Which phenomena in theatre and performance are of interest to you at the moment? I am interested in the whole phenomenon of live performance, whether theatre, performance art, music, or sporting event. I am interested in the cultural value attributed to such events in a world dominated by mass media and information technology. My suspicion is that live performance is not as important as it may once have been.

You write equally about rock music, performance art, television and theatre and make cultural connections and bridges between them. In recent years, theatre studies seem to have focused on issues outside "traditional" theatre. Has the cultural importance of traditional theatre diminished? I think it has, yes. The theatre clearly is not central to culture (at least not in most western nations) in the way it was even 100 years ago. It is no longer a form of popular entertainment, but has become almost exclusively an elitist form (with notable exceptions, of course). In the US currently, most theatres are so terrified of being controversial that their choices of material are very timid. You cannot play an active role in culture when you're afraid to speak.

The question of mediatization, the notion of things (art included) reaching to us ever more in a mediated form (mainly electronic) seems central to you. You are writing a book entitled Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture. Will mediatization cause a fundamental change even in the more traditional, drama- and physical acting -based, realistic theatre? I'm not sure about fundamental change. I don't think that there will come a time when there are no human beings on stage, only electronically created ones, or that there will be no theatre, only virtual reality. Audiences still want live events, there's no question about it. But what interests me are more subtle transformations in the live event itself, which makes it more like a media event. I have argued, for example, that the live productions of some plays I saw on Broadway that were produced with cable television money were constructed so as to be broadcastable. So, the live event had no integrity as such; it was already television. The translation of television shows, movies, and cartoons into live shows is another example, as is the use of special effects in big-budget musicals. These all show that, to an important extent, the audience's expectations of what they'll see live are formed by their experience of televison and film, not by a history of seeing live performances (Patrice Pavis makes this point, too). Live theatre will always be live, I think, but it will also start to look more and more like other, more popular, mediatized forms.

How do you see the influence of television on theatre, on one hand for example on acting and on narrative, on another on theatres' ability to offer a form of critique of our culture? I answered part of this question above. To answer further: To the extent that actors need to be trained for television and film, which are now their primary markets, stage acting will look more and more like television acting. I have made the point that the kind of task-based performance frequently required in experimental theatre has proved a good training ground for film acting, as they require similar skills and both displace the task of creating meaning somewhat from the performer's activity onto the context of that activity. As far as narrative is concerned, I think the impact of television is positive, in a way. Because television has largely taken over the task of presenting realistic, topical dramatic narratives (in the form of the "Movie of the Week" in the US), theatre need no longer be concerned with realism or topicality (and is often weakest when it still tries to be). This leaves it free to address other issues in other ways. On the other hand, to the extent that audiences expect the theatre to present narratives and spectacles that are equivalent to television shows, that's not good for theatre!
As far as critique goes, I see no reason why any particular form or medium is in a privileged position. There can be cultural criticism on television, in film, in music, or theatre. Most examples of all of those forms offer no cultural critique at all, but that doesn't mean they can't. Some people who care about theatre want to believe, I think, that it can offer cultural critique that other forms can't because it's a live medium. That's a fallacy, in my view.

One of the central issues of your book Presence and Resistance is postmodern critical art. You differentiate the political art of the 80s from the idea of political art of the 60s. Fredric Jameson has noted that a hallmark of postmodernism is the breakdown of our ability to achieve critical distance from our culture, that the cultural can no longer presume to stand back from the economic/political and comment on it from outside. You challenge this argument by providing examples of postmodern political artists (The Wooster Group, Laurie Anderson, Sandra Bernhard) whose work use and comment upon the means and representations of dominant discourse. You seem to argue that the political artist of today cannot take a fruitful position outside the dominant discourse, for example the mainstream. You seem very confident that people do not lose their integrity by working in a more commodified cultural environment. How is this "not selling out" ensured? It is NOT ensured! I mention in Presence and Resistance that one is entitled to be suspicious when Harry Kippe states that commodities trading is similar to performance art! But the larger point I was driving at is that the whole concept of "selling out" is based on the idea that it is possible for an artist to somehow work outside of the commodity economy. Since I don't really believe that (that is, I don't believe that the commodity economy has an "outside"), I don't think that the concept of selling out is meaningful. This is not to say that all artistic work is of equal integrity; it just means we need to find another way of measuring and discussing integrity.

You write that the difference between high and low, marginal and avant-garde, mass culture and high art is a question of degree and context, not ineluctable differences of form or even content. You say that conceiving of a postmodern critical art necessitates the abandonment of the concept of the avant-garde. Why? This isn't really my idea, originally. It's drawn from the work of the American art critic Hal Foster. The argument is that avant-gardism supposes a cultural horizon in order to transgress that horizon. In the postmodern world, it's not clear that there is such an horizon, so the desire to transgress it is no longer productive.

You write that challenging of representation through representation is a crucial postmodernist strategy of resistance. You also note that there is a danger that critical postmodernist art practices can turn into their own opposites by reifying the very representations they supposedly deconstruct or by providing co-optable representations. How is it possible to differentiate critical representation from mere miming (for example the discussion surrounding the work of Jeff Koons?) This is a difficult issue because the critical postmodernist work is necessarily ambiguous and ambivalent. In my book, I argue that Jeff Koons's work CAN be interpreted as being as critical as Hans Haacke's, and Haacke's work CAN be interpreted as being as complicit with commodification as Koons's. The difference is that Haacke's work is overtly (and traditionally) "political" and "critical" in ways that Koons's, and most postmodernist work, is not. The Wooster Group was interpreted as racist, but also as parodying racism, and there's no way of saying definitively which position is correct. In postmodernist art, the critique is not contained within the work itself, but arises through the work's interaction with its contexts and, in a sense, comes to exist in the mind of the spectator rather than in the work itself. So, I don't think there is necessarily anything one can point to in the work to say this one is a "critical" representation while that one is just "miming." That assessment needs to be made through critical and interpretive examination of the work's relation to its cultural contexts.

Our idea of copyright is still very much based on printed matter. The question of legal authorship and ownership of texts has become actual and difficult when performers and theatre groups quote, sample and appropriate texts from various different sources in a single performance. How if in any way do you think this matter can be solved? This is a complex problem. Basically, I am in favor of maintaining as much freedom as possible for those who want to construct texts through cutting and pasting, sampling, and so on. I also realize, however, that the people who produced the source texts are entitled to recognition and compensation. It is now standard in the music industry that samples must be paid for, so that assumption could be one part of a model. There is a concept in US copyright law called "compulsory license." It applies only to recordings of music. The law stated that once the writer of a piece of music allows it to be recorded, anyone else who wants to record it has the right to do so, as long as they pay royalties. The royalty rate is determined by law. I suggest applying this model to other kinds of texts than recordings of music. That way, anyone who wants to quote, sample, or appropriate can, but still must compensate the original author. The original author cannot refuse to allow the work to be used, and also cannot demand enormous payment. In this way, a high level of cultural freedom would be maintained, and original authors would be compensated. I would also point out that this approach comes from an area of copyright law that developed in response to a technology of reproduction other than print.
I realize that what I'm suggesting goes against much European copyright law and the concept of "droit moral," in which the creator has absolute authority over the uses of the work. But I really think adopting the concept of compulsory license would lead to greater artistic freedom by acknowledging the cultural realities of appropriationist practices.

You include some forms of stand-up comedy among the ways of cultural and political resistance. There is a saying in Britain that "comedy is the new rock'n roll". Do you think that the stand-up comic has become a substitute for the counter revolutionary rock star? I think that was true for a moment, but probably no longer is. In the US, at least, stand-up as a performance genre is fading and is now little more than a way of beginning a television career. Even in the 1980s, when stand-up comedy had some critical edge, it was still in an odd cultural position. I argue in my book that going to comedy clubs allowed aging baby boomers to feel that they were still participating the rebellious spirit of rock, while tacitly acknowledging that they were getting too old to really do so. Going to a nightclub for entertainment was something their parents did, after all!

You more or less state that the political theater of the 60s failed historically. Do you think that the postmodern political art and performance will have a more thorough effect on society and people's way of understanding the world or is it a question of a cultural phase? It would be hybristic to argue that postmodernist art is art for the ages! I'm perfectly happy to think of it as an historical and cultural phase (though it's not at all clear to me that the phase is over, as it apparently is to some). If my interpretation is correct, postmodernism at least acknowledges the nature of the economy in which it exists and does not delude itself into thinking that it can create another economy. I'm not sure that, ultimately, it will be judged to have spread greater enlightenment than the art of any other period; I'm not even sure how we would measure that. But my point is that postmodernist art is responsive to postmodern times in a way that older conceptions of political or critical art are not. My purpose in writing the book as I did was to suggest not so much that the political theatre of the 60s failed in its own context (though I am critical of it) as to say that the strategies of the 60s were not productive for the 80s and, now, the 90s. What is needed is to reimagine the project of political art in current terms.

Interview: Hannu Harju