Hans Ulrich Obrist in Conversation with Adam Vackar
Serpentine Gallery, London
May 15, 2007

Hans Ulrich Obrist: We are looking here at your urban intervention. Is this a chalk or what is it?

Adam Vackar: Yes, it’s chalk powder, which I put on a pedestrian crossing, a zebra crossing. I made an intervention in a public space, where I put white powder on the zebra crossing in the morning at six o'clock, and the cars and people passing over completely erased it during the day. It was the process of the total disappearance of this urban drawing.. I made a video, which I will show you. I captured the whole process by taking pictures every twenty seconds with my camera throughout the day, almost like a web camera. It’s the documentation of the project, which becomes a film as well.

HUO: But this is a public art without a public commission, right? Nobody asked you to do it; it is a do-it-yourself approach.

AV: Yes, I will present this project in a gallery next week in a solo show I have in Prague, but it’s basically a guerrilla approach.. It is important that nobody asked me to do it, and at the same time I want to do it without asking anyone. The documentation video is a kind of a capture of the whole day, a time leap of the whole process of this disappearance.

HUO: Who are your influences, who are your heroes when you do such a public intervention?

AV: Well, my heroes .... I am actually reading a lot of sociology, Zygmunt Bauman, Pierre Bourdieu, and this kind of social theory, which deeply interests me.

HUO: Do you know that Zygmunt Bauman is going to come to lecture at the Serpentine Gallery in the near future...

AV: Oh really?...

HUO: Why is Zygmunt Bauman your hero?

AV: Because I am interested in his views and analysis of the new hierarchy in society. It is because I was born in Prague and the change of political systems is really a major question for me in the larger sense as well. It is an evolution; it makes me think about new paradigms of reality and social and political systems. His ideas about society move me, because of my personal experience. He's fantastic.. He is about eighty or ninety years old, no?

HUO: Yes, exactly. Zygmunt Bauman is your hero and who else?

AV: I have several heroes, for example Slavoj Zizek and Alain Badiou.. Badiou is more left oriented, but I am more interested in their philosophical or social concepts than in their political visions. Among artists, my heroes are Joseph Kosuth, Chris Burden, and Vito Acconci in their early works, René Clair, Yona Friedman, Francis Alys, sometimes Douglas Gordon too. I also like Jean-Luc Vilmouth; in Paris I studied in his studio; he was a very influential artist involved a lot in public projects...

HUO: He is definitely an interesting artist for this public space question. And what brought you to France in the first place?

AV: Before coming to France, I spent a year in Tokyo studying Japanese, and it kind of dislocated me from European culture. After that, I came to France, because I fell in love with a girl (we now live together), and also because I was very curious about the development of Western society, which I think I finally started to decrypt after several years, and it gave me an opportunity to think about some new concepts But primarily, I came to France to study at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris.. Afterwards I continued my studies for a year in the post-graduate programme at the Palais de Tokyo, which was really interesting. We travelled a lot, went to faraway places such as Argentina.. It gave me new ideas and I had a chance to meet several very interesting people.. And it gave me a more global view of things. It mainly gave me inspiration for my intervention projects, and I have been trying to define new approaches in my art, and to change a bit the notion of what we understand as public art. I did another project with the zebra crossing, which is, by the way, a very symbolic place for me, where people pass, cross from one side to another. And I write news headlines – like on the Website of CNN or other news agencies –in grey powder on the zebra crossing. So again, the passing people and cars erased the news with their feet and car tyres, from morning till evening. The things that happened in a day mark the intervention through the headlines. I made another video of an intervention, which is also based on the idea of working with ephemeral things. It is called A Minute of Silence....

HUO: For whom?

AV: It’s an abstract minute of silence, a video at three locations: a classroom in a school, a call centre, and an advertising agency. It is a commemorative video of silence, showing petrified people.

HUO: So that is the video you showed in the Videology exhibition?

AV: Yes. Did you see the exhibition?

HUO: Yes, I know about it.

AV: I had this video there, I think it was quite a good exhibition with interesting artists like Danica Dakic, Kota Ezawa, and Roza El-Hassan. My video is again based on the intervention idea. I asked real people at real locations to be silent for one minute, and made it into a film. So they are very busy places...

HUO: But silent...

AV: Yes, everything is in silence. I wanted to interrupt the mindless one-way stereotype of everyday life. And the video is in a loop.

HUO: So it's an infinite minute of silence.

AV: Yes, exactly. I think it’s interesting because of the commemorative utopia of the shared silence.. Maybe it includes something of the idea of the Communist utopia, but Communism became an inefficient source of terror in the end. This is a utopia of participation in silence and the idea of being equal in one idea. It is a short video, since I don't really like long videos that pretend to be films. It is important to understand space in the video, and to understand it instantly, to be enthralled by the atmosphere. Related to this project, there is a similar performance I did in the Palais de Tokyo last year, an intervention of a group of five people, who infiltrated the exhibition space...

HUO: Five different people?

AV: Yes, a group of five different people with megaphones, who at one moment made the public silent for one minute; they made them hold an abstract minute of silence.

HUO: They asked people to shut up...

AV: Exactly.. It was very nice. There were about 1,200 people in the Palais de Tokyo.. It was a Sunday...

HUO: And people did shut up?

AV: Yes, they did!

HUO: Was there any reason given?

AV: No, just one abstract minute of silence. Many of these people were from the XVIe arrondissement, so there were many families, but there were also many art experts too. It was utopia in real time, with 1,200 people silent for one minute. It was a striking atmosphere of monumental silence. I recently did the same performance for the opening of a big exhibition of contemporary Czech art in Prague, which was curated by the artist Krištof Kintera, but it was less effective, probably because the Czech public is far less sensitive to ephemeral things.
I like intervention very much as an art form. It is invasive, which I find far more creative, because it is a form that interacts with society. It gives me a greater opportunity to include the public and social phenomena in art.
There is another, similar intervention I did, which reflects another important subject for me: consumer society. I went to the supermarket and bought four global products: Coca-Cola, Nescafé, Heinz Tomato Ketchup, and Nutella, and then brought them home, and mixed them together, and put the mixture back into the original bottles and jars. I documented the whole process on video. Then I did an intervention with another group of thirty artists in the Prague Metro. We took down advertisements and put up our own artworks instead. I put up a publicity photo of these four mixed products. It worked very well. Later, I also made a lightbox piece, because I think it works well with the idea of a tasteless brownish product in circulation

HUO: A disgusting substance, isn't it?

AV: Oh yes, terribly disgusting.

HUO: Poisonous?

AV: Yes, definitely. I tried to put my hand into the liquid and it hurt. It became a kind of acid or something even worse. It is completely inedible.

HUO: You didn't try to eat it, did you?

AV: Yes I tried, but in the end I just couldn't, it smelled so disgusting that I immediately felt sick. When you mix Ketchup with Nescafé and so on, it’s ahh... I spent a day in the room while I was shooting the video and got quite sick afterwards. I can send you a sample of the mixture so you can try it... (laughter)

HUO: Too scary...(laughter)

AV: Maybe if we ate it in the morning, it would really wake us up... (laughs).
But I would like to tell you about a less disgusting project of product image and ideology sampling I did. It’s a sculpture of the Sputnik.

In this sculpture it was interesting for me to work again with the idea of the utopia of Communism, which in reality transformed itself into capitalism. I was inspired being in Moscow last year and seeing the big all-black Mercedes-Benz cars everywhere, the emblem of high social status and success. And that’s why I painted the Sputnik sculpture in the original Mercedes-Benz colour. This sculpture merges layers of history with the present.. It marks the evolution of an ideology. Sputnik is a symbol.. It was an antenna that burnt up in outer space, similar to Communism, which burnt up in time.

HUO: Do you have links to literature, I mean science fiction?

AV: Yes, I very much like Stanisław Lem and also the films of René Clair and Jean-Luc Godard. I love science fiction; it’s a great source of reality paradigms. Recently I saw quite an interesting film, Gattaca, starring UmaThurman. Have you seen it?

HUO: No.. Is it new science fiction?

AV: Yes. It’s a vision of the future, where people take samples of DNA at the birth of a baby, and then, from examining the samples, if they see that you’ll have cancer when you're thirty, they won't educate you or invest in you. They decide your future right at the beginning. It’s the story of a person who tries to bypass this system. It’s similar to Godard's Alphaville and George Lucas's THX 1138.

HUO: So these science-fiction objects like Sputnik pop up again and again...

AV: Definitely.. It’s like...

HUO: Alien. Kind of...

AV: Yes, exactly. And like Kubrick's black monoliths, it reappears through some black hole in time and space. I still feel the great importance of the idea of layers of history and political systems merged in the sculpture, and symbolically flying through the space of ideology. I did another project, which tries even more to define the idea of history and ideology or, rather, the end of history.. It’s a project I did in Usuaia, Argentina, at the end of the world. In Ushuaia, there is a road leading to the horizon, to the ‘end of the world’. And with white powder I drew kind of road signs pointing towards the end of the world. For me it was a symbol of the end of utopia, of the utopia of Fukuyama's end of history, or the theory of the end of history postulated by Hegel and Marx. All visions of the end are, for me, expressions of fear of the unknown. I made a short video of this drawing, from the window of a car going towards the end, and when you are almost at the end, suddenly the camera goes back and you see the end of the world behind you in the rear-view mirror. So it becomes a kind of a loop again.
Recently, I participated in an experimental exhibition by Pawel Althamer in the Centre Pompidou.. Did you hear about it?

HUO: Yes.. There is this exhibition that Christine Macel curated in the Centre Georges Pompidou, and it was a sort of laboratory; Pawel Althamer curated young artists.. Can you talk a little about it?

AV: Yes, apart from the exhibition, we also did a workshop in Poland, which was interactive with the locals in the Polish countryside.

HUO: So it was a collective project.. How did it go?

AV: We were fighting a lot.

HUO: Fighting? Was it like a Big Brother?

AV: Exactly, it was the idea of Big Brother surveilling us as if we were in a laboratory. At the same time it was kind of the utopian notion of an art group. I think Pawel had an interesting idea at the beginning, where he tried to alter the notion of an art group. Ultimately, it didn't really work, because each of us was quite different; all of us have strong personalities. Pawel framed the project within conceptual and experimental borders in a very friendly way, guiding us like a guru, but I think we somehow ultimately got lost. At the very end of the project we became something like shadows, Pawel made us disappear. He convinced us to do shadow theatre. My project was to film workers preparing an exhibition in the Centre Pompidou like shadows.

HUO: So it was a collective result?

AV: Yes.

HUO: And who had this idea? Was it Pawel? Or somebody from the group?

AV: We suggested and discussed many possibilities, and in the end Pawel more or less imposed the idea of shadow theatre, which was not really the main idea of the project, but ultimately it became interesting.. We made different videos using Chinese shadow theatre.

HUO: Are you in touch with other artists from the group? Because you are the new generation of artists, who are the artists you are closest to? Are you a part of a group?
AV: I feel more nomadic than local, so I don’t really stand a chance of belonging to any group. I am in dialogue with several artists, sometimes working with them, and I take inspiration from different artists, but I am not in any particular group. Recently I initiated a group called ‘Grey Zone’, which focuses on finding new ways of exhibiting in public spaces. Just now, we started a big project, which will continue for a year, on billboards throughout Prague. There will be more than a 100 billboards during the year, made by artists working mainly with text, such as Kendell Geers, Kay Rosen, Claire Fontaine, Jonathan Monk, Adam Pendleton, and many others. For me this project is another intervention in a public space, which I am doing this time both as a curator and as an artist.

HUO: Now we've looked at all your projects, and I wanted to ask you, as the last question, if you have any unrealized projects ? Your own utopias...

AV: Yes, I have one project, which I call ‘Merged Alphabet’, which I want to do with the army and a school. It’s a project in which everyone present pronounces a different letter of the alphabet at the same time. So the whole alphabet becomes a kind of unrecognizable cry, a single sound all merged in one tone...

HUO: So that's unrealized...

AV: Yes, because I need to work with the army and that is quite difficult. But I hope to do it one day.

HUO: Thank you very much for the conversation/interview!