Interview

with Christoph Schwarz about "Spamming BacK", 13th November 2007, Café Joanneli , Text: Daniel Bleninger

Christoph, can you explain „Spamming Back!“

It’s a performance which I started to do one year ago. I have been collecting spam mails for a long time – because I am excited about the lyrical component, the used language and the striking graphic design in spam mails. The best ones I copied so that I could laminate them on aluminum. When somebody buys one of the pictures, we are doing a Polaroid photo of me handing the picture over to the collector, and we send it back to the spammer. The email comes with a text proposing a collaboration between the spammer and my Gallery Schwartz. But in the end the spammer are somehow fooled because I treat them like they treat us- I promise them an artistic career, but beforehand they have to pay some kind of fee.

What are you doing with the Gallery Schwartz?

I am playing the role of Christoph Schwartz, the junior chief of this faked gallery based in Vienna. Schwartz is a tragic person, he receives spam mails but confuses them with work drafts, with the portfolios of young visual artists. He falls in love with this kind of art, he never understood the concept of spam and he tries to contact these artists- he wants to show them in his gallery. Schwartz is proud that he found a new generation of artists, which have been inspired by early 1980’s digital computer art, by the experiments of the surrealists in automatic writing and so on. He is bit desperate though, because he is not able to contact any of his artists- they simply don’t reply to his requests.

What is Schwartz writing to the spammers?

Stuff like „Hey, I can sell your work with very little effort for good money, let’s get together, let’s increase your output and your professionality!“ or „I want to show your work on a few art fairs because I really like them! Come to Vienna so that we can talk about your career“. I treat the spammers like artists with a great potential for the art market. But in the very end of each mail there is a small line saying something like „before we start our collaboration, you have to send me 200 Euro as advance payment on my bankaccount“. That’s why the whole performance is called Spamming Back! I was thrilled by the idea that also spammers receive spam.

What is this lyrical component you are excited about?

Since a few years it is a common procedure to put random text at the beginning or the end of spam mails to trick the spam filters of the users to accept the mail. The results were so full of absurd beauty, in particular when combined with this very dry and straight spam texts. In general- the fight between spam filters and spammer is very fruitful, for example when spammers began to use „captchas“, distorted and displaced letters to trick their enemies.

What is more important for you: the performance, or these shiny, colorful spam prints?

Every layer is important for the project. On one hand, I am thrilled by the value of one single spam mail. Even if only one mail in hundred thousands is clicked, it is still a very good business- which means that there is nothing less valuable in the world then one single spam mail. I am treating this mail as a piece of high art, I make it look nice and cool and bring it to another medium, where suddenly the audience is in the position to re-evaluate what is happening every day in our mailboxes. Suddenly we have a fresh look on the dreams, fears and hopes in our society […]. The french artist Julien Bouillion used similar spam mails and showed them laminated also in exhibtions, Dragan Espenschied showed some of the most exiting graphic spam mails on his website- there are a lot of artists working with spam mails- so that’s why for me the performance is the core of the project, playing with confronting the spammers with the idea that they are the true conceptual artists of our time. Telling them that a gallery is getting rich by selling their spam sujets. I am not convinced by this romantic myth that spammers are earning a hell of a money.

What is your relationship to spam?

From an artistic perspective I think that everything which is part of human culture is exciting - and spam is an important part of culture, you can tell a lot about our societies from analyzing our spam. As a private person I am shocked by this force to consume more and more, and the wasted ressources in terms of energy are very problematic for me. But I really would like to get to know to a spammer- sometimes when I am in a queue in the supermarket, I look at the people next to me and play with the idea that one of them might be a spammer.