KUNSTENAARS / ARTISTS
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Hans Theys
PostmortemisM
Conversation with Walter Swennen
- I recently read an interview with you in a real paper newspaper. In the middle of the interview, the author points out that you’re pretending not to hear a question.
Swennen: Either we spend a week talking about painting, or we say nothing. I read the article too. There are always a lot of things you’ve said that aren’t reported, so only generalities remain.
- Do you read newspapers?
Swennen: The titles.
- You don’t have a TV. Do you listen to the radio?
Swennen: I like it when people talk about painting on the radio.
- You rarely visit exhibitions.
Swennen: Last week I was at the seaside for a few days and someone took me to the museum in Ostend.
It’s a kind of warehouse, incredibly confusing. You never know where you are or where the exit is. So ugly. The lady at the counter told me the collection numbered eight thousand pieces. I saw two or three good Ensors and two works by Brusselmans. It’s a sad place; you don’t want to hang around. Last week I went
to Wiels to see Marcel Broodthaers’s Poèmes Industriels.
- And?
Swennen: There used to be postmodernism. With regard to Broodthaers we can now speak of postmortemism. In exhibitions like this one, absolutely nothing remains of his poetry.
- During our last meeting, you told me about an author who pointed out that the difference between an artist who sets a trend and his followers lies in the fact that the artist doesn’t know what he, she or they are going to do or where they’ll end up, but the followers do.
Swennen: Yes, the followers know what they have to do, the original artist doesn’t. No one could imagine Warhol’s work before it existed. Everyone was surprised by Pop Art in the sixties. We had grown up with Abstract Expressionism. Pop Art was something we were waiting for. It was very liberating. We had lived in a reality for which no artistic representation existed. Pop Art was the world’s massive return to a space previously occupied by abstraction. I saw it as a kind of landscaping with images, numbers, and letters.
- You said you weren’t involved with art between 1970 and 1980. May I relate this to a map of Ixelles you once drew for me, marking the locations of all the good cafés from that period?
Swennen: At the Sablon in Brussels, the graphic designer and activist Frans Pans ran a café called Het Vermiljoen. Late at night, at dawn, Marcel van Maele entered carrying a brown paper bag filled with oranges. “Long live humanity!” he shouted. And he gave everyone an orange. Then he went outside to peel one. He threw the peels around him while shouting, “Tsjip tsjip tsjip!” He often didn’t go home until the early hours. In those days, you’d find stacks of newspapers tied together on the sidewalk in front of every newsagent in the morning. Every morning he took a stack of these newspapers home. He used them to make very comfortable armchairs. That was a good time, even for unemployed people like me (laughs). A few days ago, I was chatting with my pharmacist when he suddenly said, “We have to admit we’ve exaggerated for thirty years; we’ve been living like crazy at the expense of the environment.” I replied, “Speak for yourself. I was unemployed during your thirty glorious years.” Of course, I heated myself with coal, but I never drank Coca-Cola.
- You were less privileged than some might suspect today. But we can’t say that anymore. What do you think of the new political correctness?
Swennen: Ah, young people! Even as a child, I couldn’t stand them. All terror of purity is scandalous. What’s the principle of censorship? You have a list of words, and if you see one of those words appear in
a text, you have to ban the text without even trying to understand it. It’s an aspect of neoliberal totalitarianism. I recently read a bit of Marx. We all learned what Marxism is at university, so to speak. But if you delve into his books, it becomes very comprehensive. His work is very rich, very concrete. Of course, I also came across a passage about painting, where he discusses the difference between design and execution. For me, those concepts are no longer relevant at all; there’s no point in distinguishing them. Hence the disqualification of the word ‘project’. Nothing interesting can come of it.
Montagne de Miel, 7 February 2022