Slavs and Tatars:
Conversation à propos the Collective’s Work at the Venice Biennale 2019, May You Live in Interesting Times

por

Laura López Paniagua

Brumaria publica en exclusiva esta conversación de Laura López Paniagua con el colectivo Slavs and Tartars. Laura los contactó inicialmente con motivo del texto que escribió sobre sus piezas para el catálogo de la actual edición de la Bienal de Venecia “May You Live in Interesting Times”, comisariada por el veterano director de la Hayward Gallery, Ralph Rugoff. Semanas después de la inauguración, la autora discurrió con Slavs and Tartars tanto de la obra de estos como de algunos temas relativos a la Bienal. He aquí el contenido de dicha conversación, cuyo idioma original hemos elegido mantener (Al final del documento se recogen algunos datos biográficos de Laura López Paniagua y Slavs and Tartars).

Slavs and Tatars’ exhibitions, books and lecture-performances revolve around the colliding cultures of the geographical area enclosed between the former Berlin Wall and the Great Wall of China. The collective finds the cultural conflicts, quandaries and contagions of this vast remit expressed in their alphabets and their politics, which, rather than as mere communicative mediums, appear embodied in the physical organs of language (tongues, throats, noses) as much as in autochthonous objects and forms. Mixing humor, rigorous research and the codes of the contemporary visual arts, Slavs and Tatars manage to approach issues around the failure of the Enlightenment project – including colonialism, ecological disaster, and the dismissal of faith – with suave style and verve, far from the flat and colorless political rants of many of their contemporaries.

I got in touch with them while writing a text about their pieces for the catalogue of this year’s Venice Biennale, May You Live in Interesting Times, curated by the veteran director of the Hayward Gallery, Ralph Rugoff. Weeks after the opening, I met with Payam, one of its founding members, to discuss their work, as well as some questions around the Biennale.

Slavs and Tatars:

So how was the opening in Venice? We haven’t managed to make it yet because it’s been a crazy couple of months for us. We curated the Ljubljana Biennial which opened soon after, among other things. By the way, Ralph (Rugoff) snatched two of our artists for the Venice show which makes us very happy. In general, I think the Biennale is being very well received, right?

Laura López Paniagua:

Apparently yes. The only people I’ve heard criticizing it hardly are academics, and that’s expectable because it’s not an academic show, it’s not based on one grand theory that the artworks illustrate. I mean, academics create systems to understand reality that simplifies it to make it graspable. What Ralph is doing is just the opposite, he’s increasing complexity, contradiction, ambiguity. That drives academics crazy.

S&T:

How did you like it?

LLP:

I thought it was really good, but hard to take. It was overwhelming because it reflected the zeitgeist, and the zeitgeist is pretty depressing …

S&T:

What we find quite challenging is to find a formula to deliver a critique, but in a very festive way. I think with the kind of puns in our work we are almost challenging people to think we are stupid, but there are many layers to our one-liners. If dourness is the state of the world, it almost feels as if we’re out of sync.

LLP:

Probably many of the individual works had that playfulness, but to me, the general ethos was very melancholic. It felt as if we were at the brink of a world that is becoming extinct, and this has to do with embodiment and physicality. It is as if these new technological plateaus were enabling us to become more isolated and to go deeper into our own fantasy, becoming more and more stupid and less exposed to the world. As if we were confining ourselves to our own “psychic basements”, without having to develop the courage to face otherness…

S&T:

I was reading an interview with Michel Serres in which he talks about this idea that we are witnessing the end of one world and we’re giving birth to another world –which is obviously a painful process.

However, I’m quite suspicious to what degree questions of technology and de-materialization are playing an outsized role in our conceptualization of the world. I don’t think it’s had an ontological impact yet, despite what our milieu would like us to believe about artificial intelligence, the Anthropocene, et cetera.

LLP:

Yes, it depends on the scale, on whether you’re considering the present or if you are looking thirty, or even three hundred years into the future. The game-changing inventions in history, like the wheel and the printing machine, are related to communication, and in this regard, what we’ve lived through in the last twenty years simply has no precedent. We don’t know what the consequences of this revolution are, and I do sense changes occurring. The categories that demarcate reality are starting to get redefined but according to a logic which is really beyond us, and that is happening in parallel to our withdrawal from our confrontation to otherness.

S&T:

About otherness, there’s a hadith of Prophet Muhammad which says “blessed are those who exile themselves”. This idea of expatriation, the notion that you have to go far away to understand yourself, is central to Islam. It is contrary to traditional Western psychoanalysis, that encourages you to delve deep inside your own being to find out who you are. An example of this is the incredible tradition of scholars, for instance (Louis) Massignon, who was Catholic, or (Henri) Corbin, who was Protestant, each of whom studied Islam as a way to better understand their own religion (they never converted).

We take much inspiration from this. I personally only understood my Iranian heritage through the perspective of Russia. If I try to understand it directly as an Iranian- American, I’m not going to bring much to the table that hasn’t been already by others who are better versed in history than me. However, if you try to understand 1979 through 1917, then it becomes interesting because it’s about how political Islam is the successor to communism. It’s definitely not a coincidence that the Soviet Union started to fall in ´79 when they invaded Afghanistan and Iran rose, and that Iran replaced the Soviet Union as America’s number one enemy in the West.

LLP:

That’s also how your oeuvre works, right?

S&T:

Yes. This whole geographical remit is like a leurre, a red herring in some sense. Of course, we are interested in this region, but it is a kind of foil to reflect on ourselves. I’m not a Tatar, I’m not a Slav, it’s arguable whether I’m part of that region or not, but it’s the idea that to understand yourself, you have to take an indirect route.

LLP:

This idea of indirectness is very connected to how I understand your sensitivity toward culture. The way I see culture represented in your work is like a giant body composed of a multiplicity of inter-communicating partial bodies (political, religious, culinary, decorative, and also human) which themselves are porous, in a process of flowing into others and receiving others, so it’s very difficult to draw boundaries between the metaphorical, the literal and the physical. What we try to convey is that the facets of the culture that are generally understood as abstract or conceptual appear as physical, they are embodied in the material entities that compose it. Also, the material and “ethereal” entities themselves are not discrete, they are not hermetic, but rhizomatic, and that’s why when you focus on one entity, you simultaneously uproot a whole constellation of bodies. So, in a way, your work is Rabelaisian, involving the giant cultural body (like a kind of literal Leviathan) and processes of fermentation and renewal, almost like gastric processes.

S&T:

What you highlight is this idea that one indirection contaminates another, and then leads to another, and then leads to another; we don’t think this is something that is often noted in our work. People often think our work is quite literal, they think that we’re talking about fermentation in our region. I think part of the problem is that we live in a moment in which art is “a zeitgeist”. Twenty or thirty years ago it was fashion, like in the nineties with John Galliano and Alexander McQueen, and in the seventies it was cinema. Today it happens to be art, and this good, because it gives resources to people who normally would not have them, but one of the dangers is that, because it’s such a force of cultural capital, we tend to forget that art is not an endpoint. If you think about the ecosystem of culture, where there is music, architecture, film, art somehow becomes the last point. It’s very rare that art inspires a building, a novel, or a theater play. It’s usually the other way round. We think about it as a kind of “top of the food chain” in some senses.

 

LLP:

It’s difficult for me to imagine it that way. For instance, I find that the contemporary art milieu in Spain is probably really significant for the people who are in it, but rather tiny if you compare it to the general population.

S&T:

Yes, maybe like Paris, until perhaps ten years ago, but that’s definitely not the case now in London, Berlin or New York. The visual arts should have a normal, healthy position among the other arts, like theater, poetry, or architecture. It should not be as disproportionately big as it’s become in these cities.

But regarding Spain specifically, how come that it is underperforming in the visual arts? Why is it, for example, that I can perhaps name only two, maximum three institutions that have a critical impact on what happens in the rest of the world? How do you explain that?

LLP:

I know. For instance, in Ralph’s show, you had artists from Kenya, India, Mexico, et cetera, but not one from Spain. I work with sociologist Ulf Wuggenig who made a huge study based on (Pierre) Bourdieu about the power structures in the art world – which are really opaque and feudal in many senses. According to “Art in the Periphery of the Center” (2015), a country like Spain is peripheral to the centers located in cities like the ones you mention. We’re simply not fashionable.

S&T:

How come?

LLP:

Well, I can tell you how I see it, but probably many people wouldn’t agree. Spain was under Franco’s regime for almost forty years, and the country’s isolation was not only political or economic but cultural as well. This period is really critical because art in the rest of the world changes drastically, the rules of the game are completely altered. Obviously, these changes don’t take place in a vacuum, there’s no such “autonomy of art”. It changes because the whole world has changed with and after the wars. In the meantime, in Spain, really not much is going on artistically, so when the dictatorship falls and we re-integrate into the world, we have not gone through the complex socio-cultural processes that have altered art, and that is problematic.

Let me give you an example. When I studied Fine Arts in the two-thousands, there were two very distinct poles one could opt for: on the one hand, there were the traditionalists, still looking at the grand masters like Velázquez, and also Picasso and Dalí in the twentieth century, and on the other, you had the “ultra-contemporaries”, who mimicked the aesthetic of Berlin or New York. For instance, imagine an artist such as Mike Kelley, who was working with autochthonous American popular culture imagery in order to analyze its meaning. Well, in Spain, you could find artists who would use literally the same kind of American imagery instead of ever taking elements of the Spanish visual environment. They would simply replicate an aesthetic that could only be a surface because we never went through those cultural processes. Probably things have changed considerably in the last fifteen years, but I think we found it challenging for some time to find our own aesthetic, an aesthetic which is coherent with our socio-historical conditions.

S&T:

Regarding Kelley, we often think about what he said about younger artists wanting to be smart but that the artist should in fact be a fool. It took me personally thirty-five years to understand that there is a certain wisdom in this foolishness. I go back now to reading people like Rosalind Krauss, whom I saw as a goddess of art history at Columbia in the nineties, and think that those works didn’t need to be so complexly written. There are preciously few people who are able to deliver complex messages, like you’re saying about Ralph, in simple means. That’s a next level of sophistication. As an artist, at best, we do it one-tenth of the time.

Regarding aesthetics and cultural digestibility, our suspicion is, in fact, that if institutions understood really what we’re doing, they would not invite us as often as they do. We’re incredibly grateful to the public sector: we exist because of it, but I’m not naïve. So much in art has to do with context and presentation, and we are successful because we speak the language that the MoMA and Tate speak, the language of the West, while actually, our intellectual heritage or canon is completely different. We are a key into a world they have no access to. We manage to take this place that doesn’t exist on the map and contextualize it in a way that is digestible for them.

LLP:

How do you think your artistic project differs from what is projected on or expected of it?

S&T:

We fundamentally don’t believe in the Enlightenment project, because for all the great things that it brought, it also led us to a point of ecological disaster, imperialism, colonialism, and also the total dismissal of faith. Faith for us is a source of knowledge, ritual, geneaology. For instance, take Salamoia (2019), the water dispensers with a Molla turban instead of blue water bottle. It refers to an autochthonous Sh’ia leitmotif (going back to their cosmic split with Sunnis in the desert). With these things, we’re trying to put forth a different conceptual vocabulary. I don’t understand why even when we’re talking about Islamic or Chinese art, we’re still using the same, standard European intellectual vocabulary. We’re not challenging the terms of our thinking, but just the objects.

LLP:

I suppose this also has to do with your use of language.

S&T:

Yes. Most artworks that deal with translation emphasize its failure to convey what we want, its inability to communicate. Beckett is a perfect example of this, or Barbara Cassin’s “Dictionary of Untranslatables” (2004), which basically challenges the idea that philosophy can be simply translated into any language because you have to understand each term in its context. Like the word “truth” in Russian, which has two terms, “pravda” and “istina”, and they have very different connotations. We are very much steeped in this tradition, but there’s a fundamental commitment in our work to focus on language’s potential and not its shortcomings. We find it much more difficult to propose something, and that might sound old-fashioned, but I think art has to forward a proposal because it’s too easy to say that something is not working. All right, something is not working. And, then what? In our work there’s not the hubris to think we can address the problems of the world, it’s just the idea that there’s a constructive proposal. What we’re trying to do is re-shift the parameters of philosophical language through different platforms. That’s why we use transliteration. Script is a masquerade. We think there is a script attached to our language naturally, but there’s no natural reason why you write in Latin script and I write in Arabic script, it could be different.

LLP:

Regarding your criticism of the Enlightenment, I’d like to ask you if you’re also thinking about the schism between the mind and the body that Descartes introduces. I’m always referring to topics around embodiment and materialization because I’m interested in art that is able, or at least attempts to breach this Cartesian gap. I think your work shows a very unique and rare combination of intellectual depth and humor, as well as profound cultural implications which you are somehow able to always bring back to the body.

S&T:

It’s important to distinguish that these things are not calculated when they are made. It’s only in retrospect that we understand them. We asked ourselves what we could bring to the table that hasn’t already been done by scholars, NGOs or activists, and I think our contribution is definitely centered around this material, corporal, affective, sensual aspect of language. There’s so much that has been written already about language politics, alphabet politics, et cetera. Very few scholars are able to be analytical and tease out the sensual at the same time. That’s why orientalists like Massignon and Corbin are very well known: they were studying things like Islam and Judaism in Medieval times, but they weren’t doing it “with gloves” so to speak, trying to deconstruct it. They were studying them like scholars, but they were also able to live the texts themselves, as people of faith, sharing a phenomenological experience with the text, and here is where the body is important because it allows us a different kind of knowledge, as affect. This goes to the heart of our critique of the Enlightenment. There are different bodies of knowledge that we simply have overlooked, we don’t know their language. Of course, Ayurveda or Chinese medicine would claim to know it, but nothing in my education or my “script world” ever even dared to touch it, so part of what we’re doing is complementing the lapses of our education.

LLP:

Yes, the kind of thinking you evoke is very bodily. I wouldn’t know where to localize it, because it takes place in the brain, but I’m thinking here of the physical mass, you know, of the dripping, throbbing brain-organ… and it also engages the stomach, and probably many other physical regions. I find it interesting to think in this direction, like, how can you think with your skin, your liver, your spleen… I think it’s very beautiful.

S&T:

And there’s also another aspect of our work regarding the body. Even the fact that right now we’re sitting in a Gewerbe, a retail space, with no curtains covering the windows and very much exposed to the street is rather indicative of our work. We intend it to be welcoming, there is a hospitality that is often missing from academia or the art world. We are doing research, but people feel that they can come along and contribute. It is participatory, but not in the sense that visitors can sit around and use the objects. Museums often tell us that with our work, they can target another kind of audience which would otherwise not be interested, whether it’s ethnic minorities or people who normally feel left out of the discourse of contemporary art. We’d like to think the non-analytical, more affective nature of our work has something to do with this, functions a completely different register.

LLP

I’d like us to finish by talking briefly about the language of your work. I believe that one of the reasons why your oeuvre is able to de-territorialize culture so effectively is the complex rhetorical visual and verbal operations that you perform. For instance, your understanding of visual language allows you to localize certain recurrent patterns and draw parallelisms that would not normally occur within the cadence of the established narrative flow. The visual echoes and equivalences that you trace then allow you to define a new semantic territory. For instance, you always describe the geographical remit within which your work is enclosed referring to the Berlin Wall and the Great Wall of China – the operative element here being the wall. Also, you trace parallelisms between Catholicism and Shi’ism, as well as Marxism and conservative Islam through icons and crafts, and it is these visual elements that allow you to build a discourse of meaning. This I find very interesting, also because it implicitly suggests that the form of material things is not neutral, that forms embody meanings – which brings us back again to the bodies of culture. How does this process of verbal-visual translation (or transliteration?) work?

S&T:

That’s quite a beautiful part of the process because we don’t really grasp it. We are three core members at the moment, and we have very different skills, and though we are editing and consulting with each other all the way through, we’re quite clear and strict about what we are able to do.

Perhaps I should begin by telling about the process. We spend two to three years on each cycles of work, of which there are currently eight. We do two types of research: bibliographical research, as close as possible to academic research, and then field research, observing how what we have researched works in the field, on the terrain. The books and lectures we produce are quite articulate, quite straightforward. The artwork then has to undo what we’ve done in them. The hard part is how we program the scrambling of the codes or narrative that we just expounded in the books and lectures. One consistent thread seems to be a “programmed stupidity”: the pickle, the balloon, the mono-brow, that is, elements which are very unsophisticated because they are what allow us to push further on the other front, the esoteric, the obscure, the complex. The more stupid the medium, the more we can stretch the hermeneutic possibilities of the work.

That’s an example of the metaphysical splits, how you combine humor with spirituality. While religiosity is about revisiting a revelation – whether you are Christian and you have it once in your life, or whether you are Sufi or Buddhist and you want to experience an epiphany every day – humor is about puncturing that revelation, like a balloon that deflates, which is what we try to do. There are very few traditions in which you find these antithetical combinations.

Let me ask you, did you spend a lot of time down in Venice in preparation before the opening of the Biennale?

LLP:

I didn’t, though I met most of my artists in person or on Skype. In any case, it was a really interesting experience. Some of the pieces I wrote about had not yet been finished when we were working on the catalog, so there was a part of the process where I felt I was projecting my ideas more than anything else, and that was risky. On the other hand, not every artist is verbal, like you guys, where there’s a clear back-and-forth because you are writers. Other artists work from a different place, which is totally fine, but it can make communication trickier at times. But it was all great fun, I enjoyed all the challenges very much.

S&T:

Yes, though we write, we found it rather difficult to write about other artists’ work for the Ljubljana Biennial. I’m one of those people who reads everything that’s been written about the work because I’m eager to learn about other people’s viewpoint. I find there is so little dialogue in our milieu – so much of it is one monologue beside another monologue, too often without any real engagement. There’s a real burden of responsibility in ascribing an interpretation to a given work, especially if it didn’t exist or was not finished yet. It was the one of the more difficult parts of curating.

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Biografía Slavs & Tatars

www.slavsandtatars.com

Slavs and Tatars is a faction of polemics and intimacies devoted to an area east of the former Berlin Wall and west of the Great Wall of China known as Eurasia. The collective’s practice is based on three activities: exhibitions, books and lecture-performances. Books by Slavs and Tatars include Mirrors for Princes (NYU Abu Dhabi Art Gallery and JRP-Ringier, 2015), Friendship of Nations: Polish Shi’ite Showbiz (Book Works, 2013), Khhhhhhh (Mousse/Moravia Gallery, 2012), Not Moscow Not Mecca (Revolver/Secession, 2012), Love Me, Love Me Not: Changed Names (onestar press, 2010), Kidnapping Mountains (Book Works, 2009), as well as their translation of the legendary Azeri satire Molla Nasreddin: the magazine that would’ve, could’ve, should’ve (JRP | Ringier, 2011). Slavs and Tatars have exhibited across the Middle East, Europe and North America at institutions including the Tate Modern, Centre Pompidou, Istanbul Modern, 10th Sharjah, 8th Berlin, 3rd Thessaloniki and 9th Gwangju Biennials. Select solo engagements include MoMA, NY (2012), Secession, Vienna (2012), Dallas Museum of Art (2014), Kunsthalle Zurich (2014), and NYU Abu Dhabi (2015). Slavs and Tatars were nominated for the 2015 German Nationalgalerie Preis.

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Biografía Laura López Paniagua

Laura López Paniagua completed her PhD Memory in the Work of Mike Kelley (2015) holding both DAAD and Mutua Madrileña scholarships for doctoral studies in Germany (Freie Universität, Berlin, and Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Doctor Europeus Program). López Paniagua has taught on the subjects of contemporary art, cultures of remembrance, education, philosophy and psychology of art at the Leuphana University of Lüneburg and the Martin-Luther Universität Halle-Wittenberg, and more recently, at Bard College Berlin. She lectures internationally, with recent interventions at institutions such as NYU, MOCAD and 21er Haus. As an art critic and historian, she frequently collaborates to art journals such as DARDO, Mousse and Four by Three magazine. Her most recent essays have been published as part of the Catalogue of the Venice Biennale, 2019, May You Live in Interesting Times, and she is currently working on the monograph “Mike Kelley: Materialist Aesthetics and Memory Illusions”, and on a catalogue raisonné of the Ángel Nieto Collection.