Des Derrières Interview!!!
Wow! Did you faithful readers luck out or what? I just found this excerpt from a recent interview with Mason Kragthorpe of the ever-elusive quasi-absurdist art collective, Des Derrières. The interview, between Kragthorpe and an unnamed American ex-pat, supposedly took place about two months ago on a pirate radio station located in the basement of the Leni Riefenstahl museum in East Berlin, though this has not been confirmed. I only came upon it when a recent package arrived at my door with my monthly shipment of bootleg Scorpions videos, the videos being wrapped in what turned out to be the discarded transcripts of the interview. I have finally pieced this serendipitous find in an order to the best of my deciphering. Make sense of it as you will. Luckily, Des Derrières is presenting their most recent work at Art of This Gallery, 5 MAY 2007, so if you have any questions, I am sure they would be happy to drink with you.
QUESTION: I know you hate interviews, but please explain why. Why did you decide to let me interview you?
MK: What is an interview anyway? Could an interview be a work of art? I hate interviews because, (a) if verbalizing about artwork, I would rather write; (b) they’re part of the “being-an-artist game”; (c) they’re performances pretending to be conversations; and (d) when you read the art magazines you can’t help wondering if your interview will be as depressing as what you find there.
Why did I really agree to this? It is on the radio.
Q: I have admired your work for a long time, and particularly because you work both as an art theorist and as an artist. I’d like to start out by asking how that happened- how you came to be doing both?
MK: In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is. What I like doing is making art, and sometimes writing about it. What I detest is “being an artist.”
Q: You, along with Ellsworth Heck and Henry Papier, have chosen as the name of your group “Des Derrières.” The words are untranslatable, indefinable, opaque. Is this a form of provocation?
MK: In a way it is. The word is untranslatable, but you can find approximations: from the asses, of butts, scatalogical-type shit. But it’s not a concept. Indeed, it’s an anticoncept. Were you to define it as a concept, it would be the concept of undermining concepts, of depriving them of their boundaries, their capacity to articulate the world. It’s provocative in the sense that we wanted to undo some categories, and we recognized the capacity of the ass to do the job. It is also coincidental that it is a passage way. Some goes in, some comes out.
Q: You are making an ambitous effort at declassification.
MK: The ass is a historical marker, like using terribilita if you’re talking about Michelangelo. Certain foreign words plug into pieces of art history or the history of ideas. It’s a liberty one can take. We wanted to plug this into a certain place in 20th-century French philosophical thought. This is a historical exhibition that sweeps over a time roughly cosynchronous with High Modernism and is to be thought of as an alternative to High Modernism - not the lately fashionable alternatives such as iconography and content, or narrativity, but this other very powerful, rich alternative that took endlessly Protean guises: in the ’20s, Marcel Duchamp’s rotoreliefs, Picasso’s trash collages, Jean Arp’s torn papers, Giacometti’s horizontal sculptures; in the ’60s, Cy Twombly’s graffiti, Robert Morris’ threadwaste, Warhol’s shoe paintings. D.D. is not about a form or a style but rather this Protean quality.
Q: The very idea of the avant-garde suggests a time of waiting, a holding out until the broader culture correctly (so to speak) connects with the advance party of artists and thinkers whose aim it is to assemble and activate the new reality. If D.D. is the antithesis of this idea, what does that suggest?
MK: I for one believe that if you give people a thorough understanding of what confronts them and the basic causes that produce it, they’ll create their own program, and when the people create a program, you get action. I could discuss this phenomenon in terms of theoretical notions about interpretation: how art permits relatively sustained periods of puzzlement and deferred responses–”delays”–in terms of “truth.”
Q: I am not sure I understand your meaning.
MK: Sure you do. This isn’t inside information. Either you ride with the current or you head upstream.
Q: So you are saying something along the lines of, in cultural politics today, a basic opposition exists between a postmodernism which seeks to deconstruct modernism and resist the status quo and a postmodernism which repudiates the former to celebrate the latter: a postmodernism of resistance and a postmodernism of reaction. Where does D.D. fit in this situation?
MK: Depends on who you ask. A man who tosses worms in the river isn’t necessarily a friend of the fish. All the fish who take him for a friend, who think the worm’s got no hook in it, usually end up in the frying pan.
Q: Let’s move on. I want to consider a well-known painting by “Des Derrieres,” the full title of which is “If rap is rapped in the forest does it make a sound? Madison Avenue.” Technically, it is only acrylic paint on a stretched, gessoed canvas, which is to say plastic. The imagery is a large, black and white portrait of John Brown, the abolitionist, with pink text that reads, “I (heart) the Beastie Boys,” all on a neon green field. One of the most important developments in the visual arts in the last 25 years has been the emergence of a so-called “cynical art”, where the artist’s defiant complicity is carefully disentangled. Do you see yourself in this role?
MK: I wish I had an answer to that because I’m tired of answering that question. We see ourselves as re-entangling your cynicism, the cynicism that already exists. You are the cynic.
Q: So you don’t see yourselves as Dada-ist pranksters?
MK: D.D. have made a lot of wrong mistakes, but being a prankster is not any of them.
Q: What, then, is the place of criticism in a visual culture that is evermore administered - from an artworld dominated by promotional players with scant need for criticism, to a media world of communication-and-entertainment corporations with no interest whatsoever? And what is the place of criticism in a political culture that is evermore affirmative - especially in the midst of culture wars that prompt the right to threaten “love it or leave it” and the left to wonder where they are in this picture?
MK: Can you cite any authoritative historical documents for these observations? Armageddon deals with the final battle between God and the Devil. The Third World War is referred to as Armageddon by many white statesmen. There won’t be any more war after then because there won’t be any more warmongers. I don’t know when Armageddon, whatever form it takes, is supposed to be. But I know the time is near when the white man will be finished.
Q: I thought you might-
MK: Is it wrong to attribute a predisposition to wheat before it comes up out of the ground? Wheat’s characteristics and nature make it wheat. It differs from barley because of its nature.
Wow.