Not For Tourists is an alternative guide to New York City's contemporary art scene. In each <H>ART-edition, NY-based curator Niels Van Tomme highlights a non-profit cultural organization. Ranging from the well established to the marginal, from the intellectual to the politically engaged, Not For Tourists leads through the artistic heart of the Big Apple. This episode offers an interview with Sina Najafi, editor-in-chief of the wonderfully innovative Cabinet magazine, also responsible for programming its event and exhibition space.

Previously I interviewed Matthew Higgs from White Columns and asked him what my first question should be to you: "What's your favorite color?"
Sina Najafi: "Grey, because, as Geoffrey O'Brien says, there are no grey lollipops."

Cabinet magazine has a world-renowned reputation and a very specific approach that channels towards the "intellectual curious of the future." How do you translate some of the magazine's unique characteristics into an event and exhibition space?
Najafi: "The goals of the event and exhibition space overlap with the magazine's but are not identical. The magazine and the space are both concerned with an ethical engagement with the world, which for us requires, before all else, disregarding the hierarchies that dictate what is supposedly important and what is not. This also implies ignoring any disciplinary straitjackets. But some of the hopefully productive tensions in the magazine play out differently in the exhibition and event space. The tensions in the magazine are in part produced by the fact that we are equally interested in the specialist and in the all-rounder, in the professional and in the amateur-a tension that we have recently translated into a coat of arms that boasts both a hedgehog and a fox. For the poet Archilochus, the distinction between these animals is that the hedgehog knows one big thing, whereas the fox knows many small things. But we are sympathetic toward both modes of knowledge and want to be a home for both animals, contradictory though that may seem. The event and exhibition space also draws on both approaches to knowledge, however without somehow appearing to have a contradiction at its heart. I think that's simply because each event is judged in itself (each individual event constitutes the unit that is to be judged), whereas the unit of judgment for the magazine is the entire collection of essays and projects in an issue."

When do you consider a Cabinet event, or exhibition, to be successful, or meaningful?
Najafi: "That's very hard to say, but some of my favorite events have been the ones where we were surprised, where there was a gap between what we imagined that would happen and how things unfolded. We recently hosted a ‘silent' event where all communication had to be done by exchanging written notes. The event taught us a great deal about our habitual modes of communication and we could not have guessed all of these before the event itself."

What kind of audience are you aiming for with your events and exhibitions?
Najafi: "We never think of the audience, just like we never imagine a specific reader for the magazine. We think that a diehard Cabinet subscriber only likes maybe two-thirds of what's in the magazine: that's because we want our readers to bump into things that they did not know they would be interested in, and not all of these encounters will be successful. Similarly, I can't imagine many people who will be interested in every single event and exhibit that we do. This means that the events have widely varied audiences, and I imagine some people might only ever come to one event."
"But if we were to think of someone who loves the magazine and comes repeatedly to events, we imagine a fictional person who we call the Artist. This fictional person is someone whose walls or notebooks are full of images and fragments of texts culled from a diverse set of sources, someone who is, in theory, interested in everything. Though a kind of fiction, this mythical figure of the Artist has been useful for us to think with."

How significant is New York City to Cabinet's modus operandi? Do you think it could be located elsewhere?
Najafi: "We could easily be elsewhere. The only advantage of New York City is one that we'd have in any large metropolis, namely that there are many interesting people who live here or pass through and we can turn to them for our events. We also often piggyback off of larger institutions, so that a guest paid to come to NY by some larger NYC institution does a second event at our space. When researching our recent ‘Deception' issue, we read about how MIT students in the 1980s used to have a mole at Harvard and whenever an especially interesting guest would be coming to give a talk at Harvard, a MIT student would show up at the airport holding a card with the name of the guest, take the person back to MIT, and have the person unwittingly give their talk at MIT instead. We could never pull that off, but that is the dream!"

I will interview Mary Ceruti of Sculpture Center next. What should be my first question?
Najafi: "If you had to make a paper sculpture every day for the rest of your life, what would it be?"

Niels VAN TOMME

Cabinet, 300 Nevins Street, Brooklyn, NY 11217
www.cabinetmagazine.org