1. The term „gonzo curating“, which you use for your projects, was inspired by so called gonzo journalism – can you explain and describe the concept of gonzo?
The core of gonzo curating is appropriation of objects by means of constructing semi-fictional narratives around them. In our storytelling performances we use unconventional, "hybrid" tools to deliberately mix the real and the fictitious hoping to achieve "reality effects" – influence the real world in various ways.
Gonzo curating belongs to a whole group of gonzo activities that we listed in our founding document from 2012 - "Applied Arts of Gonzo". The main reference here was a famous manifesto written by Artur Żmijewski in 2007 - "The Applied Social Arts", calling the contemporary art world to have more social relevance and impact. Our goal was to respond to such a call in a playful way by means of exploring invisible structures of hidden violence present in the art world itself. We are very annoyed by the rhetoric of social relevance employed by many subjects in the art world that at the same time omit any in depth reflection upon the conditions and mechanisms of the art world itself. The text that we wrote presents examples of activities that undermine the existing hierarchies of the more and more neoliberal art world, mock its ridiculous pompousness and a growing level of rigid professionalism that restricts the freedom of artists, curators and institutions.
The core of gonzo curating is appropriation of objects by means of constructing semi-fictional narratives around them. In our storytelling performances we use unconventional, "hybrid" tools to deliberately mix the real and the fictitious hoping to achieve "reality effects" – influence the real world in various ways.
Gonzo curating belongs to a whole group of gonzo activities that we listed in our founding document from 2012 - "Applied Arts of Gonzo". The main reference here was a famous manifesto written by Artur Żmijewski in 2007 - "The Applied Social Arts", calling the contemporary art world to have more social relevance and impact. Our goal was to respond to such a call in a playful way by means of exploring invisible structures of hidden violence present in the art world itself. We are very annoyed by the rhetoric of social relevance employed by many subjects in the art world that at the same time omit any in depth reflection upon the conditions and mechanisms of the art world itself. The text that we wrote presents examples of activities that undermine the existing hierarchies of the more and more neoliberal art world, mock its ridiculous pompousness and a growing level of rigid professionalism that restricts the freedom of artists, curators and institutions.
Gonzo curating became for us an attempt to undermine existing power relations by means of imagination, highly inspired by Hunter’s Thompson sharp and lively critique of socio-political situation. In a way it creates a space of freedom in the reality of institutional, economic and imagination-related crisis, a challenge for art institutions and established exhibition formats. During gonzo performances [for example in Prague or in Kraków] we're trying to establish temporary communities based both on irrational belief and hyper rationally controlled post-truth paranoia. We follow here Hunter S. Thompson's words: "There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning".
2. You have founded a fictitious institution - Centre for Contemporary Art Wawel Castle in Kraków – which is an exemplum of your “gonzo practice”. Can you tell us more about this particular project?
Gonzo curating is essentially a site-specific practice: a particular site is treated as an aleatory score for the performance - its general course is determined but the details depend on chance. That's why we decided to choose a specific place which could be the stable centre for a part of our ephemeral activities. Since 2012 we are running together a fictitious institution where invited artists create narratives around selected elements of the existing Wawel Royal Castle claiming them to be their own works. Our motivation for the project was the fact that the Museum located in the Castle almost never allows any contemporary art into its spaces. By means of the project we create an imaginary “collection” of site-specific works of art situated there. Our project is an attempt to break the barrier related to the physical and symbolic inaccessibility of the Wawel Castle, to rediscover the potential hidden in this most recognizable element of Kraków and to provide a stepping stone to a critical and imaginative reinterpretation of the issues related to the history and tradition of the city. Together with invited artists we intend to liberate narrations “imprisoned” there and use them to construct a living, developing hypertext open for unorthodox exegesis, which would allow a new way of experiencing the Castle [itself a very conservative, ideologically monolithic, Catholic and nationalist place].
2. You have founded a fictitious institution - Centre for Contemporary Art Wawel Castle in Kraków – which is an exemplum of your “gonzo practice”. Can you tell us more about this particular project?
Gonzo curating is essentially a site-specific practice: a particular site is treated as an aleatory score for the performance - its general course is determined but the details depend on chance. That's why we decided to choose a specific place which could be the stable centre for a part of our ephemeral activities. Since 2012 we are running together a fictitious institution where invited artists create narratives around selected elements of the existing Wawel Royal Castle claiming them to be their own works. Our motivation for the project was the fact that the Museum located in the Castle almost never allows any contemporary art into its spaces. By means of the project we create an imaginary “collection” of site-specific works of art situated there. Our project is an attempt to break the barrier related to the physical and symbolic inaccessibility of the Wawel Castle, to rediscover the potential hidden in this most recognizable element of Kraków and to provide a stepping stone to a critical and imaginative reinterpretation of the issues related to the history and tradition of the city. Together with invited artists we intend to liberate narrations “imprisoned” there and use them to construct a living, developing hypertext open for unorthodox exegesis, which would allow a new way of experiencing the Castle [itself a very conservative, ideologically monolithic, Catholic and nationalist place].
By means of the project we would also like to test the power of language in creating a different and compelling “reality” and in providing an untypical agency to an invisible art institution. After a successful first edition of the project, currently we intend to create a second – this time international – full edition with different artists under the title "Mockumenta". It will consist of site-specific artworks, guided tours around them and a special publication including a map of the CCA. Currently we are also working on a website that will look like a website of a normal art institution and present all artworks from our “collection”.
In 2014 we also started an international tournee, presenting the CCA first at Vilnius University Imagination Lab, then at Kulgrinda art camp in Kartena, Fire Station Artists' Studios in Dublin and at California College of the Arts in San Francisco. A perfect medium for us became the format of "lecture-as-exhibition" – a presentation in-between a lecture performance and a guided tour during which our immaterial works are activated revealing new layers of meaning. In this form (accompanied by a theory of a nomadic art institution) we presented the CCA at the D-CAF festival in Cairo and at de Appel arts centre in Amsterdam. We also expanded the activity of CCA's Educational Department, organizing several gonzo workshops in Kraków and in Amsterdam. [One of the works from CCA's collection was also loaned and displayed for one year at the Yoav Tal Art Collection in Tel Aviv]
3. You are describing your collective practice as curating – but from the more conventional point of view it is more familiar with the modern and contemporary forms of fine art (performance, institutional critique etc.). What you think about this contradiction? And is it even important to make some distinction between those two spheres from now?
One of us is more an artist developing a curatorial practice the other - more a curator developing an artistic practice. We meet in the common field of "gonzo curating", which is in fact a mixture of artistic and curatorial practice. In this respect our practice can be viewed as a rebellion against the division between the artistic and the curatorial. In fact, if we think about the curator as an artist of the ready-made, we could also state that the art world is just an artwork.
4. Do you have any other sources of inspiration or model practice that inspired you (besides gonzo journalism)?
We refer to various sources, ex. hermetic religious communities, conspiracy theories and contemporary grant system. We're interested in Incoherent Arts movement, a proto-Avantgarde carnivalesque phenomenon established in the late 19th century in Paris. One of our historical inspirations is also Orson Welles’ masterpiece, a radio drama The War of the Worlds (1938) that caused a real panic and hysteria among wider audiences in the United States. Another reference is the pivotal piece Happsoc of Stano Filko and Alex Mlynárčik (1965), in which the artists designated all life in the city of Bratislava as a work of art for one week. "World as Medium" - that's how Jan Verwoert described Stano Filko's artistic practice and we think it also perfectly fits our gonzo practice.
5. You are developing the concept of anti-documentation. Can you explain what does it mean and give us some examples?
3. You are describing your collective practice as curating – but from the more conventional point of view it is more familiar with the modern and contemporary forms of fine art (performance, institutional critique etc.). What you think about this contradiction? And is it even important to make some distinction between those two spheres from now?
One of us is more an artist developing a curatorial practice the other - more a curator developing an artistic practice. We meet in the common field of "gonzo curating", which is in fact a mixture of artistic and curatorial practice. In this respect our practice can be viewed as a rebellion against the division between the artistic and the curatorial. In fact, if we think about the curator as an artist of the ready-made, we could also state that the art world is just an artwork.
4. Do you have any other sources of inspiration or model practice that inspired you (besides gonzo journalism)?
We refer to various sources, ex. hermetic religious communities, conspiracy theories and contemporary grant system. We're interested in Incoherent Arts movement, a proto-Avantgarde carnivalesque phenomenon established in the late 19th century in Paris. One of our historical inspirations is also Orson Welles’ masterpiece, a radio drama The War of the Worlds (1938) that caused a real panic and hysteria among wider audiences in the United States. Another reference is the pivotal piece Happsoc of Stano Filko and Alex Mlynárčik (1965), in which the artists designated all life in the city of Bratislava as a work of art for one week. "World as Medium" - that's how Jan Verwoert described Stano Filko's artistic practice and we think it also perfectly fits our gonzo practice.
5. You are developing the concept of anti-documentation. Can you explain what does it mean and give us some examples?
In our practice we very often define the art world and its subjects by means of negations of the concepts employed there looking for ideas that have been suppressed or forgotten in the course of its history. That's why our "gonzo dictionary" present in the "Applied Arts of Gonzo" text is full of such concepts as anti-curator, non-exhibition, non-critic, non-review or disinformation campaign. In fact, what we are doing is developing some kind of apophatic or negative theology of the white cube.
Anti-documentation has a place here as well. We understand it as a documentation of a purposefully creative character, breaking with the monotony of traditional means of recording art. It's a game played on the artists-curators-audience axis posing a challenge for the common ideas around documentation. To stress the importance of this practice at the CCA Wawel Castle we established the Department of Anti-documentation (or Anti-department of Documentation). [You can read more about anti-documentation here.]
Interesting example of this practice can be a project created for the CCA (with Bunkier Sztuki Gallery of Contemporary Art as a partner) by a performer Olof Olsson in 2014. Olof was invited to create an artwork for CCA’s collection, he came to Kraków for short residence but didn’t reveal to us what he actually created. What we possess is only a recording of his performative digressive lecture - a story within a story - in which he introduces his artistic research to the audience. We could say then that the final product of Olof's activity in Wawel Castle is anti-documentation of his (for us unknown) artwork. From our perspective he jumped directly from the research stage to the anti-documentation stage, omitting the artwork itself.
[A futuristic vision of gonzo curating is a one of the themes of Aneta Rostkowska's short story Object no. 2299, published by Arte East Quarterly (English) and Słownik Kultury (Polish).]
[A futuristic vision of gonzo curating is a one of the themes of Aneta Rostkowska's short story Object no. 2299, published by Arte East Quarterly (English) and Słownik Kultury (Polish).]
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