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Claude CLOSKY | QUIT CLICKING AND SURF |
Interview with Claude CLOSKY, creator of the Internet site for the Musée d'art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean
josée hansen
Consumer society? Claude Closky has to laugh! Using every medium – drawing, collage, newspapers, video, games and the Internet – he has a hilarious time classifying all the consumer codes, counting, juxtaposing, compiling them like a taxonomist, distilling their absurdity. He began counting with pathetically simple means, a pencil and a piece of paper, doing collages of similar scenes from films, or compiling the hard-core bits from erotic novels (Vacation in Arachon). But Closky also seems to follow the Indymedia slogan, "Don't hate the media, become the media!" He doesn't just carry out a détournement of the images that inundate us, but also moves in the opposite direction, infiltrating the media to produce work from the inside. Thus he has created and contributed to several Internet sites, now including the site of the Musée d'art moderne Grand-Duc Jean. I did a ping-pong interview with Claude Closky. By Internet, of course.
From: <josée hansen> To: <Claude Closky> The most striking element of your Internet sites – whether the one for the Musée d'art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean or your own – is the automatic operation of the pop-up windows, which appear and disappear of random, leaving the user powerless. To a certain extent, our virtual voyage is based entirely on chance. Why did you make this choice, at the risk of frustrating people who are stressed out by the World Wide Wait?
From: <Claude Closky> To: <josée hansen> It's true, interactivity isn't the big issue of my sites. I think it's often more effective to bring information to the surfer by simply popping it up on the screen, without any need to click on things to get there... In reality, the feeling of powerlessness and time loss that you might experience on the Internet comes paradoxically from the multitude of choices it offers. If there's any parallel to be made between Internet and another medium, it's with television: unlike written journalism, the computer screen, just like TV, can only display a limited quantity of texts and images before they become unreadable. This weakness has to be compensated by the linkage of successive pages/sequences. When you navigate on one of my web sites, the mouse is like as zapper, you use it to hit "play" or "pause," or to pick a "channel" from a voluntarily short list.
From: <josée hansen> To: <Claude Closky> Let's go a little further with the TV metaphor. On the Mudam site, there isn't any screen to warn you of the arrival of an advertising sequence, the logo of the bank that sponsors the site just pops up by surprise, appearing randomly but repeatedly. And of course that's particularly intriguing for anyone who knows about the almost parasitic use you normally make of advertising codes in your work...
From: <Claude Closky> To: <josée hansen> Rather than assigning the logos of the site's collaborators to a geographical place, at the bottom of certain pages for example, I prefer to give them a place in time. By creating a change in the state of the screen while they are displayed, I make it difficult not to notice them, but once they have been shown for a few seconds I have them disappear entirely. They are as radically present on the site as they are absent.
From: <josée hansen> To: <Claude Closky> This notion of time seems to play a preponderant role in the use of the Internet, both in the Luxembourg museum site and in the other sites you have created – I'm thinking, for example, of the site for the advertising museum in Paris, or the project at the Dia Center in the United States. "Stop clicking and surf" was your invitation to the visitors on www.mudam.lu. You ask them to adapt to the temporality you have defined. So Internet seems to be a new medium with its own space-time, a time the visitor has to accept in order to gain access to the work.
From: <Claude Closky> To: <josée hansen> The surfer has to let himself be carried by the site, just following the flows of information. That said, at the Mudam site at you can always go backwards with a click of the mouse, if things start moving too fast... The possibility of playing with time seems to be an essential element of the Internet, at least as important as interactivity. I link pages and pop-ups like a slide show, as much to guide the visitor through the site as to generate some irony about the so-called control we are usually offered, which often comes down to the choice of looking at the top, going to the next page or moving back to the home page.
From: <josée hansen> To: <Claude Closky> The Mudam site is unlike the others you have created because it has an intrinsic usefulness, which is to provide information about the future museum. At this point the site is the only place where this evolving museum can "exist," where it can display and explain itself. To what extent did it this utilitarian function cut down your artistic freedom?
From: <Claude Closky> To: <josée hansen> I don't consider the utilitarian character of this site to be incompatible with a mode of communication that's both free and independent. I'm not constructing the Mudam site as a "work," but the process has many aspects in common with my own way of working. As in the creation of a work, I try to base myself on the constraints, to maintain a distance from the subjects I'm treating, to be direct about what I'm doing, and obviously, to look at what's being done elsewhere... The site has to give a certain amount of information; this information will be all the more visible – and therefore useful – to the extent that it's presented in an unconventional way.
From: <josée hansen> To: <Claude Closky> In your work, you decipher the codes of communication and particularly of advertising, by collecting, classifying and ordering things like a taxonomist or a semiologist, but with some extra humor. Here it is as though you were testing the applications of these codes, as though the observer had become an actor, something you also did, for example, in the fashion supplement for Jalouse magazine...
From: <Claude Closky> To: <josée hansen> It's true that in my works I usually try to show, not to use. Even the tools I need to give form to the work are employed at a minimum, without effects. I began my work with a ball point pen and A4 paper, approximate cutouts from magazines, slide shows presenting only two alternating images, single-shot videos in loops without a soundtrack, etc. I'm very distrustful of skill, of technical performance. I think the formal sobriety of Mudam is pretty explicit in that regard.
From: <josée hansen> To: <Claude Closky> Still you have to download four plug-ins – Flash, Shockwave, QuickTime and Acrobat Reader – to be able to use the site properly, so one needs a certain level of technical equipment to access it. By abolishing geographic criteria, by rendering a work simultaneously accessible across the planet, Internet art nonetheless creates new divides, which are technological and inevitably social.
From: <Claude Closky> To: <josée hansen> Internet may deepen the gap between certain social communities, but overall it still allows more individuals to communicate better and cheaper. In any case, it's not the creators of sites but the owners of the telecommunication networks and the access providers who have the real power to reduce inequalities in this medium... As to the plug-ins, QuickTime and Acrobat Reader come with the operating system of your computer, Flash is installed automatically with your browser, leaving just Shockwave which you download from their site for free. Three of the four plug-ins are already on your machine before you connect to the net, and the fourth, which is only needed to see a portion of the site (like QuickTime and Acrobat Reader), can be installed with two clicks of the mouse!
From: <josée hansen> To: <Claude Closky> My question was not so much technological or specifically linked to this site, but a general question about the accessibility of Internet art. Because in order to surf comfortably and get the most out of an artistic site, you still need a fast telephone line and a good modem, a powerful computer and a recent operating system. So you need financial means. But let's get back to Mudam: you are working with an editorial team around Simon Lamunière, Jean-Charles Masséra and Benjamin Weil, and the site will be frequently updated to keep it attractive. What kind of maneuvering room do you have, and what is your personal contribution to this collective production?
From: <Claude Closky> To: <josée hansen> My decision-making power is much too big! I invited Simon Lamunière, Jean-Charles Masséra and Benjamin Weil to form the editorial committee of Mudam because they all have an original and incisive way of approaching the new media, and lots of experience with contemporary art in general. The choices we are making in the elaboration of Mudam are suggested by the committee or myself and discussed between us before being carried out. That doesn't diminish our individual freedom in any way, but it allows us to think about contradictory viewpoints on our decisions, to put them into question...
From: <josée hansen> To: <Claude Closky> How is the site going to evolve, now that it has officially been launched? How is it going to live and remain attractive for the surfers who have already discovered it? How will you get regular visitors to this virtual museum?
From: <Claude Closky> To: <josée hansen> The structure of www.mudam.lu is now established. It offers a look at certain current events and at new trends in art. At the same time, it presents works produced by artists for this site, and therefore specific to the Internet. Finally, it allows you to follow the development of the Musée d'art moderne Grand-Duc Jean, its outside events (ArtFiles, Venice Biennial, etc.), its collections, and the building under construction by the architects Pei Cobb Freed & Partners, along with Georges Reuter. The surfers receive the information like as if it were coming off a television prompter or a slide show. But Mudam will be constantly transformed by the proposals of the editorial team in by the invited artists (six per year). As we did for the inauguration in Venice, we are organizing two "exhibitions" over this coming year, to mark these transformations. Afterwards, the site will be directed by different artist every year.
From: <josée hansen> To: <Claude Closky> What about the art market? How can Internet art or sites by artists move into the conventional art market of galleries, private collectors and museums? Or if they stay outside, how will the artists be able to make a living? Does virtual art create its own financial network?
From: <Claude Closky> To: <josée hansen> For the moment I think there is no market in the traditional sense for Internet art. The artists working with this medium do it without expecting any income, or they are paid in honoraria. For Mudam we decided to offer honoraria to the invited artists, independently of the budget reserved for the multimedia development of their projects. But I don't think anything prevents an Internet site from being sold like a video or photo work. In both cases we're talking about works that are identically and infinitely reproducible, thanks to the new digital techniques. They can be encountered in public space, in a museum, or on the Internet network, just as they can also remain closed in a private collection, or placed on an Intranet network. What counts here is the contract established between the seller and the buyer, the certificate attached to the work, or simply the bill made out by the artist, and not the medium of the goods being exchanged...
