Felix Vogel

AESTHETIC INQUIRIES

Ausgabe 04/2010
Markus Miessen in conversation with Felix Vogel


Felix Vogel, you were born in 1987 and grew up in the first generation after the fall of the Wall. One could imagine that the weight of history in your case was transformed into a light and productive optimism. Is this the case?
I would not call it a light optimism, but I do think it is time for optimism regarding these issues. It is not the case that I do not care about 1989 or the Iron Curtain just because I have not witnessed it with my own eyes and I do not have any personal experience related to this event. I think that I can examine this change from a more objective and therefore more critical point of view. I am aware that this was fairly recently one of the most significant changes and that the fall of the Wall questions a long tradition of thinking that can be dated back to at least the 19th century, where the issues of today have their roots. Nevertheless, there are a lot of things that are happening now in relation to this change and especially in Romania, where I have been working now for quite a while, societies are still struggling and stuck with this problem.

What effect did this have on the art scene?
Even young artists of my age who did not have any personal relation to this are occupied with it and working with it in a very productive and yet different way than their older colleagues did. It seems that there is a shadow of ‘89 that still lasts; even if ‘89 itself vanished, it might be described as a specter. I would like to try to translate these issues – not to mention more recent issues like all those massive changes in the aftermath of 9/11 – into an optimistic and productive setting, but one has to analyze why it is still a problem and why we are living with this configuration of East and West, communist and capitalist ideologies and how both systems are merging into each other or migrating.

You recently curated the Bucharest Biennale and were previously announced as the youngest curator of a biennial ever. How do you think the issue of age, generation, and lack of legacy – in the most positive sense of the term – affected your decision-making?
I think this lack of legacy was one of the reasons why the directors appointed me. You have to know that the Bucharest Biennale is relatively unconventional and they really try to redefine what a biennial is and what it could mean. By inviting me as someone who has only a few years of professional experience they attempted to break with the common routine of inviting always curators out of the same group of people who would work with the same artists. It’s difficult to say how it personally affected me, but I would claim that relating an exhibition to more general socio-political issues was much more crucial for me than my own subjective point of view. I also have a great suspicion towards authorship and the whole question of intentionality, instead I believe much more in collective processes and collaboration.

Could you please elaborate on your interest in the socio-political?
I understand this as the conglomerate of all processes and actions that are taking place to structure (social) life. This has pretty much to do with practices of regulations through modes of inclusion and exclusion. What I call the socio-political cannot be equated with the political. I am speaking with Jacques Rancière, who has influenced me a lot, when I am saying that the political is something rare and something that is not happening very often, whereas the socio-political is always there, although it is something different than what Rancière calls “police”, since this term is a more active one. My self-conception as a curator along with my self-conception as an actor in today’s society is based on an active role in analyzing and critically questioning what the socio-political is and how it can be changed. I am sure that art exhibitions can play an active role in intervening in and making visible processes in the socio-political.

How did this surface in your work at the Bucharest Biennale?
From the beginning, the idea was to avoid making an exhibition about something – such as a certain topic, phenomenon, disposition, or Zeitgeist – and instead produce the possibility for an exhibition that stands and acts for itself. The exhibition should not function as an empty frame for something else. Rather, it should be scrutinized if exhibitions have agency too. Its methodology and form should go hand in hand with the questions that it tries to raise conceptually through the exhibited artistic projects. Thus it would allow the exhibition to be an independent self-reflexive tool of knowledge production that is not only formulating issues through its content, but also through its structure. With the 4th Bucharest Biennale I tried to create an experimental set-up in order to investigate in exhibitions as a form of agency – the exhibition space as a form of action.

What are the most important and exciting fields of investigation for you right now?
I am very interested in the connection between the public and the aesthetic sphere: how is the public structured today and what can possible interventions in it look like? What does it mean to act and react on site? I understand this in the broader sense of the meaning of “site-specificity” that is producing something not only through spatial parameters, but also connecting it to the political, social, urban, and audience related issues. Basically, everything centres around the question of living: in what way are we living together? And – even if this sounds a bit out-dated – can art play an active and emancipating role here? Bucharest really asks for something different, because the setting is distinct from other European cities and I saw my role as curator to act within this special setting and try to behave in the least colonial way possible.

How did you plan to deal in Bucharest with some of those concerns? What was the role of the audience?
The role of the audience is a very crucial, yet difficult one. There are multiple audiences and publics that all embody a different understanding of society, politics, and not least art. One of the most important decisions in this respect was to not only use art-related spaces and thus approach people who would not usually visit the Biennale. On the one hand it was a decision against the white cube, but on the other hand also against something that became very fashionable and almost substituted the white cube: the use of post-industrial ruins. Instead we went into buildings that are still in use. Through these interventions we tried to not only approach a different audience, but also to tie the exhibition faster to its spatial and urban surroundings. One of those buildings was the Museum of Geology and another one, maybe more interesting because it does not even relate to exhibitions, the Institute for Political Research. I think the way how the exhibition functioned in those two spaces is close to what Brecht calls “Verfremdungseffekt”, because both the exhibited art works and the site related to each other in an unconventional and thus non-illustrative and non-representational way.

When we last met, you mentioned that there had been an incident of censorship at the Biennale just before the opening. Could you please tell me about this, especially in regards to questions of social aesthetics and gender politics?
I already elaborated on my approach to organize the Biennale spatially and in a certain urban framing. In the case of the Museum of Geology this interventionist concept created in fact a tension, which caused the forced removal of one of the works, Kaucyila Brooke’s “Tit for Twat: Can we talk?”. The work consists of around 20 large photo-collages that re-visit the creation story as a queer-lesbian narrative: instead of Adam and Eve it is Madame and Eve. Eve is Afro-American. The director and the administration of the museum – where it should have been placed on the opposite site of their portrait gallery of former directors, all male of course – first claimed we would have to remove the work because of its pornographic and obscene content as there is sometimes nudity involved in the photos. But after exchanging some arguments and trying to explain that they can’t get through with the argument of pornography, they frankly stated that they have problems with lesbians and colored women. It is still shocking for me what happened, both the Stalinist act of censorship and their sexist and racist reasons. Although the work was not available in the exhibition, this incident started a discussion on gender issues as well as the role of culture in society.

Would you claim that the Biennale produced a space for criticality? To which extend did the show expose the relations between aesthetics and the social sphere?
To produce a space for criticality was very important for me from the beginning and I think that all of the exhibited works have a strong potential of criticality – the case of Brooke showed this in a very extreme way. The starting points of the conceptual framing and to concentrate on the ambiguity of “Handlung” – the title of the Biennale – and to inquire in how art can produce actions in the public realm was precisely to expose and to question the relation between aesthetics and the social sphere. But it is very difficult to give a general answer to this as all projects establish a very different mode of function and relating to those issues.

Can or should shows still be unique today?
I do not value uniqueness all that much. There are too many people in the world whose main idea is to create something new, innovative and unique at any cost. Most of the time I have the feeling that the outcome is just about the gesture of trying to be unique rather than actually producing something interesting. Still, I do think that shows can be contemporary – in the sense that they are only possible in a special temporal, spatial and political context – whereas the term unique is still very much connected with the 19th century genius discourse. Since art is always reflecting on these parameters I would argue that it is more important to analyze how each show is connected to its context and how contemporary a show really is.

What is your general view as to the inflation of biennials and fairs?
I have a feeling that the discussion about this particular inflation is itself inflationary and I would rather suggest critically rethinking this discourse and its roots. Of course, the very idea of the biennial as it started in Venice with its nationalistic and more or less competitive setting as well as its status as the almost only space for contemporary art is outdated.

What would you consider a more relevant format?
I think the development of biennials went away from this competitive format and instead helped to make a global network and to more or less include art from different cultural backgrounds, even if this is to be seen critically, since this is often connected to exoticism and the exhibition of otherness. But this mirroring of the “global village” within our small art village does have its disadvantages, too. I am afraid that there is an assimilation taking place right now – everywhere you go things are looking the same and you cannot really decide if you are in Western Europe, Eastern Europe, the United States, or in Asia. Things are getting more and more exchangeable and thus the potential of having different biennials in different contexts would become redundant. I would advocate for more concentration and dedication to local contexts – that does not mean local art or any nationalistic impetus – but it means a closer examination of urban and political facts; settings that are not exchangeable and cannot be transported from one city to another.

What is the most relevant question today?
I would have it with Lenin and asked – without being nostalgic and not referring too much to his answers – “What Is To Be Done?”

…the leitmotiv of the last Documenta.
Right, I almost forgot about this exhibition – maybe because it did not work out all too well with this question. I do think that this question with its general impact has to be taken seriously and it includes numerous other questions that are circling around ideas of the development for alternative forms in taking care of today’s society. I am certainly sure that one has to ask those universal questions to achieve a complete reconsidering and re-evaluation of established structures.


Felix Vogel, born 1987, is a researcher and curator based in Bucharest and Berlin. He studied art history, media theory, philosophy and aesthetics at HfG Karlsruhe and Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. As
a 21 year-old, Vogel was appointed curator of the Bucharest Biennale 4, 2010, which made him the youngest curator of a biennial in history. He has edited two books for One Star Press, Paris, written for Pavilion, Cura, Displayer, and AFI, lectured in institutions such as Index, Stockholm, Evento, Bordeaux, and Pavilion Unicredit, Bucharest, and has delivered workshops and seminars at HEAD Geneva, Free Academy Bucharest, and 1st Curatorial Symposium Sofia/Plovdiv.
www.bucharestbiennale.org