Joe:  Well… I think you're onto something in terms of staving off meaning, or explicitly spelling out what the work "does." And I think with Christo the work is successful because of its unavoidable in-your-face quality and simplicity, but I'm not sure this approach is applicable across the board in terms of what makes something "good." David Lynch obviously is a fan of creating multiple scenarios of confusing and improbable logic, then throwing up his hands as to what these scenarios "mean." He refuses to say anything more (does not do director's commentary on his DVDs), and this is what makes the work compelling. It keeps us guessing, causing us to go: "what the fuck?"

I think the issue has become: if art’s turned into a field of specialization, similar to the enclave of science, do we want it to remain so? Are we content with the knowledge that to really "get" art one necessarily must speak the language, be indoctrinated through MFAs?

What are other outlets outside of galleries and the requisite know-how of "artspeak"?

I think a lot of what you're talking about: engaging the wider public through a strategy of indifference (confronting audiences in a way where they must react) can also be seen in Ann-Liv Young's work in the dance world. Of course, one must ask first: where am I going to find such an audience outside of the art world bubble? And when and if I find this audience, how can I get them to give a shit and react? I think this is exactly what Ann-Liv is doing. Like you said about Christo, people react very strongly to Ann-Liv's performances, and most of them hate it. But this, again, is her project: to snap the viewer out of a passive state of consciousness.
You mentioned a few moments ago that you’re not sure you want to be a part of a dialogue. Tom McDonough, the art historian known for research on the Situationist International, justified “artspeak” saying: “you need to have a complex language to analyze complex ideas,” hence art criticism’s tendency toward linguistic convolutions. Is this the thing you want to try to avoid – “artspeak”? Is this what you meant by dialogue?

Ivan: My understanding of “dialogue” is more personal, specifically what I’ve been experiencing here in London. Like I just had a tutorial with a tutor at the Slade School and we talked about a lot of things, but one of the things I took out of it is that she seemed to want to push me to become a particular KIND of painter. She was talking about all the things that I paint so well and was just like, ‘Paint like that Ivan, that’s what your paintings are about!’ She was saying that she found my multi-panel approach problematic because it doesn’t let her have that immediate emotional experience with the painting, it makes it confusing and stops the rush of ecstasy that she so loves about my paintings. But the thing is that this is what I want! It shouldn’t be easy, I want to question that ecstasy, make you stop for a second, and go “what the fuck?” “Why am I being led in two or three different directions? Why not just let me enjoy the beauty of one?” She was also saying, since I’m now painting this rave-like painting of girls, that I could make that my running motif because I did it so well. When I heard the word ‘motif’ I could feel a headache coming on. I said that I hate the word ‘motif’ and that I didn’t want to have anything to do with having running motifs through my work. Because if I started just painting rave-like paintings all the time, that are beautifully painted and hit you on an immediate emotional level, being suggestive of sex and the desire for pleasure, maybe even touching on gender issues, then I’d just become another boring fucking painter that can make good paintings. And my interest lies not in making a particular kind of painting, but in dealing with the whole fucking problem with painting. Painting desperately needs to be rocked out of a dryness, a predictable dryness that it’s in. It needs paintings that are difficult, and hard to get, and don’t make sense, and actually make you work for a greater pleasure than you get out of just a ‘beautiful painting.’ A cerebral pleasure that may not come for a long time but is somehow more worthwhile than cheap fun.

Joe: Your saying that painting needs to be rocked out of a dryness reminds me of a Rauschenberg quote: "I thought my friends and I were inventing art. The exhilaration of the idea of invention is missing today. That's not why people make art today." This causes me to wonder (and draws into question) 'Why DO artists make art today?' I'm going to submit that today’s artists make art to have a career. This is where, I think, the concept of 'motif' comes in that you were talking about. Consistently, I see artists narrow their idea-set or aesthetic in order to be identified with a particular 'thing' so they can slide right into the dialogue (and/or market-driven world of the gallery). This is where the lack of challenge becomes evident. No one wants to be difficult and rock the boat because deep down they just want to be accepted; they want to have a career. There’s a prevailing fear that to truly experiment with a wide range of ideas and possibilities is to align one’s self with obscurity.
I think that young artists more and more are becoming overly concerned about their reputations such that no one has the balls anymore to stick their foot out about anything. And no one has the courage to say anything critical about their peer's work. As a result, the art world levels out at some comfortable stasis where everyone's pleasantly "doing their own thing." The artists are all patting each other on the back to get more shows, meanwhile jarring discussions and arguments are being left in the lurch... Not to say that none of this makes sense - people wanting to have a career and protecting themselves in order to do so. It's just that, for me at least, the professionalizing of the art world (an endless cycle: schmooze politely to get shows, to put on resume, to get more shows, to schmoze politely...) has made the whole establishment a ho-hum and fairly uninteresting place to reside.

Where can young artists look to break new ground? Why is changing the way we look at art important? How is changing the way we look at art relevant to anything? It's so abstract and niche-specific as to become meaningless. I mean, how does one devote oneself and one's life to changing art within itself relate to anything in the larger scheme of world events?

Ivan: I think niche-specific is the key word here. The rapid expansion during the last 100 years of the kinds and forms of art being made has led to growing buying options for collectors, and has today pretty much reached the point where whatever kind of art your heart may desire you can most probably find. I guess this may be good news for the art buyers of the world, but on the artists’ side a dangerous thing begins to happen. Because of the profusion of art out there, it is very easy as a young artist to make work that has similarities to and begins to align itself with one of the numerous niches. From a career point of view this is very convenient because chances are that gallerists and curators will know where to place you and how to understand you, ergo the perpetual appeal to align yourself with the DIALOGUE. But of course this doesn’t do much to shake up the ho-hum of the art market that you were talking about.  And the sad thing is that this sort of attachment to niches is widely encouraged in art schools, if not only as a practical strategy to make your work more marketable, then for sure as a platform to gain better critical awareness of how your work functions within itself and the larger DIALOGUE. When I was on my BA I was consistently told to look at Matthew Ritchie as a model to understand how to structure my work. Now on my MA I’ve been told to study the lineage of artists, like David Salle and John Baldessari, using similar compositional strategies as mine in order to better understand the function of all the different elements I deal with.  My problem with doing this is exactly what we’ve been talking about: that it is a predictable and boring approach that only fuels the insularity and endless in-joke referencing within the art world. I sense this is what you mean when you say that art has become alienated and niche-specific – that there is something terribly unnatural about the system within which art is made, which causes you to feel nihilistic about art’s chances to have any real effect on anything. Do you feel that if art is to have any significant purpose it has to come from outside this system?

Joe: The question of definitive influential art necessarily coming from OUTSIDE the system is a hard one. Allan Kaprow wrote in 1966: "For the experimenter, like the extremist or radical, being at the outer limit is an important condition for jarring into focus attention to urgent issues... Therefore they keep pushing what they do toward areas in which greater and greater uncertainty lies." BUT, alas, if the artist experimenter becomes completely removed from the infrastructures and institutions of art, they've relegated themselves to "outsider artist" status, and no one's around to discuss, argue, and engage with them. So it seems a bit a paradox.

It's interesting, though, that you mention Baldesarri and "in-joke referencing within the art world" because I've been thinking about him recently and getting upset with his iconic works such as "Tips For Artists Who Want To Sell." It's smart, quirky, and self-referencing, yes, but it's also very cold and narrowly postmodern. It brings to mind what irked David Foster Wallace about his literary postmodern predecessors, like John Barth (author of self-aware tics like: "here I am, the author, writing," etc.) - the trouble is (and Wallace sensed this in his fiction) that the problem doesn't get solved just by pointing at it. Wallace remarked in an interview: "Art’s reflection on itself is terminal, is one big reason why the art world saw Duchamp as an Antichrist."

It seems like referencing art within art is a dominant trend, yes, and I'm not sure there's any escape from it. We are schooled to know about art (which is the only thing we can claim to distinguish us from "outsider artists"), and once we know these artists and images, it becomes hard to "un-know" them.

Baldesarri even has an in-joke painting about this, “Painting For Kubler,” which is just text on canvas, essentially saying ‘ This painting owes its existence to prior paintings’.

What do you make of this piece and art’s inherent referentiality?

Ivan: Baldessari’s Painting For Kubler is a prime example of the in-jokes and self-referencing in art. And the super weird thing about this painting is that although it mocks postmodernism’s self-conscious allegiance to lineage, it becomes even more quintessentially postmodern in itself because it is well aware of its dependency on postmodernism to have any relevance. Like you say, Painting for Kubler points at postmodernism’s inadequacies while only burying itself ever deeper in postmodernism’s trap. To me there is a direct correlation between a) the level of reference to other art and awareness of how one’s art functions, and b) the degree of insularity the work acquires. So whereas I feel Painting for Kubler sinks into the postmodern trap, David Foster Wallace wrestles with it and more often than not transcends it. Do you feel that this may be because Wallace’s concerns are primarily those of the human and life, and only secondarily those of art? This also relates to Kaprow’s distinction between artlike art and lifelike art: “The problem with artlike art, or even doses of artlike art that still linger in lifelike art, is that it overemphasizes the discourse within art, that is, art’s own present discourse as well as its historical one. Peripherentiality is loaded so much in art that the application to, the analogy to, the involvement in everyday life is very difficult. So what I am primarily interested in is the kind of activity, like the brushing of my teeth — whether associated with happenings or not — whose reference to other art events is very, very remote, if indeed possible to make at all.” (From Journal of Contemporary Art)