| Avi Davis: This will be an interview about art generated (largely) by interviews. So we’re operating with the ghosts of a lot of interviews looking over our shoulders. Did you ever feel like this was a commentary on the interview form, that the art is interviewing (or interrogating or commenting on) the interview that generated it? Charles Gute: Not specifically, because in addition to using interviews as source material, I also use essays, artist statements, bios, basically any text that might be part of an art publication. But I think I have a sense of what you’re getting at. When you read an interview in print, there’s this illusion that you, the reader, are a ghost listening to a seamless dialogue happening in real time. |
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Charles Gute interviewed by Avi Davis
Revisions and Queries book display, Feinkost Gallery, Berlin. Courtesy of the artist.Avi Davis: This will be an interview about art generated (largely) by interviews. So we’re operating with the ghosts of a lot of interviews looking over our shoulders. Did you ever feel like this was a commentary on the interview form, that the art is interviewing (or interrogating or commenting on) the interview that generated it?
Charles Gute: Not specifically, because in addition to using interviews as source material, I also use essays, artist statements, bios, basically any text that might be part of an art publication. But I think I have a sense of what you’re getting at. When you read an interview in print, there’s this illusion that you, the reader, are a ghost listening to a seamless dialogue happening in real time. When in fact, an interview like the one we are having now is something that is stitched together and mediated by yet another ghostly presence—an editor. It’s the invisible hand of the editor that I’m interested in exposing, this series of gestures that, by their nature, are supposed to remain unseen, since their whole purpose is to make the delivery of content to the reader as transparent and unencumbered as possible. In some ways, it reminds me of a Joseph Beuys performance I once read about, where he organized a panel discussion, but clamped all the speaker’s hands to the tabletop. As the participants spoke, it was Beuys—mute throughout—who performed everyone’s hand gestures.
AD: The only real text in this book, your commentary in the back, is hidden. Was this a deliberate attempt to mirror the nature of the art (where the “true text” is hidden/invisible)?
CG: It’s funny you should ask that, because the placement of the essay was a point of contention between the publisher and me, although I’m now very happy with the final result. The publisher, The Ice Plant, does very elegant, very austere art books with little or no text in them, preferring to let the artwork speak for itself. Nonetheless, I felt like this particular body of work needed some kind of statement from the artist, to provide contextual clues, and give some explanation of how these cryptic diagrams were created. So initially, I talked the publisher into letting me write an introduction to the book. Then, as the book came together, the publisher urged me, in keeping with their vision of a largely text-free book, to make the text shorter and shorter, and to consider moving the essay to the back of the book, making it function as an afterword instead of an introduction. In the end, I came to see that this was a successful strategy, because the reader is allowed to enter the work and come to his or her own conclusions without being given much interpretive guidance. Different readers bring radically different interpretations to the drawings. Meanwhile, there’s this text in the back that explains some of my ideas, and also gives a few pertinent details about how the drawings were created. Some readers have told me that they went through the book, then read the essay, then felt compelled to go back to the beginning of the book and start looking at the images again in a very different way. Anyway, to answer your question, I don’t know that the text in the back is “hidden” so much as it is sort of “deferred” so that the reader can find their own way into the work.
AD: I feel like this collection could be called “The Copyeditor’s Revenge.” Especially a piece like Marina Abramovic Timeline, on page 74, where the words “BYE-BYE,” “REFUSING,” “DREAMING,” “WE DECIDE, WE DECIDE,” sound threatening or hostile toward the original text. Thoughts?
CG: That’s funny. All those words are derived from the original text. My reiterations of those words in the margins were only to call attention to little mechanical problems, like the need for a hyphen in “bye-bye,” or to correct non-parallel verb tense. All very banal editor’s concerns. Believe me, the copyeditor is always on the author’s side!
AD: I don’t mean that you feel any personal hostility toward the author. Of course, the copyeditor’s job, during the act of copyediting, is to bring out the best in the text. To do otherwise—that is, to subvert the copyediting process—might be called copyeditor’s sabotage. But I’m talking about the drawings, which are created through an action you perform on the text after you’re done copyediting it. And look at that action: it asserts the importance of the copyeditor’s work (which is always invisible in the final version of a text) by erasing the “real” text. It’s a kind of role reversal. But it goes beyond that because while copyeditors’ marks are conventionally seen as having no “content,” these drawings raise the copyeditor’s marks to the level of “art,” while the original “content,” now erased, remains merely an “interview”, or a “timeline.” This action transforms the copyeditor’s remarks into a sort of a higher form of content by erasing the original content. That’s what I mean when I say, somewhat jokingly, that the drawings exist in a hostile relationship to the texts that generated them. I thought the words in Marina Abramovic Timeline simply amplified that relationship.
This actually relates to a question about how you chose to title the pieces. On the one hand, it makes sense that you would simply give the name of each original text to its respective drawing, so that the marks made on Gabriel Orozco Interview are themselves given the title “Gabriel Orozco Interview” after you turn them into an art piece. Titling the drawing this way provides the simplest reference to the text from which it is derived, and also provides the best “clue” to your methods, since the drawings can present a bit of a mystery on first viewing. It’s a pragmatic solution to those problems. But on the other hand, it’s ironic because, of course, the final piece of art, now called Gabriel Orozco Interview, is exactly not Gabriel Orozco Interview. It’s not even an interview. So the title is co-opted and subverted.
In the statement at the back of the book, you say that your ultimate decision about whether these pieces are compelling felt very subjective, “especially relative to [your] usual art practice.” What makes this work more subjective?
CG: My work has been described as “conceptual.” I’m not sure that’s true, and certainly the term is more than a little problematic. But it can be useful relative to this question. One of the reasons artists began to look toward more “conceptual” ways of working in the late 1960s was to find ways to avoid the subjectivities inherent in traditional fine art practice, expressionist painting being perhaps the pinnacle of that subjectivity. Artists looked for a more analytic mode of working, in which artistic decisions were not based on subjective feelings or impulses. As Sol LeWitt suggested, “the idea becomes a machine that makes the art.”
The marks that I make on a publisher’s manuscript are all entirely in the service of necessary editorial corrections. They are not arbitrary. And when I reframe those marks as art, I don’t alter them in any way. Yet when those notations are then rendered relatively abstract by stripping out the original content, what’s left becomes open to very subjective interpretation. If you have two different pages of such notations, you can start to ask questions like: Is one art and the other not? Or, if they are both art, is one “better?” These are subjective decisions, based on arbitrary notions of composition, color, resonance, humor… When I sat down with the publisher to put this book together, all these matters of taste came into play. Meanwhile, I like to think that my work is not guided by such ambiguous criteria, that the success of a given work is determined by how well the form of the work articulates the idea. But of course that’s a deluded goal, as no art is purely empirical.
