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INTERVIEW WITH JOAN MOREY |
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Joan Morey is presenting POSTMORTEM in the CASM: a set in the form of a coffin in the cloister of the centre that serves as a set on which various performances will be staged behind closed doors. In addition, a series of monitors will screen documentation relating to the project, which can be followed up on the website www.elmalejemplo.com. In the interview below Joan Morey talks about the origins of the project, performance, the relationship with the public...
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DAVID G. TORRES
In what does the project POSTMORTEM consist?
When I was invited to realize a project for the CASM, I automatically thought of the Cloister space. It was an immediate reaction, probably linked to a great frustration at the state of art today and the feeling that a site-specific project for this space might serve as a safety valve. However, I found myself becoming increasingly disenchanted when I realized that, as chance would have it, the person who had made me this invitation was the same curator who put on my first full-scale exhibition, which occupied the central space at La Capella, ten years ago now.
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| Joan Morey. POSTMORTEM (Projet en Sept Tableaux), empty set of <<Panel 1. L’esclavemaître. Préface>>, cloister of the CASM, 2006 |
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Another space with religious connotations…
In any case, La Capella afforded me a very special opportunity in terms of my career, although I now find the construction of an emblematic work less attractive than I did then. I prefer to analyse the fact that, ten years on, Frederic Montornés should put my name forward again. What has happened in the art context that the only margin of confidence should still be confined to a few curators? The proposal excited me, because my work at present cannot slip very fluidly into the ‘art market’ (at the moment I don’t even have a gallery to protect my work, and I don’t occupy any significant place within the structures of art): I’m pretty much out on my own. Possibly the invitation appeared at a less than ideal moment (at least, that was my first reaction), because I felt I lacked sufficient humour to address the conditions attached to a proposal of this nature: to avoid any formal solution similar to those used by the artists who have previously exhibited there and to continue to work within the same codes in which the work is habitually inscribed. As a result, POSTMORTEM has emerged out of the review of the mechanisms, supports and languages utilized over the last ten years, in the manner of an autopsy, ranging from the analysis of works realized under the acronym STP (Soy tu Puta) to more complex projects such as NEW WAVE or Mistake (Espai Zero1 in the Museu Comarcal de la Garrotxa, Olot, 2004), DOMINION (in PO_2, Terrassa, 2005) or THE BAD EXAMPLE or The Enemy Within (in the ‘Sa Nostra’ exhibition rooms, Balearic Islands, 2005/06), all subordinated to the mechanisms of the performance.
You mark out aspects of dialogue with the centre itself and what has been done in this space.
Inevitably you have to compete with this kind of handicap, meet the expectations created in and from the art sphere or with the spectator and adapt to the demands of the curator. After my last projects I decided to carry on working in the same discursive and formal line, even though in terms of profitability it’s the worst option: to pour all your energy into something that you can’t position in the art market.
I don’t think that a project should be read only in terms of the market, but also in terms of trying to do something.
Yes, but although there may be profitability of a different kind, perhaps symbolic in the long term, you’ve got to make a living, haven’t you? Often you not only get tired of trying, but in addition you have to live with indifference, disillusion, lack of interest and the imposition of a lot of labels that distort the reality of your work, the dimension of the work, and even interfere in its professional standing. Right now I wouldn’t mind getting rid of all the labels that have marked my trajectory: fashion, effeminate qualities, issues of gender or club culture …
But they can also be useful.
You have to learn how to use them. Faced with the deployment of all these obstacles you try to obtain the best benefit by maintaining a serene attitude that is coherent with the ideological part of your discourse. But in the end there are so many marques that the product is no longer clear. Hence the incorporation of a large slab, an almost insurmountable solid gravestone as an image of this project.
The project basically consists of this large gravestone.
Allegorically, I have set a gravestone mortuory on top of it, but applied as one of the aesthetic-conceptual props. This gravestone —together with the website www.elmalejemplo.com, the texts and the documentation of the performances…— serves to create a market-technque context for an introspective reflection on my personal trajectory.
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Joan Morey. POSTMORTEM (Projet en Sept Tableaux),
interior view of <<Panel 2. L’esclavemaître. Solo strings and voice (N. against W.)>>, cloister of the CASM, 2006 |
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You have talked about exercising control over your work: why do you think that others have that control?
I try to bring to light in the realm of art the link that can be established between the figure of the artist and the esclavemaître (or master-slave) that Dominique Quessada attributes to philosophy, advertising and the control of public opinion. Soy tu Puta should not be read unidirectionally as artist-institution, artist-audience…, but as a statement applicable to any
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“I wouldn’t mind getting rid of all the labels that have marked my trajectory:
fashion, effeminate qualities, issues of gender or club culture …”
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‘user’/spectator
of the work. Here, for example, all of the guests invited to the project, as well as those who book to attend one of the performances, have to dress entirely in black and submit to all of the protocol assigned to each action, which automatically makes them part of the formal and conceptual accompaniment. To this end a set has been assembled inside the cloister, so as to create conditions in which I can work in comfort: the privileged site and a manipulated public. The exhibition space is thus compartmented as a large black bin that serves as a container for a white bin/performance space and the videos documenting what will take place inside it, thus questioning each and all of the expository models.
How many performance will you do?
In the form of panels, one exclusively for the press, two for the invited guests, four for the people who book in advance and three behind closed doors.
And in the end everything will be documented in the videos?
Except for the panels with no public, which will fade away into crypticism and the money squandered on producing them.
In an art world of open visibility, with a passive use of the public, you actively select your public, and even your non-public.
This has to do with the eternal conflict about culture being for everyone. Yes, of course it is, as long as you’re interested in culture. I will not adapt my codes to a pedagogical system in order to make my work as a creator easier to understand. The idea that it should be the public that validates the work is light years away from my intentions, in that the type of museum being proposed by our current Minister for Culture holds little or interest for me. You can educate and teach all you want, but only if you’re prepared to do that; at the moment I have no intention of explaining my work in clear and simple terms, still less of convincing anyone as to its relevance to the cultural context. For this reason there are four performances for people who book in advance, who will have to manifest a real interest in attending and take the trouble to sign up, accede to certain requisites and wait for confirmation of their place. I shouldn’t be saying this, but this way of doing things articulates a cloudy transparency or a false freedom of the spectator in relation to the work, a project very far from being suitable for all audiences, in that the public must voluntarily submit to an exercise of selection and training. We could apply here one of Daura García’s maxims: ‘Art is for all, but only an elite knows that.’
But it certainly isn’t lacking in the visual.
No, no. Despite the secrecy and the lack of facilities for communication this project is pure formalism, highly mannered and non-conformist and full of bitter reactions.
You really have worked on the presentation of the project.
And on the staging within the context. The use of ‘appropriate’ formal elements in recent Catalan art (such as a sculpture in wood with a certain theatrical intonation) can invoke many other works of the last few years in which the artist tries to impose dialogue between generations or to establish relations of mutual involvement.
Evidently, the master-slave relationship you posit with the public has its formal mirror in the elements of the performance itself.
You could say that, yes. The master-slave relationship, by way of the multiple aesthetic nuances of fetishism (leather, stilettos, masks, latex…) and even of haute couture, takes on a very studied and almost conservative appearance within the project and reduces the spectator to a certain role without which the reality of the work as such would not be possible. It is worth insisting that there is no master without a slave and no slave without a master. Accordingly, we apply this to the spectator and to the work of art, although here we have also to consider the pleasure and the frustration of the act of masturbation, in all its aspects and readings.
And the texts read out in the course of the performance…
Are fragments of texts and essays that require this mîse-en-scène to be understood as I intend. For example, the script for the actress in Panel 1, which precedes the project, has been put together on the basis of Michel Foucault’s Preface to the Anti-Oedipus by Deleuze and Guattari, simply replacing ‘Anti-Oedipus’ with ‘the project’ and Deleuze and Guattari with ‘the artist’. The fragments, phrases, sentences… appear as codes and tools with which to obtain subjective responses that enable the spectators to penetrate inside the overall discourse of the work, with the aid of the images, the words, the sounds, etc., the fragmentation, variation and looping of which implicate them in a misappropriated experience.
So, rather than the performative we should speak of the theatrical?
In my first performance, in front of spectators accustomed to representation (who adopted a passive stance), I forcibly imposed the pre-established relationship between audience and work (by way of repetition, fragmentation, non-narration…) with the aim of creating uncomfortable situations and inciting new ways of reading. I subsequently moved on from provoking or interacting with the audience to utilizing the public directly. When it came to recording the performance, some of the spectators manifested their refusal to be filmed by symbolically slamming the door in my face, but this reaction can be reduced to something calculated, something that belongs neither to the realm of representation nor to that of the theatrical, but puts into practice the theorizing of the discourse.
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“Culture is for everyone? Yes, of course it is, as long as you’re interested in culture. I will not adapt
my codes to a pedagogical system in order to make my work as a creator easier to understand.”
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Have you ever scrapped a performance?
For me, you only scrap a performance when the absences become painfully acute. Failing to arouse sufficient interest for the work to go ahead or not being able to tame the person you’re really interested in taming is devastating.
The master-slave relationship is not reducible to an artist-public relationship.
It has more to do with life and art, sex and death, power and subordination… For example, when sex appears in my work it does so in an aesthetic and symbolic way, but it’s never the leitmotiv. When I drink an actor’s fluids, I am referring where in a figurative sense to the cyclical, to the vicious circle, to the eternal return …, just as when an actress reads the same text several times. There can be sexual connotations, but these pertain to sociological, political and economic associations.
Guillaume Désanges gave a talk at the CASM in which he explained the ten attitudes of the performance: hurting oneself, drinking fluids, experiencing fear… There is something shameless in the performance.
Although I appear in my works recording the performance on video or as an active participant, there is a barrier that stands in the way of direct dialogue between artist and spectator. There is still this ‘romantic’ respect for the figure of the artist that has very little to do with shamelessness, but quite a lot to do with exhibitionism and voyeurism. Although ultimately you are exposing your working processes, laying bare your interests, weaknesses, fears, frustrations and vices… How can you avoid bringing your real life into your professional life? If there is no commitment, there is no work. The project should be ideological rather than artistic, and should clearly manifest the position of the person who executes it in relation to art, culture or the present. And here there is indeed a shameless nakedness in terms of politics, ideology or, at least, the creation of a micropolitics. |
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Joan Morey. POSTMORTEM (Projet en Sept Tableaux), general view
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<<Panel 2. L’esclavemaître. Solo strings and voice (N. against W.)>>,
cloister of the CASM, 2006 |
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