Congratulations to et al in various and sundry guises for picking up the big prize - the Walters Prize 2004.

Also read on for the Robert Storr/Linda Clark interview from Nine to Noon that manages to avoid any discussion of the content of the Walters Prize exhibition. The interview begs the question - "Are our top journalists willing to engage with the intellectual and aesthetic considerations of contemporary art?".

Controversial et al wins $50,000 - 30.10.2004

Image:et al. restricted access [detail] 2003Congratulations to et al in various and sundry guises for picking up the big prize - the Walters Prize 2004.

Also read on for the Robert Storr/Linda Clark interview from Nine to Noon that manages to avoid any discussion of the content of the Walters Prize exhibition. The interview begs the question - "Are our top journalists willing to engage with the intellectual and aesthetic considerations of contemporary art?".

Controversial et al wins $50,000 - 30.10.2004

Image:et al. restricted access [detail] 2003Nine to noon Friday 29th October

Presenter (Linda Clark): Later tonight the winner of the Walters Prize will be announced. Now, the Walters is the country's most prestigious award for contemporary art. This time there are four finalists, one of them the controversial collective, et al which as you know, was selected earlier this year to represent New Zealand at next year's Venice Biennale. Well, someone who will be at the Biennale is the man judging the Walters. Robert Storr is the former senior curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He's here for tonight's awards dinner but it's a fleeting visit because he's keen to get back home to vote but Robert Storr joins me now. Welcome to the programme.

Robert Storr (Former senior curator, Museum of Modern Art, New York, and judge of the Walters Prize): Hi.

Presenter: I mentioned one of the finalists, et al, had been controversial. In many ways that goes to the very heart of a lot of contemporary art doesn't it? Many people find contemporary art very hard to understand?

Storr: Well, some of it is hard to understand but I think the first place to start is to assume that artists don't make it harder than it needs to be, that they're not playing hard to get, they're trying to say something that's not easily done and they're trying to find the visual language or a sound language or a space language that will do the job and they're counting on the participation of viewers, sometimes including their discomfort, as a way to get there.

Presenter: Well, it's interesting you say they're not trying to be hard to understand because I think in the lay population there is a perception that particularly among contemporary artists, some of them are trying to be a bit obtuse?

Storr: Well, that is if you go on the assumption that there is a simple way to say what they're after, but that's not the case. And I think if you look at letters, for example if you read Samuel Beckett, it takes an effort. If you read Harold Pinter it takes an effort. We've become accustomed to this in literature and realise that people don't write big 19th century novels only, they write these other kinds of texts as well. I think in the visual arts we should be accustomed to the fact that it doesn't always look like Matisse or Picasso or Monet. It's a new world, it's a new reality and it needs new languages.

Presenter: So there is a code in a way that you need to understand when you come to this art, is that what you're saying?

Storr: Not a code necessarily but it takes an effort to decipher the things that are there, there's no doubt about that. But the code so called €” our codes aren't very often in wide public use. For example I just have done a quick once over lightly since I got off the airplane of what's in the exhibition and I haven't made up my mind and I haven't seen all of it in depth the way I would like to, but almost anybody who watches television can understand at least two of the installations which use video, and the fact that they use it differently than television is exactly the starting point for a new kind of understanding.

Presenter: But the fact that they use video, that kind of installation art, that is - you know, you will have heard this I'm sure. People stand next to that and think well, is that art? You know, because the perception - the definition of art is the Matisse, is the Monet. I go there, I stand in front of it, it's water lilies, I can understand it.

Storr: Well, of course when the water lilies were made, people put up a hue and cry because they thought it didn't look like clear and naturalistic 19th century painting. They scorned it, and Matisse of course was called a phobe, a wild beast because he didn't blend his colours. I mean the things they're now accustomed to once got them - I mean I should say their ancestors, as exercised as the things that now upset people in the present.

Presenter: Well that - the nature - I mean the thing about Matisse and Monet now and I like the point you just made, but there's a sort of decorativeness about that art and that makes it more comfortable for people, doesn't it?

Storr: Decoration can be an element, certainly, but a great deal of art is not decorative. Goya is not a decorative artist for example. He shows the harshest reality in the harshest terms. I think we think in terms of a very narrow slice of what the history of art has really been, and we tend to think in terms of the things that are most immediately pleasurable. But if people want to make contrast between the old and the new they should look at how tough Durer is or how tough Rembrandt is or a host of other artists who they respect by tradition but may not fully appreciate for some of the same reasons.

Presenter: Yeah. See you mention Rembrandt. I don't think of Rembrandt as a tough artist because we think of Rembrandt I guess, as - I mean they're portraits of - they're slice of life portraits?

Storr: Some of them are but their print work for example, I mean there are crucifixions which are quite harrowing, there's some very rude stuff - couples in bed, people peeing by the side of the road. I mean there's a lot in Rembrandt that people just sort of let their eyes drift over but there it is.

Presenter: And when those paintings were painted and first exhibited, people would have been shocked by that in the way that we might be shocked by an et al installation today?

Storr: Well, to be honest in the time of Rembrandt people had a much more comfortable relationship with their bodies altogether, and violence was much more a part of everyday life so they might not have -

Presenter: Well, it was before those lovely Victorians came on the scene you see.

Storr: Well, I think the victorians are precisely the problem.

Presenter: [laughter] Yeah, but they did introduce us to black so you know, we thank them for something I suppose. The controversy regarding et al - and I don't expect you to know the details of this because you've literally just got off the plane, but et al was announced as New Zealand's representative at the Venice Biennale and immediately there was a controversy in New Zealand, led by politicians because public money was involved in sending this collective to Venice, and the politicians said look, the installation which they'd seen was - featured portable toilets and the noise of a braying donkey and in the eyes of politicians that's not art, that was a waste of money. What do you think of those kind of debates?

Storr: First of all I don't think they begin to scratch the surface of what art is, and I think just saying that's not art doesn't get you anywhere. Of course it's art. The question is, is it art you like, is it art you can learn from, what kind of art is it but first of all it is art. Secondly -

Presenter: Well, tell me why it is art?

Storr: Well, why is it not art? Put it that way.

Presenter: No, no, no. Why is it art because people look at that and say it's a portable toilet for goodness sake.

Storr: Look, it is a portable toilet within an installation which has many other elements. It has art historian lecturing very patiently about what is art. It has so far as I could understand, tapes from parliamentary debates about this very project. It has bits and pieces of everything so what she's done essentially is to orchestrate within this piece the controversy over the piece that's going to be done in Venice and there is a sort of a rule of thumb if you will in contemporary art €” that each work of art is a proposition about what art should be. Picasso said it should be cubes, Matisse said it should be colour, Monsieur Duchamps made this now almost a century ago said it should be what, a urinal, so to have an entire porta-potty seems to me almost baroque by comparison to Duchamp who simply put a simple urinal out there.

Presenter: Well if - one of the reasons the politicians got so exercised is that public money was involved. If public money is involved in art, does it need to please the public?

Storr: Well, there's no way of defining who the public is. The public is vast and varied and people tumble to things slowly and sometimes they tumble to them fast. You can't make sort of referendums on absolutely every work of art that comes along within a public institution that gets public money. You have to see what goes on, on balance, over periods of years and the Museum of Modern Art for whom I worked a long time, started this in 1929. We still get controversies over old stuff and new stuff but in fact it's an institution which has educated a very large public to accept things which they never would have touched 10, 15, 20, 50 years ago.

Presenter: Well, there will be some who say that galleries like the Museum of Modern Art are - and contemporary art galleries all round the world, actually like the controversy, court the controversy because that gets people in the door?

Storr: Again I think that's an unduly cynical attitude.

Presenter: But we live in unduly cynical times.

Storr: I know, but my role in fact is to be not cynical about art. I'm not cynical a bit about art. It's one thing to say something, it is difficult for people to hear it, but the reasons for doing it are not low-level reasons of trying simply to shock or get people's goats. It's because there's something to be said and the content of it is difficult.
Presenter: Yeah, although art is - you know, in these unduly cynical times in which we live, art is a commodity.

Storr: It has become a commodity but then of course so were paintings by Gainsborough, so were paintings by Reubens. Reubens was one of the biggest - top sellers of art in his period, so this is not new either.

Presenter: But isn't the scale of it new?

Storr: No, absolutely not. If you look at Landseer, you know, The Monarch of the Glen, it cost an absolute fortune compared to which a lot of the things that are being sold by Mr Saatchi are comparatively cheap.

Presenter: Those are the ones that survived the fire? [laughter]

Storr: [laughter] No, but you understand what I'm saying.

Presenter: Yeah I do, yeah I do.

Storr: Yhe market of art - Rembrandt for example, Rembrandt was an enormously successful artist and when you look at his paintings of the sort of mid career, because he had money he went out and bought things like kilts and creases and all kinds of for him, very exotic décor so he would do biblical scenes that were dressed out like they were in a Cecil B De Mille movie. It was a sign of his wealth and he was in fact showing it off in making those paintings. So the sort of idea that artists have to be poor to be genuine and the fact that art trades for lots of money is not a bit new and the business about being poor to be genuine has never been true.

Presenter: No, but I wonder - you know, the sort of commodification of modern life is different. It's slicker now than - modern media makes it slicker and so when I talk about art as a commodity now, you know, it's dressed isn't it - the scale of it has to be different because you've - because the world's just different. It's faster for a start.

Storr: There's no denying that there are enormous differences. What I'm trying to get out is this kind of moralising attitude that says the minute money is attached or publicity is attached to works of art, that vitiates their content because if you take that principle and apply it backwards into history, there's almost nobody - Velasquez never picked up a brush unless somebody paid him to do it.

Presenter: I'm not saying that because it's a commodity it's bad art. Great art is still sometimes worth the price but doesn't the commodification of art mean that a lot of bad art is also fetching very high prices, just becomes a kind of fashion item, you know?

Storr: But again there's no doubt about that at all but there - you know, this has always been so. If you went to the salons in Paris in the 1860s or 1870s you would have found vast acreage of very bad paintings for very high prices, people clamouring to get into the newspapers, and what art museums do and what curators do and what art critics do is to try to winnow it out. But you know, at any given period the majority of the art is either mediocre or positively bad. To apply that rule again historically to the present seems to me to be very problematic.

Presenter: Tell me about the role of the artist in defending his or her art in these kinds of debates. Where do you see the - where does the artist fit in?

Storr: I think that varies a great deal according to temperaments and abilities. I think there are some artists who simply do not wish to have a public role, put their art out there and say this speaks for me and that's that. There are some artists who in fact are very good at explaining what they do and interpreting it and also defending it. It's the whole human range. In the same way again if you look at novelists, I mean those novelists who have cut public figures and those novelists who essentially retreat behind their books.

Presenter: Well, yeah. See, in the et al controversy, the artist behind et al, Merilyn Tweedie, never gives interviews, absolutely will not give interviews, and yet was taking the public money. That was the - that was at the heart of the debate really, was that if she was going to take the public money to be the artist, then she ought to be able to talk about her work.

Storr: But I think that's a non sequeteur frankly. She has made this work and it is a sincere work of art by I think, by any standard, and it is not necessary for her then to step forward and defend it or speak to it or what-have-you. Partly that is why we have museums and why we have curators and why we have critics. Those artists who wish to do that, fine, but it's not a requirement and it's certainly not a requirement of public money.

Presenter: So the work can and should speak for itself?

Storr: Yes, and also she's not - I mean I don't know the situation here but I would say an American example - there were for that matter a French one which I also know well you're not working for the public the minute you take public money for a project of this nature in a public institution. You're making your work. The institution shows that work. Your job is to do the right thing artistically and after that there are many, many combinations for how it's interpreted.

Presenter: The whole business actually, sparked an interesting argument in this country about identity and art because the exhibition as part of the Biennale is, you know, New Zealand's contribution to the Biennale and therefore you have the politicians saying this work has to say something about New Zealand, about New Zealand's culture, about how we see ourselves in the world. Is that what the Biennale is about?

Storr: Well, the pavilion system in Venice was established precisely so that the nations could have a venue that they could send to an international forum for art, somebody that they thought represented the best they had to offer. Whether that person chooses to make art which is decidedly nationalistic is an entirely different issue and I think -

Presenter: Well, can you have such a thing actually? Can a country be represented by a work of art?

Storr: Well, in some cases there has been that effort and at various times the Russians did it and sometimes the Americans did it too, so it's not unheard of but I think by and large now, that is not the way that it goes and that in - I'll tell you, one of the best descriptions of this I've come across is precisely an artist, Marina Abramovich who showed in Venice some years ago. She's Serbian, she comes from a country that's been split up and divided so the question of what her identity is, is already problematic, but she said that the global is the local without walls and it's a very good definition, operating definition, and in a way if I were again not advising people in this situation but commenting on it, I would simply say, if you send your best stuff, if you show yourself to be a fully cosmopolitan art world with a flavour which is unique to it but not an attempt to define a nationhood by a single work, that is the best way to represent a country.

Presenter: So it doesn't need to have, you know, Pacific symbols and - ?

Storr: It could have them. It doesn't need to have them.

Presenter: Maybe the politicians misunderstood the Biennale. I mean you're the director for 2007 and New Zealand is still considering whether or not it will fund a New Zealand artist for that Biennale. Should we €” should we be there?

Storr: I think absolutely. I think it's - the richer the mix, the far better. And I must say my own country has not performed very well in this department since it's questionable whether America will have a pavilion this year due to struggles over money and financing and who shall choose and so on.

Presenter: That's surprising isn't it?

Storr: It's surprising and it's shameful frankly, and I think it's really a mistake for countries to bow out of these things because of local squabbles. You should maintain a permanent presence, you should have those local squabbles result in a positive statement on behalf of what you send, regardless of whether everybody likes it or not, and move along through time to develop a sort of varied - I just call it mixed grill of what has been done in this country.

Presenter: The squabbling is fascinating. Art always becomes political.

Storr: Yes.

Presenter: Why is that?

Storr: Well, because people do in fact think it's important and that's a good sign. What you want is to have those debates be on the highest level that you can have, so I'm in favour of arguments. Art has always provoked arguments and in fact it's about arguments. Much of its content has to do with differing interpretations, but you want to make sure it's at the highest level and it has the most to do with what's actually in the work of art as opposed to the background stuff which is often about something else.

Presenter: I said at the outset that yours is a fleeting visit. I understand you're quite keen to get back to vote, are you?

Storr: Well, absolutely. No, I'm a professor now at a university so I have a very narrow window and in this particular case, United Airlines was no help at all and I lost an entire day on this trip but yes, I think it's important to be back to vote.
Presenter: It's being described as the most important election for generations. Does that mean it's good fodder for artists?

Storr: So far very few artists have done much with it and I must say very few artists have done much with the 9/11 situation. I think there's a sense of the gravity of it that actually inhibits people from doing sort of one-off propagandistic art or satire or what-have-you. This is the most divisive state in my country I've seen since the Nixon era and since the Vietnam war which I remember very vividly, and I think it will produce political art but in a way people have wisely steered clear of that now.

Presenter: Well, the photographic images and the video and television images of September 11 are shocking enough. They almost say everything in and of themselves, don't they?

Storr: Well, I saw it with my own eyes and there's no way you can represent that in a sense, but you can make art about its consequences, you can make art about the dilemmas that it poses the country which might have no images of the Twin Towers in it at all but would be linked to that experience.

Presenter: Very sensitive when so many people were directly affected though, because you've got this argument of sort of appropriating the personal tragedy haven't you?

Storr: Yes, I think that is a problem and I think again oddly enough a lot of artists live very close to the Twin Towers. Richard Serra, elizabeth marie [phon], a host of people live down immediately in that zone. They saw people jumping, they heard the sound of people jumping. Nobody takes this lightly and nobody thinks there's a simple way to represent this.

Presenter: So looking forward, this period of American art, will it get darker do you imagine?

Storr: I imagine it will although it was interesting, immediately after 9/11 one of my colleagues who I must say I don't have huge respect for, came into a meeting with the buzz. The buzz was that irony will disappear because the world had become so serious. The truth of the matter is, that irony is best in times of great seriousness. Sometimes you need it to protect you from the nonsense that gets said in the name of seriousness. I think we'll have a mixture of art that has the kind of gravity of the moment and other art that actually lifts us up by taking the world a little bit at its own strange estimate.

Presenter: While you're here you're going to be talking about the pressures on artists and on curators. What do you mean, the pressures?

Storr: Well, the thing that I wanted to address is the fact that experience of art, the first-hand experience of art, the circumstance in which an ordinary viewer with no particular background meets something that they weren't expecting and has to puzzle it out for themselves, that experience takes time. The accelerating markets - and this is something I think where I probably do agree with you - the accelerating markets, accelerating publicity, all of these things, they're not intrinsically bad but they're bad in the effect that they speed people up through their experience rather than allowing it to occur with all the backing and filling and doubting and you know, whatever is necessary. And I want to talk about how it is that you view the art world which is increasingly global, international, varied, all the things that are good but at the same time which gives people a surfeit of experience and not enough time to absorb any of it.

Presenter: So we look at art more quickly?

Storr: I think people tend to now, yeah.

Presenter: So then the onus is on the artist to be less obtuse I suppose, because if the viewers are looking at it less intently - ?

Storr: Not necessarily. One of the best ways to get people's attention is to give them something that they can't have a quick take on.

Presenter: Yeah, that's anti-fashion.

Storr: Well no, not anti-fashion, it's just good strategy. If you speak slowly which I'm not doing right now, but if you speak slowly, people tend to listen more than if you speak very fast. I wish I could do it.

Presenter: I - well, I was about to say that's like telling people to eat five portions of fruit and vegetables a day. We all know it's the truth. We just don't happen to do it very often.

Presenter: But we know actors who are extremely good at it and that's partly why they're great actors.

Presenter: Yeah, yeah. A lot of contemporary art is temporary anyway, isn't it? I mean the kind of installation we've been talking a little bit about this morning, they're hard to recreate so does that mean for the artist you get a kind of once - one-off opportunity?

Storr: Well, some of them are. Some of them are rather like the productions of a play. For example, it's a walk-in play where the viewer is both the audience and in fact an animating factor, almost a participant, and some of these things although they could be recreated, probably won't be. Others in fact will be and there are museums all over the world including the modern and the Tate Gallery in London and the Pompidou in Paris and so on, that are collecting installations and they show them on some regular rotation. So it's not intrinsic to installation that this be the case but you know, economically and in other ways it tends in that direction.

Presenter: Obviously you're here to judge the Walters. How do you feel about prizes, art prizes?

Storr: I have mixed feelings about them, honestly. I've been on the Turner Prize jury in London and I've given prizes in other situations. I think it's a way to get money to artists and artists desperately need money, most of them. For every you know, sort of grand slam person you hear about in the newspaper, Damien Hurst or whoever it is, there are many, many, many valid artists who barely make ends meet to make their work, much less to make a living off of it, and prizes are in a sense a way to both honour work and actually give them the means to continue so in that sense I'm in favour of it. I just wish there was more money and I could give it to more people.

Presenter: Yeah, and sometimes it seems odd to have artists competing, doesn't it?

Storr: Yeah, because you're comparing apples to oranges. I mean how do you compare a painting to an installation and how do you compare that to a video? At a certain point it's impossible and yeah, as I say, if I could be Solomonic I would divide the prize in pieces.

Presenter: If you do that tonight, no-one will be very happy.

Storr: I'm quite aware of that but I just thought I'd - I thought I'd make a little comment to stir it up along the way anyway.

Presenter: [laughter] You have a lovely time. It will be a great evening this evening. The Walters Prize is awarded in Auckland later tonight. It's half past midday [sic]. That by the way was Robert Storr whose the former senior curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Ends