often said, because the question of 
is-this-art was often raised, "Not everything is art, but everything 
is art supplies'. Knowing the difference is crucial. Artists will 
always push the limits of technology-create languages-and sometimes 
will succumb to old language with new means. It is the language that 
matters, not the technology, unless [a BIG unless] it IS a language 
[by-product] of technology. That's another topic for another time.

  MP: You have been dealing extensively with new technologies. How 
much do you see reflections of Lucio Fontana's 'Manifesto Blanco' in 
what is happening today with electronic arts?

I haven't read it. I should. In lieu of my ignorance, allow me to 
quote artist Robert Adrian X [Canadian born but has lived in Vienna 
for the past thirty years], from an email exchange last year about 
electronic arts:
I'm inclined to think that we need new models. After doing a few 
telecommunication projects [early '80s] and trying to cope with the 
[apparent?] incommensurability between traditional [industrial] art 
practice and the fugitive practice of working with electricity, code 
and telephones, I began to wonder if 'art' was the right word to 
describe the stuff we were doing with telecommunications. There was 
no discernible product or material substance-nothing 
collectable-nothing for the critic to get his/her teeth into, no 
clear tradition or history: just a few polaroid snaps and fading 
faxes, low-res video, scraps of computer chit-chat printout. Machines 
are on: its here-machines are off. It's gone!

  MP: Is there a notion of the avant-garde which is still meaningful today?

I don't think one can aspire to the avant-garde in the same way as 
the historical avant-garde was able to act. Renato Poggioli's Theory 
of the Avant-garde [1962] examined the avant-garde not in terms of 
"its species as art, but through what it reveals, inside and outside 
of art itself... an argument of self-assertion [with] a social or 
antisocial character of the cultural and artists manifestations that 
it sustains and expresses". Poggioli also noted that "even the 
avant-garde has to live and work in the present, accept compromises 
and adjustments, reconcile itself with the official culture of the 
times, and collaborate with at least some part of the public". In his 
chapter 'Technology and the Avant-garde', Poggioli proposed that "the 
avant-garde's experimental nature is not essentially or exclusively a 
matter of art [but] to experiment with factors extraneous to art 
itself".

Granted, the latter is contestable, but the avant-garde is not 
something that you can learn in art school. We may not even be able 
to discern between avant-garde and what is 'cutting edge', which may 
in turn be what is 'technologically fashionable'. There is an 
avant-garde today, but I would be hard-pressed to give you an example 
operating within the art world, or, we may not recognize it as such. 
Poggioli wrote in his conclusion: "The avant-garde is one of those 
tendencies destined to become art in spite of itself, even in the 
out-and-out denial of itself". Add Alquist's statement, mix in 
McLuhan and there's a topic for a bright young curator to take on, 
don't you think?

If I was going to start with a post-1960 view of avant-garde-ness, it 
would be with the small oeuvre of filmmaker Arthur Lipsett-between 
1963 and 1970 [his last completed film-he committed suicide in 1986]. 
They were done under the umbrella of the National Film Board of 
Canada. I don't think they really knew what he was up to, but no one 
could think of a reason to stop him.  He slipped in under the radar 
signal.  

MP: You curated an exhibition of the painter Tony Scherman within the 
gallery program of the Art Gallery of Hamilton in 1994. Even though 
you are aware of its constraints, you still see it as your most 
important and most radical exhibition, Can you elaborate as to why 
you think this is the case?

The exhibition was an example of slipping under the institutional 
radar signal. It was a collection show. I wasn't spending big bucks 
and it occupied a lot of gallery space-a win for the ever-beleaguered 
budget. The premise was simple enough as not to set off any warnings 
bells-a painting show. Rather than pull out a shop-worn theme-the 
face, the land, still life, the this, the that [how many times have 
we seen these, all watered dow, so that they neither offend nor 
inspire]-it was a predicated on a discussion, an artist and a curator 
talking about painting. That's what we did for the first year. THEN 
we went into the vaults-not to select, but to keep talking. Not what 
we thought was good, but what kept generating discussion. Clearly, it 
would not be anything we were indifferent towards. Our final 
selection spanned two hundred years, beginning with a c.1800 Henry 
Raeburn portrait-that's where it started, not chose to start. The 
installation, however, was not hung in chronological sequence or by 
style, but as if our conversation-or passages of conversation-was on 
the wall. Except, there were no didactic labels. People would have to 
enter into the conversation-maybe it would be in mid-conversation, or 
as if eavesdropping on the street. The 'seeing' could start anywhere. 
I scattered 'church hall' wooden folding chairs around. I encouraged 
them to be used and moved around the gallery-a place to sit and talk. 
I checked the location of the chairs on a regular basis-they did 
shift around, like small herds of caribou, an indication that it was 
working. I could even imagine where a conversation had ended, in 
front of one group of paintings or another.

I also asked Tony to include his own work. He resisted at first, but 
I insisted. He didn't have to deny being a painter simply because he 
was wearing a curatorial hat. I did the selection and decided where 
they should be installed. We did talk about it, but I don't recall 
him making any changes.

The title we decided on was Prosperity Returns, the oral tradition in 
painting, which came from a 'chance encounter' with a headline in the 
financial section of the newspaper. In bad times, everyone wants 
prosperity to return and no one would care about 'the return of 
painting'. Did it ever go away? The title expressed optimism.

There was no catalogue, although I had started a text. I realised 
that it would be counterproductive, even redundant. After all, it was 
the ORAL tradition, not writing about art. [This may have put us at 
odds with John Berger-but seeing is a step to knowing.] That 
exhibition has kept me goin-it provided a model that could be 
re-examined, shifted here and there-made me wary of manufacturing 
words. Challenging my assumptions, biases and taste.

-- 
EXPERIMENTAL ART FOUNDATION curates its exhibition program to 
represent new work that expands current debates and ideas in 
contemporary visual art. The EAF incorporates a gallery space, 
bookshop and artists studios.

Lion Arts Centre North Terrace at Morphett Street Adelaide * PO Box 
8091 Station Arcade South Australia 5000 * Tel: +618 8211 7505  * Fax 
+618 8211 7323 * eaf at eaf.asn.au  * Bookshop: eafbooks at eaf.asn.au * 
http://www.eaf.asn.au * Director: Melentie Pandilovski

The Experimental Art Foundation is assisted by the Commonwealth 
Government through the Australia Council, it arts funding and 
advisory body and by the South Australian Government through Arts SA. 
The EAF is also supported through the Visual Arts and Craft Strategy, 
an initiative of the Australian, State and Territory Governments.