Interview with Stephan Dillemuth

Kristian Ø Dahl and Marit Flåtter

MF: As a result of your research period at Kunstakademiet in Bergen, you have edited the book “The Academy and The Corporate Public” (2002) with contributions of various artists and scientists. Here you discuss the problems involved with the fact that we have a culture industry that is more often driven by commercial interests. Now that you have had time to reconsider the experience you got from publishing the book, how is your view on the art-field today, on this point?

SD: The ‘culture industry’ as the Frankfurt School has coined the term is not so much the topic of this book. Meanwhile all industry is culture, and all culture is industry, and that’s the new politics. So we have to cut into this mess and look what’s at the core of this. I started to look into the recent changes of the idea of the public sphere, privatisation and fragmentation amongst others, because I assumed that this might be constitutional for the idea and the function of the arts in our western societies. The investigative part of my interest ended in the book that you mentioned, the research part led to two experiments, one of them, conducted by a seminar group was the White Cube in Bergen.

Later I continued these studies together with a group of students from Hamburg. We looked back to the beginning of the 20th century and investigated the Lebensreform (reform of live) movements as forerunners of alternative lifestyles and fragmented publics of today. More recently I have opened another dark chapter and very up to date: the so called ‘-Bologna Process’, an agreement on European level to make higher education compatible amongst each other. As an initial idea probably not so bad, it has unleashed all the repressed desires to control and regulate education and finally make it into a commodity. Again the state hands over one of his most essential domains, cuts back on study-time and money to surrender education to merely utilitarian and profit-seeking motives. After corporations have made themselves a good image via sponsorship, after they have made themselves avant-garde-like creators via branding, they are finally nesting inside of the reproduction machine. Education and its institutions are not only seen as welcome new markets, they are not only turned into business themselves in order to generate big money, but worse, they are used to produce and reproduce this new principle, a neo-liberal world order. So here we have a new totality right on the doorstep, maybe we are living inside of it already: Corporate Rokoko!

Right now I am preparing myself for a group show at UKS in Oslo, which deals with some of the results of this process, the obscuration of the dismantling of democracy. The title of this exhibition is OPACITY and I am especially interested in two sides of this term: for one it means more representation, more glossy surface, dramatisation, spectacle, transparent architecture – all hiding the fact that the ways decisions are made is becoming less transparent, that democratic organs in institutions are dismantled through “reform”, that – in the end – everything has to obey the dictate of economy.

KØD: I wonder what strategy you use, as an artist, or what thoughts you have, on how to bring political issues into discussion in a more efficient manner, – for example; without becoming a disqualifying circus sideshow, – or bourgeois, as the latest Berlin biennale was accused of being. – Or maybe the discussion about this, actually only reveals a formalistic sensitivity/interest?

SD: Yes, I mentioned above that I see also another side to this term ‘opacity’, because on the other side it can be used also as a kind of protection shield of a critical discourse – but with the disadvantage that it can become a hiding place for the frustrated.

Clearly – if it seems that every space, every difference, every critique in public is co-opted for the profit of corporate image making, and one realises that this can not be the world that one imagines to be – one might hide away and turn to the secretive and the obscure. In the arts of today we can realise an increased interest in esoterica, in gnostic experience, in spiritual aristocracy and in aesthetic fundamentalism – all the, yes, the old ‘bourgeois’ anti-modernism. But if one does not cope with irrationalism in an analytical and distanced way, but rather identifies with it, one might end up, as our investigation in the Lebensreform movements has shown, to pave the road for some totalitarian ideology. Back then it was the Third Reich.

But after all, those ‘critical elements’ - that once were inhabiting and constituting the public sphere producing critique, dissent, discussions and significance – what happens to them now, after its corporate takeover? There are certainly some who cheer and collaborate, some who hesitate and negotiate – some who hide in the dark and masturbate.

But how can one use opacity to protect critical analysis and make it a sharp and strong tool again, in order to create transparency? How can dissidence grow in the blind spots of the ‘society of control’ and articulate itself? And here I am pointing – as I did teaching in Bergen – to the necessity of research and playfulness within the relative ‘autonomy’ of a self-organised practice and in the end – forward to something that was once called “enlightenment”.

(to be continued… but in all its difference.)