It comes out of my own experience as an artist.

Interviewee: Gregory Sholette

Sholette: It comes out of my own experience as an artist and someone working with artist groups for many years. I realised that there was no one writing history on what we were doing collectively and that it seemed unlikely anyone would bother to write that history. So I began to self-historicize, you might say. That in turn gave birth to this idea of Dark Matter that asks what if the majority of productivity going on in the cultural sphere is not only visible, but it is actually intentionally kept invisible, and is yet completely necessary for the “architecture” of the art world to operate and reproduce itself? Which would then mean if that is true that art institutions like universities or colleges help to produce invisible foundations of “pre-failed” artists in a highly organized and hierarchical system that is presented as totally “natural” and based on mysterious and expert functions of talent, taste and judgement. But the really interesting question was, to what degree is this structure dependent on this hidden foundation, and how would one begin to think and act upon things differently? How could you begin to question this naturalized artifice? I also came to the conclusion that, to a certain degree, because of changes in the economy, changes in technology, and in the way labor is organized, a lot of these once invisible substructures are actually becoming visible anyway, whether we like it or not. Dark Matter it is not so dark anymore. And that has consequences for the system, both positive and negative.