Anton Vidokle on Night School

NEW YORK—Anton Vidokle, artist and creator of e-flux—an international network and information agency he started with a group of artist friends—is poised to launch Night School, a yearlong series of seminars on topics ranging from the post-communist condition to artistic agency, set to open at the New Museum on January 31. E-flux started in January 1999 with a simple yet ingenious e-mail announcement service and has since blossomed into an important player in the global art world. It has sponsored many special projects, including unitednationsplaza, a temporary school in Berlin that served as a precursor to Night School; the traveling e-flux video-rental project; and Pawnshop, an artwork in the form of a fully functional loan business housed at e-flux’s New York storefront space (through February 29, 2008) that offers loans to artists and whose profits will be donated to Doctors Without Borders. At a time when much of the art world is characterized by excess and commercialism, e-flux has maintained independence and financial stability, allowing it to offer a high level of programming without having to answer to funders or sponsors or create a marketable product or exhibition model. ARTINFO spoke with Vidokle at the cozy Lower East Side café Brown in New York about his Night School project at the New Museum and what participants can expect.

Tell me about Night School, part of the Museum as Hub initiative established by the New Museum. Why did you want to continue your series of temporary schools?

I wasn’t planning to continue. I didn’t anticipate there would be any further venues for the project, which involves so many people and a lot of organization and is a very complex thing to pull off. Then Eungie Joo, the director and curator of education and public programs at the New Museum, asked if I wanted to bring unitednationsplaza here. I had worked with Eungie previously, when she was the director of Redcat gallery at Cal Arts in Los Angeles, and as we talked, I realized it would be important and challenging to bring a project like that to New York.

What will be presented at Night School?

There are three thematic directions for the yearlong program. The first is a discussion of the post-communist condition, but not in the typical way. Marxism was such a major ideological movement in the 20th century from here to Egypt, to China, to Vietnam. Most critical theory is based on Marxism. So when this ideology collapses, what happens? In particular, what happens to intellectuals, to artists, to every kind of progressive creative thinkers?

The first seminar is led by Boris Groys and titled “After the Red Square.” It will be on the reemergence of religion after communism. He’s presenting workshops and screenings and films. The second seminar will be with Martha Rosler, who is an interesting counterpoint to Boris because her work is based on Western Marxist tradition. What does the collapse of communism mean not only for the populations of Eastern Europe, but for Western intellectuals and artists? The third seminar is by Liam Gillick, who ultimately deals with very similar problems, but has a different type of vocabulary and is concerned with post-WWII cultural history in Britain and beyond.

For the second segment, we’ll move into a discussion of artistic agency and what that could possibly mean today, which is of course related to the discussion of post-communism. The two things are interlinked.

Your projects like unitednationsplaza and Night School tend to be very theoretical. There is another part of the art world that is obsessed with objects, prices, and the market.

My projects sound theoretical, but basically they are discussions with groups of different people. Theory is useful because some of it is able to articulate subtle things that can be very difficult to describe otherwise, but I wouldn’t say it’s a theoretical program. It’s not only thinking about theory; it’s about active engagement and actual practice. As for the marketplace, I simply don’t care about it. It’s out there, but I hardly ever think about it.

You were one of three curators of the canceled Manifesta 6 in Nicosia, Cyprus. It must have been disappointing for you. Did you learn anything from that experience?

In retrospect it was a very difficult, complex experience. It was a project I worked on for two and a half years, traveling like crazy and visiting hundreds of people in the region. The amount of personal investment that went into it was huge, and to have the rug suddenly pulled out from under it was really shocking. I think it would have been only a very negative experience had we not turned it into something positive by realizing it as unitednationsplaza in Berlin.

What were your goals with unitednationsplaza, which was in the tradition of free universities?

The most ambitious goal of that project was to try to generate a new kind of public, a public that is not just interested in coming to an exhibition opening to have a drink, chat with friends, and never come back, but that is closer to a real constituency—a group that would become real participants in a project, become engaged and have a stake in it. Of course, you can never quantify this in numbers, but even if there were only one or two people for whom this happens, that would be enough for me. I think it happened in Berlin and for me that's probably the most important thing.