Germano Celant

Interview by William Furlong

from Audio Arts Volume 8, Number 4, 1988

Transcript

This double issue of Audio Arts recorded at Documenta VIII in Kassel West Germany, comprises interviews, statements and commentary juxtaposed with audial reportage of soundworks, installations and local ambience.

William Furlong: I am sitting next to Germano Celant here in Kassel. Germano what do you think of the Documenta so far?

Germano Celant: I think that it is a house without windows, there is no vision outside and it is a very compressed show, very flat and banal, but it is a very interesting moment today, to show two different political possibilities. The most interesting works, especially in the States at the moment, are from Buenos Aires but they are poorly represented here except the incredible work by Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger and Marie-Jo Lafontaine. It is very confused and melting you know, you don’t see the main idea of the show. It is a kind of flat tyre for me. The feeling of the show is that you enter one space, a gallery space, which is a kind of repetition of Marianne Goldman or Mary Boor, Metro picture, and the architecture is very effective against the show because they completely close the building, and the operatic architecture is gone and what you find is just a repetition of gallery space. It is a kind of fair, that is my first reaction; my second reaction if you have to do Documenta year after year then the fifth year has to be an exceptional event but the exceptional part is missing. Something that gives you an interpretation about what is going on today, because everybody is travelling and knows what is around so they have to consider that Soho is a better Documenta everyday, it is not every five years, because you have all of this work together in one block, so that’s a kind of competition in the world that has to be considered and not just in Europe. If you are International you have to consider that, so you have all the same artists in one day in New York so ‘Mission Surprise’ is about that.

WF: You don’t think that the show here expresses the argument that art that has some social function and social placement?

GC: No because you know to do that you have to have a project in mind - it is the project that is missing. What I was trying to say is that there is no main street; you know that means the idea of art and society is very important and I have been fighting for years with the idea of collaborating architecture with art which is interesting. What I proposed, to my team, for this Documenta was a ‘jam session’ of the arts, was to ask people to work together. I don’t know what kind of project but I have to actually work with them and to make them work together because the architect knows about urban planning, the artist about visuals or advertising so in fact the best work is by Barbara Kruger who is using advertising against the vision of today. ‘We Don’t Need Another Hero’ or ‘I Shop Therefore I am’ is an incredible piece because it deals with consumerism and you can work with these people on this level of projecting some idea for society, but you have to commission in the same way you commission an architect for a building.