David Liss in Madrid

In February, for the third year in a row, MOCCA director David Liss curated a special exhibition of Canadian artists at the Feria Internacional de Arte Contemporáneo (ARCO) in Madrid. He was also featured among the speakers invited to the fair. Amigo Motel talked with David Liss shortly after his return from Spain. Here is an edited version of our interview.

Amigo Motel: What did you learn in Madrid?

David Liss: What I’ve been learning in Madrid, and what I’ve been having some fun with, is working with the art fair as a theatre of operations, as another context to present artwork. The role of art fairs has changed quite a bit in the last three to five years, and the art market and art fairs have radically shifted the landscape, if only temporarily.
A lot of people now are getting quite worried about how the market seems to be leading the discourse at this point. It was one of the things that went on at the speakers’ forum at ARCO: Curators telling me they’ve had situations where young artists have not made their best pieces available for a show at P. S. 1 because they’re going to be in one of the art fairs. I really am fascinated and intrigued by the tension that exists between the market and theory. I think that, at this point in time, it’s the edge to be working on, because there are so many contradictions involved in that relationship. Yet both [market and theory] are so necessary.
So what I’ve been learning, in Madrid, in Miami, and in the Toronto art fair, is how to mine some fissure in this particular landscape and open up a frontier for artists to be working in. It’s another form. We’re working in our gallery, a traditional white box. We’ve done performances out on the sidewalk, and over at the Drake Hotel, and now we’re doing them on convention centre floors. So it’s exciting.

AM: Tell me about this fissure. What forms does it take?

DL: With the overheated market situation that we have today, when there’s that much money at stake, it does tend to affect human behaviour, whether we’re in the art world or otherwise. The prominence, the media attention, and the money that is now accompanying the contemporary art industry! Make no mistake: even if that industry isn’t well evolved in Canada, it is in most of the rest of the civilized world, and we will be catching up eventually. Artists in particular, and curators, like to think art is somehow separated from the real world, and the human imagination should not be tainted by some of the harsh realities of the world. On the other hand, how can art not be affected by those things?
So there’s a conundrum embedded there as well. There are artists and art dealers who are doing quite well, and I can’t suggest that’s a bad thing. Of course, there are so many more artists than galleries, dealers, non-profit organizations out there, so the industry has evolved into quite a large and complex form, with opportunities for young artists to sell work, and make a living from their work. That’s been the modest dream of every artists since time began: to simply make a living off their work. Most artists did not get into the art world motivated by financial greed. Obviously, that would be the wrong business to be in!
But I think younger artists in particular see opportunities to get paid for what they do. I think we’re looking at a younger generation of artists who don’t necessarily have the same romantic, bohemian notions of the world that artists of other generations might have had. They are influenced by the material world we live in, and they say: We’re doing what we do, we want respect, and we want to get paid for what we do. And I can’t argue with that.
On the other hand, I’m interested in art that explores the outer limits of the human imagination, because that’s how humans evolve forward: by challenging the imagination, by going where others fear to go. [Art] is not always bound by economic and commercial considerations, so that’s where I think that fissure lies.

AM: What’s special about ARCO?

DL: What I do like about ARCO is that they have, more than any other fair, the experts’ forum. They trimmed that down a little this year, because there were some complaints last year, when their roster of speakers reached 250 over the course of five days. Starting from 10 in the morning until 9 o’clock at night, there was, at any given time, five or six panel discussions taking place--and we’re talking about every leading expert in the world: the director of the Museum of Modern Art and the Tate Modern, independent curators from all over the world, directors from China and the director of the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, architectural experts, design people. In my own speaking panel, I was frustrated because there were at least two other panels going on at the same time that I would love to have attended.
ARCO is the one fair out there--one of the oldest ones, 25, 26 years running--that seems to be fostering a dialogue between the market and theory. But even there, the fair is taking place in one section of the building, while the experts’ forum is taking place elsewhere. Physically and ideologically, they seem like two very different worlds. A lot of dealers and the artists are on the floor trying to sell art. The curators and the experts are all mingling with their types, and everybody’s trying to broker deals and explore ideas and create exchanges all over the world. For them to be walking around the convention centre floor--which is an absolutely horrible way to be looking at art in the first place--is not conducive to looking at art.
I find it interesting that, in some discussions, you have these leading academics and theorists, high level PhDs. And if somebody sticks up their hand from the audience and asks them about economics, some of these people are left absolutely speechless. They just don’t know what to say about it. Then you get down on the convention centre floor. I know a lot of the art dealers do not like these academics hanging around their booths, using $50 words, because they are afraid the collectors are going to get all confused.
For the last few years, ARCO has invited ten curators from different parts of the world to present artists, based on a theme. It’s about what’s new, upcoming, edgy and experimental. In 2007, the theme was Projects, so again it was open-ended. There were no age restrictions and I was allowed to select five galleries, with a maximum three artists per gallery. On one hand, I’m invited to participate at the theoretical level, at the level of the discourse. On the other hand, I’m inviting commercial galleries to risk a lot of money by going to Madrid and participating in this fair. It’s a tricky, challenging negotiation for the galleries to present something that I think is exciting, relevant, and needs to be seen in an international forum, versus what they think they can sell.
So far, in Canada in particular, there aren’t galleries out there that are willing to say: Yeah, whatever you want, go ahead and we’ll spend the $40,000 [necessary to take part in the fair]. There aren’t many Canadian galleries in that kind of luxurious position, if there are galleries anywhere in that position.

AM: What is contemporary art about, as you saw it in Madrid? The topics, the concerns?

DL: I think the themes, issues and concerns that are emerging are multifaceted, pluralistic. I suppose we could call them post-Modern, post-post-Modern. Some people call it internationalism, some call it globalism. A trend or direction is completely elusive at this point, which does frustrate the human impulse to have things categorized and defined as simply as possible. I’m quite happy to embrace the fact that art at this moment is pluralistic. That is our human condition, as the world grows smaller through technology.

AM: But can you pinpoint one direction?

DL: Yes. How to say something about one’s cultural or ethnic heritage in a world that is being increasingly flattened out by communications and immigration patterns that are threatening to turn the world into a homogeneous mass.
As I travel to various cultures and places around the world, I find it’s getting extremely difficult to purchase something, even a T-shirt to bring back to my kids, that would say something about the place I was in. They’re selling the same crap on the King Charles Bridge in Prague as they are selling in Taipei, as they are selling in Madrid, as they are selling down at Yonge and Dundas in Toronto. Are we on the verge of realizing the dream of one people, one world? Or are we threatening to eliminate all the rich tapestry of ethnicity and cultural mosaic that is also fascinating about the world we live in? I think a lot of artists are dealing with issues of identity.
Another thing: Twenty years ago, it was fairly easy to say what kind of art Canadians were producing. It always went through the lens of landscape, or weather. Those are things that oddly unite us as Canadians in some ways. I know people who live in Toronto, who have never been to the prairies, or seen the Rockies. But they can very quickly conjure an image in their minds of what those places are and look like. It’s not so easy for people in other countries who do not have that. When a Torontonian is travelling abroad, you always get questions about the mountains or the prairies. We know what we are being asked. This issue of geography, this territory we live in, unites us.
But I think, with populations shifting toward the urban, we get into these issues about identity, with people trying to reconcile their own roles in densely populated cities. That’s a major issue right now. We are experiencing farming crises all over the world. Populations move into the cities and multinational corporations take over the rural areas and the production of the food supply, so we are becoming increasingly estranged from some of those vital aspects of what keeps us alive. Interestingly, that’s one of the major crises in the world, this shift of rural to urban.

AM: How do you understand your own role, as a curator, in the midst of these shifts and slides?

DL: I’m quite ambitious about being as up to date as I possibly can be. These days, it’s a full time job to read all of the art magazines, all the on-line information that’s available, all of the blog sites that carry on the discourse, not to mention getting to the hundreds of artists’ studios that are in Toronto, never mind other cities.
So that’s my personal challenge: to manage the local-to-global engagement which we have built into the MOCCA vision and mandate. I’m excited by that, and by all the contradictions that are embedded in that. I’m fascinated by the fissures, areas of contention--where the shit flies and where all the fun can be, where discourse gets heated and intelligent people are agreeing and disagreeing. I love that kind of stuff. And that’s how ideas evolve, that’s how the human imagination goes forward. I like it when people re-open debates on things we thought we’d already solved. The established canon of contemporary art is of little interest to me. I want to know what the artists are telling us about now.