Anton Vidokle is the type of artist who might not seem to be a very prolific author, at least not in the classical, material sense of art production. Vidokle is interested in art as a means to learn as much as possible about the world we live in, to explore it.
This Vidokle’s interest is brought together by the e-flux platform he founded in 1998 that today serves as a service for art institutions, a platform generating art projects, a publishing house, a bar, a space for moving image and much more. However, back in 2006 (interview with H.U Obrist, Anton Vidokle and Julieta Aranda), it was still true that Vidokle considered e-flux as a long-term art project. This is no longer true as of today (due to the larger number of employees), although e-flux still bears elements of an art project, and with its scope and breadth of influence it represents one of the most important platforms (not only) for contemporary art.
All the Vidokle’s projects are always created in collaboration or involve a large number of participants. The cancelled Manifesta 6 that Vidokle was supposed to co-curate was meant to take the form of an art school that was to last for 12 weeks. After its cancellation Vidokle decided to set up an experimental school in Berlin – unitednationsplaza. His interest in complex educational projects consumed him for several years. At that time he was interested in the possibility of an artistic practice that would not oscillate around the creation of concrete objects, trying to understand if art free of matter not requiring any objects, images or anything material could exist and still be accessible to sensory perception. Unitednationsplaza can be seen as an artwork.
Among his own projects are e-flux video rental conceived in 2004 as a free video rental service, a project proposing an alternative way of distributing and circulating video art, or Time/Bank that served as a platform where groups and individuals could pool and trade their time and skills, bypassing money as a measure of value. Time/Bank was based on the premise that everyone in the sphere of culture had something to contribute and that alternative economy could be developed and sustained by combining existing needs with unacknowledged resources.
In recent years, Vidokle has focused on exploring the historical movement of Cosmism and its possible applications and updating of ideas in the present. Cosmism is a philosophical and cultural movement that emerged in Russia at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. Among its prominent representatives was Nikolai Fyodorov (1828-1903), a proponent of radical life extension through scientific methods, of human immortality and the resurrection of dead people. Vidokle’s interest in these topics and the whole movement is represented by the Institute of the Cosmos project. As a collective research project founded in 2019, it is a space for creative exploration of the materiality of the cosmos and its strange universalism from the perspectives of philosophy, anthropology, the history of science and art.
It includes lectures, exhibitions (Art without Dead, HKW, 2017), various texts, or Vidokle’s films dealing with Russian cosmism (This is Cosmos, 2014, The Communist Revolution Was Caused By The Sun, 2015, Immortality and Resurrection For All!, 2017) or follow-up films (Citizens of Cosmos, 2019, Autotrophy, 2020) that seek to break out of the Russian linguistic and cultural context, exploring the potential and influences of cosmism in other cultural contexts.
Bataille in his book The Accursed Share argues that solar energy and its abundance is one of the main problems and sources of all conflicts. He suggests that art could be one way to spend the excess energy in a non-violent way (instead of tsunamis, eruptions, wars – which use huge amounts of energy). At the same time, other species of animals and plants on Earth are dying out, with some of them already completely extinct. Vidokle argues that it is our ethical duty to bring them back to life. After all, there are many research projects trying to resurrect extinct species, and they will soon succeed. Maybe humans are next.
Peter Sit
The interview was shot on January 2022, before the russian invasion to Ukraine.
