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it's art, but it only becomes art in another context. There are too many years between the beginnings in Canada and the retrospective, and the problem is that this retrospective will really concentrate on work since 1970, basically 1975, 74, 75, one or two small pieces in it from that time, but what we'll be missing will be all the time.
We'll work before that, which would work smaller pieces and experimental pieces and things like that, which I did when I was in Vienna first, which was, I was full-time in Vienna since about 1972, had a studio in Vienna from around 72, and then of course all the things I did in London from 1960 into 1971, that will also be missing from the exhibition.
And of course what I did in Canada from the time I was about, I left Canada in 1959, and so I was quite active as an artist, I was 24 when I left Canada, so I was active as an artist for that, since I was 19 or so, and all that work would be missing, and that was very much to do with landscape painting, which was a family tradition, a family of artists, and everybody painted in the family.
And the Canadian style and the Canadian interest at the time, well not at the time, still in many ways historically Canadian landscape painting, landscape is a big thing in Canada.
The work, which I did in London from 1960 until 1970-71, had a kind of parallel element too, there was the works themselves which were happening within the context of a very active social life in London, London in the 60s was notoriously active, the famous Swinging London period, so it was a busy time.
There was a sense in London at the time of tremendous optimism, so people began doing all kinds of things, starting businesses, and I was one of the people who started the business, it was a rather complicated business, it was a kind of industrial commune, and people were talking about going back to the land,
but I felt that was a bit absurd, that we were city people, so we should be doing things which were like industry, but in a way starting fresh, not making conventional businesses, but making collaborations, collectives, communes which produced things and sold them in normal course of things.
The product itself was not the most important element, but it was the example of an alternative to normal business practice and all that kind of stuff, so with some two partners I began to work with reproduction glass paintings, complicated antique process.
Looking back on it I see that it was a kind of artwork in itself, it's very hard to explain how, but I think in the context of the 70s or the 80s we're creating spaces for work or operating with performance or with immaterial forms became normal.
This project which was full of artisans, it was a company, becomes a kind of artwork, not necessarily my artwork, but an artwork in itself, it was a business, but it was actually a kind of picture of a business, it was successful as a business, in the sense that, in the Warholian sense of being business art, so to speak,
so re-examining Warhol in the 70s when I had time after the experience of the London energy to reflect on what happened happening, realized that Warhol recontextualized art made a picture of the culture,
ironical pictures of the culture, so that the full of artisans project, which was the small business, in a way becomes an artwork, but there is no product to this artwork, it's just something which informed me about how to operate, although at the time I couldn't,
I didn't know myself, I couldn't define it as an artwork myself, later I could have defined it as an artwork. And I guess it was that experience with the full of artisans, which operating with immaterial space, the space of a business or the space of an electronic system
made it possible for me to get involved at the end of the 70s in communications projects, which were completely immaterial, using at the time quite sophisticated electronic devices, slow scan television, fax machines were very new, very modern at the time,
there was nothing, they were not in every office as they were by the mid 80s, by 1980 the fax machine was a pretty exciting innovation, so artists using it was in itself exciting and spectacular, but of course there was no product to that, these pieces of
thermal paper with images on them, which were transmitted across the world, didn't have any value or any permanent, so it was just the activity of operating within the system, and it required a lot of organizational energy to put a communications project together,
and that's something I'd learned to do through these, you don't learn to do such a thing, it's a level of commitment or engagement, obsession if you like, so you spend a lot of time organizing things, put getting people together across the world and then getting them all together on the
telephone at the same time and working with these projects, so in a way this invisible or this episode in my life of working for these three or four years with the art, with Full of Artisans, was a very important element in my art practice, although at the time it didn't seem to me,
so I began to read people like Michael Freed and Kevin Greenberg and one thing or another about painting and about formal painting, and began to ask myself questions about what painting was, basically reading about my own history,
basically reading about my contemporaries who had been involved in the arguments, and began a series of formal paintings, trying to reduce painting to its absolute surface, which was an argument at the time, and it was not an attempt to illustrate the theories,
but to really produce the kinds of things, to really reduce painting to its absolute minimum, by 77, I think I found solutions to most of the problems that I could discover, I mean I reached my limitations as a problem finder,
and solved all my problems, and was beginning to repeat the solutions, and that was extremely boring, so by 78 I was more or less at the end of it and quit, using various materials, not working with color applied to surfaces,
but colors which are, the colors of the materials themselves, I was using different kinds of fabrics, so black silk for one thing, and then using colored rice paper, which had a painterly kind of effect, but it was not painted,
so there were paintings which weren't painted, I've called them collages, they're kind of pseudo paintings, they don't have any support so that they don't hang, they hang direct on the wall, this kind of thing,
but by 78 I'd exhausted that pretty well, and began to work with other kinds of materials.
I think that came out of a visit to Canada in 1978, and this trip to Canada I met Bill Bartlett, who was working with communications technology, and it was the way I became,
Mr. Bartlett I became interested in communications work, I started working on a couple of projects with him, and then continued, the other person I met in Canada was Hank Boulder, and the people around the western front in Vancouver,
and that introduced me to people who were completely unconcerned with these formal problems, they were much more oriented on, had been oriented on, Flexus Intermediate,
but what they were doing was work which was indifferent to the art market, they were indifferent to the problems of formal painting and what they were doing,
they were just doing things that they enjoyed doing, and which they shared among themselves more or less, without bothering to worry about whether they were acceptable to New York,
or to high theory, and I think because I was exhausted with the operating with high theory, I went home and decided, well I didn't decide anything, I just wasn't able to work at all,
and I began to make model ships out of junk in the studio, and so that's where the ship pieces came, this piece called Seascape,
but it didn't start off as an artwork, it started off as something I just did because I like doing it, and I had a four year old son,
and I took him to the park every day, and the model ships were being sailed in the park, in the pond, in the crossplates, and it was something to do while he was playing on his bike,
and in the end I had 18 model ships, and I began to do a photo series of the ships, and made a film with Karl Cobans of the ships,
and I began to work with narrative work, and small sculptures, and miniatures, and things which I'd done as a child, making small, and making plasticine soldiers,
I was working with Fimo in 1979, making miniature figures of myself in various jobs,
and strangely enough at that moment this kind of work began to, in the new spirit of the 80s, so to speak, was included in the Venice Biennale,
and that kind of introduced me to the international art market at the place where I wanted to get out of it.
It was a very strange environment to be there as a kind of dropout, and finding that I'd actually dropped in,
because what I began to do was something that a lot of other people were beginning to do at the same time,
to escape from the straight jacket of formalism, a certain kind of formalism,
I began to exhibit in the larger venues, and that made some serious changes to my attitudes about myself,
and to reflect theoretically on a great many things about art, and about artists.
Parallel to that in 1979 did the first communications project,
so I was involved both in the larger art world, which was a very strange phenomenon for me anyway,
and in this very outsider situation of the non-objective area of telecommunications where no product is available,
no institutions or the art world is completely uninterested in it,
and I began to work these things parallel, the whole thing was going on at the same time,
I was making these sculptures, they were exhibited in places like the Museum of Modern Art in New York,
and the big art fairs, and stuff like that.
And at the same time I was doing these strange projects, which just involved people in different parts of the world,
in Sydney, Australia, in Vancouver, in Toronto, New York periodically,
but almost never any place that was central in the art world.
There was always people on the perimeters, on the margins of the bigger art world,
working with communications technology, which linked them, gave them a community,
so I felt myself a part of that community.
And strangely enough, supported it out of money I was earning in the art market,
also through Canada Council grants, which were being, as a painter,
exhibiting sculptural works and selling sculptural works in New Zealand galleries.
It was a very strange, schizophrenic situation, because these two worlds are completely parallel,
the artists working with communications and technology are very paranoid about the art market,
they feel rejected by it and so forth, and couldn't talk about it, I mean,
my work in that field for them was almost traitorous.
For the museums and galleries, especially for the galleries, it seemed to them a complete waste of time,
they felt it was not really relevant to art practice and so forth,
but if I wanted to carry out as a hobby that was okay, so that there was this strange schizophrenia, a strange split.
And that went on right through until about mid-80s when I dropped out of the communications part.
Several things to be said here about the whole experience of the split between the communications art,
this non-objective art, this open art that doesn't belong to anybody that nobody can own,
that amounts to experience of an event or participation in an event,
and this has no purchasable quality, it doesn't, you don't have anything left over from it.
And that way it's very much like much of the art of the 70s and early 80s was performance art,
where the performance was experienced and there were a few photographs
and people had card catalogs of things they'd seen so they could refer to them
and hold lectures about this performance artist and this particular performance
or this version of a particular performance.
But there wasn't anything left, the experience was individual and personal.
And I think that element is very important in understanding how the so-called net art operates
parallel to and outside of the normal art market, the museum world, the art world, whatever you want to call it.
And the problem the museums and the curators and the establishment have in trying to incorporate
this open, ownerless art within the collecting framework.
This is a problem which was there from the very beginning with the performance art,
and certainly with also some of the video, but very much so with communications art.
The problem hasn't gone away, the problem is the same, the art market and the art world
or the art institutions or whatever you want to call it cannot change so quickly.
I'm sure that they've come to some sort of method of understanding this,
but actually until now they haven't.
Working in the communications territory, whatever you want to call it, is hot at the moment.
That's the new technology, that's the new place where artists are finding themselves.
Artists are DJs and performers in one way or another in discos and clubs.
They're making websites, they're making all kinds of things which have no physical property.
For someone like myself who's been involved with this whole project for 20 years,
there's nothing new about the World Wide Web.
The technology is new, it's much more available, many more people can use it.
It's on the front page of every newspaper, you don't have to explain about networking any longer,
you don't have to talk, explain about what computers can do, modem speeds and all of these things.
That's what everybody's reading every day and the technology sections of every newspaper.
But the problems about what this is, whether it's art or not, or whether it's collectible
or how do you live from it, all of these questions, that they're the same as they were in 1980.
And actually when you come to think of it, 20 years is not all that long.
Most of the people involved are still alive.
It was clear right from the very beginning, from the first time we ever got access to this equipment,
that what the kind of technology we're using was just becoming available to the normal human being.
As I say, it was equipment which was coming into the shops.
It was expensive, it was seldom, but you could get things along to you by manufacturers
because they wanted to market new technology.
Fax machines were still Group 2, they were very slow, but there were companies producing them.
There were things you could hook on the telephone, although it was mostly illegal to hook them on the telephone.
The telephone companies were very slow in adapting to the new technologies as we know, especially in Europe.
But all of this stuff was there, but it was clear that much of this material,
much of this technology was rooted in military technology.
The notion that you were penetrating a somehow corporate military terrain was important to the whole episode.
The systems we were penetrating, these systems were not there for my use,
they were not there for anybody's use, they were not there for nine things, they were there for the operation of global finance.
Insurance companies had networks using the telephone networks for transmission of data.
It was very clear that even then globalization was not a word which was on everybody's lips as it is now.
The globalization for most of these multinational corporations or transnational corporations,
as we're starting to call them, that these companies basically existed only when the machines were turned on.
That notion was the notion that there is a kind of electronic space in which the transnational corporations,
the military intelligence, military command positions, all these things exist only in this communication space,
or electronic space, and that is when the machines are turned on.
There was a kind of metaphor that I used in trying to describe networking structures.
The company is a phantom, and this notion of the phantom company existing in a communications world
is like the phantom military, it's like the echelon system.
At the time, telephony was very expensive.
You knew perfectly well these people had special rates operated within a closed network of invisible machines,
which no one else had access to.
So this military, commercial, financial field of control was the place we wanted to be.
We felt it was an invisible world, a somewhat threatening world, but it was invisible.
We wanted to make it invisible.
If you make artworks in the system, then you imply visibility because as a visual artist you make visual things.
If you operate within an invisible system, just being present in the system makes the system visible.
That was a kind of basic theory.
One realizes how naive that was, and our naivety was exposed when the Gulf War happened,
and we saw the technologies which we've been using in action, the real technology.
We're working with Pentagon institutions all over the place.
I've worked with MIT, which is almost 100 percent Pentagon funded,
with the Carnegie Mellon University Robotics Lab, 100 percent Pentagon funded at Stanford.
All of these institutions are basically military institutions.
Very benign.
It's very interesting the way American military finances its research programs,
because it's very open.
The money's there.
They find it's interesting.
They don't do anything about it.
They're not interfering with it.
They watch the program.
If the program turns out to be militarily interesting,
those elements are moved off into a secure area of the university,
behind a door with the special keys, and locks, and identification badges,
and palm print identifiers, all kinds of things.
We've seen this in the 80s.
What it's like now, I can imagine.
And then that element of the research is no longer available to anybody but the security people.
But we could also get into the Robotics Lab and work with the systems
and watch the little robots trundling around.
What we were watching was, and what we were part of, without intending to be or without knowing it,
we were part of the program, American program of the automated battlefield.
And the automated battlefield is a pretty terrifying thing.
We saw it with the Gulf War of what it really looks like.
So this military element was always present and remains present.
I mean, after all, no matter how many denials you read nowadays
about the benign beginnings of the internet with the DARPA
and the military involvement in the early internet development, it was there.
It was the same kind of benign system.
Much of this technology we're using has military roots.
Many of the works that I've done have been involved with military objects
or military period objects.
And that may have a lot to do, not so much to do with the American experience
but to do with the Austrian experience.
Living in Central Europe on the edge, also the time I lived here since 1972,
up until 1989, the so-called Iron Curtain was 40 kilometers from Vienna.
But you were always very conscious of a war border,
a border of conflict within a tram ride of Vienna.
Basically, Bratislava used to be a suburb of Vienna in a way.
There was a Strassenbahn there.
So that feeling was very strong that the skies above you were full of military objects.
Invisible above the clouds, surveillance systems, Vienna was full of spies at all times
so that the American embassy had in the 80s over 400.
Vienna is a city of one-and-a-half million.
The whole country has not even 8 million people.
And there were 400 American embassy staff, at least 400 Soviet embassy staff,
200 West German, 200 East German.
The British had 150 to 200 the French.
I mean, what were these people doing?
There was certainly nothing to do with Austria.
They were spying on each other.
And that atmosphere of Cold War wasn't terrible.
Nothing is ever terrifying in Vienna.
It's always very benign.
It's exactly that benign quality, which is what I was after.
The acceptability of a latent military violence is always just there.
You were very aware of it.
So I guess that was the reason I began to work with military objects.
But there was also another element.
I've always liked model-making, like most men.
As boys, they've all had something to do with model-making.
I mean, you talk to almost any man and they say, oh yeah, I used to make model airplanes.
Or I made model ships.
Or I used to do this.
But they were almost all with model-making.
When you examine these models, you discover something strange about them.
Most of the models are military models.
That's a huge industry.
So I began to make airplane models.
And what you do as an artist is you do exactly what everybody else does.
I mean, all these boys in other bedrooms are making airplane models.
And you're also making airplane models.
And they hang and model airplane models up in their bedroom and look at them.
