This legendary theatre text which was performance by Tor Lindstrand and Mårten Spångberg are in many ways fundamental to the work of International Festival. The performance first presented in Berlin in August 2002 was staged as an artist-talk between Tor Lindstrand and Mårten Spångberg but the text is a compilation from interviews of other artists, actors, architects etc.
The text has been presented in several publications and were performed more then 3o times under the title "Artists't-talk". It was common that the audience detected that the text was not authentic but in case of there is a segment towards the end of the text that is repeated eight times. Even so it has happened that audience members have left the theatre convinced that these were the words by the individuals on stage.
Yet another time the text is being made available and we hope that somebody will perform it somewhere in some occation, or maybe just in the kitchen because it's fun.

Artists'-Talk

Q: What is the theme of your new work?

A: The basic story line is about art leaving the sphere of the artist, when the artist looses control of the work. It's defined basically by two ends, one would be Louis XIV; that if you put art in the hands of an aristocracy or a monarch, art will become reflective of ego and reduced to decoration, and on the other hand of the scale would be Bob Hope; that if you give art to the masses, art will become reflective of mass ego and also decoration.

Q: What is your main interest as an artist?

A: I'm interested in the morality of what it means to be an artist. As an artist I'm most concerned with what art means to me, how it defines my life, etc. And then after that, my next concern is my actions, the responsibility of my own actions in art in regard to other artists, and then to a wider range of the art audience, such as critics, theatre people, programmers, etc. Art to me is a humanitarian act and I believe that there is a responsibility that art should somehow be able to affect mankind, to make the world a better place.

Q: This sounds like a very American answer?

A: Well, it's all about seduction. If I was an amoeba I would try to seduce the amoeba next to me.

Q: So what's the starting point for your work?

A: I say, "Cazzo, cazzo, I'd like to do something great ..."

Q: What does that mean?

A: "Cazzo" is your dick. [laughs] Cazzo! Cazzo! It's like, "Fuck, fuck!" So this is the first point ... to present something like an idea or a concept. But when I realize that it's extremely difficult for me to obtain this result, then I start hating myself, the fact that I grew up and decided to do it, to be in this fucking world.

Q: Hating yourself?

A: Yeah, sure. To find myself in a situation where I'm not able to say; "No, I can't do that." Because I feel like a professional. When you say, "Yes", you are sure that in the end, good or bad, you're going to end up with something.

Q: There are some people who have very specific goals that they are trying to reach in their lives and others who seem to wander into their accomplishments. Which do you think you are? Is there a certain contribution that you aspire to make?

A: It's very simple and it has nothing to do with identifiable goals. It is to keep thinking about what performance can be, in whatever form. That is an answer, isn't it? I think that the performance has one beautiful ambiguity: it used the past to build a future and it’s very specific about giving notice that this is not the end. That's how it felt to me, anyway. That is in itself evidence of a kind of discomfort with achievement measured in terms of identifiable entities, and an announcement that continuity of thinking in whatever form, around whatever subject, is the real ambition.

Q: Maybe I'm not being as direct as I should be. Maybe I should just ask: What is your goal for the rest of your career?

A: I'd still give the same answer. To keep thinking about what performance could be. What I could be.

Q: Could be or could do?

A: Could be. Could do. Could do is more interesting. Be or do. That's in itself beautiful.

Q: Be or do? Is that a choice?

A: It's an oscillation.

Q:What did you think about the performance when you first saw it?

A: You know there are things that I didn't liked about it, there are things I loved about it, there are things that moved me in the story. It's hard when you watch a show that you're in for the first time because you can't really look at it objectively.

Q: But, what do you want the audience to experience. With what sensation do you want them to leave?

A: I never think in terms of spectacle. It's always in terms of idea. How best to put over the idea-like in italics. It is what the audience thinks it is, all open to interpretation. I just do this work, it's up to others to interpret them, to make them mean, what they want them to mean.

Q: What do you expect the viewer to do with it?

A: They are supposed to read it, that's all. I think culture is a kind of intersubjective space. So art connects in a way which is more than simple, visual pleasure. If I pander to the viewer in a kind of show-biz way I compromise those uncomfortable ruptures of the supposed "normal" way things are expected to go. I don't want to risk doing that. That de-politicizes art, cancels it out. The so-called avant-garde is a political history, if it is anything. I couldn't imagine a more banal activity than simply providing visual kicks to the public. Of course that's how a lot of artists see their role. But let's face it: There's a lot more dumb people out there, then there are smart ones, so if your goal in life is to be popular, and/or rich, the choice isn't a difficult one.

Q: Is the viewer supposed to solve the riddle itself?

A: That's part of the riddle, my riddle.

Q: I gather you see little connection of your art and poetry?

A: Absolutely no relation at all.

Q: Was there a point when you just got fed up with having to do a particular kind of performance? Has this had any bearing on why you're not doing performances now?

A: I stopped doing that kind of work just because of that press. It wasn't an art world press, it was just sort of: "Will he live to thirty?" I felt to continue would be to fulfill their expectations.

Q: In the documents I have seen of your earlier work, they all seem to express a certain vulnerability?

A: They were very private acts and some of the things written about me really sensationalised and distorted my art. I'm not too interested in doing performances these days. I can't think of anything more dreadful. I think performance has become something else, become sort of cabaret. It verges on entertainment, it has become very theatrical.

Q: Theatrical, how did you consider yourself as a performer?

A: I never saw myself as an actor. I'd never stand in front of an audience and do a performance over again, for example. That has no interest for me whatsoever.

Q: Have you regretted some pieces you made?

A: No, because in the end, even if it's a failure - and I've done many - it's something that is part of your experience. Because I don't have a studio, a piece is made just for a show and what I see is what you are going to see.

Q: I've always been a fan - long before we met.

A: When people tell me; "I like the work." I say "Okay, okay", but I can't believe it because I'm not able to take myself seriously.

Q: You can't believe that I like your work?

A: I mean, yes, I do. But it's amazing.

Q: Well, listen, life is really tragic.

A: Yes.

Q: So tell me about some of your interesting failures.

A: Oh, God...You start with an idea and you think, "I'm going to make at least one action." This is always my goal, to do, let's say, a rhetorical performance, and then in the end I'm not able.

Q: And your goal is to do, I mean in your most recent works…?

A: Yes, that was directed against anybody's claim about performance. If someone had started an argument about performance, I would have maintained that we had a right to do this as a performance. But that wasn't really the main issue. The issue was to make art, or to make something which reflected our presence in a certain context.

Q: Did your materials or your choice of material have political connotations?

A: Definitely, yes.

Q: Like denying high art conventions and materials?

A: Right. Art can be made out of rags. Eventually I put this all into a kind of programmatic statement.

Q: So that means the commodity status; the value of the work did become an issue.

A: Yes, I think that’s very true. And it wasn't so much against performance as against methods of dealing with the presentation of performance, the definition of performance.

Q: What do you mean…?

A: ... since I'm not interested in problems of form, dramaturgy and material, it goes without saying that my evolution could not be aesthetic.

Q: So your work is all about…

A: My work is a manifesto against sensibility, against the expression of the personality of the individual. In my work, the final manifestation of my personality, my last choice will have been opt for objectivity.

Q: What about the future of performance?

A: I don't look at the history of performance any more than I look at the history of art. I like a painter for the painting and for what the painter himself does. His position in the history of art is for the historians.

Q: In what respect does art progress and develop? How do you reflect art historians and perspective on the demagogy of artistic importance and their contribution in relation to cult of old and new masters?

A: I don't suppose every work is a masterpiece or even fulfils itself. And I don't necessarily see every work as a sign of progress. Very often it's a decline. But then, even in its decline something can be fascinating.
In sum, I guess it's probably as bad to be ahead of your time as to be behind your time. What we look for is instant, universal acceptance. The true artist helps the world by revealing mystic truths.

Q: Does the confidence in a performance relation the belief in a material?

A: Yes…

Q: How do you know when a piece is finished?

A: How do you know when you're finished making love? Its part of the work that is very personal to me. It has helped me survive as an individual. I also hope it is communicative to other people and gives them a sense of personal value.

Q: So, for example, when you search for material that is right, it isn’t what is “right” but what “feels right”?

A: Of course… Something that develops, that makes itself known to me. I don’t search for material - it comes.

Q: Has it arrived recently… have you been working out lately?

A: Yeah, I just did it.

Q: How much are you lifting now?

A: 65 kilos.

Q: On the bench-press? That’s strong!

A: No, it’s light. You’re stronger than me, and fitter and handsomer and younger, and you ware better clothes.

Q: You’re a professional…

A: There was a time when I had to go… I went to China, I didn’t want to go, and I went to see the Great Wall. You know, you read about it for years. And actually it was great. It was really, really, really great.

Q: The great wall?

A: I was extremely exited but, at the same time, every inch of it, if you decide, as every performance you decide to do is important.

Q: In most of your work you perform yourself…

A: Oh, Jesus… I mean these, from the last piece, were professional actors and I tried not to tell them what to do… I just wanted them to do the same thing as…

Q: When he greats people?

A: Yes. So I tried to not interfere with what would happen on its own. And after a while, it was the audience who directed almost everything.

Q: No one is the same person from one moment to the next, real copying is impossible.

A: I'm just looking to that the actors to the smallest point of personality, to where there will still be a human being. I love it when I see something escaping that we didn't design.

Q: But how do you work with your actors?

A: I always do as little directing as possible. Always. I don't want to colour characterizations with my own personality. I try to get as much as out of the actor as possible and tell him as little as possible. I try to develop what is there-whether the actor is a professional or has never done anything. It's largely a matter of the personality and how to bring that out - produce it and give the audience the joy of discovering them.

Q: How is this affecting the audience then?

A: It's creating a self-consciousness of people in a public space, in a public situation, something like the Brechtian idea that the audience should be made self-conscious of itself, the way performers should call attention to themselves and their performance by making themselves and their gestures self-conscious.

Q: Actors are really sweet aren’t they?

A: Some are. I can think of some, where that wouldn’t be the first adjective… I get along with them .

Q: Innocent and vanity, I think?

A: Well, kid actors are innocent. What’s hard is if you’ve been a start a long time. It’s really hard not to be driven crazy eventually.

Q: I can of course only imagine.

A: Because you are so afraid that you are going to lose it. I think that celebrities that hate being recognised when they go out, what they really fear…

Q: Is that they won’t be recognised.

A: I really don’t know people with that kind of problem, but it must be incredibly drug like.

Q: Would you describe in detail how you would go about creating a scene?

A: First, it’s the atmosphere of the scene. If I'm being interviewed, for instance, we might start with ...

Q: Well, is it true....

A: Yeah, it’s really true that I’ve taken interviews from other people as my own. Once I completely copied one. Other times, friends have shown up at interviews pretending to be me. People, you know, would stop me and say; “Oh, I didn’t know you were born in Corsica.” or, like… “I didn’t know you studied with Bataille.” - which of course I didn’t.

Q: But, like that is, no no no, that’s subjective treatment.

Q and A changes position, the former Q becomes A and wise versa.

Q: So, could we say that a strong point in your style would be this subjective treatment?

A: Subjective treatment. As against the objective. You see, the objective is the stage, it is the theatre. We are the audience looking at people on the stage. We aren’t with them, we aren’t getting any viewpoint you see. You know, it's a trick and there is nothing to it.

Q-Now is this a philosophical viewpoint? Or is this something that just happened, like the man who makes cartoons likes to make people laugh?

A: The Theatre? How far does that get? It never gets to Japan. Really! Yes! But this is my point when you say what do I enjoy? I enjoy the fact that we can cause, internationally, audiences to emote. And I think this is our job.

Q: As an entertainer? As a creator?

A: Well both… Yes, and I'll tell you why. Because I've seen so many stage plays go wrong through opening up, loosening it, when the very essence is the fact the writer conceived it within a small compass.

Q: This has been highly criticised by some critics - the tempo.

A: I deliberately made it slow.

Q: You deliberately made it slow?

A: Oh, no question about it.

Q: But it was still - to me - interesting.

A: But the point is, that's where the critics were wrong, you see, because the effect on an audience isn't there unless I've made them wait deliberately and gone slow.

Q: This is timing?

A: This is truer timing. Well, it's just like designing a composition in a painting. Or balance of colours. There is nothing accidental; there should never be anything accidental about these things. You've got to be very clear in what you are doing and why you're doing it.

Q: To go back a bit, content to you then is not necessarily a message, but a story line?

A: A story line-yes.

Q: That is the thing that counts. Telling that story, and not necessarily that it conveys a political...

A: No.

Q: ....or a religious...

A: No.

Q: ...or any kind of message.

A: I don't interest myself in that. I only interest myself in the manner and style of telling the story. But as for the story itself, I don't care whether it's good or bad, you know. As long as it serves my purpose.

Q: I would think that your interest in transformations is a residue of your background as a biologist?

A: Maybe, even not consciously so. It's also an expression of the need to change our ideas about the body, as well as institutional structures and everything that represents an attempt to freeze things in order to be reassuring. As Bruno Latour said: -"We have to change the way things change." Sometimes we think that changing something means doing the opposite, which simply means reversing the image in the mirror and continuing to do the same thing. For me transforming an idea, an action or a concept means diverting the process, and that’s what I do. But in the end, that’s how it works: We transpose, we copy and we recycle, and that’s how we transform concepts and ideas.

Q: In many of your works, both in early ones and in very recent ones, you relate to topics of major political consequence via issues and motifs from everyday life. Coming from the theatre, I have thought about Brecht's idea of the Verfremdungseffekt in relation to your work: The spectator is meant to dis-alienate himself in and through the consciousness of alienation. The spectator are meant to feel displaced from themselves, but only in order to enter more effectively into themselves, and to become conscious of the real, and moreover of the contradiction of the real.

A: Well… When I have to deal with this kind of questions, I resort to an old maxim of mine: nothing in the world is as dull as logic. I use the same logic as the Mormons. Do you know the Mormons? When kids ask them diffucult questions, they tell them: "Get lost."
There's something more important than logic, and that's imagination. If we insist on always thinking in logical terms, we will never use our imagination. Sometimes, when I'm working with my collegue, I suggest something to him. "Not possible!", he says. But the idea is good, even if the logic isn't. Logic we should pitch out the window!

Q: What then is the deep logic in your work?

A: To make the audience suffer.

Q: But you must get some satisfaction from making your work.

A: It’s a deep orgasm: there hours, if it’s a good work. Five minutes if it’s so so. But when it’s not very good at all, you might regret it for the next six months.

Q: Since you do rather a lot of work, that must even when its only so so, be quite something. What about women…

A: Mmm… I drive slowly.

Q: So it’s a myth all that talking about…

A: No no, we are pretty good, and we have fantastic - how do you… blowers.

Q: Horns?

A: Yeah, the level of noise. It’s unbelievable.

Q: Well, that’s sound like great. But you’re still interested in story-telling?

A: I really don't understand your question!?

Q: Telling a story.

A: Well, it's not that I don't believe... I see language as something building on a complex series of reference points. In terms of artwork, no matter what you look at or what you have, the complexity of that experience is the same. Do you know the story about the child who never said anything? Finally, one day when he was sitting at the dinner table, he said, "Please pass the salt." And his mother said, "How come you haven't talked in all these years, and now you have finally said something?" And he said, "Well, things aren't perfect anymore," or something like that. Once the need starts to make things easier and better, you know, it never ends.

Q: Well, I mean, basically what you are saying is always the same crap. It's losing, disappearing. And it's interesting to be able to express it at different levels and in different ways so that the work can improve. I don't have anything to lose. I don't have anything to gain.

A: What’s real?

Q: Don’t know.

A: Life is fantasy?

Q: Yeah, it is.

A: Do you really believe it, or tomorrow will you say the opposite?

Q: I don’t know. I like this idea that you can say the opposite.

A: But you wouldn’t in this case?

Q: No… Do you think there are UFO’s.

A: Of course, I've seen some.

Q: Why would people who were so sophisticated that they could travel from solar system to solar system bother to hide?

A: Because they want to take over, maybe. Or perhaps they're not hiding - maybe we know a few.

Q: Probably. When you read a magazine article about science - about the shape of the universe or something - do you find it all believable?

A: I think what interests me most is what cannot be proven. If something's kind of foggy, I'll go for it and I'll believe in it - much more than anything that can be proven.

Q: Wow. That was Kirkegaard's view of what belief is - that if you can prove it, it's not belief.

A: That's why I kind of dig the New Age stuff too.

Q: I know you see all this New Age stuff as a little bit campy or ironic. But are you actually interested in that type of thing too?

A: Yes, I am.

Q: So are you becoming more spiritual?

A: Well I'm influenced. It's like fashion - you can never say it doesn't affect you. But to me, that stuff remains superficial, which is an important aspect of my work. I'm always dealing with the superficiality of things.

Q: You know on my way here today. I saw Xaiver and asked him what I should ask you, and he said, “I don’t know. For him everything is equal.”

A: Xaiver Le Roy. He’s right, absolutely right.

Q: How do you describe that point of view?

A: I don’t know. If he said it, he’s right.

Q: That sounds so Zennish.

A: Zennish? What’s that?

Q: Like Zen.

A: Zennish. That’s a good word. That’s a good title for ... my new performance.

Q: You once mentioned to me that you hate yoga and meditation. What was that all about?

A: [laughs] Well, I'd always resisted meditation with a full-on defense mechanism, but I'd never understood why. I wouldn't meditate - no way, ever - and Thom felt the same way. He got angry just talking about it. We ended up laughing about the whole thing, but we figured that singing is a form of meditation, where you kind of go to an imaginary place that you've built over many years. It's like a state of trance. So to go to a meditation class where somebody tells you, "Do this, feel this," like they've got an instruction manual on how to get to this place - it's offensive. It's like reading a sex guide before you are with the one you love, and then asking whether they wouldn't mind moving their thigh, like, twenty centimetres to the left - and then measuring it with a stick.

Q: Actually, that sounds quite exciting. Everybody has a different method of getting to that place, because everybody needs it. Some people play golf, some people get drunk - one method isn't better than another. But if I ever sat down and listened to a guru tell me how to meditate, I would feel like I was having an affair. I would feel disloyal to my own temple.

A: But do you believe in God?

Q: I don't want to get into that. It wouldn't be wise to give an opinion. I am an onlooker of the spectacle of life, all amazed.

A: What is a genius?

Q: Someone who sees things in a way that illuminates them and enables you to see things in a different way.

A: What would you say you do for a living?

Q: I never know what to write down sometimes filling out those cards and things. Sometimes I write singer. Sometimes I write actress. Sometimes I write mother. It depends on the mood I'm in. Sometimes I write entertainer and I feel like that sort of covers all the area. And you…?

A: I never know what to write down sometimes filling out those cards and things. Sometimes I write singer. Sometimes I write actress. Sometimes I write mother. It depends on the mood I'm in. Sometimes I write entertainer and I feel like that sort of covers all the area. And you…?

This loop can be repeated as long as the performers like.

Q: Were you thinking about the idea of the readymade?

A: Yes, but the readymade had been done so much already. There was no point in just redoing a readymade. I liked the idea that the work could be completely superficial. There was also the idea of seduction, the idea of brands, names, labels, and all this stuff that was very present at that time. I also liked that the work was abstract, in that when you looked at the performance, their contents were hidden and you couldn't quite know what was in there.

Q: So, it plays out in lot of different ways? Warhol said, "I want to be a machine." but that was very romantic, a romanticiztion of the mechanical.

A: Yes, I always interpreted that statement as striving to reveal the human element by dening it. When I am at my best. I am just an automatic pilot.