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Dan Cameron

interviewed by Graham Coulter-Smith

Graham Coulter-Smith
Eyeline 07
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Dan Cameron is a leading New York critic who writes regularly for Flash Art. He is also a curator, and has recently curated a panoramic exhibition of New York postmodern art in Barcelona, plus the “Aperto” section of the Venice Biennale this year. Dan also sings for a rock band called Infra-Dig.

GRAHAM COULTER-SMITH
In your Flash Art article "Art and its Double" you speak about postmodernism as if it's a serious critique of society, but isn't it just concerned with a Post-Popist playfulness?1 

DAN CAMERON
No, I think the playfulness you're referring to is rooted in a state of ambivalence which an artist feels about the culture they participate in. Their work potentially becomes an act of signification, but it's wrapped around a hollow centre, and to me that signals a kind of despair or a kind of sadness about the state of the world today. You've also got a situation where artists are persevering not for the sake of a belief that they will at some point break through to some final core of truth, but rather that they will become a "multiplicity of voices", which is a Krugerian phrase. That the art work, once it's been launched into the world, just sort of floats around nebulously with these sort of points of reference; it can attach itself to any social or cultural situation that it wants, but is, in fact, specifically untethered. So that kind of play can really occur. But once you nail the work down in a certain situation you realise how the work is not equipped to stay there, it will never conform to a situation. Once you think you've nailed it... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline

Jenny Holzer, Selection from The Survival Series, May 1987. Project - Candlestick Park, San Francisco. Sponsored by Artspace, San Francisco. Photo: John Harding. Courtesy Barbara Gladstone Gallery, New York. 

Jenny Holzer, Selection from The Survival Series, May 1987. Project - Candlestick Park, San Francisco. Sponsored by Artspace, San Francisco. Photo: John Harding. Courtesy Barbara Gladstone Gallery, New York. 

Jenny Holzer, Selection from The Survival Series, 1986. Spectacolor Board Times Square, New York. Courtesy Barbara Gladstone Gallery, New York. 

Jenny Holzer, Selection from The Survival Series, 1986. Spectacolor Board Times Square, New York. Courtesy Barbara Gladstone Gallery, New York.