Jan Hout

Interview by William Furlong

from Audio Arts Magazine Volume 18 Numbers 3 & 4, 1999

Transcript

William Furlong: Jan, do you have any particular views on the 1999 Venice Biennale, in terms of its characteristics and its themes?

Jan Hout: I think we have to divide it into three parts. First the Giardini and then the Arsenale and then the third is all the first projects in the city, dialectics and all the things behind. I’m a little bit disappointed about the pavilions. I think it’s not as strong as before. Nevertheless there are some points which have my particular interest. I like very much the Bath House with the men, a woman artist and very precise, very deep. For example Anne Hamilton is more on the surface, charming. I prefer the Belgium Pavilion because with Michel Francois with smoke, but with the object inside, so from time to time it’s vague but then you have a focus on things. You feel a physical touch, there’s tactility. The central pavilion is not that good. There’s a strange mixture of things. I have difficulties with the associations and the connections. Dieter Roth, for example, it’s not a work he did himself, it’s an anagram of things he did but it’s not a real show. Some pieces are very good. I think the Arsenale is interesting because it’s open, really open to Asia, and the Chinese have a particular ability to deal with the clichés we all know in the development of contemporary art, the irony and to project the academic style of China into this contemporary experience. Experiments like Kae Sai with these sculptures made by fantastic art and crafts people from China, which are all lost in our academies, but he plays with that. He’s not the man who is making it but the man who conceives it and that is I think a beautiful bridge between China and the Western world. Then there’s Bruce Nauman of course. There is also the mystical work from the man who prays (Richard Catelan?). But generally I have to say we are in times of chaos, everything is based on chaos today. We all have to deal with Internet and the Internet is the perfect catalyst for chaos. There is no censorship, there is no control, there is no system there is total chaos and I think it’s interesting. Nevertheless, there are some artists who are going too far, so they are no limits anymore. Before we all criticised the curator and now the curator is giving space to the artist, the artist is taking over the power of the curator and then it’s lost. That’s very strange.

WF: You really think that has happened in this Biennale?

JH: Yes changing roles for example. Changing roles is so powerful, so megalomanic that you don’t think any more about the curator you think about the artist.

WF: So it’s not curated out of existence, the art is at the front you think?

JH: Yah, I think the artist is in the front but he has lost control.

WF: That’s a very interesting perception.

JH: Yes in the way that before the curator was both choosing the work and installing it, operating as a conductor, but today he is only playing as the medium and so the artist is taking it, is claiming it. It goes out of control, but sometimes it is too aesthetic. It’s aesthetic chaos, and I would prefer real chaos not an aesthetic chaos.

WF: That model would suggest a certain redundancy for the curator though, if the artist takes complete control.

JH: I think they are, we don’t speak any more about Szeeman because of the respect we have for him as a man, as the Godfather of the exhibition. We don’t attack him.

WF: So what he’s done is provide space for artists from within?

JH: That’s what I think, he has a great sense of trust and confidence and faith.

WF: That’s seeping through. I certainly think that you have this traditional model of the Biennale, where the Pavilions are chosen, almost diplomatically, by curators from their own countries.

JH: Some pavilions are really not good you know. It’s so sad to see that. Szeemann, as a curator, should also have control of the people who have to do it I think, and not only of the artists.

WF: That’s difficult isn’t it?

JH: That’s very difficult because of nationalism. Today there is an ambiguity between nationalism and local. Nationalism should be used as a location from where everything is looking for an appeal to the universal.