Antonis Pittas – Landart (2012)

Saturday was the last day of a three day excursion with students from the University of Hildesheim, concluding the seminar ‘The Art of Describing Art’ that I taught together with Julia Heuser this winter semester. We ended visiting Annet Gelink Gallery, where artist Antonis Pittas (part of the Chasing Rainbows exhibition on until 23-2) was finishing his last ‘performative’ public writing of the word ‘implementation’ on a rectangular slate of marble that has the same dimensions as one step of the stair leading up to the Greece parliament. As it goes with these excursions everyone was exhausted at the end of the three days, so when Antonis invited us to sit on the sculpture, everybody immediately obliged! One of the students noted with a sense of irony that the steps of the Greece parliament was now ‘occupied’ by German students. The observation was more than just a funny comment. It was a precise historical image of where we were: resting on the steps of Greek democracy, while trying to figure out where we are, how we got there and where we can go from here.

In the last days we had looked at modern and contemporary classics from Lissitzky to Kabakov, from Cézanne to Mike Kelley and with our eyes and bodies confronted the battlefield of aesthetics in the American-European 20th century. In a sense we had followed the simultaneous move inward and outward that marked this creative and destructive century. For it was in the depths of the human subject, in the movement of the eyes, the innate sensibilities of the bodies, in the unconscious, that during 20th century the workings of the world – both natural and social – were discovered, which offered the foundation for utopian designs to reshape the world. As Benjamin stated in his famous essay on ‘art in the age of technological reproducibility’ commenting on the complex spatial organisation of modernity (the moving in- and outwards): ‘the modern masses have a desire to come closer to things’, to ‘absorb’ the world in their being, to overcome the distance of reflection, to counter alienation, to let the aura of the work of art whither and decay into a new substance, a new subject, who would approach the world no longer as a Cartesian Mind, but as a complex weaving of body and mind. In the three days we were such a mass of bodies that tried to absorb modernity – perhaps to get beyond it.

Looking at Lissitzky

We discovered this looking at Lissitzky in the Lissitzky-Kabakov exhibition ‘Utopia and Reality’ (still in the Van Abbemuseum until 28-4-2013). We followed with our eyes how the Prouns of this Russian avant-garde artist were not offering the mind an image that it could read as a story, but that it juxtaposed complex and contradicting shapes that activated eye and mind at the same time, producing a flux between imagined three dimensional space and physical shapes on the canvas. The picture addressed a ‘new man’, who would learn to think through doing; a man who would overcome the body-mind split through a new type of dynamic unity between form and content that marked constructivist graphic, architectonic and artistic design. This was the aesthetic utopianism that accompanied the Russian revolution at the dawn of the century. Looking then at the work of Kabakov after this we saw the clumsy and everyday man who struggled with the impossible demands of this clinical, mechanical constructivist dream that had turned into terror as quickly as the French Revolution did. Approaching human beings no longer as spiritual machines as Lissitzky, Kabakov introduced human beings as filled with stories and dreams, trapped in an everydayness that in no way reflects the exalted rhetoric and dream-like images that the Soviets made of their earthly, socialist paradise.

Attentive Audience

After experiencing this confrontation between the two Russian giants, students the following day gave presentations to the Van Abbe-staff that focused on the website. Talking today about the ‘art of describing art’ requires talking as well about where these descriptions will be made public and here the Internet still poses many questions. By making proposals for the Van Abbe-collection-website, the students gave their views and ideas and were offered generous, but also critical feedback by Daniel Neugebauer (head of marketing, mediation and fund raising) and Christiane Berndes (curator and head of collection). It was a nice moment of exchange not only between the people involved, but also between the world of the university and the museum and as such another good experience in the now already three-year old structural collaboration between the Van Abbemuseum and the University of Hildesheim. During the days we also visited Onomatopee, MU and Piet-Hein Eek, which made the exchange not limited to the two institutions, but also made it an encounter with Eindhoven in a broader sense. (And, for those who also read the earlier blog-entry on this seminar, another high-point of course was the physical encounter with the Buste de Femme, from Picasso that had made the trip to Palestine and was subject to an assignment in the first part of the class.)

The last day we visited Amsterdam and went first to the Stedelijk Museum, who generously welcomed us by giving us free entrance. Walking through the quite majestic presentation of the collection of the Stedelijk, the story that had been presented to us in the first days through the iconic figures of Lissitzky and Kabakov now unfolded in its many different manifestations through the traditional narrative of Western art of the 20th century. In the end the visit became a kind of crash-course in Greenbergian aesthetics looking first at Cézanne, then Mondriaan and then Newman. Of course, there are many reasons to critique this modernist tradition, but when studying art within Europe it is difficult to ignore this history. Also, since it belongs to a much broader and more general history of exchange between art and society and the role aesthetics plays in politics it is impossible to ignore this episode in an art history curriculum or to consider it in only negative terms. And, as an added advantage, it proofed a good exercise before entering the absurd, humorous and terrifying world of Mike Kelley, whose work still seems very much connected to the aesthetics of the modernist period preceding his work and is legible as critique only from within this tradition.

Ilya & Emilia Kabakov – Let’s Go Girls (1995)

And then, after all this looking and walking, we ended up sitting on the steps of the Greek parliament in Annet Gelink Gallery. In our discussion Antonis Pittas openly admitted his strong affinity with the modernist sensibilities of the Minimal and Conceptual artists.  Like Kelley, he still has one foot in the old world of modernism. However, as he explained, what he does is ‘unforgivable’ to those Minimal and Conceptual artist’s whose aesthetics he borrows. Closer to Lissitzky than to Kabakov, these artists also worked in an anti-anecdotal way and wanted to produce works which would, in the formula of Donald Judd, be ‘specific-objects’ that told of nothing but themselves. Antonis in contrast, takes as the measurements for his Judd-like slate of marble the real historical staircase in Athens. On it he writes with graphite a quote by Christine Lagarde (director of the IMF) ‘implementation’, which refers to the implementation of the hard austerity measures to get grip on public spending and reduce the deficit. But the work reflects the contemporary moment in many other ways. When Antonis visited Athens some time ago he noticed that everywhere marble stones had been smashed on pavements or from buildings to to throw at the police. The marble that was considered the strongest and noblest material with which to build the city that is the historical birthplace of democracy, today serves as a weapon for common people to fight a system that they no longer understand and see only as an enemy. The current situation gives wings to the proto-fascist movement Golden Dawn that is scarily popular. And even if it seems unlikely that they will follow a military trajectory similar to National Socialism, the fact that such open fascist sensibility can manifest itself again in Europe in synchronicity with an enormous economic crisis is cause for deep concern.

on the steps of Greek democracy

It makes me wonder what the meaning of ‘describing art’ could be in such a tense political moment. I don’t have a clear answer to this. But thinking about it I’m reminded of the way in which the French philosopher Jacques Rancière describes how there is an aesthetic component to (democratic) politics, because it requires ‘recognition’ before any change, any decision, is possible. First we have to see the danger, we have to see our neighbour (strange and close) and recognize the fears and dreams of one another, to discuss possible solutions. It is the dream of democracy perhaps, extremely fragile and maybe more a vision than a reality, but what else do we have other than this vision? Even if it is no solution, the work of Antonis makes us see, and writing about it allows us to share what we see and as such allows us – perhaps – to see a little more. It may sound simple, but seeing is not simple, neither is talking about it. Seeing and saying are a crucial part of the human ecology and a world that doesn’t care for them constantly is exposed to the risk of forgetting the difference between fact and fiction, between what is there in front of our eyes and what we intellectually know. The artist, the art historian, the art critic, the art mediator, the curator they all belong to a delicate economy that provides a platform where we can exercise the skill of seeing and saying. Of course, this alone will not solve our social or political problems, but I do believe that it is part of the solution. So, sitting on the steps of Greek parliament we rested from three days of hard work to gather strength, strength that I’m afraid we might need more than we would like in the days to come.

*Thanks to my colleague Nick Aikens for reading over the text

**Photos from excursion-participant Paula Rathjen

Last Friday evening, I picked up the newspaper to read about what is called the ‘birth certificate’ of Palestine by president Abbas. What I understand of it is that the new status of Palestine doesn’t change much, but does open new possibilities for the Palestinians. For instance they can now potentially go to the International Criminal Court and press charges against Israel if it acts in contradiction with international regulations like building settlements in occupied territory. This sounds significant. However, what the paper considers as more noteworthy is the small support Israel has left in the International community. Within Europe only the Czechs support Israel, even Germany refrained from voting and as result have given up their unquestioning support.

Perhaps I wouldn’t have thought so much about the waning support, if not earlier this week the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was the subject of a heated debate within the seminar that I teach at Hildesheim University. The seminar is entitled ‘The Art of Describing Art’ and the subject of it is also very simply writing about art. I teach the seminar together with Julia Heuser, an almost-graduate student who studies creative writing. In the seminar the first assignment was to write a description of Picasso ‘Buste de Femme’ from the Van Abbe-collection, the painting that was sent to Palestine a year ago. When giving the first assignment however we did not yet reveal the trip the painting made and asked them to stay close to the work itself. In the second assignment we asked the students to now use their understanding of the picture and try to integrate it into a text in which they also reflect on the Picasso in Palestine-project.

Being part of the Van Abbe-team, I’ve heard so many things about the project and have been in or at so many discussions about it that I perhaps start to become blind to the challenging nature of the project. So when I proposed this trajectory of two assignments, in my naivety, I thought that the biggest challenge would be to connect the content of the painting in some meaningful way to the content of the project of bringing the painting to Palestine; a challenge many students dealt with very beautifully. However, when we discussed some of the texts in class – using a creative writing method that is new to my dry, academic deformed art historical eyes – suddenly all the emotional historical booby-traps located right underneath the surface exploded.

One girl corrected a fellow student who had dared to connect in two paragraphs the Nazis and Israel, stating more or less that ‘this can never be done.’ Something said with such a conviction that I myself started to feel guilty that I wasn’t as shocked as she was when reading the text. Another international exchange student who was born neither in Israel nor Palestine, but close, had a hard time to sit still and not comment on each attempt of her fellow students to describe the political situation in the region. In a friendly, but also persistent tone, she offered an inside account of the conflict. And, minute after minute, I saw the whole class become more and more uncomfortable, becoming more and more afraid about what to say, and what they wrote. The image of Picasso’s painting projected silently on the wall slowly stopped being the subject of our discussion, more the still observer of a tense, but also beautiful encounter of a group of people talking about a subject which they feel unable to talk about, but still feel the necessity to do so.

By starting this discussion through an artwork, however, it seems we had a possibility that perhaps is absent from normal discussions on the topic. Based in both personal experience and abstract reflection, through or with art, one is invited to be personal and general at the same time. Your own observations are translated in a ‘judgement’ that transcends your individual position; an ability that has a distinct significance in democratic society. Because in such a society it is demanded of each member that he or she can develop a position based on the ideas and experiences of others and yourself. What the discussion during the class made clear again is that even if it may sound quite complex and abstract, the reality of democratic exchange is that it is a very emotional process and the challenge of it is to balance and make productive those emotions in a public discussion. Something that cannot be learned through theory alone, as the discussion also showed, it has to be mastered through practice as well. And teaching such a practice perhaps does not so much requires ‘instructing’ but a levelling of the playing field in which teacher and student stand ‘eye’ to ‘eye’.

And by accident, writing this down, I stumble on a new reading of ‘Picasso in Palestine’. Perhaps the point of similarity between bringing the painting to Ramallah and the painting itself is located in this standing face to face. The museum facing the International Art Academy of Palestine; the women painted by Picasso with her strange and intriguing eyes, facing the Palestinians. What is seen; what is said during this encounter is neither complete affirmation, nor negation; what is seen is the other as a presence that cannot be ignored and which existence is complex. Addressing this complexity is difficult, close too impossible, but we have to try and for this trying we need both physical and mental space. Perhaps this is what the acclimatised white-cube space in Ramallah, with its solitary Picasso painting, helped to create: an open space to speak about a conflict that is so emotional, but which affects us all as members of a ‘general’ or global public. We in Hildesheim could share this space by simply talking about the project and the news of last weeks showed a change in international relations, which makes this discussion more urgent and open than it has been for a long time.

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 as an archetypical one in 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 its cultural importance. 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 times where one is not allowed to exist beyond unavoidable financial catastrophe, offers a potential of visibility for capitalist and financial systems and surfacing of 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 have initiated in the Netherlands parallel with the introduction of the  rhetoric 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 a more radical shift undertaken by the merge of Fonds BKVB and Mondriaan Fonds, up until 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, could provide a new line of sight. A line that shows us not so much radical changes in cultural policy itself through social change, but the non radical changes in capital policy itself in a world where some believe capitalist systems can no longer be valid, non functional and the apparatus of betraying the people.

However, for me, the interview shows no signs of any despair, disbelief or even a collapse of any of these systems, or even a true radical rethinking of foundations of cultural policies, in fact, the true potential lies in surfacing a new capitalist possibility in total opposite of destruction. The language being operated is one that signals an urgent need of awareness and visibility in many institutional discussions occupying the current. Especially alarming however is to hear that culture can only retain its value by serving a ‘wide as possible audience’, a direct link to consumers. 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 space for growth with many more visitors. This in itself is an equally evident as well as shocking conclusion where a gap in the market urgently seems to need a refill. In many fields, this mobilizing of the ‘customer subjects’ can be regarded valid, but in the case of the Tropical Institute and perhaps even in the wider cultural field, culture kicks in as a badly selling product in need of renewed strategy. This radical reduction is apparent in the attitude of the new director when commenting on new and broader audiences able to learn through the Tropical Insitute on new cultures as well as their own. But how then? I read nothing more than Dutch present colonial language that still functions on a form of ‘barbarising’ a culture through only acknowledging its economic value and using culture as a mere marketing language, it sells, but what does it do? It exchanges, cross examines and let cultures learn form each other, as if the Tropical Institute is the only institution capable of playing a role in cultural exchange and comes to this conclusion by drawing out a simple measurements of bodies.

In that light it could be 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 search for the new product, the new kid on the block, but its deep commitment to new capitalist urgency in the name of culture itself. This in itself could be 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 and imagine 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 »