Pandilovski in conversation with Holubizky 1/2

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.

–
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The Experimental Art Foundation is assisted by the Commonwealth
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