In Conversation with the curators for Momentum 2013, Erlend Hammer and Power Ekroth

Sissel Lillebostad

Moss 21.6.2013

Jacobsen

Stine Marie Jacobsen, Direct Approach (2013), Momentum7. Photo: Vegard Kleven.

Sissel Lillebostad (SL): How did you get involved as curators for Momentum 2013?

Power Ekroth (PE): I met Dag (Aak Sveinar) in Stockholm when he was looking for curators for 2011. I expressed my wish to create an exhibition with artists working on site, doing three-month residencies. Back then it was obvious to us that it wouldn't work out for 2011. "But," he said, "maybe in 2013?"

Erlend Hammer (EH): After meeting Dag in Venice in 2011, I sent him an email saying: "Hi Dag, it was good to meet and chat with you in Venice. What do you think of the idea of me and Power Ekroth curating the next Momentum together? Regards, Erlend." Three days later I got the reply: "Yes, that sounds like a great idea." So that was settled.

SL: Did you work with the idea of two different exhibitions right from the start?

EH: Yes, we decided pretty quickly that we wanted to divide the task between us.

PE: We didn't get a formal offer right away. Dag asked us to submit a description of what we wanted to do at Momentum. So we developed a text, in dialogue form, about what we envisaged. Even at that stage it was clear to us that we couldn't work together on one show.

EH: I wanted to relate to what I'd curated in recent years using a similar approach. It's a combination of selecting artists with a clear mandate to produce something, and picking out works. Once we got started, the most important thing for me was to get clear about the spaces I'd be working with. The first step was to develop an image of the exhibition. My usual practice is to put people in a space and say: "Do you fancy creating a work? It should be in this corner or on that wall, or I'll devise a space for your work." Although the invitation to the artists generally promises them free rein, they aren't entirely free, because there are physical limitations on where and how their works will be displayed.

PE: My starting point is to think of the artists. For Momentum I wanted to produce something new based on an extended process that involves me working together with the artists on the development of something site-specific. The idea was that we should share a kind of residency. It's a method I've used many times.

Momentum and funding

SL: The ambitions that you initially described to the artists and Punkt Ø were very clear, but many things happened along the way. Could you say something about this?

EH: Momentum and Punkt Ø have a fairly lengthy institutional history. There was a point at which Punkt Ø acquired Momentum Kunsthall, but the building is poorly insulated and can only be used from April to September, which is very uneconomic. They wanted to have it renovated, but the owners of Punkt Ø refused. So the Kunsthall was sold and now Punkt Ø has an agreement to rent it.

SL: What's the background to this arrangement?

PE: FrP kom til makten i Moss og de sa: Vi avskyr samtidskunst og mer spesifikt avskyr vi Momentum, så da trekker vi 500.000 kroner. Men det var jo ikke bare en halv million de gikk glipp av. Resultatet var at både fylket og staten måtte trekke seg. Dermed mistet Momentum rett og slett
2,5 millioner kroner.

PE: When the Progressive Party (Fremskrittspartiet) came to power in Moss, they said: "We hate contemporary art, and more specifically we hate Momentum." Whereupon they cut NOK 500,000 of it's funding. But it wasn't just half a million they lost. The result was that both the county and the state had to withdraw funding. In the event, Momentum lost 2.5 million kroner.

EH: There's a 20/20/60 funding division between the municipality, the county and the state. One of the first things the new municipal council did was to withdraw their funds from Punkt Ø. I think they thought it was specifically Momentum that would be cut, but the statute's of Punkt Ø make them responsible for mounting Momentum. When this was explained to the politicians, they realised that the budget for Punkt Ø couldn't be micromanaged. In 2012 the finances were restored to their former levels.

PE: But the consequence was that we started with zero funding and no venues.

EH: We spent some time considering some spaces adjacent to the defunct Peterson factory. We invited artists to come and look at the place and began the process of applying for funds for the production of works. Power and I submitted our respective parts of an application for production support for the actual works. But in this application we didn't include any expenses for infrastructure. Even if we had received the 700,000 we wanted for the production of works, there still wouldn't have been any money to display them at the venues. If the applications had been submitted by the artists rather than being coordinated by us, things might have worked out better.

SL: And this led to a fragmentation of responsibility?

EH: Yes, responsibility was pulverised, as one says in legal language. As of today, we still haven't seen an overall budget for Momentum, so we don't really know how the money is being spent, except that from a total budget of 3 million, 450,000 is allocated for the production of works.

PE: And these 450,000 we've split 50/50.

Momentum and the property developers

EH: The area has been the focus of considerable attention since it was finally liberated from its hundred-year history as an industrial estate. It's owned by a property company that wants to develop it into a new neighbourhood. They want to fill it with homes, hotels and businesses, things that would ensure that it's used. It's a fantastic property. It faces the sea and has views of the uninhabited part of Jeløya. This plot, which contains Momentum Kunsthall, lies between the new and the old town. Punkt Ø wanted to work together with the property company. They made an agreement to exhibit art, but the collaboration has run aground. We've managed to upset the real estate guys.

Wankel

Charlotte Wankel, Portrett av Ingar Wankel og Elisabeth (Beth) Wankel (gift Bjørnvall) (1949). Oil on canvas. Photo Terje Holm.

I don't think anyone thought Moss had much development potential in the past, but now that they're planning a whole new neighbourhood, it's become an entirely different proposition. There's a lot of talk about Moss being the cheapest place within an hour's radius of Oslo. You can get a large apartment in Moss where you could dive from the balconystraight into the fjord for half of what you'd pay at Tjuvholmen (Oslo). It's very attractive. And you get the impression that local politicians have just latched on to the idea – twenty years after the rest of the world read Richard Florida – that culture can be good for business.

There are many conflicting interests here, concerning what the exhibition should be and who it should address; whether it should have a broad, local appeal, or be an internationally relevant contemporary art exhibition and thus, by definition, elitist and narrow.

PE: To my mind there's no contradiction.

I think my show is both very accessible and very elitist and narrow.

EH: Well, I feel my own show proves that what I just said isn't true. I think my show is both very accessible and very elitist and narrow.

Power

SL: In your catalogue text, Power, you use concepts like base and superstructure to describe the social scaffold. It's a terminology developed by Marx and Engels to describe the structure of human society. The base is where the various transactions of everyday life take place, the level of production, while the superstructure, which includes history and ideology, is what's needed to make sure the base functions. You seem to suggest that you find it more interesting to be involved with the art, which belongs to the realm of ideas – the superstructure. But you also reflect on how difficult it is to break away from the chain of production. One thing you write is that the ultimate form of resistance would be to stop creating. You seem to be working from a position that involves an awareness of your own activities as part of something you'd prefer to avoid, while at the same time using art as a critical tool.

PE: That's certainly what I try to do. I'm fascinated by the commercial world as a structure, but for me, that's not what art is about. I'm far more interested in art that highlights other values, or which encourages us to think and use our imagination. The consumerist fetish can ruin such experiences. But we all have to survive and adapt to the structures that are there if we're to achieve the things that interest us. You can choose to submit and to say, "Okay, then I'll do what's necessary for survival," or you can try to change the structures.

SL: What you seem to be suggesting, is a position of constant negotiation?

PE: Yes, I use base and superstructure as an illustration for how society works. Of course, our first priority is to eat. Next, you need to feel secure. Only then can you start thinking about other things. For most people in the West, their situation is pretty safe, although we're becoming increasingly obsessed with consumerism. And I'm not just a consumer but also a producer of facts about my life, facts that are used to aim advertising directly at me. My activities are being tracked, not just by the US and the state, but also by all these various social forces. No matter what I do, I'm subject to influences, and I have an influence.

SL: I'm not quite convinced that you're really that pessimistic. The works in the project you've curated at Momentum have stories they want to tell; the audience is drawn into many different narrative situations. Stories are an important aspect of human life; they bring us together and can keep hunger and fear at bay.

I'm far more interested in art that highlights other values, or which encourages us to think and use our imagination. The consumerist fetish can ruin such experiences.

PE: I'm both pessimistic and optimistic. The picture is complex. It isn't as if everybody participated in consumer society to the same extent. There is resistance, although it struggles to make itself felt, because it's far too easy to assume that everything's fine. I wish I could really believe that. But then you see the pictures from Syria, and the idea that all is well gets shattered. It isn't a dichotomy that works for me, although it does for many others. In Stockholm's cultural circles, for example, there you'll find people who vote for the Greens, who at the same time find it extremely important that they buy just the right organic coffee and the right designer coat, or that they live in precisely the right district. There's so much positioning and in reality absolutely zero resistance. We grow up with the idea that we have to be consuming all the time. There's a kind of ad absurdum about it, which has led to us losing touch with the rest of the world and what it looks like. And this will also affect what the future will be.

There's a myth that we become happier when we can have all the things that confirm our identity. Communism was a similar mythology that many people blindly supported without thinking.

SL: Perhaps this says something about how dependent we are on social recognition. It also says something about how we understand the systems of which we are a part, in other words, the unwritten codes that operate in all societies, large and small. We create a story that makesus part of this social game, and if you're lucky, that makes you feel safe. Art is also full of different codes. A single work can be a whole forest of references. One work in particular, Muslimgauze RIP 2010, Manchester 1982, by Hassan Khan, came across to me as being about codes and references in an ambiguous social space. You see a boy wandering around an apartment, opening cupboards and examining random objects. From a shelf he pulls out a book. The camera lingers for a while on the book and the title, but the focus isn't sharp enough for it to be legible. This made me wonder whether there was a reference here to something I should have known about or been able to spot.

PE: Muslimgauze was originally a label used by an electronic musician from Manchester. The film was made in Ljubljana for Manifesta a few years ago. One's supposed to imagine that it's set in Manchester in 1982. On one level the film could be viewed as being about the Palestine / Israel conflict, as seen through the eyes of a boy who represents an imaginary neighbour to Muslimgauze. It could also be about Thatcherism in Manchester in 1982. It isn't essential to pick up on all the details, but what is important is that you're given a variety of keys to the exhibition in case you need them.

Hopefully it'll trigger trains of thought, because that's what makes art fun. And it's one of the things I aim for here, although it demands a lot from the visitor. Or, it demands nothing, and the viewer can simply start thinking about the works.

SL: Who do you think the curator has a responsibility to?

PE: The curator is responsible to both the artists and the audience. The curator is a mediator, someone who produces a gestalt between the artists and the audience.

SL: Is that where the work is situated?

PE: The work is largely imaginary. The work is what we mediate, together with the artists, to an audience. The difficult thing with this exhibition is that it has pretensions to appeal to a large international audience, which it won't manage to do with the budget Momentum can offer. It's a fine exhibition with international artists, but to call it an international biennial is almost a bit embarrassing, considering its size.

Erlend

SL: In the catalogue you define yourselves in very different ways; Power presents a text that functions as a narrative, whereas for you, Erlend, that's something you try to avoid. The thing that struck me about your text was the opening quote about the barriers to love. I rather suspect that you're romantically inclined when it comes to art.

EH: I took the title from the social media program Instagram, which I'm a big fan of. One of my Instagram contacts, a young American artist named Jared Madere, whose Instagram name is babyjsmooches, has "Dare 2 Love Yourself" as one of his regular hash-tags. I think of Babyjsmooches almost as a kind of hash-tag poet. He posts a lot of photos with long texts. The title of the catalogue text, "Dare 2 be a Student in the Presence of Teachers", which is perhaps an even better formulation, is also from him.

Khan

Hassan Khan, video stil from Muslimgauze R.I.P. (2010). Copyright the artist and Galerie Chantal Crousel.

The quote at the beginning of the text, "Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek, and find only the barriers within yourself, that you have built against it", is by the Persian poet Rumi. At one point, I considered having the Rumi quote as the only text in the catalogue; I'd written the text that's in there now several months earlier, it was just a question of whether or not to use it. In a way it employs a kind of self-help logic while at the same time containing a yogic truth. I like the title as a positive message.

SL: I get the impression you're trying to get rid of the academic frame of reference that surrounds your job as curator.

EH: That's absolutely what I'm trying to do.

SL: Is it the non-verbal aspect of art that you're trying to get closer to?

EH: Yes, which is represented in the exhibition by the paintings of Lars Monrad Vaage, which are entirely non-figurative and untitled. His works are an extreme form of non-verbal expression. You're given nothing more to go on than the who and the what. They're objects of pure visual experience. The fact that there's no information about them in either the exhibition or the catalogue is a silent protest against the tyranny of mediation – a protest motivated in part by my own strenuous activities as a critic, where the main problem wasalways this expectation that I should explain to one load of people what it was that someone else meant. A kind of intermediate position between someone who has a thought and someone who seeks to understand it. Here I see a similarity between the critic and the curator; to be worth his salt, a critic or a curator has to have his own speculative stance.

SL: So, if I understand you correctly, what you want is that the work should pass through as few filters as possible before it reaches an audience?

EH: Right, and one reason for this is that my own attitude to looking at art was seriously damaged by two trips to look at all the land art works of the 1960s and 70s. After being alone in the desert with Spiral Jetty, everything else just seems like noise. It's a goal of mine to get as close as possible to the experience of art. There are many things I'd like to see again, the Sistine Chapel and Giotto's Scrovegni Chapel in Padua, but unless I'm allowed to do so alone, which is unlikely, then it's not going to happen. Having people around me while I'm looking at something has become totally unacceptable. Usually it works out fine, because in most exhibitions one is alone anyway.

SL: Would you say your curatorial objective here at Momentum has been to create a good exhibition which is best viewed alone?

EH: It comes across best when viewed alone. But from what I know of visitor numbers to Momentum, that shouldn't be a problem.

SL: Who do you think the curator has a responsibility to?

EH: Himself and the artists – as the one with artistic responsibility. And one has a degree of administrative or financial responsibility towards the institutions. But I think of that as just management.

I don't feel I have a responsibility towards the public. I don't see how that could work out. Should one give audiences what they want? But what could that mean? I think my show is more accessible to a non-specialist audience than an audience of art experts, because for the experts the lack of information or of a conceptual framework will seem like an obstacle. Possibly. The exhibition framework is meant to question the way things are usually done. Ihave a highly unfashionable taste for modernism. I don't like narrative and I don't like mixed media. Perhaps I've been damaged by reading Clement Greenberg.

But not too badly, of course. I started out writing about sound art, which is the least Greenbergian medium imaginable. In fact, sound in an exhibition space has very little to do with modernism. But I also bring something from that background with me. In creating an exhibition you have to be aware of every element, because what you're doing is designing an environment, an exhibition space.

SL: Are you responsible for the works?

EH: Yes, but here I think things are very fluid. Many works could take much rougher treatment than we normally give them. In this exhibition everyone's treated very nicely. There's a delicate balance between the exhibition design and where the works begin and end. One example is Bjarne Melgaard's room. It wouldn't have been difficult to define the space and the paintings as one work, but the space is exhibition design.

If on the other hand you invited a philosopher of art to talk about it, he or she might say that the setting has such an influence that it's essentially part of the work. My own perspective is far more pragmatic. Here you have five paintings that are on sale as individual items, which means they can't add up to one work.

Erlend and Power

SL: Does the process of selecting artists, through which you can assert your power and influence, give you more joy than the art itself? Many reputable contemporary social theorists say that pathological narcissism has become the dominant form of subjectivity, especially during the past forty years. Since this is the same period in which the role of the curator has developed, could it be that the profession has evolved specifically to suit this type of human condition?

PE: I understand your point very well, but feel a bit exasperated that some people still think like that. Curators have been around for as long as people have been mounting art exhibitions. The fact that they've become more visible in recent years is another matter. If you wandered into an exhibition in the 1980s and found one wall painted green, a few works hanging on it and an inscription saying it was about Picasso and the Mediterranean, then you'd immediately know you were in Stockholm's Moderna Museet, which used a kind of objective standard for the presentation of great artists, rather than the ideas of a subjective curator. There was a clear structuring and conceptualisation, and it influenced the way you viewed the works.

As a curator working with living artists on the production of new work, I feel more like an accomplice, and very often as a therapist – a best friend, a lover, a mother, or simply someone you can blame when things go wrong. There isn't much narcissism in that. Personally, I'd describe it more as "bordering on the masochistic," since there's no infrastructure, money or glamour in it for the curator, just hard work and immense pressure to achieve, from both the artists and the administrative side. And a desire to produce a good exhibition.

As a curator working with living artists on the production of new work, I feel more like an accomplice, and very often as a therapist – a best friend, a lover, a mother, or simply someone you can blame when things go wrong.

EH: I should begin by saying that the process of selecting artists and works is what I really enjoy most. Or more specifically, the hanging. I feel it would be fantastic to have just one space I could work with on a regular basis, where I didn't have to think of anything other than creating an exhibition alone with the artists, because that's what's most enjoyable and most rewarding.

With this exhibition, the thing I find really interesting is that it'll be standing long enough for me to come back and see it again. And that'll probably provide a new perspective that allows me to see it as a more independent entity.

The other thing was the pathological narcissism, right? That sounds about right. It ties in with the quote from which the title is taken. "Dare 2 Love Yourself" is of course something a pathological narcissist would be happy to hear. It's popular to attack Instagram or Facebook status updates as an expression of social decay, in the sense that they invariably amount to a form of extreme self-presentation, but I really like it even so. I find it fantastic that there's this explosion of self-awareness, which refines itself into an array of references. It's a combination of Marshall McLuhan, Wittgenstein and LSD ideology, mixed with Hinduism and Buddhism, which really appeals to me. There's just no way that it's indicative of any kind of decay, whether social or personal or whatever you want to call it. I like the idea that people are really nothing more than a sum of references. 90% of one person's consciousness is identical to 90% of any other person's consciousness.

SL: In other words, we're highly social.

EH: Exactly, and this extreme self-presentation merely reveals that individualism is dead. It's an outdated, somewhat questionable 1970s ... It was probably Pol Pot or someone like that who claimed that the individual is an abstraction. It's at the opposite extreme from Margaret Thatcher's statement: "There's no such thing as society." I feel that, even if abstraction can lead to an unfortunate lack of respect for the individual, it's still a better basis on which to build a society than a denial that society exists.

 

Kunstjournalen B-post #1_13: Assembly, Momentum, LIAF