". . . BOUNDLESS, DEVASTATING, SECRET."

Interview with Robert Cheatham and Monika Weiss

Perforations: Given the diversity of themes that Perforations has developed in the last few years this question might not seem entirely apropo but perhaps it is nevertheless a place to start: why Toxic Art, much less it's subtitle?

RC: The subtitle we will no doubt deal with later, although of course they are bound together. The diversity of Perforations contents is due in part to the charter of Perforations: to deal with questions of what it means to be alive NOW as we make the entrance into the third millenium. and that involves a wide ranging series of questions. Certainly not answers however. Many of those questions are fundamental ones. Nevertheless, many feel that because of various technological imperatives, those questions now have a slightly different shape. And given that Perforations is not tied to hard-wired insitutional imperatives, we feel a certain freedom in developing the range and responsiveness of those questions.

In general terms, the theme for this issue still follows along the line that was set down in the very first issue of Perforations, that is, a certain idea of leakage and contamination which technology often seems designed to contain and which artists seem to want to spread. In some respects it seems like a war between an older idea of the sublime and a more recent conception of the uncanny, which we can discuss later perhaps.(Just as an aside, we can note an association of certain artists such as Joel Peter Witkin and others who deal with the abject body to be aligned with an emergent unheimlich--even if, to many critics, it seems as if they are throwbacks to older, even medieval, modes of representation. The place of allegory is fitting here also since the 'emptying out' of the personal under allegorical assignations and the substitution of 'placeholders' can be seen to align itself with thanotological and abject concerns--the body becomes "the body" and becomes the seat for a flux of impersonal forces and representations. The 'gap' which a techno-pharmaceutical culture brings provides ample leverage for the dethroning of subjectivity--or at least its displacement--of which allegory AND the abject consist.)

More specifically, the theme arose out of a clash I observed with artists and local art bureacrats, concerning the nature of 'public art' and what are acceptable venues for artists as well the role of artists in culture generally. And knowing and appreciating Monika's work and her thinking in these areas, it seemed appropriate to invite her to co-edit this issue.

MW: one can perhaps start by questioning the term 'art' itself at first, although it is an extremely difficult and still unresolved semiotic 'problem' that we maybe have with any given word. Is art, according to Webster's dictionary " the conscious use of skill, taste, and creative imagination in the production of aesthetic objects " or is it , after Kristeva an act of "naming suffering, exalting it, dissecting it into its smallest components"? If art would be what it sometimes seems to me : consciousness, then perhaps this " awareness of something within oneself and the state or fact of being conscious of an external object, state, or fact" is...toxic. As if 'consciousness', that I understand as the freedom to see the Eternal Crime, was poisonous, as if the awareness of Being was a toxicon itself ? In that case I would say that the term 'toxic' changes or rather defines the word 'art' itself and in that context I feel honored to be invited to co-edit this issue of "Perforations".

PERF: The juxtaposing of art and toxicity is, for many people, somewhat quixotic. By that I mean that the history of art (though perhaps not Art History) would indicate the opposite of such, that is, art is seen to have certain therapeutic and healing aspects...

RC: Is there anyone who believes that anymore? (laughter) Seriously though, the reputation of art has gotten quite bruised about lately in 'official' (that is, mainly in terms of economics), the explanation given is always in terms of political correctness: that Mapplethorpe, Serrano, etc. (there are many others coming along behind) are 'pushing' certain destructive images in their art.

There no doubt is a certain corrosiveness there, specifically in terms of larger culture identities. And simply on the surface of it (though surfaces are never 'simple' nor isolated as some impoverished post-modernisms would have it) such art often seems to be about exacerbations of and confusions surrounding identity. It hardly needs pointing out that artists did not invent those. (Although, as a sidebar, that was precisely Plato's concern: that is, that artists do not in fact report the 'truth,' that poets are confabulators, confusing the borders of truth and falsity. This is a well-rehearsed disputation that lies at the heart of much modern philosophy. The difference, perhaps, in a writer such as Guy Deleuze is the valorization, one might say, of Plato's enemies, those lying, inventive poets and artists. If in previous centuries art has been seen as providing support for, shall we say, hegemonic orders of control--that is, church and state--some art, certain artists, certain writers, seem to be enemies of the 'cardinal points of the compass,' so to speak...the alliance of philosophy--'the pursuit of truth' -- with art -- 'the pursuit of illusion/invention' has indeed birthed certain monsters of which deconstruction may be the prime example and about which Derrida has written extensively.

I would say that here are many ways one could go about talking this 'monstration.' One way would be to point out, as Monika has just done, the concern that 'consciousness' always has with externality, a certain beyond one might say, and especially concern with 'border-conditions' and liminal states. (and the pertinence of the comment by Nietzsche that when one looks into monsters, the monsters look back into oneself) That extends in many directions but the closest referent that EVERYONE has is their own body and it's surface, the skin. Surely monstrations of the body have to do with violations and defenestrations of that stronghold. Toxicity in general, and specifically as regards art, would seem to delineate thresholds conditions.

In one of his essays, Maurice Blanchot writes that the conditions surrounding madness (perhaps the last step in boundary negotiation) and its peculiar claims to 'knowledge' are "boundless, devastating, secret." Contemporary human life as it is lived in the 'ordinary' day-to-day seems now to be on the verge of those categories, maybe the 'madness of the day' as Blanchot has also written. Perhaps it now becomes easier to see the outlines of toxicity here, intimately bound up with formalist concerns of methodology and technicity and psycho-analytic concerns of suffering, death, and violation.

We are perhaps ourselves yet only on the threshold of your questions.

Part 2:

"There are things in the earth, things made with hands and things not made with hands that live a life different from ours, that live longer than we do, and cross our lives in stories, in dreams, at certain times when we are floating redundant."

A.S. Byatt, The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye

PERF: earlier you commented on the difference between a society of the sublime and one of the uncanny...

RC: well, that is perhaps a bit dichotomous but yes

PERF: ...but it's hard to see how a society of techno-logic would have much to do with either category, technicians being mostly a pragmatic bunch.

RC: True, the great hope of all exoteric methodologies, psychoanalytics, economics, all the sciences, is that the hypervisibility that modernist discourses promote as the ultimate realm of truth will absorb, make visible all the invisibilities which surround human life and which constitute its tragic condition, it's ob-scenity if you will, it's hidden aspect. For many moderns this darkness has come to seem a wound. And wounds are always openings between an outside and an inside. And if you believe many postmodern theorists, such as Baudrillard, we (that is, modern tecnological societies) are busily trying to cauterize this wound and seal off human history from those openings. And the primary wound in human individual history would be death, the sutured trace perhaps not being erasable although that does seem to be the 'program' of a certain techno-logic.

As a correlate of death (and the toxicity of a 'beyond,' or 'outside of,' as a portion of a hostile admixture), we might also speak of the necessity of illness, at least as Nietzsche conceived health, for example this quote: "...every predominantly aesthetic or religious craving for some Apart, Beyond, Outside, Above permits the question whether it was not sickness that inspired the philosopher." And we could no doubt extend that to the artist even more so. Pain, suffering, trauma ARE nosologies of illness and also symptomologies of those who step beyond the campfire. True, technology is making the fire burn even brighter, 'securing the grounds' as they say in the military, but it is also widening the circle of dis-ease and hence DISSOLVING the ground at the same time. As Nietzsche also put it: "Life--that means constantly transforming all that we are into light and flame--also everything that wounds us; we simply can do no other. And as for sickness? Are we not almost tempted to ask whether we could get along without it?" So perhaps toxicity is for certain artists, maybe even art in general, what belief in god is to the atheist in the foxhole.

PERF: It seems to me that you have it exactly backward. Most artists are not trying to be sick. they're trying to bring some healing, joy, and light into the world..

MW: Maybe cauterizing the Wound would be then the primary goal of postmodern thought? If so, even if painful (a burning Wound is an interesting idea, as if "punished" for its visibility), even if cruel (visible), it would be to try to stop the bleeding, to close the opening between the inside and the outside...to try to re-cognize the Wound (but what would be the answer for the eternal question "why"). To re-cognize it would be like eating the same apple again, knowing already that it is venomous (by Conscience of tragedy), like looking inside of that little old box of Pandora (in this case we would be craving for the Inside - and maybe art is that little box that we should be afraid to open?). But 'why' would we try to seal off that (w)hole?

We "shall never die anymore"...Modern technologies are busily trying to provide an eternal or at least longer life...How much the Scene would change if the surrounding panoramic wall of death would disappear...Although, perhaps instead of burning the Wound as a treatment, art is maintaining the bleeding (dis-ease), by sticking toxicon into the wound - the visible proof of the internal damage, so that we are able to NOTICE from time to time, the possibility of the "Apart, Beyond, Outside, Above". We can maybe realize its existence only in the state of Tomas Mann's fever - being sick. And maybe that's one of the reasons of contemporary censorship so to speak (or rather sentencing the art), especially focused on visual art, and especially concerning the art representing Body...but this is already a different (?), more political issue.

PERF: Let's talk about politics then. You mentioned before that the name of that issue of "Perforations" arose out of an event that you observed. What was it, and have you both participated in it?

RC: yes, well, without being too specific about it, we were both in attendance at a local art event, a presentation by a well known European art curator who was not, in fact, allowed to give the bulk of his presentation because it seemed that the local artists who had visited Europe thought it better that they talk about their own work. Which is not necessarily germane to this issue. But during the discussion that followed afterward, some of the artists present took a few contemporary artists--Serrano specifically--to task for "poisoning the well", so to speak, as regards funding for public arts.

MW: The title of that issue of Perforations came to our minds during ameeting with Dr.Michael Haerdter, the Director of Kunsterhaus Bethanien Berlin (one of the most important european contemporary art centers), in Goethe Institute in Atlanta, in which we both participated (or rather observed). It was called Artists, Postmodern Nomads, and the name for that conference was also a name of the text prepared by Dr. Haerdter. However, he never read his essay.

In the middle of official presentations and welcome speeches, and right after his short presentation of the Kunsterhaus, a disscussion developed, between the public and official guests invited for the same meeting. The subject of that disscution was not really related to the idea of the meeting (Artists, Postmodern Nomads), nor was it connected with any of issues that Dr Haerdeter started to describe in his preface. The main subject concerned the problematic idea of art being public, depending on public money and therfore being a subject of public investigation, perhaps even having to be surrendered to public opinion, to the point of view of majority and censored in the name of " the public's" sake. The term toxic art aroused together with names like Andres Serrano and a famous public enemy of his art - Mr Jessie Helms. Perhaps it is a pity that we never did hear the main speech, the one about artists, being nomads of (in, through) postmodern culture. Perhaps we would even find answers for some of those questions, that are similar all over the world...

Can we still protect the old walls of the Castle of Art, against owerwelming Public Censorship, in the name of High Culture, in the name of Catharsis , but without any promised redemption, without any promised progress of any sort...What would be the official sense (not cents) offered to the "public opinion" of puting Money into maintaining that castle, equivalent to the sense of any other public support (public security) , do we need to "explain" to the majority WHY, knowing that there is no answer, no security involved, when art is concerned...