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. (more…)

By Steven ten Thije

Some weeks ago we had an interesting discussion in the museum with a group of art history students from several different universities. They came over to look and discuss the three exhibitions that comprise the first chapter of Play Van Abbe with Charles Esche, Christiane Berndes and myself. In the conversation especially one thing struck me. In the discussions we found ourselves several time returning to the average visitor. Constantly we were speculating on whether or not this figure would comprehend the show. (more…)

Back from Istanbul, back from holiday. It’s been quite some time since my last entry in our log of thoughts, but after visiting the Istanbul Biennial I feel the urge to write again, an urge that perhaps (or hopefully) mirrors the urge that one feels expressed in this intense biennial.

Without giving an overall review, I would like to reflect here on just one work, which, in its thematic and execution is somehow exemplary of the biennial: Marko Peljhan’s ‘Territory 1995’. The work exists out of an installation in two spaces dealing with 90s conflict in former-Yugoslavia and contains a brutal exposition on the events leading up to the Srebrenica-massacre. The first room is black, the walls are covered with sound-isolation foam, in it are hanging three rows of transparent glass, long rectangular windows prox. 40cm high and several meters long. They are hanging one after the other at eye height and are ingeniously lighted through the frame, which makes white letters that are printed upon the planes light up as though in a radio-room of James Bond-movie. One cannot move between them but only look at them from a distance. The letters or schema’s are obscure documents explaining command-hierarchies and transcripts of notes or letters with no clear discernable content. In the centre of the room a small pedestal is standing on which a type of comic or children’s book is lying. The pedestal is dramatically lighted with one spot. In the room one can sit down on a long black bench, near the entrance, and listened to fragments of radio messages. They are inaudible – or at least, to me. The darkness of the room reflects the darkness of the messages and signs to be read. (more…)

Onlangs is weer nieuw hout gegooid op de immer smeulende discussie omtrent het bekende Thorbecke-principe, dat luidt: ‘De regering is geen oordelaar van wetenschap en kunst.’ In reactie op twee artikelen gepubliceerd in het NRC Handelsblad, publiceerde NRC dit artikel van de hand van Charles Esche en Steven ten Thije.

Opmerkelijk in de discussie is dat voorbij gegaan wordt aan het paradoxale karakter van het huidige gebruik van Thorbecke’s principe. Volgens ons ligt in deze paradox de sleutel om voorbij de huidige impasse van af- of bijvaller te komen en tot een werkelijk democratische kunstpolitiek te komen.
Als eerste is het belangrijk om te realiseren dat vandaag de dag het Thorbecke-principe niet meer dient als verdediging voor een liberale, op de vrije markt gebaseerde ideologie – de ideologie die Thorbecke zelf aanhing -, maar een schild is voor de ‘autonomie’ van de kunst. Een autonomie die zowel los van de markt als van de staat lijkt te staan. De staat wil kunst wel financieren, maar wil niet voor de specifieke invulling van die financiering verantwoordelijk zijn, noch wil ze dat de markt het alleen bepaalt. Hieruit bestaat de paradox van het principe: niet willen, maar wel moeten oordelen.

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Reading through the blog-comments of last weeks (Charles you’ve been busy) and cleaning up my desk at home, I stumbled upon a page I copied from a recent number of October-magazine. It was an article by Hubert Damish on abstraction. I remember reading it some weeks ago, sitting in the library and feeling a bit naughty somehow for doing it. Of course there was little time - the museum may be conservative in its function as repository, but its practice is as fast as anything today - but also the type of phenomenological language in which it was written, the blatant western focus (Matisse as undisputed centre of a world that was spinning around Paris) it was all so remote from the type of dialogues we are involved in in the museum. The ‘internationale’, the symposium in Ljubljana, a recent visit I myself made to Bulgaria and Slovakia , talking in Berlin with people from ‘Public Movement’ (an artist collective from Israel), all this made my traditional, art historical head spin and were so distanced from that phenomenological engagement with vision and abstraction. Sentences which in my study were so important like they cryptic remark of Merleau-Pony in his ‘eye and spirit’, that the ‘painter puts in his body,’ now seem to speak of problems from a distance past. Why was the relation between body and mind, between ‘eye and spirit’, so important? Did I think something could be solved if only we had a sufficient theory to explain the abyss between the non-conceptual world of our experience and the conceptual domain of the mind?

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Taking up Charles’ invitation, allow me to also reflect on some of the issues raised in the inspiring if not historical conference in Ljubljana. And please realize that these are open speculation, which hopefully show my active attempt to get grip of the question raised in these inspiring days, but do not contain the firm architecture of a finished argument. Or, more plainspoken: please, give me some slack.

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Yesterday the third internal seminar in preparation of the 14 month project on the position of the museum in the 21^st century took place at the Institute for the Cultural Heritage Collection of the Netherlands (ICN) in Amsterdam. The subject was ‘copy and original’ and the day existed out of four lectures from Nicolle Lamerichs, Ysbrand Hummelen, Florian Schneider and Jos de Mul. It was in inspiring afternoon, which was especially fruitful in presenting new metaphors in which to formulate the central questions of the project. Terms like ‘Noise Margin’, ‘ownership’ and ‘Wittgenstein 2.0’ were small portals through which we could see old concepts like ‘the work’ and ‘knowledge’ or ‘truth’ in a new way.

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Kunstgeschiedenis is in zijn klassieke zin een verhaal over de opeenvolging van stijlen die zichtbaar worden in werken. De essentie van een stijl is haast ongrijpbaar, een ongrijpbaarheid die zich spiegelt in de ongrijpbaarheid van het werk. Een museum is binnen deze logica een ruimte waarin originelen het mogelijk maken om de successie van stijlen te ervaren. Het museum is daarmee, zoals besproken in O’Doherty’s ‘white cube’, onzichtbaar. De kunstgeschiedenis bestaat zodoende bij de gratie van de onzichtbare wanden van het museum en het is geen toeval dat de opkomst van het museum in de 19^de eeuw parallel loopt met de opkomst van de wetenschappelijke discipline en dat eerste museumdirecteuren vaak eveneens de eerste institutionele/professionele kunsthistorici waren. De structurele overeenkomst tussen kunstwetenschap en kunstmuseum is de onzichtbaarheid van de locatie. Zoals Malreux ‘museé imaginaire’ bevindt een kunstwerk zich zowel ergens als nergens, zoals een wetenschappelijk werk overal gelezen kan worden en overal waar is. De kunstgeschiedenis en het museum hebben daarmee een vreemde haat-liefde relatie met de reproductie. Aan de ene kant is ze een mogelijkheidsvoorwaarde voor haar bestaan en beantwoordt ze aan de behoefte van kennis en kunst om universeel te zijn. Aan de andere kant kan de reproductie niet het werk zijn, omdat het werk uiteindelijk onuitspreekbaar en daarmee onherhaalbaar is. In deze zin speelt het kunstmuseum ook een complexe rol in het functioneren, verspreiden en de theorie van kennis in de moderne samenleving. Het museum is de meest letterlijke ruimtelijke vertaling van de voor de moderne kennistheorie constituerende onmogelijkheid om de afgrond die zich tussen subject en object, tussen concept en ding te overbruggen en de reproductie is als het ware het onaangename litteken dat naar deze wond verwijst. (Voor de lezers van Foucault, de onmogelijkheid van metafysica in de 19^de en 20^ste eeuw, zoals uiteengezet in zijn ‘The order of things’.)

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Sitting at home in the weekend thinking back a bit on end of last years events and the upcoming challenges. Traveling to New York to do research for my dissertation on collection display in December last year, and to Linz to do preparation for the exhibition ‘Where We Are’ summer 2009. This week picking up the thread after the Christmas-New Year interval discussing new ideas for the big (14 months!) exhibition we’re opening november 2009. Let me focus here on the trip to New York, later more on Linz etc.

For New York, the focus was on the exhibition ‘The Anyspacewhatever’ in the Guggenheim Museum, which is/was a remarkable retrospective exhibition on the art of the 90s, loosely organized around what can be called the ‘relational aesthetic’-movement. These artists were less interested in creating objects, but more in organizing social situations. Perhaps Tiravanija’s ‘free curry’ (distributing curry as art project) has unwillingly become an icon for this art that sought not to question anymore what ‘is’ art, but was more interested in investigating the potentialities of situations offered.

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