Jürgen Roth: The Installation, „Contemporary Art II - from the Szuper Gallery Collection", is comprised of selected videos, pictures, and text dealing with Art & Architecture. Beyond that the installation deals with the construction of a mobile Szuper Gallery, for which you held an Architecture contest.

Szuper Gallery: In this installation we displayed a variety of presentations and attitudes with a very particular relationship to Art & Architecture. It serves as a guide to show us how a mobile Szuper Gallery would look, and what sorts of things it should contain. In a way, the installation is a model, a miniature presentation of a social possibility, which is very different from the overwhelming forms of persuasion and regulations surround us today. A model is always smaller than the real space for which its proposals are submitted. It must be small, in order to design a picture of a temporary, possible future that could be perceived as a useful experimental experience.

JR: In addition to other examples of architecture, there is a picture of a computer-aided sketch by Frank Gehry. Gehry as representative of contemporary architecture?

SG: As he was designing the Bilbao Museum, Gehry was working with the idea of a wandering circus. The museum was supposed to look like a collection of circus tents all crammed together. But in the actual, technically complicated fulfillment of the structure, this original idea is barely detectable. It´s no secret that this computer technology was developed by the military to create fighter jet planes. Perhaps this is why Gehry experiments so much with falling pieces of cloth, frozen in space. We took up this principle in our video, „circus artists under the big top: clueless and -other business strategies".

JR: Gehry’s studies help him to find unusual forms for his architecture. A red cloth appears in your video over and over again. What sorts of shapes emerged, and in what ways were you able to translate them into reality?

SG: For instance, the sign of the English pound.

JR: That sounds a bit ironic.

SG: It´s not ironic. The sign of the English pound doesn’t say anything about its contents. Money as such has no way of expressing itself. That’s why money is always on the lookout for a suitable aesthetic form. The English pound is a solid currency, you can use it to buy guns or art. You can build a house, support humanitarian charities, or use it to support artistic projects. For an exhibition at the ICA, a private sponsor gave us 5.000 English pounds. Our intention was to spend the day buying and selling stocks on the internet for the duration of the exhibition. At the end, we would split the profits 50/50 with the sponsor. To lose most of the money had not been our original intention. But the sponsor later convinced himself that we went into the project from the beginning, fully intending to basically, in effect, throw all his money right out the window. He did not understand the piece. He wanted to make money with art.

JR: How would you define your position on money?

SG: Hm, that’s hard to say. There’s a great line from Groucho in the first Marx Brothers movie The Cocoanuts: „Money makes you happy, but happy makes you no money." Do you want my money, my money will make you happy, but happy makes me no money.

JR: And the architecture model as cream pie was not meant as an ironic poke at contemporary Museum architecture either, I suppose.

SG: Ever since the Slapstick films of the 20’s, cream pies have been well known as „soft-weapons" against particular representatives or targets. When Jean-Luc Godard was struck in the face by a cream pie thrown by Noel Godin, he remained cool and calm at first; then very slowly removed his cigar from his mouth and proceeded to lick the cream from it. It was a homage to the filent films. The first „Pie Fight" in Germany took place in Hanover in 1968. Fritz Teufel and some others had wanted to enter a café but the owner refused them entry, calling the police. So, at that point, Fritz Teufel & Co. served themselves from the pie display case and defended their right to remain. Our cream pies themselves serve to represent museums and other institutions concerned with art, as for instance, the Beck’s House in Bremen. Beck’s is well known as an active sponsor of the arts, especially in England.

JR: The cream pie as weapon against particular representatives and at the same time representing something themselves?

SG: That complies in a certain way with the Szuper Gallery strategy, to define itself as an institution and then to collaborate with other institutions.

JR: And then to throw a cream pie?

SG: Eventually we will throw one, but usually we do not throw cream pies, we make them, we give them a particular form. In the fullness of time they fall together all by themselves.

JR: So it is the time-factor that destroys the representation, as in the case of some works from the Fluxus Group where the materials were chosen for their transitoriness; it was planned that they would fall apart. And now the restorers are faced with difficulties.

SG: The example of the Fluxus works shows us that you cannot depend on the time factor. The manipulation of the pieces is no longer in the interest of the artists. It has to do with the art market. The pieces are preserved and conserved like stuffed animals, and displayed in museums. They are given a totally new content. Naturally things change over time, but one never knows in which direction. You can see that in the case of Otto Schily. The consistency and content of our cream pies is very important to us.

JR: So, what is the consistency of your cream pies?

SG: A lot of cream on the outside, holes and air space in the middle, with plenty of room leftover for new content and movement.

JR: In your installation, „Contemporary Art II" there is a photo of Bill Gates with pie in the face.

SG: Bill Gates represents the very complex connections between Money, Politics, Culture, and the Media. Apart from his wealth, he is not only the head of Microsoft, but also the owner of one of the largest photo-archives in the world, called Corbis. He is at this moment having a high-tech mausoleum constructed 70 meters under the earth to house this archive and protect it for eternity from attack by hostile forces. Beyond that he is the owner of a major art collection, and has secured the electronic rights to the art collections of important institutions such as, the London National Gallery, the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. This interplay of computer-technology and the owning picture rights has a definite effect upon the construction of Reality and History.
Bill Gates himself entrenches behind his 80 million dollar fortress, but is nevertheless smacked in the face by a 20 dollar cream pie. That is another aspect of reality. With very modest means, you can still achieve effective results.

JR: Did Bill Gates also buy the rights for this picture?

SG: Maybe, but it is available all over the Internet.

JR: We’ve talked about the consistency of your cream pies, what is the consistency of Szuper Gallery?

SG: Szuper Gallery is simply a lie, an invention. But this invention has maintained itself in the most various of manifestations over the years: in publications, discussions, postcards, normal art objects, exhibitions… To talk about Szuper Gallery means to talk about analyzing the delusion. The usual galleries and their representatives present only one form of reality. To talk about Szuper Gallery means to talk about the conditions of reality. There is a thing called the Truth of Lies. This determines our consciousness. When an artwork exists under conditions of lies and delusion, is it still an artwork? We have no answer for that. A gallery, which is itself a delusion, has something to hide. The personal lie has a Freudian aspect. The personal gallery has to hide the real gallery.
Szuper Gallery makes the effort to steal from the official, real galleries and institutions, in order to give its lies more power and credibility, just as we used this answer to steal from Marcel Broodthaers’ Museé d´Art Moderne, Departément des Aigles.
It’s also important to discover whether a fictional gallery can cast a new light on the mechanism of art, artistic life, and society. With Szuper Gallery we ask the question, therefore it is not our job to come up with an answer.

JR: In the video installation „Venice" many gallerists are robbed.

SG: The video is based on a true story, which occurred in Venice in 1999. A group of clever con-men tricked more than a dozen galleries out of artworks worth millions. The trick was really quite simple: They rented a 17th century Pallazo and set themselves up as an art collector’s family. The entire setting was so believeable, that the gallerists walked in and turned over their very expensive picture, in exchange for a deposit slip. And with every picture that was received the scene became that much more convincing. The Pallazo was rented for only one week, with an invalid check.

JR: So, also a question of the mechanisms of art?

SG: Especially when you realize that the whole remained secret for a very long time, because none of the gallerists wanted to talk about it, for fear it would have a detrimental effect on business. Who knows what goes on in this basement or that one. The story has been going around for years, how Anina Nosei used to lock Basquiat in the basement and pump him full of drugs so he’d keep painting.

JR: The gallery as a cover for criminal activity is certainly an exception.

SG: In 1995 we were invited by the owner of Szuper Gallery, who had handled Easteuropean art up to that point, to take over the planning of the program. He had hoped this would stimulate business. However, what we didn’t realize, was that the gallery was being used in dubious ways by certain mafia-types for money-laundry. In addition to that, an attempt on the life of the President of the Ukraine was exposed. This was all due to the diligence of a German television journalist. After the police carried out a huge raid in classic style, we were interviewed about our work by a journalist from a well-known television station, Kennzeichen D. We thought, „well at least this will put us on television." And, in fact, we were on television, displayed as the nasty accomplices of the moneywashers.

JR: No one would deny that criminal business is sometimes mixed in with art business.

SG: In 1966 the Columbian drug mafia published a communiqué with which they wanted to present the public opinion of their alleged existence.
That’s very interesting because when it comes to the mafia, their number one duty to themselves, no matter where they’re doing their business, consists of seeking to prove that they do not exist, that they are the innocent victims of rumours and lies. In this case, angry at being put in the spotlight, they went so far as to name all those groups, who themselves would have preferred to remain invisible, as being the ones who unfairly treat the drug mafia as the scapegoat for everything. „We are associated neither with the bureaucratic mafia, nor with the political; not with the bank mafia, nor with the financiers and millionaires; not with the contract-swindler mafia, nor with the mafia of the oil and communication monopolies." You must remember here we are dealing with people whose business it is to know what they are talking about.

JR: Getting back to Art & Crime in one of your works you deal with Alexander Brener’s art-action „Gesture on Suprematism by Kasimir Malewitch". A Russian artist sprayed a green dollar sign on a Malewitch painting in the Stedelijk Museum and was imprisoned for 18 weeks.

SG: That action had a polarizing effect upon the otherwise homogeneous art world of that time. One side insisted that he was a serious artist and that this was an act of pure artistical expression, supporting their opinion with arthistorical references, claiming that he fits right into the History of Art. The other side perceived him as a criminal, plain and simple. Some people blame him for the present situation where more and more works of art are displayed behind thick bullet-proof glass. At any rate, Brener achieved over night international fame and that’s rather astonishing as art history is full of examples of more or less aggressive Interventions into institutions. Macunias suggested to stick chewing gum into the keyholes of museum doors.

JR: Which position does Szuper Gallery take in this case?

SG: In the Threepenny opera by Brecht is one line: „What’s breaking into a bank compared to opening one up?" Transporting this into the art system one could ask: „What’s breaking into a gallery compared to opening one up?"