From "Blue Landscapes, Bewitching Numbers, and the Double Life of Jokes: An Interview With Komar and Melamid"Q: How did the idea for this poll start?
Alexander Melamid: It was a continuation of our work for the last number of years, which was to get in touch with the people of the United States of America: somehow to penetrate their brains, to understand their wishes--to be a real part of this society, of which we're partially part, partially not.
For a couple of years we were working in Bayonne, New Jersey; visiting Bayonne, New Jersey, homes and talking to Bayonne, New Jersey, people. And I realized there that people really want art, but we, the elite artists, we don't serve them.
People buy these terrible pictures, but do they like them, or is it just all they have? We worked in this studio in Bayonne which was adjacent to a carpet warehouse. And people coming in there--you know, truck drivers, delivery men, people buying rugs--could see us working. And they would say, Listen, we want to buy this. One guy--a young guy--said, "I will pay you $1,000 for this picture." One thousand dollars! And it was not a kitschy painting. It was a normal, elite painting. So there was a scent of something, but we couldn't grasp it. There were not enough people.
Q: So what do you make of the fact that people have spoken for the blue landscape?
VK: I believe it reflects people's nostalgia about freedom. It's a very simple metaphor, and very deep at the same time: closed space and open space. The concentration of idea of closed space, I believe, it's prison. And concentration of idea of open space is a landscape--air, no barriers, in other words, vacation, freedom.
You know, we are not free. We do not choose to be born. We do not choose to inhabit this world, this space, this giant room, or, in language of contemporary art, this installation. But if, initially, life was not act of free will, then freedom does not exist in principle, much less in day-to-day life. In search of freedom, of blue landscape, we can at any time open the big door that leads out of this room, out of this time and space, out of this world and this life. But most of us are not capable of suicide; we are afraid to find out maybe behind this door there is another installation, another, different-colored landscape. So most of us do not choose to leave the room. Most of us wait for door to open by itself--another, maybe final, violation of our will. Meanwhile, we look for smaller freedoms open smaller doors, which are so numerous in this installation they resemble some labyrinth of modern offices.
AM: It might seem like something funny but, you know, I'm thinking that this blue landscape is more serious than we first believed. Talking to people in the focus groups before we did the poll and at town hall meetings around the country after, I think people want to talk about art, for better or for worse, and they talk for hours and hours. It's hard to stop them; nobody ever asks them about art. But almost everyone you talk to directly--and we've already talked to hundreds of people--they have this blue landscape in their head. It sits there, and it's not a joke. They can see it, down to the smallest detail. So I'm wondering, maybe the blue landscape is genetically imprinted in us, that it's the paradise within, that we come from the blue landscape and we want it. Maybe paradise is not something which is awaiting us; it is already inside of us, and the point is how to figure it out, how to discover it, how to get it out.
We now completed polls in many countries--China, Kenya, Iceland, and so on--and the results are strikingly similar. Can you believe it? Kenya and Iceland--what can be more different in the whole fucking world?--and they both want blue landscapes. So we think that we hit on something here. A dream of modernism, you know, is to find a universal art. People believed that the square was what could unite people, that it is really, truly universal. But they were wrong. The blue landscape is what is really universal, maybe to all humankind.
Q: How do you respond to people who say that's all very well but the broad public just doesn't know enough about art to be an adequate judge?
AM: I think it's the wrong premise--which is still in fine arts and the visual arts, and not in almost any other art form--that we need some special historical knowledge in order to appreciate art and make art. Just look at music, all this great American music. People don't know notation and still they create fantastic music. But we ask the people who create art to know a lot about art. I don't think it's necessary; everyone knows enough about art, because we're surrounded. The decoration over here on the wall, all the architecture, reproductions in magazines--it's all over.
What we need is to create a real pop art, a real art of the people, like the music. Because classical music still lingers on--John Cage, something like this. But the country lives on the pop star. And the hip-hop, rock; that's the greatest thing in the world. We need to make art like these people. We have to learn how they work. That's what is an artist. I want to work like those kids from the ghetto. They know a lot about music--it's not that they don't know. But there is no special knowledge involved. It's true that everyone has a talent. You can pick up a kid from the ghetto--if he is talented, whatever, he can express himself, be a famous, great musician. So why not in art?
Q: Do you think there's some sense in which even the leaders of art are losing their grip?
AM: Yeah, we're in kind of a dead end, the whole society. There's a crisis of ideas in art, which is felt by many, many people. Not only in art; in social thinking, in politics. That's one of the other things about this poll, one of the attempts to get out of this, by some maybe funny means--humor helps--because we really don't know where to go, and what our next step has to be.
Artists now--I cannot speak for all, but I have talked to many artists who feel this way--we have lost even our belief that we are the minority which knows. We believed ten years ago, twenty years ago, that we knew the secret. Now we have lost this belief. We are a minority with no power and no belief, no faith. I feel myself, as an artist and as a citizen, just totally obsolete. I don't know why I am here, what I am doing. What is so good about me doing this, or any other artist? Looking down the SoHo galleries, or going to museums, you see contemporary things, and you say, Why? Okay, it can be done this way, or that way, or in splashes or smoothly, but why? What the hell is it about? That's why we wanted to ask people. For us--from our point of view--it's a sincere thing to understand something, to change the course. Because the way we live we cannot live anymore. I have never seen artists so desperate as they are now, in this society.
Q: Let's go back to what you said earlier about paradise and the blue landscape. Going up the Hudson River the other day I thought perhaps the blue landscape is the last pure idealization, because with nature, in the instant of contemplation, you can forget that the water is polluted, the air is polluted, that on each side of the river is a strip mall or a faded town or whatever. In the moment of observation, all of that is forgotten, which is something you can't say when you look at cities or factories, or when you think of communism or of the old idea of progress through electricity--all motifs of modernism in one way or another. So maybe when people say the want a blue landscape it's as a kind of icon of a purer reality, the last remnant of faith.
VK: But you are mixing beauty in reality and beauty in art. They are two different kinds of beauty, two different kinds of aesthetic--in art and in life. For example, socialist realism asked artists to represent reality, but it was false reality. Because the basic idea of socialist realism was to depict people as they might be, not as they are. Because we are building ideal society, so we need ideal people. Of course, it was not realism at all, because real people were polluted, real life was polluted. And when people are speaking of blue landscape, I'm afraid they mean real landscape, not painting. They just like to have a reflection of reality in their everyday life; in their apartments they imagine this picture as a window of their freedom. It captures experience of hermits, who go out into desert and so forth. The blue landscape can make people hermits for a second, to meditate. Making people hermits for a second--maybe that is the basic idea of art.
AM: Modernism lived on the idea that art should be new. In the sixties the idea was that something which hasn't been said before, because it's said therefore it's good. There was a very strong idea of what is good and what is bad. And art was judged by this criterion, which is quite a good criterion. Now we're in postmodern times, so we say that we repeat ourselves, and this criterion just collapsed, so then what? Why this artist, not that artist? Why Schnabel is a good artist? Who can tell? I don't know. Can be good, can be bad, but there is no objective truth.
This is the crisis of modernism. Modern art used to reflect a radical way of thinking. It did this until World War II and then it gradually became more and more established. Eventually, the radical thinking was totally removed from this. People adapted to this, said, Okay, let there be, say, triangles. But in the beginning painting triangles was a huge statement, a daredevil act--for good or for worse that's a different story, but that's how it was. But now it's totally changed its meaning because it's just a bourgeois business. You produce pictures and you sell them. You keep the form--you can play with triangles endlessly--but the meaning is lost, so it's a perversion of the intention of modernism. And nobody cares. The same thing happened with academic painting and ancient history, before modernism. Nobody believed in it anymore, nobody cared, but they still went on depicting these beautiful women, these mythological figures. But it was totally obsolete. It lost the common sense; it lost touch with the people. Modernism was the idea to get back to some sense. Now it is senseless, so we have to revise again. And even the idea that art irritates or angers the people, it's very nice because it captures the people. You have some communication; even negative communication is better than no communication at all.
Q: How do you think people who aren't part of the art system express their aesthetic judgment?
AM: They do all the time. Americans are very down-to-earth people, very concrete, and they know precisely what they like--the design of their apartment, the color of the sink--they think about art. And that's a very legitimate way to think about that. I am a modernist artist, and I think even polishing your car, cutting the hedges, is a totally legitimate modernist action. But how to get people to talk about this? In the poll we didn't start out asking about museums. We asked about color, size--real questions. We start with a common object and go into objects as art. The car as an art object. People like the car not because of its real ability but because it has a particular form. Maybe they don't understand that a car is art, but they buy it on their aesthetic urge. They need to buy beauty. And, you know, it's mesmerizing, the shininess. Just visit the showrooms and see this incredible beauty--incredible!
Q: In the course of this project you were on NPR's "Talk of the Nation" asking people what they want in art, and this one guy called in pretty derisively asking you whether what you were talking about was really art or something more like furniture--something "to match the couch."
AM: The problem is that we define art as something really ideal, beyond and above the couch. But in real world, art lives in the environment, and it can be environment in the museum with white walls, so in this case it has to match the white walls--it cannot be bigger than the walls, for example--or the paintings it's surrounded by. And that's the same with every interior. If you happen to have small walls, you buy small paintings.
So art lives a real life. It is not better, purer, or more exciting than anything else in our life. And I don't see why people want to see art as something excluded from our daily lives, because our daily lives are very noble and very good.