SA: One of the topics that struck me most reading your essays is your relationship with "utopia". Some say that this is the era of the crisis of utopias and you yourself have said: “Globalisation has replaced the future as the site of utopia''. In your books, however, you mention different meanings of this concept. I wonder how the poetic approach is to reformulate the notion of utopia that tradition has left us.

BG: In the context of modernity the dominating aesthetic regime is characterized by the dictatorship of the spectator over the artist. The artist functions as a supplier of aesthetic experiences for the audience – be it privileged or mass audience. The poetic utopia means the reversal of this relationship. The artistic avant-garde searched the domination over the spectator, inclusion of the spectator into the artwork, sovereignty of the artist. The revolution can be understood as such a poetic act because it does not have an outside – and leaves no place for a spectator.

SA: In regard to the relationship between art and society I'd like to focus on the meaning of “action”. There has always been a tradition in the old Greek culture, for example, linking art to action. Today, however, the concept of action is treated in strictly political terms. You wrote “aesthetic form loses its relevance in any act of real political engagement - and is discarded in the name of direct political practice. Then art functions as a political advertisement that becomes superfluous once it has achieved its goal.” There are many artists who choose collaborative practices, working on the social and ecological factors, how do you rate this type of action? Some spoke of a new “aesthetics of action”...

BG: An action is not necessarily a “useful action” – that means an action that has a goal to “improve” something. A poetic action is an action that has its meaning in itself. Such an action is open towards an unpredictable future. The poetic action changes things – it maybe even changes everything – but one cannot calculate the results of this action. One cannot predict or control its effects.

SA: I'd like to ask you something about the “public space” issue. In one of your essays, specifically Politics of installation, you have demonstrated the latent ambiguity in the operations that aim to the democratization of art space. Do you think the same dynamic might happen also in the public or non institutional spaces?

BG: Yes, one can say so. Let say, Occupy movement practices precisely the occupation of certain public spaces. It changes the neutral spaces into the “curated” spaces that became heterogeneous in relationship to the “normal” public spaces.

SA: In this regard, what do you think of Public Art projects? Many of them were born out of community's needs, civic commitment, enhancement of urban areas...

BG: In general, I like the idea. There is only the problem that in the public space one has to identify art as art – something that one should not do in the museum because there the art status of art is garanteed by the appropriate framework. That is why public art often looks more old fashioned than the museum art: publicly one can identify art as art only by using some already well recognisable signs. Thus, in the framework of public art is it very difficult to problematize the difference between art and non-art.

SA: In her reflection on the "agonistic" model, Chantal Mouffe identifies the act of appropriation of public space as an essential way to challenge the hegemony of the power that manifests itself in those places. In many parts of the world people have committed to occupy public spaces such as squares, as well as theaters, as they consider the cultural areas as new sites of resistance. What do you think about this?

BG: I think that we have to do here with the genuine poetic actions. Then it is, of course, interesting to see how these spaces are transformed, what is done out of them. I mean: how the occupiers feel themselves and what they do.

SA: You said that art is now becoming (or perhaps is already become) biopolitical “because it has begun to produce and document life itself as pure”. The eternal question of Art and Life, in terms of production of life. A new approach to existence, the artist’s quest of eternal life or even a matter of representation?

BG: I think that art should be seen as a mode of life. Art vs. life is a false opposition. One can live artistically – and that is art.

SA: Concerning to de-professionalizing art, you say that our actual condition - where everybody is an artist and is able to produce and exhibit artworks “at this or that biennial”- is not so utopian, but quite dystopian: “a complete nightmare”! So, what is the role of Internet in spreading new works of art and personal initiatives?

BG: Of course, the Internet is a good chance to avoid the selection proceses and, accordingly, censorship because this patform is less restricted. But, on the other hand, the audience of art in the Internet is more narrow than the audience in the museum. And the choice in the Internet is also more narrow. In the museum one can see something accidentally – something that one could not expect to see. In the Internet one can see only what one has already clicked – what the user knows, expects and wants from the beginning. The chance to see something unexpected on the Internet is almost equal to zero. And for art the unexpected is an important category.

SA: What about the power of everyday life… What kind of power is it? Is it a poetic one?

BG: The power of everyday life is so powerful because it is mostly unreflected: one operates in the everyday life almost like an automaton. Art and philosophy of 20th century tried to sensibilize us for the everyday life – but it remained a difficult task.

SA: You criticized the claim of contemporary art and curatorship of representing otherness. So what do you think of the cultural institutions that in one way or another, are committed to value pluralism such as Manifesta, Documenta, etc?

BG: I have not criticized these institutions – I think that they fulfill an important role. I have only remarked that the diversity is understood today mostly – but, of course, not always – as thematisation of diverse collectives, diverse groups of people like women or gays. But what about an individual and his or her individual otherness – also otherness to oneself? Earlier, this more radical form of otherness – the otherness to oneself and not the otherness to the others - was an object of interest for art to a greater degree than it is now.

SA: What's your opinion on the last Venice Art Biennale?

BG: I liked the curatorial project made by Massimiliano Gioni because it made a point – very often the main Biennale curatorial projects want only make a kind of survey. And I liked the reenactment of When Attitudes Become Form at the Prada foundation. When one compares this exhibition with the actual Biennale one can see very clearly how far contemporary art moved from its origins – and in what direction it went.