My advice: keep one foot in education: Either counterculture starts at grassroots level or it doesn’t start at all
a cura di Nadine Curanz and Elisa Galli
You should be telling me. Currently I see these countercultural movements in their foremost social form (possibly “political” but very much in inverted commas), as it’s more a rejection of politics – albeit not an a-priori rejection – but denial in view of something, from production/non-creation of something else. For the moment I mainly see this side of counterculture. I see great interest on the part of the capitalist society in reclaiming any form of counterculture in social and market terms, in the sense of standardization and integration within the mechanisms of accrual and wealth, of those forms which could turn into breaking points; I see an ever greater challenge – that of “succeeding”, we see how the art world has become financialized, becoming a market in its own right. It’s very difficult for an artist to be such, because the market lures and draws you in, and once you are inside, it’s very hard to define a different, opposing identity.
In my view it is highly likely that inside this capitalist fraction, entirely integrated and commodified, the ground is being prepared for a large art bubble, a counterculture bubble whence voices and jargons worthy of being regarded countercultural may emerge, but for now they are difficult to spot. An essential feature to be part of it is being young, conversely it wouldn’t be easy. But I think that we are to an extent in this phase, which I see more in social terms though, as things were stretched to the limit, poverty has grown disproportionately, the contrast with wealth is highly apparent, you even see it in shop windows, on television but you don’t rejoice in it, hence it is, even more so, violent. If you came from another world you wouldn’t notice it, but because it isn’t so, in that you are constantly confronted with this wealth, you reach a certain stage where you can no longer cope and you rise up. Much the same applies though to the art world, think what financialization of this world has meant, the number of people collecting works of art has grown, people who have never taken an interest in art, and if there was a time when they would go to Dubai or Miami it was because it was fashionable, and now they buy a number of paintings because it works the system and it is also a shortcut to joining the elite with a cultural identity card. It is rather shocking how financialization has heavily upset the very parameters. These are all things I’m not saying you should turn down, but that they are stages which have by now taken hold and which we must tackle. The power of finance within the art world is pretty dramatic and, here too, it’s impossible not to perceive the imminent outburst of a refusal. Countercultural movements, as far as I can remember, have been ground for rejection, we reject everything, all-out statements to see the emergence of a different spirit of society, seen as oppressive and boring. I teach a course at Milan’s NADA (Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti), I deal with young people like yourselves, and you can see that this is a problem, but knowing that you are inside the economics of the arts, how can you also be against it? It is a new ‘inside-outside’ that is actively being sought, now we are at the research stage or perhaps already at an explosion phase.
Undoubtedly in a positive light, if however you are hinting at other forms, i.e., the distribution of wealth, we have been talking for years about forms of basic income, but in the art world this has always been around, managing to secure some basic income for an artist, a scholarship or something like that, so that they could work without worrying about finding galleries where to show their output. Therefore the issue of wanting to be oneself while also claiming the right to some basic income, leads to the individual having to deal with how to be one’s own artist but without chopping their ear off because they’ve gone mad. In an economy like the one of the last thirty years, there has been a proliferation of jobs, and artists have been able – with great difficulty- to juggle their artistic work whilst having a job at McDonald’s, thus seeing the real world and gaining from this experience. At the same time, though, art has undergone commodification, financialization and greater collectors’ power. I have experienced this situation, when in the 1970s I lived in the United States, artists had taken over lofts. This is where counterculture or countercity happened, they were spaces of artistic activity and life. Later on brokers came and bought these spaces, and artists were split between those who managed to become “court” artists, at the disposal of the wealthy, while others simply vanished. There was a similar situation in music, the New Wave of the 1970s and 1980s, where some artists like Madonna made it while others failed to stand out. We are always before two souls, an eternal contradiction which is what counterculture feeds on.
Keep one foot in education, where there may be job openings, i.e. an internship, without leaving it immediately after your first degree, since starting from scratch I think would make it difficult for your working career to take off. Also travel and leave Ticino, as it’s a very small place.
I’d be more inclined to say that in the last few years we’ve seen an event economics, going from one event to the next, from the 2014 Expo to the Venice Biennale. The art world goes through these events and they have become a fad; think for instance of what happens in Germany at Documenta. They are extremely interesting moments, but the problem is how to make counterculture beyond the events. The exhibition has become a snare for counterculture, i.e. it’s a very way of killing it off before it even manages to come to the surface, to reflect on this event economics in a critical way, thinking about what it is that stops counterculture blasting out and emerging. The rationale of the event forces everyone to take part in a validating and validated manner in something organized by others, thus you are not in a position to act in a countercultural manner. Counterculture either starts at grassroots level or doesn’t start at all, there is no other way of creating countercultural events, it is therefore necessary to find ways to “counter (zany) events” in order to redefine a counterculture domain.
When I was in New York I experienced first-hand the New Wave Underground movement, I was friends with Jean-Michel Basquiat and David Byrne. At one point there was an event: the PS1, a very well-known exhibition that appears to have started the New Wave, in actual fact, it sealed it. And this was the event that killed off the countercultural nature of the New Wave.