Aaron Moulton: The Influencing Machine

Explicit content warning

12/28/22 • 78 min

In the 1990s, a network of twenty Soros Centres for Contemporary Art sprung up across Eastern Europe: Almaty, Belgrade, Budapest, Kiev, Ljubljana, Prague, Riga, Sarajevo, Tallinn, Warsaw, and Zagreb among them. These centres, funded as their name suggests by Geroge Soros’ Open Society Foundation, had as their mission the cataloguing of dissident pre-1989 art and the introduction of new forms of artistic practice to the art scenes of post-Eastern Block states. Within a decade, the centres wound up their operation and their histories have been forgotten but not because they made a mark on Eastern European art and societies.

The Influencing Machine, Aaron Moulton’s exhibition and book traces the network’s history and evaluates its outsized impact on its host societies. Through the use of template annual exhibitions and synchronised open calls, the Centres pioneered forms of socially engaged practice that preceded the form’s development in Western art capitals and gave artists access to unprecedented production budgets, international networking opportunities, and access to new media technologies.

Moulton proposes that the Centres played an underappreciated role in orienting artists ideologically in pro-Western and pro-neoliberal directions, a that the extent of their influence has been underappreciated. In societies making the transition from socialism to free-reign capitalism, the actions of a single NGO which habitually outspent all other funders appear to have been glossed over if not outright expunged from memory.

The book invites a conversation about the global art world, the role of activism in art, and the power of institutional critique. Its proposals should be a warning to anyone attempting to understand the role of capital in forming cultural consciousness today. If a single NGO could be credited with creating the cultural values of a whole region without once being called to account, what other ideologies is contemporary art producing and on whose orders?

Aaron Moulton speaks to Pierre d’Alancaisez about the legacy of the Soros Centers of Contemporary Art Network, gonzo anthropology and conspiratorial theorising as methods for writing art history from neglected vantage points, and the antisemitic, bogeyman tropes which appear along the way.

Aaron Multon trained at the RCA, London and was the editor of Flash Art International and a curator at Gagosian Gallery. He founded the Berlin exhibition space Feinkost.

The Influencing Machine exhibition at CCA Ujazdowski Castle
My interview with Geert Lovink

The Influencing Machine

Aaron Moulton

ISBN 9788367203050

Published by CCA Ujazdowski, 2022

Episode info: https://petitpoi.net/aaron-moulton-the-influencing-machine-soros-centers-for-contemporary-art/

GET THE BOOK: https://verdur.in/store/the-influencing-machine-by-aaron-moulton/

*************

Find many more interviews, projects, and my writing at https://petitpoi.net/
You can sign up for my newsletter at https://petitpoi.net/newsletter/
Support my work: https://petitpoi.net/support/

Aaron Multon trained at the RCA, London and was the editor of Flash Art International and a curator at Gagosian Gallery. He founded the Berlin exhibition space Feinkost.

The Influencing Machine exhibition at CCA Ujazdowski Castle
My interview with Geert Lovink

The Influencing Machine

Aaron Moulton

ISBN 9788367203050

Published by CCA Ujazdowski, 2022

Episode info: https://petitpoi.net/aaron-moulton-the-influencing-machine-soros-centers-for-contemporary-art/

GET THE BOOK: https://verdur.in/store/the-influencing-machine-by-aaron-moulton/

*************

Find many more interviews, projects, and my writing at https://petitpoi.net/
You can sign up for my newsletter at https://petitpoi.net/newsletter/
Support my work: https://petitpoi.net/support/

Previous Episode

Geert Lovink: Sad by Design

Why is the internet making us so unhappy? Why is it in capital’s interests to cultivate populations that are depressed and desperate rather than driven by the same irrational exuberance that moves money?

Sadness is now a design problem. The highs and lows of melancholy are coded into social media platforms. After all the clicking, browsing, swiping and liking, all we are left with is the flat and empty aftermath of time lost to the app.

Sad by Design by Geert Lovink offers a critical analysis of the controversies which drive our online media behaviours. Lovink calls for us to embrace the engineered intimacy of social media, messenger apps and selfies because boredom is the first stage of overcoming ‘platform nihilism’.

Geert Lovink speaks to Pierre d'Alancaisez about the frustrations of studying the internet as it evolves from networks to platforms, the politically-contingent notions of online 'communities', and cycles of ideological production and capture.

Geert Lovink is a media theorist and internet critic who has chronicled the development of internet and network cultures as they came of age alongside him. He is the author of Zero Comments, Networks Without a Cause, Social Media Abyss, and most recently Struck on the Platform. He is the founder of the Institute of Network Cultures in Amsterdam where we met.

Sad by Design
On Platform Nihilism

Geert Lovink

Published by Pluto Press, 2019
ISBN 9780745339344

*************

Find many more interviews, projects, and my writing at https://petitpoi.net/
You can sign up for my newsletter at https://petitpoi.net/newsletter/
Support my work: https://petitpoi.net/support/

Next Episode

Kaelen Wilson-Goldie: Beautiful, Gruesome, and True

Art has a long history of engaging with conflict and violence. From the antiquities, through Goya, to Guernica, our museums are filled with depictions of battles, pogroms, uprisings, and their suppression. Not all of these stories are told from the perspective of the victors.

Many contemporary creatives have continued this tradition. While the position of the official war artist seems to have gone out of fashion, conflict hasn’t. Artists are compelled to document the violence and conflict that for some is the matter of the everyday.

Kaelan Wilson-Goldie’s Beautiful, Gruesome, and True is an account of the lives and practices of three such artists Teresa Margolles, Amar Kanwar, and the collective Abounadorra. The documents which these practices produce have found their way into the mainstream contemporary art world, for better, or often worse.

Kaelan Wilson-Goldie speaks to Pierre d'Alancaisez about the implicit contracts artists enter with their communities, the art world’s exploitative interest in conflict, and the role of aesthetic expression in mediating, if not ameliorating conflict.

Kaelen Wilson-Goldie is a writer and critic who contributes regularly to Artforum, Aperture, and Afterall, among other publications. She is the author of Etel Adnan, a monographic study on the paintings of the Lebanese-American poet Etel Adnan, and a contributor to numerous books on modern and contemporary art.

Teresa Margolles