Editor’s Note

The most exciting things in the art world don’t usually happen in the spotlight. They happen in small gatherings, unexpected encounters, powerful presentations, in squats and artist-run venues. In a world sick with entertainment, consumption and the bling of the rich and famous, we sometimes seem to forget the essence. When it comes to art, the power lies in the image itself, not in the hype created around it, nor in the money spent to acquire it. Every time we prepare a new issue of GLEAN, I’m struck by how many interesting artists we come across. How much powerful work we get to see. And how important it is to go beyond the mainstream institutions and reliably funded venues.
Artists invite us to see more clearly. It takes an artist’s eye to draw our attention to what really matters in this world, to comment on it, capture it and confront us with it. It was Kendell Geers who, during an after-dinner conversation recently, told me a beautiful story about Wim Delvoye’s Cloaca, an artwork that literally reproduces human faeces. Geers had seen the installation at the New Museum in New York in 2002, and he pointed out that the work only fully resonated with him when he saw Tom Friedman’s Untitled (1992) — a tiny sphere of the artist’s own shit — upstairs in the same museum. This anecdote, and the attentiveness with which it was told, hints at a world so much richer than what our generation’s superficial, hasty way of consuming images could ever allow us to see. As an art magazine, we persist in the detail, in the pursuit of slowness, in the love of the work and its maker. We’re interested in going off the beaten track and seeing what’s going on in those unexpected places. Like Lubumbashi, the city where Collectif Picha — the Guest Editors for this issue — have been organising Africa’s most dynamic biennale since 2008. Or the French Pyrenees, where the Russian dissident artist Andrei Molodkin is hanging out. The artist recently attracted the attention of the New Yorker with his Dead Man’s Switch, an installation programmed to destroy legally acquired masterpieces of Western art if Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, were to die in prison. Molodkin himself refers to the work as an ‘art shield’. It’s one of the most relevant definitions of art imaginable: art as a tool for negotiation.