Again a day closer to the opening and I have to make an apology. The photo I posted yesterday shows the room of Gerald Byrne and not Phil Collins. In all the stress I confused two rooms that both had dark painted walls. (One of them is already completely white by the way.) However, the mistake allows me to tell you what will vist Byrne’s room in 9 days: James Lee Byars ‘Extra Terrestrial’. This is another beautiful work and one of the highlights if I can be so self-congratulatory and again a work from M HKA, Antwerp. The photo above  is a snap-shot from the 3-D drawing we’re using to install the exhibition. As you can see, the work is a giant stick-figure, that will be partly mounted on the wall. It is made of  textile and was ‘used’ in performance in Antwerp in 1976. The figure is 245 meters (!) long, so the two ‘legs’ will lie in the middle of the room as large piles of cloth. We’ll also exhibit some documentary material, so you can see E.T. in action. If all goes well the work will arrive tomorrow and next week, we will see how big the pile will be.

Today I stumbled upon an interview with the new director of the Institute of the Tropics in Amsterdam. Since last year, as a wide array of other cultural stages, the institute has experienced a direct financial threat by withdrawal of large governmental funding. In order to be able to deal with this instant threat, the board has appointed a new director who hopefully will be able to save the institute from its urgent lack of oxygen.

The choice for the director perhaps can be seen almost as an archetypical one in these dark days of cultural setback in the name of financial decline. Constructing his CV mostly in the entertainment business, he is hoped to deliver new forms of ‘earning models’, the only way forward to save an institution of cultural importance as this. It made me think once again how the entanglement of clear capitalist systems can be read through the shift of cultural institutional practices. I was wondering if perhaps, in the times where one is not allowed to exist beyond unavoidable financial catastrophe, it offers a potential of visibility for capatalist and financial systems and motivations to be read through the current (dis)placement and mobility of culture in the very name of unavoidable financial crises.

The Tropical Institute and the appointment of a new financial strategic brain is not a unique event, but part of an array of measurements that seem to take place in the Netherlands parallel with the introduction of the language of ‘the financial crisis’ starting in 2008. Since then, some major cultural institutions in the Netherlands have seen change of leadership, like the Prince Claus Funds appointing a lawmaker as its director or even a radical shift of organisation like Fonds BKVB and Mondriaan Fonds or the threatening disposal of institutes like Rijksakademie and SKOR. Each history having a complex relationship to governance, which is something that one should read closer, perhaps we can begin to see a line here. A line that shows us not so much radical changes in cultural policy, but the non radical changes in capital policy in a world where some believe capatalist systems are no longer valid, non functional and betraying the people.

However, for me, the interview shows no signs of any despair, disbelief or even collapse of systems, or a radical rethinking of these cultural policies, in fact it has the potential to bring to the surface a new capitalist possibility in total opposite of destruction. The language being operated is one that signals an urgent need of awareness and visibility now in many institutional discussions. Especially alarming is to hear that culture only can retain its value by serving a ‘wide as possible audience’. The new director recognises this by taking the total population of the Netherlands (17 million) and comparing it to the current visitor amount (200.000), concluding than that there is could be many more visitors. This in itself is an equally evident as well as shocking conclusion where a gap in the market needs to be filled. In many fields, this mobilizing of customer subjects can be regarded valid, but in the case of the Tropical Institute and perhaps even in the wide cultural field, culture kicks in as a badly selling product in need of renewed strategy. This reducing is apparent mostly in the attitude of the new director when he says that new and broader audiences will be able to learn from the Tropical Insitute in its entirety on new cultures as well as their own. But how then? I read nothing more than Dutch colonial language here that barbarises culture by only acknowledging its economic value and using culture as a marketing language, it sells, but what does it do? It exchanges, cross examines and let cultures learn form each other. He speaks as if the Tropical Institute is the only institution capable of playing a role in cultural exchange and comes to this conclusion only by drawing out a simple measurements of bodies.

It seems that we are at a junction where intellectual approaches are believed to be out of economic potential, to be traded in ( as it no longer contributes to a cashflow) for something new. This ‘something new’ mostly finds its way in language forms of creating ‘wider audiences’ or ‘wider programmes’, but in fact the real potential is not existing in that search for the new product, the new kid on the block, but its deep commitment  to new capitalist urgency in the name of culture. Ofcourse it’s worrying and at some times irreversible frightening for many people that still believe in the value of other value systems in operation, but it does give us one opportunity and that is to make visible the capital apparatuses underlying our cultural infrastructure, networks and even future potentialities.

10 days until the opening of Spirits of Internationalism. Phil Collins room is being de-installed to make place for a remarkable presentation of Panamerenko’s old studio. The exhibition, dealing with the period 1956 – 1986, doesn’t exist only out of artworks, but also shows some unique archive material that gives a more intimate view into the universe of several artists and artists collective. We are especially proud to be able to show Panamarenko’s studio in Eindhoven. For quite some years he has several works on display in the Technical University and it is great to be able to give those people who pass his work everyday a sense of the ‘universe’ out which these works originate.

Exactly two weeks before the opening of Spirits of Internationalism an exhibition dealing with the art produced between 1956 and 1986, and which runs parallel in M HKA, Antwerp and the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven. It’s the next and last exhibition organized within the framework of l’Internationale. Last week we finished the 3D drawing, installing the exhibition in the virtual. Yesterday we ended with the OHO installation, of which I had to do a small part in the real world seeing what fitted in the vitrines. Monday ‘Vanuit Hier’ will be deinstalled (so this weekend last chances to see), and then slowly Panamarenko, Antoni Muntadas, Jef Geys, James Lee Byars, OHO, Július Koller, Fina Miralles and many others will start to ‘occupy’ Van Abbe. Complementary there will be time line with some historical tv fragments containing among others the famous W. T. Schippers action emptying one bottle of lemonade in the ocean.

Some people were asking what I think about the occupy museums movement and I thought about this text that I wrote many years ago for a project by Tilo Schultz. He wanted us to write about the future and designed a poster with it which I think I’ve lost…but nowadays the text seems strangely relevant…It is called 28th August 2015

28th August 2015

After it had happened, no one could really find a convincing explanation for it all. Why did a local art museum issue its call and suddenly open its doors to all the city’s asylum seekers? How did such a small, local action then connect to all sorts of gatherings across the European continent? And why did the corporations of the day not see it coming? After all, consumer intelligence was their speciality, and this was nothing if not a free choice revolt. Each person seemed to join by themselves, perhaps out of some unfathomable herd instinct, but nevertheless as individuals. And it wasn’t really true that they joined anything anyway. They just went to the museums, kunsthallen, artist spaces – art venues of all sorts and in every major city. They sat, looked around, slowly started to speak to each other and enjoyed it all enough to keep coming back. Soon, the museums started to respond – organising meetings and commissioning short term projects as a result, inviting the press and asking artists and others to turn the tables on cynical journalists. The art mausoleums that had slumbered for so long suddenly started to live. Impromptu activities were welcomed and the rules of engagement with art were changed whenever necessary. Museum workers even started to talk about the need for unconditional hospitality and visitors responded.

Strangely, the action spread across central Europe. For once, our disempowered citizens seem to shrug off their apathy and find a voice beyond the reach of administrative control. Of course, everything stayed on the local level, but a new spark was ignited almost daily and every week a new city fell into line. The speed of the change produced problems, most of which we still have today. When people failed to turn up for work, production initially fell by over 70%. But gradually provisional solutions were found, priorities were changed and people drifted back to work for two or three days a week anyway, just to make enough money to carry on. The corporations issued threats, sackings, even appealed for military action but there were no laws against public cultural attendance and the smart entrepreneurs quickly adjusted to the new lower level economy.

Now, it simply goes on like this. The museums are the new public forums, the remaining party politicians try to go there to make there point but mostly production and distribution take care of themselves, administered by the few who still take pleasure in the treadmill of wealth creation. The purpose of meeting seems to be changing. No longer about protest, it’s now about something closer to the old, perhaps mythical, idea of the agora. Exchange simply happens for its own sake and for the pleasure of the result.

Maybe we could say everyone’s an artist now, except hardly anybody uses that term, preferring other words, usually adapted from local slang still surviving in our international patois. Why did it all happen? If you ask me it’s pretty straightforward. It happened because there wasn’t anything else to do. We’d exhausted every other option and this was the one place left worth trying. Funny, I guess, but I don’t know why we never thought of it before.

Yesterday the Van Abbemuseum was proud to host the first of the three day symposium organized by The Autonomy Project. With lectures of Peter Osborne, Ruth Sonderegger, Gerald Raunig, Maria Gough and Tania Bruguera. In the afternoon we also gathered in the studio for a large debate on the current state of the arts in the Netherlands. For this associate professor Kees Vuyk joined us and artist Jack Segbars, who is a member of ‘Platform Beeldende Kunst’ (Platform for the Visual Arts), which played a central role in the protests of last summer. Parallel a master class took place with Tania Bruguera.

The content was too rich to summarize poignantly. From Adornean dialectics, via a collective thinking, to a historical overview of the relation between art and society in the Dutch context, to a poetic account of global protest today, to early avant-garde Sovjet art collectives, to useful art; it all came by and formed a rainbow of voices that together addressed that one precarious and complicate term – autonomy.

Today Rancière himself will speak, together with Thomas Hirschhorn, Isabell Lorey and Adrian Martin. Workshops in the afteronoon. The lectures will be web-cast, if the Internet doesn’t fail us.

So please join us, any way you can.

The Autonomy Project Symposium addresses the position of art in society today. The notion of autonomy, once designed to specify art’s place within society, has become a means of occluding its public relevance. This has become very clear when recently Dutch neoliberals and populists proposed large cuts on culture, arguing that art is primarily a private affair and has no real public function. The inability of the Dutch art world to mount an effective counter campaign has thereby made explicit the fact that the confusion   concerning the public nature of an autonomous art comes not only from without but also from within.

The symposium wishes to address the current situation through the work of the French philosopher Jacques Rancière. He has been committed to describing the function of art’s autonomy within public life today. Through a mixture of lectures and workshops the symposium explores Rancière’s valuable contribution both from theoretical and practical perspectives.

Dates: 7-9 October, 2011

Location: Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven

Participating in the symposium costs €45 for 3 days or €15 per day (including lunch). Students are charged €25 for the whole weekend or €10 per day.

The symposium is in English

Register

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Given the coverage and now political accusations around the project  - I think it is worthwhile posting this essay on the bog which was published in the catalogue produced by the International Art Academy Palestine (IAAP) in Ramallah…

A Picasso in search of a cause

The exhibition of Picasso’s 1943 painting in Ramallah is an auspicious occasion. It confirms the development of an already long-standing relationship between the Van Abbemuseum and the IAAP as well as between different colleagues in both institutions. More than that however, it represents a symbolic connection between European modernity and contemporary Palestinian culture; a connection that can serve, if understood well, as a way to imagine cultural globalism as mutuality rather than conformism to a single worldview. The story of modernity as told from Europe is aligned with colonialism and war, as much as it is represented by the liberating images of the artistic avant-garde. Palestine, like other non-European nations, was a bystander in the high modern world represented by Picasso and his comrades. Ramallah, Jerusalem, Hebron and many other cities in the region were, at that time, places to which things were done and rather than agents of their own destiny. Read more »

As a student I was always joking with my colleagues that as an artist you have to wait a lot during your time of work. If not waiting for the paint to dry, one has to wait until funding comes in or a project to be accepted. I can tell that curators, societies and institutions have to wait too in order for something to arrive, or to leave.

But what is it that arrives and is this not something that oneself initiates in the first place? I’m here in the academy in Ramallah waiting for our painting to arrive and rethinking why we are doing this in the first place and how to tie what I see happening around me to this event. Already this in itself signals for me the connection of the endeavor to a structure that is much more sensitive to its efforts beyond taking in account only itself through acknowledgement of its own excellence, contribution to art history and its value in the magical market. It seems therefore that more issues currently at stake in different geographies can relate to this trip of Picasso’s Buste de Femme. Who could have think that an old painting could navigate us through these issues? A ‘top talent’ of sixty years ago who proved itself to the market! Thus, it makes me think about the current aggressive cuts in the Netherlands on (cultural) life, rather than only budgets, the cut of people not being able to mobilise themselves through territories here, the cuts and the Arab Spring that let new trees grow in the streets of Ramallah? A modern sign? Read more »

Just back from Venice and the Biennale….the most interesting general tendency to me was retrospection and recuperation of the past. From Tintoretto in the International show to Monastyrski, Boltanski, Gotovac, Schlingensief and more it felt like revisiting our parents or grandparents. even works like the excellent Polish Pavilion by Yael Bartana were looking back and Mike Nelson reconstructed a previous work from Istanbul. Is this a sign of a culture in decay or a sign of something about to happen? Reminds me a bit of my early teens in the mid-seventies when the best music was always at least 10 years old and the best thing to do was repeat it. In 1976 we were desperate for something – and then punk happened. Any chance the same could happen in art today?