ARTWORLD interview w/Warren Neidich 1995

Chris: Let's start with Spot. Your tag line is "If you think its art it probably isn't."
Warren: "If it looks like art it probably isn't." I have said that.
Chris: "Right, I went to a couple of things at Spot and they're obviously no traditional presentations of art- commodities as it were.
Warren:"If it looks like art it probably isn't." Meaning that in the context of Spot if you see something that looks like art your not going to look any deeper because its probably a "mimetic" work.
Chris: Which is...
Warren: Mimesis is a mechanism by which different kinds of species camouflage themselves by mimicking other animals and insects. That they taste badly or are poison for instance. Or perhaps mimic their surroundings. In psychoanalytic terms there is this definition of schizophrenia where the boundaries between the person and his surroundings completely melt away, so that the person is his surroundings and this has been an explanation of schizophrenia as well. So when you come into Spot don't expect to find art or anything that looks like art because you're not going to. You're going to find something that maybe related to another field of knowledge which is on some sort of margin of art or some other practice. Whether it be ecology, science or political studies and on the other hand it you walk into Spot and you see something on the wall which you think is art then it probably isn't.
Chris: Let's talk about specific shows. There was this artist, who I think lives in Greenpoint- she created an environment- women in styrofoam dresses..
Warren: She doesnt' live in Greenpoint, she actually lives in Manhattan, Karen Kimmel. The show was called "Cozy". A "cozy" is something that surrounds a beer mug. Its that styrofoam holder... its actually a term from England, people cover teapots with a cozy, and it keeps the tea warm, its usually made out of knitwear. In America its been interpreted as a way of keeping beer cold. She used that as a metaphor to construct a sociological phenomenon. One of the things about Spot whatever artists were talking about and this relates to Karen's work as well is that the difference between Spot and other spaces is that Spot is an independent space. The biggest difference between alternative space, an independent space, and a commercial space; is that the alternative space came out of a radical position in the sixties in opposition to commercial space and Spot is a reaction to both.
Alternative space, which in the nineties has become an archaic term-its become institutionalized. In terms of the way its set up, the way it runs and operates, exhibitions planned two years in advance. Spot is the antithesis of that. It's symbiotic with independent music and film. A phenomenon of the early nineties which again because its non-commercial its much more real it uses a lower budget. Its not made for a wide audience, its kind of quirky, it relates itself to issues, as opposed to a commercial movie house which invests millions of dollars to its product.
Spot is self-reflexive, and this is key to what Spot is. It is self-reflexive. That means is that it's always looking at the institution of the alternative space as it itself exhibits work. Looking at the structure of what makes an exhibition space. How is an exhibition is run, how its produced, how you keep things going, what kind of exhibitions you have, how do we see artwork, every aspect.

Whether it was the way we made our first benefit. The benefit itself was a fiction. You know, what is space? It was based on looking at the way a benefit was constructed. We constructed the benefit as an exhibition in itself. It really wasn't a benefit, we took in a meager amount of money, we charged very little, gave a lot of free passes. Diane Lewis, she built a warped wall to deconstruct the notion of the white cube, the building, the architecture. We had Martin Beck, who did a piece called storage- which was built around the idea of Spot as a storage space.
The way an alternative space archives itself, how they collect their data, how they keep a file, what's the history of the space, so the history of the space becomes investigated. All of these particular aspects of the space become investigated. In terms of Karen's work, and I think it may not have been intentional, was the whole idea of the social context of the space and how people come together. It has a sick sort of morphology, where on the one hand you're being taken care of in the space, and on the other hand you're being abused. It was a very complicated piece in her case.
The key to understanding an independent space is that it's self-reflexive. When Jean Luc Godard makes a film it unveils the structure of the film, how the thing is made. He takes you away from the action, and you're looking at the camera man, and you're looking at him talking about the film. He interviews the camera man, you're looking at him taking about the film, he's interviewing the camera man you see the gaffer, you see all the people who construct the film behind the scenes. Godard investigates the event of the film making process itself, as Spot investigates the nature of the exhibition space, while at the same time its exhibiting work. That's the key.
Chris: How do you plan exhibitions?
Warren: I see a lot of work. We did a show on postcolonialism 2.5, with the idea of 3 artists from post-colonial countries substituting the idea of Racism for mimesis . The New Museum may be showing Mona Hartoum, but we showed Doris Bekar, and Mere Ishaak,. Their using structures from their own indigenous cltures to interpret the intake of modernization from the colonizing influence. For instance when Picasso and Modigliani took these objects from Africa, those masks, they were doing it to make their art more avant-garde, more radical, to deconstruct the nature of their own modernist position. In a way they were a part of the basic colonialist structure, instead of taking boxite, aluminum or diamonds they were taking other materials that they could use in their own way.
Chris: Now your reversing the gaze.
Warren: Right, we did that 2 and a half years ago now the New Museum and other places are doing it. We knew no one was going to show these artists, no one had any idea of what these artists were doing at that time.
Chris: How long has SPOT been in existence?
Warren: We've been in existence for 3 years. Now we're moving SPOT out of the gallery. We did a show with Gillbert Vicario, a young curator, a site/non-site piece in a SOHO garden, with Paula Hayes, Meg Webster and a number of other artists. We did a show called In Synch at SPOT which is touring the US and Europe. Another show is called Conceptual art in Neurobiological Practice. Which we are going to try to get into Thread Waxing Space.
Chris: Now let's talk about your work as an artist. You Just had a show at Steffany Martz in Chelsea, Why did you title it Recognition?
Warren: I like to think we are in what I call the 3rd phase of Postmodernism. The first phase was what I call the breakdown of the barriers that separated different practices. Rauschenberg's Flatbed paintings, Warhol's work , and other artists investigating aspects of photography and sculpture in their painting.
The 2nd wave was the period in the 80's where women, people of color and alternative sexual preferences were negotiated into important roles within the Art System. I know we talk about the 80's as this horrible time because of the distorting economic aspects but it was a time which gave important artists like Felix Gonzalez Torres, Cindy Sherman and Fred Wilson to name only a few.
The 3rd phase is the breakdown of the barriers between the aesthetic discourse and other discourses, and afudamental shift in the role of the artist. Sol Lewitt, Marcel Duchamp, Donald Judd all artists that I admire were artists who curated. People have come up to me and said, "You know Warren you shouldn't be curating when you're trying to be an artist." Spot was an art project. I was investigating in a self-reflexive way the recognition of what a gallery was. The same way I investigated America's historical reinvention through historical fictions in my earlier work.
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