“Phänomenale Popkultur”, Lena Seiferlin, Art das Kunstmagazin, www.art-magazin.de, 28th August 2013.
[EN]
Lena Seiferlin: By which means is an internet meme a piece of art?
Mathieu Tremblin: An Internet meme could be turn into piece of art by detournement, by moving the gesture from one context to another. Since the end of modernity, appropriation of popular forms and mimetic of vernacular skills became the way artists chose to challenge the common perception and conception of reality. Internet memetic proceed in the same way than most actual art implemented into everyday life, putting attention on the process more than on the result and playing with banal or infra mince to get some audience. For example, we could relate the concept of « deceptive art » of the nineties to the idea « fail » which consisted to put the modern artist heroic figure in crisis by using self derision and playing against expectations of spectacle.
The only difference between art and meme is that the art form is bringing sense or at least something else than just pure fun, referring to the history of art forms and concepts instead of being confine to the genealogy of various consecutive appropriations.
With Ink Geyser, I’m bringing the potential user on a new ground of reflexion regarding action painting: what if vandalism could be something fun?
LS: Do you yourself like this kind of distribution of clips/pictures/trends in general on the internet?
MT: My whole practice is turning around the economy of attention, from the urban field where I mostly create contextual art interventions, to the documentation itself which is mostly diffused first on the web then (rarely) in exhibition spaces. Regarding some of the most discrete gestures I do, I pay attention to document the action in real time from a neutral passer-by angle of view in order the viewer get a feeling of immersion. I try to reach an horizontal relationship of power with the viewer, being as transparent as possible on the condition when I do things. Internet permit a kind reception which feets with this aim. When they drift on the web, people have the opportunity to cross art forms they wouldn’t have paid attention to or hadn’t access to, without asking themselves if it’s art or not, as if they were walking through the city and discovering some anonymous traces or cryptical graffiti on the corner of a street. This fitting of physical and virtual process of art discovery brings you back to the essence of making art which is sharing with a community a free and open point of view and not owning valuable artifacts which form and discourse are ruled by market interests.
Cultural consumption on the Internet is a good way to get out of captive public from museum and also to hijack the vertical system of art recognition. Most of French people think contemporary art is elitist and difficult to access to due to the stereotyped vision of art mass media give. But this difficulty is part related to the institutional way of presenting things. I could show my work in a museum or post it on the web, people won’t get the same understanding. In the creative process, medium of diffusion actually became an aim in itself and so a field of experimentation.
LS: Could you explain your performance?
MT: Ink Geyser is a variation on the meme Mint Mentos plus Diet Coke geyser which produce a kind of random action painting on ceiling, walls and floor depending of the orientation of the bottle neck.
The idea of the performance will be to give a visibility to the making-of of the geyser including preparing the place, the action painting itself, the exhibition of the result of the painting, the cleaning of the space an the covering of wall, the documentation of the performance and the uploading of it on the Internet at the end. The whole process will lang around four hours.
LS: Where does your idea of this performance originate in?
MT: The idea came directly to turn a playful and inoffensive Internet meme into subversive painting action. Viewing all the videos of DIY classical geyser, I just had this vision of how it could alter surroundings if I added paint inside of it because most of those geysers were made in urban or residential area as I already precisely figure how graffiti change your look on the city. As an active graffiti writer I used to be, I always though that the Getting Up culture of graffiti writing was more about finding places or means than focusing on the decorative/calligraphic skills for themselves. So I had great pleasure to offer a new tool which permit to create wall painting automatically with things you can buy in super market.
LS: Where’s the connection between your mentos-and-coke-geysir and the issue of the exhibition?
MT: Here it’s not about artifact, it’s about playful experience and the using could be experimental, decorative or vandalistic. As a kind of « how to » performance, I expect the efficiency of the device creates desire of using it. For now, I made it and documented it properly two times (for a few fails) and I did not saw anybody trying it elsewhere. So I’m attending people viewing the performance to experiment this renewed tool by their own and especially challenging writers and activists to use this open source vandal tool, as for example they use shoe polish, fire extinguisher, even eggs filled with paint to do some action paintings.
But because I’m altering the mixing of the chemical reaction by adding ink it also could be a big fail… so I think this variable make it relevant.
LS: Could you tell us what you think about this exhibition and the issue it deals with?
MT: The issue of this exhibition is about gathering a generation of digital native creators and giving a perspective on actual experimentations created and diffused elsewhere than in classical art spaces and based on Internet subculture which happen for those artists to enter in echo with their conception of art as a mix between high culture, low culture and life. During the last decade with the common use of Internet and digital camera, creativity started to spread on each field of everyday life, arriving to a kind of situation that historic art groups who wanted to bring art into life couldn’t expect. Art consumption exploded due to young artists showing their experimentation first through it instead of using physical spaces which were and are still difficult to exhibit in when the form you create is not looking like something you already saw. Also the way those artists think about their art forms slowly evolved with this new paradigm shift which permit to anyone to act like an autonomous self media. As I far as I can tell, I started my carrier seven years ago and I’m still free not to think about my work in a commercial way. All my approach stays defined by live performance and contextual creation because people who invite me follow daily the development of my practice on the web and appreciate this experience based and non-commercial relationship to reality and surrounding. This situation happened because of this real time and distant access to the work made possible by the Internet.
LS: Do you think it is necessary?
MT: Definitely. There’s not so much show like this because most of big institutions are still directed by before-digital generation persons who think Internet is just a trend that will pass. But they don’t realize it’s the third industrial revolution which change totally the way we consider culture itself, art especially, how we create, consume, share or sell it.
In France beside the group of research Culture Visuelle who is studying the impact of the industrialization of cultural consumption on popular/vernacular imaginary, there’s not so many researchers who are taking risks of not waiting fifty years to consider it as a subject worth of interest. Meme is a good theme for studying and experimenting now because it’ll influence and generate new forms for the next upcoming ten years as this phenomenon which matter for a lot of people from different intellectual and social background. To make a small comparison, that’s the same situation with American graffiti writing which should have been in the past decades a important topic but was considered with a lack of interest by art and human science community because they felt like this movement was too young.
Alain Bieber, beside his art curating and critic skills, is first a user and a producer of content. He shares freely on the web as he’s blogging about activism and involved in the Arte Creative platform. It’s important that this show is managed by someone who’s as a passionate user of Internet because with the horizontal scheme of the Internet, insiders are in the best position to have a full understanding of its aim.
Preliminary interview by Lena Seiferlin, Art das Kunstmagazin, about “Und Alle so: Yeaahh! Die vulgäre Avantgarde”, Haus für elektronische Künste, Bâle (CH), 2013.
Tags: interview, publication
