Safety Propagandist #15: Mathieu Malouf
The year is 2020, and in a week the whole world will lock down. Not knowing the fall out ahead, Adam and Mathieu Malouf met up to discuss his then recent show at Greene Naftali
In 2020, I met up with my pal the artist Mathieu Malouf about his then recent exhibition The Fairy Godmother at Greene Naftali, a gallery that would soon after kick his ass to the side over some nonsense financial or ideological or who fucking knows. I had been commissioned to profile Mathieu for Gruppe Magazine, a German art mag. I don’t know why Germans still think I’m cool, but they do. Anyways, I consider this interview to have some historical value now. We conducted it just as Covid started giving people the sniffles, and even tried to see a Peter Saul show at the New Museum, realizing then that indeed lockdowns were going to be a real thing. It also took place in Seward Park, where just six months to a year later the reactionary artist wannabes of Dimes Square would be pissing out their beer bloat after long nights at Sovereign House, or whatever. I had AI transcribe this audio and it did a terrible job of it, so I did my best to edit it back to legibility from a very fluid memory of the conversation and the disorienting events that would follow it.
Adam Lehrer: Yeah, so I'm trying to find a regular job now, and I've been applying for grants to write or something. You used to write, right?
Mathieu Malouf:. It's tough to write right now. Before the whole Knight Landesman #metoo thing, Artforum would actually publish me. II pitched a review of a Houellebecq show and they fucking did it and they were cool and they published it in the front of the magazine and stuff and they wrote me a little note about doing it again. And then fucking immediately after Knight’s nipple twisting scandals nobody gets back to my emails. Never.
AL: I've been spending so much time trying to analyze how the art world got to this specific ideology. I genuinely don't understand it.
MM: You can't, from the outside, you have to go to collectors’ dinners and talk to them when they're drunk and shit like that. I think that's how you kind of understand, right?
AL: I'm definitely drawn to artists that point out hypocrisy. Do you think you do any of that?
MM: Yeah, I mean it's weird. Usually, yes. In this show, not so much. This show's pretty distilled. It’s mostly about fairy tales, and I was talking about that with my friend Michael, who's a writer, and then he came up with a title for the show.I thought it could be cool to do a show that deals with “trolls” but on a subtler and more subliminal level. So it's more about psychology and personal experiences, kind of universal archetypes that are maybe relatable to people. I don't know.