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I was very young, 13 or 15 years
old. I was in Athens, locked in the
bathroom - the only place of a Greek house where
you can find concentration.
I was looking at the pink porcelain tiles, dreaming
that they were
telecommunication buttons and screens, through
them you could give orders to a group of terrorists
and even produce distant explosions. My mother
kept talking from the other side of the door,
(or was it just the recording of her voice in
my mind?). She was repeating that I should design
my future and I should be careful because if
I wasn't good enough to enter the university,I
would end up as a construction worker or as
a car mechanic. Life was not supposed to be
for free, you would need a job because nobody
would give you money to do nothing. Do nothing,
that sounds already a good job I thought. I
remember clicking those pink tiles and while
a central Athens building was
collapsing in flames, I would promise to get
"do nothing" as my future job.
Later, around 1981 I discovered
a book on American contemporary art. It was
so easy to do that I started immediately producing
some of it and soon there
I was: getting money to do quite nothing. Contemporary
art was great until
some years ago: You'd travel around the planet,
free tickets and hotels, and
you had an illusion of participating in something
important, a conspiracy
maybe on an aesthetic level and social level.But
around 1995, everything
became too democratic. The exhibitions were
full with all those ex students
from art colleges, they were now respected artists,
each of them specialised
on a slice of the pie, not so different than
the car mechanics. Some of them
even resample construction workers, such was
their capacity to fill up rooms
with trash. Europe and America were also full
of Museums and Institutions
and you had to deal with the lower class of
lost souls hired to serve them.
They would all be directors and they would be
even more creative than the
artists themselves. They would do one biennial
after the other, sometimes
forgetting that biennial means every two years.
It was still free and
somehow cool but you should really work hard
to find ideas to satisfy their
demand. Other friends were spending a lot of
energy searching for some
photogenic scandal, I bought a computer instead
and I started to lose my
time on it.
At one point, desperate for
money and for some sense of conspiracy, I
started to paint it on a canvas: it was easy,
you should just follow the
instructions given from the old dead masters.
The dimensions of the
paintings would also come from the old paintings,
as well as the
composition. In terms of colouring, I would
try to apply some additional
video game atmosphere in the pictures.
Well, paintings were fine, but
you still have to exhibit them and this is
too much of a job. There is this preconception
today: if you are a visual
artist, you ought to fill up white rooms in
a great way, the public - mostly
the expert one - must always get surprised.
And even worse, they already
know what they want: they want contemporary
art.
I decide that we must find some
stuff, which you could hardly call art at
all. Unfortunately, any object you'll take today
and put in an empty room,
will look as art. Only some of the objects you'll
encounter on your computer
screen will still look uncertain or too cheap
- such as a Pokemon image - to
be art and of course theories. Theories, as
well as a computer desktop or as
a button from a software menu, are nothing until
you'll use them. If you try
them, something unpredictable may happen. Theories
and computer interfaces,
will also look ridiculous when exposed in galleries
and museums, they just
don't fit the description.
I was living in NY then, but
it was too traditional a city. I moved to Los
Angeles and I opened an Electronic Orphanage,
a club for '"screen safari"
and theories. Visitors would check it through
a large projection visible
from the street. Visitors would become "orphans".
I would arrange for some
of them to go to other countries to "orphan"
for a while, and eventually
come back or send more visitors. All activity
would be observable on-line at
http://www.electronicorphanage.com. People would
build the base of a new
culture casually, like a drunk mechanic who
fixes the transmission of a
Volvo in NY and the brakes of a Mercedes in
Paris, convinced that he is
working on the same car. It is stupid today
to pretend that you are doing
art while you actually do nothing else than
a regular job. And if art is
just a job as any other, I don't want to do
it. I suppose that according to
the words of a literature critique speaking
about a black writer "I never
been hungry enough or insecure enough to learn
the game". But also, the
game today is probably different. While today
there are opportunities for
everybody, whoever will express himself in a
professional manner is mediocre
by definition. The new fun, is to sponsor remarkable
people to do nothing or
close to nothing in an illuminating way.
MILTOS MANETAS
Miltos
Manetas 2001, written for Learn and Pass it
On, published by i-D
magazine
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