Interview

Momus wants us to imagine worlds different from our own. The Scottish artist, musician, and writer speculates on alternative realities that are flagrantly absurd yet grounded in an encyclopedic understanding of culture that only the most edifying bookworms could muscle: When I met him he wore a pink fuzzy eye patch but spoke with the breadth and calmness of a professor-type. In 2006, Momus played the role of the "unreliable tour guide" at the Whitney Biennial, parading around the exhibition with a bullhorn, telling viewers that a photograph of, say, Madonna, was actually a Mayan artifact. As a musician, Momus' career comprises over twenty albums, ranging in genre from post-punk to folk ballads and even electronic-pop. But it's with his hyper-literate lyrics that he builds castles in the air. In the 1991 song, "Michelin Man," he suggested a parallel life for the Michelin mascot as a blow-up doll. In the 1998 track, "Walter Carlos," he imagined transsexual female musician Wendy Carlos traveling back in time to marry pre-surgery Walter Carlos. Both Michelin and Carlos later threatened to sue. And now, after a years-long output of speculative ideas and observations through his blog, Click Opera, Momus is set to release not one, but two books, both expanding his unique form of satirical thinking and penchant for good taste and bad. The Book of Scotlands, coming out in late July through Sternberg Press, is a random sequence of 156 possibilities for what the country could be. Some of the possibilities are epithet-length sentences and conjectures, while others are longer theatrical dialogues or narratives where fictional characters develop alongside the fictional Scotlands. The Book of Jokes, his first novel due out in September through Dalkey Archive Press, presents the story of a family forced to live out its existence through jokes.

Interview sat down with Momus to discuss his two new titles, and everything else from reverse Orientalism to recession-design and cartoons.  


MATTHEW EVANS: The quotation on the front of your new book reads, "Every lie creates a parallel world, the world in which it is true." You like alternatives.

MOMUS: Well, Picasso said, "Art is the lie that tells the truth," and it's not a terribly radical statement. It's always been that you can tell truth through fiction. And this idea also comes from nuclear physics.

ME: In what sense?

M: Well, in the sense that for every reality there are many parallel, co-existing states.

ME: Because the physical world that we're accustomed to is not at all the physical reality discovered in the realm of physics?

M: Quantum physics says that there is an infinite number of possibilities and parallels to the one that we know, and every event is also played out in a parallel world. It's kind of a crazy idea, but someone called Saibal Mitra at the University of Amsterdam says that if you could back up your memory in case of a catastrophic event, you could actually revert to that back-up and find an alternative world in which the Earth didn't explode or collide with Mars. In The Book of Scotlands, I present a series of parallel Scotlands that aren't tied to the theories of quantum physics, but instead to the idea of delirious speculation. And if you look at the steps being taken towards Scottish independence right now, they're being dealt with politically in very dull and boring ways. So if you just feverishly speculate numbered but random Scotlands—because in the book, it's a random sequence of possibilities—you can imagine many ways in which different things might happen.

MORE »

Installation view of "The Devil," 2009. Courtesy September Gallery, Berlin

Not for over a century have painters headed for the hills to paint abstract landscapes and religious icons. But that's exactly what Berlin-based artist Carsten Fock has been doing recently, to remarkably contemporary ends. While other artists in a similar situation might appeal to our escapist impulses in a time of crisis, Fock's relationship to painting is grounded in a complicated exchange of dissent and fondness for the medium and its history. Previously, Fock covered entire canvases in all-black felt-pen hatch patterns as a rejection of painting in the spirit of Ad Reinhardt's monochrome "Last Paintings." However, instead of Reinhardt's attempt to lead the viewer to a visual neutral point, Fock's monochromatic works are an accumulation of varied detail in the rhythm of their hatch lines, and therefore suggest an almost painterly effect. Later, Fock, who grew up in Soviet East Germany, began working with collage and images from Western culture like the Chanel logo, American soldiers, or the red, white and blue itself, covering them with a simple coat of acrylic,  thereby treating painting for its superficial function. And now, Fock is dissolving much of his noncompliance with dowdy art practices in his solo show, "The Devil," at Berlin's September Gallery, where he presents a series of explosive new works—many of them paintings - of abstract, demonic landscapes and frenzied, expressionistic religious icons, echoing more maniac than minimalist, more Outsider provocation than insider strategy. But don't start imagining Fock as some anachronistic romantic, for he also reveals that behind even the purest artistic intentions is a taste of Pop.  


ME: We were just looking at your monochromatic felt-pen drawings of hatch patterns, which were some your first works, correct?

CF: Yes. I did them originally for my solo show at Jan Winkelmann Gallery called "Black."

ME: And they were made as a reaction against painting?

MORE »

When I first asked sculptor Kasia Fudakowski for an interview, she took me aside, "Do you want to do the deed with the work as witnesses, or more discreetly in a coffee shop?" Indeed, her irregular, animated works loom so vividly they look like they might be deft enough for a Q&A of their own. Fudakowski makes odd forms emerge from everyday objects: Tables, buckets, and walls are infused  with a personality that Pixar would esteem. Clean coats of lambent reds, yellows, and blacks seal off shapes made of plaster, wood, and stringent foam—forms that appear frozen, mid-ooze, along the floor, or in half-spurt above the viewers' heads. But Fudakowski's sculptures are more than simple, abstract gestures; they're actual characters that hint at an absurdist narrative and delineate cohesion where there would otherwise be meaningless clutter. These characters include, among others, harvested white asparagus, a reclined transvestite, a lonely fisherman, and a glum horse on its way to the knacker's yard. (LEFT: OPENING AT ZAK BRANICKA. PHOTO BY MATTHEW EVANS)

Interview sat down with Fudakowski (with the work as witnesses) on the occasion of her first solo show at Krakow/Berlin-based gallery Zak Branicka, "Gleaning the Gloss." She discussed Polish doughnuts and 1960s British comedy.    


MATTHEW EVANS: Kasia, you're half Polish, half British?

KASIA FUDAKOWSKI: Yes, but I grew up in England, and I spent one year and almost every holiday in Poland.

MORE »