course for curators of contemporary art: course participants / study excursions / program collaborators / exhibition / course participant's texts

Eda Čufer
A conversation with Clémentine Deliss

You deal explicitly with trans-cultural projects. Where did this interest come from?

Most probably it is a result of my personal biography as well as my studies art in the late seventies and then of anthropology. I was born in England, but my mother was French and my father is Austrian. My grandfather Leo Delitz was a painter in Vienna in the first part of the twentieth century. At the time he did not wish to participate in the Austrian debates about art, was not a Secessionist, but had studied in Munich (rather than Paris). Accompanied by his two sons, he travelled across Eastern Europe on his bike or on horseback, and while doing so he painted portraits and landscapes for the local and once-Austro-Hungarian nobility and bougeoisie. This experience obviously influenced my father, for he raised us in a similar spirit. My grandfather moved to England before the beginning of WW.II and, my father, who was raised with a healthy anti-nazi spirit, participated on the British side as a glider pilot, and changed his surname from Delitz to Deliss. We lived in a very non-English way in London. During our holidays we travelled to Eastern Europe, to countries like Hungary, Poland, former Yugoslavia. In 1968 we also visited Albania. I think that this experience enabled me to learn no fear towards other people and cultures and it encouraged a constant need to travel and meet people I could dialogue with. However, in the context of my professional work I only began dealing with the issues of so-called other cultures at the beginning of the 1980s when the debates in London focused strongly on the 'other', other cultures, the other artists from African and Asian diasporas within the cultural life of England.

Your central project Metronome combines the role of a curator, editor, anthropologist and pedagogue in a very individualistic manner. At the same time the concept is very critical and operates as an art project. How did you come across such a synthesis?

When I started my studies at the academy of applied arts in Vienna at the age of 17, I believed that art was something you create with some sort of talent and material. However, I soon discovered that art is in fact a way of thinking and acting. I found that the art that interested me mainly referenced writings in ethnology, anthropology and new theory - in fact these were a central information base for artists in the mid to late 70s. I left art school after two years and decided to study anthropology, first in Vienna, and later on in London and Paris. Once I completed my studies of anthropology I never again worked in this field. At the end of the 1980s there was a semantic anthropology department in London at the School of Oriental and African Studies. Although it was more analytical and reflexive than the study of philosophy, the ideas as of anthropologists at the time with regard to contemporary art practices were old fashioned. In the mid-1980s, anthropologists were extremely skilled at text analysis but they were not interested in visual culture. I started to realise that I was not operating in the right field. However, it was the field that gave me a critical stance towards interpretative structures. Even today I still operate with these starting points and methods and all these roles that you have mentioned can very successfully supplement each other within this frame.

I am interested in your experience in curating exhibitions. You said that you perceive Metronome as a medium which enables you to set yourself free from the standardised role of the curator. Where does your need for emancipation come from?

In 1988 I completed my Ph.D. on the theme on eroticism and exoticism in the representation of the 'other' within French anthropology in the beginning of the 20th Century. At this time two large exhibitions began to affect the way people were looking at non-European or non-American art: Primitivism in 20th Century Art, in New York's MOMA (in 1984) and Magiciens de la Terre in Paris (in 1989). These two exhibitions made me curious of events and transformations taking place in the areas of contemporary Africa. I wrote a text which juxtaposed new works by Neo-Conceptualists such as Jeff Koons and Haim Steinbach with issues surrounding belief and the object in certain contexts in Africa. I wanted to highlight the absence of recognition in art from Africa of those new transformations that could be directly related to collections of 'traditional' art in ethnographic museums. It was quite a daring text when I think back to it now: an attempt to draw a coherent parallel between different notions of discourse and the material object. It was immediately accepted by Peter Pakesch as a concept and he commissioned me to make the text into an exhibition for the Steierische Herbst (Styrian Autumn) in 1990 according to the ideas I had raised in the text. The title of the text and later on the exhibition was Lotte or the transformation of the object. The text dealt with the issue of the operations of the art markets, in as far as it brought together objects from different market spheres, be they the Max Hetzler gallery (for Jeff Koons, for example), or a market in Kumasi, Ghana.

What does Lotte referto?

Das doppelte Lottchen is the title of a children's story about twins written by Erich Kästner. I chose this name as a metaphor for another story this time from Africa. The story dealt with a teacher in an African city (Lagos), who, after her had twins died, carried a plastic doll with her everywhere she went. The bright red doll with blue eyes was based on a mould that had been produced in Germany in 1940s. However, this doll had been manufactured in a Chinese factory in Lagos and had a very distinctive aesthetic to it, even though the basic form was European. The teacher used this doll, so the story goes, as a ritual object yet being in plastic it fell into a category which no ethnographic museum would collect. Other versions called the 'Ere Ibeji' (Yoruba) are highly collectable and are in dozens of museums all over Europe and the States. This case clearly highlighted the problem of the Western art market of 'tribal' or 'African art' with regard to the on-going transformation of African cultural systems of value. The Western market is still not capable of articulating the changes in perception as regards the ritual object in the context of industrialisation and modernisation. To me this doll played an iconic role, that enabled me to establish a critical discourse in relation to a debate on new work from the African continent. It reminded me also of the wall installations and floor installations using plastic debris that the British artist Tony Cragg was doing at the same time. I started thinking about what we understand under the term African art. If one mentioned African art in 1988 one generally had in mind 'traditional' African art, objects which belonged to the 'tribal art' market. I wanted to set up an exhibition that would draw the attention of visitors to the critical systems that are set into motion in relation to objects and materiality. So I travelled to Africa for the first time in my life. I visited market places, bought plastic objects, fabrics with prints of various typographies and objects, and then researched the market and economic background of the gathered objects. I also visited Freetown, Sierra Leone because I had heard that there were young urban groups there (Odelay gangs) who produce the so-called 'fashion devils', a kind of urban variation of the traditional Yoruba masquerade. They had kept the form of the masks and the execution, however they added urban communication systems, including politics, trading, contemporary music and so on through the inclusion of man-made materials that counter-posed the natural materials of the earlier masks. At the same time I was also borrowing works of art from the Western art world. I borrowed a work by Jeff Koons, his large porcelain bear, then I also borrowed single works by Heim Steinbach, Mike Kelley, Rosemarie Trockel and Lubaina Himid, an artist from the Black British scene in England. I placed all of these objects into the museum space without any signatures, signboards or explanations whatsoever. The visitor of the exhibition therefore had to react in a formal way, for there was no mechanism established which would define the critical, cultural or market differences between the objects. The exhibition was an attempt to play against the formalism of the relationship of affinity which at the time linked Europe to Africa.

What sort of relationships do you have in mind?

My intention was to show that a context exists and that each object is always a part of a critical context. I wanted the absence or repression of a critical context with respect to activities and transformational concepts in Africa cities to become clear and unavoidable, so the Eurocentric art world would realise the borders of its knowledge. Therefore, if a visitor recognised a Haim Steinbach, but at the same time did not recognise, for instance, a plastic object that I had purchased at a marketplace in Africa that was placed next to it, they had to ask themself the question of what it is that their judgements as regards a work of art were based on. This exhibition was a great success. Almost simultaneously with this project I also worked on an exhibition for the Hayward Gallery. This was a national travelling exhibition entitled Exotic Europeans, and it had a very simple concept. The idea was to investigate the reserve collections of ethnographic museums in the UK, and find works of art (not only African but also Indian, Japanese, Chinese and so on) that depicted the imperial or colonial European in any kind of medium. This project was my first experience of curating with the British art world, and it proved far less experimental than the work I did in Europe. At the end of the eighties, I started seeking new ways to develop my ideas further. At that time MTV and Channel Four started working on a joint documentary programme called Buzz, a kind of Global video-newspaper. For this 13 part series, I filmed in Bombay, Cairo, Togo, Ghana. Together with my working partner, Simon Underwood, we conducted a large number of interviews and shot vignettes of people in normal yet unusual situations. I spent one year and quite a lot of money trying to set up a new documentary series with a production company in London, but in those days even video was still regarded as problematic, and the my idealism found no success. After being disillusioned by television I returned to the university where I had studied and keeping abreast of new developments in global art issues organised a seminar on 'African Art Criticism'. During this period I closely followed the rise of European interest in African art and wrote several quite polemical articles on this topic. During the time this seminar was running, the Royal Academy of Art in London was preparing a large exhibition of African art with the goal to set up the most extensive and prestigious exhibition of African art of all times: from the first portable painting found in Namibia 20.000 years ago to contemporary work. It is hard to imagine that as late as the 1990s in America and elsewhere, various catalogues and publications had appeared which stated that art criticism does not exist in Africa. This is pretty strange; it is as if somebody said that art criticism does not exist in Slovenia. Within the frame of my seminar we were actively trying to prove a different point. At the same time,the Royal Academy invited me to come up with a concept for a festival, which would deal exclusively with the urban, contemporary side of Africa. I asked for funds that would enable research, and the possibility to meet artists, writers, musicians and film directors in Africa, so that we could jointly come up with a form and concept for such a festival. I visited twenty countries. We held intensive debates, critical discussions of the new surge of interest in work from Africa. However, at the end I did not have a concept for the festival, but more a certain image of the fact that people want to co-operate. Collaboration became the leitmotif. This project, entitled Africa 95 took four years of my life and it grew into an organism that in the end encompassed 60 institutions throughout England. However, the first event took place in Africa and was an experimental workshop in Senegal. The 'africa95' season included different media such as television, new forms of writing, discussions on film and the visual arts, music and dance. The Patrons were Nelson Mandela, Leopold Sédar Senghor, and HRH Queen Elizabeth II.

This was therefore the project which lead to the first Metronome in Dakar?

No, the last exhibition I set up before starting Metronome was at London's Whitechapel Art Gallery. This was at a time when nobody in the West wanted to hear about modernist tendencies in African Art. I researched art schools, the academic situation, political manifestoes of artists from the 1950s and 60s, when artists and intellectuals took over colonial art schools. These urban and progressive tendencies, represented by modernist predispositions, were in opposition to the European traditionalists - amateurs who travelled to Africa in the 60s and who were opposed to art schools believing instead that the 'pure African spirit' should be expressed without a 'foreign' education. For the exhibition 'Seven Stories about Modern Art in Africa' at the Whitechapel gallery, I was helped by five curators from Africa: El Hadji Sy from Senegal, a young Nigerian Chika Okeke, the young Kenyan woman artist Wanjiku Nyachae, Salah Hassan from Sudan and based in the USA, and David Koloane, an artist from South Africa. David Koloane was the first black artist to gain access to the collections of the South African museums and the works that he presented within the frame of our project, were a selection of his personal history which included white as well as black artists. In my selection I focused on works that proved extremely abstract and demonstrated the conceptual tendencies in African art. We worked on the exhibition for three years and it was very complex. We compiled a catalogue, which received an award for the best reference book on contemporary African art, and within it we included manifestoes as well as plenty of other information. For me this project was of extreme importance, for on the one side I wished to open up the issue of modernism in Africa and on the other side I had to control the strategy of co-operation with five co-curators. We tried to set up a historic exhibition, with the desire to be humble - these were seven stories after all - and show works of art that should be seen. However many people who came to the exhibition the quantity and the diversity of the exhibits. They compared them to Western art and exclaimed 'Oh, this is like Jasper Johns' or something similar. One could not help but notice the persistency of the idea that contemporary Africa must remain true to its past or be seen pejoratively as a cultural derivative of the West. After this experience I decided that I will not set up any exhibitions any more and my first project that followed was Metronome No. 0, Dakar. My real reason however for leaving exhibitions was to move away from catering for a general art public, however diverse, and to try and set up a more precise circuit between professionals, to define my curatorial activity more and more as an 'artist-to-artist' curator.

Dakar appears as a constant reference in nearly all issues of Metronome. You say that you are not a specialist of contemporary African culture, but you are a member of the artist collective Laboratoire Agit-Art from Dakar. How did this co-operation emerge?

I met Issa Samb and El Hadji Sy for the first time during one of my first visits to Dakar in 1992. Every time I visited Dakar since our relationships and interests got closer. Both artists co-operated in London on several of the 'africa95' projects. I became a member of the Laboratoire Agit-Art collective as a result of several years of discussion and mutual respect. They accepted me as a co-thinker, translator and editor, however, the most important issue was that I paid attention to their methodology of work and that certainly influenced me to a great extent. This was not a case of writing about their work as an external observer, instead I studied their methodology and co-operated intensively with them.

The first Metronome was published at a time when intensive debates as regards the necessity of redefining the global-local relationship and the needs for new trans-cultural organisational models emerged. How come you chose the form of a publication?

The first three issues of Metronome, produced in Dakar, London, and Berlin, functioned as a platform for artists and writers so they could express or articulate issues and forms that they could not exhibit or publish elsewhere. For me Metronome is like an affair, a promiscuous entity within the orthodoxy of each person's work. Because of this it always gathers a large number of very different people. The key strategy is that it joins and links different generations of artists and writers who are known within the different contexts they operate from. The early Metronomes included, for instance Paul Virilio, Rebecca Horn and Slavoj Žižek alongside intellectuals and activists who are less known in Europe, such as Issa Samb and others.

Do all of them write exclusively for Metronome?

Not necessarily. Sometimes I translate into English already published, yet unknown texts. For instance, I published a translation of a new text by Edouard Glissant, the philosopher from Martinique, that had not been published in English even though he is one of the most constructive and poetic thinkers on the issue of diaspora. I never define the theme for an issue of Metronome in advance. Now that I have met Mladen Dolar I am already thinking that I would invite him to write something for the next issue, but at the moment I have no idea what the next issue will be about. Usually I have no idea as regards the function of an individual issue of the Metronome until I enter a special state of research, when things start to link and form. I work only with people who find the project a challenge and are prepared to offer something and not only take advantage of publishing some old texts. The most valuable experience of the Metronome is the invisibility which it enables, for it is not distributed in a normal manner. These publications are circulated through personal contacts, which means that many people who might be interested in it do not have the possibility to put their hands on it. However, with this I am freed of the market pressure. Academies and art schools are very valuable points of research and exchange of ideas and lately I have worked a lot within the frame-work of art schools.

With practices that try to bypass mainstream logic and mass distribution there is always the issue of translation, not only from one language to another, but also from context to context.

This is an issue I am very interested in and I believe that it is important today more than ever before to know who we are translating for, who are we talking to, and to whom do we wish to pass on the information. Too many young artists create their works of art without thinking to whom in the differing art worlds they are intended for. The argument that they wish to create works that would address a broad audience is not good enough for me.

Do you agree that theory plays the role of contextualisation in contemporary art? Or, to put it in another way, what is the amalgam in contemporary societies that enables communication among thinking people who live completely different lives?

I agree that theory as a complimentary and sometimes secondary discourse is of great importance, however, when we are talking like this now, it is also a primary experience, which does not differ from the one that people at the next table are having. Various languages and dialogical codes co-exist. Of course there is the question of what will happen with our dialogue when I will return to London and our communication will change.

You have mentioned the problem f standardisation, which affects art as well as critical theory and other systems and sub-systems that enable operations in the art world to take place. If I understand correctly you are dealing with the issue of how to bypass the standardisation?

Yes, and this is very difficult. I am completely aware that there are no perfect solutions. That is why I often say that I would like to learn how to tell lies. I would like to be aware of what a lie can cause in a certain context. I am interested in the concept of lies and honesty in today's art world. I am interested in what this really means. Forming an image about oneself is usually a sincere act based on the desire to give something of ourselves to somebody else, so we could start with a more precise discussion. As much as I can, I try to bypass the direct routes and seek for formulas that indicate how to present myself and others in a more wayward way. Avoiding frontal disclosure of information about oneself or about the things we know by searching for side alleys always brings curiously interesting and positive results.

Even though you are a master of communication with very different people and cultures, you are come from the centre of the Western world and you are well equipped with all systems which we need for orientation and operation in this world. For us, who come from elsewhere, the process of learning and adjusting to these systems is a long and difficult one. I do not mean only language or theory but also some sort of basic self-confidence and belief in the sovereignty of the individual. Western individualism is a well-conceived system, whereas outside the Western world, collective experience and traumas dominate.

have learnt a lot from my experience in Dakar and being a member of the Laboratoire Agit-Art. I managed to establish a dialogue between these closed circles in which the local intelligentsias move. Therefore the model of differentiating personal and collective trauma is not so relevant for me. I have a very deep resistance to definitions of 'other' or similarly simplified polarisations. People still talk through concepts from the 80s, about the West and the rest of the world, about the dependence and independence. I do think it is important, however, I do not believe that these polarisations cannot be overcome and that people in principle can speak the same language. My way of operating is based on the belief that I can meet somebody who thinks in a similar way or at least parallel to me anywhere in the world. Of course, we can have numerous backgrounds that can be completely different. The most important thing that I have learnt during my work with the Laboratoire Agit-Art is the timeliness of mutual interest as regards the forms of real life, forms of kindness. That is from the belief that the person opposite me is my neighbour, even though I do realise the immense differences between the two of us.

This seems to be a healthy standpoint. Closed communities need a dialogue in order for them to get rid of the old models of resistance and past mythologies, so they can develop further.

That is also the reason that I have published the interview with Paul Virilio in Dakar. Why would I not publish Virilio in Dakar? In the West nobody would read Issa Samb, if his text was not published next to Virilio's. In the last issue of Metronome which was created in Scandinavia and includes new text by Issa Samb but this time it is in Wolof, the national language of Senegal. I was faxed the text written by hand in Wolof. Issa has had a Francophone colonial education and when he sends me his handwritten manuscripts even in Wolof, I am able to decipher them. But this text is poetry and it was written in manuscript form in his language. I tried to get an epistemologist from the university in Dakar to write some sort of a parallel text as a translation, but it did not work out, because the text was written in such an erudite fashion that it is absolutely impossible to translate. Therefore we published it in the Wolof language in Scandinavia, and when the latest issue of Metronome will reach Dakar this will be a great event. For the next time I arrive at Dakar or when you go to Dakar and meet Issa Samb the connections will be immediate. And this is what I find exciting.

These are small, yet important steps. In the case of Eastern Europe we can see that fast internationalisation and globalisation strategies, which are establishing themselves through biennials and similar projects, do not work out, for they bypass everything that is not standardised.

These small steps are the only true challenge, are they not? I do not know what the situation is like in Eastern Europe, but in the African context it is of great importance for artists and intellectuals to explore different forms through which debates develop, debates which reach various audiences, at home and abroad, and that deal with important themes without naming them precisely. I think that we today can no longer operate politically if we name our strategies. The moment we name our goals within a political operation we lose them. I am aware that if I call my work political, everything would be lost. That is why I am surprised when some artists think of themselves as activists. That is like an alibi so that the moment they call themselves activists they can stop being active.

* First published (in abridged version): Delo, August 27, 2001