The Art World: What If…?!, Episode 7: Paul Chan
In this episode, we get into some of the biggest What Ifs —about virtue and value, about life and loss. Host Charlotte Burns is joined by one of the most thoughtfully provocative (or cunning, as he’d say) artists of our time, Paul Chan. He made his name in the early 2000s with film and media works, and by 2008 had found significant success. Then, he stopped making art. Now he’s back with a show called Paul Chan: Breathers, where, influenced by sky-dancers, he literally shapes air. He says, “Maybe one way to talk about pleasure is a capacity to control our own time. Time may be the only non-human thing I really care about losing. I can lose everything. I think I've lost everything. I'm willing to lose it all, but I'm not willing to lose time, and that to me is more precious than anything else.”
Tune in and join us. New episodes every Thursday.
You can purchase Paul Chan’s book, Above All Waves: Wisdom from Tominaga Nakamoto, the Philosopher Rumored to Have Inspired Bitcoin here.
Courtesy of the artist and Greene Naftali, New York. Photo courtesy of the John D. And Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.
Transcript:
Charlotte Burns:
Hello and welcome to The Art World: What If…?! I’m your host, Charlotte Burns. In this series, we navigate the churn and change currently shaping culture.\
We imagine different futures and we talk about big shifts that need to happen for art to stay relevant.[Audio of guests]
In this episode, we’re going to get into some of the biggest “what ifs.” We’re going to talk about virtue and value, about life and about loss. We’re joined by artist Paul Chan who is one of the most thoughtfully provocative, or perhaps cunning, as he’d say, artists of our time. Paul made his name in the early 2000s with film and media works, and by 2008 had found significant success but it was at this moment that he decided to stop making art, because he felt like he was in a circus. He set up Badlands Unlimited, an alternative publishing house, which was also one of the first to accept Bitcoin—but that’s a different story. Paul has since returned to art making, finding a totally new form powered by air. You can see these works in his first major US exhibition in more than 15 years called Paul Chan: Breathers. The exhibition is now on at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis until 16 July. The show will travel around the US through 2024.
Paul, thank you so much for joining me.
Paul Chan:
I’m happy to talk to you.
Charlotte Burns:
You took a break, you took a breather. There's sort of two concepts to this idea of breathing: the breathers, the body of work—which we'll talk about—and then this idea of taking a breather. You took a step back from the art world in 2008. You felt that you were sort of done. You said that there was this moment in the mid-to-late 2000s when there was such excitement about contemporary art in a way that made it global and festive and vivid for people, in the events and the art fairs that gathered them, which created a really robust contemporary art economy, which created lots of opportunities for artists. But, at a certain point, you felt like your production cycle wasn't your own anymore. You said, “I felt like I was in a circus, and I wanted to leave the circus. I was very grateful for the opportunities, but I was kind of done.”
You had this moment where you wanted to take a step back, which is quite a brave thing to do when you found this degree of success that you had found.
What did it feel like to take that step back? Was it just inevitable? Was it something you just had to do, or was it a choice? Did you feel like you were doing something risky?
Paul Chan:
I think you've characterized what I put myself through pretty well. I don't know if it was inevitable that I would quit. My gallerist would probably say it wasn't. But I think that moment in my life, like so many moments in our lives where we feel like a path is forked, comes with a sense of really having to listen to yourself and all your senses about what those senses are telling you about what is happening to you, and around you.
And at that point, my senses were telling me that, as cool and as fun, as vivid and festive as it was, something was wrong. So, it was then a question of whether or not I was going to listen to those senses. Whether I would pay attention to them, whether I would take them seriously. You know, there are many times when we don't take our senses seriously, when we don't listen to what we feel.
In the case of 2008, 2009, I had sensed that I was tired. I was done, and I wanted to try something else. What that something else was, I didn't know. But I was always dumb like that. The uncertainty never scared me as much as the anxiety that comes from regret, I suppose. I didn't know that I would return to art making. I didn't plan on it. I didn't plan on any of it. All I actually planned to do was to clean my studio and maybe check my email every once in a while, back in 2008, 2009. But I thought I'd give it a go, and here I am.
Charlotte Burns:
Now you are back making art, you have this major museum show. It's going to be on tour for two years. Do you feel like you're back in the circus, or does it feel different?
Paul Chan:
I'm not back at the circus. I'm not, and I think it's because the circus has moved on from me, which is great. I think a new world deserves new art, and a new world deserves new artists. And so the festive, vivid, complicated circus that we understand as commercial contemporary art, I think has gone on. And it's wonderful to see the circus from afar and to partake in it every once in a while, but I think I live differently. And also, I have different, perhaps even more peculiar ambitions. I like the circus, but it’s something I do on weekends, I suppose.
Charlotte Burns:
Let's talk a little bit about those ambitions. Can you define your ambitions? I know you don't like really being pinned down, so I'm going to try and do that.
Paul Chan:
Oh. It's a great question. I'd like to stay alive. I would like to keep all my limbs. I would like to raise my daughter to be the most resilient, independent-minded and cunning person I can. I would like to get a haircut every three months. That's mostly about it.
Charlotte Burns:
So I like this idea that you brought up of cunning. I also love that you brought up your daughter. I was reading an interview you did in Vogue with your then 10-year-old daughter, Ruby, about your 2021 work, A Drawing as a Recording of an Insurrection. You explained how you were giving away a drawing to anybody who registered to vote on-site at the gallery, Greene Naftali, where it was showing. And she reacted, “You're giving away art?” which just really made me laugh. And you said, “It's not like they're worth anything, Ru. But maybe it's a gesture to remind people you know about voting and participating in a democracy. And maybe art can play a role in democracy in a new and vital way.”
But I love the fact that your daughter got straight to the heart of the value of art. “You're giving it away? Like, why would you give it away?” And you often want to give things away. You'd given away the source files, for example, of a New Museum work in 2008, The 7 Lights (2005-07). And you were asked about it by a journalist who expressed similar kind of incredulity. You're giving it away, it's an editioned work of art, and someone could recreate it. And you said, “you could conceivably, and you could try and sell it on the open market, but A) it takes more than the work itself to sell the work.” And you said, “Besides, there's no such thing as the open market.”
But you are very drawn to that idea of the open market. Through Badlands [Unlimited], the publishing company that you ran, you were looking for decentralized ways to deal with e-commerce. You were one of the first publishers to take Bitcoin, and you said, “There's no such thing as an open market. Bitcoin is maybe an option, maybe even an answer, or at least something like it.”
Are you still looking for that idea of an open market in the way that you think about disseminating your work and the ideas that you are interested in?
Paul Chan:
What you brought up about Ruby being flabbergasted that I was giving away artwork and how it relates to maybe earlier things I had done in my life, my so-called career, and to me, what connects those two experiences may be the more general experience I have about the nature of value, which is fundamentally social.
There is, to me, nothing inherently valuable about anything. It may seem to be the case that gold, as we understand this sort of precious metal, is somehow inherently valuable because everyone covets it. But I think it took some point early in our history for someone to say, “this looks and feels valuable, and so we should save it and we should prize it and we should use it for whatever purposes.” I am a believer that value is ultimately socially derived.
So when Ruby was flabbergasted that I was giving away artwork, on the one hand, you could conceivably think, “oh, you're giving away something that's valuable, that has value.” On the other hand, the way I see it is, perhaps the giving away part inaugurates a new kind of value for it. One that's not derived from what we generally and conventionally understand is how we value things like artwork.
I think you can think that way if you believe that value is fundamentally socially derived as opposed to inherently derived. I know there could be artists and perhaps galleries that believe that there is an inherent value in art, that the thing itself holds the value. And it may be the case. I think those forms of values are fair game and I think exist, and we should live with them and partake in them when we can. But to believe that that is the only kind of value that an artwork can take on is, to me, narrow-minded and close-hearted.
What was the second thing?
Charlotte Burns:
The second part is open-sourcing, but let's put that as a fork over there that we'll loop back around to and talk about value a little bit. I just read the book that you produced.
Give me one second while I find that piece of paper.
Paul Chan:
Charlotte, if you're having trouble with those papers, you could have invited me last week to your place. I would've helped you, uh, file them, put 'em away. Just let me know.
Charlotte Burns:
Well, I'm, yeah, I'm living in a different country, but you're very welcome because my books are a mess. I just moved.
Paul Chan:
Okay. Where did you go?
Charlotte Burns:
That's a long story. We'll get into that.
Paul Chan:
So where, where are you? Do you mind me asking?
Charlotte Burns:
No, not at all. I'm in the middle of the countryside in a village in England, in the UK, in the middle of the middle of an island.
Paul Chan:
Oh.
Charlotte Burns:
Far away from New York, which is where I was.
Paul Chan:
How do you like it? Do you like it? Do you mind me asking?
Charlotte Burns:
I don't mind you asking. I…I don't know. I do and I don't like it. It was necessary at this point in time, I think, for lots of different reasons. And I think then that if things are necessary at some point in time, then you have to let go of other things and you have to be on a different path and be on that path, whatever it is, and think about it in a different way.
Actually, something you said in that book about being an outsider, it reminds me of growing up being outside things. And I wanted to get to the heart of things and now I'm back away from the heart of things, but I don’t know if I'm away, really. When you, if you think about the value of art and this is what I was thinking about last night. My daughter wouldn't sleep and so she came into my room, and I was reading your book, and she said, “What are you reading? Will you read it to me?” And so I was reading this Japanese philosopher to my daughter, who's six, and showing her some videos of your work, which she found funny and creepy and said, “Why don't they have heads? But I like the way they move.” I was thinking it was great that I didn't need to be anywhere for That. I could just be with those ideas and think about them and share them in a way that if you were inside something, if you were inside the circus, I guess you wouldn't.
I don't know that that's an answer to your question, but I did think about that last night that physical distance is a kind of outside-ness that can be useful for thinking.
Paul Chan:
I think that's a great train of thought that I'll piggyback on just a bit because what it reminds me of is the capacity for those who are in contemporary art to partake in a particular quality that art has to offer, which is the capacity for us to change the goalposts of a game. That I think, what you say about being in the center of it, I think I understand in spirit, you know. So let's say for the sake of argument, conventionally speaking, New York is the epicenter of contemporary art, for many people and for lots of epochs, that's true—and it may still be true. But on the other hand, if I was to take seriously the experience of art and what it has taught me and what I have learned from it, it's that art is most cunning and perhaps at its best when it shifts the goalposts of what it means to be it and what value may mean.
And so your experience of shifting the goalposts, of realizing that maybe New York or those typical epicenters can be shifted, so that you can partake in it in your bedroom with your daughter on a laptop on an island, and have it sort of resonate in such a way that it makes sense, perhaps even more sense than being in a gallery in the Lower East Side, I think is a quality that I think art offers and art can illuminate for us. That's why I think of art in terms of cunning in a very historical lineage. And I think it's an important and vital concept for me, as far as I recognize it in art or certainly the art that I admire.
Charlotte Burns:
Let's talk a little bit about that cunning because I was confused about that a little bit last night. I was reading this book Above All Waves: [Wisdom from Tominaga Nakamoto, the Philosopher Rumored to Have Inspired Bitcoin] an Introduction, which is about Japanese philosopher Tominaga [Nakamoto], and this idea of decentralizing moral value. And I won't explain it as well as you, but there's a point in the book where he looks at the dominant thought systems of moral philosophy at the time and essentially decides that there's something like a fraud because whatever the original kernel of the idea was, the followers of that philosophy have had to explain and convince other people of the integrity of that philosophy. And in doing so, have led to aesthetic embellishments, which Tominaga essentially says there are a kind of deception and fraud, and it's this kind of cunning that people have used to get followers towards Buddhism or Confucianism or these different schools of thought. And that because they're, therefore a kind of fraud, we don't have to think of them as sacrosanct.
And so Tominaga, who seems to be someone that you have as a kind of hero, is seemingly slightly anti-cunning. And then, when I look at the Greene Naftali website, they describe you as an artist who has a Homeric cunning to your practice. So, can you square that for me?
Paul Chan:
Sure. I think one thing to say is that perhaps the description of me being Homeric cunning is a pure PR stunt. It’s possible to say it that way so it's easy to dismiss. On the other hand, I think how you describe Tominaga is right. But I would only add that my feelings and my characterization of cunning involves more than the creative act of making something out of nothing but that my notion of cunning as I have learned it, is that cunning is itself a form of reason. And that in practicing cunning, you become more reasonable.
Let's say Charlotte, that you are a great thief. So let's say as Charlotte Burns being the great thief, you may carry yourself a certain way and have certain tools on you. And what if then on the street you see someone else who is carrying the same tools that carry themselves in the same way. You may be able to recognize them as a thief as well, right?
And so I think the notion is that, through practice, you come to learn a certain way of thinking, feeling, being—a certain methodology, perhaps—that you can recognize when someone else is deploying them.
And so maybe the next step of that is that, let's say for the sake of argument, aesthetics is the capacity or the methodology of making anything agreeable. That means to me that if you were genuine in your experience of art, you may be able to understand what makes anything agreeable, whether it's a painting or a car loan or a federal policy. Because car loans have an aesthetic to them, federal policy has an aesthetic to them, and that aesthetics is the capacity to make you believe that what they're saying is true, is reasonable and right and should be believed. That's an aesthetic, and our capacity to recognize aesthetics being deployed in things other than art, to me, may only come from a genuine exposure and experience to art itself. Because my claim is that a more genuine experience in art allows us to be more vigilant when aesthetics is being deployed in other arenas of our life and that truly is what I think cunning is. That's cunning in The Odyssey.
In Homer's The Odyssey, the main character, Odysseus, is described as polytropos, which in ancient Greek means “many ways.” The poet Stephen Mitchell translated the word polytropos to cunning for the first time in 2012. It's true Odysseus is a liar and a cheat, but he is also the most reasonable person in the story. He's the guy who says, “Don't go on that island because if you eat those cows you will anger the gods and we will be screwed.” He's the guy who realizes that we shouldn't mess with these people because they will fuck with us. In the story, he not only is the most creative person, but in a way, Homer intimates that his creativity is what gives him a better sense of reasoning. And I think that's an important aspect of the aesthetic experience in general.
Charlotte Burns:
If I'm synthesizing this correctly, it's sort of this idea that what art can do is prepare us to live better against systems that may not have our best interests at heart because we can recognize. We can be more reasonable. We can be better prepared. That the five senses, as we think of them, sit alongside another set of senses, our internal set of senses and that these things work together and that they empower reason, but that we have to have our senses alive in order for reason to be capable of being practiced.
You then wrote that “What stands between democracy and mass deception is the genuine experience of art because aesthetics heightens epistemic fitness if and when artists practice and experience with more than a return on investment or taste-making in mind.” I love this idea of epistemic fitness, of art, you know, being this workout essentially for our survival.
Paul Chan:
I think we generally know what's called the five big senses: seeing, smelling, tasting, touching. But those are not, certainly not our only senses that we possess. We possess also a suite of senses that are collectively called interoception and it's weird. It took up to the 1960s and ‘70s for human beings to acknowledge that we have sensory capacities inside us. Before, we just took Aristotle on face value that we only had five senses. Our senses are called Aristotelian senses because Aristotle came up with them and we've kept with them for thousands of years.
The notion that we have sensory capacity inside our bodies. Hunger is considered a sense. That's just common experience. We feel hungry. Our capacity to tell how much oxygen is in our body is a sense. Our capacity to tell our heart rate is a sense. Proprioception is our capacity to tell where our limbs are even though we don't see them. These senses collectively help to give us a sense of what is happening inside us.
And so it must be these senses connected to our Aristotelian senses that truly give us a greater picture of our situation. And as a consequence of that, and as an artist who's interested in experiences, it must be that aesthetics—as a methodology or a theoretical, conceptual, perhaps even an emotional framework for understanding what is agreeable—aesthetics must also touch upon those senses as well. For me, understanding interoception and other things that I've learned and admired over the years have given me a kind of peculiar picture of what art is and what art can be.
To me, it's like a whole new perspective in seeing things. And I think it dovetails nicely into the notions of cunning and art, insofar as in our common experience, I think, Charlotte, that when we, when we meet someone that we find incredibly uncomfortable or perhaps a creeper, we may not see it right away, but we can certainly feel it. And who knows what that is, right?
I'm just trying to make sense of the world like everyone else.
Charlotte Burns:
We're living in a moment when lots of authorities are being questioned and the power of institutions is fraught. Whether that's the role of media, whether that's institutions like museums or governments or monarchies, a lot of that has been decentralized, in a way because of the internet, but also is consolidated at the same time.
Bitcoin and blockchain are two separate things. Do you still think that there is the promise of something else there in the same way you did, you know, 10 or 15 years ago?
Paul Chan:
I first knew about Bitcoin in 2010. And I didn't actually think much of it when I first learned about it. I was actually interested in the Silk Road. Do you remember the Silk Road, Charlotte?
Charlotte Burns:
Yeah. I was really fascinated that you were interested in that. And the dark web, you wanted to sell things on the dark web and reach new audiences, reach people beyond typical art and culture, right? Is that what was going on?
Paul Chan:
Yeah, in 2010, that's when I started Badlands. And as someone who's never run a business before, I absolutely had no idea what I was doing. You know, I literally bought a book called Small Business for Dummies, and I thought I could learn from that way. And I started Badlands out of my studio. And one of the ambitions of Badlands was to be the first serious e-book art book publisher because, at the time, e-books were in the ascent, and it was cheap to make e-books as opposed to spending thousands of dollars making paperback books that no one will buy and will sit in my studio for years and years, in perpetuity, probably.
So we focused on e-books, but I was also very curious about what other ways we can distribute our books. And one of them was the dark web, literally an alternative internet. And the Silk Road was a website on the dark web that was notorious as being one of the most robust marketplaces for people to buy and sell goods. And so I wanted Badlands to be a vendor on the Silk Road. But in order for you to be on the Silk Road, you had to use Bitcoin. You couldn't accept USD or Visa on the Silk Road. They only accepted and used Bitcoin, and so I thought, what is Bitcoin? We actually never ended up being a vendor of the Silk Road, but I think we kept up with Bitcoin and in 2011 became, I think, the first art book publisher to accept Bitcoin payment for works and books, which no one ever took us on up on until 2017.
Crypto has certainly changed since 2010. And I'm not part of the crypto space enough to really have anything concrete or salient to say about where it's going. I do know that it hasn't left. And for me personally, I really do differentiate Bitcoin with crypto, Bitcoin being the first cryptocurrency. It’s also qualitatively different than the other cryptocurrencies that have come, and so for me, Bitcoin is just, among other things, a remarkable story about an anonymous inventor who invented something that still exists, that has had such an outsized influence on how we live in the contemporary world.
I'm not aware of a technological invention that has not been hacked, and that has had that such an outside influence that nations are now thinking of doing it. I just think it's a remarkable story. For me as a publisher or as a reformed publisher, or maybe a recovering publisher, I find it fascinating to think about the blockchain as a form of publishing because that's what it really is. The blockchain is essentially an open database so that anyone can write or read it. That's what it is. And so if you take the notion that publishing is simply the act of making information public, regardless of medium, then the blockchain really is just a kind of evolution of what is possible as publishing. And so that's how I thought of it and continue to think about it and continue to develop peculiar things quietly, secretly on my end to sort of make that a reality for me.
Charlotte Burns:
Make that a reality for you in what way?
Paul Chan:
Since sort of the transition of Badlands from it having an office and having a staff, and sort of folding, folding the work, is that I had enough time to really delve into the technologies of things that I'm interested in.
One of the other reasons why I stopped making work is that my work before 2008, 2009 was so sort of entwined with technology, video projections, right? Animations, the look of it, how it was produced, how it was presented. Along with reaching what I call peak screen, where we're so tired of looking at screens that we can't bear to look at it anymore, I think maybe I also reached a kind of peak technology that I felt like technology as a field wasn't interesting.
Back then, the technology that was on the ascent was like social media and apps and sort of the development of the web as a kind of service. And it wasn't interesting. It just was kind of boring and so I kind of left. But around 2015, 2016, to me, particular kinds of technology became interesting again.
Charlotte Burns:
Which kinds?
Paul Chan:
Well, you've got machine learning, you've got the development of blockchains, and maybe it's those two. It's the rise and the golden age of AI in 2015, 2016, and the sort of maturation of Bitcoin, not only as a technology but as a platform for other things, like other cryptocurrencies and other technologies that play with fintech, financial technology.
I'm not a technologist. I'm not a developer. I'm not a programmer. I may be nothing. But the best part about being nothing is that everything is up for grabs. I have no domain to protect and so I can go in and out of them as I please, and no one's wiser for it.
Charlotte Burns:
When you're experimenting in these more secret capacities, do you have a sense of ultimately making those things public—producing a body of work or producing a book? Because I know that part of the issue in 2008 was production, and then you became a book producer and publisher, and now you are producing work again. It feels like there's always a tension between product and the other forms of creative act. And so do you envision some of these forays into technology now that you're doing resulting in a production, or is it more that the creative act itself is enriching?
Paul Chan:
I don't know is the truth. For instance, I just wrote an essay that'll come out in May, and the essay is called, “Sympathy for the Devil in the Machine,” and it's an essay about my experience of creating what I call a self-portrait of me using GPT-3, which is a variant of the chat GPT produced by OpenAI.
OpenAI is the company that has been innovating in what's called natural language processing in the NLP space and they have arguably one of the largest LLMs out there. LLM stands for large language model, and it's these models that allow one to generate text using machine learning frameworks that can sound human.
All I know is that I'm curious to know what it can do for artists, but I'm not willing to work with software engineers or developers to do it, like partner with Google or MIT because in my experience, working with technologists in art projects is a terrible experience.
And so my only choice is to learn it on my own. When you do that, you sort of set your own time frame and you make your own mistakes, and those mistakes lead you elsewhere. And I think that's part of the pleasure of it, you know?
Like you talked about earlier, about how you wanted to talk about value and pleasure and maybe one way to talk about pleasure is a capacity to control our own time. Time may be the only non-human thing I really care about losing. I can lose everything. I think I've lost everything. I've lost everything. I'm willing to lose it all. I'm not willing to lose time.
And so the capacity to control my own time to do things like learn linear algebra so that I can more adeptly do programming in machine learning or learn enough JavaScript to do a database of my own work or learn differential calculus so I truly understand what a gradient and a derivative is insofar as machine learning frameworks use those to statistically understand what the next word ought to be in a sentence.
They may not lead to anything. What they ultimately lead to is my sense of my own time, and that to me, is more precious than anything else.
Charlotte Burns:
I think that's really interesting because as I was preparing for this interview, one of my questions was how did art alienate itself? I've was thinking about it in this series a little bit, is this idea of how we talk about art. The ways in which we've talked about art for as long as I've been a person working in the arts have been around the price of art, the value of it monetarily, or around the sort of social good of art. You know, if you think of Tate Modern opening in the UK, it was a massive moment where we talked about art for all. If you ever went to an Armory [Show] art fair, you would hear Mike Bloomberg talking about the economic impact of the arts upon the City of New York with all the people working and the money coming in and the hotel stays. I was talking to someone in a big foundation the other day who was saying that they had asked artists to nominate institutions that were really meaningful for artists, and they were really surprised by how few museums were on that list.
I was thinking about that and don't really know the answer, but something to do with that circus that you talked about and using languages that maybe constrained art or took away the time or the inefficiency of it. Art was meant to do something, and in a certain way that we could put a metric on and I'm not sure that it's worked.
That’s what I was thinking about art and time and freedom when I was reading your book. You said, “Art is a field of endeavor that historically has tolerated the act of making something out of nothing and that it's not so much what's left behind by that act for you, but those ways of thinking and making that can be admirable.”
Paul Chan:
I got you. I feel the spirit of what you're saying. What struck me as you were talking about how artists and nominating institutions, that so few museums showed up on the list. It reminds me of an experience I had for the last couple of years, actually. I've been on an artist council at the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, run by Kathy Halbrech, and this is a council consisting of 13 or 14 artists who help the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation give away money.
And one of the interesting experiences about the group is there are arts spaces and groups or entities that we've given away money to, but there's also a wide array of other groups that we've given money to: advocacy for housing, advocacy to help with the problem with desert islands in different places; indigenous rights; voting rights; advocacy groups for mental healthcare, not only for artists, for others.
And I think how we characterize the reason for the kind of spectrum of spaces, as opposed to just focusing on art spaces, is that working artists make better art when our civil society works better. That artists aren't any different than you or your neighbor or my neighbors. We're human beings and it just happens that we make art. But as a person who makes art, we need access to better healthcare. We need access to more equitable housing. We need a civil society that works better for more people than not, because our argument is, if it works better, we make better work.
So supporting those kinds of institutions, those endeavors, I think uplifts art insofar as we know what underwrites the production of art, are working artists and working artists need better healthcare, need a kind of judicial system that works, that is equitable. What I would say as a maker is that my experience with art has taught me that in genuine experiences with art, I can discern more ably the aesthetic qualities that make anything agreeable.
And so, I don't know if this is true, but my claim is that if you have a genuinely serious experience in art over time, that you will be able to tell a good car loan from a bad one. That a bad car loan will have the kind of aesthetic qualities that will want you to believe that it is a good car loan and that only someone with a genuine experience of art and only someone who has an in-depth sort of experience with aesthetics, right—the capacity to make something persuadable or agreeable, regardless of what it is—will be able to tell, will see the telltale signs of the ways in which the contract is written or designed to convince you that it's worth doing. And so you'll be more likely than someone else with no experience in art to say, this doesn't smell right. This doesn't look right. And my suggestion is that you only get that experience if you go see a Chris Marker film or a sculpture by Iza Genzken or a painting by X.
I don't know if it's true, it's a theory. It may be a terrible one, but I like it because it gives me a new reason, it gives me a renewed purpose of what art can be.
Charlotte Burns:
Did you need that new purpose? You said you felt like you'd lost everything and I read in the Star Tribune that Badlands bankrupted you. Have you experienced that as a grief? Are you going through a phase of renewal now? Where are you in that process of loss?
Paul Chan:
[Laughs] Oh, that's a great question. Where am I in the process of loss? I think we're always losing. You ever read that, Charlotte, you know that great essay by Anna Freud on losing and being lost? Have you ever read that? It’s beautiful.
Charlotte Burns:
I probably lost it.
[Laughter]
Paul Chan:
Yeah. I think I've lost it too. I'm gonna have to find it again. I love that essay. I've lost as much as anyone else has. No more, no less. But I don't grieve it. You know? I am… how would I describe myself? This is how I describe it. I believe in science. I believe the world is round. I believe that the earth revolves around the sun, right? I believe that we are multicellular beings. And I believe in Newton's law of energy conservation.
Newton's law of conservation is that mass equals energy. That energy in a closed system, energy in a closed system is never lost, it only changes right in form, right? So energy turns into mass, mass into energy, but no energy's lost. So I think, to completely misuse Newton, I suggest that any loss that we feel may be a kind of game, if you are willing to see it as a transformation, I suppose.
So, I don't wish for anyone to go bankrupt. I certainly didn't want to go bankrupt. But I loved every experience. I loved the whole time of going into bankruptcy. It was worth it working with the young artists and writers. It was worth it putting out books that were accessible while being—hopefully—culturally, intellectually sophisticated. It was worth it to make books that people could afford, $12.95, $11.95, as opposed to artist monographs that are $60, $70, that weigh 75 pounds. It was worth it.
And so the loss, I don't really think about as much as what I gained from it. And maybe this is my way of dealing with it. But I don't know how you gain something unless you lose something else. I don't know how that works. I don't know what it means to only win. I don't know what it means to only gain. And it strikes me that people who want to only gain are people who Marx called primitive accumulationists.
Charlotte Burns:
I really like that. I was talking to my daughter the other night. She was really sad about something, which she's not usually, she's a very happy child. I was like, when you have these moments, it's just like, I’d seen a picture of a heartbeat, it's just like that. It goes up and it goes down and that's how you know. And that's what it's gonna be forever. It's gonna go up and then it's gonna go down and that's just what your heart will do. And that will also be the landscape of everything that comes from your heart.
You talked about this idea of transformation a little bit and something I was reading today…
Paul Chan:
Wait, can I just say one thing after that? I think that's great. What I empathize about it is the feeling as a parent that you want to give your daughter a different way of seeing it, which is very important. And perhaps another way of describing what I've been calling cunning is that, just simply another way of describing something so that the choices that are given or self-evident are not the only ones available, because truly that's what the creative act is, to me. Giving oneself or others choices where none are self-evident or given. Apart from that, to cultivate a capacity for that, to me, would mean cultivating and deepening our sensory awareness of the things around us and also within us.
And who knows what makes us sad or depressed. There's an infinite number of reasons but it seems to me that a capacity to reflect upon what it is that saddens us or depresses us in a way that speaks to an accounting that we feel up to is one of the ways in which we can pull ourselves out of it. When it's a fog of depression or a fog of sadness, one of the reasons why it feels so debilitating is because we can't pinpoint what it is. I'm not saying a deepening of sensory capacities can pinpoint it, but it may be possible to at least give it shape and in giving it shape, we have more of a chance of describing it. And in describing it, perhaps there's a way of coming out of it.
Charlotte Burns:
I think it makes a lot of sense what you're saying. There's something about art that is about ideas and is about being able to think and reason beyond the systems that you are in. There is a creative space that you step into. And something about it is that very physical experience of seeing something. I don't think I understood Minimalism when I read about it until I went to Dia and I stood in front of those [Gerhard] Richter mirror paintings, and I was like, why do I always stand to the left? You have to approach things head on. And I realized I should move into life more directly, rather than obliquely, through Richter.
Paul Chan:
See that's interesting, right? That to me connects to the notion that to see something in person is to engage all the sensory capacities.
But IRL [in real life] experience with art are truly, at its best, engages the whole of us in a way that makes us feel a little wholer. I think if one were to engage in it or see it that way, and it doesn't come from mediated technologies. I'm not a leadite, you know, I think we need technology. Do we need technology? I don't know. I'm agnostic about it, but I do know that I believe that experiences like art are at its best when they're fully embodied.
Charlotte Burns:
You talked about writing being a full-bodied experience and also this idea of the glimpses of what you learn, you know, that maybe it's not important to remember everything, but the things that fall away are the spaces that leave the gaps for, you know, the next inventor of Bitcoin to put all of those things together and create something totally new.
Paul Chan:
Oh, see, now Charlotte, we have to really find that essay on losing and being lost by Anna Freud.
Charlotte Burns:
We're gonna have to do. We'll have to find it.
[Laughter]
Part of this makes me think about fetishes. You said in an interview that you had a foot fetish but I was thinking that your work is almost deliberately anti-fetish. That you produce digital books when art books can fetch so much money, that your work has become further and further away from being material. It's now work made largely out of air when the art market’s in an all-time high for objects, for 2D objects specifically. And also this idea of rejecting the fetishizing of trauma via images. You broke sanctions to go and visit Baghdad and you filmed Iraqi citizens dancing and singing in the face of the impending Gulf War. You refused to put out images of conflict and trauma post-Katrina. You staged Waiting for Godot in the ninth ward, which had been very badly damaged by the floods. You refused the mediation of crisis as image at all and so it seems like a lot of your work is moving away from that idea of fetish.
Paul Chan:
I don't know if I would characterize it under the rubric of fetish. What I would say is that we are shaped as much by what we say no to as what we say yes to. I am a big fan of people who say no. I'm a big fan of quitters. The first book that I published at Badlands after my own stuff was Yvonne Rainer's first book of poetry. Yvonne is a national treasurer and began her career as a choreographer but quit and said, I'm done, and became a filmmaker.
All those instances that you point out is really just… I don't know if I think of it in terms of fetish as much as thinking about what it means to say, “I prefer not to.” It's again, the loss and gain thing. What do you lose and what do you gain? Is it possible to redescribe them so the loss is in fact a gain and perhaps the gain is the loss. I mean, it's a vertiginous way of thinking and I don't recommend it to anyone. It's a terrible way to think. It's really awful. But maybe the only saving grace is that one becomes more comfortable with uncertainty and unpredictability, and to not see those things as only threatening, that perhaps we can think of them in ways other than merely threatening.
Charlotte Burns:
Does that work for you? Do you see those things now? Are you more comfortable with uncertainty?
Paul Chan:
I haven't lived a peripatetic life, but I've moved around a lot and so I've had as much uncertainty in my life as anyone else, I suppose. What's interesting is that my experience of art has encouraged me and gave me permission to think about uncertainty in different ways. Certainly not as a threat. Certainly as perhaps something that could be of value and perhaps could lead to something even better. It can certainly lead to something worse. I mean, I've made terrible works, arguably, it's all terrible. But I think I can't say that I've been attracted to certainty a lot.
Charlotte Burns:
You said at the top of this show that one of your ambitions was to live, which is a serious thing. You were diagnosed with very severe asthma, when you were young. Your mother was told to plan your funeral, that you had a 10% chance of surviving, and the family left Hong Kong to escape the air pollution to move to Iowa and Nebraska.
And you've said that you think about the body a lot when you're asthmatic and you think about breathing. So it's funny to use air as a medium, which you now do with the works that you produce, the breathers, these wonderful creations that exist between sculpture and mobiles and moving image.
If you're familiar with the American landscape of car dealerships, you've probably seen these sky dancers, tube men, clothes for spirits, as your work has been described, and you've sort of repurposed that idea and powered these creations by industrial fans and using different fabrics, and one of the works you created, you said is the closest thing you've made to a self-portrait, and it's the sort of movement of an asthmatic attack.
And when I look at these works, they're so moving. Also this idea of engaging bodily, that there's something you can view full on and it’s noisy and you can hear them, but they're also things that move slightly peripherally. I always think, like, what happens when the machines are turned off? They seem very much about mortality in a way and that human condition of struggling—and they're also kind of fun.
Can you talk a little bit about the breath of it all?
Paul Chan:
Should I talk about this? You know, I just had…[Laughs] Why not? We only live once, right? Wait, that's not true. We live every day. We only die once. In any case, I had a recent revelation. Should I say this revelation?
Charlotte Burns:
Yeah. You should.
Paul Chan:
Oh no. I am gonna save it. I'm gonna save it.
Charlotte Burns:
You're gonna save it or say it?
Paul Chan:
I'm gonna save it. Should I say it?
Charlotte Burns:
No! You can't do that to me. I'll be wondering for the rest of my life what it was.
Paul Chan:
Okay. But I think it's gonna trigger podcast warnings. So it might, this whole episode may be taken down for lewd, for rudeness or perversity.
Charlotte Burns:
It's fine. It's fine.
Paul Chan:
Okay. They revert between geometry and mimetic representations of animals and human beings. I like that interstitial space and it's very important. When I design them, I have to categorize certain parts of their bodies. The part that's connected to the fan I call the body, and then the parts that are around the body I call limbs. And then there is the opening, which I naturally assumed was the head.
But I recently sat down and had to do a kind of an audit of my patterns that I designed to make these. I'm doing a hardcore database that can work with machine learning techniques to heighten the experience of designing them on my own. And I had to really think about, well, is the body a body? Are these limbs? What do I call them? And it turns out that if I seriously look at it, the opening on the top is not a head. Because the opening at the top is where air comes out. And a head isn't a place where things come out. A head is a place where things go in. And so technically the fan is the nutrient and the part that connects the limb to the fan is the mouth, is the head, which means then that the opening here is the rectum.
And so I had to reconcile the fact that I'm making these things and they're literally assholes.
[Laughter]
Now, I don't know, I'm pretty sure this is not gonna sit well with anyone.
Charlotte Burns:
Literally. Literally not gonna sit, no.
Paul Chan:
But I thought, “Gosh, that's terrible. This is what I'm making.” But I'm too in it now. I enjoy myself too much making them. They're a sheer joy to make, and I think they have certainly renewed my interest in making work. And I think it really came from me finding myself in a situation where I had to truly come to terms with what I was willing and not willing to look at.
I'm very proud of the work that I did with screens, but I can't bear to look at screens to save my life. And so the real question is, well, what do I make? So for years, I didn't make anything, but I think it turned out, given time, if we give ourselves enough time and if we are honest enough with ourselves, for me, I realized that maybe all I cared about was the movement. And I think this is the sort of cascading and consequential sort of train of thought that led me to making breathers. That it allowed me, I gave myself permission to animate off of the screen.
So, you know, it's taken years, but I can comfortably say that I know how to shape air so that these things move in ways that I want them to, whether they're circling, whether they're drooping or the work that you're talking about, The Inhaler, it looks like a quasi human-like figure that is trying to hold up a towel but can barely do so because I find movement very moving.
Charlotte Burns:
No, it really is. It's helped you literally create your own world. Like you've seen things in your own way and now you've created this sort of universe of these figures who are about movement. But how much of that is about controlling that universe and how much of that is about grappling with breath and air and mortality?
Paul Chan:
Whoa, that's a lot. That's a lot, Charlotte. I would say that in general, living tends to be a little easier when you don't feel like you need to control it. I would say that when contingency is a friend, living becomes friendlier. That I think life lived with the notion that you must have absolute control for it to be any good is not a good way to live. Not only is it unreasonable, it is maybe sadistic. And the question is, who are you being sadistic to?
I don't feel like making breathers means I am controlling anything in particular. On its worst days, I feel like the world's worst seamstress and the world's worst pattern maker and the world's worst artist. On the better days, I feel like I'm on an adventure with material that has a life of its own. My capacity to negotiate with these materials so that they will allow me to make the thing that I see in my head—but only to the degree that they're willing to allow me based on the natural laws of the world—is as good as it gets.
It's a kind of synthesis between what I think I want and what the material's willing to be. It's never wholly from my mind but never wholly from the material. It's a sort of nether space, which I think is as good as it gets.
Charlotte Burns:
Paul, this show is called What If, and I feel like our conversation is that because so much of your art, I think, is probing into all of these spaces. I'm going to round us out with a couple of specific ‘what ifs.’
Do you have like a dream, if you had a magic wand, you would wave on the art world? Like “what if the art world,” or “what if art was…”
Paul Chan:
“What if the art world was dot, dot, dot?” Is that the question?
Charlotte Burns:
Yeah. Or “what if art was…”
Paul Chan:
Oh, that's two radically different questions.
Charlotte Burns:
Yeah. But you can choose which one you'd like.
Paul Chan:
[Laughter] Okay. You know, the funny thing is, and this could be my contrarian nature, nothing exactly comes to mind. [Laughter] Let me try it on. What if the art world was, what if art was more and less than a thing? Can I say that? I'll try that on. What if art was more and less than a thing? Full stop.
Charlotte Burns:
So what is the “what if” that keeps you up at night, and what's the one that motivates you to get out of bed in the morning?
Paul Chan:
Oh, whoa. Oh, the night's easy. What if the salmon I ate was bad? That usually keeps me up at night. It usually does keep me up at night.
What is it that gets me up in the morning? [Laughter] What if I forgot to turn off the heat in my studio? That's the one that wakes me up in the morning.
[Laughter]
That's a good one.
Charlotte Burns:
Do you often leave the heat on in the studio? You have a lot of fans in your studio. So…
Paul Chan:
Charlotte, I'm a terrible artist. I don't know how to run anything. A studio, a business, email. I can barely buy pants.
Charlotte Burns:
Paul, you shouldn't talk about yourself in this way. There is substance in what we say, as Tominaga wrote.
[Laughter]
Paul Chan:
That's so true. And my substance is inability to buy pants. I don't actually even know what my pants size is. Is it 28? Does that sound right? I don't even know.
Charlotte Burns:
It probably depends on the salmon.
Paul Chan:
I think so. I think so.
Charlotte Burns:
Depends on the salmon.
[Laughter]
Paul Chan:
I like that.
Charlotte Burns:
Paul, thank you so much for joining me today. This has truly been my pleasure.
Paul Chan:
Oh, it's been a lot of fun. It was great talking to you.
Charlotte Burns:
My enormous thanks to Paul Chan for some of the most interesting hours I’ve spent talking to anyone.
Next time, curator and choreographer, Rashida Bumbray, joins us to talk about some of her what ifs and share her performances…
Rashida Bumbray:
We really deserve spaces of experimentation, spaces of incubation. And that is sort of the ‘what if’; what if we actually had that? What if we actually had the resources, the space that would allow us to then push our imagination to its experimental lengths.
Join us then on The Art World: What If…?!
And in the meantime, you might like to listen to our friends over at Artnet.
Artnet Ad:
In a time of global upheaval, art provides an invaluable lens for understanding our change in society. I’m Andrew Goldstein, host of Artnet News’s The Art Angle podcast, a show dedicated to those places where the art world meets the real world bringing each week’s biggest stories down to earth. Join us for conversations with artists and thinkers, analysis and in-depth reports on the most pressing subjects.
Stay contemporary. Subscribe to The Art Angle wherever you get your podcasts.
Charlotte Burns:
Love that show. Definitely worth a listen.
Our podcast, The Art World: What If…?! is brought to you by Art&, the editorial platform created by Schwartzman&. The executive producer is Allan Schwartzman, who co-hosts the show together with me, Charlotte Burns of Studio Burns, which produces the series.