Transcript for Episode 195 – Multi-Media Artist + Designer, Pia MYrvoLD (France + Norway)

Recorded June 4, 2021
Published August 3, 2021

Full recording here: https://wisefoolpod.com/multi-media-artist-designer-pia-myrvold-france-norway/

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

Pia MYrvoLD 0:10
I am Norwegian. And I decided to become an artist when I was 18 years old, I wanted to be a painter. And at that time I lived in California, I was an exchange student in Santa Cruz. And it was a very important moment for me to be exposed to art in America, both because of what was going on there. And in the older Museum, dominated by the American expression is color and those kind of huge works, large scale art pieces. And in Norway, we of course, had Edward monk and we had a kind of a painterly tradition with a few painters, also Frances with Vidya Berg, which was a more contemporary, and in sculpture, the dominant sculpture was still the contemporary of Edward monk, which was Gustave Golan, which both of those artists were influenced by Art Nouveau. And Norway, I had a kind of bumpy road and modernism, because I missed a lot of turns. So basically, when I came into the art world in the late 70s, I came back from Santa Cruz and wanted to start my career as an artist, I met a lot of resistance in the local art environment that I was frequently at, which is in Stavanger, by the way, which is a very small town, on the west coast of Norway. And it created a kind of situation for me that everyone I talked to about going forward with art and painting had a very negative attitude towards what was possible, they mostly talked about everything that was not possible. What I couldn’t do, before I had done such and such and such. And it was quite a contrast to what I had encountered in California, which was a very nourishing and positive outlook on creativity with a lot of response to my talent. So for some reason I became I always say that I became radicalized in California. Although I had been to a sex pistol concert before that in 77, in Norway, so I was kind of on that trail. But I actually decided, like my older brother, who was a pacifist then had refused to go to the military in Norway that I actually refuse to go to the Academy, because I felt that they were teaching 30 year old knowledge and that it would not be procreative for me to go that way.

Matthew Dols 3:03
It’s funny you say that, because I’m a professor. And I feel the same way. Like, that’s one of the reasons why I made this podcast is that I’m sitting here teaching the next generation of artists, but I’m teaching based on the way I was taught 30 years ago. Yeah, by teachers who were taught 30 years before that. So there’s, there seems to be like this generational gap. They sort of have like, 2030 years where like, the teachers try to teach the next generation of students but they don’t, but they don’t actually know how things are working. So that’s what I’m trying to do is I’m trying to find out, like, how are things working? Because I’ve been in my ivory tower for too long.

Pia MYrvoLD 3:43
I think that maybe the questions to find out what is not working. That’s a lot of things that are not working, basically, actually, it’s kind of like a pun on that thing, because people are not working. I mean, they’re not actually working. And that’s, it’s intellectually, it’s creatively. Most of the barriers that I met in as a young artist, which I still meet today, and academics, and also with people who are running institutions, you know, they might have their degree there three or four or five years studies or degrees to get their precision, but they’re not actually working with what is going on in our time. And they’re not working with themselves as a creative potential. And not couriers, and I work in with a curiosity. They’re now working on the community properly, like to build it up and to know what is necessary in the community, both here and internationally. They’re often working on their strategy for their careers and their security nets and their security net. Yes.

Matthew Dols 4:56
Theory of a security net Yeah, the theory of 10 years.

Pia MYrvoLD 5:00
Yes, and I find that always frustrating on every step of my career, which, you know, it’s been 40 years. It’s basically that kind of negligent attitude towards what art and creativity is about.

Matthew Dols 5:18
Well, sadly, like my position, or my experiences in academia are very much where it’s meant. Now universities and sort of places of higher education are oftentimes like teaching to a test or teaching to a curriculum that is designed by administrators, not artistic practitioners. So we’re trying to meet government regulations or, or state regulations or whatever, kind of like even like NASA ad international accreditations these kinds of like, sort of meeting other people’s standards that are not necessarily the community’s standards upon which we are teaching in. And I feel like that’s a weakness of the current arts edge academia in general, like, my universities that I’ve taught at, they were very much like that private art schools are much more free, much more supportive, much better. And I mean, they’re not free, they’re super expensive, but they’re much they have a lot more freedom to teach the way they want to teach versus having to meet these guidelines, which is a contemporary thing. You know, 30 years ago, 40 years ago, there weren’t these federal mandates of what was taught in in art schools and stuff. But now there are and that I think, is a generational problem that is only going to get worse.

Pia MYrvoLD 6:39
Because I have not been teaching I’ve been doing some teaching positions, but short based on in different universities around I have a flow of interns coming from universities in Paris and Venice, in Norway, and sometimes abroad, or all over the place coming for instance to Paris when I am working there. And I had to when I was young, I had to defend my decision to be autodidact which pissed a lot of people off and people would still there’s a certain generation in Norway that still will come and accuse me of not having a formal education after I had my solo show in Sandton Pompidou and, and my talk for New York Times about art for tomorrow, and so on. So on, you know, I’ve done really great things I sort of artist.

Matthew Dols 7:32
Yes. Speaking of that, we met in Doha. Oh, we did. How nice. Yeah, it was very brief. I mean, I was at the event, and we was at near your Stargate exhibition, though. Okay. It’s there. Yeah. So at that event out there, we met briefly, because I was actually working in the United Arab Emirates teaching there. And so we came over to Doha for that event.

Pia MYrvoLD 7:57
Yeah. Okay. Well, that’s good to know. I mean, that’s great. I’m happy that you were there.

Matthew Dols 8:02
It’s a very small world.

Pia MYrvoLD 8:03
Yeah, exactly. But anyway, what I see in my students is that they like, actually, okay, I wanted to say this, and I kind of a double way, because when I was young artist, it was this kind of academic training that I meant that I lacked. But then I started to find out that I knew much more about almost everything than most of the artists I met. Because if I wanted to find out something about thermography, or textile printing, I actually went to the library, and I read books, and I ordered the materials, and then I, I became a chemist, and I mixed all the chemicals and, and I built the frame and I prepared the screen and so on. So you know, so I learned a lot from that. And then I met those people who had that formula education, and they were like, Oh, no, I was sick that day, or, you know, I, I, you know, they were out partying, and you know, all those things, which is fine for me. But the argument of the formal education didn’t hold up. They didn’t know more than I did. And so the autodidact is a kind of phenomena that has been around for 1000s and 1000s, and 1000s of years. And all of a sudden, in 100 year or a little bit more, I mean, it. Women were not even allowed to get an education and still are not in many places. All of a sudden, you cannot do anything without an education. So what happened to transfer of knowledge through natural culture and simulation and other improvised settings, you know, that How did people build boats to go around the world? How did they find out astronomy or you know, so this is a misunderstanding that is based on a kind of economic position because the most powerful universities are the most most educated, no, no, no not educated, they might be the most educated. But they’re our most prestigious and expensive. This business. And so to get in there, you have to have a lot of money, like, say Harvard, I don’t know how much the tuition is now a year, but it’s a lot. And so, when internet came in the 90s, I worked very much with web based art. And it became an incentive for me to work there, because we saw a glimmer of hope, in the 90s, that we would tear down the hierarchy, the paramedical structure, and to equalize the right to information that everybody could get educated through the internet, and, you know, access the same knowledge, and therefore, this institution would actually not have that argument anymore. What argument they do have is that they have the network. And that is true, they do. What I have realized over the years is that that network is not ready to include people who are not in the same network is not based on knowledge. And like some prominent leader of one of those institution, America told me, she said, some of us had to pay for their education. And at that, I said, I was sorry, but I am sure that I paid more for my education than you, then your mother paid for yours, you know, which is actually true, I pay a tremendous amount of dollars for my education.

Matthew Dols 11:45
I’m still paying off my student loans to this day. So yeah, it’s an in America, it’s absurdly expensive, for sure.

Pia MYrvoLD 11:55
But what I mean by that, as I said, when you create a project, you say, Okay, I’m gonna build a sculpture, I’m gonna make an interactive clothing collection, you have to start building funds, and you have to get research, you’re doing things that nobody else did before. You have to invent a lot of things was rather expensive. But when you do it, you learn all the things that you learn, you’re actually building a kind of master in a new field or different field like I am, you know, I have six, seven fields combined. And so all those things are expensive, but it’s more than cost to go to Harvard.

Matthew Dols 12:37
Well, I mean, the arts world, much like a lot of the quote unquote, like business worlds in the corporate worlds and stuff is very much an in group and an out group. You know, there are people that are educated at Ivy League schools that are part of the in group and then people are state schools that are out group. But in the art world, it’s more of, you know, there are certain prestigious schools, there’s your Yale and your Otis Cal Arts, these kinds of plays, then then there are not those schools, let’s say, you know, just like other schools, yeah. But then there’s also the like, what you’re kind of talking about is which I my terminology, which I’m sure it’s horribly outdated, so please help me with this is still sort of outsider artist. Yeah. So would you consider what you’re talking about, like an autodidact? Is that is that a contemporary version of an outsider artist?

Pia MYrvoLD 13:28
I’m not sure because I mean, the outsider artist is like, 98% of the artists.

Matthew Dols 13:35
It’s probably true.

Pia MYrvoLD 13:36
So what does it mean? You know, it’s just another terminology to, to open a door. I think that for me what was important with Sex Pistols and the punk movement in the 80s. And then the web based art in the 90s was too rich to open up the field for the people who are creative, and not make it so select, that only a few people are allowed to participate in the dinner party, you know, to sit around the table and make deals. So that was an actually when you deconstruct which was very important an ad in the 90s this word when you deconstruct it as we start to create a sustainable environment, and that’s what we’re doing with ecology, we’re doing it with energy, the energy is the same thing, right? Should we have a monopolized energy source where we pull out oil in Norway and put it on huge ships and go all around around the world with this energy, when we should be sourcing energy locally, through wind power, solar, other different means, you know, we need new thinking and we’ve been needing this new thinking for at least 40 years, and it’s very slow to catch on and why is it so slow to catch on? I’ve been working on that too, because I thought it He said something wrong with collective IQ. Because we have very high IQs individually. But when we go collective, we dropped down below 100. Or maybe like 95, we’ve become very stupid. But that’s actually true. Yeah. And I thought that that has to do and I think as an artist, we are supposed to be working within this conundrum, you know, like, what is so complicated in order to lift this environment? You know, we’re not very successful in the world right now. Like, look at the world right now. It’s very, it’s a disaster. We have some glimmer of hopes everywhere.

Matthew Dols 15:45
There’s always a glimmer somewhere of hopes the made I remember, in my era, there was Greenpeace, we had just done all their great stuff in the like, late 80s, early 90s. Like, there was that glimmer of like some resolution coming out of that. But and then it The problem is, is money, it’s always Money, money and power. It’s, it’s what overrides any society’s impression of what the best thing to do is like, individually, we could sit and say, You know what, I want to put solar panels on my house, I want to put wind power out of my yard, I want to do all this kind of stuff. But as a society, we’re run by large corporations and money.

Pia MYrvoLD 16:25
I keep hearing society when you say society. Okay, but kind of fun. Society, you know, the money is always a catch. And I think that there is no artists alive that are not worried about that. And I early on decided that the problem was not education, the problem was money. And, and so I’ve been financing myself, since I was 19. As an artist, I lived for my art the whole entire time, I never had a job. Besides art. And I met with students, they are very frustrated, because I didn’t learn anything about money when they went to art school. But I said to the last one, I said, You’re the one who creates a definition of the value of your work, nobody else can do. But you have the power to define the value. And that’s where you have to go and it’s creative. It’s like art is like painting. When you decide a canvas or a sculpture, you decide what you’re going to do you follow that. And to do that with your own self as an artist, it’s also the same thing, you have to make a definition because if you don’t, nobody else will do it for you. They won’t say, Oh, this one is very valuable, we should invest in this one, you have to, I mean, a few people are that lucky.

Matthew Dols 17:51
But well, and there’s a slight difference in what you’re talking about, which is like there’s value, which is sort of an intrinsic thing and a concept and feel versus the price of your work. Like the the the actual, like, Euro amount being put onto it. Like that’s cool, those value and pricing are kind of different, because to a certain extent, it’s our job as creators to not only create really interesting work, but create a reason in the world, for there to be a value for it to be in the collection, or the exhibition or the, the whatever, you know, wherever it ends up kind of thing. Versus the price, the price can be set by a gallery, or somebody who’s willing to buy it basically. Because as they always say, like, the value of art is whatever somebody is willing to pay for it.

Pia MYrvoLD 18:42
Okay, so I’m gonna throw in something that I learned when I was 32, or something like that. Somebody asked me how much of my work that I actually invoice for. And that was really good. Because at the time, I think it was less than 5% that I could actually send an invoice for. And this person said to me, Well, what would happen if you could invoice for 20% of your work? And I thought I would be well off, I would be rich, you know. But that is something that is a kind of thinking that I also meet with young people because they’re very obsessed with how much I should get paid for their work, instead of being obsessed with what they’re working with, which is much more interesting. And when you’re working like I do, I work all the time, even when I sleep when you know or even when I’m not working. I’m working in conversation when I party with friends or whatever. I’m always doing something like I think most people are but not everybody wants to commit to that in the way that maybe a few people are doing So what you just have to do is to try to figure somewhere along the line, how can I invoice for some of this work, so that I can make a living. And I think also that what I decided early on was, I was motivated by my ideas. And my ideas were becoming more and more advanced and costly. So I started to develop skills, how to find money to finance that, I realized that the normal channels that galleries and museums and so on very, very limited in terms of what they would finance. So I became very creative, going in other completely different streams of consciousness, where no artists, were actually asking anything, and asking those people like, hey, how would you like to be part of an exhibition awareness, you know, awareness being all I’m doing that in 2011, and I’m, I’m being the first artists to do new media art in the contemporary art world in this context. And I would like you to support this art project, and come to the opening and, you know, book an expensive trip and travel and, and when you come, we have a nice dinner at Harry’s Bar, and, you know, we go around and get some gondolas or, or whatever. And then you add that to the price. And then it worked.

Matthew Dols 21:35
Were these individuals that you went to, or were these like, corporations,

Pia MYrvoLD 21:40
mostly individuals in my network, but I have worked with corporations too. But corporations are, of course, based on individuals. So unless you have some contact within that Corporation, it is really like, going into a beehive, where everybody’s like, this is this is, you know, people don’t necessarily know how to make decisions in their

Matthew Dols 22:04
world, and they don’t know who you are, or why you’re there.

Pia MYrvoLD 22:08
They might be enthused by it. But you know, in order to know this, corporations are really like a military organization. And when you work with people in the middle management, they are not able to make decisions based on other things. And what has trickled down from below, not below. But above. I’m talking about some big corporations like Samsung, for instance, or, you know, they, they need to sell 500,000 more screens in one year. And you know, everybody’s working on that plan. And so they’re trying to figure out how they can get 80 or 100, or 200. out. And so when you come there as an artist is I will I need 77. They go like, Oh, yeah, we can maybe help you. But then they figure out that I should be in the other department, not that department because I need professional screens. And then they don’t have that as incentive. in that department, which is a whole different department.

Matthew Dols 23:12
The whole Corporation support thing is fascinating me I love corporations that support the arts, I think they’re amazing. And I mean, in some some countries, there are like tax deductions for supports for the arts and things like this, which I think there should be more of like I you know, as much as I abhor large corporations, I do like the fact that as many of them do support and give back to the artistic and cultural communities, a lot of them support theatres and operas and other sorts of art forms. So it’s not just visual arts.

Pia MYrvoLD 23:46
Yeah, that is also particularly tradition in America, because supporting their art in America was only support that would come to art and those institution fairs. In Europe, we have cultural fundings through the government or the local government and so on. So we don’t have that strong tradition. But what I have noticed, especially because I worked with new media art, which was not a mainstream phenomena in the art world at all, even though the world had become digitalized, the artwork was still, you know, trying to paint like 1960 or, you know, making installations like 1965. So, it was strange for me that there was no people in the art world for Rogers going on a new media art. So I started to find support in the companies that were developing in the digital world, like telephone companies, screen talent, television companies, web companies, and so on because they were interested in IBM, Apple. I don’t remember all of them, but you know, I mean, we forget who they’re all our Google, whatever, you know, and There was a moment 10 years and where it started become increasingly difficult to get support for them because it had been become infiltrated by the curators and the different people who wanted to have the piece of the cake, they finally realized that they could do this that we had been doing already for 10 years. And what was very sad for me was the kind of realization like one of the great galleries in America pays, started their own new media department for artists to do new media art. And they started to do everything that we were doing the whole time, we’re working with city governments getting over the budget that we had found in the region, or because we for a while there, we could work outside of the framework of the art institutions. And now all of a sudden, it’s sewed up again, it’s closed. We can’t get in there because the curator is taken over. I sell all the another problem that we’re faced I faced today, the curatorial world has become absurdly dominant in the art world. I have curated a lot of exhibitions and art festivals during my time because I, I could do it and nobody else were doing it. So therefore I did it not because I wanted to be a curator, but because I could see what would be necessary to do and contribute. But this kind of obsession with the curators should dictate the art for the artists are so stupid that they don’t know what to do or what to make that it’s really an insult for me, which is one of the other problems that we have today. As free independent thinkers, I think, you know, like creative, pre independent thinkers, we don’t need a curator to tell me Oh, you should make this now appear because that’s what we want.

Matthew Dols 26:54
Is that what curators do, because I have very limited experiences.

Pia MYrvoLD 27:00
I it was that famous curator of the document, who I can never remember did I have to say her name correctly? Not the last document, but the one before and she’s Italian. Anybody who listens to this who are informed know who I mean? So but she went around she said that artists no longer know what to make. We as curator have to inform them about what they should be making. That is actually going on in a few places. I mind you.

Matthew Dols 27:38
Are you talking about Carolyn Christo of black? Give? Exactly. You know I can say I’m horrible with pronouncing names that that’s one of my greatest weaknesses. Beside languages in general, but yes, but but I mean, I’ve Oh, yeah. Okay, that’s a totally different perspective. On curators, I always saw an image again, maybe this is like my training of decades ago kind of schooling like, to me a curator is somebody who is a go between. So like you are in your studio, you make your thing, when you’re done making your thing you give it to a curator, the curator then chooses to help you put it into a gallery or get it in into an institution or whatever. But they have no right to say anything about what we do in our studio. I mean, if the artist asks for it, okay, fine, that’s great. But like, that’s not their place to tell us what to make. That’s my feeling.

Pia MYrvoLD 28:39
I agree with that. There is however, when I’m curating. I usually work with artists who are similar to what I do, but who have taken another decision. You know, when you have like 30 things to drink, you have to choose one, in order to go forward and what you do. But you see, there’s 29 other possibilities. And sometimes you meet the artists who took that other choice. So you can support them because you, you know where they went. And sometimes we also find out that we are concerned with the same basic idea. But we choose a different execution to engage our minds and the audience with the same idea but through different execution. But sometimes it’s also that you have a kind of artist situation where they don’t know how to present they don’t understand the potential of the space or the potential of their own work. And that’s where a curator could be good. But sometimes we don’t know if it’s a curator or an exhibition architect or something else. In this in Santa Pompidou. For instance, they have a curator, then they have an architect who decides everything and then I have a designer. Then there’s somebody who does the tech And then one who does the marketing, they’re very lucky. Most of the time we do all of those things ourselves, you know,

Matthew Dols 30:08
that’s one of the things that I’m feeling a lot of like. So I feel like these days, a lot of these responsibilities that were traditionally the gallery’s responsibility are the curators responsibilities are being placed back onto the artist. So like, in some ways, it’s great, because we’re being given our own responsibility, we can sort of define ourselves, however, we want all this kind of stuff. But on the other hand, it’s more work and effort. And it’s basically you taking on more jobs that were traditionally not ours, back into our control in our hands and our obligation, which I kind of like the old way, I kind of just want to be an artist and be in the studio and make my stuff and then hand it off to somebody else. I don’t want to be involved in all the other stuff. If I had a choice.

Pia MYrvoLD 30:58
If you had a choice, yes, I always wanted a wife, who could take pictures of all my work and do all my cataloging, and write all the letters to all the institutions. You know, I met, I remember we curated an exhibition, we had bill Viola in 1986. And we were dealing with all the businesses through his wife. So that’s something that I missed, I didn’t have a wife, who could do all those things. But, you know, that’s been old school, that’s been for a lot of artists, they had that, you know, they come home for dinner, and the kids were there, you know, everything is laid out, then we kind of work into another discussion, which is gender. But I think that just to relate to what you’re saying is that, I found out that I’m better at most of the things in the production side, and most people I meet who are professionals who are paid for those kind of things. And I’m also very good at getting more value for the little money that is available, I find out that, you know, I have done 40 years of crisis management. That’s what I always say, there’s always crisis management. So how do you optimize the situation, so you get most out of it. And the more you work with that, the more you understand that it’s actually the energy that you put into the project that creates the optimal result from the little money you have that energy, you will never be paid for by, you know, by hour or whatever, you have to energize everybody in the link in order to perform well. And it doesn’t matter if they are paid or they’re not paid. It’s the same work that you have to do. And I did think that was very interesting learning process to come to that conclusion that, you know, if you don’t have the energy to really spark a project, it will just fall flat, no matter how expensive or no matter how many people you have working with it. It’s like a film, you know, a good film or bad from cost to save money to produce, you know, you have to bring the skills into the process. I mean, I have had a lot of conflict. I’m sure. I hope you did, too. But it’s like the conflicts have been painful, and sometimes absurd, sometimes extremely interesting, unfair. And you have to develop a kind of a strong resistance to not get destroyed by that also as an artist, you know, and I think that the key word as you go along is perseverance. You’re not the one who’s standing in the end, after 16 rounds. You win because you’re still alive kind of thing, you know, but it’s a really hard world. And it’s easy when it’s easy, like Rakowski said but it’s not always obvious. Not always, always how you’re going to move on. For me the two last years have been very strong demotivator or like putting on a whole different set of glasses because I’m wondering, is there any reason to be an international artist, I have really been an international artist since I started I wanted that career I wanted to be recognized to be able to have the freedom to create what I wanted to create and I’ve done very well. Considering I could have done better but you know, I I guess is relative for everybody. But with this COVID situation and several project being canceled or mood my Even the thought of going on a plane to New York or whatever, you know, it’s like, well, I hate. And then it’s also is, is this the end game? This art world isn’t an end game or? And where’s creativity? Where are we taking over from that moment of vacuum that moment of death? That is interesting?

Matthew Dols 35:26
Oh yeah, there was a book I read years ago, finite and infinite games by James Pete karsch. And he talked about how like, there are infinite games like love life, these kinds of things. And then there are finite games like a job because there’s a beginning, a middle and an end, there’s a field of play, and a set of players and all this. And like, I’ve always tried to, I should say, I’ve always tried to keep in mind that art is more of an infinite game, like so it’s the the production is an ongoing thing. Like it’s not, you know, exhibitions or books or whatever. They’re just a random stopping point, basically saying, like, this is where I am today. But, but I’m going to keep working. So that it’s not a there’s not an end goal for me, other than well, death, basically. death and taxes. Always gets you. Indeed, yes. Now, you brought up gender, what what? What’s your experiences in the art world with gender issues?

Pia MYrvoLD 36:30
on my Facebook page, I put my gender as yet or something like that. And I did, I can newsletter and it says, like the advantages of being other. Because if you just look at the financial statistics of male artists and female artists work, female artists work our price much lower. So why would anybody in the right mind say they were a woman? This just crazy. That’s like, don’t I’m in land. I’m a man, I’m sorry, I have purple hair. And I have glasses. But I’m a man. I’m a male artist, looking like a woman

Matthew Dols 37:11
with a but I don’t understand the fundamentals of that. Why if there are two pieces of art, which are pretty much the same, let’s say skill, level, size, etc, this kind of stuff. Why is a woman’s worth less than a man’s? I don’t understand that.

Pia MYrvoLD 37:26
No, it’s a psychological thing. I caught myself when I was 22 years old. I was in documentary in castle. And I went into see an amazing installation. That was a fantastic show, one of the best I ever, you know, my favorite of all the documents I’ve been to. And this was such a great installation among many that I had seen and I went up to the to the cartel and read the text. And I was like, Oh, it’s a woman was like, I degraded it like in my mind. And then I caught myself and I said, What did you just do? I’m a woman, I degraded another woman’s work, because I thought she was a woman too. Not important enough. And this actually, when I catch myself doing something like this, I know that it’s true, is what people do. They do it again. And again. I’m currently in Norway. in Oslo, there’s like five dominant galleries. You know, 95% men, the most prestigious gallery in Stavanger, where I am, it’s only men. And I know that they’re not painting those paintings with their penises. So it’s just weird, you know, like, and, sadly too, there is also a criticism somewhere for me, because a lot of the owners of the galleries are women, but they participate in this psychological game. And they don’t have the same discrimination. Like if I’m a female art dealer, I only get 10% of what my male art dealer friends gets when they sell their work. Like they get less commission, they don’t only get 5% on my male, they don’t have that they get the same commission when they sell the work as the male. So why would they participate in this psychology? And then there is also the fact that the men and most of the fortunes in the world are dominated created by men like Silicon Valley kings, you know, how many women are there. And in Norway, there is actually becoming quite a few young stockbrokers and cryptocurrency women you know, in their 20s and 30s. really taking off, which is great because we will get a kind of new game when women have the same amount of money as men in general just in general. But I think the gallerist thinks that I want to sell something that is easy for me to make money off and when See a woman, they say like, Oh, that’s less worth it is more noise, we have to work harder to make that a success. So they take the easy choice. It’s like the bottom of the shelf. You know, why stretch up?

Matthew Dols 40:14
Well, but I don’t understand the fundamental behind that. So like, where does it even come from historically that a woman’s artwork is valued less or sorry, priced? Less? Let’s not talk about because we differentiate value in price earlier. Yeah, price less than a man’s art. Like, I don’t understand that. Because like, if I were to walk into a studio, a gallery and see pieces, I would the the issue of what gender the person was, would never factor in the price, I would be willing to pay for it. Now, of course, I’m a liberal artist, and all this kinds of stuff like, Yeah, I would think I’m a little more evolved, white man in America. White man.

Pia MYrvoLD 40:58
I’m joking with you. No, but the thing is about this is that it’s historic. And I’m not talking about the last 100 years, I think it comes from the fact that women were not allowed to read. They were not allowed to engage in academics. They were not pursued, they were not actually just Christine de pizan. In 1405, she wrote his book, why cannot women do this in this in this medicine, literature or whatever. And she wrote a book illegally, she was not allowed to write the book. And she went into history with sources dating back 1000s of 1000s of years of women who had done something prominent, their sources have later been hid and taken away by African and other institution burned in Alexandria libraries. So some people say there is a moment in history where women lost power and men took over and that is maybe like, two 3000 years. So we are still struggling with a long history of women not allowed to. In Sweden, they changed the law and 1980, Sweden was the most deliberate places around that. Women, the children was no longer the property of the man. Right? So these are recent stories. These are not like something that happened like 1000s of years ago, this happened recently. And how could women get into universities that happened slowly? We are you have a lot of glass ceilings everywhere. So you have somebody like arrestor saying, like I hate women cannot paint he says, Nicole is an art. You know, it goes into the art newspaper. So he’s saying like, he’s a stupid chauvinist pig or something, you know, but some people believe in it. He might even believe it. I mean, I think he believes it. But I mean, like, really believe in him, he might think that there’s a million women who wants to paint now, which is true, because they have nothing else to do. And so he every time there’s a new female painter, there’s a similar Oh, my God, another one, you know, like, just popping up everywhere. So there is a kind of strange discrimination. Like, when I was doing fashion in Paris, I thought it was very weird that, that they didn’t think that it could be academic or intellectual. And then somebody said to me, like, you know, when Amanda said, it’s much more important, like cooking fashion. I don’t know what to say, I cannot enlighten you about why, but I think it has to do with that history that I mentioned.

Matthew Dols 43:54
Yeah, no, I mean, I don’t even understand the whole issue of the gender pay gap that exists in any industry. So wherever you are the you know, to, if a man and a woman have the same position in some major corporation, oftentimes the man is paid more than the woman I don’t understand that. It To me, it’s completely illogical. So what, we’re not going to resolve that here.

Pia MYrvoLD 44:19
But I do want to say something which I’m very critical of women in the art world, because they are quite difficult, which with each other, you have like this kind of idea that women should support each other. You know, we should be feminists, we should like, give each other the backing that we need to support. But a lot of the women that I met in Article are very, very protective of their position. They’re really using their elbows and it’s a lot of jealousy coming in, and it’s not so much this great sisterhood that you would imagine that the women would be and that’s not in an in Norway, where I come from, it also extends to other parts of the community that women are, you know, quite critical of other women and afraid that they should get power and they should have success. And maybe in France, it was very much like that when I first came here, the women were petrified that there was some independent woman who had their own company or could do all these things. And, and the fact that I was blonde was not easy, either. And, you know, and I, I found that the biggest barrier were with the women or not with the men, the men were more clear Gale, they could understand what you were doing. They were also, you know, some factors playing in that, they wouldn’t talk to you about opportunities the same way they would do with their bodies, they were more like, Hi, how are you? How are you baby? And then they would go to their buddies and say, Hey, you should really visit that gallery. He’s very interested in new artists right now. And I could hear that they did that. But they wouldn’t ask me, you know. So and that’s because I have that culture and women, they don’t, we don’t have that culture. And then they cannot translate it when women come in, you know, that it’s not because they’re bad people, it’s just that they don’t know how to include the women in their body game, you know, fascinating.

Matthew Dols 46:22
I find that there’s two sides to it. Like a lot of times, there are artists who are incredibly open and inviting, and they share everything. And then there are the others that are very secretive, and they don’t share anything. And I don’t, I probably fall more into the allshare everything camp, because you know, I had a professor at school at the Corcoran in DC that said, basically, we actually did this as a class assignment where he set up a still life. And it was a photography class, he set up a still life in a room. And he sent us out each in one by one. And so like one photographer went in, they got to take one picture of this still life. And then they left the room and another photographer went into the one picture, no two pictures were the same. So the exact same scenarios, exact same equipment, exact same everything, no two people took the same picture. So it doesn’t matter if we share and engage and share our ideas or AI techniques, all this kind of stuff. Because they’re just techniques. They’re not you are creative idea. They’re not your way you perceive the world, all this kinds of so I’m all about sharing as much as possible, because it will only make us all stronger. Instead of sort of being secretive, and you know, being proprietary, and all this kind of crap, that’s more corporate than it is sort of artistic to me.

Pia MYrvoLD 47:43
Yeah, I agree with that. I think that do you kind of get burned out if you share all the time, and nobody else does. So, you know, it’s like you’re sharing, you’re giving information away, and you get God get nothing back. You give people great contacts, you know, you hook people up that you know that they would know and you do it, it is a kind of a community building thing. And then you find out that nobody’s sharing back with you. I was taking a second before we started today, about when you’re a young artist, you’re kind of like a child artist who’s looking for a parent who can help you, you know, or mentors or whatever, somebody. And when you become older, you become like the mother artist or the father artists who are like helping others. But when you are the mother or the father artists, you don’t get any help from anybody. So I went like from the Amazon Teresa who never got any help. To become the mother art is just helping other people, but still don’t get any support in the sense that it’s not true that I don’t get the support, any support. But I feel like I could have some help sometimes to build the community and that it would be more organic in the sense that we all need that kind of encouragement. So I actually I have to say this, I came back to stay longer. And I’ve been here, which I left when I was 30. I kind of ran away. And then I came back here because of COVID. And I’ve had a very strong confrontation coming back to the place that I ran away from. Because in one in some ways, nothing changed there in 30 years, and I changed a lot. And I see the same indifference. I see the same lack of knowledge I see. And I do have friends here. But I realized quickly that they have consumer identities, most of them like have you seen this film title? Have you read that book title? Have you tried this app title? And then they talk they don’t talk about what’s inside of there, what are the bridges, what are the ideas and so on? And I realized that in Paris I did find that particular environment And that people knew what I was talking about what I was trying to do, and the art and the design. They had a long tradition of culture and education and practice with fourth generation collectors, for instance, and so on, which had the language and for all of that, and coming back here, I of course, miss that. But that is also, as far a few people who can be able to cushion our world, it’s a harsh reality. And I drove down the street here the other day, and I saw some kids and I just said very loudly in my car, like, never become a genius. Okay, that’s the wrong path today. Just be ordinary. Don’t try. And in any way was sad when I said that.

Matthew Dols 50:52
It’s really hard these days, because, like, it’s funny, okay, my wife is Czech, and I’m an American. And in America, when we were being raised, we were taught, like, you could be anything, you know, shoot for the stars, you can be the best in the world, all this kind of stuff. And it’s like, Yeah, but I mean, I could be the best auto mechanic, I could be the best ditch digger like that. But the problem is, is a lot of things these days has seemed to be that everybody wants to be the best in the world of whatever they’re doing. Like, there’s the super high expectations being placed on everything that we do, whether it’s making a piece of art, like it’s got to be the biggest thing on Instagram, or Tiktok, or Twitter or whatever it like, to a certain extent, like, it’s gonna sound bad when I say, but I guess, like, mediocrity is not as sort of frowned upon at this point, when you know, the majority is mediocre. That’s sort of the definition of mediocre. So like, that’s the majority of society. So like, everybody can’t be the rock stars, but everybody wants to be the rock stars. And it’s only getting faster, and the expectations are getting higher, as social media and the corporations are taking over. And like these iconic worldwide, things are being created in a way that they never were even a generation ago.

Pia MYrvoLD 52:18
Yeah, I think that’s the reaction to that. It’s like people are stopping to go online, they start to only care about our local communities. They don’t want to make records, they only want to go to live things, they only want to play live, people are doing even with COVID there is this kind of thing that people do things at home, now they don’t go to the concert hall anymore. In a way, it’s interesting. If that happens, that people start to work in their, what we call the short traveled culture, like, you know, like with food, that it shouldn’t travel so long it should be in the community. And I think there there is something about this moment that calls for that. But there is surprise with that too, because you have to become an educator. And you have to figure out also Is there any money in this community to sustain me being an educator? How do you deal with that when your client group is potentially not educated to what you’re doing? And so there’s that I think that we are still on this brink of trying to figure out where the world is gonna go right now. And this massive Instagram selling art on internet until one seems I’m happy that it works for somebody but I’m not relying on it to it doesn’t sustain me neither emotionally or financially because I cannot stand being on that Apple of time and being a maniac. Like this is not a way of life for me. And I don’t want I don’t have the interest in hiring somebody to do it because then I have to train them and that takes too much time. So agreed. Yeah, there’s that hype going on which people are lost and and also created after that other thing that people young people go to psychologists they want to kill themselves they don’t feel like they can measure up and you know, it’s a very sad situation for loneliness is huge in the world right now.

Matthew Dols 54:37
Yeah, my sense of loneliness and anxiety has been exacerbated in the last two years for sure. I mean, I always was a little bit anxious and I always was a little bit lonely but lay the the entire lockdown COVID situation and then of course the the reliance on the internet to be connected, but the Problem is, of course, the internet is a, a showcase for the best stuff kind of things. And like, it looks like everybody else in the world is having a great time. And it’s like my life’s not as good as that my, my arts not as good as that whatever. Like, it’s really difficult.

Pia MYrvoLD 55:15
I had a friend who said it in interesting race, like when you’re in the hospital and you have COVID. And, you know, you have tubes coming out and you’re really feeling shame. You don’t share that on Instagram do. You share, you share when you’re like on top of the world, and you’re like, climb the mountain. And so I think there’s also some a few people who made successes of being vulnerable on social media, saying that they had a bad day. And you know, things didn’t look right. But actually, I’m losing a little bit respect for my friends who only post things about How marvelous they are, when I even know that they’re struggling like hell, it just makes me think it’s just a pathetic time that people feel like they have to place the success on social media, nobody really gives a damn, what you do is just to fake what you say, you know, the likes that you get whatever doesn’t. It’s a fake mirror. I would say fake mirror is maybe a good word.

Matthew Dols 56:22
I agree. 100%. But let’s go back. Okay, so early on, you talked about how the, you feel the art world is broken? in many ways. I have my opinions on that. But I’d love to hear your sort of impression of like, what are some different ways it like partly, how is it broken? And potentially even So what are some ways we could resolve those broken parts? If you have any?

Pia MYrvoLD 56:48
Yeah, it’s, I’ve tried a lot. I mean, I, I always tried to work on the art world from the point of view of creative growth and healing. Like in the 80s, I did a big project on a beach, actually, the same year as Burning Man, started in San Francisco, me and my partner, we made an art festival on a beach in Stavanger, because we were young artists, and we had no opportunities. Like, contrary to what happened in New York and Berlin and other places, they were not interested in the young generation of painters. So we decided that why should we stand at the gates of the institution where or 99% of the artists were standing to get in, rather, those change the location and do something in another place, it was a huge success, and also the biggest project I had done organizing and planning the monies or, you know, big learning curve, to do it. What I did find out, and maybe that was because it was Norway’s that the establishment didn’t appreciate the competition for the, you know, who owns the consensus. And I think that a lot of the art world is really about who owns the consensus who decide what is right now what’s most important, and that’s actually power. And it’s about market control. That’s two things. So that’s on the top of my head, I can remember I would mention that. And then there is that other fact that we know about that the big galleries have become bigger, they have opening in 510 2030 locations worldwide. And they are like, ships in the ocean, you know, like they’re like huge structures. And they are financed by this 70% and Asia, people hiding and washing their money, which is what is going on, this is what actually is happening. And when I meet people in, you know, like in a museum or whatever, who talks about this artist or that artists, and about art structure without realizing that it’s actually inherently corrupt, all the way to the top when you talk about this money structure that you are being seduced by here. The curators are on in on it. What happens, you know, how does Jeff Kuhn get a an sculpture into a museum, for instance, I know because I work with I talked to I had dinner with some of the people I even met him in Doha, so I know what they’re doing. And so when you’re small fish like me, you’re all in this pond. I don’t have a tremendous amount of influence. I don’t have a lot of support to exercise de Lille in France. I have so you know, I’m in a in a bind, because I don’t want to get burned out, I need to sustain my ideas I have to continue. And in the end, I say that, first, I have to be honest, as myself as an artist, follow what I want to do with my art. I do think that it’s a good idea to work independent, beside these colossal institutions, because I think that they can collapse like a cryptocurrency that can like, because that they are inflated, and they’re not working on the proper value system. So we need more independent people taking charge of our destinies, and to ignore the tendency of the market ignore the tendency of fight against the consensus. Basically, say, Okay, well, we don’t agree with this consensus, the problem is that most everyone get caught. Because if I start to get really big success, you know, all sudden, I’m invited to be some modern art, and then these collectors are buying my work. And then I’m, you know, I’m done. I’m cooked as well. So you know, and that’s also what happens with artists in the beginning. And I think that situation is they talked about that, because they said like, it’s, it’s a commodification of the creativity, it eventually happens to everyone, because then we have become commodified. And then we are no longer dangerous. So they were against the commodification of art, it was in the late 50s, and 60s, because of the same reason.

Matthew Dols 1:01:37
Well, I mean, Jeff Koons is an excellent example of that. I mean, you know, he found his, you know, balloon animals and all this kind of stuff. And like, he could never get away from that, like that will be his legacy, no matter what other creative idea he ever comes up with, and maybe his other creative ideas are amazing. But he will always be known for that one thing, and he will always be expected to still produce those same kind of balloon animals, again, and again and again. And to a certain extent that repetition, a lot of people will perceive as sort of the death of creativity, as soon as people start expecting things from you.

Pia MYrvoLD 1:02:13
Yeah, to a certain degree, it’s our problem as our community, I think about I also met when I was really young, I met Damien Hirst. And I saw, of course, what happened with his support from such in such a gallery, and so on. And I know, for instance, geography is very important for those two successes, because they could never have happened in Norway, there could never happen in another place that they would have to happen in London, or in New York, where there’s a dominant press World Press and where they have this selection of, but they have a ready infrastructure to push somebody to become a megastar, you know, that doesn’t happen everywhere in the world. And we have that problem, which a lot of the last 1520 years, maybe more, there’s been a lot of political activism about the South North axis, how to get artists well known from other countries, also more women, which, you know, they are working on, which is very positive. So, the only thing I don’t like about that is that if you don’t make that kind of art, when should you then be ignored? You’re not like, oh, you’re not a political activist? Well, I am, but my art doesn’t have, you know, like a red banner that says free, the free the penguins, whatever, you know, like, I don’t do those kind of messages. So, you know, like, you have to be more subtle, because some of the values that I’m working on are very intrinsic to circular economy and much bigger issues. So that’s where the headline art that we see, kind of are important. But also, normally, we had a big campaign for the lap lander artists, which is really great, because they were indigenous people, that everybody, you know, ignored, has a culture. And so that culture has a main, been dominant, and also contemporary art, and also for the last 10 years, and it’s really good. But what happens is that all the other art gets ignored at the same time. And that’s not correct. You know, we have to have the new artists happening now, we cannot go back to the old art and make sure that it was correct. You know, like it was also seen on the expense of the artists that are bringing the forefront further.

Matthew Dols 1:04:43
Was your topic of geography is very interesting, because I was talking to somebody else who was in London and they were saying that these days, an artist or sort of any creative person can’t afford to live in London. But yet you need to be in London, same thing, New York, possibly even Paris. I don’t know. But it’s really hard because like the hubs of creativity and arts are so damn expensive that they’ve out priced the ability for younger people to be able to live there yet, that’s where they need to be. But on the flip side of that, you are living in Norway, you’re in Norwegian, Norway has his amazing support structure for creativity in the arts, like, that’s not anywhere else in the world. So it’s one of those hard things of like, if you’re trying to make a decision, like, ooh, should I go to a hub that I can’t afford to live in? Or should I go someplace that actually supports what I do? But maybe he’s not going to necessarily, like help my career matter better, but it’s going to make it so I may be happier, more productive, have more space, whatever kind of things like these interesting choices that we all have to make of like, the geographical choices of where should we be producing and where should we define ourselves as being from?

Pia MYrvoLD 1:06:01
Yeah, I know that in Norway, we had the last 15 years we had a phenomena, which I don’t think many people realize it. But there was an architect’s office, new hetta, who are famous for the ground zero monument in New York, of course, they won an architect competition many, many years ago, in the new library in Alexandria. And there were like eight architects, one of them were from Norway. And then when they sent in the competition, they will decide like, Where should we be from. And then they decided to be from Norway. They have a New York office, and they built the moment San Francisco, and you know, they’re building a lot in America. So that became the exoticism of their company, which was actually designed that they were from Norway in the late 15 years has been many international artists who have been motivated by the new space for artists in office of contemporary art. And it’s a few galleries very elitist galleries that chose a slower their as their location because when our boss looked different art fair wanted to have diversity, they needed a gallery from Oslo, they didn’t need another one from New York, they didn’t need another form from Berlin. So it became actually strategic to do that in Oslo. And they’re saying, showing the same artists to Berlin artists in New York artists alone an artist and maybe an original artist as well. But it’s become a kind of a, the tour route for people to, to use that hub. There’s a lot of things there that I was based on networks, not so much about, because they already have the networks in order to strategize in the right clientele, the right academic circles. And what I have found all said, in the 90s, now in 2003, I had a daughter, I lived in Paris, and I was a single mother or a single other single mother with a child. And in the period when the baby was a child, you know, I had a nanny, who would come and daytime. So I would sleep and I worked all night. And I was very, very productive. So there’s no way that I could say that you as a woman, I couldn’t work when I had a child. But I did have enough economy to hire a nanny. And so I could be really productive. But I could not go to all the openings, all the networking events for our art, I just didn’t have a chance. So that is why I went to Venice in 2011. Because then I could concentrate my energy. And I thought when people see me in a gallery, especially in Paris, they don’t want to talk to me, because they are not friendly with foreigners. And when they hear me talking about my, you know, animated forums in 3d Max, or you know, digital art or whatever, they are less interested even there. And it’s not like I’m a big potential for the marketplace, because I’m a woman. So therefore, I decided that if I put up my exhibitions and my project in a place where people have a chance to see it, that’s my best bet. And so I thought like that, because I think that in the end, the work speaks for itself. So the fight is to get to work seen by as many people as possible. And although in Venice in 2011, maybe I had 5% of all the attendees, you know, it was an independent project 5% of all the attendees to the benalla. I had very important people dropping by by chance and gave me enough leads to build my career further from there. But otherwise, I was I and I’m just at a loss, how do you get people to understand what you’re doing simply by meeting them in a gallery in a museum at the Art Fair in Art Basel in in, in Miami, whenever going, drinking, partying New York, blah, blah, blah is great fun, but not at least not for me. You know, that’s not where it happens.

Matthew Dols 1:10:26
Oh, it’s hard. I’m yeah, I’m great with socializing. I can meet people, I can party with them and all that, but it I’m really hard it I’m bad at closing the deal. pace. Yeah. saying like, okay, you know, we’re really good friends, you want to include me in an exhibition, or, hey, you want to buy my work. Like, that’s the hardest thing for me to do. Like, I can be great associates and friends and hang out with, you know, very interesting people. But it’s that that’s the tough one for me for sure.

Pia MYrvoLD 1:10:54
stuff for everybody. I say the young people, they come and ask me about this, they have a hard problem because they don’t know what to make. They’re young, and they get out of the Academy. And they have no idea because they learned a lot of things, but they didn’t learn how to be true to themselves. So they asked me, What should I make? And I’m like, I don’t know. I don’t know what you should make. This is what you have to figure out yourself. Because there’s no real answer how to how you’re gonna there’s not one road, how you’re going to sustain. I think basically, how do you sustain yourself as an artist? Not how are you as successful artists, but more How can you sustain your creativity? That is the real question, how can you make sure that you get to do what you need to do as an artist?

Matthew Dols 1:11:52
Agreed. And that’s a lovely place to end this. So thank you very much for your time.

Pia MYrvoLD 1:11:58
Yeah, thank you too, and good luck with editing.

The Wise Fool is produced by Fifty14. I am your host Matthew Dols – http://www.matthewdols.com, the music was created by Peat Biby, and the audio for this episode was edited by Jakub Černý. The Wise Fool is supported in part by an EEA grant from Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway – https://eeagrants.org in an effort to work together for a green competitive and inclusive Europe. We would also like to thank our partners Hunt Kastner – http://huntkastner.com in Prague, Czech Republic and Kunstsentrene i Norge – https://www.kunstsentrene.no in Norway. Links to EEA grants and our partner organizations are available in the show notes or on our website https://wisefoolpod.com