I’m in Jerusalem at the moment, here for an almost ten day trip that has to propel hopefully Picasso in Ramallah as an endeavor into the future more and to meet Jack Persekian for an interview on CAMP ( Contemporary Art Museum Palestine).

I’m getting quite used to the Israeli border control, but now it was the first time they stopped me before entering, rather than only interrogating when I left. I know that some stamps of Lebanon and other ‘Arab’ countries do not help the process of getting smoothly through border control. It’s an easy thing to talk about and I imagine all international travelers, curators, artists, NGO active people, writers and journalist talk about this issue much too often, like I do now. I will therefore stop this nagging about my position and pseudo cruelties, knowing the real constrictions of many millions of people in West Bank and Gaza. Still, it is a discussion that I talk about every time and keeps on coming back.

I visited Jack today to interview him on the history and future of CAMP. We will use the material for a short film that will be presented during Play Van Abbe, chapter 3, The Politics of Collecting and the collecting of Politics. It was an amusing interview that I had very little work to do for, since Jack spoke lively and committed on anything that I slightly touched on. These are the easy and joyful parts of my job, listening to somebody who is talking about his lifelong work.

I was accompanied by Issa Freij, an equally passionate filmmaker who was one of the co-initiators of Al Ma’mal in the 90’s together with Jack and whom I met for the first time. He filmed the interview with Jack, without tripod, for over an hour long.

I always get lost in the Old City, I don’t know what it is, but I always seem to take the wrong turn. On one of these occasions however I turned up at the front of the AL Aqsa Mosque entry, on a Friday, fully packed with people everywhere. This was exciting.

Jerusalem is vibrant and for the first time, something like the Syndrome popped up. Not in terms of religious anxiety, but anxiety that imagines all the possibilities of this city, even given the conditions of occupation it is in at the moment. If you draw this back to a more institutional critique, it was lovely to see the workshops that Al Ma’mal organised for kids to paint and draw for a full two day course. It’s education at its best and makes Al Ma’mal a very natural combination between contemporary artproducts that reflect on life in the political Israeli/Palestine arena, but lives it through this education. An enormous simple example that we could even learn from.

More to come in the following days,…

East Jerusalem and Workshop at Al Ma'mal

I’m currently in Beirut, Lebanon on a last-minute decided visit without having a project, book, idea or any other productive end result in mind. I’m not here to do a show on the Middle East or to seek for unique stories that artistically aim to tie political moments to an engaged practice. I have to tell you that coming here without prescription is refreshing in itself, to just be in a place and meeting people, see work and show some films. It made me realize again why I am doing what I’m doing and how nice it can be to share information and knowledge in a place that you don’t know beforehand and maybe not even at the end.

I arrived a couple of days ago from London on a highly modern and completely packed flight to Hariri airport. Quickly I was checking again, just to be extra sure, my passport for stamps of ‘the state that cannot be named’, although I made very sure last couple of times I was there to not get my passport stamped, knowing I had this tactics successfully completed, but still. It reminds us again that free travel is not a given fact for everybody.

Beyrouth 1948

Although the wrong stamps in your passport will not allow you to enter the country, the same sources of these stamps remind me actually very much of the first impressions of city aesthetics and dynamics in Beirut. The beach is the same, the houses in Jaffa look like the houses off Al Hamra and Ashrafiyeh, the streets look the same, etc. I’m constantly reminding myself that the humus however 200 km to the south is really not tasting the same, I’m sorry, but the Lebanese can cook, that is for sure.

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Fresh from a talk by Conditional Design, I could do nothing other than writing you a congratulate email on your efforts that took the form in Take on me, take me on. Please forget that I’m an interested colleague and hopefully will be able to beyond that role ellaborate a bit on why I think ‘Take on me’ is an important factory. Call it a too early review or something else, but allow me to write down some quick thoughts on the need for an alternative factory that can not only produce kilograms of Flowerpots, Bugaboo’s and Bikes that add even more value to our demanding lives, but can really give shelter to possibilities that feed ideas to a practice that so hardly seem to need an alternative in the process of making and a life that demands a shift of value.

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A unique possibility in the Southwest of The Netherlands for an exotic, unknown and everyday spacial Centre West European location, very very close to Belgium. Perfect for a Manifesta or biennial. Anyone? Sorry, no trains.

Last week I read the following text, a text that left me totally in-between wondering if I was reading a naive text, or an underskin attempt to radicalize critical thought on a biennial and a supposed global phenomenon that ‘everyone’ is experiencing.;

“In the age of globalisation, it is not enough for contemporary art to become a spectacular phenomenon embraced by almost all people in all corners of the world. It’s even more important to testify that artists and art communities from different parts of the globe are increasingly sharing the common understanding and strategies to reinvent themselves through engagements with the realm of everyday life. More and more artists are magically turning the ordinary into novel forms, meanings and usages while innovative collective mobilisations are brought to the forefront as a more democratic structure of art practices and their social functions. They are the core of the global art and culture scene today. Through intensely presenting and promoting these initiatives using the most efficient tools, including spectacular events like international biennials, truly innovative and relevant contemporary art practices will obtain a much larger visibility and help us build a new, genuinely public space for our era.

After 20 years of existence and growth, the Biennale de Lyon is now facing a new challenge to reinvent itself. Exploring and presenting the new tendency of the global art scene in its common efforts to reinvent the ordinary into something spectacular and unique, or a new multitude of expressions of diversity, complexity and interactivity, the Biennale itself will certainly reach a new youth. And it’s the best recipe to confront the current crisis that the whole world is entangled with…
The Spectacle of the Everyday is fundamentally changing both the spectacle and the everyday!”

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A Concise Reflection on Questions of Culture, Excellence, and Authority

Culture is too vast a reference and too complex a term to have ever been invented by politicians scratching over how to liberalize a cultural economy. Culture is not an easily traceable phenomenon it is an evasive and an unspecific term to the point of confusion, yet it remains a habitat for the many logics and emotions of artistry, ingenuity, debate, as well as tradition and its protectionism. On the other hand ‘cultural leadership’ is a specific, recently invented, and hyper-pragmatic term that calls to mind a somewhat precise moment and place in history, politics, and economics. Whether we find the idea of cultural leadership to be our cup of tea or not, it is exactly its unambiguity, pragmatism, clarity of roots and agenda that makes it a good point at which to start addressing some of the severely tangled problematics inherent in the architecture of today’s highly politicized cultural industry.

Functioning within the borders of a country or as a cross-border vehicle, the cultural industry is on an over-dose of political utilization. Cultural Leadership’s role has been mainly to, among other things; raise the standards of this utilization process. It strives for excellence but, it has yet to formulate a strong questioning of the terms on which this excellence is being promoted. What units do we measure excellence in? A so called ‘gangsta rapper’ might have elements of influence, appeal, creativity, cultural leadership, and business entrepreneurship embedded in a cultural code that doesn’t make sense to a creative industries jobholder in an Amsterdam or London office. In this example of many, the conservative roots of the cultural leadership methodology begin to reveal themselves. However, there is still room for negotiation, maybe even a renegotiation of the moulds that have confined the relationship between cultural leadership and its industry.

What needs to be renegotiated is cultural leadership’s position within the wider context of the cultural industry. Can it remain in its current position, exceptions acknowledged, under the binding authority of air-tight cultural industry circumspection? Or should it attempt to gain some more authority and autonomy in the scheme of things? In other words, should cultural leaders be led by the industry or should they be leading the industry? It seems that the current situation is one that highlights cultural leadership on the leash of political leadership. It is up to a younger generation of potential cultural leaders, all over the world, to empower themselves with enough knowledge to create a balance in this authority dynamic.

© Bassam El Baroni

A small point of visibility
Remco de Blaaij

In curatorial and artistic practice there is a moment during which the work of art, its influences and possible outcomes appear to the surface. It is from this moment of ‘visibility’ that the work of art can be subject to response and perhaps even criticism. This point, perhaps perpetually in motion, can be called ‘a point of visibility’. Could this point be constructive in helping to realise that a work, an idea or their consequences cannot exist without revealing themselves to the surface? Is there the possibility of something greater achievable than the relationship between the artist and curator? Between the communities and histories that surround them? Are we at this very moment not talking about the appearance of the object itself, but about that what precedes the (pre and post) production and the point of visibility itself? What are the possible consequences for the future if we think of it like this? And finally, does judgement play an important part in generating influences and confluences?
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Already a month ago I was in Helsinki, Finland and finally now in the opportunity to write something about this one-week adventure. The reason to be there was quite simple; FRAME issued a call for proposals in the summer for young curators to discover the local art scene. Being very unfamiliar with that ’scene’ I thought it would be a nice opportunity to use. That summer I read an article about the “middle-school”. The middle school is a pedagogical model ‘developed’ by Errki Aho that tries to erase borders on class, race and learning or other disabilities by keeping children to the age of sixteen in the same class on school. This modelhoosing a completely different approach of for example the Dutch model that tries to separate and concentrate on the given problems. The article seemed a good reason to discover the background of this, including a connected discourse in art.

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