Jonathan Watkins

Peter Hill

The Albury Wodonga Superfiction 1993

Collaboration Peter Hill and J.J. Voss (Photographer)

Jonathan Watkins, Director 1988 Biennale of Sydney

Peter Hill: I have not enjoyed such a user-friendly art event since last year's Munster Sculpture Project in Germany. I imagine that was intentional?

Jonathan Watkins: It was. I wanted to have a number of venues around town and to engage the urban fabric in a comfortable way. Sydney is a natural habitat for such an event. You can move between these different spaces quite easily and with the exception of Goat Island where a lot of the British artists set up, you can walk everywhere. That way you don't lose the thread. I mean if you were in London and walking say from Whitechapel to the Hayward Gallery you would have quite an irritating tube ride or car journey between exhibitions. So Sydney's topography is just right for a show like this.

PH: When you buy a ticket for this biennale you are issued with quite a substantial passport which you get stamped at each venue and which recommends different routes around the venues. It also suggests good eating places close to all the galleries and copious maps. Is this a planned marriage of art and tourism?

JW: Well why make it difficult for people? This is a bienalle which will hopefully appeal to a non-specialist audience. And given that the theme of the biennale is "the everyday" we want people to enjoy the gaps between the exhibits, which I would argue are equally interesting.

PH: At what point in your directorship did you settle on the theme of the everyday?

JW: That came before I was appointed. Along with several other people I was invited to submit a detailed proposal. I had just done a Fischli and Weiss show at the Serpentine in 1996. After a long time, while biennale
restructuring was going on, I finally heard I had got the job. Then the travel, research and field trips began, during which period I fleshed out the theme and added new artists to the ones I already had in mind.

PH: Was there anything particularly Australian in your choise of theme or was it just a project that you were keen to investigate?

JW: Almost the opposite, in that there is something quite academic and theory driven about the Australian art world and I wanted to somehow
counteract that.

PH: I noticed a similar iconoclastic feel in your biennale to that of Rene Block's eight year's ago where he focussed on the Duchampian idea of the readymade?

JW: Yes, I think that Rene Block and I, out of all previous directors in all the biennales - in all the gin joints in all the world - have probably been closest - including a bit of overlap with artists like Julian Opie, On Kawara, Fischli and Weiss. So he and I do have a lot in common.

PH: Perhaps one difference would be the historical context, which in fact did not finally eventuate in his show but was all there in the catalogue...Broodthaers, Duchamp, Picabia. You kept it contemporary.

JW: I absolutely didn't want to be didactic in that sense, to be teaching people a lesson. It has nothing to do with the development of 20th century art. It is about what is happening now. There are two artists in the whole show who are not alive. One is Rover Thomas who died as we were preparing the show. The other is Absalon. He has been so influential and is right at the heart of my scheme of things that I just had to keep him in. The other point I want to make in relation to the curating is that I did not want to turn up at studios and borrow work that had already been made. Wherever possible I wanted new work to keep the whole thing as fresh as possible - although there are exceptions to this.

JW: But their work is so relevant and highly regarded by younger artists. In the case of Carl especially there is such a strong concrete aesthetic and thread that is pulled throughout the show with his influences on younger artists like Katherina Grosse and Perry Roberts that make him absolutely right. I'm thrilled with his piece at Artspace. I love the heaviness of it compared to say the lightness of Fernando Gomes. And there is an artist who is very much steeped in a concrete tradition and that is why there are so many Brazilians in the biennale. There is a very cohesive Latin American community at the moment.

JW: Yes, he's representative of the artist who tracks the passage of time, like so many of the works in this show - Germaine Koh, Jean-Frederic Schnyder, Thomas Struth...

JW: I'd worked with him before at the Serpentine and his material, scaffolding, is certainly very everyday, as is its gradual construction before and during the exhibition. It is a very subtle process with non-subtle materials. It also makes reference to earlier movements and traditions such as minimalism. And I thought it was nice to put him beside Tadashi Kawamata, their work contrasted very well.

PH: In the catalogue you speak of "the power of simple gestures" being attractive to young artists globally and against this you write about certain played out operatic tendencies particularly "the pseudo-academic discourses." Can you expand on that?

JW: It follows on from what we were just saying. There's a lot of technology around and without naming names there have been - well, I will name a name, why not? If I go and see a Mathew Barney show at Barbara Gladstone it's interesting but it does epitomise a tendency which is probably played out now and it's derived from a fairly theatrical post-modern tradition which is full of pastiche and very camp. I wanted to come down on the other side and get away from the notion that everything is virtual. That sort of work has its own space, and its own elaborate lighting, and formal complexity but at the heart of it you find some disappointment. There's something about confronting material fact which these artists in Sydney are asserting. And as for the pseudo-academic discourse we are all quite familiar with that. A lot of today's young artists don't read Deleuze, and Derrida, and Baudriard - and we as curators don't need to either.

PH: I used to enjoy Artscribe magazine because most of the writers were, or had been, practising artists and their criticism was informed by practice. Throughout the nineties there seems to have been such a gap between what artists are making and what theorists are writing about. It is usually a very clumsy fit. Often very boring too. Then there's the Mathew Collings' approach in books like Blimey.

JW: In that book he represents a sort of laddism which is prevalent in the UK. It's interesting, it's eloquent, and its very significant in its own way.
Although I sympathise with it I haven't embraced it in this show, I've been quite deliberate about that. I didn't want the Chapman Brothers in the show, I didn't want Sarah Lucas or Tracey Emin, that's a different story from the one I'm trying to tell. But getting back to the question of theoretical discourse and the gap between theory and practice. what was really sad was that so many artists in the nineties felt obliged for whatever reason to engage with that theory and make work which demonstrated their understanding of it. In that situation you will be forever behind the eight ball. You, as the artist, will always be in a subservient position to the theorist, and the art works will suffer.

PH: I am fascinated by the mechanics of how art movements change, and the influence of dealers, critics, art magazines, auction houses, even much-maligned theory. Collectors like the Panzas and the Saatchis exert trenmendous influence, and not just by buying but by selling also. Saatchi, as a creative person is now working like a conductor and orchestrating change, inventing new movements like his "new neurotic realism" which is being discussed globally before it has even been exhibited. But I like to think that most change is artist-lead, even though events outside the seemingly hermetically sealed art world - Vietnam, Aids, new technologies can have an influence.

JW: I think there is a paradigm shift occurring with the type of work being made in this biennale, this everyday way of doing things. But I don't want for one moment to be prescriptive and suggest that this is what all artists must be doing now. There are many, many artists I admire and will curate in the future who I have not included in this show. I think of Juan Davila, Cornelia Parker,Langlands and Bell, Claire Barclay, Mike Stevenson here in Australia. If they are not in this biennale it's not that I don't think they are worth looking at - it's just that I'm developing a different idea. I'm very catholic in my tastes and there is always room for more than one dominant idea. But look, a number of things aren't going to change now and one is the development of the relationship between the artist and the curator. We have become much more complicit, much more cooperative. Artists very often realise their work through their curator.
The curator has become a facilitator. Curators are so much more involved with the production of work than they used to be. And that's the way I've always been as a curator. I hope that comes through in this biennale.

PH: I certainly thought the relationship between the artist and the viewer
has changed dramatically in this show.

JW: Much more participation by the viewer is now required, either real or imaginary. The relationship is more open and more generous which is the point I try and make in the catalogue. There's a sort of "over to you" mentality which I think can only be a very positive thing. And you can't put that sort of attitude back in the box, it's out now. You know, the art world is not going to retreat back to painting. We now have a much more sophisticated idea of what an art object is, and that's very exciting. Rather than getting depressed about things closing down at the end of the century, some kind if fin de siecle thing, it should all be opening up. Postmodernism is still there at the heart of things, but it's a different kind of postmodernism.

PH: I'd like to debate the state of painting with you at a later date, I actually think it's quite healthy as can be seen in the work of Bernard Frieze in your biennale. But where modernism and postmodernism is concerned I've never seen it like a football match with two opposing teams. I think there are tenable elements in both and for that reason I have been seeking a synthesis, and using the term synthetic modernism, for over a decade.

JW: I like to thiink the same here in this show. But I think the modernist paradigm is well and truly gone and that postmodernism still has a long way to go. But I agree with you that it should be artist-lead.

PH: Lets talk about some of the artists then. Martin Creed from Glasgow trained at the Slade in London. He appears in the catalogue twice, once with the art band owada, then on his own. Is his work with the band quite separate from his practice?

JW: His work is a mix of informality and stringent internal logic. The music has an almost Cage-ian quality that is very rigorous - if you start you've got to go on to the end. Yet on the other hand it's not dry, it's great music to listen to and dance to. And that great sense of humour. It's smart and it's pleasurable.

PH: Is his work on Goat Island, the house filled with balloons that you have to literally push your way in to, typical of his practice?

JW: He has made three versions of that piece now. Once in Geneva, once in Gavin Brown Enterprise in New York and here in the harbour master's cottage, which seemed like a perfect match.

PH: Tell me about Beat Streuli whose work adorns the catalogue and whose photographs of tourists on Bondi Beach are all over the city.

JW: You can pick a Beat Streuli a mile away. I've always wanted to work with him since my Chissenhale days. I like the way it deliberately runs the risk of being confused with something else. You are made to wonder, where does the art work end and the world begin? And in a sense this is close to Martin Creed's way of thinking. In the catalogue I quote his formula which is "The Work + The World = The World”. And that's also the case with Beat. In his piece here I like the way he reflects back to Sydney with a giant billboard and people passing in the street might spot themselves up there. But my favourite juxtaposition in the biennale is in the pier with Beat at one end and Thomas Struth at the other.
Beat is often accused of being voyeuristic but I think that his choice of young subjects gives you a cross section of the planet. They are not being nostalgic about a past time, they are here, in the present, learning about life. It is like a time capsule. And the fact that there is the image of a young Asian woman on the catalogue, well Australia is like that now and Pauline Hanson and others will just have to accept it. It's not going to stop, and it makes Australia a much more interesting place than it was when I was last here about twelve years ago.

PH: I went to Julian Opie's floor talk yesterday. I've always enjoyed his work but had never seen the recent work in the flesh and I was quite surprised at the scale of it. And by hearing that museums can order up the work from a mail order catalogue and create their own configurations of signage. Was he someone you had thought of right from the start?

JW: He was there on the list right from the beginning. The way I tend to work relates to another point you were making about changes in the art world being artist-lead. When I'm asked to do a group exhibition I tend to think, who am I interested in now? And you write a list and it included people like Fischli and Weiss, On Kawara, Julian Opie, Beat Streuli, peole who were around my art world then try and work out what they have got in common and that's where the Everyday thing came in. So in a sense this exhibition kind of summarises my concerns up to that point, and brought in the peole I had been working with. And I realise also that I have been very fortunate in being able to travel and make research in countries where the art world was not known to me, so I have grafted new, presonal discoveries on to my on-going concerns.

PH: Thailand and Brazil seem to feature strongly in this biennale. I sometime wonder if Bangkok artists really benefit from their airport being an international pit-stop for 747s.

JW: I've used the catalogue to flesh out certain areas of personal discovery with Phatarawadee Phataranawik, who everybody just calls An,
writing about the incredible things going on in the Thai art world, the new spaces and the emerging artists. An is an interesting commentator and writes regularly for the Bangkok Nation. Similarly I haveViktor Misiano writing about Russia in his essay Radical Quotidian, and Djon Mundine writing about Australian aboriginal art.

PH: I've overheard a few biennale visitors in the last day or two say that they felt Jonathan Watkins must have young children because of the playful, sometimes cruel, often potentially physically dangerous nature of a lot of the work, from tortured cats to obsessively planned suicides that features in a short story in the catalogue. Can you talk about that and about the On Kawara piece in particular?

JW: I think the directness that is aspired to by many of the artists in the show is very akin to that of children. Rather than a jaded cynical view of things there is a very strong sense of wonder and a desire to communicate that candidly. I find that very refreshing and I know that many others do too. A lot of artists without me even prompting them have drawn parallels. Carl Andre talks about his work being like fireworks for children. On Kawara has always been introduced in children from thos very early works with pregnant women. He wants to make that connection. I can tell you that there is a secret art work here in Sydney that will only be seen by children. Seven of his date paintings "1 January to 7 January, 1977" have been placed in a kindergarden in the city and will only be seen by those children. It is a project he has titled "Pure Consciousness", and it epitomises this tendency. But it is there too in the work of Ann Veronica Janssens, you know the sort of thing that children do when they press their knuckles against their eyes and see different colours and shapes in their heads. Normally children are considered a problem in art exhibitions and I would like to think of them more as a feature. They are the next generation after all.