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

“Double Infinity” engages the Expo’s utopia complex with a solid lineup of artists, performances and lectures.

Shanghai-based art collective Arthub reinterprets pieces from the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, The Netherlands, a modern art museum renowned for its collection of El Lissitzky, the Russian designer, architect and photographer. This show poses questions about whether the meaning of work changes once it enters transnational space.

The Lissitzkys alone are worth the trip. Announcer heralds a new mechanical age, with the human form purified into geometric shapes. Although the piece aesthetically belongs in early 20th century Russia, its ambitious break with tradition is comfortable in Shanghai.

Instead of another East vs. West show, “Double Infinity” shows us utopia vs. tenement, art vs. the world it depicts. Liu Gang’s images from Dutch Town, the lowlands-inspired Pudong subdivision, capture Shanghai’s habit of throwing pictures of Haibao and mountain streams over construction sites. In The City as Dreamworld and Catastrophe, Susan Buck-Morss defines this meshing of image and city as “an echo of the call for social utopia, like a mirage of the existence of collective desire.”

Although Shanghai as either dreamworld or catastrophe is nothing to chuckle at, “Double Infinity” does a good job at making the whole discussion entertaining. Thai artist Surasi Kusolwong hides a gold necklace in a gallery full of thread. The viewer is invited to find the necklace, thus participating in the endless search for the genuine that lies at the end of consumption. Or take the Xijing Men Collective. They have created a fictional country and, in a critique of urban planning, carve up a watermelon to fit their needs (pictured).

Maya Kramer hired a candy sculptor from Nanjing to create replicas of some of the Van Abbe’s more risqué pieces. It’s hard to slip a piece like Warhol’s Electric Chair through Chinese customs, so why not make duplicates out of sugar? By reproducing controversial art, Kramer’s work lambasts the saccharine culture that will be diplomatically hawked this summer.

Liu Gang Window

Double Infinity - Dutch Culture Centre, Shanghai

My text is a working draft for the upcoming Your-space newspaper - I apologise for self-plagarism here but felt the content was an appropriate update for Kitchen readers!

_____________________________

A lot seems to have happened between the last issue of the Your-space newspaper and this one. With the launch of Your-space’s Free Vrij Film programme with the Van Abbemuseum; a ‘Demonstration Aesthetics’ workshop and installation by the Swedish artist, Erik Krikortz with invited participants from Eindhoven, Breda and Tilburg; and volcanic irruptions in Iceland shutting down travel in and out of Europe - there’s a lot to take stock of.

While these events don’t seem to have much in common, in fact, they couldn’t be more alike. Each, in its way, stages a disruption in the regular rhythm of everyday life which we so easily become complacently complicit with. Let me explain what I mean by way of an example, an example that finds me writing this editorial note on a very long train ride from Bratislava to Eindhoven. The fact that all flights between the two locations have been cancelled is perhaps of secondary importance. But trains are good. They give you time to think and look out the window. Also to look at your neighbour. Who may or may not be a young German man in military gear on weekend sabbatical from his national service.

What does it mean when he puts on that uniform? What is his cause? Could he imagine himself fighting for the Fatherland in Afghanistan if the “need” arises? Or is this a means for him to get the education he wants and move on to doing something he really believes in? Is he looking for solidarity amongst his, possibly, equally laisser-faire colleagues crowding the train passage with their “cammo” bags and machismo? Are they all looking for something they can be in, together?

This togetherness, or shared sense of dedication to a bigger end, is what took me to Bratislava where a group of young artists and theorists began a civic action at the start of the year called, “Twenty Years After the Velvet Revolution Did Not Happen”. I won’t go into the historical, contextual details of their name, suffice it to say that revolutions, in whatever form, generally mean different things to different people, depending on where you were, when and to whom you were loyal (ideologically or even emotionally and culturally). This particular group in Bratislava, as local practitioners and a generation growing up around but not necessarily directly involved in the transition of the Czechoslovak Republic into the present day Czech Republic and Slovakia, was contesting the very nature of this transition as being something worthy of the title of Revolution (velveteen or not). In light of Slovakia’s current financial and administrative complexity the Ministry of Culture’s open call for applications to the position of Director of the National Gallery, caught the group’s attention. The group saw themselves as being a necessary part of this selection process as a new Director could mean new direction for both the arguably mismanaged and somewhat static National Gallery and  more generally, institutional approaches to contemporary art practice and display within the city.

So a new style of revolt began. The group initiated a series of public meetings between city officials, developers and the local arts community to discuss the selection criteria and urgency of a flexible, official support of Slovak art. This discussion led to a second, about the need for a plurality of spaces in which to display contemporary art in the city. Without the sophisticated funding structures of the Netherlands, small organisations are often completely dependent on the state for financial support and this is often half hearted and fleeting - making long-term programming or a five-year plan for art projects unimaginable. To bring in some fresh perspectives and possible solutions to narrow, money driven responses of the city, the group invited outsiders from interesting institutional models (the reason I found myself in Bratislava). Our seemingly “Western and Well Funded” examples were followed by a heated debate in the theatre where we presented as well as on the radio, telephone and Facebook, was heated and conflicted. Everything these discussions about art in a city, in a new nation, in a society in transition should be. This demonstrated the capacity of a group of people, all working for free while trying to hold down other jobs, to come together repeatedly for the Long Haul over a set of issues which needs addressing and action. The channels they use are contemporary as well as they are age-old. Facebook, town meeting, radio, newspaper, international guests, village artists. These are all valid means of furthering a message - a message, which at some point, I hope sooner rather than later, will take physical and visible forms as the art community in Slovakia takes the lead in staging meaningful disruptions in that context.

Discussion at A4-Zero Space, Bratislava

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.

Totally leaving the cuisine behind me, I should write and eat more about it, I quite got a good impression on some of the artistic activities that are carried out here. Seeing the upcoming programme of HomeWorks I became very sad especially this week that I will not be able to visit this wonderful programme and initative by Ashkal Alwan. However I also realise that my form of visit now allows me to see places not in guided tours, mapped on artmaps, or referred to in brochures. It needs regular calling, some home preparation and rehearsing first and surnames to get going. I got going very fast because of enormous help of Mounira al Solh and meeting Ninar Esber on my arrival evening, who happened to be in town and was thinking of re-establishing again to Beirut. Given the fact that she was in a ‘mode of Beirut reflection’ this offered me a lot of extra hand on information on how the city is lived, at least through her eyes. To get more readings on this I started reading Fawwaz Traboulsi, definitely a book I should transfer to Charles as it describes highly detailed the Ottoman history of Lebanon and its effect on contemporary society today. The history of Lebanon and especially Beirut is defined by class and religious distinction from on of the very early stages of Mount Lebanon, historically the geographical place north of Palestine that later on became the state of Lebanon. Parallel to an equally divers city of Istanbul, the city was home to numerous religions and sects from the beginning. The Ottoman times describe the rise of Christians, as they were, together with the Jews a protective group in the empire. As these groups were not allowed to take up military posts or tax collecting post at first, they devoted themselves to economy and trade. The statuses of these two groups quickly rose and were both important for establishing trade routes with nearby Europe, leaving Lebanon with a strong economic position in the region. It seems that a Christian influence opposite to the Jewish influence, has still an enormous effect on contemporary society today. As the Ottoman empire collapsed, Lebanon became a small country lead by mainly Christian attitudes and references, although there was always a continuous influence of Islam and up until the 1930/40’s a relatively big Jewish community. Today there is a big immigrant community of The Philippines and Ethiopia. They are the nannies of the rich Lebanese, because I will not get into this, but the Beiruti like to have Porsches/Ferraris and Lamborghinis. In the airplane I also learned that Lebanon is the best in aesthetic surgery in the Middle East. It’s the place to be to have some good Botox sessions I was told in the video.

Back to art. 98 Weeks is a small initiative of Mirene and Marwa Arsanios and is attempting to address every 98 weeks another research project, although i’m pretty sure that these timeframes are not a reference point anymore. Started in 2007 as a research platform, they recently opened a project space in which there is space to exhibit work and to have film screenings. On my first night I went to the opening of Arts Floreaux, an exhibition that transformed the new space into a flowershop avant la lettre. It was there that I was warned that the Beiruti art scene is a small one, I that I should not be surprised that everybody knows everybody. I took the warning as a message of relief, because that sounds familiar in every scene, it’s applicable for New York as well as for Eindhoven. Yes, ofcourse the scale is different.

Other than 98weeks, there are whole arrays of small artist run spaces that organise events that range from artistic to activist production, or sometimes together. Next to hummus, politics are the most consumed goods in Beirut for sure. Sanayeh house is a temporary refuge for artists, writers and others that offer a possibility of residency and to exchange experience in a nice nightly setting with Almaza and a lot of smoking. The architecture of the building as well as the strong dedication of the people inside its architecture was amazing to see and very rare in the places that are familiar to see. Very refreshing.

Institution wise there is the newly Bierut Art Centre that still smells like fresh paint and does what it is meant to do, being and looking like an institution. Beatiful presentations by Walid Sadek ad Emily Jacir. I wonder what this will look like in five years. A new initiative is currently being developed by Christine Tohme from Ashkal Alwan and will be presented during Home Works. Having a clear interest in educational approaches and possibilities, Ashkal Alwan will setup a total new Academy, offering a postgraduate study programme in the artistic field. I was very impressed by the foundations of Ashkal Alwan and its commitment to long-term contribution of a critical voice in both the Lebanese and international world. The immense collection of DVD’s of works of artists, (please see BerlinBeirut of Myrna Maakaron when you have the chance) are a true gem standing in the office and remind me of the same methods used some 200 km to the south, even the offices and desks look the same, it is really amazing.

In Zico House I showed Renzo Martens’ film Episode III at Zico House in front of a small audience. Without explicitly giving too much information on what they would see, they were poured into Martens’ 90-minute adventure. Ofcourse the usual discussion started off again and it was almost confronting to see that showing the film, expecting the same critique again, is part of what Marten’s addresses with this visual report. This trip to Beirut and the non-context that it had, made me realise once again that for numerous reasons this is truly an underestimated visual and conceptual work and should be standard issue for everyone interested in human activates. Not because we can think through this on the various complications and doubts that we have, but because it relates to a critique within a system that uses explicitly that very same systems and techniques to make the criticism clear. Ofcourse he crosses borders and the work tends to shift gears vey fast, but already for this understanding of pure criticism of contemporary visual representation, I’m glad. As well as Beirut, its tactics are quite complex to understand or to bring under words.

The museum blog of the 21st century? For anyone wondering:

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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.

“Taking responsibility for being open” - these were the key words of Angela Plohman’s workshop held at the museum on 20 January, as part of the Transparency series we’re putting together. It was the very term “Transparency” that Angela first ploughed into (no pun intended) regarding the dangerous duality of being open while also generating a set of ethics for oneself in how and when and why information is communicated and feedback is invited.

Much of the appeal with online interaction for a public institution such as a museum is the “eventism” and newness (Ned Rossiter) around which contemporary culture revolved. So much content can be generated around a certain moment, current issue or presentation and yet, the capacity to follow these up, deconstructing them in post-event discussion and feedback is also an extremely useful quality of those same online platforms. Angela encouraged us to see past the hyper speed of web-based activity to the sustained, documentational and preservational potential it has. Another quote from Ned Rossiter: “Plagarise yourself as often as possible” - re-use and repetition is something integral to the Play Van Abbe programme currently overruning the museum. Why not also our webspace?

She recommended the text ‘Working the Net’ by Adam Jeanes

Who are we being transparent with? And why aren’t we facilitating that online feedback? This point raised some interesting discussion in terms of “user-testing” and stats analysis on our part as a web-team. What methods can we use to see how people work with the museum’s website? Angela also encouraged a real Peer-for-peer kind of self-editing - I we, as readers, cannot understand or use our own online applications, how can we expect those of our age group or online education to access and engage with this content? There may also be a lot of pruning of ‘virtual tumbleweeds’ necessary as we receive this feedback. And who will take responsibility for this, along with the other user comments we would receive if we invested in this opening up to user-comments?

This of course means that social networking sites are extremely useful but is this the right avenue for the museum? Angela cited the example of the Brooklyn Museum website and approach, as well as the Musee d’art Contemporaine Montreal’s Facebook page, as being PERSONAL examples of how this networking can be achieved. She stressed that if this end of transparency is not personalised, with people taking responsibility for the content they produce, we fail to fully grasp the nature of Web 2.0 culture. Perhaps even a visitor’s blog wouldn’t be such a bad idea!

For this reason, the museum’s Network and Discussion page could use a specific vision. It’s broadness is both its strength and downfall in that it has the capacity to give space to so many interesting discussions and issues laterally connected with the museum programme, however, its metabolism is too slow. If this page is meant to generate discussion, then it must keep track of the progression it stimulates. Angela challenged us to reassess the meaning and follow-up of these phrases and what we really aim to do with not only this page, but each aspect of the website. With transparency comes long-distance vision and it is precisely this which segues into our next workshop in the Transparency series as we generate a museum online policy. Angela encouraged us to be inspired by the creativity of other institutions, and the advise of seasoned practitioners, while also being true to the strategies of vision of our own museum content. Translating this into an online context is a challenge but by no means insurmountable.

Some other readings and suggested sites are:

Museum 2.0

Powerhouse Museum

The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki

and Blast Theory for how online can be translated into the spatial and vice versa

Ned Rossiter’s Organised Networks

Below is an introduction for an upcoming show I’m working on at the Aarhus Art Building in Denmark, The Good Old Days. It showcases the work of four artists from my own generation and while that’s perhaps not the most original way to build a show, for me, it’s revealed some urgent matters for contemporary practice, which seeks a relevant political action based on situated, re-constituting of recent history.

Lara Baladi, Lucia Nimcova, Nandipha Mtambo and Agnieszka Polska

6 February to 17 March 2010

Day by day

Introduction

The Who wrote a song in 1965 that entered Rock ‘n’ Roll history and influenced the development of Punk Rock in the UK. My Generation is almost a self-fulfilling prophecy: as it names and gives voice to the young, mobile, irreverent g-g-g-generation of Western Europe and the United States.

People try to put us d-down (Talkin’ ’bout my generation)
Just because we get around (Talkin’ ’bout my generation)
Things they do look awful c-c-cold (Talkin’ ’bout my generation)
I hope I die before I get old (Talkin’ ’bout my generation)

In the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic the phrase “Rock ‘n’ Roll” had been banned by cultural censorship boards. A savvy theatre group called Semafor wrote a song in which they used the words ‘Rok co rok se divíme, jak rok co rok se měníme’: ‘Year by year, we are surprised how, year by year, we are changing ourselves’. The phrase is not about Rock ‘n’ Roll at all, and yet through the obvious phonetic similarity, the performers were able to encrypt a political message.

Semafore’s irreverent example is only one of the many drawn upon by the four artists in this exhibition: Lara Baladi, Nandipha Mntambo, Lucia Nimcova and Agnieszka Polska. Despite their disparate geographies and political contexts, these artists are bounded by a generational shift: the era after Rock ‘n’ Roll, the time between walls and wars, a period of repressing, then recollecting and sometimes reclaiming. Yes, history often repeats itself, but I’m talking about my generation.

The ‘Good Old Days’ being an overly familiar phrase, is only possible to use here within quotation marks. In this case it comes from Homi Bhabha’s seminal, The Location of Culture where these words delineate the hazy horizon behind us, of a past imagined, in relation to a group of women miners in Britain who took part in the miners’ strike of 1984-5. Bhabha cites this example to illustrate that any movement to change is always complex, surprising even, in its trajectory and outcomes. The relational nature of any political position, and I use “political” in the broadest sense of everyday living, means that because of its interconnectedness, the way change happens could so easily be something else - what Bhabha calls the ‘au dela - here and there, on all sides, hither and thither, back and forth’ (‘Year by year, we are surprised how, year by year, we are changing ourselves’). It is this eccentric contingency that binds together the work of these four artists. By using what could be called analogue or traditional material within a contemporary frame, they foreground what constitutes the background, and the instability of pasts and past-futures, as they become the present.

Lara Baladi’s Diary of the Future is a deeply personal presentation embedded within the age-old domestic Middle-Eastern practice of coffee-ground reading. The photographic and sonic components of the project diarise the period of the artists’ father’s illness, and when seen from a certain standpoint, the ensemble creates a kind of stained glass in which one element should always be read in relation to another. Together with the destinies spoken by the coffee-ground reader (which may be one thing today and something else tomorrow), the work intimates the always-already otherwise tangle of both the present and what comes next.

This logic, with its instability and complicity, is shared in the work of Lucia Nimcova. Combining found footage from “hidden films” created by Slovak directors during a period of intense censorship in the former Czechoslovakia, the artist pieces together moments of slippage, of Double Coding, to create a hybrid film of ‘partial objects’, leftovers and shards which complicate the politically acceptable codes of the communist story of her region.

Copying and pasting as historical interruption is performed by Agnieszka Polska whose manipulated archival images and animations resist the symbolic when it comes to issues of mediation and representation. By replicating certain moments in Modernist art history in an alternate or arbitrary setting, Polska foregrounds the possibility of difference and the poetry that comes with distance. She catches the run-on sentence of art history, mid-breath and says, ‘no, this is not so, we can imagine something else within which your imagined structure looks arbitrary and oppressive.’

In Ukungenisa Nandipha Mntambo physically places herself within the received tradition of Portuguese bullfighting. The word “Ukungenisa” suggests a ‘taking in’ or ‘to accept into’ - it’s even used when a widow remarries. As the artist embodies the role of the matador in an abandoned Mozambican stadium, she closes a gap of colonial, geographic and gendered distance, marrying the choreography of both the fighter and the noble bull.

As each artist reaches through time and place to circumscribe their intuitions, their rememberings, their politics over history’s traces, their works simultaneously propel us forward to think about ‘What now?’ and ‘What next?’ in our own generation. There is no return to the ‘Good Old Days’ and yet the intimate urgency which these artistic projects take up performs the ‘sundering and splitting’, the copying and pasting, and the recomposing of relevant forms of solidarity which call us to look for the ‘joins’ and year by year, surprise ourselves by how we are changing.

CLARE BUTCHER

Homi Bhabha: The Location of Culture, Routledge, 1994.

Ibid, p. 28

Ibid, p. 2

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari: Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, University of Minneapolis Press: Minnesota, 1983, p. 42.

Anthony Elliott and Stephen Frosh quoted in Brenda Cooper: A New Generation of African Writers: Migration, Material Culture and Language, University of Kwazulu-Natal Press, 2008, p. 5.

Homi Bhabha, 1994, p. 28

With the development of Web 2.0, and I’ve been told now, 3.0, culture there comes a need to reevaluate, or indeed, truly evaluate for the first time, how a museum of the 21st century might actually integrate the culture of the Online into its daily, and perhaps minute by minute affairs. We are holding a number of internal seminars, entitled the Transparency series, at the museum to unpack the issues of publicity, discretion and experimentalism in our hyper-reality. The first will be led by Angela Plohman, director of Baltan Laboratories, Eindhoven. Following are some links to a few relevant readings in connection with the content of the workshop.

Virtueel Platform

Through the Looking Glass - Museums and Internet-based Transparency

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.

We presumably returned to this figure because we considered ourselves not to be average visitors. We were curators, art historians, or curators or art historians to be and apparently, in assessing the ‘success’ of exhibition there was a wish to somehow return to a virtuous state of the none-initiated. A quick response to this, especially by thinkers who use the word ‘difference’ a lot, is to point out that there is no such thing as an average visitor, that this figure is more a character in a novel than a person walking the street. However, charming as it may be, it feels somewhat too much like an abstract, text-book, defence and not like a real engagement with the almost natural response of art professionals to analyze exhibitions on the basis of what somebody else might think of it.

In a way it is such a normal practice that it is almost silly to investigate it. Of course, one tries to adjust to what your average visitor might know and see when making a show, for only then one achieves a maximum result. Only in the case of an art exhibition what is ‘result’? The difficulty in an art exhibition is that one is mediating an object which we accepted to be ambiguous, layered and complex. The artwork by its nature is open and to a certain degree incomprehensible. It cannot be reduced to simple, clear-cut statements. So, if the nature of the object is to be complicated, isn’t one cheating if it is presented in a clear way?

In a way this seemingly simple paradox is quite close to being the daily obsession of someone working in a museum. We spent a great deal of time thinking about how to present something complicated as complicated, without it being unattractive. For instance, the luring attractive nature of Fuchs’ summer display (one of the three exhibitions of the first chapter of Play Van Abbe), in my eyes, is the intelligent answer to this paradox. Unfortunately, it is the answer of more than two decades ago, and doesn’t help me in presenting works which are expressing the complexities of these days, but more on that some other time.

And very short. The complexity of art is not an autonomous complexity; it’s not a complexity for the sake of complexity. It is the complexity that is central to the way in which we know the world. Our ideas mingle with our experiences and this process of mingling strengthens the ideas we have, or forces us to change those ideas. Everybody has different experiences and different ideas, but large eras overlap, which makes it possible to agree, while other views conflict and inspire debate. For this exchange to work, we need to be skilled in experiencing and understanding the relation between ideas and experience. It is my understanding that this is what art can be or is in a society like ours. It’s a philosophical task, and yes, quite complex, but in its basic structure everyone does it when one tests ones ideas to ones own experience. When one looks carefully.

Back to the conversation and average Joe in the museum. For the difficulty is not only that an artwork is obscure and that therefore its presentation should be so (in a way Fuchs shows that that’s not necessary, for his display is luminous and clear). The difficulty that became clear to me in the discussion is that this mysterious, average figure, was one manifestation of the problem or question out of which, in my understanding, Play Van Abbe, grew in the first place: how do we deal with art today and tomorrow? For, if art is almost by nature complex, because of its idiosyncratic nature, asking into the ways to negotiate it, is almost like asking how we deal with complexity in our society.

So why can’t we return to the display strategy of Fuchs? Wouldn’t our average visitor appreciate such a presentation more, understand it better? To me the answer seems to be located partly in the medium that I’m using now – the internet, blogging. One of th things that have changed in those years separating us from 1983, is the way in which we communicate. The immense production of written text on the web, the diachronic way in which we can ‘mine’ it with search engines, the astronomical proliferation of cinematic and photographic images. These things are deeply affecting the way in which we negotiate complexity, and an institute like the museum is affected so hard by it, that it feels threatened in its existence if it considers the consequences.

For in a sense the museum is everything these new technological means are not. It is a static, authorative, hierarchical machine, whose techniques of display evolved to educate a mass audience. To negotiate complexity in a museum one has to accept it as authority, one has to return to its status of specialist institute that knows better. In the age of blogging and surfing it is especially specialism that is under siege all the time. Specialism is no longer acknowledged on the basis of degrees, but has been reduced to blunt arguments: can you convince me.

There is something positive about this, for it means that people are critical. However, it poses a challenge for those people whose practice was based on being a specialist and being trustworthy on that basis. Art historians are such specialists. We – I’m also an art historian – need to reconsider our practice and wonder how it functions within this new system of exchange. What role does the type of knowledge production with which we are engaged play today?

The spectre of the average visitor seems currently embedded within this problematic. For it seems the average visitor itself has changed and especially our relationship as specialist to a non-specialist audience has changed. The question therefore should not only be: does an average visitor understand the exhibition?, but how do we, as specialists, relate to somebody who doesn’t considers oneself as such. We have to be aware that the economy of knowledge has changed and that it requires, or even demands, that we face this change and reposition ourselves. Our practice of looking and analyzing, contemplating that complicated relationship between experience and ideas, is still valuable and necessary, just as art is, but if we don’t find ways in which to integrate this knowledge into the new system of exchange, I fear the distance between us and anyone considered average will only grow until we are to each other only a spec at the horizon.

I’m on a plane flying to Alicante. God knows why really, it is not necessary for much that I cherish but I said yes once to some invitation and here I am, not wanting to think about it further. At least I get to listen to God Help the Girl

The flight is, not surprisingly, a holiday flight to escape the cold Dutch winter. It is only half full and I’m sleepy with a precious seat between me and my neighbour. I take a look across…and that’s where it begins to get interesting or maybe better troubling.

Sitting by the window is a woman, late middle aged, silver rimmed glasses that could almost be described as baroque, lace blouse, silver chain, pendulous earrings, purple jacket and a mouth that purses up in disgust every time I reach into the bag that I placed on the empty seat between us. I’ve seen this face before, I think. Not this one specifically maybe, but a certain type of Northern European bitterness that twists the features into misalignment with the world and especially with the other humans who always fail her expectations.

I try to imagine her life and admit that all the clichés start falling into place. She married money I guess, enough anyway to pay for a house in southern Spain. Engagement and wedding rings (big ones) are stuck firmly on her left hand but I still think she’s divorced, nastily abandoned for a younger woman by an incompetent but lucky man who left her with enough cash to be comfortable. She doesn’t really like the sun but enjoys telling her friends back in Haarlem about the broad terrace of her Alicante apartment with its beautiful southern prospect of hills and a glinting sea. Equally she doesn’t like the Spanish, except for the occasional youngster who passes through her bed on the way to a new future. Of course, she makes him have a shower before and after and changes the bed sheets as soon as she can. Back in the Netherlands, I can only imagine her as a PVV voter, someone who would happily send the foreigners back to where they came from so she can visit them on holiday. She’s been on a Nile cruise and to Antalya but neither lived up to the pictures on the website. In fact life is in general disappointing, even though she has everything her ancestors dreamed of and built a country to provide.

Oh god….this terrible…

I feel so unfair condemning her, but there it is, it’s how I feel. I see in her face the author of the letter to the newspaper that says the Van Abbemuseum should close and the money be spent on what people want, or the Dutch art critic who is so concerned about preserving his ‘critical objectivity’ that he seems to have forgotten how to act as a human with passions, enthusiasms and friendships, or the local Eindhoven artist who uses the word “rape” to describe Lily van der Stokker’s playful “reeducation” of Don Judd’s obsession with purity.

This is so bad. The woman is innocent afterall, perhaps she is even friendly, I don’t give her a chance. So, how do I overcome these prejudices, these ignorant fantasies based on nothing more than appearances? How to not be angered, almost repulsed by her apparent provincialism in my arrogant, cosmopolitan eyes? And how to avoid that anger turning into bitterness, prejudgement, closing communication off before it can even begin?

Because isn’t what I am doing now, sitting on this plane, just what we ask people coming to the museum not to do. We ask them to give us a chance, to overcome their initial rejection, wait, look, think again – don’t judge a book by its cover. All that stuff.

So, how do we create the openness that we need as a society (and as a museum), the generosity that doesn’t condemn but empathises. What’s the use of judgement when the judgement’s already made before the experience has begun? Indeed, what’s the use of judgement anyway…shouldn’t we try to be understanding even when we don’t understand? Ultimately, how do we embrace the PVV voter, put our arms around the unhappy visitors, at least metaphorically, without trying to convince then they are wrong and we are right?

I don’t know how, as is pretty obvious from the speculation about my poor, innocent neighbour but I am pretty certain it has to do with two qualities – generosity and confidence. Let’s learn generosity not only in terms of hospitality but it terms of giving space and time and energy to those who don’t want to take it and let’s be confident that we are the ones who make the decision anyway, and we can only do that better if we love a bit more and condemn a bit less.

So, I am going to help get my neighbour’s bag down from the overhead compartment when we land, and I’m going to try and not dismiss the artist or criticise the critic. You doubt it? Well, so do I a bit…but I do promise to get the bag…and that’s a start at least.

By Gemma Medina Estupinan

With projects come challenges. Each one different and attractive…but, no way. Sometimes, the things happen just to make your life difficult and difficult!!

2 weeks ago, I live in a Soap Opera, the Choir’s Soap Opera and I am wondering to myself what will be next!!!…

Gemma Medina narrates her experiences coordinating the Choir’s recording and performance as part of the Chto Delat work, Song of the Museum Guards for the People of Eindhoven (2009). The first part is a series of fragments from Gemma’s correspondence with the Head of Collections, Christiane Berndes; and in the second part, Gemma stews a little.

*

From: Gemma Medina

Date: 2009/11/13

Subject: Update!

To: Christiane Berndes

Hi Chris,

Our choir’s soap opera seems that it will be a nice end.

The first choir we approached wasn’t professional enough (so our conductor said).

He says that it is really difficult to know which singers we need without first having the music. And that, after listening to it, maybe it might be impossible to find professionals with the time, who are prepared to do it for such little money or good amateurs to sing it (because it’s a difficult format for these voices). So, we have to wait till Monday, till we have the music, and then, maybe we can find somebody.

Just two choirs of amateurs could do it in Eindhoven (that are good enough): The first one, answered me that they couldn’t. The second one, they didn’t answer me.

Your friend cc-ed to me a proposal from a professional quartet from Delft, but they wanted to earn 500 euros each, excl. travel costs (impossible!) and they are just 4!!

Then I sent emails (a lot!!) to different choirs.

I found one, the Utrecht KamersKoor.

The conductor said that he could find professionals to work with us but he must act as the conductor.

He will look for the people, and Monday, he could give me the names and I’ll send to him the music and all the details. For him, the budget is OK but we should pay apart from the travel. It is OK because at this moment we still have money free from other things that were cheaper than budget (accommodation and translation to Dutch).

Now we are looking to make the video and the sound recording the same day on the 23rd. I found a specialist that could manage it.

Again, It seems like it will go on! but…let’s see what happens Monday!! hahaha

Have a nice weekend!!!!

Groetjes

Gemma

From: Gemma Medina

Date: 2009/11/16

Subject: Other chapter…

To: Christiane Berndes

Dear Chris,

I will be crazy at the end of this project! (hahaha, I am kidding)

We have a new chapter in our Choir´s Soap Opera.

On one side:

Dmitry won´t send us today the music. He has still to change things and he say that it will be here at Wednesday. That means, that the choir will have less time to work with the song before to do the recording.

On the other hand: the conductor of the Utrecht Kamerkoor, say that they asked some really good, smart and quick professionals whose find the work attractive but, they say that the budget is almost nothing for them. The conductor says that it will be really difficult to find someone that could and would like to do it for so little money (again with the money!). He is quite nice and says that he is looking for somebody but he thinks that it is almost impossible.

They ask at least 100 euro more for each one.

Actually, I think that it is true. There should be good professionals to do this work in so little time. And if they are professionals, they earn more money…

I calculated that with the money of rest, we have almost the amount but still we need 100 euro plus transport (I was thinking, maybe someone could go to Utrecht and pick up them and then drive back…that could be cheaper…) And I am trying to get cheaper the audio and film recording…

About the recording option, it wasn’t through the contact the museum had worked through before (I am still trying to get contact with him, because he is never at the office!) It was directly through the audio studio that often makes recordings there.

Tomorrow morning, I will be at the museum (until 12),

Maybe we could talk about it…I hope that everything will be OK and I could arrange it.

But could you still cross your fingers for us?

Best wishes

Gemma

–

Op 18 nov 2009, om 11:21 heeft Gemma Medina Estupinan het volgende geschreven:

Sorry, Chris,

I talked with the person coordinating the recording studio in Eindhoven. He admits that it was his mistake and he is trying to get the space for us the same day (Tuesday 24th!) And I talked with the conductor, and he said that it’s OK…

I am really sorry for everything..

(but anyway, give me a moment today to talk please)

Best,

Gemma

>>> Christiane Berndes 11/18/09 5:02 >>>

Gemma, you don’t need to apologize! It is great, the effort that you are doing!

Met vriendelijke groet,

Kind regards,

Christiane Berndes

Curator and Head of Collections

>>> Gemma Medina Estupinan 18-11-2009 17:16 >>>

Thanks Chris,

But it was 10 minutes before that he phoned me again, and said that it was completely impossible to use the recording zaal.

But is OK.

I am looking for studios and there are two where maybe it’s possible (I will know tomorrow) and on the other hand, I am waiting to get contact with the guy that arranged for us with the first recording studio because he has a space and he knows different places…let’s cross our finger again!!

And actually, I didn’t find the studio that you mentioned before. Could you give me the name?

Inge gave me a contact of a music specialist shop and they gave me the name of a studio.  Let’s go on!

But at least, the conductor seems more relaxed now. He thought that it would be necessary to sing without music sheets, in the audio recording too, and he was worried about the time. They have just 2 pieces of the song (they still don’t have all the song…).

I’ll let you know how it goes tomorrow!!!

best

Gemma

*

THE CHOIR SOAP OPERA!

Gemma Medina Estupinan

With projects come challenges. Each one different and attractive…but, no way. Sometimes, the things happen just to make your life difficult and difficult!!

For two weeks, I have lived in a Soap Opera, the Choir’s Soap Opera and I am wondering to myself what will be next!!!

Two weeks ago, I had a conductor whose should find a good choir, an studio, audio and film. WE GOT A CHOIR!!! Everything was perfect. So perfect that I had to imagine that the storm was coming.

I got an email: “Sorry, but I can not find singers to do this job. It’s really complicated and I won’t to go on”, said the conductor…the former conductor…

URGENT!! WE ARE LOOKING FOR A CHOIR!!!

In just a week, I didn’t have a conductor, a choir, but I have a studio recording!

Stress, phone calls, emails (hundreds!!) and after that, a new oasis came to me. I found a conductor that promised me he would find a really professional choir. YES!!! WE HAVE A CHOIR AGAIN!!!

And yes, he did it, but it was not easy!

A week before the recordings, something happens. I have to change the date of the recordings.

I got a call of the conductor. “Sorry, but we can’t do it at this date, it’s completely impossible, you have to looking for another choir!” After 10 minutes of conversation… “OK, I will try to find someone for this date”

Uff….I could breathe again…

But WAIT !! There is a problem with the studio and the space to film. We made a reservation but it was a mistake. We couldn’t use it anymore! We had a place and later we didn’t have it. Then…I had to looking for a new studio of audio and film recording….URGENT! WE ARE LOOKING FOR A STUDIO!!

Stress, phone calls (hundreds), emails, arghhhh!!

I found a place! It is nearby the choir’s base-city. It sounds OK, easier and better for everybody…THE THINGS GOES ON!!!

Three days before the recording. The conductor said: “I can’t find the fifth singer. But don’t worry about it. If I couldn’t find it, I could sing it myself.”

Two days before: “I am still looking for”

One day before: “Nobody called me back, but for sure this night I’ll know something more”…

Recording Day: A LOT OF PROBLEMS!!!  We got lost! All the ways have constructions works (I hate the navigational system!). We were there, in the studio, the conductor was singing. Oh my god!

The choir with uncertain faces: “Is it working?” “Could you do something with this material?” The artist with a concentrated face.

After recording day (3 days before opening); Everything seems be OK. The artist showed us the videos. They are great!! BIG BREATH FOR ME!!!

2 Days before opening: The Conductor called me: “Sorry, I am sick. I won’t be there on Saturday for the opening. But I will try to find someone to replace me…”

WHAT!!! I CAN’T BELIEVE IT!!!

The opening is tomorrow…and I still don’t know if it will be a happy end…but as a good Soap Opera, the end has to be exciting…

The last chapter of this story: Saturday 28^th November at the Van Abbemuseum…I see you there!

Here is a text, not yet published, that I hope gives a little background into the thinking behind the project

Why Play? Why Van Abbe?

“it’s all about the thing itself”, he said in Dutch, arguing that what we are doing with the Van Abbemuseum and its collection transgresses the rules of art. He was a fellow museum director, this man who confronted me, but he deserved a hearing. “I honestly don’t think it is” I replied “it’s about the context at least as much, possibly more – and as museums we should to give people a chance to make their own mind up.” He offered me a lift in his car, but we didn’t talk about art and context anymore. It seemed our two points of view couldn’t be reconciled, maybe because they emerge at different historical moments and in response to different understandings of what art represents in the world at large.

Play Van Abbe is in some ways a long response to my colleague director. It is an attempt to show why context is crucial, while not excluding the possibility to contemplate individual objects. In general, this 18-month project suggests fairly firmly that art is not a straightforward choice between either the thing itself or its context. Rather we understand that the one cannot exist without the other, and that the traditional context in which art is presented, such as the white cube, make it hard to see it as anything other than a isolated, autonomous thing that is disconnected from daily experience. Yet, it is obvious that art is a product of its history, its conditions of display, its viewers and the societies in which it is made and received. The uniqueness of an object or its maker’s autonomy only really come to light when they are seen in relation to what surrounds them politically, economically and physically. At the same time, that object can, and regularly does, surpass the conditions in which it is formed. However, the wish to let the ‘object speak for itself’, is counterproductive if it tries to hide the penumbra of influences and conditions external to it, in an environment like the idealist “white cube” of the museum. This distils complex meaning to essences, while not allowing the artwork to be enriched by its context in its struggle to surpass it. The most direct consequences of this is that the artwork’s commodity value becomes the most accessible measure of its value and meaning, there being few other useful comparisons or connections to the rest of life.

What Play Van Abbe attempts is to recognise that our awareness of the condition of art in a museum must include the staging or making visible of the context in which we operate. If we do not do this, we sell ourselves short and diminishing the possibilities of contemporary art to express itself in the here and now. I use “we’ here because art is defined collectively, even if individuals make it. This fact of collective judgement is crucial to understanding how art changes, and why it is always in an entangled web of relations with other things and people. Acting together as a field means change in art is probably much more socially meaningful and reflective than we really understand or can trace back to specific exhibitions or artworks. Play Van Abbe is our attempt to deal with what this museum sees as its collective task, which is to create the stages on which a possible public museum of the 21^st century can be enacted.

But why this “need for change” at all? What is it that has made us more aware of our contexts and conditions than before. To answer this, we have to look at the world at large.

I began working in this museum with a series of questions that I believe are shared with many others. What should a museum look like today? How does it behave towards the art of the present moment? How does it respect and animate its past? I had the feeling that the museum was starting from a story of art and its place in the world that was no longer so recognisable to its society and intended visitors. In 2004, the new building of the museum had just opened in Eindhoven and entered a world that was very different from the order under which it had first been planned. Those changes have come to be symbolised by the year 1989, which represents both the so-called end of ideology and history, as well as accelerating, new forms of globalisation. The modern art museum, by virtue of its contemporary ambitions, needed to reflect these changes in terms of geography, time and thinking about the public sphere. Perhaps only now, after 20 years, can we begin to take a more detached view of what we think happened then, as a way to help explain why “the thing itself” stopped being the main focus and why making contexts visible seems such an urgent task today.

Let’s start by oversimplifying, to help sketch out a process that can be modified with experience. Before (roughly) 1989, the modern and later contemporary art world was small, confined largely to the big cities in a few North American and West European countries as evidenced by major self-proclaimed ‘international’ shows like Westkunst (1981), Documenta (1982, 1987) and Skulptur Project Munster (1987). Artists from elsewhere needed to move to Paris (Picasso) or New York (Kawara) or a few other urban hotspots in order to find supportive conditions and a community of common interests. Within this community, the basic narratives and the terms of iconology, form and method were shared. It wasn’t generally necessary to spend hours explaining the context of a work or how it related to history, economy, society etc. because these things were known. Even most museum visitors, though on the periphery of the common interest, shared enough vocabulary not to need extensive background information, and when they did education programmes knew what story to tell. After 1989, contemporary art went slowly global and many more artistic positions entered the arena. With this growth came a breakdown in the common language that had been built up through modernism and artists had to start to tell stories about where they came from and what there work meant in different situations as it was moved from the place of production or inspiration to an exhibition elsewhere. Thus, the narrative media of video, artworks explaining themselves and their areas of research and personal testimony exploded and created the expanded, complex art world we have today, This is one in which viewers who are often quite locally grounded are asked to consider and respond to global conditions and differences in a world that extends fromn Helmond (a city near Eindhoven) to Helmand (a province in Afghanistan), and where artists are often not locatable in one place but move between cities and cultures.

The problem is only that most of the tools we have to show these artworks – perhaps with the exception of the biennale – are built for that small, common artistic field of 20 years ago. The questions we are faced with, and that we try to answer in Play Van Abbe are these: could the ideological architecture of the museum reconfigure its universal claims and still make sense of itself as a museum of contemporary art? Might the recognition of international localisms and our own provincial status allow different forms of understanding to arise in different places, and still allow our visitors to feel connected to something bigger than themselves? In the museum, the initial response to deal with these questions were temporary exhibitions like Eindhoven-Istanbul, Be(com)ing Dutch and Heartland but the core task of the museum is to display the collection, and for that we developed the Plug In principle.

Play Van Abbe emerges out of our experiences with the Plug Ins. The latter were singular presentations, confined to one room, where an artist, a curator, a writer, a museum employee and even a visitor could determine how the collection would be installed and what works would be shown. There were some notable successes and failures but what the Plug Ins did achieve was the fragmentation of that old universal narrative of modernism and the possibility to see artworks in unexpected configurations that addressed social or economic history, political change or cultural difference – and sometimes they even allowed “the thing itself” to be seen in a new light.

With Play Van Abbe, the team in this museum wants to start to put the fragments into new forms of order and to suggest lines of development as well as fundamental historical breaks. It means that we need to tell quite complex stories of repetition and discovery while ensuring that the experience of the art remains paramount for the viewer at first glance. Art itself is not always easy in that respect, because art’s power largely lies it is ambiguity and in never being able to pin it down to one specific meaning. At a time when simplification is greatly prized, it seems almost perverse to produce things that are deliberately uncertain, but this layering of possibilities is the best way to generate personal response and collective discussion, as well as the main reason to keep going back to a single work of art. Complexity is part of our everyday experience after all, when we take the time to see it.

It is our ambition in the museum to create the conditions in which you as a visitor are helped to think critically about the world and the museum’s place in it, as well as the art that our young global culture has produced. We hope you can enjoy the experience of looking at works of art in our collection and constructing your own narratives around them, while being aware of how meaning is constructed out of the things that we value. We would ask you to keep both levels - the artwork and the context - in mind and to switch your gaze between them when you visit. In this way we hope that the question of relations between artworks and between these artworks and the world around them can be more helpfully framed. Ultimately, this museum is here because this society (you and me) agree that it is important and worthwhile. That worth must be judged in terms of the experience of art that it offers and the possibility to access artworks that change opinions and inspire new ideas and behaviours. In the museum, we believe absolutely that this is possible because it happens to us regularly, and with Play Van Abbe we want to share it with as many people as we can.

Cultural Confinement

Cultural confinement takes place when a curator imposes his own limits on an art exhibition , rather than asking an artist to set his limits. Artists are expected to fit into fraudulent categories. Some artists imagine they’ve got a hold on this apparatus, which in fact has got a hold of them. As a result, they end up supporting a cultural prison that is out of their control. Artists themselves are not confined, but their output is. Museums, like asylums and jails, have wards and cells- in other words, neutral rooms called “galleries.” A work of art when placed in a gallery loses its charge, and becomes a portable object or surface disengaged from the outside world. A vacant white room with lights is still a submission to the neutral. Works of art seen in such spaces seem to be going through a kind of esthetic convalescence. They are looked upon as so many inanimate invalids, waiting for critics to pronounce them curable or incurable. The function of the warden-curator is to separate art from the rest of society. Next comes integration. Once the work of art is totally neutralized, ineffective, abstracted, safe, and politically lobotomized it is ready to be consumed by society. All is reduced to visual fodder and transportable merchandise. Innovations are allowed only if they support this kind of confinement.

Occult notions of “concept” are in retreat from the physical world. Heaps of private information reduce art to hermeticism and fatuous meta-physics. Language should find itself in the physical world, and not end up locked in an idea in somebody’s head. Language should be an ever developing procedure and not an isolated occurrence. Art shows that have beginnings and ends are confined by unnecessary modes of representation both “abstract” and “realistic”. A face or a grid on a canvas is still a representation. Reducing representation to writing does not bring one closer to the physical world . Writing should generate ideas into matter, and not the other way around. Art’s development should be dialectical and not metaphysical.

I am speaking of a dialectics that seeks a world outside of cultural confinement. Also, I am not interested in art works that suggest “process” within the metaphysical limits of the neutral room. There is no freedom in that kind of behavioral game playing. The artist acting like a B.F. Skinner rat doing his “tough” little tricks is something to be avoided. Confined process is no process at all. It would be better to disclose the confinement rather than make illusions of freedom.

I am for an art that takes into account the direct effect of the elements as they exist from day to day apart from representation. The parks that surround some museums isolate art into objects of formal delectation. Objects in a park suggest static repose rather than any ongoing dialectic. Parks are finished landscapes for finished art . A park carries the values of the final, the absolute, and sacred. Dialectics have nothing to do with such things. I am talking about a dialectic of nature that interacts with the physical contradictions inherent in natural forces as they are - nature as both sunny and stormy. Parks are idealizations of nature, but nature in fact is not a condition of the ideal. Nature does not proceed in a straight line, it is rather a sprawling development. Nature is never finished. When a finished work of 20thcentury sculpture is placed in an 18th-century garden, it is absorbed by the ideal representation of the past, thus reinforcing political and social values that are no longer with us. Many parks and gardens are re-creations of the lost paradise or Eden, and not the dialectical sites of the present. Parks and gardens are pictorial in their origin - landscapes created with natural materials rather than paint. The scenic ideals that surround even our national parks are carriers of a nostalgia for heavenly bliss and eternal calmness.

Apart from the ideal gardens of the past, and their modern counterparts - national and large urban parks, there are the more infernal regions - slag heaps, strip mines, and polluted rivers. Because of the great tendency toward idealism, both pure and abstract, society is confused as to what to do with such places. Nobody wants to go on a vacation to a garbage dump. Our land ethic, especially in that never-never land called the “art world” has become clouded with abstractions and concepts.

Could it be that certain art exhibitions have become metaphysical junkyards? Categorical miasmas? Intellectual rubbish? Specific intervals of visual desolation? The warden-curators still depend on the wreckage of metaphysical principles and structures because they don’t know any better. The wasted remains of ontology, cosmology, and epistemology still offer a ground for art. Although metaphysics is outmoded and blighted, it is presented as tough principles and solid reasons for installations of art. The museums and parks are graveyards above the ground- congealed memories of the past that act as a pretext for reality. This causes acute anxiety among artists, in so far as they challenge, compete, and fight for the spoiled ideals of lost situations.

*This statement was published originally in the Documents catalogue as Smithson’s Contribution to the exhibition.
Text excerpted from ROBERT SMITHSON: THE COLLECTED WRITINGS, 2nd Edition, edited by Jack Flam, The University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, California; University of California Press, LTD. London, England; 1996
Originally published: The Writings of Robert Smithson, edited by Nancy Holt, New York, New York
University Press, 1979
ISBN # 0-520-20385-2

An interesting article I recently came across in the last edition of the Open cahier published by SKOR and the NAi - by Pascal Gielen: “The Art Scene. A Clever Working Model for Economic Exploitation”

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[24-10-09 13:24:58] hadas zemer: hei Freek!

[24-10-09 13:25:07] Freek Lomme: Hei Hadas!

[24-10-09 13:25:24] hadas zemer: from 1 to 10 how tired are you?

[24-10-09 13:25:42] Freek Lomme: 7.6

[24-10-09 13:26:05] Freek Lomme: feel a bit like I’ve been in bed too long, but it’s the contrary.

[24-10-09 13:26:09] Freek Lomme: how about you?

[24-10-09 13:26:53] hadas zemer: hmm…. its kind of a nice, exhausted, numb feeling… especially after yesterday’s partying…

[24-10-09 13:27:26] Freek Lomme: so: how do you feel about the live-exhibition’s live aspect?

[24-10-09 13:28:33] hadas zemer: first thing’s first - it is alive! The big question of “if we build it will they come” got a positive reply from the people of Eindhoven. This is really reassuring.

[24-10-09 13:30:47] Freek Lomme: indeed: the project opens up the shared share between producers, users/consumers and the architectural scope: feels like an organic body that we’re only a small part of… illustrative, for me, is the fact that assistants are quoted in the Eindhoven’s Dagblad: very good!

[24-10-09 13:32:28] hadas zemer: the assistance issue is an important conclusion of it all - the quality of the human contact aspect is highly dependent on the commitment and communication skills of those performing the “face to face interface”.

[24-10-09 13:35:58] Freek Lomme: suddenly, the interface consists totally the faces of those involved, operating beyond any constraints, engaging from multiple perspectives related to it all. For me, the emancipator capacities of this are totally great, although it’s difficult to know what they are about and what they bring about.

[24-10-09 13:39:17] hadas zemer: it was in the TAKE A SEAT talks that we got the chance for a more open interaction, airing out, asking questions together… it was interesting for me at the Acclair presentation for example to witness the balance between the more ‘technical’ questions which came mostly from the students present and the later on in-depth ethical questions were brought in by peers and members of the TAKE of the ad-hoc creative community…

[24-10-09 13:44:34] Freek Lomme: totally: to step beyond the normal constraints of the scene (as each collective in this community and each visitor involved is somehow misplaced due to the fact that this sphere is open to each, engaged with by numerous), regular motives and means are practically challenged, morally tempted. Did you hear any specific stories from visitors that are nice to bring forth?

[24-10-09 13:48:33] hadas zemer: An interesting story is one from Conditional Design who are acting during the week as the Vitruvian Painting Machine, following a strict code and being partially operated by the visitors. One visitor spent two hours in the hall. He took some time to configure the code and then, by placing different buckets of paint for Edo and Luna he tried to manipulate the “machine” for creating the painting he envisioned. After two hours he decided he was done and asked someone to take a picture of him in front of “his part” of the wall painting…

[24-10-09 13:49:02] hadas zemer: what did you get from the visitors going around?

[24-10-09 13:49:22] Freek Lomme: First of all:

[24-10-09 13:49:59] Freek Lomme: smiling faces, looking at me quite demanding and interested, while I was looking back at them, wondering what both of us might be up to….

[24-10-09 13:50:04] Freek Lomme: Second of all:

[24-10-09 13:51:03] Freek Lomme: engaged stories on how they wandered, on a personal level, through the processes on display; via the hall-texts orally distributed by whoever was around.

[24-10-09 13:51:08] Freek Lomme: third of all:

[24-10-09 13:51:36] Freek Lomme: stories on how they received these processes and, moreover, the visual outcome.

[24-10-09 13:51:45] Freek Lomme: As a total sum:

[24-10-09 13:51:52] Freek Lomme: engagement.

[24-10-09 13:52:08] Freek Lomme: although the form and content vary a lot

[24-10-09 13:53:37] Freek Lomme: visitor’s took the given with warmth, not with coldness!

[24-10-09 13:53:58] hadas zemer: I think the accumulated Agreements presentation tells it all - since we bothered to ask if people were willing to commit themselves for curiosity and triggered them to develop their own questions. For a contemporary art museum that’s a lot. Actually for any cultural venue.

[24-10-09 13:54:56] Freek Lomme: totally: starting with trust is a big step for many; since it’s personal and optionally deep and fragile.

[24-10-09 13:55:40] Freek Lomme: still, people felt the worth of it: they signed with the love to share their curiosity and keenness.

[24-10-09 13:58:29] Freek Lomme: as well, the paper brought it all further; beyond the personal into the social I guess. Of course, the spine of it all was the issues brought forth by the four collectives.

[24-10-09 13:58:31] hadas zemer: I can’t help thinking about the array of exhibitions and events in Dutch Design Week (though saw so little this week, sigh), and reflecting upon the state of mind of the visitor, the supply and demand, or in other words: the relationship of an observer vs. a still object on a pedestal in relation to processes and engagement… relates a lot to the question of what should a design exhibition be, if we think that design is supposed to be used, touched, part of everyday life and in our case - radical and provocative…

[24-10-09 14:00:04] Freek Lomme: For me, everything deals with identity, but identity is something sincere, so it is about morality and sociability: often these consequences are not taken into account I guess.

[24-10-09 14:00:06] hadas zemer: definitely. In our curatorial layout the paper plays the role of what is “editorial design” but I think it did much more. It was a tool for self expression and a fierce contemplative platform (!), the energy in the papers room was highly social and charged!

[24-10-09 14:00:34] hadas zemer: its already 14.00… another TAKE A SEAT is about to open

[24-10-09 14:00:38] hadas zemer: the last one…

[24-10-09 14:00:43] Freek Lomme: indeed!

[24-10-09 14:00:51] Freek Lomme: keep up the good work!

[24-10-09 14:01:02] hadas zemer: thank you everyone!!

My cautious hunch was sparked off by walking through Take on me and the presentation of Conditional Design this afternoon. Maybe performance-wise not the most notable one in history, but important to at least understand in one way the need for an alternative. Conditional Design drew an outline of their collective practice in which they find themselves in self defined complex results that one might find hard to recognize as design that normally can be better recognized through traditional means that relate to economics, aesthetics, pleasure and practicality. We cannot do anything with the lines on the walls and there is no value that can be put of it in strict selling terms. But how can we perceive it as valuable then and is it not just a play that maybe leaves a nice drawing, but is really nothing more than that?

I believe it’s not, otherwise I would have never written this email. I believe it is not because Conditional Design, as other examples in the show take their practice up for a spin and open up a broader spectrum that can re-value and rethink their practice based on pragmatic tools, the same tools common to there counterparts we see in large quantities on other locations of the DDW. Conditional Design is not always doomed to only kitchen tables experimenting with only five colors of markers in endless nights of gaming, they all have their own studio practice that very much relate to a world much better known by us as graphical designers, sound designers or any other ’serious’ job. They take on the possibility to extra disciplined themselves, as the American researcher and writer Brian Holmes calls this, in order to reach for new means that are not only possible but also very necessary to their ’serious’ practice. It comforts me to see that an alternative conducted and perceived to be existing can be so assisting towards their practice. I think then we come to see that not everything is running so smooth as we think and that more is to be discovered under amazing layers of just discovered plastics. What is most notable in this act is that they use their experimental thoughts and actions to implement it back to an ‘original’ practice, you know, the one that we can recognize better. It therefore not only questions the very essentials of designs’ needs, but also does not exclude production to happen, as we see also in this very newspaper. Perhaps it means that we should not be scared for things like this to happen, although at first they are beyond recognition and seem to only touch are eye in search for mere aesthetics. For me this is real design, a form that questions the bones of it, look good, revalue its underlying system and using the only tool that sparks the new and undiscovered, called imagination.

It makes me thus also wonder how utopian beginnings can be connected to ‘facts on the ground’, a term that is often used in a conflict territory that I just came back from. As referred to earlier, writer Brian Holmes talks about extra disciplinary attitudes that feed a form of intellectual practice that not only connects to different disciplines coming from only one, but can also step out its own discipline to reflect on the needs of its very existence. It’s that moment that I would like to imagine as important for every ‘creative practice’, although any suggestion of calling this practice otherwise is very much welcome. It’s the moment that Take on me is beginning to lift up and showing if you try to notice, not as utopia or as something disconnected from anyone’s reality, but really taking on a response ability and possibility that is offered in valuing the moment in which extradisciplinarity can happen even if you don’t recognize it first time around. Ofcourse you don’t have to take that on, you can also just leave it where it was and continue with your business as usual.

The following is a role-play I just delivered here in Gothenburg at Art Monitor’s ‘The Art Text’ conference, organised by the Faculty of Fine Art, University of Gothenburg, Sweden with Johan Oberg, Mika Hannula, Henk Slager and Emma Corkhill. It was a real melange of contributions from artists, artist-researchers, art writers, fiction writers, performances etc. Really reinvigorating what the Art Text could and should be, while uncovering all manner of grey zones concerning what research is and how much autonomy we have within pedagogic models in terms of the expression and materialisation of that research. *One interesting example of this, the Future Reflections Research Group from Chelsea.

My contribution was a little more discursive in terms of the murky waters my writing is wading at this point. It’s a dialogue between myself and my many voices that picks up on a number of similar polyglot projects. Perhaps this speaks to the wadings of others…

A Role-play (X and Y)

For, “The Art Text”, October 9 2009. Faculty of Fine, Applied and Performing Arts, University of Gothenburg, Sweden – Dickson Palace.

X: there’s a bad joke they used to tell on South African radio

Y: you know you’re never supposed to try tell jokes when they’re only funny to the context they come from, and won’t be understood elsewhere, or will have to be explained so much that the explanation kills the humour.

X: ya, but I’m going to, it’s more illustrative than funny anyway.
Okay, so you know that white South Africans have a very particular accent. Supposedly. And there’s a kind that even South Africans make fun of themselves, because of its class and education connotations. So here we go. A guy with one of these accents calls into the radio and on the other end is someone who sounds like he got straight off the boat from Cambridge, Cambridge United Kingdom we’re talking here.
“Right,” says the English scholar, “Mr Van der Merwe, if you could spell the word “air” for me.”

“Eerh?” says the caller

“Yes, air.”

“Ay-eiy-aaarrrr.”

“Very good. Now spell, “hair”.”

“Haich-ay-eiy-aaaarrrr.”

“Well, yes. Now one last word. Could you spell, “lair” Mr Van der Merwe?”

“Yes, I think it is, “el-ay…uh…ay-eiy-aaaarr?” he says, unsure of himself.
“Excellent. Now if you could put those words all together for me and say them aloud.”

“Eerh, heerh, leerh…erh, herh, lerh, eh, heh, leh, air hair laaaaair.” [final words produced in perfect Queen’s English, "Oh, hellooo"]

Y: Okay, okay, I get the idea. Now you’re going to do the this-is-what-happens-when-centres-impose-cultural-codes-on-the-periphery shtick, I suppose.

X: What gave you that idea? I was merely using this as an example of accented speech. The way we are understood and misunderstood because of the specificity of our language – not the vocabulary itself, though there is often a very specific lexicon that develops to meet certain needs under particular conditions – but how the same words are pronounced, which often makes for completely different impressions. There are so many assumptions about where someone comes from, their status in that place, how well-travelled they are, and how much they actually know based on if they spell “colour” with or without a “u” or whether they say “aftermath” or “aftermath”.

Y: You can’t hear if someone is spelling “colour” with or without a “u” in regular dialogue.

X: Exactly. Thank you for pre-empting my punchline.

Y:….and….you don’t know anything about linguistics or the study of accents, the politics of language. What makes you an authority in this case? Just because you’re the token African in the room doesn’t mean you have the right to speak for a continent. Particularly you with your strange mix of International school education, your American childhood confusions. You’re white which means you’ve always had one foot out of Africa and don’t forget you have ‘Alien’ stamped on the ID card from the country of your birth.

X: I’m not here to be an authentic African. Whatever that means. I’m here to be an Afropolitan: speaking more broadly about the worldliness possible when people are mobile, when they can traverse cultural territories, visual vocabularies and make themselves understood in how they relate all these things.

Y: Ah, you’re talking about this new label African intellectuals living away from the continent are giving themselves, trying to feel better for leaving.

X: Yes, and no. I think there’s something much broader to this idea that by Taiye Tuakli-Wosornu first wrote about in 2005.

He said, ‘What distinguishes [the Afropolitan] and its like (in the West and at home) is a willingness to complicate Africa – namely, to engage with, critique, and celebrate the parts of Africa that mean most to them. Perhaps what most typifies the Afropolitan consciousness is the refusal to oversimplify; the effort to understand what is ailing in Africa alongside the desire to honor what is wonderful, unique. Rather than essentialising the geographical entity, we seek to comprehend the cultural complexity; to honor the intellectual and spiritual legacy; and to sustain our parents’ cultures.’ (2005)

This doesn’t only count for Africans, or Afropolitans, but any group in a context grappling with a mess of histories and chaotic presents…which is, everyone. The idea of producing creative thought around this now, as it happens, in its tense and changeable ways, means that we don’t rely completely on old ways of speaking or wait for a knowledge to be produced about the times we live in. Instead, we find ways of articulating what Achille Mbembe and Sarah Nuttall call the ‘indeterminacy, provisionality and the contingent’ which I would argue constitute daily experience in many contexts and, as Mbembe and Nuttall agree, are ‘hardly the object of documentation, archiving, or empirical description—and even less so of satisfactory narrative or interpretive understanding.’ (2004)

Y: But I think you’re underestimating the power of known narratives, of understandings we think we possess. Whether in South Africa or Serbia, we’ve theorized about Modernism. We know the effects of cultural imperialism from the supposed “centre” of art and literature.

X: A centre which was in fact different for Serbia and South Africa.

Y: Whatever. Even the joke you opened with alludes to all the linguistic stereotyping and access to ‘culture’ brought about by what Huckleberry Finn would have called ‘sivilisation’ (spelt with an ‘s’).

X: And Huck Finn is an excellent example of how, even in the new hallowed spaces of contemporary culture, there is space for chance, misunderstanding, accented freedom of expression. As Mbembe and Nuttall also remind us, ‘Africa like, everywhere else, has its heres, its elsewheres, and its interstices (emplacement and displacement).’ And these thresholds, like Huck Finn’s Mississippi, represent ‘a space of flows, of flux, of translocation, with multiple nexuses of entry and exit points.’ (2004)

Y: Well, if we’re going for the Mississippi as a metaphor here then we should talk about New Orleans. That place has been and still remains a cacophony of intertexts, references, appropriations from a gumbo of cultures and colonisers.

X: The city held its first biennial there last year, Prospect 1. Sans Gold Rush connotations, the show was of course overshadowed by the city’s recent trauma, but also by the tension accompanying most new biennials: that lying between “civilized” contemporary artistic presentation and the sprawling vernacular culture surrounding it. How do you tell or translate the one to the other? In dialogue with the curator Dan Cameron, a once-local artist, Willie Birch stated that ‘the challenge lies with writers to use a different vocabulary, to find ways of speaking about art from this city.’

Y: Perhaps the only hopeful example of that was Lolis Eric Elie’s text in the biennial’s catalogue, ‘Still Live, with Voices’.

X: Here Elie contsructs a beautiful montage of interruptions by the spirits of slaves, authoritive, colonial interjections and the confused thoughts of the contemporary journalist searching for clarity, as he calls for “more voices”!

Y: Rather than paraphrasing read some of it already…

X: Elie and his many voices begin: ‘I would like to tell the story of my city.

I would like to do so in simple, declarative sentences. I
 would like my narrative to be neat and linear, like I learned in
school and on television. Do not think me unequal to the task. In
fact, I have already started a draft:
“We were founded by the Europeans. They taught us to cook
and to speak French and to look down on the Americans. We were built
by the Africans. They had tremendous talent for dancing and singing
and following European instruction. We were saved by the non-Native
Americans. They taught us to work hard and to honor the dollar and to
cherish the word freedom even more than the condition itself.
Then the gods of misfortune stirred the winds of disaster and left us
clinging Noah-like for dear life in the flooding of three years ago.”
         As you can see, my city has three parents, not counting the
gods and the winds who have shaped us as surely as any DNA. I myself
have two parents–a kind, sweet mother and a most unruly father. The
neatness of every draft I compose is ruined by these five voices,
voices that suddenly pop out like the wild hairs that have escaped the
barber’s scissors unclipped.
         So we Africans, the Africans in you, are nothing more than
dancing beasts with wild hair? No one is anything yet, father. It is a draft and we are all
in a state of becoming.
     In a state of becoming sold down the river again.
         Excuse me, Kemo Sabe, but when the Europeans were doing
their founding, they founded us already here. Put that in your story.
More voices, you must have more voices. I will have more voices, I’m sure, invited or not.

-2-

         ”For much of the 19th century, New Orleans was the economic
powerhouse of the southern United States. The city has spent millions
to recapture that greatness. The investment may one day pay off. But,
in the meantime, we are known principally for two things: our food and
our music. They grow so naturally here as to be deemed by our city
fathers as hardly worthy of investment.
         ”In the matter of food we were instructed by the French,
whose reputation for culinary genius is time-tested and well earned.
Subsequent Europeans–the Spanish, the Sicilians, the Germans–have
all left their culinary mark. Black cooks, with their innate sense of
seasoning, have also lent their peculiar je ne sais quoi to our
culinary heritage.”
        Do not blame us for your food, monsieur. Your poisson
meuniere is deep fried; your remoulade is red and has no anchovies;
your “French” bread has a crust like phyllo dough, not like a proper
baguette, and you put that slimy okra in your bouillabaisse. Your food
is good, peut-etre. Peut-etre. But Francais? Jamais! Okay, it’s Creole. It’s our version of French. It’s France
in America plus 300 years plus black cooks.
         Why do you insist on crediting the French with everything?
That bouillabaisse is neither bouillabaisse nor French. It’s okra
soup. It’s soupa konja. It’s west African; just like jambalaya. And
can you imagine Creole food without rice? We were growing rice in
Senegal before the French knew how to plant it. And these vague
”Africans” you refer to had countries—Senegal, Benin, Cameroun, etc.
It’s been documented. Have either of you read the books about our food? They all
say the same thing. Genius French chefs. Talented black cooks. Don’t
blame me.
         I hate to darken your narrative again, Kemo Sabe, but the
filé in your gumbo is the sassafras leaf powder we introduced to your
people. If I might please continue. . .
         You might, but you will be the only one pleased. ’ (2008)

Y: So through mimicry we come to a better understanding of the complexity of individual and collective expression? We’re talking about food not art here.

X: Well, both. These traditions, like ways of speaking, cooking, dressing, constructing cities, are not clearly the property of any one society. The contingency as spoken of by Mbembe and Nuttall returns here where we begin to see what might have been, what could still be and the danger of presenting any text or comment as finished because of the ongoing creolisation of every aspect of daily life.

Y: But we can’t be all things to all people. What you’re proposing is a kind of ultra reflexive Lingua Franca artspeak – a romantic and dangerous notion if you ask me – where we attempt to cover an issue from all possible sides, incorporate every layer of history and generally drive ourselves mad.

X: But there are limits. Elie’s text only includes the voices in his own head. He’s not speaking for Dan Cameron or Willie Birch. He’s not incorporating the thoughts of the jaded international art viewer. If anything, he’s circumscribing his text more to the location not less. By situating his language, its references and specifying the lines of flight from countless origins to where he is, now, we hear his accent more clearly than ever before.

We see the beauty and possibility of these language limitations in the work of Katarina Zdjeldar.

In her work more generally, she seeks to amplify the simultaneous power and also the disempowerment of accented speech. As we try and imitate the language of others, what are the effects and affects of this mimesis, to our own identity and the space of comprehension around us? In her piece A Girl, the Sun and an Airplane Airplane (2007) she films a number of Albanians who remember living under a communist government and she gets them to recall and repeat certain fragments of Russian songs, expressions and greetings that they once learned. They say ‘Good morning’ and ‘My mother works at the textile factory’. The juxtaposition of these phrases, the way the game is portrayed – for indeed, it’s a game: one of those memory ones, like a brain twister – constructs an incredibly nuanced background for the somewhat lonely or awkward actors on screen. In another piece with a bit more of a Scandinavian relevance, Everything is Gonna Be (2009) she takes a group of amateur singers learning or at least sort of singing the words to the Beatles’ ‘Revolution’. These middle aged people, in pastel colours, sitting in their pine and book-lined setting mouth the words uncertainly, adapting their voices and tones to each other as they go. Waiting for the revolution was never so pretty.

Y: But that’s not really a fair interpretation. Zdjelar is being ironic but not about the actors and their social situation…it’s more the frustration of collectivity. The finding of one voice. It’s quite Utopian in its ambition.

X: exactly! But you can’t miss the perhaps sardonic undertones. This idea of singing or speaking in unison is taken to the extreme in one of the same artist’s most recent works where she sits with an immigrant student in Oxbridge in the UK, with a speech coach. In the video piece, The Perfect Sound (2009), the coach takes on a Henry Higgins-esque position, using strange, almost dance-like gestures as he conducts the phonetics of his student, who obviously thinks he’ll be employed after gaining some kind of social camouflage via the attaining of flawless Queen’s English. They carry on in this strange ritual of student following the teacher, copying and placing vowel sounds and vocal techniques. It’s the perfect enactment of the transforming power of voice. And yet, as you say, there are limits. What happens to the traces? There will always be traces.

Y: Traces of what?

X: Well, like Elie, and the Albanians in Zdjelar’s film, the other voices can still be heard. In the seminal text The Restless Supermarket by South African author, Ivan Vladislavic, he creates this character, Aubrey Turle who is a self-described ‘incorrigible ‘European’, living in one of the shabbiest areas of the new Johannesburg (the story takes place in the era just proceeding the end of apartheid). Turle spends his days in the Café Europa, originally opened by a Greek woman who’s since left the expatriated and is currently occupied by has-beens and down-and-outs, left-overs of the new “rainbow nation”. There’s a wall in the café painted with a kitsch mural which Aubrey calls, Alibia. Alibia, which literally means, elsewhere, is a hodge-podge composite of what seem idyllic postcard scenes which the painter blurred together to form a panorama. The French Riviera, the Dickensian cobbled alleyways of London, ‘while in the east,’ writes Vladislavic, ‘a clutch of onion domes had been harrowed from the black furrow of the horizon. A Slav would feel just at home there as a Dutchman. It was the perfect alibi, a generous elsewhere in which the immigrant might find the landmarks he had left behind.’ (Vladislavic, 2001:19)

This character, Aubrey Turle, with his assumed sensibilities and almost forced sense of cultivation regards the world around him in an obsessive linguistic sense, trawling the telephone guide, looking for types of surnames, where they’re living – all of this to gauge in his compulsive way the dramatic socio-political shifts of the South African interregnum period. He knows Alibia is not his home, and he has no illusions about the real language of Café Europa.

Y: Yet, there is a yearning for some space of emulation, such as that provided by the idea of Alibia, or New Orleans, or the civilization on the banks of the Mississippi, a kind of continuity with the time of inhabitation by Europe, when there was an obvious line of progress and a clear voice one could adopt in order to be heard.

X: Like Foucault writes in his Archeology of Knowledge (1972) in his chapter “The Unities of Discourse” – it’s the semi-silence that precedes the articulation of knowledge, that underwritten traces where truths are always already formed. It’s this same silence that gradually overtakes Vladislavic’s protagonist, where, he holds a spelling competition as a last ode to the Café Europa before it closes down and the Alibian wall is erased. The grammatical structure of the text itself begins to break down and we are left, uncertain of anything. As one character states, ‘I can’t believe you’re so upset this joint is closing down. It’s not the end of civilization, you know’ (p.300). Huck Finn would be pleased.

It’s this idea of breakdown which is completely embodied when Elisa Dolittle in My Fair Lady, having gained the education of Henry Higgins, is declared ready to be a lady with her flawless pronunciation of English and fancy getup and taken out on her first test run at the horse races. In the heat of a heated race she lets slip one of her voices and yells above the crowd in working class drawl, ‘Cam on Dowver! Moove ya bloomin arse!’

Y: But these class distinctions you keep referring to and standards of “civilization” are so passé. What of the Modernist idea of the nation state, the working middle class, and then the exploding of all these as Coca Cola was brought to the masses? There is now less limited access to information, to some kind of discursive platform regardless of location or education (particularly, virtually), there is mobility in the cultural world both physically and in status.

X: And yet following 2001, the imposition of national identity through a unified accent gains volume. It’s what builds cohesion, conviviality, it makes us the same because we can understand each other. At least we think we can. In a moment of supposed “post-globalisation” there’s actually a shrinking back and a tuning out of Amero-phylic or “centred” sounding speech. We’re anxious to align ourselves in how we say something, even more than what is said. We are after the perfect euphony, like Zdjelar’s linguistic student.

Y: Though even Zdjelar’s student doesn’t always get it. We don’t know if he ever gets the job, the fancy car, the life he always wanted in Oxbridge. He’s still an immigrant. Like Aubrey Turle will never be a European.

X: It’s these impossibility or truncation of that narrative of a single accented voice which brings us here, to this point. Foucault reminds us that the seemingly natural progressions and ‘universal unities’ (1972) presented by the immediate framing of gestures or expressions – be they artistic, political, both – are anything but sensical. When we listen to the convergence of the references, the texts and voices that have informed our conversation today and the strangeness of this conversation itself, we see the absolute necessity of regrouping and reassociation when speaking and writing about the contemporary practices of everyday. Foucault would call this the forming of a ‘locus of assignable exchanges’ (1972): a comment, an outburst, a moment of slippage that disrupts supposedly natural orbits of discourse and triggers all kinds of polyphonic collisions between cultures, traditions, methods, lexicons.

Y: This is all very easy to achieve in the dramatics of this kind of role-play between you and yourself. But what is the method when writing to a multiplicity of audiences, when not all of them are going to sigh and say, ‘Ah well, only in the art world’? You need to formulate an entirely new set of parameters, categories, canons by which you judge and represent the artist, the speaker, their expression and the discussion it generates. How do you intend to incorporate all this in a single text without sacrificing rigor for this relationality? Or comprehension for some altermodern schizophrenia?

X: But we’re on the Mississippi right? We’re on the self-made raft. The drift away from ‘sivilisin’ has already begun. I can’t masque my own accent and I don’t wish to. I can’t tell you when we’ve reached the destination because there is no X and Y route to finding linguistic or textual liberation. It’s never a simple journey. Huck Finn wasn’t the only soul on the homemade raft. There was also the figure of Jim, a black slave who’d escaped at the same moment as Huck. They find themselves haunting each other’s steps, and must negotiate a loyalty to one another that’s born not only out of necessity but could also bring them to a deeper understanding of the circumstances that brought them together.

These surprising groupings and forays into uncertain but connected waters are what the adventure of our texts is about. While the narrative behind us sets up material markers for the passage of history, the flow of the river thus far; what Jyoti Misty calls, the Vocabularies of the Visceral (2009) and to return to Mbembe and Nuttall’s, the provisional and contingent (2004), guide our traces up and down the tributaries which ‘irrupt’ in front of us, to quote Foucault once more. Like the antics of Huck and Jim, these coincidences and “wrong” turns force us to masquerade as those we are not, take on the voices of others – creating, what Jan Verwourdt, when looking at Katarina Zdjelar’s singing Scandinavians, called a ‘conspiratorial mode of mimicry that modulates the identity of the speaker; or finally [results in] a mode of tentatively attuning oneself to one another’ (2009). This attuning opens the floodgates of ways of speaking and writing which can stay afloat amongst the rapids of worldliness and situatedness.

Y: And through this, our voices become empathetic to each other.

X: And through this our voices become empathetic to each other.

Works cited:

Lolis Eric Elie, “Still Live with Voices”, in catalogue Prospect 1. 2008.

Michel Foucault, Archeology of Knowledge, 1972.

Achille Mbembe & Sarah Nuttall, “Writing the World from an African Metropolis”, Public Culture Journal, 2004.

Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn, first published 1884.

Jan Verwoert, “Move Your Lips to This (in Praise of Accents)”, But If You Take My Voice What Will be Left to Me?, Serbian Pavillion, Venice Biennale, 2009.

Ivan Vladislavic, The Restless Supermarket, 2001.

Taiye Tuakli-Wosornu, “The Afropolitan”, 2005.

Katarina Zdjelar, A Girl, the Sun and an Airplane Airplane (2007), Everything is Gonna Be (2009), The Perfect Sound (2009)