Martijn Hendriks – Interview

Martijn Hendriks, (Untitled) The Birds without the Birds, 2008 - Ongoing

Let’s call the whole thing off
Nicole Edwards, interview with Martijn Hendriks
April 2009

1: Your work is said to address ‘the conditions under which non-productive gestures become productive’. In what ways may a gesture be considered productive or unproductive in the context of your practice?

Much of my recent work somehow involves doing things that could be considered unproductive; for example removing, extracting or misplacing things, using cheap effects while addressing grave subjects, editing out essential information from found images or videos and redistributing them. In a way they are all gestures that seem to deliberately miss the point, or perhaps more precisely, they make it missing. But what interests me about those gestures is that a new, unexpected point emerges in ways that you wouldn’t expect. In many works, I was interested in choosing the worst option from a given set of possibilities, or in doing things that run counter to the idea of the artist as a person who is creative, who produces things, who offers constructive critique, produces coherent meanings, makes things visible and available to viewers, and so on. I was more interested in finding ways of not really making anything visible or available in the usual sense, and in doing things of which the works would only be traces.

Once you deliberately work with the idea of the unavailable or the not completely given, you introduce new possibilities of doubt and uncertainty into your art practice. But that’s good; the sequences of events that are started by doubt and uncertainty, or by overdoing something or mistaking something for something else, are much more interesting than knowing what you are doing from the start. For me, this is a kind of shadowy in-between area where unproductive gestures such as displacement or removal or negation become productive. They offer a way of rethinking things by allowing uncertainty back into situations that were considered as settled, and allow for lateral approaches, double takes, ways of seeing things that hinge on multiple, different interpretations at once. At those times that I could produce these situations in my work, I felt that I had somehow found a way of making the unproductive productive, which interests me.

So the difference is often a difference of perspective. A gesture may be unproductive in material, visual, economic terms, or in terms of what is done with a medium. But it may become productive conceptually, in terms of the ideas it translates, the questions it raises, or in terms of the ways it allows you to think about something. Yet this second perspective still relies on the negation that a gesture represented in the first place. Which would mean that many things I do are both: both unproductive and productive at the same time. And then in the end many works are about this double bind of the tension between being productive as an artist while unproductive against other measures, which for me is an interesting part of working as an artist.

2: Can you clarify what you mean by the ‘consciously unproductive practice of contemporary art’?

You’re referring to a text in which I said that I’m interested in addressing the current position of contemporary art as a consciously unproductive practice. For me this is a key aspect of working in contemporary art; you can do things that are not considered constructive, responsible or productive outside of the field of art. This gives you an immense freedom to seemingly do whatever the hell you want to do (which, of course, is often used as an argument that in contemporary art ‘anything goes’), but it also gives you an enormous responsibility: if you can really do anything, then you’d better get it right. This makes you make conscious choices. It’s somehow defending the right not to make yourself useful, by doing something else that can stand up to that demand, something that can hold its ground. So there is an immense responsibility that comes with the freedom to do irresponsible things. By accepting this freedom of working as an artist, you also force yourself to position yourself in an extremely complicated and layered discourse and into thought processes that can be pretty demanding.

Of course, these issues didn’t come out of nowhere. There is a deep historical grounding for these considerations, since we can trace the ‘unproductive gesture’ as a more or less conscious position in art to at least Duchamp’s readymades. That gesture of simply displacing an object from one context to another context obviously had a tremendous effect on what art could be. But this effect essentially relied on very consciously and very precisely doing something that even today, from a common sense approach, is still sometimes seen as lazy, uncreative, worthless. And I like that. I like it that people even today can still have trouble with it, even though we live in a time when immaterial signs and gestures pretty much define our world. The point is that this gesture of displacement only became productive by claiming it as a legitimate gesture in art, which is the only place where it could produce its effect. So when people discard a readymade sculpture as worthless they are usually trying to hold on to their ideas of what the ‘creative’ artist should materially produce. Of course this brings us back also to the legacy of conceptual art which theoretically freed art from its necessary place in the market as a material object to be produced, sold, distributed, resold, etcetera – a legacy that would subsequently need to be completely re-evaluated when commodities became increasingly immaterial and when certain immaterial works actually did very well in the art market. And a similar role can be traced today for the legacy of appropriation art. All these developments are somehow present in the work of many contemporary artists today, but more as a given background than as an explicit program. So today, the idea of art as an unproductive practice (as opposed to, for example, art that legitimizes itself as a constructive social practice, which is really easy to do and which is encouraged from all sides today) raises more questions than it is able to answer, and that’s a good thing.

3: You have expressed your interest in exploring the possible role of art as a form of ‘critical iconoclasm’. How do you perceive the relationship between your own strategies of intervention through negation and iconoclasm?

I think that both are caught up in a kind of split situation, which interests me; the split situation of drawing attention to the very subject of the images that are destroyed or negated. Any form of iconoclasm, it seems, both introduces an act of negation and reproduces what it destroys. Even if it is no longer present or visible, iconoclasm reproduces its object by bringing it back to our attention somehow, or bringing it to memory. That doubleness is more interesting to me than any thinkable form of true nihilism or complete negation. There is a sort of dialogue or level of communication in both historical iconoclasm and my strategies of intervention through negation. It’s not just that you take something away by taking its image down or defacing it, it is more that you propose to reconsider how we relate to what it stands for and how it is represented and reproduced in a certain context. That’s what interests me more than the purely negating aspects of these practices.

4: To what extent is it possible to engage in a truly critical form of iconoclasm without re-evaluating the means of production by which such critique is made possible? In other words, how effective is the project of questioning visibility through visual media particularly in the context of an institutionalized art forum?

There are multiple approaches to this question, depending on how you define ‘means of production,’ which exist on many levels. For me, the means of production that enable any critical art practice to emerge are increasingly multiple: they bring into play knowledge, money, the gallery, theory, some familiarity with art, the space of the exhibition, the time you need for conceiving of and making a work, an interview such as this, the technical and material tools that I use, a certain visual literacy, channels of distribution that are available, texts that I read, images that I see, films I watch, figuring out how to communicate with curators, the visual media that you know how to use, trips I am able to take, and so on. They all somehow have a part in enabling a practice to develop into a coherent whole from which it becomes possible to formulate even the most minimal critical thought. And since any critique also relies for its existence on what it criticizes, we could even argue that the object of criticism, in a weird way, is also part of what we can understand as ‘means of production.’ In that sense, visual media may well provide the most effective place to question expectations of visibility. Once you see all these different aspects going into your practice, it is impossible not to re-evaluate those things. That’s what you’re doing, constantly, in a yet unarticulated way, when you make a work. But at the same time you don’t really want to be doing all these mental loops. It’s just what happens in a process with many steps and ideas and levels of thinking. That’s what makes it so hard sometimes to realize a new work: you are conscious of all these sides to a situation, and you somehow need to take them into account without letting them paralyze or dictate you or make you too self-conscious about what you are doing. There is all this stuff, all these considerations and re-evaluating going into a work, and still you know that the strongest work is the work that translates a single idea clean and simple. The trick is to realize that simple work while dealing with the fact that there is nothing simple about making it.

5: Digital technology and online media have opened up spectacular new territory for the commodity form, its distribution, consumption and subsequently its appropriation and critique. In what ways have such media affected the nature of your practice?

A substantial part of the source material I use lately comes from the Internet. There is something about how it has become so stupidly easy today to look things up and to have things available to us immediately that somehow stuck to my practice; this complete and constant availability made me consider practices and interventions that played with our expectations of unconditional availability of images and information about whatever we feel like.

6: Rather than simply add to the momentum of self-parody already at play in an environment perpetually snacking on itself, your work points towards our complicity as viewers and readers in ‘producing new meanings out of existing images or texts’. How significant is the question of agency in your work?

It is significant, but it is hard to say in which ways exactly. I think that many of my works really need their viewer to bring things together or to take into account several ways of interpreting a given situation. That’s almost always there: a kind of conflict or confrontation between incompatible or at least different readings of a work. I’m not so much interested in creating works that advertise some finished meaning, but more in the situation of a double bind, a situation in which we’re confronted with irreconcilable demands that challenges you to make what Bruce Nauman described as the ‘effort of resolution.’ That’s a form of agency. But I rarely think of my work in those terms when I make it. I guess that what I often attempt to do is to reconstruct the elements or conditions of a thought process or an idea, even though those elements are sometimes disparate or contradictory.