 Hello everyone, welcome to the Brooklyn Museum. My name is Allison Burstein. I'm a member of the adult programs department of the education division here and it's my pleasure to welcome you to May's in Conversation, which is part of our Thursdays at 7 series. Tonight's conversation is part of a series that aims to expand the realm of discussions that we host here within the museum and investigate a wide range of topics, ideas and processes that kind of underpin the art that's on display here. So tonight we have the opportunity to be discussing the topic of utopianism, a broad topic that applies to both the Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn Museum proper and on global and personal scales. We have the honor of being joined tonight by Liam Gillick and Simon Critchley, who will be discussing the ways that their work intersects around this topic. Hello, I'm Elizabeth Callahan. I'm the manager of adult programs here at the museum and when we first came up with the concept of working with Liam Gillick and Simon Critchley, we acknowledged that there was a certain amount of experimentation in their work. So we approached them with the idea of maybe having an experimental form with our conversation tonight and to our great pleasure, they were game. So I'd like to thank them for being willing to experiment with us and also thank Lucas Jones of Politi Books for coordinating all of us. So the experimental format will be this, the audience will serve as moderator. We crowdsourced a number of questions via Twitter and Facebook. So thank you to those of you who participated on those forums. So we're going to start them off with some of your questions. Many of the questions reference the wide array of fields and discourses that you both work in and explore within and sort of what are the reasons behind doing so and what are you the criteria used to decide when and how to engage with these different projects? Yeah, but I did hear this word impetus and I think it's quite interesting because in fact the decision to function as an artist is had nothing to do with impetus. It's too That sort of word is implies too much agency. In fact, it starts with doubt in a way and it starts with a kind of series of denials or an attempt to differentiate yourself and Of course, what happens after time is people think that's an active decision or they think it has impetus or it has some motion in fact it often has a lack of motion It's a series of denials and as you get older You start to kind of fake your own history or you trick yourself and you think you made dynamic decisions In fact, a lot of the time you were sort of sitting in the back looking at Someone thinking I will not be that person. It has a kind of negative Aspect, I don't know Yeah, I don't think I made Decisions to I mean much respect to be you can construct that But why work in different media? Well, I mean, I you know I Write for the most part and then other things cropped up and I'm curious so you end up in Having friendships with people Occasions arising which retrospectively it can look like a certain plan, but that's just not the way it is So and I think it's I don't know. I enjoy a certain media promiscuity so So I don't want to just be writing academic philosophy because that's but but don't you ever I'm gonna start interviewing you now But don't you ever have this problem of What I call like the Baudrillard's photos problem the worry I mean as a philosopher There's I don't know if you know what I'm talking about but John Baudrillard the sociologist thinker Also took photographs and when I was a kid you were supposed to read Baudrillard because he did write some really important stuff especially in the 70s and But you're also aware that he took photographs and the photographs were kind of a problem because the photograph were They were in the coding of photographs I mean they were things like a duck on its own or like a kind of sunset or they seem to completely erase and deny Most of the things he wrote about strangely enough So I think it's important to explain that that from my perspective your Engagement with with with other mediums and other things is not on that level It's not like it is sort of integrated for me with your Reading and writing and mm-hmm. Don't you think or maybe I'm wrong, but it's also that you know I mean, I don't I began by doing different things badly, so beginning writing poetry doing playing in bands doing that badly unsuccessfully Then writing poetry doing that badly Unsuccessfully and then stopping thank God at a certain point and then You discover this this form of writing which you can sort of do But which I see as a secondary activity So, you know, I guess which thing is secondary the right. I think that I mean, you know, the I mean You know folk de mure as they say in France I could have been a novelist or I could have been an artist or I could have been a musician didn't work out that way I Could read texts and do a certain number of things with them And maybe some interesting things happen, but I don't think of that as as as as primary or Particularly original work. Mm-hmm. If other people find it Interesting. Well, that's good. But I see it as a kind of like default position or so for me, I guess what's essential is the That things emerge out of an experience of failure, right a self-conscious of failure But I always think that sounds to me I mean, I kind of know what you mean But and I found myself writing something similar today and I think of it as really age specific It's the kind of thing that I would find kind of nauseating When it comes out of you know the mouth of someone my age because I think it's it's a sort of mere culprit in a way And I know what you mean, of course, but it's something that I think you maybe It's too difficult to recognize to recognize that at the beginning is Impossible because of course it means you cannot act at all So instead of maybe what was the word impulse or impetus instead of impetus which suggests the kind of Setting something to action as in a rolling impetus something gains impetus and starts to move In fact instead what there are a lot of acts like isolated acts of either defiance or action or Actually often feeling left out of something left out of a discussion or or excluded I don't know. Maybe this is not relevant to the another this is because I was reading this interview with you in the Brooklyn Rail this this issue of the Brooklyn Rail and What we have in common which is interesting is Education at a certain point right the one may want to be a rock star or To write, you know sub TS Eliot type poetry and then you wind up through a series of accidents in an educational institution and you discover teachers and Those teachers if you're fortunate in Melbourne you to do something you didn't think you're able to do beforehand so for me you know Whatever Whatever it is that I call what I do, and I'm not sure what it is that I do It's because of a series of discreet encounters with a number of number of teachers So the educational background is for me hugely important and you were talking in the interview about your experience at Goldsmith's as a student at a very particular point in that very particular Institution in in in South London in dear old New Cross and I guess, you know What one hopes for is that there's it's the question of one's own impetus is subsumed if you're so if you're lucky enough to discover teachers that will Enable something to happen for you then over a period of time something will begin to emerge In philosophy it takes a long time Maybe that's a difference, you know, it seems to take I mean, you know The difficult thing in philosophy is is having something like a voice and the only way you develop a voice is through Complex acts of ventriloquism. So what you learn to do as a student is to ventriloquize with different Different puppets different dummies over a period of years that puppet can be you know The Hegel puppet or the the Derrida puppet and you you ape that you ape those manners and then after a certain point Something begins to emerge, which is something like a voice, but it's funny last night. You talked about you would not the other night You were talking about people you'd known or people you'd studied with who and one or two characters You said had burnt out like you used that phrase. It's it was suddenly as if we weren't talking about Philosophers or academics at all. We were talking about something completely different even artists or something I don't know many artists that have burnt out. I know some that have taken too many drugs But maybe we were talking about that, but it's a funny idea There's being burnt out of ideas and it it does strike me that some of what you're doing is about being able to see the future Do you see what I mean that there must be some It has a different speed maybe maybe not maybe not all artists are as neurotic as I am But but somehow it seems to project into the future your work to have the the patience To do it to have the patience to work, but maybe I miss understanding or romanticizing how you work Well, that means with no vision of the next five minutes, I don't know now you there's a sense in which there is you know, there are Having you know accepted that happiness is not going to be an option, right? get rid of get rid of that question and so you know Given the happiness is off the table then one one works in a certain way and As a certain discipline I guess another you know crucially important thing here is the the acquisition of a certain Discipline and for me that's a discipline of writing Which which for me? I mean this goes back to this ventriloquism issue is very important because You know you learn to write through taking notes This this is totally banal, but hugely important that for me I mean the most important aspect of my education was learning Languages and then making notes on texts in foreign languages For hours and hours and hours in libraries at the end of which I'd have a page and a half of notes in you know on a French or a German text or whatever it was and then and then that was mine and then Seven eight years later somehow that would that would find articulation in some way the burnt-out thing is that I mean you know and this is another maybe Let's say this is here's my fantasy about about you right my fantasy about Liam Gillick is that you know Liam is you know really cool and does all this great stuff, and he did it all so incredibly young and and there were these other people doing similar things all these other cool artists some of them French and and they seem to form a group and there seems to be a movement and you think oh this is fantastic whereas for me I Can think of a moment when I was a graduate student when I was 25 26 27 there was a group of us and then different speeds began to kick in and And things got weird between people people that I was friends with and I sort of really respected We ended up hating each other and falling apart or people couldn't write or they began to write And the next thing didn't happen and then 20 years later you look around and There are people there are still people older than me here with it's very important to have those sort of Transferential relationships upwards and then the students at different levels, but As it were laterally There's not terribly much Whereas when I look at you you think oh you've got all of these People that seem to be part of a group. Yes, because it's that the two big Misreadings of contemporary art what there's many misreadings, but two of the primary ones which are actually convenient misreadings of the misreading of nationality and generation and they're very convenient because of course you can just It's a sustaining Misunderstanding so there's the there's this illusion of horizontality As if you somehow have something in common with your generation and maybe where you were born or something like that And of course if it people don't do much to break it down because frankly to break it down Removes part of the fun of the kind of edible aspect of being creative, of course, which is often real It does exist, but it's not It's it's easier to kind of To stick with it's it's it's not that easy to really deal with really breaking down a Generational hierarchies in a way it's much easier to stick in this kind of hovering thing So, you know particularly interesting for people who've just graduated from from art school There's the an assumption that somehow collectively they've all come up with this kind of new Generational solution and particularly in New York it even is the name of a kind of show that they do and It's such it's of course a normal thing, but it doesn't help you understand anything about the work It's a convenient misreading that sort of lumps together a whole bunch of people born at the same time as if that would help you Understand something and of course superficially it does seem to suggest something. It seems to suggest energy a limited degree of diversity not not in certain class ways and sense of identity but certain diversity and a certain kind of dynamic unreadability which is supposed to stand in for like art as a Exciting thing, but of course a bit like anything else You know a doctor in in in the Philippines as much more in common with a doctor in Beverly Hills Then all the doctors in the Philippines who were born at the same time You know do or all the people hang on wrong hang on all the people born in the Philippines who went to that university or something like that I'm not doing this right you need to there's a better way of putting this at the Philippines something like that But I don't anything about the Philippines you you I'm interviewing you now. So you so Liam in a text that you wrote you say something like I work in isolation, but I cannot we cannot work in isolation So there's this fundamental paradox of work one works necessarily in isolation, but one cannot work in isolation Therefore collaboration becomes hugely important now. That's true for Different domains of You know of production of all kinds in terms of Contemporary art and we could maybe think about what that term means if it Means too much or too little and whether we ought to get away for there's another thing to think about, you know there's this Critique of contemporary art the category contemporary art in some of your recent stuff, which is very interesting but it in terms of the history of Contemporary art that 90s moment that you're part of right and that group of people that you are associated with even if you have Contingent things in common Still defines That thing called contemporary art. We're still living through that that 90s moment in a way Which is which is peculiar because it's some time ago now So and then, you know, then you become periodized then you become identified You know Nicola Burio writes a writes a book relational aesthetics becomes a term and then there's a thing that one is passed off, right? That I did ideally what you what you want as an artist is to be in a position where you can deny being part of a group I Anything else is a problem unless you're a visionary or a genius or have or crazy at some level or different Because what you need ideally is to be able to say I am not a pop artist or I'm not a minimalist Or I was never really a surrealist and it's the fact the most decadent indulgence of an artist is is to be able to do that and of course what you see What you see now in fact is Very little attempt to define groupings in fact Nicola Burio's book Aesthetic relational was really written towards the artist to try and get him off himself off the hook Where as a curator, I think he realized he'd misread some of the work that we've been doing and he Misrepresented it as well So he wanted to write a sort of letter to his in a way friends to try and explain himself And that's what became public as but you see I'd already been peripherally engaged with this kind of Young British artist thing so I'd already benefited or I'd already been able to do I've been able to do it twice I was able to say to people well I was never really a young British artist and I could also say and I had nothing really to do with relational aesthetics And this is a kind of incredible luxury that is more and more difficult to achieve Not because artists have really changed or contemporary art has really changed as a as a terrain. It's a very Dynamic well, it's not dynamic. It's the opposite. It's an incredibly slow-moving kind of Like lava flow that just tends to absorb things but but what happens is that that there's been a lot more focus on on Curatorial practice as a discipline that's made people more reluctant to actually stick their neck out and Claim anyone and to say I will say that you you and you are doing this identifiable thing because the jet my generation who had Born in the mid 60s They started as critics because you couldn't get paid as a curator was a non-imaginable job It was still a terrain of work that was Tended to be taken up either by accident or because you wanted to work in a museum and and people like Nicola started as critics Not as curators. It's only because they were writing that people thought why don't you organize an exhibition? Seeing as you seem to think things have changed and that's completely different now anyone under 40 that I meet who's interesting Tends to have studied curating at some level and they've skipped the critic part. So what they're really fascinated to do is is recuperation and Reanimation of things and that does not include a lot of the people in this room who are Not ready to be recuperated or reanimated and I've even sat in meetings at Bard College at the curatorial studies program and heard people question Someone's thesis proposal on the grounds that they intend to look around them horizontally and try and Do something to kind of identify something happening The only time it's usually permitted is if the person I dent if the group as it were Identify some specific quality that is other than the received idea of what you know The dominant culture is and then it's it's it's questioned But there's a deferral to to the young curator But it causes a bit of a it causes a bit of a void, but it also allows something to last much longer Historically, there's a reason for this and there's a precedent and that's Nouvelle Vague and French cinema where almost everyone involved Also started out as a critic. I was read first as a critic not seen as an artist as well And this is the one thing that this is the precedent for it and until that happens again Nothing will happen really you'll have these kind of pseudo movements But you won't have until people take the voice and take the the text and rewrite a kind of present You won't get the possibility of an actual Movement you'll get these weird ones like younger than Jesus type ones which have proper artists and them are real People but then they're kind of they're they're actually pseudo groupings. They have no real meaning I guess what you're saying about An artist wanting to deny being part of a group or a movement is that why you've chosen to collaborate sort of outside of the field Specifically right here. You two have collaborated on two books now So I guess I'm curious about the impetus for that collaboration how that came about right, but the thing is that it's At one point I worked with a lot of people in France and of course this word collaboration was something that they were extremely uncomfortable about using and As we know in French history the word collaborator doesn't sound right. It doesn't sound very good so we actually used to use the term work together shall we work together on something and Subsequently, I've written a couple of texts about working methodology in relation to art which tried to suggest that certainly in northern European and partly relatively privileged North American Cultures that a lot of this sense of working together is actually rooted in changes in in elementary school and kindergarten education In the 60s and 70s where the way of working was project based You're encouraged go to school and like explore something explore an idea or work together like you'll do this now Do this or have a non-hierarchic or creativity and of course that still that I think is at the root of some of the feeling that this is a Good way. It does have some psychological Root, but it also is political because those teachers often were the most Left-wing the only really applied left-wing people you ever met Like they were the first ones to go on strike or the first ones to have a position or the first people to have a kind of politics that you met who were not like We talked about families the other night, but they had a certain dynamic So this is this is really important this idea of working together But it working together can mean side-by-side and not face-to-face and when I was young of course the artists who collaborated Had an amp for sand they were like Gilbert and George or so and so and so and so and when I worked with people We don't work equally. It's more like I Don't kind of embarrassed to say it, but I wrote very short text in 1989 Called the Scooby-Doo complex, which was about the model the Scooby-Doo model of working which is like you and Shaggy go that way and me and Valmer Valmer will get lost and then you see what I mean But you're actually kind of working together to solve something and I've kind of suppressed this text subsequently But it but I pitched it against what I called the Disneyic way of working which is to create a kind of Illusion of a sort of a of a character the artist character who becomes a kind of cartoon Person who can do anything you can be this figure who can who can kind of become who can sweep through culture and create these amazing images and and Only notices it's going wrong In you know that way you run off the cliff and it's only you only fall when you when you realize you you're in mid-air The Disneyic I always felt was a kind of inherently right wing Model a softly right-wing model of art which was much more connected to people like Jeff Koons or it had a kind of Logic to it and the Scooby-Doo model which was Hannah Barbera I guess Was essentially much more to do with splitting up and meeting back somewhere and if you work together you work together In a way by accident. There's a lot of unmasking involved unmasking the institution Finding out that the very person who was undermining you was the same person actually running the place for example This Scooby-Doo thing actually was quite useful at the time And also was deeply sounded deeply unserious therefore irritated even further the kind of Pious and prissy Guardians or gatekeepers of art at that point in Relationships who I mean I Mean there's an image of philosophy We could call it a Cartesian image of philosophy of Descartes in his oven in the Netherlands ruminating on The nature of certainty you know and coming to a series of conclusions Which he publishes in the discourse on the method and the meditations It's this idea of the philosopher is this solitary character that Rembrandt a painting of the top philosopher, so we have that and But and I guess this this this is a way into this this question Philosophy is group activity right philosophy begins in a quite peculiar way, I mean and the names are listed on the facade of the Brooklyn Museum on This side is extraordinary. You've got all the Sophists right over there Protagoras and Gorgias and the rest and then Socrates now Socrates is this Old man that likes younger men Who asks questions which have the form T. S. Dean? You know, what is it? You know, what is what is it and they kill him? End of story Justly, you know because he was impious to the gods of the city and he corrupted the youth and most of his students were reactionary Characters that wants to overthrow democracy which they did He dies Then a school is founded called the Academy We don't know much about these schools and we don't really know what they did But they flourished in outside the city of Athens and then elsewhere across the ancient world. So If they're at one level is the fantasy in philosophy of the individual Producer the thinker, you know the thinker who's thinking difficult thoughts then for me What's more important is the idea of the group, right? The idea of philosophy as a group activity a dialogical activity of back and forth There are numerous problems with that which I could go into it's usually a group of men With the exception of the Pythagoreans who are mainly women, but Pythagoras probably didn't exist and they were vegetarians That's a separate story but the Usually men and usually younger men having a relationship to an older man. So What you have in the philosophical group is some kind of master figure some kind of big other Around whom the younger men congregate and that still exists. Think about all those younger Eager men that congregate around people like bad you or Zizek or whatever and they want they believe in the master All right, they believe that the master will From his lips something will fall will write it down and it will be the truth So there's that So for me one of the fantasies that I've been animated by in terms of my stuff is trying to Group think in a way philosophically it's very hard to do now This sort of goes back towards the you know, I guess The art world in a way The longest collaboration I've done is with this novelist Tom McCarthy and Tom and I worked together for you know for about I don't know 12 13 years or something like that and This vehicle called the international necronautical society was developed as a vehicle within which we could do stuff And we are interested in obscure corners of theory and modernist literature And nobody in the academy or in certain in literary circles had any interest But the art world did it did have an interest so we found that we were We had a our vehicle found a sort of garage in the art world And we did all this weird shit at the in different places over a number of years and then We wrote collectively so that I mean that was another thing to think about is that we had the as it were the Anonymous persona of a society the international necronautical society and we could subsume whatever Individual individuality we had into that group and writing the persona of the society that was interesting But for me it's been I mean given that the default position is me at home in my laptop, you know trying to Think of things to say or or teaching and feeling anxious. I mean the What I'm trying to do is to produce a kind of Collaborational practice as a promiscuous series of collaborations whereby my intentionality is subsumed into something else and I can ventriloquize in some other way So when I was writing with Tom, I would fantasize about being Tom He'd fantasize about being me and it would go back and forth. I just finished a book with my wife, which has been a very a unique collaboration which is a kind of Hystericization of philosophical discourse in all sorts of interesting ways we could talk about that But what you end up doing is trying to Find some other voice now in relationship to you know I mean we met through through Philippe Parreno, right and and I I got to know Philippe and And what's interesting about Philippe Parreno's work is his sort of insistent or his insistence but his His his sort of relative withdrawal from from publicity, right? He's been involved in all of these Collaborations for all of these years and only came out as he says he only came out as an artist whenever you know a few years ago now and I guess another aspect of this question is when I was looking at things by Philippe or Liam and people connected with that and Reading things by Hans Ulrich and There was this idea of could they be a collective intelligence? Could we imagine a form of collective intelligence and Or could there be Could there be a way of Reanimating what we imagine Groups say like the situation is we're up to in the 60s where there seem to be some sort of different form of organization and production and Sure, that's always going to be a fantasy, but it's it's it's Yeah, but the only way it can work is if it doesn't settle it has to retain its its lack of Settling and I think the artist Philippe Parano He whenever he senses something settling he tries to agitate within the group and I talked a lot in the past about this idea of of How one functions within a group not how one functions an artist? I think artists kind of ego deployment or their work or their behavior Is often masking a lot of things you don't find out very much You know they work seriously or they hardly work at all or they do this and that I'm much more interested in how they operate within the group and that's not because I Necessarily think you could find out anything by this kind of group think thing, but I do think you can find out something About their work by actually looking at the way they will work with other people But then I also realized that I think this word collaboration in the end when you get to a certain point might be a to use the French form of it might be a more accurate form because of course collaboration usually has an Some views that French understanding or the problem of collaboration it is out of it is out of sync It's not equal, you know, I get a lot of I mean it depends what you think of Simon But if you think something of Simon I get a lot back for doing the cover of a book in a way and yet vice versa You know, it's not equal. It's not even it's not even handed and I think it's this lack of even handedness That is actually what I find interesting about it It's more and more difficult to do and it gets harder and harder over time And it's something I've talked to people about before the problem is in fact not the problem that you think it is The problem is actually how to remain dynamic within the group yet also find a way that you can take Responsibility for your own actions, which means of course stepping out and saying well I'll take responsibility for that myself and so you've got this dynamic between the individual in the group that I think you'll see that almost any artist in the kind of post war or the Last 50 years it has to be kind of post war because it's such a rupture Has always had this strange Relationship unless they were unless they came Reinvented themselves so that Andy Warhol has to create his own kind of phantom group Within which to operate because it's very clear that he cannot function alongside his contemporaries that alongside Jasper Johns and Rauschenberg He's completely insecure he cannot have like Maybe a kind of natural Disagreement with them you see what I mean, and it's this kind of sense of a sort of natural disagreement or a That's actually quite hard to sustain. It's much easier to retreat like and some kefir to your castle somewhere or to Retreat into The art market, you know the art markets the problem of the art markets the place to retreat and hide in or to give up In that's you see what I mean that a lot of these things to me are very that's interesting Maybe there should be another subject Question or subject maybe from the Mob sourcing you want to use the mic so you can in various ways you've both Engaged with this issue of utopianism in your work So I'm wondering what you think are the unique potentials of your fields to contribute to an understanding of this issue well the First thing I'd say would be that the Philosophy as a field, let's say that Begins with a Walk out of the city in the beginning of the Republic, right? Socrates Wonders down to the the port of Perez and engages in a conversation about about justice Which lasts for an awful long time in the house of a medic Merchant and these details are very very important, right? So it's outside the city A medic as a foreigner a foreigner who had rights of residence in the city of Athens, but who was not an Athenian so Philosophy in on that model and there's an awful lot of ways of complicated but that this just but let's just keep it simple begins with um Leaving behind the city and trying to and and criticizing the city and criticizing all the different forms of what it means to be a city Be it democracy oligarchy tyranny and the rest and imagining another city And imagining another city in speech so philosophy begins by leaving behind as it were the topos of the the place of the city and and imagining an and an utopos, you know a numb place and Imagine that numb place in speech, right? And to a certain extent At least the way I see it the obligation of philosophy is precisely that it is utopian. It's the it's the you know, so the idea that philosophers should be pragmatists or philosophers should be attentive to What is reality always strikes me as counter-intuitive philosophy is that? weird marginal and Parasitic practice which imagines another state of affairs, right another way of ordering human affairs and in that so to that extent philosophy is utopian and philosophy is the imagination of a Political vision of utopian the imagination in speech of another way of ordering human affairs. So for me, there's a continuity between forms of Philosophical reflection and forms of political utopianism and it's a lot more I could say about that but that's a partial I mean To be glib about you know where I where I grew up Thomas Moore was a saint because if he grew up in a Catholic household in Britain Thomas Moore was a saint not just a funny man who wrote a book called utopia So I was made I was always I came at it through that literary that sense of admiration for st Thomas Moore that that still was there So it comes slightly from the origin of it is biographical and to do with identifying quietly and privately with someone That's not identified as a saint by the by the dominant Culture, I noticed today on the BBC. They had a clip of Prince Charles doing the weather forecast and I looked at the Daily Mail On I like to look at the Daily Mail newspaper unlike because of the comments and one of the comments Which no one knew whether to give it a plus or a minus said something like God's representative on earth Which of course the Queen is the head of the church in Britain, but of course no one knew they weren't thinking They didn't know which direction to put that one. It stayed at zero no pluses no minuses It was almost like people were allergic of this thing like if they gave it a click on the computer Something bad might happen somehow anyhow And more is killed right more is you know rights I mean, there's the book of tribulation that it writes in captivity He's executed for his beliefs and you know another thing which is I guess the same point with this there's this extraordinary text by Erasmus Enconium Moriai right praise of folly. Where is the play on more and and madness where? Erasmus imagines as it were a complete inversion of the social order based around this ludicrous idea that there was this character called Christ Who got nailed to a tree in occupied Palestine nine two thousand years ago? isn't that strange and and and you know and what Paul says about About Christ was what we have to think about is the folly of this the madness of this And this is also another way of imagining a different A different location right so then What happened in about towards the late 90s people were looking at these new forms of Working together that were not even handed and they weren't the melding of a number of artists into one body or one voice But they were hard to control maybe not as radical as some people claim But neither were they as useless as some people make out. They were rather self Regarding actually unless they had less desire to really change a relationship with an audience or a public than I think people Imagine but what I noticed started to happen is people would describe things as utopian Not me and not any of my friends but critics or certain curators had come up to you and say yeah We're thinking of doing a show about utopia or we're interested in these utopian projects You're doing now the thing is I'd grown up in the suburban London surrounded by public housing That was neglected right from the moment It was built because certain interests didn't want there to be well done public housing that was looked after and cleaned and maintained and Wasted on lazy people And so basically I'd grown up with things being accused of being utopian my whole life You know the the housing public housing was utopian the The idea of a new public library that was actually designed by an architect and done properly was utopian The idea of actually changing anything was utopian that if you're in a union You believe that there should be better rights for everyone in the society That's utopian and I grew up with that and I suddenly found myself as an artist doing quite practical work sort of the opposite of what Simon's talking about but actually trying to play with institutions and play with the idea of art still sort of trying to Resuscitate the body of art as it were and keep it alive and you'd learn behold You'd run into some dopey curator from Salzburg in Austria You'd say I'm very interested in your utopian projects and I'd say they are not utopian There is nothing utopian about them. This is an accusation So I got very interested in this idea of the accusation of utopia as an applied thing and you notice it's very common that Not used so much in in the US, but certainly in Europe. It's still used the entire European social projects is viewed as utopian by right-wing people Because the idea that you could have this kind of federation of states that could have decent sort of base level social services is essentially a kind of utopian dream Invented by a bunch of lazy Greeks, you know the contemporary Greek cartoon You know the person who's retires at 28 and doesn't do anything is inherently corrupt Inherently bureaucratic, you know, it's an interesting thing. So I got very involved in it for that reason and would try and sort of pitch a kind of You found what had happened in art Technically is people have tried to deal with utopia through appearances and I was interested in it through acts and not appearances So you had plenty of shows that were dystopian, but that just meant they were scruffy Or they were abjects, but they weren't actually dystopian They were scruffy and abject and you had utopian projects that were shiny and Participatory and I I've constantly been trying to Agitate some of this but I don't have the philosophical What not to do it properly the model is me did this stuff in Your fascination with Volvo Your fascination with Swedish car production techniques in the early 70s as this text What may be factories in the snow and this text maybe it would be best if we worked in groups of three there's a kind of a Supposed that would be a critique of utopianism, right? So here was here was if we look at Swedish car production in Gothenburg in in this period here We had a different way of organizing production Which disappeared for reasons that we could or has come in under crisis reasons that we could document But that could be Come exemplary but those those those people in Sweden with the architects of their own redundancy as much as anything else They they found once they didn't instill the kind of horizontal working practice where people managed their own their own Actions that they first managers became somewhat redundant They didn't actually literally know what to do they had lost their authority But secondly and maybe it's because a lot of Swedes Carvanists or whatever they are Lutherans or something they They work in a different way or they think they are working in a different way to other people So they tended to rationalize their own production in their own spare time and this created I was interested in it because it's really in an Early example of what became very common in the society like if you work even in a it's very easy to to look at labor and work through through The filter of like education and say and talk easily about and quite rightly about how Education can make people free and it can make them put them in a better space But in fact at the base level of it a university professors Ex the expectations of a university professor now and someone working in in a big box store are similar They're supposed to manage themselves in a way manage their own redundancy potentially so that they already are aware of their own kind of limits and their own Expendability while they're actually working which creates of course a very interesting dilemma that in a way You are in acting a kind of freedom in a way a kind of control of over time of your own time but by doing that you're also creating the conditions of for your own redundancy and This I found extremely interesting that this had been developed and applied very early in Sweden in car production and done for all the right reasons and In fact stopped in the end for all the right reasons. They actually ended up trying to read They reinstigated like a process of management in order to create a kind of antagonism within the workplace That will allow people to battle over time again because they didn't you know, they they needed to have this sense of a time battle So I don't know if it's really about utopianism really I'm much more interested You know that whole work that started in 2004 It's really about what happens when you have a crisis in a culture that's not supposed to have a crisis And I I didn't want to look at the edge of things because partly because I'm not qualified to I'm it's not my I Wanted to look at the gray area that the federal the federated zones the areas of compromised strategy negotiation Redundancy payments like cultures that feel everything's fine those places that feel they've worked it all out And I wanted to write about the idea of a crisis in those kind of cultures and lo and behold it happened Right now. It's not because I'm a genius. It's because or I'm a I can see the future It's because you know, it's there. It's built into the structure already and I wanted to examine that ironically Sweden Again had it first because they had a big housing crisis Exactly like a mini global credit crisis in the either the late 90s. I think in the late 90s So they had they'd re they'd instilled like high high level controls over credit and and And so on but also at the same time but in place heavy protection for renting renting Accommodation so if you rented you could you could you could be protected and they've almost escaped the entire Bank crisis Who's next? Hey, yeah, I wanted to ask actually with kind of direct response to what's just been said This site these ideas of utopianism or not utopianism Specifically to do with the kind of unrest that's been going on across the world. How does that factor into your arguments? specifically like, you know the rights in England specifically to do with that kind of you know, some of those very Important ideas about what's happened with the crisis. How does that factor in and I know like some of your work is very you know Talk about those structures those architecture and how people then interacted with that architecture in a very violent way In England and then and also in on a broader level. It's happening on a global level You know even here with occupy slightly different model, but it's happening all over the world Like how do those things factor into your understanding of utopianism? I just want to say something very quickly about it and then Today the police in London were marching against the cuts right so I found extremely interesting So it was about 30 to 50 thousand police, which is a lot of police and the only thing that I found Was actually the first time I thought I saw a real potential for something to happen something to change In a strange way because the police announced that if necessary They would kettle the police meaning that British technique where you kind of try to neutralize a riot or a demonstration By not letting anyone leave and you surround them And you won't let anyone leave if anyone tries to leave the kettle They get pushed back into the kettle and they get kept there for hours and hours and hours And I thought this image of the police cuddling the police was kind of something on These other matters are deferred to Simon maybe for a while. I think that we share is a a an anxious relationship to where we're from you know and there's So I Wish pestilence and plague and fire and Death on England I loathe England with a With a vengeance that Surprises me as the years go by and it gets worse. I take no particular pride in that but it's a fact The riots were fantastic. I thought I thought it was just great I mean in some ways it was you know in some Here was a reanimation of a very peculiar kind Because the I was living in London when the the riots in 1981 That spread all over well, they began in Liverpool and Hansworth in Birmingham and elsewhere, but the Broadwater Farm Estate in Tottenham where the The incident began that the thing that started the riots Was like a sort of Re-enactment of you know of what had happened In a C1 when it was a police officer that had been killed on that estate, right? And that was the the thing that lit the lit the fuse now there's an awful lot to say because But a general level it's for me the question Hmm not the question, but a big question of Politics for the last Century at least has been the relationship between Working-class Unrest and middle-class unrest and in many ways the history of Politics turns on Moments where those two experiences of unrest are linked and not linked So if we think about 68, which was largely a student protest, let's say, you know More or less middle-class French students and for a moment it's seen you mean English middle-class meaning No, I mean what was happening in the same middle class. You don't mean it in the American oh not in the American sense. No, but you know the question of whether there could be whether the Occupation and defeat of the the police in the Sorbonne would lead to a general strike, right and The students went into the the Renault factories and all those you probably know this history Anyway, it it happens and it didn't happen It happened in the sense in which there was an extraordinary moment and then at the end of June of that year De Gaulle was re-elected into power and it took another sort of 12 13 years for 68 to sort of work its way through the political system with the election of meteron in AC1 which did a re-enactment of that last weekend in some sort of faded Grotesque form which we from which we should expect nothing But that's by the by but the question has always been a question of whether of linking up forms of say working-class protest and middle-class protest and It's in that light that obviously you can look at say parallel movements in In in the late 60s here, you know, there was that moment when the when SDS People went underground became the weather underground There was that there was that the attempt to form coalitions between the weather underground and the the black panthers and then with the white Panthers and all that stuff that was an insurrectionary moment bringing the war home and all of that it seems that at this point in History in different contexts those questions are being posed There was a great book that came out last year with Verso Called chaffs, you know chaffs in English is council house and violent A term that she used a term of art that she used described the working-class and This is a book on the demonization of the working-class and that demonization the working-class was what was playing out in the Response to the riots and what you should look at and I was on sadly a way Without an internet connection when a lot of this is happening So I caught up with this later But looking at the BBC coverage of the riots and there was one moment where there was an Interview with a darkest how who was originally I think originally Caribbean British politician became a Labour MP for Tottenham for that and he was interviewing the BBC and he was in a gentle way saying that perhaps something revolutionary was at stake here something was happening and He was the BBC interviewer said, you know, well, you know, mr How you have a history of rioting yourself, don't you I believe and and he said, you know Anyway, and then they cut it from the website BBC website. You can't find that interview anymore He revealed the So there's that so can there be an alliance between Whatever was going on in the riots and what was going on for example in Britain with the protest against fees the student riots and all the kettling that was happening in November 2010 what forms a coalition are possible between what was going on in the Occupy movement and And wider movements that seems to be the question and it seems to me that Occupy is at a particular juncture at the moment and Me my view on it changes day by day and I try and follow keep up with things a little but the It seems to me that the That that extraordinary efflorescence of Confidence that happened around Occupy which for me is it has to be linked to an idea of location and There's another question here that that location was something that looked like an art installation as well That's another really interesting question Zuccotti Park Looks like a Thomas Herschorn piece, but that's a separate Separate separate issues, but you know anyway art and politics, but the link between that and then Organized labor and unions and even the Democratic Party and how Whatever was being articulated in Occupy can form the basis for a mass movement That's that's the juncture that we're at and it seems to me that it's It's an Unpropitious time for there to be an election in that sense, right because obviously the the rhetoric of Occupy is Going is has already been co-opted by Obama as the language of fairness and equality and diluted at the same at the same moment and in a sense the The risk now is that the the extraordinary and this happens in a generation What happened last fall here happens in every generation that they extraordinary confidence that the people acting peacefully in concerts Suddenly understand that they have extraordinary potency as a group, right and then Anything can happen, right The the the possibility for a dissolution of the energy, you know, I find sad, but I'm not you know, I'm not Pessimistic yet, but we'll see the thing is I I don't know dwell on it too much or make any I do think there is a slight problem for certain artists in terms of In the last 10 years who've adopted a certain aesthetic in order to indicate an ethical position that it has been That's you know things have to move on for some of them because I think it becomes more difficult When when that happens just to add To add to what what Simon's saying that Actually think that I tend to look at these things structurally and aesthetically which doesn't mean obviously Whether things look nice or not. It just means looking at its aesthetic qualities And of course you see that there's an extremely precise well orchestrated campaign To stop anything happening and to do that in very devious and well-organized ways So I cannot talk about any of these moments in terms of whether or not they themselves Kind of fade or they themselves fail to achieve something because I see the the way the Architecture of the environments is manipulated in the way the street is Used in the way certain people are singled out for kind of humiliation and punishment that then puts off certain other people You know if I see another photograph of a fat white Police chief in a white shirt like with his knee on a woman's face. This is an absolute decision This is strategy. This is not these are not idiots These are people doing this on purpose because they know that if they're going to do that to To this person then what are they going to do to you kind of thing like this is a it's almost For me sometimes I think it's on the level of of what they call war crimes You know that it's that sort of level where you're using Terror of the sort of the land or of the the nation as it were as a technique, of course, it's much softer Than that I'm not possible, you know, but it has similar psychological effects and similar Create similar fears about what could be It's not about what's happening at the moment. None of this is about what's happening at the moment Do you serious? You know, we don't think we know that nothing's really happened in fact I mean, I'm not talking about elsewhere in the world But certainly here it's in a suspended state and I think that this is extremely interesting and And it does require from an artist's perspective It does require a little bit of a rethinking of where you stand a little bit in terms of what you're letting out into the world and Strangely enough, it complicates things more than More than it makes them simple. I wish it made it more simple I wish it made it more simple where to stand, but it means the role of the artist becomes Maybe I think sometimes there's a spotter, you know this idea of a spotter it exists in in For people who are snipers for example, they have a spotter because you can't snipe and spot things at the same time you need someone to point things out and maybe Maybe it's a kind of process of Two sets of people pointing out their limits at the moment and maybe that will Produce something I don't know okay, so That was really interesting here the answer to that question This one is kind of to do with the difference between occupy and like the kind of more you talked about this kind of The working class versus the middle class in British terms, but how would you compare? the difference between occupy and the rights here you spoke of This kind of coming together people realizing it and knowing that there's something in that movement Whereas it seems to me the rights in britain were very different than that It was very it was much more react almost felt more reactionary and violent and angry And less thought through so I wondered like I don't know that's my kind of reading of it But I'd wondered how you would compare these two things But these things again are they're structural that that you do wake up I mean occasionally you must have it and you'd have it less here because Okay, let me try and do it in quickly and From my understanding then maybe you can respond to what I say in terms of my faulty history, but there is something about self imagination Or projection of a of a culture that is sometimes to do with grand ideas I think and in britain there's no constitution for example now the constitution right now just seems like And a weird thing to somehow want to hang hang on to in a way You know in that way to sort of align yourself with a a constitutional Original list would be kind of bonkers But strangely enough it does change some of the relationships the feeling you can address someone and say who do you represent? Like who are you speaking for like who are your people and that person is supposed to Answer you now whether they do or not is another matter and that's why things get complicated and and so on In britain it doesn't exist. There is no constitution technically A figure of authority cannot Demand that you identify yourself because the relationship between you and that person is not clearly defined by law And this is extremely complicated situation and not uninteresting now What happens therefore is that I sometimes walk around in in london for example, and I think Not isn't it amazing I always think isn't it amazing but people aren't rioting or isn't it amazing that people aren't just smashing windows and helping themselves Because there's actually very little there apart from a few cameras And maybe some other people to stop you doing it and that at that point I'm going to hand over to simon because I think you might know why Or I've thought about it because I think this is an idea that's come up before right? It's like water the enigma of the enigma of politics is how How is it that the many are governed by the few given that the many are many the many are always many How is it that the many Subtume or subject themselves to the few who govern them The obvious answer is guns and sticks right but my dad always said to me You can always tell when you're in a republic because they've got bars on the windows And I don't know what he meant, but he was sort of half right in a weird way It was something to do with the sense of an antagonism that you have a mock people have a more I don't know what it is carry on. No, it was it's um Meaning a modern republic. Yeah, I mean that there's I mean states operate through forms of um What's the extraordinary thing about nation states and this isn't really a nation state, but let's think you know the western european nation states classically is the extent of consent to Uh authority that's always the enigma in countries like britain where there's no constitution is liberties underwritten by tradition and so on and so forth um in I don't know where I'd take this it seems that the um In um I'm trying to bring it back around to your book All right, the book the whole point is we're supposed to be promoting your book. Oh, I don't know I wrote a book I said at the beginning the most difficult thing to do is going to be to end this So I thought I was trying to like feed you a line Uh, I wrote a book. I thought it might have something to do with empathy or some forms of like collective human recognition or something like that That prevents the the just Let me let me say this let let me say this the um I won't talk about it, but in the in the book. No can't do that the extraordinary thing about the american republic is um It's a federation. It's it it was preceded by 13 colonies that had strong forms of local government and were relatively extremely affluent in comparisons to western europe Where people had a twofold identification as road islanders or as kinetic cussians or virginians And then secondarily as british And what madison crafted in crafting the institutions of the republic was something that would break down those identifications and leads the identification with this thing called the republic, right? And uh that came down to questions of territory And the more you know about this the more you know, you think of people think of philosophy as abstract They're reading obviously lock, but hum was crucially important And hume thought you could have a large republics over large territories and they would work So madison thought let's try it here and here we are a couple of centuries later the point is that um What there is in place here is an extraordinarily robust civil religion, right? And a civil religion which is based upon um some premise of the deity in some form in god we trust or whatever But the god the deity cannot override the constitution, right? So as it were the fundamental back to liam's point the fundamental fact of american political life is the fact of the constitution And it's in that that you have to believe Questions of politics simply beyond questions of the interpretation of the constitution, which is why constitutional lawyers Are so important and why the president is a constitutional lawyer amongst other things the But what's somehow released by that or happens under the radar? And this is something which isn't true in a country like britain in the same way is that um There is that broad constitutional stuff and somehow that uh was consistent with uh forms of radical local communist groups there's a great book Written in 1879 called the communist societies communist societies of the united states of america By someone called nordhoff and he plots the history of groups like harmony the shakers and so on and so forth that were autonomous communes basically off operating off limits In accordance with their own rules usually in relationship to religion But usually pretty pretty wild and out there religion so What's the point of me saying that? um You have that robust civil religion at the one hand and that and that's not something that can be Disregarded it's something that has to be harnessed and re-energized and the civil rights movement in the 60s was that was one example of that but also you have this Tradition of deep democracy here, right? Deep direct democracy, which means that something like occupying feeds directly out of some or can Feed out of some deep Folk memory now the last this this is I'll ask you a question and this might sound patronizing, but I was reading a book at the weekend I read two books at the weekend the book of mormon Which was interesting. I won't talk about that and Sorry No, I just read but dipped in dipped in and And this this fantastic book by someone called Jonathan Rose called the The intellectual life of the british working classes the intellectual life of the british working classes and it's a study Of what working class people in britain in the 19th century read What they read and we know more or less what they read And what they read wasn't marx It wasn't you know radical political or economic analysis. It was dickens It was walters scott It was thomas carlyle and top of the list always is bunion pilgrims progress most important text now Maybe you'll see where this is going to go the what that What that led to in the early decades of the 20th century Were traditions of working class self education, which were incredibly strong. There was this thing called the workers educational association Whether it still exists. I don't know but I went to workers educational association classes When I was 19 it was the first time I'd read books really much and there was an idea of working class The working class auto didact right Which often meant that they were reading, you know The people written on the walls of the brooklyn museum this idea of you know of a completely as it were conservative Agenda but which was being harnessed for subversive ends or to try and allow for some autonomy A real question for me is that question of education and where that goes And this guy rose in this book for him the the crucial juncture in the history of Literacy in a place like britain occurs with the transition from books to television Right and so his thesis which is a kind of you know Theses we could think about contest is that television eventually kills off That tradition of working class self education now I'm not sure where that's right, but whatever Is going to happen politically over the next period of time has to turn on the question of education Right, so politics has become a question of focus groups a question of interest and the calculation of interest and that's Always going to be a disaster The central concern that any politics has to be a notion of education and an idea of what What it might take to form um Form genuine, you know intellectual independence and so, um That in my view and and so obviously, you know, that's um I mean, you know and that saying things like that in the presence of the american broadcast media is sort of laughable, but I think that's Well, I end up saying and so it came out. No, I have to say came out a little bit I mean, it's hard to I mean no one's going to say no are they I sounded like you were just saying we have to think about education and they even Romney says that probably I don't think you mean quite what you said. I think you mean something else I'm not I'm just trying to You know what I mean No, but the most the most the greatest thing about the uh, the uh, zuccosi part was the library Right, so you mean a specific type of education. You don't mean education regardless reading books reading books And other things not necessarily being trained to do certain things Discipline as well discipline as well. I mean, you know, that's and that's and going back to where We started and you know You know, um, whatever it is that we do Is entirely dependent upon a certain access to education, right? And a certain access to education that's got a quite interesting history Which is linked to this, right? It was because of the Transformations caused by the second world war Um in in a country like britain that led Through a security series of routes to the emergence of a series of educational institutions and initiatives that meant that people from certain Class backgrounds such as myself had access to this stuff And you breathe this and you drank it in and it was powerful And you found teachers that would you know, would it would allow you to Would give you the confidence to do that stuff? So You know that that's a banality of it and who's going to disagree with that but obviously, you know, um A huge issue at this point in the us is the question of what education costs The level of student debt and all of that So one thing that I'd like to see even if it meant me losing my job, which I guess it would because it worked for a private university The emergence of free universities and free Educational system public school and things. I think I find this really very interesting You know, and it's put it's put education The issue of education back on the agenda in a very powerful way Yes, you're so utopian Maybe that's they should end it like that Thank you for coming