Who is art for and what defines its function? From an economical sense, works of art are least about their material form and all about their resell value. In a financial world full of increasing polarisations and disparities between the rich and the poor, the West and the East, a work of art can pass through various nations, hands and contexts without a stain on its surface. This system of import and export of culture is what artist Surasi Kusolwong questions and intends to make visible.
His work “Golden Ghost (Welcome Back the Spirits)”, part of the exhibition “Peace” at the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt shows open scavenging sites and pits full of textile waste. The viewer is asked to scavenge for value by sifting through the waste in search of six golden chains. The fabled term “finders keepers” is wistfully invoked through the installation’s instructions, though keepers here are value plunderers able to resell the work on the second market, crushing the artist to a mere scrawled signature on the work’s ebay CV. In today’s art world we see the reduction of art work’s meaning to mere curatorial tokens in mega-shows in Biennales and Documentas, which all function to assist the accelerating mechanisms of capitalism. So, works like Kusolowong’s could function as a necessary interlocutor to our current over-exposed state of contemporaneity. Below is a conversation on the origins of the project “Golden Ghost (Welcome Back the Spirits)” with the artist at the vernissage of Peace at the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt.
SLEEKThe work “Golden Ghost (Welcome Back the Spirits)”, 2017, is a follow up to “Golden Ghost (The Future Belongs to Ghosts)”, 2011, initially conceived for MoMA PS1. The emphasis in both these titles is on the spectral nature of the future that is constantly in flux due to financialisation and the unequal distribution of wealth, which place countries in crisis. How did the series start and how has it shifted?
Surasi Kusolwong: The project started when the major investment bank like Lehman Brothers went bankrupt in 2008. The big companies in New York closed down or were taken over because of the subprime lending and financial propriety collapse, and there was an immanent anxiety across the globe that the economy was going to melt down. At that time, I was working on the new project for the Volta New York. The world financial crisis made me think back to my other on-going project “Market” that started since 1998 and that also criticises the economy and value system, both of the everyday market and the art market.
Surasi Kusolwong, (Welcome Back The Spirits), 2017, gold necklaces hidden in industrial thread waste, benches and title on mirror, detail, © Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt 2017, photo: Neven Allgeier
With this in mind, I extend my idea reflecting on the economy and value again, but in a reverse way. For this “Golden Ghost” project, I use the real gold for its high given value, the precious materials for all cultures. The lucky persons who could find the gold works would be very happy especially during the world’s tense climate and situation. Maybe, this is another way what art can really give; the feeling that you are lucky, the feeling of hope and positive future with full of spirits. But the work also has its own heavy critical part. It emphasises peripheries. I use the cotton textile waste from Canada and Texas to build up the installation, the work spoke about the history of cotton field and slave trade, the way we build our economy and global system. I call my tons of threadwaste floor as the meltdown landscape because economically we produce a lot of junk and we have to look at that carefully and ask why we produce so much. It’s a criticism of the capitalist society and art plays a role in that. The art world also produces a lot of junk; junk in your mind, junk in your head, junk in physical production. So, I started to think in this difficult world economic situation, how my work could step further and shift with good function? If this junk waste taken from factories ends up in the art world, it can be more useful, more beautiful and clean.
Why did you choose textile waste?
Textile, the material itself is the second skin of our body. The textile is one of the earliest types of business. Its history connects to the Silk Road and people from different cultures. Even in the United States, this was one of the first major industries in terms of cotton that fuelled the US creating its market. This material has in itself many layers and aspects of history, socio-politics and economics.
It started a system of import and exporting.
Exactly, trading in order to yield a surplus value. I mean art is the same thing, it adds surplus value, but in my work, I do the opposite. You can see from my “Market” project, I create a fixed flat price like $1, €1, £1, ¥100 or other currencies for every object sold in my installation. It is much lower than the real price of the real market. So, it is an economics of loss because I end up paying more for the goods than I sell. In “Golden Ghost”, the loss is even greater because I hide the real gold that has a real value of its own materials in the meltdown yarn landscape and give to visitors who can find and can have them for free; nothing for me to gain, except spirit and memory.
Surasi Kusolwong “Golden Ghost (The Future Belongs to Ghosts)” 2011
Surasi Kusolwong “Golden Ghost (The Future Belongs to Ghosts)” 2011
In the title, there is a strong metaphysical invocation with “Golden Ghost (Welcome Back the Spirits)”. This golden ghost is also the text written on the necklaces but one could also read it as golden host. It seems a curious connection with the work’s strong economic character.
In 1953, Marcel Duchamp wrote A Guest + a Host = a Ghost. He liked to make word plays. I’m also interested in playing with the words and their meanings and their connection to value. When the visitors find the gold works, they receive a jewel box with my signature and running edition number. They get gold, and at the same time, a work of art. Then questions arise, can they sell it and what is best to sell it as: a work of art or as gold itself? In Korea, the audience wrote to me and asked “Can I sell it as your artwork?” And I answered “It’s your decision, not mine”. I’m a host inviting you to come into my work. Whatever value you will give to my work depends on you alone. You use your ghost, your spirit, to evaluate my work.
On your work, it has been written that you use Thai practices of “cheerfulness and hospitality”; how do you see hospitality unfolding in “Golden Ghost (Welcome Back the Spirits)”? Is the polarity between Thai-ness and German-ness entrenched within your articulation of hospitality?
I think hospitality is part of our society, our social value. Though you may feel it stronger in some cultures than others, but it is still there in every society, every culture. I’m not sure that it can be framed as Thai-ness. For my generation, and for me especially, hospitality is quite an important human trait. It may appear strongly in my works. My concern is much less with art objects, but much more with the space of human relationship. The work is expressing the meaning of being a host. To host someone is to accept them.
I think depending on where one is embedded within culture, this notion can be very different and as an artist, since you are between both countries, had lived in Germany as well, you already have a hybridisation. It is already liminal or ghostly.
I used to live in Germany for s short period. So I could not claim that I understand German society well. But if it has any concern to my perception, I think it shows itself most in my “Happy Berlin (Free Massage)” for the Berlin Biennale in 2001 that visitors could have an hour of free massage service from Thai professional masseurs who live in Frankfurt.
There’s also an exotic function of what it means to be a Thai professional worker in a western context.
I once read from NU, the Scandinavian art magazine, the review was on my “Free Massage” for 2nd Berlin Biennale that normally Germans do not like other people to touch their bodies. My work was even more extreme because the masseurs were the foreign people from Thailand. In the calm atmosphere of this work, you could see German audiences lying down in the colorful and warm welcoming space, enjoying the touching of the masseurs and the serenity of the moments. It wouldn’t happen easily in the day to day life situation because we all naturally carry some kinds of attitudes or prejudices or incomplete understandings. My Massage piece opens up this kind of hospitality power for human beings.
Right, you are inviting the viewer into a type of performative situation, which is not a normative experience in the museum. It is one that is something more intimate. Your work follows a lineage of artists such as Claes Oldenburg and David Hammons who produced a commerce that was based upon replication but also hospitality. In Claes Oldenburg’s seminal work “The Store”, 1961, he casts commodities around him in plaster and set up store front with their pure artifices. What is the function of hospitality in this work or how are its frameworks redefined?
What I share with Oldenburg and Hammons is the similar approach of criticising the capitalist system and the art market system. Oldenburg’s “Store” is a kind of unified production and management; he produced, exhibited, sold his products by himself, all happening in one place. It is an independence from the art market and an overlapping between the art system and the everyday life culture. He also wrote once that he doesn’t concern himself with the idea, but more the experience. In the case of Hammons, his Snow Ball piece in the street is radical irony for the art market especially when the snowballs melt down, and at the same time acutely reflecting the issue of race — whiteness made by the black artist. My works are also in this kind of radical hospitality.
Surasi Kusolwong, (Welcome Back The Spirits), 2017, gold necklaces hidden in industrial thread waste, benches and title on mirror, detail, © Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt 2017, photo: Neven Allgeier
Lawrence Weiner also once wrote a postcard in 1979 to an artist Goran Djordjevic, saying that “when an artist no longer makes art they can no longer function as an artist but as a concerned citizen. The concerned citizen at the same time must work at their work & concern themselves with the level of the culture…”. Art should be around art, at least an artist should make a work of art.
You are suggesting that art should have a material function and manifest itself in a way.
Art is a kind of tool and material. It is a tool that has a certain language, like poetry, even if it is invisible. I really try to go as close to reality as possible even it is not really “real”. That is why I hide the gold works secretly in Central Park, New York, or, for this show, in Bockenheimer Anlage, a park on the periphery of Frankfurt. It is important for me to expand my Golden Ghost without putting much on aesthetic weight, but rather on spirits of the nature and the work itself. In geographical aspect, I want to mark the outermost of Frankfurt, both to extend the physical space of my work and to touch that peripheral line of the past which soon would be disappeared, since now with the expansion of the city and the park has been consumed by it. And in cultural and social aspects, the gold works left out there in reality, I mean the space outside the art museum, are for everyone who would find them by chance. For me, not everybody goes to the museum because art is like a nonsense matter for them. But gold is not nonsense for everyone because of its real high value that people can sell, exchange or keep for future wealth.
It can be compared to the mirror you have in the installation that suggests a liminality—also alchemy.
Yes, the mirror is the fourth dimension. It helps to extend and open up the space. But it is a space that you physically cannot enter.
Also the ghostly dimension.
Yes. Through the mirror you suddenly can see yourself in my space. Without the mirror, you can see only the space, but not yourself.
The mirror forces one to see oneself—a type of realism. The activity the viewer is doing is also a savaging, a type of laboring in an economic sense. This laboring seems to be a stand-in for forces of capitalism.
In social situation there are always divisions of labor—of working for money, for something else other than money, or doing nothing. Some people have to work hard but get little money. Some prefer doing less and get more money. Some decide to do more and even go for more money. Some do the least but gain the most. Or some decide to do nothing and not even use money. There is no sensible reason with the system of money. It’s the same in my work, there is no sensible reason who is going to have the luck. Visitors have to make a choice on their own and search for it. In this sense, the museum is a perfect transition for my work because my work itself never stays long, whether in the museum or even in the park. Capitalist should not be the only machine to generate profits or benefits in the society. Our lives can have more deeper meaning than that.
It’s like a magical manipulation of the market—inflation.
That’s a good metaphor.
Surasi Kusolwong, “Peace” is at Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt until 24 September 2017