OLS

Where should we start?

DP

The basics. How did the project get started?

OLS

Some twenty years ago, as some of us were churning through graduate school, it became evident that the system we were involved in was not viable long-term for reasons that everybody recognized. Nobody knew what you were supposed to do about it except complain. At first, we complained like everybody else. We’re still complaining, but what we wanted to do was to try to find at least the beginning of a beginning of a beginning of an alternative. What would the beginning of a beginning of a beginning of an alternative be? For us, it meant trying to imagine a vital scholarly life that was not bound up exclusively with The Institution. Now little did we know that through an odd chain of events, the very existence of The Institution would someday be threatened by a destructive trickster imp and his jolly, saucy crew of education de-activists. So, we do feel that some small part of whatever it was we were thinking—that the hammer is going to fall someday—was not entirely wrong.

We figured that the Right would eventually realize: “Hey, only liberals are working in higher education. Let’s crush higher education.” That’s a smart move if your goal is to get the liberal establishment out of the way. For these reasons, we thought that it might become necessary at some point for scholarship to try to imagine how to live an autonomous life beyond The Institution but without being “Popular.” We’re talking pre-Twitter, pre-Facebook here, a long time ago. And what we knew was that OLS would make OLS. And if someone asked you what OLS is “about,” then the answer would be: OLS does OLS. We don’t have members, and we’ve never claimed a membership anywhere. We don’t know how many people are involved. We’ve never said somebody’s in or out. It just needs to exist. And it continues to exist.

HM

Was the only unifying thing, then, a feeling? One that something had to change?

OLS

Yeah, that’s about right. A feeling of unease.

We felt as if we needed something beyond “academia.” Other people apparently felt that too, but from slightly different angles, different perspectives. The artists involved came at it, it seems, feeling that the surroundings around art were fake, that the artworld was, and is, fake. Like, everybody can kind of verify that the artworld’s fake. The one thing scholarship or academia has going for it is that it’s a lot more directed toward problems than the artworld. For the artists, I think OLS was a way of dealing with “substantive” issues whereas, for us, the more scholarly people, it was more a way to envision something separate from a bankrupt system. These are nineteenth-century models. We’re not just saying this. It’s a fact. You can interpret it however you like. They’re straight white male structures created by German speaking, straight white male individuals who maybe weren’t demons or terrible people. Maybe they were perfectly enlightened and doing the best they could. But it just struck us as highly unlikely that the presentational and informational structures dominating academia were neutral or the best: peer review as “quality control,” the blurb veneration, the hire my friend’s student-ness, the high-end mediocrity of it all; that stuff seemed obviously geared to ensure that the same folks, or same kind of folks, would be in charge, generation after generation. We’re not saying there was a conspiracy or something. Functionally, however, there was a conspiracy.

HM

What is OLS’s relation to the American South? Out there, it says that OLS is based in Selma, Alabama.

OLS

Hmmmmm. Well, we asked ourselves: what does academia need? It needs to be grounded in specific places and specific times. Scholarly discourse acts as if it floats in this abstract space with standard, linear time as its container, and even if this is true, these are basically liabilities to be overcome. Space and time aren’t neutral. Pierre Menard-like, they change a situation without changing a situation. The question then became, “What spaces and times are most meaningful to us?” Doing things on May Day or in Selma are part of that. Some of us knew Selma growing up or had relatives there. We created a real gallery space in Selma. The time was significant. We were having these Selma conversations in the late 2000s, and if you go back and do some kind of high-tech search, you won’t find much mention of Selma, Alabama in 2009. During the early Obama years, there was a feeling that we had transcended those nagging racial divides. A feeling we were moving into some new, pan-racial utopian future. We never believed this was accurate. We thought the American right-wing lunatic “fringe” was not, and never was, a fringe. That’s why we distributed a replica of the original 1968 Wallace-LeMay campaign bumper sticker in 2014. We were saying, yeah, 1968 is Guy Debord for some, but for others it was George Wallace.

DP

What is OLS’s relationship to clarity? Accessibility? Before the interview, Henry and I were researching and discussing your work. We found that, as a whole, your project lacks clarity. Not only do the participants go unspecified, but the tone and message of your work differs across your published work. Pedagogical projects, at least normally, demand a certain level of clarity.

OLS

We try to write everything so that a “normal person” can understand it. Accessibility, in that sense, is a positive. Literal accessibility, however, is a negative. Nobody needs to be able to find this material—and, short version: clarity is probably overrated.

Sven Lütticken talks about this in his book Secret Publicity. There are two different ways to overturn a system. Exactly two, not three, not four. (1) mass movements and (2) secret societies. The early Bolsheviks and early Christians would be models for secret societies. We’ve been very committed from the beginning to the idea that it’s not necessarily better when more people know about what you’re doing, that “attention” is actually a Kitsch-Ray that irradiates everything in its path with a kind of violent, mouthy, self-defeating triviality. What’s not kitsch is when nobody knows about something. Of course, academics get upset and say, “How elitist! How will The Common Person ever know about it?” Answer: They won’t. There you go. That’s the problem. It’s like painting an abstract painting in 1902. People are going to look at it and say: “That’s just noise.” We were very much interested in something that would continue to be marginal to a margin.

DP

What is it like for those of you who do hold tenure at major institutions? How self-reflexive is the project?

OLS

That’s a great question. This was something we noticed very early on: academics speak in two languages. They use one language when they’re “on,” when they’re talking about theory and political things. And, when they’re “off,” they’re talking about dogs and clothes and dinner parties, The New Yorker and NPR. With us, there’s really no distinction. Dogs and Theory.

HM

Isn’t there some inherent ambivalence to your practice, then, since art has historically very rarely made real change?

OLS

We’d be the first to say, “If you’re really committed to social change, art’s about the worst way you could go about doing it. Why don’t you just go out and be involved in social change? What’s the value of art, anyway?” To us the value of art is unknown. We don’t know what the value of art is. We have a hunch, though, that to the extent that it’s kept small, art has enormous potential energies that are hard to track. This circles back to pedagogy in that the things that academics say about pedagogy sound good if you put them in some bullet pointed thing, but it’s not real. Real education is a furtive, strange activity that involves huge amounts of boredom punctuated by moments of huge enlightenment. That’s how art educates you.

This may be a link back to our dear T.J. Clark and the Situationists. It’s our belief that small moments of transformation are the key. We’ve worked for years to create these. We had this one event in Selma in about 2013 on a hot summer night. We were breaking the law by illegally gathering in public and drinking alcohol from open containers—we weren’t drinking, other people were—and the police were called in—and nothing really happened—but it was a moment of a kind of ecstatic strangeness to have the police chief of Selma on his flashing segway lecturing the crowd about public togetherness.

Moments of strangeness can be extremely educational. They’re not the primary forms of education, obviously, but they’re important. And how many of those ecstatic, strange, non-linear forms do we have in academia? Our answer would be virtually none.

HM

Is this sort of related to what you write in the review of Sebastian Zeidler’s Form as Revolt: Carl Einstein and the Ground of Modern Art, that is: “Zeidler not only explores the cast of mind found throughout Einstein’s writings (most fundamentally, their active, productive rather than reactive, nonproductive stance toward the world) but also probes the possibilities of such active, productive revolt in the scholarly present.” I feel like that bridges the gap that you’ve established between the academy and the activities of OLS. Do those two spheres ever come into contact?

OLS

A brilliant book and Zeidler’s a brilliant person. The only way you can exist in academia is to self-marginalize. That’s our answer to your question. The virtue of self-marginalization means that your challenges become real, not symbolic. It’s easy to write about right-wing movements, how horrible they are, to Bring the Resistance, and cash one of those nice checks from Artforum. Ironically, we were “banned” from Artforum (they refused to publish our writing under the name OLS and we stopped writing for them) ten years before everyone else quit because of “censorship.” You have to wonder: maybe we were all always being censored, and we just didn’t realize it?

DP

When I was starting my thesis at Princeton, I didn’t really know what I wanted to write about. I started reading and couldn’t really decide on a topic. I had the idea to go to San Francisco, though, just because I had never been. On a whim, I asked for funding to go on the weekend of the Folsom Street Fair with the purpose of visiting an archive in the San Francisco Public Library. I visited the archive and did a lot of partying. It was all really fun, and I became deeply invested in the archive I saw and also the history of the city.

It felt genuine. It became clear to me that the sort of alternative scenes of pedagogy—parties, bars, bedrooms—were equally as important, if not more important, than being in the library or being in a classroom. Because I never took a class on queer political mobilizations at Princeton, I ended up ultimately writing about it.

OLS

That phrase you said was great: alternative scenes of pedagogy. We’re there. The Left has been outclassed when it comes to freaky energy. The Right, meanwhile, has created a huge amount of freaky energy. We’ve been caught flat-footed, basically. Why have we been flat-footed? A part of that has to do with the lack of alternative pedagogical scenes.

HM

In your review of Benjamin H.D. Buchloh’s Formalism and Historicity: Models and Methods in Twentieth-Century Art, you write of Buchloh’s field-defining critical voice,

“These arguments have mattered because they describe twentieth-century art not in terms of modernist good or bad, or avant-garde new or old, but fundamentally as a dialectical back and forth between same and different: either the form of an artwork recognizes its innate historicity, its ineluctable tango with modes of formal repetition and ahistorical mythmaking, or it does not; the artworks that Buchloh most values always manage to discover difference in sameness, or, better said, they reveal a different sameness, a repetition that does not repeat, a myth that becomes unmythical.”

What does historicity mean for you? What is the historicity of your practice?

OLS

Historicity is being aware that everything is a variation on something that has already existed. In that sense, we’ve never been interested in originality. We wouldn’t claim anything that we’re doing is original, even remotely. We’re just repeating things. Whatever happens, happens. The word we often use to describe what it produces is “energy.” We tend to think that revolutions don’t happen because of ideology. They happen because of energy.

In 2009, OLS “convened a conference” on May Day in Chicago that’s talked about in Art Since 1900, sort of the standard “critical” textbook for contemporary art these days. There’s practically no documentation of this three-day event, but it had—among others—Anne Wagner, David Joselit, Walid Raad, WJT Mitchell, Peter Weibel, Carrie Lambert-Beatty, Alison Knowles, Hamza Walker, Hannah Higgins, Sharon Hayes, Boris Groys, Theaster Gates, Juliet Koss, Jackson Pollock Bar, Hal Foster, Darby English, Christine Mehring, Rainer Ganahl, Bernardine Dohrn, Bill Ayers, Tom Crow, Zan Dumbadze, Eve Meltzer, Tony Cokes, Tania Bruguera, Gregg Bordowitz, and Art & Language, and what is the archive? A few random pictures from some pre-iPhone phone and that’s pretty much it for documentation. We did the whole thing outside The Institution. It exists only as a ghost that no one can really access—virtually no photographs, no recordings, no archive at all—which is perfect. Things should exist like that. In a certain sense, that’s the historicity of our practice: a rumor about a rumor.

DP

Vibes and feelings.

OLS

Vibes and feelings. You can’t argue with someone’s vibes or someone’s feelings. You can only try to understand.

HM

Can we also discuss the assimilation of the avant-garde into the institution, and what that does to avant-garde “energy,” to use your language?

OLS

We want to create situations where the importance of different things is not immediately obvious. We want an alloverness, a Discursive Rauschenbergism, and if you ultimately decide that what we have done is irrelevant, then that’s fine. The way that we communicate knowledge today—with an important authoritative person standing in front of everybody—is non-leftist. This is the thing about avant-garde energy: we have put it in a box, stored it away, and said, “We don’t need this anymore.” What OLS has been trying to do is salvage little bits and pieces of that energy and then ask: What does a non-white-male-dominated-21st century-gesture towards avant-gardism look like? Probably it has to be something that others take over. So, the best you can imagine is to create a platform, and that’s what OLS has always tried to be: a platform made by Cousin Eucie after he’s already downed his second six pack, a platform that barely platforms.

HM

I heard Robert Slifkin speak a few weeks ago about the Minimalists. He of course admitted that they were creating something new, but also charged that the most radical thing for them to have done would have been to simply stop making art altogether.

OLS

That’s just it. Being on the Left, we think, isn’t about building things or inventing things or explaining things, it’s about finding ways for already existing energies to be released. What’s the point of all this nonsense that’s totally pointless and small? We don’t know. We just really don’t know, and we’ve tried to be okay with not knowing. We try to make things happen that wouldn’t happen without us.

HM

Some of your interventions involve actors performing as different figures from the academy. What are the implications of repeating a pedagogical scene as such?

OLS

For those activities, all of what the actors say is from actual statements that people have made. In that sense, it’s a collage.

DP

I watched a recording of your performance at Documenta that involves two people talking about art history—form and content and that sort of thing—and then all of a sudden it’s a concert. It repeats twice.

OLS

You’re the only person globally who can actually state that’s what happened. [Laughs.]

DP

[Laughs.] Well, I’m interested in your interest in music. There’s also The Size Queens thing.

OLS

If you start a scholarly presentation with music, the room is different. We’ve found that it creates an anxiety that is productive.

HM

What are your classrooms like?

OLS

Totally normal.

HM

One of our questions is about academic autonomy.

DP

Right. Both in the context of the Gaza solidarity protests and with regard to the codes that practitioners at elite institutions trade in.

HM

I think they’re related. Everybody is always checking themselves, almost self-surveilling. I don’t think that’s a new phenomenon, but I think it has a particular character right now.

DP

Exactly.

OLS

That’s something that we’ve thought about a lot. We don’t want to make things that are offensive. Deviating from the academic norm is not about doing something threatening or something that offends. You don’t have to deviate much to create space for something to happen “otherwise.” Part of that self-surveillance, to us, is a hyper-vigilance to the propriety of academic form. Like, politically-speaking, we need to create more deficient communication for the same reason the Velvet Underground needed to play their instruments badly. Others will try. That’s what we need in academia: a drastic widening of what gets labeled “scholarly.”

HM

Is this approximate to a deskilling argument?

OLS

Somebody familiar with the lingo might call it that. There are many moments when modernism seems to have died or been killed. It still exists in academia, though. In the contemporary present you can do absolutely anything as an artist, and nobody’s going to care, no one’s going to protest, but the minute you do something minimally different as an academic, there’ll be a protest, they’ll be rotten fruit and denials of tenure. That is, contemporary modernism is not an oxymoron in academia.

DP

Right. I never thought of academia as modernist, but that formulation is very revealing. I’m thinking about a quote from an article you published in October: “An art/curatorial project such as Thomas Hirschhorn’s Musée Précaire Albinet mobilizes these residually modernist and pedagogical modes to confront a mobile, frivolous, and coercive visuality.”

OLS

That was seventeen years ago at this point. Things felt “mobile, frivolous, and coercive” then. It’s hard to even begin to describe the visual landscape today.

A freakish situation, you might say, seems to demand freakish forms. This is not to suggest that we need to create a freak show. No, it’s just about getting the brain to go to slightly different places to take in the information, so something can begin. Modernism—as an investigation of formal languages—plays a prequel role in this. What do forms allow? That’s an important question. While we’ve been talking about OLS mostly from an academic angle, there have always been artists involved. That’s partially why it’s been artful, but not art. The future of academia is one that involves scholars working with artists and artists working with scholars to create forms that we can’t really imagine yet. That’s been our wager since way back when, and we’ve never really changed our thinking on that.

The thing is: it’s not us, it’s not even the people we know. It’s somebody twenty years from now, thirty years from now, who’s going to figure out how to make some creative thing that posits scholarly problems in mind-blowingly compelling ways. As a society we just haven’t gotten there yet—not as far we know, though there’s always the distinct possibility that other people are already doing this somewhere, and the signal just hasn’t reached us yet.