sphaleotas

Tate Modern: The Enemy Within

BBC Two, Sunday May 14, 2000.

A verbatim transcript.

I think... the... changes in science taking place now in our understandin’ of, erm, bacterial and viral forms of life... which spread thfw... through... contagion... and contamination is that... in fact we have to... reconfigure... or re-think... how we... conceive of these... germinal forms of life... so that... if you could apply that then to a relationship between the museum as an institution... and art, how can the museum adapt to... the... invasion of its body by these alien elements... these, erm, these viral infections and contaminations of avant-garde art.

[...]

It’s almost an impossible dream to fulfil, that you can actually domesticate, erm, viral contagion or con-contamination through developin’, erm, antibiotic resistance to it, because all you’re doin’ is in fact, erm, generatin’ the potential for these, errrr, bacteria and viruses to actually become more and more intelligent in terms of how they devise new strategies of invasion and penetration so in fact you’re not, erm, solvin’ a problem at all, you’re just exacerbatin’ the eventual, errrr, takeover of the body by these viruses and bacteria. So I think contemporary artists are perhaps driven more and more to come up with more extreme forms of shock and surprise in order to keep... on trying to... run ahead of the museum, to keep trying to escape its essential logic of assimilation and domestication.

Posted by sphaleotas at March 1, 2005 12:03 AM