Could be Asked, Might Choose to Answer: Twenty Questions for Raimundas Malašauskas

Chris Fitzpatrick and Matthew Post recently conducted the following interview in a hot air balloon over Nice, France with Raimundas Malašauskas.

Chris Fitzpatrick: This is our first time in a hot air balloon; it is an incredible mode of transportation! We are above Nice, but are we still in Nice?

Raimundas Malašauskas: No, I don't think the air belongs to Nice…it must belong to France, I believe. It is above city politics, air is national.

Matthew Post: Is air only temporarily national? Maybe airflow presents a way of thinking about the interchange of systems and pressures from one zone to another. How have your projects—which have taken place in different atmospheres—reconciled their sectioning and exchanging of air in different contexts and locations?

RM: Let me answer in the “Chauncey The Gardener” way: you have air, you have wind, you have storms, you have hurricanes and you have typhoons.

CF: I also heard that Marcel Duchamp put 50cc of Parisian air into a vial. It also makes me wonder about Art & Language’s Air Show, Michael Asher, and also Robert Barry releasing inert gases back into the air. Do you think Barry’s work may have traveled to France by now and become French?

RM: Yeah, there is a lot of gas…I remember Chernobyl survivors used to say that the toxic air could be seen, orange, hovering over their heads, sometimes walking next to them. And no, it could not have gotten that far—Robert Barry’s. Air is a slow traveler and does not keep its identity for long.

MP: “When did you feel that other dimensions of reality were impinging on your own?”

RM: It is not very clear to me which dimension is mine. I like to think I can freely move through different ones.

MP: How did you end up as a cultural producer? When did it begin?

RM: It began in high school. More or less when The Wall came down.

MP: You’ve talked about how Contemporary Art Center, Vilnius was an “alien” in Lithuania. What was it like working there?

RM: Like working in a flying saucer, of course. Later on the mother ship came to rescue me and take me back to my planet, where we are right now.

CF: You seem to have worked in and outside of institutions throughout your career. What challenges do curators face when working independently and nomadically?

RM: The major challenge is to overcome exhaustion, memory loss and rage fits.

MP: Working mainly between Paris, Vilnius and New York, does the center differ from working on the periphery?

RM: I don't think the binomial center/periphery is valid anymore. Everything is periphery now.

CF: How does illusion function as a revolutionary weapon?

RM: When it blinds your counter-revolutionary opponent.

MP: How does the production of the space between reality and illusion, fiction and non-fiction, play out in artistic or curatorial practice?

RM: Honestly, I think that space is overcrowded. One has to get away from it, or die asphyxiated.

CF: So is your desire to escape from space what led to your interest in the malleability of time?

RM: I don't want to escape from space (I couldn't), but from that particular space between fiction and reality where honestly there is no place left for a pin. The whole terminology fiction/reality has to be re-named so that it has sense again, because right now it has become desementized because of excess of use. I think personally any sensitive person should be interested in the resilient nature of time, because we witness it daily, and sometimes it is truly unbelievable.

MP: Your projects do not follow a linear temporality. They take place in the past or the future, even both simultaneously.

RM: Time is the place.

CF: You have commissioned proposals for Documenta that could take place at any place in time. You curated 24/7 at CAC Vilnius. More recently, you randomly called me on a payphone at the 7th Regiment Armory during the Whitney Biennial in 2008 from 1977 with Tom Marioni’s art-related predictions for 1978, perhaps from the very moment I was conceived. You collaborated with Francesco Manacorda to propose 1972: A Proposal for the 6th Berlin Biennial—Spring 1972, in which 1972 is conflated with 2010. Can you explain your interest in time-travel, temporal intersections, and simultaneity?

RM: I love Ray Bradbury.

MP: You recently led a seminar called “Kaleidoscope Room” at the California College of the Arts. How do the mechanisms and histories of the kaleidoscope inform or complicate how we can perceive vision? How can this tool be used to view and describe certain forms of cultural practice?

RM: I cannot remember that seminar. But a kaleidoscope is probably good to imagine how a fly sees the world.

CF: (laughter) Yet the forgotten seminar relates to your upcoming Paper Exhibition at Artist’s Space in New York. Is it a process of recollection and reconstruction? Can you tell us about this show?

RM: No, I can't. It is a secret. You'll know when you are ready for it.

CF: Everyone seems to call you a curator but yourself. You resisted defining your practice. Do you see the gap between this and that, those and them also as a space you straddle or navigate?

RM: I am an artist.

MP: Do you think exhibitions should make sense? Traditional conceptions of curating involve the illumination and explanation of information, particularly putting works of art into context so that something makes more sense than it had before, and differently. Do you feel your practice is a reversal of this process, one of obfuscation and complication?

RM: The difference between reality and fiction is that fiction has to make sense. Reality has no obligations. I am an artist.

CF: Do artists have investments in that divide?

RM: Yes, artists and art don't have to make sense either and to force sense in them should be punished.

CF: Your art practice often assumes the form of what is generally understood as curating. For example, you recently had an exhibition on display in Rome at Galleria 1/9 Unosunove Arte Contemporanea entitled, One of These Things Is Not Like The Other Things, which used exclusion rather than inclusion as its premise, as well as Sesame Street. What were the results? Did any viewers figure out the One Thing?

RM: Yes, we had some pretty smart people seeing the show.

MP: Many of your projects involve inverting or tampering with the structures and tenets of exhibitions. While your selections in O.O.T.T.I.N.L.T.O.T were based not on a work’s relation to another but rather on how those works do not relate or even resist relation (which is an interesting relation in itself), you’ve also written a curatorial essay as a libretto with Aaron Schuster for Loris Greaud’s Cellar Door exhibition at Palais de Tokyo. These projects seem to signal a shift in the ways art can be organized or framed through traditional curatorial methods. Would you say that the curatorial field—increasingly defining itself as a discrete discipline with its own histories, dogmas and clichés—generated a need for its own inversion?

RM: Yes.

CF: Does it now depend upon its inversion in order to exist?

RM: Honestly, I just said yes because I did not understand the question.

CF: This also seems to relate to Black Market Worlds, The IX Baltic Triennial, which you curated at the Contemporary Art Centre in Vilnius with Sophia Hernandez Chong Cuy and Alexis Vaillant. How did you end up in the shadows and how did you get out? What do you think draws artists to these non-spaces?

RM: Artists are by nature abyss-observers.

MP: What are artists looking for in this void?

RM: For their chances of surviving if they leap into it.

MP: Can you tell us what really happened on the airplane during BMW?

RM: We were paralyzed with fear.

CF: What, if anything, can we learn from Narcosophy?

RM: I guess sophisms spoken out by narcos. I do not think they write.

CF: What about mind-travel?

RM: Would that be a sort of brain tourism? I guess we would learn something like “people ARE weird.”

MP: We’ve talked about An Evening With Joseph Cornell, in which medium Valerie Winborne channels the artist from the dead and then Anne Walsh and Chris Kubick lecture about him. You’ve spoken a lot about Robert Barry’s Telepathic Piece and you recently held Hypnotic Show at Silverman Gallery, where the audience, hypnotized, created an artwork in their minds. How does the medium’s incantation complicate the ideas of authorship and agency? Who are we speaking to?

RM: Rosabelle, believe! - last words of Houdini to his wife before he died. He wanted her to believe that he would communicate with her from the dead, but according to Rosabelle, he never did. Perhaps she did not listen carefully enough, too busy dilapidating his inheritance. I cannot say I believe, but I love observing people who do. Authorship, as well, is a matter of belief.

CF: Maybe you don’t remember, but we spoke in your “Kaleidoscope Room” seminar about the tendency towards “the missing masterpiece” and immaterial artistic practice and its relation to the accessibility of information today. Do you see it as a conscious reaction?

RM: Unconscious.

CF: Is it tied to the legacy of Conceptual Art, 19th century mail routes, patchwork quilts, and Balzac?

RM: Yeah. It is also related to, “The Figure In The Carpet,” by Henry James.

MP: You commissioned Francis McKee to write “Phantom Rosebuds,” the autobiography of Clifford Irving, who infamously wrote Howard Hughes’ autobiography. The text then morphed into F is for Park, a variety act based on Orson Welles’ film F is for Fake at New Langton Arts in San Francisco. It included a video involving psychokinesis and astronauts by Fia Backstrom, anonymous balloons, an invisible magic show, prepared answers to unknown questions, a bass player who never played, Cake and Sake from Olivier Babin, Gabriel Lester, and much more. Was what happened what you intended?

RM: Partially, yes.

MP: The writer Kevin Killian recently restaged “Phantom Rosebuds” in Vancouver. Has Clifford Irving taken on a parallel life of his own?

RM: Clifford Irving always had a life of his own. He does not need me to be in the spotlight.

MP: How do you fake the fake fake of the fake? Does it matter?

RM: pffffffffffffffffffffff…

MP: In a review of F is for Park, Killian referred to you as possessing PT Barnum-like showmanship, suggesting that you may well be a curatorial William Castle. This would make you both a ringleader and a swindler in the great tradition of capitalist spectacle, but also a master of gimmickry! I don’t think he meant this in a pejorative sense, but probably more in the sense that you possess an acute understanding of the kind of creative framing that makes the event inextricable from its marketing. “What if information no longer had anything to do with an event, but was concerned with promoting information itself as the event?”

RM: I believe this has always been the case. The “no longer” makes no sense; it has always been like that.

CF: During the “Kaleidoscope Room” seminar you also once showed us Theatre de Poche by Aurelien Froment on loop twelve times and asserted that it was one film that repeats differently each time, which it definitely wasn’t, yet somehow was. How do fakery, conjecture, incredulity and doubt relate to possibility?

RM: I just hope we don't end up in a Paul Auster script.

CF: Do you think that artists participating in group exhibitions ever find themselves trapped in a Paul Auster script?

RM: Probably artists are artists because they read too much Paul Auster as teenagers. You take away Paul Auster and soon art schools will run out of novices.

MP: A magician makes the audience believe that something has occurred when nothing has changed. Yet while most magicians want us to believe in their power, Houdini showed us the artificiality of our own confinement. Today’s street/TV magicians like David Blaine or Criss Angel want to show us the mechanics of the trick. Which kind are you?

RM: Oh, they do that? I'd like to see that! à la Poe?

CF: I’m not sure about Poe, but I was surprised when Bernice’s teeth fell onto the floor.

MP: Marcel Marceau walked against the wind, yet it ended up as Michael Jackson’s moonwalk. Is walking just arrested falling?

RM: I am no expert in M.M., a bit more on M.J. Yes, it probably is.

CF: What will be the impact of the marswalk?

RM: You refer here to the chocolate bar or to the planet?

CF: The planet.

RM: Let me see…given the mass of mars, I guess we would jump in the air.

MP: And the chocolate bar?

RM: No impact. Just a silly dance appearing in that Mars commercial. No impact for anyone older than ten.

CF: Marceau to Jackson is also a jump. Or maybe it is a time-stretched collaboration—not unlike you and Robert Barry or you and Tom Marioni, actually. You often collaborate with or commission artists for specific projects.

MP: Sometimes not even resulting in exhibitions, but in publications or even 12-hour brunches, which you have become famous for in San Francisco. Do we still need exhibitions?

RM: Yes. They are the only things that justify us. That justifies this. We would not survive just on brunches and publications. This said, very little must be exhibited to call it an exhibition.

CF: You are also a former television star. Yet fortunately you didn’t go to jail like Willis and Kimberly Drummond.

MP: One of the most interesting things about CACTV—the television program you produced for CAC in Vilnius, broadcast regularly—was that every show was a pilot and every episode was the last show. Can you explain?

RM: Ever seen the pilot episode from M.A.S.H., the TV series? Then you could still believe it was going to be something and that Alan Alda could be a believable Hawkeye. Pilot episodes are by nature, potentially, the last show (because most of them do not meet the expectations of the audience), but also, they still make you believe the next episode will be good… that magic evaporates with the second episode.

MP: So the collapse of the beginning and the end provides for an alternative form of content-generation?

RM: Did you see the last appearance of Sarah Palin on SNL when she passes by Tina Fey? I thought that was brilliant. I liked as well the actor playing Todd Palin in snow bike attire.

CF: I thought I heard: “Shoot a mole-humpin’-Moose eight days of the week!”

MP: There was an interesting doubling and leveling in Palin’s proximity to Palin, no?

RM: When their two silhouettes met I though time and space would explode.

CF: You are also a former model. Are amateurs really professionals? Can these distinctions be made any longer?

RM: We were amateurs but were forced to become professionals. No, you cannot make that distinction. It is just a matter of how much time you have left to read.

CF: Is the art world too professional and productive these days? Even the terminology seems to reflect this: “Art production,” “Cultural Producer,” “Practice.”

RM: Yes, it is a bore. You can read between lines: “we do not want indolent lazy bastard sexually degenerate artists.” That efficiency is terrifying, or worse: it is a bore.

CF: We can speculate based on some of your past-collaborations, but are there specific artists that have been essential to your work today, yesterday, or in ten years? Curators?

RM: A great number of them.

MP: John Fare?

RM: You are reading my mind.

CF: How did you come to be the head of the headless John Fare Estate?

RM: Do you know Dionysius the Areopagite? He is referred to in the movie Hellboy as the saint who wards off demons. Like him, I hold my head in my hands to say: “I forgive you.”

MP: How high above the ground do you think we are now?

RM: About 500 meters.

CF: Maybe we’ll see Michel Fournier parachuting from outer space! I don’t know why the press made such a big deal of his recent failed attempt, when his balloon floated away without him. In terms of world records, art, anything, what do you think is most interesting—potential, failure, or success?

RM: Potential.

CF: How does your interest in potential correlate to the “the missing masterpiece?”

RM: Your question contains the answer.

CF: What about your article in Afterall? Can you tell us about the pseudonym Agnieszka Kurant?

RM: I have used that pseudonym since I was in high school.

MP: I heard you once sent a papier mâché surrogate to attend a conference in your place. Was this about the potential of your presence or were you more present in your absence?

RM: I saw it in an episode of The Simpsons. Bart Simpson creates a latex replica of himself to sit at his school bench.

CF: Was that gesture also related to space being asphyxiating, or just conferences?

RM: It just allowed me to be in different places at once. Sometimes you could not tell the difference between the surrogate and myself, especially at parties.

MP: “It’s after the end of the world; don’t you know that yet?”

RM: Yeah, that's what global warming is about.

CF: “Are you Raimundas Malašauskas?”

RM: No, I am Dora García.

Dora García (Valladolid, 1965) studied Fine Arts at the University of Salamanca, Spain, and the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam, Holland. She lives and works in Brussels, and her particular field of interest deals with the creation of situations or contexts that serve to alter the traditional relationship between artist, artwork, and spectator. Recently she had presentations at the 16th Sydney Biennial, Tate Modern, and the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London.