Are We Entering a Post-Individual Era of Art?

0:00Christopher Kulendran Thomas:I'm Andrew Russeth, the editor of Artnet Pro. Every day, I have the thrill of working with award-winning journalists, critics, and columnists who are on the ground at art fairs and auction houses, artist studios, and gallery back rooms. They report as important new art comes into view and as high-risk deals get done, or come undone in some cases. The Artnet Pro team breaks news and provides expert analysis of the fast-changing art industry. The kind of journalism that takes time, dedication, and resources. If you subscribe to Artnet Pro, you're helping to make that happen. So thank you. If you would like to support us, please subscribe at news.artnet.com forward slash subscribe.

0:50For our civilization, I would like to see us get a bit more comfortable with other civilizations living by their own values, even if we're not into those values. I think we haven't had to think like that.

1:09I'm Ben Davis, and this is The Art Angle, a podcast from Artnet News.

1:21The new museum in New York opens its new building this week, And it's doing so with a big show called New Humans, Memories of the Future, about how artists have rethought what it means to be human through technology. It's a topic on a lot of people's minds right now. And among the many artists whose visions feature in this important show is Christopher Calendron Thomas. Calendron Thomas has a lot going on. Aside from the new museum, he's got another video installation up at the Museum of Modern Art right now. Well, last fall, his work Peace Corps showed at Gagosian Gallery in New York. He also runs a buzzy project space, Earth, on the Lower East Side and in Echo Park, Los Angeles.

2:03Calendron Thomas' works are complicated. They often feature paintings inspired by AI-generated images. His video installations at MoMA and at the New Museum involve deepfake interviews with celebrities like Taylor Swift, Kim Kardashian, or even other artists, together with documentary footage about Sri Lanka, where his family is from. Beneath all these complex parts about political systems, philosophy, technology, human creativity, post-human creativity, and where we might be heading in the future as artists and as a civilization. Christopher, Kalentran Thomas, thank you for joining me on the show.

2:39Great to be here, Ben. So I have so much to talk to you about, and thank you for your time, because you're sort of having quite a year and you're on a bit of a world tour, if I understand it. Where are you now? I'm in London. What are you doing there? I technically live here, but my studio's in Berlin. I see. You are the paradigm of the post-national artist. I guess we'll get into that. You are an artist of big ideas. You are featured in this new museum show, New Humans, that's opening this week. but I do want to give people a sense of where you're coming from because it's really important to your work.

3:20So how did you decide to become an artist? What interested you when you were coming up? I kind of didn't. I didn't ever want to be an artist. I didn't even know it was a thing you could be because I didn't grow up with art or going to museums or even studying art in school. I had more of a kind of, I guess, engineering mindset. I was really into like taking things apart and seeing how they work but I started making stuff kind of at the very end of my childhood and initially kind of out of desperation because I had a debilitating stutter I couldn't speak all through my childhood and it wasn't until I started making things that I got the confidence to be able to teach myself to speak and first it was photography, which was easy for me as this kind of like, I guess, reactive mechanical way of making things.

4:21But yeah, that somehow gave me the confidence to reverse engineer how speaking works. I had to literally like train myself, I had to sort of take apart how this thing that most people do naturally, to take apart how that works. And since then, I've been kind of obsessed with painting as this kind of iconic form of self-expression but terrified of doing it because making a mark with my own hand had always filled me with the same kind of terror that I'd used to get when I'd open my mouth to speak and nothing would come out it's exactly the same kind of physical experience so I eventually kind of came to painting through a more kind of circuitous way of approaching it.

5:06Systems, systems. Yeah. I mean, you have a very peculiar way of thinking. That's interesting. You say you came at it through engineering. You went to Goldsmiths in the early 2010s. What kind of theories interested you there? What was the mood in art school at that time? A bunch of interesting characters around. Suhail Malik was doing the kind of theory component. And with Suhail, I got interested in this idea of understanding contemporary art, not simply as whatever was being made at the time, but as a kind of historically specific genre of art that we call contemporary. And to me, that made so much sense because of where my family is from.

5:49In Sri Lanka, it's much kind of maybe easier to see than it is in the centers of where the Western canon is defined and transmitted from the peripheries. It's maybe easier to see what that canon does and how it operates as a kind of cultural expression of a particular way of organizing economies and a particular kind of set of values from the West. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, like I was going to ask you about that. Your first stuff that you did right out of art school, When Platitudes Become Form, it really kind of made your name very early on. It's interesting because it's about painting and the canon and stuff, but it is a systems work, right?

6:39And it kind of becomes the foundation to this day of a lot of what you do. Can you just briefly sketch what that is? Well, the kind of work that I got interested in when I started first getting interested in art, way before I was making my own paintings, way before I went to art school, was by a generation of artists in Sri Lanka who kind of since the 90s have been sort of influenced by the Western canon, but kind of reinterpreting that canon from a Sri Lankan perspective and in relation to particular kind of histories of war and conflict that they were living through at the time. and I kind of I don't know viscerally related to their work um without knowing anything about it and then at art school being into that stuff was like very not cool because because it's kind of representative it's not representative it's like it's like a painting goldsmiths for people who don't know is kind of a conceptual art bastion you know a lot of the famously young british artists came from it yeah like you were studying like suheil malik like high theory this is not It's not really theory-driven art.

7:48It's almost like expressionist painting. Is that how you describe it? Well, I mean, there's certainly a prehistory that you could describe like that. But then this generation of artists in the 90s started thinking more expansively about the forms that art could take and were working in all kinds of mediums, but certainly not what was cool to be into at Goldsmoke's at that time. And doing that work that you mentioned, Ben, it was for me a way of kind of coming to terms with the gap between where my family is from and where I was at that point and also kind of doing that in a way that didn't paper over those differences.

8:28And I didn't want to engage in this kind of cultural exchange, collaboration kind of thing. I just bought the work of some of those artists with the very modest budget that I had for my degree show, which was like a grand, I think. And I bought a couple of these works and then incorporated those original artworks by other artists in my installation, which was a way of doing things that I kind of kept doing after art school for a few years up until, let's say, 2019 or so. almost like a provocation, like buying artworks from Sri Lanka, incorporating it into your own artwork as like a, almost like a found object.

9:09And then sort of showing that relationship as the work of art. Am I saying that correctly? Yeah, absolutely. And I was kind of interested in the idea that as those artists who were kind of well known at the time, and I believed would become kind of crossover international successes, I was interested in how my work might sort of economically rip itself apart as those artworks that I was able to buy quite affordably at the time became more valuable. So there was that kind of economic upcycling, downcycling dimension to it as well. It is like a provocation, this work. This is what I want to get to.

9:48It's like a provocations i mean so what's the what's the reaction from those artists i don't have any relationship with those artists and i i i didn't want to it wasn't about a collaboration it was about the unequal relationship yeah i mean i also stopped working in that way when the power dynamics reversed or at least when my work became more visible i started doing that for my degree show when when those artists were like the biggest artists that I was interested in and and I kind of stopped working in that way when my work became like visible on a par with their work because then it kind of changed how it's not for me oh that's interesting that's that's actually an aspect of it that I've never thought about that you were although it was about the dynamics between the west and the periphery if you want to call that it was also about the dynamics between an art student, and working artists.

10:43And they're heroes, yeah. All of my work is metabolistic in one way or another. I channel the work of a lot of other artists, including the work that's on now that I think you have seen, Ben. It's always my heroes. So I want to get to the contemporary work because there's so much to talk about that. Before we do, there's one more thing I think we need to get at because it goes through your entire thread of work, is that moment in 2009, politically, there's something going on. a conversation that you're interested in that surfaces in all the work I've seen at MoMA and Gagosian, the one that'll be at the New Museum.

11:20There is a specific conversation about the role of contemporary art in politics and the economics and the political moment in 2009, 2012, when you're in art school that you're thinking about, right? I mean, what was happening for me was I was seeing from a distance how a conflict that I had sort of grown up with back home ended in the most brutal way that I could have imagined. And then it was super weird seeing how in the kind of opening up of the Sri Lankan economy that followed the end of that war, how the first sort of Western style contemporary art galleries opened and the biennial. The Colombo art biennial.

12:00Yeah. It appears in your work. which no longer exists. But these things happened in the immediate aftermath of what more and more people are recognizing was genocide. And being far away from that and starting to study art for the first time, I guess I was just wanting to kind of figure out what art was doing in the world. Yeah. And what conclusion did you draw that it was doing? Turned out to be not such a simple question. Okay, okay. Let's get into the complexity. I mean, I guess in my opinion, almost some of these works are like you working through that or like a man of almost like manifesto artworks about that.

12:40I don't think they can be manifestos because I don't know the answer. Like maybe you could see them as sort of hypotheses or something. Well, you've been, for instance, critical of the kind of performance of identity in contemporary art. I think that starts with that early work, which is maybe counterintuitive to some people who have seen a lot of contemporary art that's very much kind of trying to teach you a nice, neat lesson about the history of colonialism. That's a very important topic in contemporary art right now. Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but I mean, it seems to me that your way of thinking almost reverses that kind of conversation where there's a lot of art that's trying to give you a window into historical moment of the West's domination of other cultures and kind of maybe make you feel like you've learned something.

13:28And to you, I think the lesson you drew from this moment of contemporary art in Sri Lanka and your experience in art school is more the opposite, that that kind of humanist gesture is two-faced or cynical. And you're really more like, want to point that out. Yeah, but I mean, I have no personal beef with any individual artist on that particular grift. But what happens systemically when you have this kind of situation where everyone knows that all you have to do is perform an authenticity to your minority identity in the most kind of simple and legible way possible? Like what happens systemically is that you end up with a reduced set of possibilities about who we can be.

14:10Yeah, certainly in my work, I don't know, I guess I feel something of an obligation or duty or something to inhabit my own kind of identity in a way that opens up possibilities or complicates the kind of reductive narratives about what that can be, perhaps. So let's talk about your work that was recently at Gagosian, which is called Peace Corps. It has two components. It's a complex work. Just explain it very briefly. Yeah, so Peace Corps is the name of the exhibition and also the name of an artwork in that show. Oh, Peace Corps Sphere, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the show also features a series of paintings as well as this 24-screen video installation of infinite duration.

14:54Which is like a sphere of screens that just plays this continuous footage. It's very hypnotic. And it's all footage that was broadcast on American television on the morning of the 11th of September 2001. All of it is from that morning. Most of it is from the five and a half minutes between when the first plane flew into the first World Trade Center tower and when it showed up on TV. So you never see what happens next. It's all from those kind of final moments of innocence, perhaps. And that's what I find so, I don't know, perversely compelling about that footage, why I can't stop watching it, is because it has this sense of innocence that feels like it's from another world.

15:38And it's a world that I remember because I was at school at the time. And if you were alive in the West during that preceding decade, you could probably believe in this idea that history had ended and that liberal democracy would prevail forever and ever and bring peace and happiness to all of humanity. And of course, that was a fiction. But it was, I don't know, one that I believed in when I was a kid, growing up in London. And yeah, something that I would never have been able to imagine when I was watching those planes fly into those buildings was that the knock-on effect would be where my family's from would cease to exist.

16:24But that's kind of how that went down. Because it's the beginning of the war on terror. And that becomes, you know, much bigger than that event. It's used as a justification for the elimination of Muslim peoples in the north of Sri Lanka. Well, yeah, and Hindu people, Tamil people. The narrative of the war on terror gave Sri Lanka's president at the time the pretext to reframe the Tamil liberation movement as a terrorist organization and then genocide them. And the paintings in the show are paintings that are somewhat unusual for me that they're historically specific and they are paintings of the most haunted place that I've ever been, which is a narrow strip of beach in a place called Muna Vajakal in the northeast coast of what is now Sri Lanka, where in the final stages of the war there, something like 100 ,000 Tamil civilians were marshaled onto this narrow peninsula, this beach that was made into this no fire zone and that safe zone was made smaller and smaller and smaller and then bombed and and nobody really knows how many people were killed that day because there were no outside witnesses the united nations were required to leave the country before that happened and foreign journalists weren't allowed back in for a long time so these paintings are not painted from photographic evidence they're imagined the same way that i compose all of my paintings using neural networks that I train on the work of successive generations of artists in Sri Lanka who have been influenced by the Western canon.

18:04And then I use that to generate new compositions. And all of those paintings are paintings of these digital images. So in that sense, these are paintings that use the styles of these Sri Lankan artists, similar to the artists from the earlier work that you appropriated to illustrate this historical event. You said you started out sort of engineering thinker, you're a systems thinker, you think about art as systems. And there is a continuity between this earlier mode of appropriation and thinking about the circulation of art between nodes in the art system and your use of AI now, what is the connection?

18:49Like, how do you move from this one way of thinking to this other way of thinking using artificial intelligence as the basis for these paintings? Because they're hand-painted paintings that the images are inspired by, by this sort of synthesis of images from, yeah, neural networks. Yeah, I mean, what I love about using these kinds of tools, and I've been using AI tools in my work for most of the last decade, originally like GANs and then the first LLMs and now all kinds of transformer models. And I kind of like being able to compress a huge amount of influences from beyond just myself. And I particularly love it when people recognize things in my paintings that they describe in great detail, but that I don't even know it's there and so yeah I've come to see this way of making things as being about kind of channeling a network in a way channeling a sort of collective consciousness or something like that I mean you're very critical of contemporary art's idea of the individual the idea of sort of selling an individual's authenticity in some of your videos and writing you describe contemporary art as a universal, nonspecific, non-genre.

20:12The kind of contemporary art that was being introduced into Sri Lanka, where it's this kind of cosmopolitan, universal art where every artist can be everything. And it almost seems to me like part of the appeal to you of artificial intelligence as a tool is that it kind of realizes that idea of contemporary art. This expression that's coming from everywhere and nowhere. Yeah, and also the kind of painting that my paintings are influenced by through the work of a few generations of artists in Sri Lanka and the canon from the West that they have been influenced by is a particular kind of history of art that I think is hardwired with a particular idea of what it means to be human.

21:01Which is what? That's based on this idea of the individual, This idea of our individual free will as liberated, autonomous individuals. And it's an idea that is specific to our civilization. Our civilization is the only one on the planet at this point that believes in this particular idea. Our being, what's the our there? Oh, the civilization of the West. In a way, that idea is the kind of foundational style of that civilization. It's the fiction that makes everything else go around. It's the basis of our economic system, our political system, our culture. And it's an idea that has been concretized into the United Nations Universal Declaration on Human Rights.

21:49And it's kind of the ideological front line of an empire. And on the one hand, I'm kind of infatuated with that idea. I think it's one of the greatest stories ever told. And it's kind of awe-inspiring how pervasive it is. But the thing about growing up between different cultures is that it makes it easier to see through all of them. And I think a part of me has maybe never entirely believed in that fiction. And I think more broadly, I think it's a set of ideas that is perhaps unraveling anyway, not just with these new technologies, but also in a shift in the balance of power from the so-called West to the so-called East.

22:41these ideas all continue to come up in the work that is currently on view in the museum of modern art permanent collection being human which i sat through several times yesterday and in the in the work the finesse that will be at this new museum show both of which retell the story of the sri Lankan genocide and revisit Sri Lanka and that moment of contemporary art that we're talking about. And then also have these AI elements that they incorporate. The one at the Museum of Modern Art has an AI, Taylor Swift. The one that is at the New Museum has an AI, Kim Kardashian, among other things, and sort of speak both about that political history and the technological moment.

23:25So you're bringing together this critique of Western doublespeak about individuality and an embrace of digital networks and a new form of digital creativity. Is that right? It's somehow about all bringing about the idea of authenticity into question, correct? Yes, a hot mess. There's a lot going on. Yeah, yeah, it is. It is. I mean, maybe start by just give us your description as precisely as you can, of what's going on in being human at MoMA. Well, that video installation, well, it takes place during the Colombo Art Biennial, which we've already mentioned, and kind of looks at this relationship between human rights, if you see that juridical framework as the legal expression of a certain set of so-called liberal, so-called democratic values from the West, looks at the relationship between that juridical framework and the aesthetic expression of those same set of values in contemporary art.

24:24And it looks at this relationship through the prism of artificial intelligence and machine learning. And the work kind of began, in a way, it came out of this ongoing debate I've been having with my uncle who makes a little appearance in that work. He's the older person. Who used to run a human rights center? Yeah, he's a bit of a family hero. He was the last of my family to leave because he was headmaster of a school and wanted to stay to protect his students in Jaffna from the Sri Lankan army. He used funding from the Catholic Church to set up and run this human rights center to investigate government war crimes, which unsurprisingly, the Sri Lankan government didn't really enjoy.

25:05So they tried to assassinate him several times. And he's kind of the luckiest person I know. Like the first time they tried to kill him, he got up in the middle of the night to go to the loo and a bomb landed in his bed. That's the kind of luck he has. And that's how he knows that someone up there is looking after him. He used to live with us in London when he was doing his doctoral research on human rights. And he and I more recently had been having this kind of ongoing debate about that legal framework that he's relied on for his activists to work, but that he also on another level kind of understands as this kind of, you know, what I described a second ago as this kind of ideological front line of an empire in the West.

25:48So, yeah, the work kind of, I think, started from that discussion. So the work very explicitly has the subjects in it basically proposed based on this political experience in Sri Lanka. it's interesting to see at MoMA which is like this temple of modernism and

26:23this video arrives at the towards the end of their permanent collection towards their story of art and I almost see it as like a Trojan horse in this museum to me you said it's not a manifesto but I think the argument's pretty clear in it, that it's like a post-liberal argument, you know, that you have this explicit argument being made by one of the figures in the document that real democracy isn't about elections, real democracy is about being able to choose between different systems. Like basically the idea that the West's idea of democratic freedom is a lie. And I think it's specifically making an argument that we should give that up.

27:05Yeah. You were describing it as a Trojan horse, and I think, I don't know if it's exactly a Trojan horse in that I'm sure that that's why. I just mean that I'm not sure that it feels like they know what they've got there. No, certainly that's why everyone involved at the museum is interested in it, I think, as this kind of meta-reflection on what a collection is. I think they certainly know what they've got. But certainly, yeah, that's kind of why I find it interesting to have that work in a collection that has historically been part of that kind of soft power operation, for sure. Yeah, so you have in the gallery where you see it, you have, again, these works of art that are sort of syntheses using AI of these expressionist styles that draw on a certain history of Sri Lankan art, but they're like not real, or they're like your paintings that are produced out of synthesis with that.

28:06And then you have intercut into this video, this AI Taylor Swift, who holds forth on authenticity, about authenticity as the most important commodity. And of course, that's all very ironic because I assume, I mean, that you didn't get her permission to use her likeness for this work. These are your syntheses of other styles from the canon that you're just using. And that is you basically being like, we should give up that idea of authenticity. Like, you know, that's just a fiction, a useful fiction that people have. The fiction of the individual style. Well, that's kind of the idea that the Taylor Swift character articulates, I think, in the work.

28:48She's making the argument that if performing your own authenticity is the price of admission for everyone, then what does it mean? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, well, but I've read you say, I guess I've come to feel pretty relaxed about where the so-called individual is and where everything else begins, the ecology, the flow, whatever. What does it mean to be a post-individual artist, to give up that idea? You know, I don't think it's such a big deal, because like I said, we are the only civilization on this planet that thinks that way. And for our civilization, I would like to see us get a bit more comfortable with other civilizations living by their own values, even if we're not into those values.

29:34I think we haven't had to think like that when we could have believed at one point historically that our values were a moral good in themselves and therefore universal. But I don't think that that way of thinking is going to be viable for them. So the new museum show that you're in is called New Humans. It's about technology and the idea of the human and artists who work to create new ideas of humanity at the edge of technology or post-humanity. Your MoMA show is explicitly about the idea of letting go of the state and the individual. And I do feel like, yeah, there's something about your work that, I mean, it comes from this very serious history of experience of Western double standards, colonial double standards.

30:30It resonates with the thing that's going on in culture, sort of a post-liberal moment, this kind of disillusion with... I'm not sure that the gatekeepers of culture realize how deep that goes, the kind of just deep disillusion with the idea that culture as it exists offers a future. I mean, you see that a lot in the crypto world and the NFT. young people who are just like this this world is not offering me a future so i just need to go build my own future with whatever tools are available you're a rare artist who's explicitly kind of like a post-liberal artist in that sense i mean and i'm looking at your your work and all these flagship places of contemporary art it's something you've said you know contemporary art always produces the art it needs um and i'm just wondering does the christopher calender and thomas moment, does that symbolize a kind of like a post-liberal disillusion going mainstream within the culture industries?