Interview with Werner von Delmont and Hans Dieter Delmont

Werner von Delmont: What kind of spaghetti sauce are you going to make tonight?

Hans Dieter Delmont: Pesto.

WvD:........have you considered that Engels and Kautsky already interpreted Marx' idea of dialectics in a wrong way, namely as some kind of law of nature? This misinterpretation fostered the belief that all you needed to do was sit complacently and wait for things to progressively deteriorate, and the World Revolution would take place automatically.
So, back to something that we have talked about before... Such an attitude would never appear in the history of fine and modern art as we understand it today. What remains historically relevant to us now is an idea of art that DID NOT want to wait, an idea of art that DID want to make a change.

Gardar Eide Einarsson: Hmmm...., but you couldn't really say that this was the case in the good old year 2000. I can't remember so many people making the effort to change anything. Was there ANY will to make a difference?

WvD: At that time it was more difficult than ever before to get your head out of this fug. Looking backwards now, it is quite easy to see that art at the turn of the millennium merely produced a lot of overheated, sultry, dusty stuff . Look, even the Astrup Fearnley Museum is putting that fin-de-siecle crap it bought in the dustbin now. And I am happy to see that those artists who criticised their contemporaries and created ideas that heralded the arts and societies of today are currently being re-evaluated.

GEE: But back then, it looked as if the state saw the construction of the scene as something to be built from the top down, which could be instigated and controlled by the institutional players. The construction of a 'Scandinavian Scene', for example, led to a hollow structure, whose sustenance and instigation was controlled by those who were in fact responsible for the failure of the already existent scene.

WvD: Just look at some of those old catalogues here: Blonde girls in the birches ... mystic nature .... the psycho family ... the bad boy kid ... The abundance of the welfare state seemed to provide a secure playground for artists' careers which often did nothing more than to extend national stereotypes and celebrate the status-quo. Of course, this happened at exactly the same moment that national identity was threatened by global capital.
The British art scene of the 1990s provided a successful model for the promotion of a national image in order to attract global capital for investment in England. Trotting behind them came Germany and Scandinavia, from their German Open to their Oslo Open, hahaha! They cranked a lot of money into the arts and hoped to make their sites culturally attractive. The art that remains from those days is buried deep in bubble wrap now.

GEE: Of course, clearly, something had to happen. Something had to give. That kind of work could not go on forever. The wonder was that it went on as long as it did. Some viable alternative had to be posed eventually.
And when it was, its initiatives branded and marketed themselves as "Alternative", and they seemed very much content with the liquidation of their alternative aura in exchange for some relative power that they felt they had been entitled to all along.

Matias Faldbakken: Anyone who started up smaller initiatives and wanted to make a change was immediately sucked up into the institutional system before they were even able to pose a viable alternative.

WvD: Culture at the fin-de-siècle was top value and was seen to be at its best when it was young and sexy, morbid and ....traditional. A good image was no longer a painting on the wall, but a vehicle for self-promotion and commerce. The fear of being out of date produced an existential angst, which in turn resulted in unrest and incredible greed!
No one realised that it was in fact our old friend POP who had since long sold the ideas of the underground, and hammered the equation commodity equals culture, culture equals commodity into every pit of this earth. There was nothing in the world which was not POP. Planet POP, the old style.

HDD: I know that song!

WvD: All right sonny, but would you please try and imagine what it means when everything that created a slight significant difference was immediately sucked into the mills of the corporations? Every new image, every interesting attitude was seized in order to keep the overheated circulation running. And the curators and the magazines combed through the remotest sub-cultures for something to burn, and artists burned themselves in order to become cheerleaders for the advent of the global player... There was no sense of keeping inventions secret in order to let them grow strong.
Every flower got wasted as soon as it started blooming and could bring to bear no fruits. Competition, competition, it was an amusing game to watch. Who will be the next court painter, how long will they maintain that position... The season of dead cows, the season of the return of painting, the season of performance in the spring and politics in homeopathic dosage for the fall...

MF: But I realised that the Scandinavian problem consisted not in the fear of being outdated, but rather in the irresistible impulse to avoid becoming accepted. Obviously, it was clear that the underground was no place to stick around if you wanted to be an effective critic or rebel, while the established … well… the difficulty was finding a position that would effectively slide out of the grip of acceptance. I looked into the possibilities of becoming a talk-show host, a Satanist, an immigrant, a hard-core Protestant … but none of these attempts to position myself functioned as more than the systematic gesture art-rebellion usually is…

HDD: How, then, could it be possible to create a fundamental difference? One which could function as a critical tool, without being incorporated by the corporations, and create a market situation that could not be controlled by the forces of the anti-market?

WvD: There were two contradictory tendencies at that time. There was a process of global homogenisation in economy that led to new absolutism; our Corporate Court as we know it. But on the other hand, you saw a fractalisation of societies...

HDD: ...which could be easily controlled and ruled by the Corporate Court... "Divide et impera!"

WvD: Exactly! It was the Corporate Class who had taken the dream away from workers' organisations and who, in spite of the need for competition, succeeded in creating their own version of the International Solidarity. At the other end of the scale, the classes of the service industry serfs ended up as fragmented societies, which were easy to control for the homogenised economy, and which were often conditioned by the return of patriarchal, regional and national minds. It was a long struggle, after the Big Worlflation in 2017/18, to turn circumstances upside down and to install a network of local and fractal economies and international minds against the Corporate Court.

GEE: I remember that you, Werner, were quite preoccupied with the academy as a possible model for resistance. What lay behind your interest in this model at the time?

WvD: I really want to get away from that image. I just emphasised the necessity to create and control our own structures and discourses. I called those structures 'condensation points' for critical thought and I thought institutions could be such points, but they usually they weren't. More successful were self organised structures that occurred outside of them.

Clearly, they had to grow out of POP, but POP had to sacrifice the idea of the popular and corporate and dedicate itself instead to bonding tribes who would then be entertained, educated and agitated by the new ROKOKO.

Today, I am one of a dying generation. Over the past 30 years, I have pinned my hopes on the extreme recurrence of a past that I myself have never witnessed; a past which appears to me, in its extremes of style and political utopia, to be more radical to what I all to often have been forced to witness, that is, an endlessly recurring repetition of the youth culture of my days.

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First published in the UKS Forum for Contemporary Art Nr 1/2 2000