Marc Camille Chaimowicz

Here the artist talks baout his interest in revisiting Celebration? Realife nearly 30 years after its original appearance.

from Audio Arts Magazine Volume 19 Numbers 1 & 2, 2000

Transcript

Marc Chaimowicz made Celebration? Realife in 1972, staging it first in Birmingham and subsequently at Gallery House, London. For his first exhibition at the Cabinet Gallery, in the summer of 2000, Chaimowicz recreated the installation. This interview was conducted by Michael Archer and William Furlong. Also present were Cabinet directors, Andrew Wheatley and Martin McGeown.

Michael Archer: Marc, you did Celebration? Realife in 1972, and this is a slight re-working of it. Are there any great differences between doing it now and doing it then?

Marc Chaimowicz: I think the differences are more perceptual than material. The title is symptomatic of a proactive working relationship that I insist on if I work with agencies or galleries, and that’s perhaps why I’ve not shown very much in London for a long time, because I wasn’t able to make those connections.

MA: This work, even though it has a history, is absolutely contemporary and is taking place right now.

MC: I’ve wondered whether – time unfolding in the way it does, rather than being chronological as we’re falsely conditioned to presume time to be – whether it wasn’t more viable a reconstruction to have done 28 years later than, say, 14 years later, so there’s something in the air. I also think that, having become involved in a highly aestheticised practice in the 1980s and 1990s, there are times when I need to reconnect with the outside world and I’ll tend to do so in a Boltanski-like way, by hanging out in the shadow lands and quite often just literally finding things, so the low culture side of the piece seemed more viable than might have been the case, say, 15 years ago, so I think timing was critical.

MA: This low-culture accumulation of things that you’re referring to includes strings of really cheap beads and party masks from newsagents’, glitter, fake glamour.

MC: Yeah, kind of trash culture. But I think that then as much as now there’s a relatively primitive or at least childlike attraction, a kind of magpie-like attraction to things that glitter. It’s in a way a kitsch interest for me, it’s more to do with that part of one’s subjective self that maintains a sense of delight in the incidental. I guess that’s often manifested in the neighbourhoods in which I hang out, so in that sense it’s a south-east London kind of piece. Oddly enough I was living in Camberwell in 1972 and I’m back in Camberwell now, and I don’t think Camberwell has changed very much. We’re still getting a healthy amount of product. The very concept of a studio was anathema to a number of us then, and so the streets, and notably the streets at night, were material for the need to contest the dominant cultural value of the time. I guess what now has to be taken into account is how much that marginal position has gradually been acquired by the dominant culture. So the piece now I think has a much more aesthetic feel about it than it would have done then. The feeling is one of welcome, whereas in ’72, although I was attempting to question alienation between the viewer and the maker, for example by being present in the piece, and although there was an intellectual attempt to bring a kind of caring side to art-making, there’s been such a cultural shift that I think the piece, paradoxically, has become much more autonomous. I mean I think it’s welcoming in itself rather than needing the agency of the maker. People are better able to deal with their own subjective response, are they not? I came into Cabinet a year ago or so and I saw some pieces from the artists they work with and I remember saying, ‘This is great, this is typical of what we would deep down want to do but perhaps don’t dare to do.’ And Andrew said, ‘That’s what Cabinet’s about.’ I think that the re-siting of the subjective nature of looking is something that the piece might have, to some extent, predicted. I guess for that reason it’s a lot more user-friendly now.

MA: One of the very important elements of the installation is the way that you’re drawing on pop culture. The pop culture of the time is again represented here, through the CDs that are available for playing – Bowie and his androgyny, Janice Joplin and so on. That was very important for you at the time, was it?

MC: It was. I think at the time there weren’t any pluralistic options, so one always had to make choices. So John Cale had to give up classical music and risk sort of personal erasure. Even then there was a kind of hierarchy, was there not? It seemed to me then that my generation was fortunate to be party to a radicality that was more prevalent in popular culture than it was in my area. Music, with its implications of the drug culture, did annexe a very wide range of youth who would not necessarily be involved in high art, however radical it be. The other artists present in the context of the first showing at Gallery House, Gustav Metzger and Stuart Brisley, were rigorous and uncompromising, so they were actually quite exclusive, and I think by contrast my piece was quite inclusive and I guess music was a very good metaphor for that.

MA: I’m interested in the title; the question mark in the middle, tell me about that.

MC: It’s going back a long time, but I think it’s typographically it’s crucial. It dealt with the dilemma that any artist has if they’re attempting to step outside of normal boundaries. The moment you question the frame, as it were, that questioning could so easily implode to such an extent that there would be no artifice left; it could so easily lead one into the literal or the photo-journalistic. The piece wasn’t evidently about real life. It was a fiction; many of the constituent parts were of the everyday, but they were almost metaphorical. I guess the question mark was a metaphor for that gap between art and life.

MA: Does doing the piece sit comfortably with the other things that you’re engaged in now?

MC: I see it as a kind of homogeny, but what’s been really interesting has been the problematic of reconstructing a piece from then, that wasn’t contained. I mean, a maker of objects can summon up work from 30 years ago by making a few phone calls, whereas we had to do a lot of thinking and looking at blurred photographs, so it was a much more active kind of mental game.

William Furlong: I’m very interested in how work travels through time. It was an extraordinary exhibition in 1972 at Gallery House, which could be described as alternative or counter practice with all the kinds of references that you’ve talked about – coming from the street, coming from Camberwell, coming from the night, referring to trash culture; but what’s changed in the meantime is that now we go to any art school degree show and we see installations with lights, with mirror balls, maybe with sound, with controlled lighting, so the context is so very different that it makes the work acceptable and readable.

MC: I take your point. I think that the awkwardness of the piece in ’72 is, in retrospect, perhaps the strength of the piece. It was problematic. I mean people didn’t know how to handle it, they didn’t even know whether they were allowed to walk into the piece or not. There was no critical framework by which to witness or to enter the piece. That has changed so it’s a lot easier to digest, but equally, I guess, its pedigree is that it was anarchic and it was questioning. It was questioning every possible premise, because it was so sensual and seemingly without boundaries. So I guess at that time it was probably quite a problematic piece for the art world; it was probably easier for the non-initiated, who could simply enjoy it as an experience.

Andrew Wheatley: I think it’s its historical pedigree that actually makes it kind of radical now. It’s interesting in as much as it has received such a positive reaction from a very different generation of artists 28 years later. Our knowledge of Marc’s work, and indeed this particular piece, was mediated through art journals. Once we met Marc we realised that his sensibilities lay at the core of Cabinet’s own activities and it was that sort of marriage that we developed over the course of three years. Whilst we can argue the ways in which it’s prescient of much that has come after, I do believe that other artists have adopted its inherent formalism as a strategy, but when Marc first showed Celebration? Realife it wasn’t about making strategic decisions, it was actually the only possible action that Marc could actually enact in 1972. I think its provisional nature is quite shocking to artists who are half Marc’s age. I think that’s been an important part of the archaeology of presenting this piece.

Martin McGeown: I guess there’s a mixture of motives behind representing this work. Some of them are subjective, in that it was just something that I’d originally encountered in magazines at the same time as I was listening to the music that is featured in the piece, but as a teenager I was unable to reconcile these interests, which we’d been taught to think of as high and low culture. Also I’ve always been fascinated by the nature of documentation, especially from that period in the 1970s, when there were so many temporary installations, performance, conceptual art and a kind of ethical notion about documentation. The documentation on this piece was very rich, and I always thought, ‘Wow, I would really love to have seen this piece.’ I think that galleries should admit to desires that are not necessarily to do with the market and not necessarily to do with a theoretically appropriate position. Of course I believe that both those things are apparent in this work but they are there as the accidental fall out of desire.