9/14/09

Chris Kraus with Martin Rumsby


Chris Kraus: The present moment always radicalises everything... I wanted everything to be current, contemporary, right now, even when looking at history.

Martin Rumsby: Paul Thek, an artist who was celebrated, he left America, was shown in Europe... was catalogued, but the work was bulky, it became inconvenient, the places that supported it destroyed his work when they were trusted to look after it and then he was written out of art history and no longer exists. That's an important story: the way art history is constructed.

Chris Kraus: That's the real story, being that there is no such thing as something that is objectively great or objectively monumental or objectively worthwhile. All of that occurs by consensus, what the culture believes at that moment is important.

3 Comments:

Anonymous beefgrizzle said...

Please excuse my ignorance but who is the deceased artist she refers to at about 3m42s?

12:58 AM  
Blogger acw said...

In the wee hours of the morning of Sept. 8, 1985, Carl Andre, a successful avant-garde sculptor, argued with his artist wife, Ana Mendieta, who then somehow ''went out of the window'' (Mr. Andre's phrase during his emergency call to 911) of their 34th-floor Greenwich Village apartment. She may have committed suicide, as Mr. Andre claimed, or he may very well have thrown her, since she weighed only 93 pounds compared to his 175. There were no eyewitnesses.

12:26 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

The deceased artist is Paul Thek ... a fuller transcript of this interview can be found at www.floatingcinemas.org

Regards, Martin Rumsby

10:10 PM  

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