GUAGNINI:

NICOTAS GUAGNINI in conversation with JOHN KETSEY

I knew what you were doing but did not know whe-ther to l ike it or not. One day I went to the oldReena Spaulings gallery on Grand Street. I think itwas in late '04 or early '05. There was a Claire Fon-taine show. I became interested in one of the pieces,a coin with a retractable hook that could serve as ajimmy, and asked for the price. You showed me achecklist that had two or three orices scribbled nextto each piece. I asked you whether the prices werefixed. You said no. From then on, I l iked you. When,how, and why did you begin to l ike me?

Your series of "monkey shit" texts in Time Out NewYorkwas the first I heard of you. lthought I l iked youlater at Orchard gallery, where I sensed your missionwas to bring out what was most nasty and contradic-tory there, and where you seemed to insist on thefl imsiness and moldiness of everything that wasthen emerging (and already crumbling) on the LowerEast Side. You were the only one smiling in the ruinsof Orchard, and the only one who showed me histesticles.

KELSEY:

b--.

GUAGNINI: Claire Fontaine is now more a brand than a con-spiratorial entity. You just fed it to Metro Pictures, agallery that riffed ironically with the idea of brandingfour or f ive cycles of crit ique and legitimization ago.Because of my position of tell ing it l ike it is andattempting to ride on the contradictions at Orchard,I later became some kind of official interventionist.Kathy Halbreich recruited me to look into MoMAwhich led to the "9 Screens" exhibit ion. Once wehad settled on the occuoation ofthe bank of nineinformation screens by the ticket counter as a sitefor the show, I brought in Bernardette Corporation,one of your older brands on the market, and UnionGaucha Productions, one of mine. I am now so pan-icked at the salutary idea of intervention that I amtaking a cue from a truly "unsexy" position, MarthaRosler's defense of realism in documentary photog-raphy, and I 've been taking pictures of white upper-middle class mothers and daughters in situationsof consumption. I 'd rather be a photographer for aseason or two than a sanctif ied anarchist.

My init ial proposal for Orchard was for it to be a oneyear project. lt turned out to be three because of theconditions of the lease, which was just about rightas it almost entirely coincided in time with the sec-ond Bush administration. I was adamant about hav-ing the end of the project inscribed in its conception.Building ruins was a simple, and simplistic strategyto deal with instant absorption in a semi-dignifiedmanner.

I have always been curious about how you handle

KELSEY:

time and timing; you never kil l your fictions, evenwhen they dangerously take defined forms. I don'tknow if I l ike that because finitude is relaxing to me,but I envy how you squander your contestatory moralhigh ground by having this protracted and successfuldecay. How programmatic is that?

Your mother and daughter images capture lhe ieune'f'lle in the act of producing herself through consump-tion but also in the process of decomposing ("thejeune-fi l le does not age, she decomposes"). PiperMarshall and Alex Gartenfeld's apartment was anideal "gallery" for their exhibit ion.

I 'm not sure what to say about our particular decom-position or the rhythms of our fictions except thatyes, I have always preferred the Dada self-terminat-ing model to the Surrealist slow bloating and calcify-ing model. But I think that what allows Reena Spaul-ings Fine Art to last and not get too tired of itself is

the fact that from the very beginning we've said wecould always stop the gallery tomorrow. We alwayshave one hand on the plug, and we are alwaysstumbling over the cables. Then when we turnaround and behave as an artist, there's a feeling of

stopping the gallery every time. So rather than onefinal end we are always ending it and forgetting it.It's a sort of intermittence, turning the lights on and

off and making a sort of signal that produces a con-

sistency that's legible to at least a few people. But

it 's not at all programmatic; it 's more parasitic in

relation to the program of the art world and its non-sensical boom and bust rhythm. I think that, rather

GUAGNINI:

KELSEY:

than ending on a note of prosperity and successin 2OO7, we wanted to extend our project into thebust, in order to see to what extent our project wasmerely an effect of the last boom.

Ah, the jeune-fi l le ...In your prologue to your trans-lation of Michele Bernstein's novel A// the King,sHorses you position her production in relationshipto producing Reena Spaulings (she, not "it," in thatsituation), and pose a feminist(oid) question to tnemale authoritarianism of Situaitionism, and of De-bord himself (which is somehow structurally analo-gous with Breton's affi l iation with Stalinism and thecalcification of Surrealism-avant-gardes with expul-sion policies!). Theorizing a gallery in a prologue of aSemiotext(e) publication is a stylistic gesture properof A.J. Raffles.

I associate the jeune-fille with Witold Gombrowicz scelebration of youth's immaturity, crucial to Ar-gentine culture. But then there is the Gossip Girlelement, which sounds more l ike boom and bust.Would you elaborate on the influence of Cecilv vonZiegesar on your work?

Gossip, along with cynicism and opportunism, is oneof the attributes by which Paolo Virno defines thepost-Fordist multitude. Gossip or idle chatter ... ,,a

contagious and prolif ic discourse without any solidstructure," describes the multitude's relation tolanguage once the latter fully enters the place andtime of work. lt is always-already shared, and anony-mous, requiring no external legitimization. Our worx

becomes chatty, and chat does not refer to anythingmuch beyond itself ... i t is the new productive me-dium, the production of communication by means ofcommunication.

Gossip Girl's real protagonist never appears, sheis the faceless source of this pervasive discourse,which in the book is based partly on telephone textmessages constantly circulating among its variouscharacters. Who is doing the writ ing? | guess it 's acollaboration, a collectively authored "novel" insidethe novel, or a novel written by its own readers.So Reena Spaulings took this as a model whileattempting to elaborate a sort of post-literary novel,involving many authors, and branding this fl imsy l it"BC." Another model was found in a book calledThe Genius of the Systern, a history of Hollywood'sstudio era. Here we learned something about the"stables" of writers that major studios employed inthe industrial production of blockbuster screenplays.Many writers, each with their assigned task or spe-cialty (comedy, love scenes, action, witty dialogue,etc.) working together, l i terally side by side with thetypewriters lined up at a long table. Reena Spau-lings also dealt with Ihe jeune-fille (perhaps she firstappears in Gombrowicz's Ferdydurke, as you say),a concept that allows a simultaneous engagementwith Spectacle and bio-politics. Theleune-fil/e is aliving, breathing, self-managing commodity. She isalso an agent on the front l ines of Spectacle, andlocates her so-called freedom and health within itsmechanisms, absorbing these inside herself and herlanguage.

LA

GUAGNINI:

The series of Enigmas by the artist Reena Spaulingspresented physical traces of the above. "Paintings"based on tablecloths taken from art world dinners,they are mute, but also made or painted with gos-sip. Unlike the recent abstract painting of some ofour friends, these displayed another sort of abstrac-tion: "real abstraction," or the story of l i fe (lan-guage, sociabil ity) going to work. These days, mostwork happens at the dinner table, so why not paint-ing? "Painting beside itself"? Speaking of which,how did you end up painting with your balls?

Giorgio Agamben, so close to some of your causes,expands towards the biopolit ical Foucault 's no-tion of the apparatus, partit ioning beings into twolarge groups: on the one hand living beings, and onthe other apparati in which l iving beings are ince-ssantly captured. In his distinction, it is not onlythe instances in which the connection with oower isevident, such as in disciplines, juridical measures,schools, and so on; but also in ways less evident,where he highlights computers, cellular telephones,and moreover posits that language itself is an appa-ratus. Here he is also denouncing how the commu-nicational techno-utopia is a post-Fordist quicksandwhere Gosslp Girl can be produced as "communica-tion by means of communication."

Nothing models, orientates, determines and inter-cepts the art historical discourse more than theperennial questioning around painting itself. Cap-tured between the mandates of Gerhard Richterand Martin Kippenberger, of Benjamin Buchloh and

David Joselit, all semiotic and/or polit ical models formeaning, including David's recent "network," mustsooner or later be measured against the allegedhistorical possibil i t ies or impossibil i t ies of painting.So that's why painting, I needed to check that box!!!Whether we like it or not, it 's our favorite apparatus.It is us. And it pays for dinner, too.

Testicling enabled me to enact and mock all thebasic crit ical constructions around historization andthe idea of genius, condensing the patriarchal andthe indexical in a singe gesture. lt was my mostheartfelt attempt at male feminism (you pluggedit for me in Artforum as a "brute, faux-macho ges-ture"). Remember that in his recent essay publishedin October,"Painting besides itself," Joselit makesthe argument of the re-ownership of works and theirmeaning apropos Stephen Prina and Manet.

"77 Testicular lmorints" was also made into abook, where I pulled quotes and edited content ofthe publications that I had stamped with my balls.This created a quasi-essay made of fragments thatread not unlike gossip. Curatorially, I could deal withCorbu and Picasso; Hitler, Stalin and Hiroshima;but also with Stanley Brouwn and Lettrism; with Ubuand Juan Downey; with Jonas Mekas and Paul Shar-its; with Duchamp and Asher; and with the biggestswine, and greatest letter writer: Dan Flavin. Seventyseven, is a number that allows for a self-portraitthrough reference and a discourse complex enoughto contain some metadiscourses. And then therewas the actual pleasure of the making, of smearing

L

KELSEY:

my balls with oil paint and slowly or violenily defac-ing the paper. lt was cosmic and comic, seminal anoscatological, meaning hanging between my cock andmy ass. I loved the fi l th of doing it.

Anytime I fall into one of our classic rhetorical argu-ments with Dan Graham and he accuses me, and allof us, of being "neo sixties," I remind him I am, anosome of us are, "neo fift ies." I think the ideologicalgenealogy of traces and gestures is operative inboth my imprints and Reena's Enigmas; more Fon-tana and Klein than De Kooning and pollock ....

Let's rewind a quarter century. When I was seven-teen I encountered for the first time the literary ex-perience of point of view and the voice of the wrirerbeing "universal" and "floating" while also beingparticularly modulated by and through each charac-ter and their debates. I am talking about ThomasMann's The Magic Mountain. As an artist, I wanteoback then to be that book. Not Mann, but his boor<.But I am too comedic and too sexual for that-lcheerfully failed. I am also confessing to somethingvery unfashionable, such as Mann, while I should beadvertising my fully-fledged Borgesian credentials.What were the l iterary experience, or experiences,that shaped you? Which texts captured your l ivingbeing into an aesthetic apparatus and formed vou?

At some point in grade school my class was askeoto write letters to our favorite authors. I choseFranklin W. Dixon, the name on the cover of everyHardy Boys book. The reply I got from the publisher

L

was that Dixon did notactually exist, that he was

a pseudonvm and that rV favorite books were in

f"it*riit"n bv commitee or by corporate teams of

writers. I felt partly cheated and partly fascinated

bv this revelation. Myfrrst long book" was Jaws,

*ii"f, f bought because of the amazin$ cover with

the monstei s66yg risin8 uD to eat the naked swi-

mmer (this *u, pelorethe movie came out). I also

,."n.'"r.",. an encounterwith the hippie feminist

Osot, OAr A,odies, gurSeives' which I discovered in

n,'', "'J",

Jrr"r', bookshelf and smuggled to school

in'un ltotu MonopolY box to show my friends (that

;";" ;;; anol'er Kid smuggled in his father's gun)'

il;r;;. tfris was more about the pictures than the,- , : . , , - . . , . . , - " oartof an inst i tut ional exper i -

wrltlna. Later, I wdJ r

,"ni-*f,"r" a few select "advanced" 4th graders

*"t"-t"""0 up to a 7th 0r 8th grade English class'

*^i* "i

,f, ' '" t ime felt l ike a punishment. Our first as-

r'n"r"ra*rr to Write a book report' I had no sense

"t'*n"i " report on 2 book could be' all I knew was

t| 'ut i inuo io oe arotrnd 5 pages long' and the book

ii i"rn", *ni.n) was over 100 pages' So I began

ir""r?r'o'.n it word forword in very small letters'

in"" , o"rr"ration began dropping every other sen-

i"..". ,*,ta simply to shorten or condense the book

i; ;;; i;;;ri ptibn' com plete lv m i su ndersta ndi ng

;"i;";;r i6s61e somehow come from outside

in"'b"""n?O ortride the immediacy of reading. Any-

;;t;;;"'i"; 6e6''n'rnicaion with Dixon was mavbe

il '#"r;ative and derail ing of my early l i terary

experiences.

It is ironic that your primal scene is the discovery

KELSEY:

that the author is a corporate concoction, a traumaacquired while catering to the requirements of aneducational institution.

As much as you have experimented with the disso-lution of authorship and attacked artmaking as anactivity grounded in an expressive subject, for eachof your endeavors there is a text signed by John Kel-sey. Ihe Enigmas series you mentioned before cor-responds to "Dinner," your entry in lexte Zur Kunst'scrit ical lexicon published a couple of summers ago,and Reena is theorized in the prologue I referredto, and so on and so forth. You, the writer, are incharge of the official exegesis of you the producerof oroduction. Your email address salutes RobertWalser, a figure as obscure as exquisite. I often feelthat John Kelsey the writer is more a perverse anderudite prankster, an eighth grader, rather than avictim of an experiment for advanced fourth graders.

In the introduction to the Bernstein book, I wasmainly attempting to contextualize the activity of mytranslation and explain how it functioned in relationto the operation of Reena Spaulings Fine Art. lt wasa question of mapping the connections betweenmy own writ ing and the social situation within whichit occurred. But it would be impossible for me asa writer to sign or take charge of all these yearsof group activity that in so many ways exceed andabandon my sad solo efforts on the laptop.

And here's how the Enigmas began, a story so banalyou know it must be true: Reena Spaulings was in

London install lng her debut show at Sutton Lanegallery, which happened to coincide with the Friezefair in 2006 or 2OO7. We had prepared an exhibit ionof pointi l l ist paintings of a slick condo high rise thathad recently gone up near our gallery on DelanceyStreet (B/ue, designed by Bernard Tschumi). A fewnights before our London opening we're at a party

for the Fischli & Weiss retrospective at the TateModern, and suddenly we get a phone call fromSutton Lane asking if we could provide a large hori-zontally formatted painting for their Frieze booth. Thefair was opening the next day, so this was obviouslyan outrageous request. Do we pull work from ourgallery show and drag it over to the fail or leavethe party and work all night on a new painting? Stil lon the phone with the dealer, I look down and seethis long, black Tate tablecloth, realizing it 's exactlywhat he's asking for. The next night we took anothertablecloth from a dinner celebrating ChristopherWool's opening at Simon Lee and decided to work itinto our Sutton Lane show. So the Enigmas began inLondon as the direct result of the contagious panic

that drives dealers at fair t ime (all the time). Butthe "Dinner" text you refer to was more of an after-thought, nothing l ike an artist 's signature, and noth-ing l ike taking charge of the meaning or reception ofReena's work. Ihe Enigmas were made by whoeverhappened to be sitt ing around the table at the time(Glenn Brown, Lawrence Luhring, Christopher Wool...), and by the dealer who needed to fi l l some wallspace and inspired the idea in the first place. "Din-

ner" came later, and appeared elsewhere.

L

L-

GUAGNINI:

Maybe now is the time for you to explain "PowerStructure," the group show you curated at AndrewRoth. Didn't you somehow place yourself at thecenter of this device? lsn't every group show a sortof panopticon controlled by the curator? What did ithelp you see in terms of your own relations with theartists you invited?

I don't think it is a matter of taking charge or ofdegrees of authorship. lt 's just that your writ ing rein-scribes and somehow historicizes in real t ime thesediffuse activit ies.

"Power Structure," also a reinscription, was simi-larly borne out of dealer pressure. I had done twosuccessful projects with Andrew Roth. Breakeven,in which Gareth James and I asked that the galleryplace a full-page blank advertisement in the 2006summer issue of Artforum.We then invited sevenartists: Alejandro Cesarco, Rodney Graham, JuttaKoether, Guil lermo Kuitca, Seth Price, Nancy Spero,and Lawrence Weiner to intervene on the blank ad.The seven original works constituted a "deluxe edi-tion." The balance of the orint run of Artforum wasconsidered the "popular edition." The profit from thesale of the "deluxe edition" was divided between theinvited artists and the gallery. Gareth and I did notintervene directly on the blank page nor did we par-take in any financial transaction. Then the followingyear I did 77 Testicular lmprints. Both pieces solc.Andrew wanted another ubergesture and I was in abind to deliver. I had all these physical remaindersof my incipient public acceptance: Buchloh's thank-

you note on October's stationary, Kathy's MoMAcard, some handrwitten invite to a collector's cock-tail, etc. So I built a kind of Tatl inesque structure topaste them and display them, a "power structure,"that looks like a crossover between a senior highschool science project and neo-modern nostalgia.I then called a number of artists whose work I l ikeand that are writers, curators, dealers, publishers,

in short, that occupy more positions in the power

structure than simply "artists." I included a'67 DanGraham piece that proposes the replacement of artcrit icism for a three way dialogue among artists.Piper had the idea for "Middle Man," the three per-

son show with Dan and John Miller (also included inthe Roth show) which features my mother-daughterpictures, when she discovered Dan's piece in thatsetting. That work was directly juxtaposed with theBetween Artists books that Alejandro edits, whichis what we are doing right here. Reena produced aportrait of me so ugly I don't dare take it out of thecloset more than once a year. Luis Camnitzer andJuan Downey were in the show. In the middle of theroom, my structure functioned as a panopticon-asyou described. The press release babbled some-thing l ike, "Among the many vectors presented inthis configuration of artists, the most discernable isa re-reading of the legacy of Conceptual Art. In turn,each share in the methods they uti l ize to dissemi-nate their ideas: the public space of the magazine,video art, and the cultural conditions of production

of several generations of South American artists liv-ing and working in New York City." lt is as generic asit is true.

IL

KELSEY:

Yesterday I was browsing mags and saw your fare-well ad to Claire Fontaine in Artforum.lt containeothe face of Karl Marx, four times. I envied the pieceand wish I 'd done it. Tell me about it.

To make a long story short ... Claire Fontaine is leav-ing us, moving over to Metro Pictures. There's nobad blood here because we helped them find thisother gallery and negotiated the transition, agreeingit's the best thing for everyone, etc., but it alwaysgets touchy when art world relationships changeor end. lt 's also so painfully predictable, the waythese things play out (the decisions that artistsmake). In this case, Reena wanted to publicly markthe moment (and all of its obvious and repressedmeanings) with a sort of "ad;' We always see galle-ries announcing the addition of new artists to theirrosters, advertising expansion of programs, puttingtheir power moves in our faces, etc. So we thoughtit would be amusing to announce a loss instead, toadvertise a shrinkage, and-leaving the phrasing ofthe ad somewhat open-maybe even an inabil ity orrefusal to continue together. Those ads are prettyexpensive, too, so it was a total waste of gallerycash announcing this loss (of an artist, of capital) ...a loss marked by a loss. The only copy in the ad is"CLAIRE FONTAINE IS NO LONGER WORKING HERE."This also refers to the "human strike" theme of theirfinal show with us, and the ad coincided roughly withthat show's closing, and also with the installationof a CF neon over the entrance to Elizabeth Dee's"lndependent Fair" at the old DIA space in Chelsea(which in turn coincided with the Armorv fair). So the

ad is a temporal marker, marking a moment where

a lot of different relationships were in some cases

coming undone and in other cases solidifying under

the pressure of the current recession. We were actu-

ally opposed to CF's contribution to the Independent

because we knew it would only function as a logo

there, like a free ad for the fair. But the artist re-

ally wanted the exposure, and used the situation

to mark its own move over to Metro (their sign was"courtesy of" both Metro and RSFA).

There are so many tensions and contradictions in

the co-dependent relationship between an artist

and a dealer. The two functions co-produce each

other. Reena Spaulings sometimes tries to make

art out of this, and this has its therapeutic side. lt

was also therapeutic for us to paint portraits of all

the other art dealers we've become associated with

over the years (Ihe Dealers,2OOT). Relationships

between dealers are always interesting, so many

forced smiles, so much muscle flexing' This is one

of the reasons we actually l ike doing art fairs,

because it 's the only time the dealers show up all

together in the same space, on the same supermar-

ket shelf, and we've learned a lot watching other

dealers performing for each other there. Normally

dealers stick to their own territory but the fair is l ike

a dealer orgy (Mike Kelley once said that artists

shouldn't go to fairs because it 's l ike watching yourparents have sex).

Was my portrait intended as a portrait of a dealer?

I still own ten percent of Art Sales and ServicesGUAGNINI:

KELSEY:

(ASS), the l imited l iabil i ty corporation that controlledOrchard. The last institutional sales are sti l l tr icklingin. You know how long it takes to go through com-mitees and boards .... How do you deal with sales?I mean with the very act, the tedious explanationof the work and its qualit ies to someone whom youmight respect or not, the moment of the discounr ...the miseries of commerce?

Your portrait was our first of a curator, and I'm sorryif it struck you as ugly. As for sell ing things, I haveno problem with that. One of my main problemswith artists is the pretense that their own tediumis somehow above or separate from the tedium ofsell ing, a distinction that they continue to enforcein their gestures and time-worn habits ("the artist 'sl ife"). lts also my problem with crit ics and histori-ans-the feigned neutrality of the discourse, goingon as if their language were something pure anddetached from business and life, and the more de-tached therefore the more crit ical. Artists though,they have a way of endlessly constructing formalfreedoms around the normalization of the artist-dealer (and artist-crit ic) relationship, and they alwaysget sad when this relationship is questioned. Artistscan only continue being artists if they have dealerswho continue relating to them as dealers, and crit icssitting at a safe remove. For us it was never reallyabout embracing business, it 's about using the dea-ler role to say something about the artist role. lt 'splaying against the efficiency of a certain division oflabor. And I don't prefer artists to collectors. Somecollectors I know are much more intell igent about

art than some art historians I know. and much moreinteresting to talk to.

Orchard, from my perspective (three blocks away),seemed to fetishize institutional oower ... universi-t ies and museums. There was always this need tohave a PhD connected to a show or event, or an Oc-tober connection, a vitrine, a seriousness. And nowyou have been moving behind the walls of MoMAwhich seems a rather natural or easy transition,from Orchard to the museum. Do you ever feel l ikeone of those animals in Kafka's writ ing?

lf there is a Kafka story I identifu with it's "ln thePenal Colony," in which the written sentence is in-fl icted on the accused, who is ult imately sentencedwithout a trial, by a torture machine that inscribesit in his body, hence fulf i l l ing the sentence. Again, Idon't identif lt with the victim, the machine operatoror Kafka, but with the narration itself.

It's strange ... you started differentiating me fromthe Orchard pretense. and come back at me witha demand on its general tone. I agree with yourattack on the false pretenses of purity and discipli-nary autonomy for art and crit icism. Sell ing is part ofthe work, of course. Exchange value is everyday l ife.That's what "Power Structure" was about, curato-rially. Art historians often work for dealers, besidesworking for and from lvy League ivory towers. Andmany collectors understand things about art thatpeople who don't own it do not understand andnever wil l.

GUAGNINI:

L-

My own position: I took my strategic clues from Lib-

eration Theology and Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the

Oppressed' You take on major blocks of disciplinary

knowled$e intersecting power (religion' education)

and subvert them from the inside' So' yes' I am a

full-f ledged fetishist' Fetishism' insofar as it is a

projective attempt to resolve the castration anxiety'

is in this context synonymous with "institutional

power'"

We'l l tackle the whole MoMA experience shortly-

let's stay on the Lower East Side for a little longer'

I always felt, three blocks away from Reena myself'

that the question of style associated with a contes-

tatory halo functioned in your space in the same way

that the October/Grey Roorn connection was operative

in Orcharcl .. ' Reena Spaulings is the only gallery

that ever made me question my haircut as I walked

in; that's why I wore a Staples button stating' Hablo

Espanolto one of your openings' I always find legiti-

mating nyper-style somewhat refractory' Martin Kip-

penberger and Colin de Land are dead!

KELSEY: And Kippenberger and De Land are not the only

corpses amongst us! | remember once at orchard

when Dan Graham said that the problem with Reena

was that it was too "chic"! That was pretty funny'

Orchard had a style too' a sort of yogurt and plywood

thing, ano smud$ed eyeglasses and carefully organ-

ized reading material sitting there' not to mention

the styles of socializing and gossiping' and the way

bodies (darkly clad) clustered as if in a New Yorker

cartoon, erc. There is always style' in everything we

do. I l ike how Deleuze thinks about style' especially

when discussing writ ing and tennis' Style is how you

get past you""lf, the way to get around obstacles' I

didn't mean to pin you down to Orchard or its style' I

WaSactua| |ymorecur iousabouthowyourpart icu|arway of moving works' how you move from there (out

of therel) to tvtolR and other sites' I remember that

on the final, closing day of Orchard you had timed a

solo show at Fruit & Flower-another' much different

type of $allery a few blocks away' For that show you

designed neckties'

GUAGNf Nf : Your stylistic description of Orchard as a New Yorker

cartoon points to an important aspect of its aestne-

tics and ethos: it was a very Jewish gallery' Kind

of the Upper West Side post-New Left bourgeoisie

meets the Lower East Side' Reena' on the other

hand, is Cologne redux' an iconographical and Ca-

tho| icendeavordespi teyourownprototypica|WASP.NESS.

An aspect I would not like to overlook of Orchard's

liberal humanist ethos' with all i ts self-deprecating

guilt and its normalizing democratic assumptions'

(on which l ' l l elaborate later when we discuss

MoMA, which I choose to postpone again)' was its

political commitment' and my role in it' I am refer-

ring to tne "september Ll L973" show I curated'

and to tne SSS piece in the bathroom by Jeff Preiss

ano yours truly' which featured a picture of Bush

inside the toilet bowl' and which was briefly cen-

sored by the Belgium-state-sponsored-anarchist and

conservative hippie Jef Geys, with the subservientacquiescence of R.H. Quaytman and Rhea Anastas'cheerleading. The refusal of the solo show was thecenter of a heated discussion within Orchard, andSadie Benning's solo outing articulated the falloutbetween myself and most of the other members.On closing day, which conjured the full spectrum ofour public legitimacy (Jerry Saltz and Roberta Smith,you and Emily Sundblad, all the Octoberized andGrey Roomed post-minimal artistic glories whom weexhibited and discussed and several of the art histo-rians who also routinely discuss them, a specific artworld wing of the LGBT community, and so on, andso forth, and so what), I opened a solo show in thenow defunct f irst incarnation of the Fruit and FlowerDeli. Rodrigo Mallea Lira, who runs that ghost "gal-lery," is a Chilean forcedly exiled to Sweden in hischildhood, right after the '73 coup. So I bonded withhim because we are both children of the failed revo-lution. I am attracted to experiments with the galleryform, such as Rodrigo's or Alex's and Piper's. Iwanted to enact some kind of opportunistic proce-ssion of all these luminaries from one venue in theLower East Side to another. I wore the tie I featuredin that show to both the closing and the opening.You know I mil itantly dress down, so dressing upfor the closing was a gesture not unlike your fare-well ad to Claire Fontaine. The tie. that reoeats theword "capitalism" in the typography and green colorscheme used for the dollar bil l , was a collaborationwith a Harvard kid named Alexander Olch. He's in-credibly hip, a f i lmmaker running a niche businessof hand made silk t ies sold at Bergdorf Goodman

KELSEY:

and Opening Ceremony. I wanted to check the "art-

as-fashion" box too, and doing so as a goodbyegesture to Orchard, where I f inished at odds withalmost everyone, was to me a proper stylistic turn ofthe screw.

You affect a fake dressing down, with very specificsubcultural and crit ical connotations. I am talkingabout your pseudo Navajo Ralph Lauren wool shirt.But what interests me more are your caps, which tome nuance your grimness to dimensions of meaningthat are way beyond "punctum." Tell me about yourcaps and your polit ical involvement with theTarmac 9, the Invisible Committee, et al. They arecertainly not going to Metro Pictures. You enactedsome other type of procession in Union Square, notfar from Seth Price's new loft.

Ralph Lauren-who's at least as Jewish as Orchard-is such a vague style, so generic (straight, gay,

urban, suburban?) that I don't think it makes muchof a statement at all, really, unti l you twist it a l i tt lethis way or that. lt works as a kind of a base-coat.Riding the hell ish L train to Will iamsburg, it 's actu-ally rare not to be sharing a car with at least threedoppelgangers. I 'm conscious of being half-disap-peared and absorbed in a nasty monoculture here,but it takes too much energy to differentiate oneselfThe cap just puts a cap on the disaster of being sowhatever in New York. lt 's a capitulation.

We don't have to talk about MoMA if you'd prefer

not to. Maybe you'd l ike to say something more

GUAGNINI:

about your testicular imprints? I 'd actually l ike tohear about your feminism and how it 's articulatedvia your balls, in that particular instance. I 'm alsocurious about your castration complex. I really don'tknow much about psychoanalysis.

About my own castration complex all I would say isthat my mother is a psychoanalist and a feminist.Feminism is naturally a default position anywhereleft of Gagosian, and more so for us born in the six-ties. So the question is not whether to subscribe toan ideological struggle but how can this be madewhole with who I am. In the standard re-reading ofessentialist feminism (Laura Cottingham), if femi-ninity and masculinity are constructs, they are onlypartially so: men and women nonetheless havefundamental biological differences. I can only truly"speak" from my testicles, from my biological posi-tion in that struggle in which I am always-already anoppressor.

The book for "77 Testicular lmprints" opens withseven uttera nces : patria rchy, private pro perty,power, progress, position, packaging, personality,which combined yield the formula for the perfectly"successful" artist, potentially constructing a gen-ius. I also thought that in the master narrative ofmale genital art, AbEx, Acconci's masturbation,Mathew Barney's gymnastic saga of sexual differen-tiation, they all take themselves too seriously. But,I am serious about this piece being male feminism.This entails to laugh mainly at myself as a whiteLatin Jewish straight male, but also at a certain PC

asoect of feminism as an academic and art worlddiscourse. How's your feminism doing, by the way?Whilst the jeune-fille, as you claim, can be a figureof discourse where biopolit ics and a crit ique of thespectacle intersect, she can also be immediatelyconstructed as an objectifiable little slut-the basiccommodity of the fashion-art-tv complex. Between,to, and from sexy to sexist there is a no man's landwhere the fashion police and the academic policeare out there to get you-and her.

Premiers matdriaux pour une th1orie de la jeune-filleis a book by Tiqqun that came out in 2001. lt callsitself "trash theory," as it is constructed around aseries of citations lifted from the covers and contentof mainstream women's and lifestyle magazines(Cosmopolitan, Se/f, etc.), pasting these into adiscourse that references Foucault 's late work onbiopolit ics and the care of the self. l t is not at allan academic book, it comes from somewhere else."fhe jeune-fille as technique of the self," "theJ-eune-f//e as social relation," "the jeune-fille as living mon-ey," and "Ihe jeune-fille as war machine" are someof its chapters. So, the theory is a crit ique of thejeune-fille that turns a certain advertising-type dis-course back on itself, that attempts to understandthe commodification of the self and the neo-liberalideology of self-enterprise in relation to the biopo-lit ical management of health, l i fe and nothingnessunder Empire. "She" is not gender-specific, sheincludes all cit izens of the metropolis, including menand old people. We are all jeunes-fl/es.

KELSEY:

GUAGNINI:

KELSEY:

GUAGNINI:

KELSEY:

Then, what would be an outside lo lhe jeune-fille?And what would be an outside to feminism withinany contestatory discourse?

In the metropolis, the.y'eune-fl/e is inescapable. Sheis a surveil lance camera, an ad, a yoga champion, agreen consumer, a discourse, a medicine, a money,a depression, a fun. She is in your balls, too. Shemust go to war with herself, it's the only way.

I agree, we must be at war with ourselves. This alignswith my spie/ on subverting disciplinary blocks ofknowledge from the inside, and with your recognitionof market conditions as part of our productive situa-tion-consumption is production. But, I sti l l cannotdisti l l anything in relationship to gender here. Map-ping difference of course is inevitably an apparatus.That's the curse of cultural studies. Bridge the gapbetween lhe jeune-fille and feminism, as you hint onthe prologue to Bernstein's novel.

Two dudes challenging each other's feminism, thisdoesn't bode well. I think it 's less a question ofwhat is a woman or a feminist than how someoneinhabits that predicate, or how we inhabit the gapthat separates us both from our gender assignmentand our declared Leftism. The jeune-fille is a sort offeminism that speaks back in the re-appropriatedlanguage of the very apparatus it wants to destroy:Elle. lt works in the gap between e//e and elle, elleand nous.

It is impossible to imagine a revolution that is not

GUAGNINI:

KELSEY:

GUAGNINI:

feminist, but feminism needs to fight itself too,otherwise it r isks confusing its potential radicalitywith matriarchal forms of control, which are no be-tter than the "hard" patriarchal forms. Somewhere ithas been suggested that networks are a matriarchalform.

In regards to "networks," a total buzzword at thispoint, we need a working definit ion and a taxonomy.The CIA can be described as a hierarchical networkcomposed of several horizontal networks. This doesnot make it any better or establishes ontological dif-ferences for patriarchal and matriarchal oppression.

I 'm not actually sure why a network would be ma-triarchal. Maybe this idea had something to dowith the feeling of a motherly embrace, our generalinfantilism today, and the perceived softness of eve-rything molecular. lt does sound paranoiac. And it 'snot my idea so I won't push it. On the other hand,these boys clubs continue to claim territories in theart world. lsn't there a point where we all decidehow much to allow ourselves to participate in andhow far to identify with these convivial fraternitiesthat always organize themselves in our midst, andwhich of course include women?

As much as I agree, and you well know that my pri-mary collaborator for a decade was a woman, and infact I always quality control my production against awoman I love, I have a boys club fantasy.

Curiously enough one of the writers that obsesses

KELSEY:

GUAGNINI:

me the most is Michel Houllebecq. Total male swineparanoia. I don't think it is even in fashion anymoreto be for or against him*it's pass6. But I have thedesire that he write about my work from a paranoidperspective.

You and Richard Prince. But I suppose Houellebecqwould rather stick to his own misery. lt wouldn't bemuch of a c lub, I th ink, wi th him.

What do you mean about quality controll ing againsta woman? That sounds ... controll ing. I 'm not surewhat to do with your swine feminism, Nic.

Of course it 's all controll ing. lsn't Houllebecq in-formed by both Sade's and Choderlos de Laclos'sjustif ications of sexual intrigues and excesses,which are nothing but forms of control codified inliterary forms? What I mean is that while I do nothonestly think neither you nor I can really make asignificant contribution to femlnist theory or militan-cy, supporting a position implies l iving your l i fe ac-cordingly. In my case, this has manifested itself in acurious productive structure, which I cannot claim isparticularly feminist in a socially useful manner, butthat certainly implies a recognition of an equality atthe deepest level. I am always in relationships withwomen artists whom I deeply admire and againstwhose criteria I am constantly negotiating mine. lt 'sa position in my subjective and epistemic horizonthat kind of defines me, even if I perpetually associ-ate myself with male "masters," and master narra-tives not unlike the clubs vou mentioned ...

KELSiEY:

GUAGNINI:

KELSEY:

you know: Roberto Jacoby, Dan Graham, JuanDowney, John Miller, Luis Camnitzer.

Houellebecq describes the impotence of the swinebefore the ever€lowing porno screen of post-'68culture, the l imp dick at the end of sexual l iberation.

Maybe now would be the time to return to mommyMoMA and your recent work there. How was she?

Houellebecq also upholds some kind of return to aprimitive and primitivist sexual economy, ironicallyin sync with Marx's and Engel's assumptions aboutcommunism being the original primitive economy. In-fluenced by Catholicism, Houellebecq makes all hismale swine characters pay dearly once they accessthat lost primitive sexuality. For me he is the writerwho has really absorbed Foucault and presented hisknowledge as and in everyday l ife in a plausiblenarrative.

As for she-MoMA, foreplay was more exciting thanintercourse. But I 'd rather talk about our commonexperience with her. How did you feel about mak.ing art for a lobby, with a captive audience of thou-sands?

I l ike reading Houellebecq but I don't see muchFoucault either in his primitivism or in this figure ofthe crucified white male who basically just followsthe nihil ist logic of an imploded society to its end.I heard that he's actuallv a Stalinist.

GUAGNINI:

MoMA was like getting dipped in quicksand. Thelobby is a lot l ike an airport terminal, and the videoscreens can only function l ike those in airports. We(Bernadette Corporation) didn't see it as a placeto present video art. Instead, we tried to make animage of and with the empty time and eventless-ness generated by the museum itself and by theprogrammed cycling of the museum's informationpanel software. Our work, The Big C/ock, wanted tojust spin there like the revolving racks in the lobby'scoat check area and the revolving doors. We cameinto the museum like bad tourists and we left in thesame way.

The intersection between power, oppression andsexuality that emerges when Houellebecq describesthe social realm in which his narratives take olace iswhat has a Foucaultian dimension for me.

How can you tell a good tourist from a bad one? Ora good artist from a bad one?

A good tourist enters the museum to educate him-self or at least to bask in the aura of its treasures,probably reads all the wall texts and rents an au-dioguide, pays attention. Likewise, a good artistsees the museum as an archive to be studied,mastered and extended. Something l ike that. A badtourist only goes to the museum against his betterinstincts, or goes because there's nowhere elseto go, same as he goes to department stores ora Broadway show. A bad artist is a good tourist. Agood artist is in his best moments a bad tourist.

GUAGNINI:

KELSEY:

I don't know what makes you think that betweenThe Department of Eagles, new media, and the con-ceptual art galleries (formerly known as the printsand il lustrated books lateral depository) there isnot already a guaranteed place for bad boys,/gooda rti sts/ bad tou ri sts/ iconoclasts post-fla neu rs. Wehave already been pre-archived, and probably by thecurators whom we have been dining with, as MoMAunderwent a major generational change. What Ilearned working on the other side, as you put it, isthat all the l iberal humanist asoirations of the museum are alive and kicking, both out there factuallyand within myself. Yes, it 's a place where peopletravel in time, meet eventually, have some kind ofexperience that Broadway or Yankee Stadium cannotgive them (and only for 20 bucks!).

When I was a teen I was kind of nerdish and couldonly pick up girls in museums or bookstores. Themuseum is deeply transformative, at least for theco-opted contestatory types like me. I go to muse-ums, any museum, anywhere in the world, and havea good time. Only museums, novels and soccer trulyentertain me. Museums do give you something.

The best t ime I ever had at MoMA was some yearsago at an Andreas Gursky exhibit ion. I had draggeda friend along and he was so bored he decided todo a sort of performance in the museum, announc-ing to the spectators that he was Andreas Gurskyin person, explaining that his mission was to makebeautiful pictures of the metropolitan disaster andsell them back to us at a profit, that the practice of

KELSEY:

photography and all the money he was making sup-ported his cocaine habit, etc. The crowd listenedand followed him from image to image unti l theguards caught on and we were kicked out. I think it 'sall a question of one's relation to one's own archiv-ing there (how to show up or not in an archive thatpretends to already include you). I sti l l l ike the ideaof bad tourism as art, or as an attitude towards the

archive. For me, this is exactly what Marcel Brood-thaers was doing with his museum signage.

GUAGNINI: Remember Maurizio Cattelan greeting visitors l ike agiant Picasso puppet? There is an official MoMA ver-

sion even for the Prankster.

the so-called author of the work, who are not always

the same person. Theodor Adorno had a nice idea

about the artist acting as a sort of social agent for

the aesthetic subject. lt's via the gap between these

two that the subject elaborates an objective rela-

tion to itself in art. As long as there's this gap' or

distance, or non-identity, we can actually go to worK

on the subject in an objective way, or something'

Display is one means of creating this gap' And I

think Broodthaers pretty much opened the door for

all this. He put institutional discourse on display and

made it strange. He was the Musuem director/deco-

rator.

Sure . . . Adorno . . ' I 've been working on "Nic" a lot '

I mean objectively. Regarding display and decor'

I've always thought that the critical aspect of Brood-

thaers work is overly emphasized and how comedic

both his mechanisms and crit iques are is often over-

looked. Humor is mY objective.

Know any good jokes?

All along you have been insisting in those momentsin which the airt ight continuity between crit icalityand legitimation has a gap, a kind of "outside"

where you try to position yourself. Working in the "9

Screens" project I occupied simultaneously the posi-

tion of artist, curator, institutional accupuncturistand negotiator. I came out of those waters fi l led with

entropic contradictions, and with the conviction thatthere are no brotherly Broodthaersian signs reallyavai lable.

Maybe, in a good week, a meta-structure, and con-tingent to scale. Downscaling is where it is at to re-

tain a modicum of negation. Orchard, Reena and theLower East Side were about that, too.

I guess it 's always possible to produce a gap be-tween oneself and oneself or between the artist and

GUAGNINI:

KELSEY:

GUAGNINI: Why was Hitler such a bad artist?

KELSEY: I don't know, whY?

GUAGNINI: He didn't know when to stop.

That's an Adornian joke. Your best joke is your tit le

for a Richard Prince catalogue essay: "My other

painting is a car." Pretty funny for a WASP Do you

have any serious jokes?KELSEY:

KELSEY: Why is the scarecrow so good at his job?

GUAGNINI: Don't knov" . . .

KELSEY: Because he's out standing in his field.

GUAGNIN|: A joke in the expanded field, meaning hinging on agap. My best poem follows that logic: cock tail.

and fi lms, etc. I see these as poetic gestures aboutthe outside of poetry, by putting poetry into a newkind of relation with the image and with display.Anyway, only a poet can decide not to write poetry,or activate it as im-potentiality.

Broodthaers was schooled in the demise of Sur-realism. In replacing poetry for a crit ical poetics ofdisplay he is understanding both the shift towardsthe audience that the specific public space of theart exhibit ion implies, and the end of poetry as arepresentative discipline-by this I mean that in thesecond half of the Twentieth Century poetry is nolonger the major theater of ideas. Also a good wayto get rid of all that stiff cult of imagery.

Out of Surrealist methodologies we have detour-nement and Broodthaers. The detournement is tooCartesian, too dialectic, and too Hegelian; as bothDuchamp and Debord are. Broodthaers's abandon-ment of poetry, and its realization as im-potentiality,is structured as a joke. He stays clear of the reduc-tive didactic logic associated with institutional crr-t ique, which it inherited from the most anal retentiveaspects of Minimalism. Broodthaers's humor mightbe the way out of a current disease: the idea thatcrit icality per se is a higher value. And there is noopposition. lf you laugh with or at Broodthaers, youalways have to ask yourself why.

I 'm interested in what could be called immanentmodes of crit ique, or crit ique that risks abandoningits proper place in order to assume the creative

KELSEY:

GUAGNINI:

KELSEY:

Have you tried your hand at poetry?

Besides the 130 page epic poem with BernadetteCorporation, not so much. Poetry has become anofficial l i tt le business that happens in university de-partments. lts secret, jealous wish is that it can oeout where the art and the money is, but it 's lost itsconnection. BC wanted to steal poetry back from thepoets, make a poem without a poet, and make it asgood-looking as art.

Yes, I saw (or did I read?) the invisible hand in tharpoem. The abil ity to consolidate identity, to be ademiurge that represents social aspirations andcreates ideological and aesthetic markets has beenstripped from poets long ago. Architects occupy thatposition now. Why do you think Broodthaers opteoout of poetry?

I don't think he really stopped. Sinking his publishedpoetry in plaster, where it became forever unread-able, is to me a kind of poetry, too. Then there werehis open letters and all the other writ ing that ap-peared in exhibit ions, his text works, sound oieces

GUAGNINI:

KELSEY:

possibil i t ies of its own practice, to elaborate a moreconspiratorial relationship with the object it address-

"Where is the critioue?" That's a Texte zur Kfunsttype of question that we already see coming froma mile away. The demand is for a crit icality tthatlocates itself in a recognizable way and that usesa certain established style of discourse, all ' the

while disavowing both its own aesthetic andl its owncomplicity with power. Crit ique that disavows itsown creativity always betrays a certain reserntmenttoward the creativity of the practices it judges. ltsfavorite insult is to accuse writers of "belle-l lettrism,"which only proves its own insecurity in langulage

I do agree with Adorno that crit ique should be hereti-cal, and the best jokes are l ike that too. ReaentlyI was thinking how importanl vaudeville is folr acertain generation of post-6Os artists, particcularlythe Pictures Generation in New York, Dan Gnaham,Cady Noland, etc. lt 's interesting how these tenden-cies gravitated toward low forms of entertairnmentand comedy: masochistic loser stand-ups, c:lowns,bad acting, Catskil ls humor, etc. There is sormethingvery profane in these attitudes, and Agamben hasa nice way of thinking profanity as a reroutirng ofsacred contents back into the field of everyday use.To profane is to make useful. lt 's a kind of hrereticalredistribution.

The demand for crit ique, on the other hand, smellsof the sacred or of an order where certain thrings are

KELSEY:

positioned out of reach. But you can't crit ique some-thing if you can't touch it. There is no more crit iquein crit ique.

Agamben's short essay "What is an Apparatus?"has popped up consistently in our dialogue. lt 'sturning out to be an important text for this moment.In general, I relate the profane to Georges Batail le,and in particular with menstrual blood and shit asbeing the ultimate heterogeneity, and the sovereign.The crit ique of Christianity sti l l pays off for Agambenand Jean-Luc Nancy. Clownishness, self-deprecatorycomedy, scatology ... I feel at home. There is alsoan inherently melancholic aspect to this construct(l 'm thinking of Mike Smith, for example). But thereis also a latent violence that won't be absorbed inmere crit ique. By the way, in the opening of "MiddleMan," Carol Greene asked me the question aproposmy mother-daughter pictures, and in its plainestand most direct formulation, "Where is the crit ique,Nic?" Where is it, John? Let's be crit ical. That is:let's mourn. Or else let's swine u0.

Somebody asked the same question about BC's IheComplete Poem, as if you could point your finger atit. But as soon as we recognize crit ique, we put itover there at a safe distance, and nothing is trans-formed. Someone organizes a round table or sympo-sium (minus alcohol), and suddenly we think we seeit again, right there on the table. You know it 's cri-t ioue when the audience is in their seats and noth-ing is happening. lt 's pretty rare that art and polit icsreallv cross wires, but these are the moments to

look for. They're mutually immune to each other,mutually resentful, two worlds built up around theimpossibil i ty of ever touching.

But isn't the swine basically an artist? Maybe youjust want to finally be an artist. In Germany they say

maler-schwein.

The demand for crit ique, and for the polit ical, is born

out of the exhaustion of politics in western democra-cies; which in turn funds art festivals where the artproduced in places where polit ics are not in check-mate, l ike South America, is hailed as a cure, andgenerally sanitized and misunderstood. Godard said"all art ends up becoming culture." I see the mutualimmune condition you describe as domestication.House artists, house of cultures.

Yes, the swine can only be an artist, and conversely'

the artist can only be a swine. lt 's mostly an egobased activity, despite all efforts against authorshipand authority. My swine artist hero is Fassbinder ...

But then the cult of Fassbinder is a new melancholy.

And I am wary of the swine heroic myths of self-de-

struction d la Kippenberger ... essentially, our every-

day life is petit-bourgeois and that's the swine we

must construct from.

That was the idea hiding in the ieune-fille: to trans-

form the commodified, biopolit ically self-managedlifestyle into a war machine.

GUAGNINI: What would be the role of sexuality in that war, and

in that machine?

GUAGNINI:

KELSEY:

KELSEY:

GUAGNINI:

KELSEY:

I l ike the idea of playing roles within sexuality but

I don't know if sex itself would need a role. In sex'

identity politics never really went away because it

never got boring there. lt 's been thriving there all

along, staying healthy by staying sick.

I 've heard about the l iber-teen scene in Argentina'

l i tt le kids fucking l ike mad, what's up with that?

Yes, that's right. ln sex, differences are both ir-

reducible and negotiable. I was a teen in Argentina

long ago, and it 's been a while since I 've had sex

with an Argentine teen. Generally there, $enitalia is

not under a religious spell. In America sexuality is

everyvvhere but in sex. Porn mimics some idea of

sexuality, and then sex mimics porn. What I think

happens in Argentina is that people begin exploring

their sexuality al t4,15, often with the acquiesence

or encouragment of their parents. In Buenos Aires

there are temporary lodging places called Alberglue

Iransitorios with the sole purpose of fucking. They

are all over town, in every price range, and this fa-

cil i tates one or two hour encounters at any time' In

New York the logistics of space and time conjugated

with money make it difficult to have casual sex'

Maybe it's when we become indifferent to sex and

its imperatives that things can get interesting' May-

be sex doesn't want to wort{ ...

GUAGNINI:

KELSEY:

GUAGNINI:

Between assigned tasks and indifference there is insexuality always already a potentiality. I don't thinkany social change is feasible or complete withoutchanges in both sexual behavior and how it 's regu-lated. Ever since the onset of agricultural socie-ties, when marriage and private property becameentwined, sex has been a barometer for all oppres-sion. All the battles between religion and secularismin relationship to gender are at the core of any "us

and them" rhetoric. Sex is also the place whereeconomic relationshios between first and third worldbecome clear cut (back to Houllebecq!).It would help if you define the imperatives. Also"sexy" art is always ... sexy, isn't that a contempo-rary catastrophe?

lmperatives, I mean ... back to Foucault, f irst the im-perative to always talk about it ( l ike now), and thenthe imperative that l i fe and art have to be throbbingand sexy and connected, which of course meansdemonstrating this in all kinds of laborious and un-sexy ways. Painting always has to "come."

Throbbing, sexy and connected is the l itany thatleads to the ultimate imperative, the orgasm. Ulti-mately the swine wants to come. To find true love,connecting his balls with his heart and mind in a uni-fied stance, selfhood vibrating in a moment of abo-lishment of the difference between exchange anduse value, being here, now, and forever? Or maybegood sex three times a week?

lsn't there a sort of accountant at work, hidingKELSEY:

GUAGNINI:

KELSEY:

within your psychedelic swine speak? Sometimes Ihave the feeling that you are in fact obsessed withexchange value and the cost benefits of swine love.But at the same time you're yearning for a kind ofBatail l ian communication with the other and a totalerosion of boundaries and categories. lt might bediff icult to resolve this need to calculate and quan-

tify your l i fe with this other, more heretical economicimoulse.

Yes, you're right on every count. lt 's fucking hell tolive l ike this. I wish I could be cooler (and by thatI mean cold, detached, and seemingly effortless)like you. All I have to say is that if that contradictoryattempt to destroy boundaries through quantitativeand qualitative classification is my differential "val-

ue," or my "content," I give it to the world for free,but people sti l l pay for it!

John, you are a fine analytical mind and can surelyself-diagnose. What do you ultimately sell? What'syour given?

The last thing we sold was an image of a shadowof a palm tree taken outside the Raleigh Hotel inMiami. I don' t th ink I 'm sel l ing mysel f so much assomething generic that I also share with you and somany others. As artists, we are all easily replace-able. Our dealers alreadv know this.

We gave you a bad charcoal portrait of yourself witha yellow painted-in nose and a punctured grommet

hole for an eye. In exchange you gave us a smal

sculpture made from a desktop novelty pendulumand a MoMA security crew work schedule.

There's something funny about a man countingup his attributes, checking his personal wallet ashe loses himself in collaborative projects, love,orgasms, etc. Because I guess it 's not really hisorgasm, but he needs to be there in order to losehimself there.

The desktop item is called Newton's Craddle, and it'sa reference to Fassbinder's film fhe Third Generationin which all the petit-bourgeois members of a clan-destine revolutionary organization have one of thesein their apartments. The schedule is actually forbathroom cleaning. I think that there is no self out-side marketing and vice versa. You are in a pseudoBartlebian position of ontological refusal-gentlerefusal, you would prefer not to-but the refusalsare within situations you constructed: galleries,discourses, social scenes. I think maybe that is ourcommonality then, this being there to get lost, thismoment of constructing to refuse?

In our case, and in much New York practice, Bar-tleby is never far from PJ. Barnum, and sometimesthe ghost of Jack Smith. Smith's stage was a torndown ceil ing, a rubble heap, and the three peoplethat found their way to the Plaster Foundation ona certain midnight were never sure when the showwas beginning or ending. Sti l l , i t was a show.

I agree that what we're probably both working on, in

different ways, is testing the relationship betweenconstructing and refusing within a hyper-productivenon-context we both somehow work on extending,l ike it or not. lt seems more and more pointless tosign our refusals here, but then refusing to sign canjust end up functioning as another kind of signature.

GUAGNINI:

KELSEY:

At