"Resist the Flattening Effect of Being On Display" interview with Sal Randolph

[Anna Balint]

 "Resist the Flattening Effect of Being on Display"
 Interview with Sal Randolph, September 2002

Cristoph Büchel, selected artist for Manifesta 4 in Frankfurt 2002 sold for 
15.000 USD his  right to participate at the show at an ebay auction. Sal Randolph,
 young artists from the United States won the action, and turned her right of 
participation into an open structure, an artistic hosting project and a three months 
long event running under the name Free Manifesta. Her announcement circulating 
on the net brought an unforeseen success and resulted in a lounge for about 225 
projects and artists who invited themselves to Free Manifesta. It is not the first time 
that major art events and their audience serve as alibi for spontaneous art 
demonstrations, and parallel events at a specific location, but Free Manifesta is special
for that these kind of artistic expression could converge in an open artistic construction.

 The following interview is looking over the results of the project and sums up 
Sal Randolph's second experience with free culture.

 Q: Looking over the statistics of Manifesta 4, it is impressive the
 number and variety of the projects you hosted at Free Manifesta.
 Whilst Manifesta is supposed to be the biennial of young European 
artists, you succeeded to expand the limits of the show, and turn it 
into an international art event. Did you have in mind any border 
issue while conceiving your project?

 A: Only in the sense that an important part of the project had to do
 with the idea of open access, free access.  With that in mind I do resist
 the idea of a show based on nationalistic or geographic criteria.

  Q: Did you expect such a large-scale contest?

 A: Yes --  I had just done a similar project in New York, the Free
Biennial, so I had an idea about what to expect. I was quite surprised 
by the size of the response to the Free Biennial, but it did allow me to 
be a bit prepared for Free Manifesta.

 Q: Were the works presented mostly conceived specially for Free
 Manifesta, or artists used the opportunity to promote their older work?
What was the response to your artistic concept?

 A:  It was a mixture of the two. There was no requirement that the
 work be new, but many artists did use the opportunity and the situation to
 create something fresh and specific.  For me it was important to leave
 it up to the artist how to make use of the context that was being
 offered.  I think the response to Free Manifesta as an art project
 varied - some people were interested in the project as an artwork, and others
 were interested in it simply as a show, and as a platform. I wanted it to
 work well on both levels. I felt it was important that  both the artists
 and audience were free to make use of whatever aspect of it they wished.

 Q: To what extent Free Manifesta worked as a commission for artists?
 How many of the works were site specific, relating either to the context of the city
 of Frankfurt, either to the Manifesta show?

 A: Approximately 60 pieces were created especially for Free Manifesta,
 and most of those responded specifically to context of the show, either in
 terms of addressing questions of art, money, gift, and access, or in
 terms of engaging Manifesta 4 or the city of Frankfurt. Heribert
 Friedl's piece, for instance, was conceived to coincide with the Frankfurt Art Fair, 
which was taking place during the first week of Manifesta/Free Manifesta.  
It was a multiple of 1000 plastic shopping bags which said, "YOU CANNOT
BUY ART / ART CANNOT BE SOLD".  Most of the visitors to Free Manifesta 
that week had just come from, or were on their way to the art fair, whose motto 
was "buy art." Robin Kahn & Kirby Gookin (aka S.O.S. Int'l) gave out 100% 
certificates to Frankfurt's most famous department store ("Take This: 100% 
off Merchandise Event") -- implicitly encouraging everyone who took a certificate 
to engage in a performative event at the department store register. 
Christina Ray's "Virus on Foot," Nick Grindell's "Frankfurt by Boat," and 
Adrian Lear's "Strategy of the Void" each built the idea of psychogeography, 
borrowed from the Situationists, by creating structured walks and explorations 
of Frankfurt.  The first two of these invited participants to share their intimate, 
on foot, reimagining of the city. Raphael Di Luzio shot, edited, and presented a 
new video work, "Axismundi: Frankfurt" during his two week residency at Free 
Manifesta.  New video work was also premiered by Igor Antic, Simon Morris &
 Howard Britton, and three students from the Goethe University in Frankfurt,
 Luna Atschekzai, Laura Dumitrescu, and Alexandra Härtel. Christina
 Pavesi's "Comments" collected viewers responses to Manifesta 4.  
The SCAPE duo walked through the Manifesta spaces wearing black T-Shirts, 
one saying "Don't look," and the other saying "now."  Street artists SWOON 
and Rryan Ceol tagged the outdoor courtyard of one of the Manifesta 4 exhibition 
spaces with a 7 foot poster collage.  And hundreds of passers-by took stickers from 
the booth and placed the words "FREE MANIFESTA" around the city, as well as 
on their shirts, hats, and messenger bags. This is really just a small taste of what
 happened. There were also performances, street installations, thousands of free
 art objects given away, interventions in the Free Manifesta exhibition space, etc.

 Q: As an open structure connecting different projects your initiative
extracted a public service from a mainstream art system. What was the relationship 
between Free Manifesta - and the official "selected and paid" show? Was Free Manifesta 
an autonomous space of production, did it create also an alternative social interface, were 
there many collaborative initiatives ?

 A: This is a difficult question for me to answer.  In one sense I was surprised at how easily 
Free Manifesta fit into the context of Manifesta 4.  In another way, though, it had a tendency 
to infiltrate its host, growing through and around it. In the end Free
 Manifesta was larger than Manifesta 4, with more than three times as many
 participating artists.  It sprawled across the city, over the internet,
 through the mail, the phone, and social networks.  And because most of
 the Manifesta 4 artists did not live in Frankfurt and were only able to
 be there for a few days at the opening of the show, Free Manifesta had
 a somewhat more personal presence in the city with a large number of
 artists visiting and spending time in Frankfurt to do their projects.
 Several of the Free Manifesta artists became involved with a local
 alternative exhibition project called Don't Miss and had shows
 organized by Don't Miss director Saul Judd.  Also the artists who
 happened to be in town for their projects at the same time met, and
 often became involved in each others projects.  Other connections were
 more elusive and ephemeral, but I feel that there is now a large
 community of people who are interested in some of the same questions I
 am and who have come to know more about each other through these
 projects.

 Q: Compared to the previous Free Biennial experience in the US were
 you surprised by any aspect of the Free Manifesta?

 A: The two were quite different in feeling because Free Manifesta had a
 public space, an office and information center in the Manifesta 4
 exhibition space at the Frankfurter Kunstverein.  The experience of
 working every day in a museum space was very interesting and
 challenging.  At first the office looked like a design display, and I
 was worried that it would be impossible for the project to be really
 alive in such a formally beautiful space.  Soon enough though there
 were artists using it as a studio and intervening in the space with
 their work, and boxes of free art arriving every day, and music, and
 coffee, and hanging out.  By the end, when a group of artists from
 France were watching over the office and I was back in the US, things
 got quite wild -- art everywhere on the walls, covering the signs,
 covering everything freely.
 I was also surprised by Frankfurt itself, and what a great underground
 art & music scene it had -- I came to really love the city which was at
 its best between midnight and 6 am.

 Q: It looks like that you had to perform a tremendous amount of work
 as curator. Did you organise everything alone, did volunteers show up,
 or mostly the artists organised the events themselves? Did you have
 difficulties to find the appropriate location and ways od display for
 all the projects?

 A: Yes, it was certainly a lot of work!  But of course any big art project
 is demanding. I did all the main organizing myself, produced the
 website and newsletter, kept office hours at the Kunstverein,
 communicated with all the artists and hosted visitors, etc.  However
 each artist was completely responsible for producing their own project
 -- all I did was handle their information: make a web page, copy their
 flyers, promote their events through the calendar and newsletter, etc.
 Quite a few artists involved with the project helped out with the
 office, including one who helped me set things up before the show began
 and several who were in Frankfurt after I had to return to the US in
 August.
 It's important for me to say here here that I wasn't a curator in any
 traditional sense: to me it was not a curatorial project but rather an
 artwork in the medium of social organization.  My aim was to create a
 structure that acted as transparently as possible, which artists could
 use to meet their own needs (for exhibition, promotion, context,
 connection) and bring forward their own intentions and desires.
 Because each artist chose their own location and presentation
 strategy, I wasn't really responsible for this aspect of things. But of 
course many people asked for help, and when possible I did bend the 
rules to try and help people set things up, particularly for people who 
travelled to Frankfurt to do their projects.   I might note however that 
quite a few artists did public space projects in Frankfurt, most of them 
without asking for any kind of official permission, and everyone was 
able to do that kind of work without any difficulty or resistance.

 Q:  Did Free Manifesta have a budget?

 A: Despite the unorthodox nature of my entry in Manifesta 4, they gave
 me
 the same budgetary support they gave any of the other artists, in my
 case about $5000 which was mainly used to build and set up the office
 space, make copies of various print materials, and for my housing while
 in Frankfurt.

 Q: Besides the official website of the show, Manifesta 4 comisisoned
 an alternative web project, the e-manifesta of the Technology to the
 People group. e-manifesta was a bulletin board for announcements,
 and also a space for reflection about the show and contemporary art
 in general. What is your experience about these models of
 communication?

 A: I was very excited by the e-manifesta project which also had a
 physical world component in the Manifesta 4 exhibition area called the
 "Trespassing Space," theoretically open for all kinds of community
 uses.  I think both had amazing potential.  Unfortunately, however,
 they were rather under-used and never gained a real momentum or
 community base.  The structures were in place, but not the people.

 Q: Apparently the Free Manifesta web page was not only a text pool,
 but became also a site of documentation and interaction, whilst
 information was circulated by the Free Manifesta newsletters. How 
many subscribers did the newletter reach?

 A: There are about 500 subscribers to the newsletter, which was also
 published on the website.  The newsletter also went out to some larger
 email lists, such as the local thing-frankfurt.com mailing list.
 The website http://www.freemanifesta.org will stay up indefinitely as
 a kind of catalogue of the show, and will continue to give access the
 work which is ongoing (for instance, many of the internet and mail
 art projects).

 Q: How does Free Manifesta relate to the concept of gift economy?

 A: Free Manifesta was an experiment in creating a small but working
 gift economy where the artists contributed their work and I contributed
 structure and organization.  Over the course of several previous
 projects involving free art I had become interested in what happens
 when people give things away. I began to study the work of Marcel
 Mauss and other people who have been influenced by him.  Gift
 economies permeate our society, but we rarely discuss them.  I both to
 increase the amount of conversation about the role and function of the
 gift, and to experiment with making use of a gift economy to build an
 alternative kind of social architecture.  

Q:  There wasn't any restrictive criteria to enter Free Manifesta.
Perhaps the non-selection is what gave the energy of  opposition...

 A: Yes, I think that was the key for me as well: the non-selection (or
 self-selection).  But interestingly, that kind of openness is not
 actually typical of traditional gift economies, where gifts are usually
 exchanged within closed circles.  The idea of a gift economy with open
 access is something fairly new -- it borrows one of the better
 qualities we associate with market-based systems.  I think this is part
 of what has given internet-based gift economies such an energetic
 quality -- gifts available to anyone for use, gifts that anyone can
 contribute to.  It alleviates some of the problematic qualities of the
 gift (obligation, dependency, social restriction, burdensome gifts,
 etc).

 Q: Besides the Situationist inspiration of the psychogeorgaphical
 projects, to what extent the projects were critical about capitalists
 economy and cultural industry?

 A: A very large percent of the work was critical either implicitly or
 explicitly, and I think everyone who took part in the show understood
 it to be an act of resistance to the dominant commercial and
 institutional paradigm in the art world.  More than 40 artists gave
 away a total of several thousand individual art objects.  These were
 obviously acts of both generosity and resistance. Almost all of the
 work created especially for Free Manifesta engaged these ideas, and
 much of the existing work came from communities like the net art and
 mail art communities that have been working outside of  the gallery and
 museum circuit for many years (although museums have recently developed
 an interest in net art).

 Q:  Was there an emphasis on free speech, and if any, could that be
 understood as a rection to the spread of surveillance in society, and new
 restrictions of civil rights in the aftermath of September 11?

 A: I spent the months after September 11th working on the Free Words
 project.  It involved going into bookstores and libraries around New
 York and slipping a free book onto the shelves for anyone to find, and
 it also involved walking the streets putting up bright pink stickers
 which said FREE WORDS.  Although I had created the project over the
 previous summer, I felt keenly the resonance of those simple acts of
 nonobedience.  It changed my relationship to social power structures
 like bookstores, publishers, urban planners and also my relationship to
 public space in general.  It was this experience which led me to start
 the Free Biennial, and to enter Free Manifesta.

 Q: Were there people who the possible challenge for cultural institutions
 by creative commons? Can you grab any influence of the  'free' net
 economy on free culture?

 A: Of course.  The whole early history of the internet, as well as the
 open source/free software movement are one of the most powerful
 examples of what a gift economy can produce.
 Yes, I think you're right that there is a challenge being presented.
 The internet in particular offers the potential for a decentralization
 of power, a more level playing field between individuals and
 institutions. As art forms change, cultural institutions may begin to
 feel some of the pressure that the music industry is feeling now.
 Though copyright issues didn't come up in any explicit way, also
 these questions are deeply connected.  In fact my next projects will
 be moving in this direction.

 Q: The rise of new media and internet culture brought also several
 social and economic utopia: it seemed in the mid-nineties that grassroot 
social and art networks will raise due to the easiness of the 
communication, and the law costs of immaterial digital works. It seemed for a
 moment that the social promises of the early 20th century avant-garde,
 Joseph Beuys' social sculpture can be fulfilled: the internet can promote
network democracy from below. However, disembodiment and dislocation 
limitated at the same time this culture. Though circulating idea may 
considerably influence reality, established systems may resist unaffected, and 
can respond with appropriation, inclusion or neglect, as it happened with the 
large concept art and mail art movement in the 70's and 80's.

 A: Well, I think you sum up what is hopeful and what is problematic very
 clearly in that statement!  On the hopeful side, I do think there are
 some qualities of the internet which are fundamentally new, which make
 the current moment different from the 60's and 70's.  Certainly none of
 these projects would have been possible for me to organize in any other
 way.   Almost everyone involved in Free Words, the Free Biennial and
 Free Manifesta -- I'm guessing something like 700 people or so -- came
 into contact with the projects through email or the internet.  They
 hadn't known me at all before that.  Internet communication combines
 qualities of broadcasting (one to many) with personal contact (one to
 one) and group discussion (many to many) - this creates a very flexible
 field for organizing groups and creating temporary institutions.
 I think it also has the potential to change the way historical
 information is gathered and organized.  Although things can disappear
 from the internet of course, they can also persist -- for instance
 there is no particular pressure for an internet exhibition to ever end.
 Email communication and internet-mediated discussions are
 *self-documenting* -- only a modest effort needs to be made in order to
 preserve them.  In this way individuals and smaller groups can take
 over some of the preservation functions of museums and institutions.

 Q: Adorno predicts in his Minima Moralia that gift will loose its
 meaning when gift culture is organised and starts to generate a gift
 industry. Could his opinion have any relevance when about exchange
 of cultural objects? Or, on the contrary, free cultural exchange is not
 a free service based on capitalist attention economy, but it is a valid
 protest against the capitalist market of cultural objects. Does Free
 Manifesta's statement reconsider art as a basic public facility?

 A:  I think it is dangerous to be too utopian about gifts or the gift
 economy.  I don't think gift economies in art or culture are any kind
 of complete cure.  To me it is more of a balancing action.  The market
 and institutional systems are so strong right now that they are
 creating a kind of distortion field, pulling art in some very
 particular directions.  Because of this many kinds of work and ways of
 working are being ignored or stunted.  It's not so much that I think of
 art as a basic public facility.  This would imply an institutional kind
 of solution.  Instead, I think of art as a basic human activity, part
 of being a person.  I see it very broadly, and in this way I am of
 course sympathetic with Joseph Beuys.  Rather than creating another
 industry of control (flattened, utopic)  I'm more interested in systems
 which are open, messy, democratic, contradictory and chaotic.  In other
 words, alive.

 Q: New art servers, art ports, media lounges that emerge and disappear
 not only  on the net, but they reach established art institutions and museums. 
 Do you sense that contemporary art scene is more accepting the attitudes of the
 alternative networks together with the alternative collection and distribution forms?

 A: I think there is definitely an interest in more socially activated,
 networked, and participatory artworks, particularly in Europe where
 state funded institutions play a stronger role relative to the gallery
 system.  Both Manifesta 4 and Documenta XI included a number of these
 kinds of projects.  The problem that museums and big shows have in
 working with this type of artwork is that it inherently resists
 exhibition -- it is made to be used rather than displayed.  It is very
 difficult for museums in particular to fundamentally incorporate
 use-space.  Viewers still come to museums and exhibitions expecting to
 be shown things, rather than expecting to do anything.  Because of
 this, most social artworks don't show well in these sorts of exhibitions,
 even if they are included.
 There are some signs of hope, however. A few of the Documenta projects,
 for instance John Bock's and Thomas Hirschorn's, created use-spaces and
 were quite successful in resisting being deadened or flattened by the
 exhibition context. Notably both were built by the artists, and took
 place physically outside of the ordinary exhibition areas.  They also
 allowed for and required the ongoing presence of groups of people who
 were engaged in work.  The biggest and most surprising challenge for me
 in creating Free Manifesta was in finding ways of resisting the
 flattening effect of being on display.  If I hadn't been there in
 person for most of the exhibition period, it would have been
 impossible.

 Q: To what degree was Free Manifesta a time-based project, a unique
 experience? Was it an ephemeral project, or there are lasting benefits,
 gateways opened from Free Manifesta?

 A: The project was meant to function both as an event and as a model. 
 It is very easy to feel passive and helpless in relation to social
 hierarchies and institutions.  Access can seem very restricted.  I
 wanted to experiment with alternative ways of gaining access, and of
 relating to institutions of the art world.  Part of the point,
 especially with the Free Biennial project which was done with a very
 low budget, is that anyone can do this.  In fact there is already a
 group called Liberarti creating a similar project in relation to the
 Liverpool Biennial.

 Thank you for the conversation.