NABA and Isola– a week Milano
February 16th, 2010 by Steven ten Thije
Steven ten Thije
NABA
Recently Charles Esche, Diana Franssen, Carina Weijma and myself had the opportunity to have a taste of Italy again in all its richness and complexity. For a week we acted as guest teachers at NABA – a private art school in Milano – and while there had the chance to hear the tragic story of Isola Art Centre, which lost its building to city planners. In many ways it was a inspiring week which allowed us to reflect and speculate on the future.
Bert Theys one of the founders of the Isola Art Centre
The teaching was a pleasure to do, for it not only allowed us to engage in a dialogue with the art students – always refreshing – but also gave us the possibility to hear each other speak. Even if it is clear that each of us has a different perspective, unifying us however, within our understanding of art at the moment, is a wish to try and bring forth the potential of art in a political sense, without reducing it to mere political means. In a sense we seem to be engaged in a complementary questioning of both politics and art, for both notions seem to be subject to change today.
Presumably those who still treasure a classic idea of autonomy are horrified by such a strong double focus on both politics and art, but to emphasise this relationship is so necessary today. Art as it manifests itself in our current society cannot be apolitical and every attempt to state otherwise is a strong political statement. For those who still maintain that art can exist separate of the political, do not realise that this turns the public expression – which an artwork is – into a private event. The artwork is elevated over a private opinion or passion, by its openness to debate and critique. The work therefore happens in between the public and private and shows how general concerns manifest themselves within the personal domain of experience.
In our discussions with the students we touched on many examples of the relation between art and politics. Some explicit like the ‘Entartete Kunst’ exhibition of the Nazis in 1937, or the ‘Magiciens de la Terre’ in 1989, but also in perhaps less political shows like ‘When Attitudes Become Form’ of Harald Szeemann in 1969. Works always reflect and relate to the context in which the form themselves. Investigating this context and trying to create a space where the situation of today can be questions in relation to possible pasts and futures seems one of the possibilities of the museum for modern and contemporary art.
Isola Art Centre
During these days of discussion we had a chance to meet the people from the Isola Art Centre, who lost their self-organised exhibition venue to city-developers recently. It was a stunning story that shed a new, darker light on the merits of gentrification. In a dazzling power-play between a somewhat naïve David (the art centre) and a rather ruthless Goliath (the urban developers) the dangers of an weak local politics and an unrealistic trust in private real-estate developers showed itself. In a sense this story shows clearly how art and the political are interrelated and ask important questions on what role cultural institutes and producers have in making this story visible, debatable.
In a nutshell the history goes as follows. Between 2003 and 2005 the Art Centre grew out of community based practices and became part of a neighbourhood that was neither chic nor down and out. Located near the central park, vital for the social infrastructure of the area the art centre unfolded its activities and witnessed and participated in the re-invigoration of the district. Then project developers take notice of this well-located but ill-developed part of Milan and start to work on it. After this what happens is opera. One group fights for the neighbourhood, another bets its money on what it might be. For an outsider it’s difficult to assess in detail who is right where and when, but one thing is crystal clear: without a strong political player in the game, money takes it all. It was depressing to hear how no relevant political fraction could take a position against profit and in favour of a area that was not high-class, but did work and had a rich variety of social groups living together. The whole story, which one can read in detail on the website of Isola Art Centre (http://www.isolartcenter.org/), makes one think on how these processes develop in the Netherlands and Eindhoven, and makes one hope that it will become possible to articulate in a stronger voice that politics is not to be equated with profit.
Tags: Isola Art Centre, Milan, NABA
