The choice for the director perhaps can be seen almost as an archetypical one in these dark days of cultural setback in the name of financial decline. Constructing his CV mostly in the entertainment business, he is hoped to deliver new forms of ‘earning models’, the only way forward to save an institution of cultural importance as this. It made me think once again how the entanglement of clear capitalist systems can be read through the shift of cultural institutional practices. I was wondering if perhaps, in the times where one is not allowed to exist beyond unavoidable financial catastrophe, it offers a potential of visibility for capatalist and financial systems and motivations to be read through the current (dis)placement and mobility of culture in the very name of unavoidable financial crises.

The Tropical Institute and the appointment of a new financial strategic brain is not a unique event, but part of an array of measurements that seem to take place in the Netherlands parallel with the introduction of the language of ‘the financial crisis’ starting in 2008. Since then, some major cultural institutions in the Netherlands have seen change of leadership, like the Prince Claus Funds appointing a lawmaker as its director or even a radical shift of organisation like Fonds BKVB and Mondriaan Fonds or the threatening disposal of institutes like Rijksakademie and SKOR. Each history having a complex relationship to governance, which is something that one should read closer, perhaps we can begin to see a line here. A line that shows us not so much radical changes in cultural policy, but the non radical changes in capital policy in a world where some believe capatalist systems are no longer valid, non functional and betraying the people.

However, for me, the interview shows no signs of any despair, disbelief or even collapse of systems, or a radical rethinking of these cultural policies, in fact it has the potential to bring to the surface a new capitalist possibility in total opposite of destruction. The language being operated is one that signals an urgent need of awareness and visibility now in many institutional discussions. Especially alarming is to hear that culture only can retain its value by serving a ‘wide as possible audience’. The new director recognises this by taking the total population of the Netherlands (17 million) and comparing it to the current visitor amount (200.000), concluding than that there is could be many more visitors. This in itself is an equally evident as well as shocking conclusion where a gap in the market needs to be filled. In many fields, this mobilizing of customer subjects can be regarded valid, but in the case of the Tropical Institute and perhaps even in the wide cultural field, culture kicks in as a badly selling product in need of renewed strategy. This reducing is apparent mostly in the attitude of the new director when he says that new and broader audiences will be able to learn from the Tropical Insitute in its entirety on new cultures as well as their own. But how then? I read nothing more than Dutch colonial language here that barbarises culture by only acknowledging its economic value and using culture as a marketing language, it sells, but what does it do? It exchanges, cross examines and let cultures learn form each other. He speaks as if the Tropical Institute is the only institution capable of playing a role in cultural exchange and comes to this conclusion only by drawing out a simple measurements of bodies.

It seems that we are at a junction where intellectual approaches are believed to be out of economic potential, to be traded in ( as it no longer contributes to a cashflow) for something new. This ‘something new’ mostly finds its way in language forms of creating ‘wider audiences’ or ‘wider programmes’, but in fact the real potential is not existing in that search for the new product, the new kid on the block, but its deep commitment  to new capitalist urgency in the name of culture. Ofcourse it’s worrying and at some times irreversible frightening for many people that still believe in the value of other value systems in operation, but it does give us one opportunity and that is to make visible the capital apparatuses underlying our cultural infrastructure, networks and even future potentialities.

10 days until the opening of Spirits of Internationalism. Phil Collins room is being de-installed to make place for a remarkable presentation of Panamerenko’s old studio. The exhibition, dealing with the period 1956 – 1986, doesn’t exist only out of artworks, but also shows some unique archive material that gives a more intimate view into the universe of several artists and artists collective. We are especially proud to be able to show Panamarenko’s studio in Eindhoven. For quite some years he has several works on display in the Technical University and it is great to be able to give those people who pass his work everyday a sense of the ‘universe’ out which these works originate.

Exactly two weeks before the opening of Spirits of Internationalism an exhibition dealing with the art produced between 1956 and 1986, and which runs parallel in M HKA, Antwerp and the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven. It’s the next and last exhibition organized within the framework of l’Internationale. Last week we finished the 3D drawing, installing the exhibition in the virtual. Yesterday we ended with the OHO installation, of which I had to do a small part in the real world seeing what fitted in the vitrines. Monday ‘Vanuit Hier’ will be deinstalled (so this weekend last chances to see), and then slowly Panamarenko, Antoni Muntadas, Jef Geys, James Lee Byars, OHO, Július Koller, Fina Miralles and many others will start to ‘occupy’ Van Abbe. Complementary there will be time line with some historical tv fragments containing among others the famous W. T. Schippers action emptying one bottle of lemonade in the ocean.

28th August 2015

After it had happened, no one could really find a convincing explanation for it all. Why did a local art museum issue its call and suddenly open its doors to all the city’s asylum seekers? How did such a small, local action then connect to all sorts of gatherings across the European continent? And why did the corporations of the day not see it coming? After all, consumer intelligence was their speciality, and this was nothing if not a free choice revolt. Each person seemed to join by themselves, perhaps out of some unfathomable herd instinct, but nevertheless as individuals. And it wasn’t really true that they joined anything anyway. They just went to the museums, kunsthallen, artist spaces – art venues of all sorts and in every major city. They sat, looked around, slowly started to speak to each other and enjoyed it all enough to keep coming back. Soon, the museums started to respond – organising meetings and commissioning short term projects as a result, inviting the press and asking artists and others to turn the tables on cynical journalists. The art mausoleums that had slumbered for so long suddenly started to live. Impromptu activities were welcomed and the rules of engagement with art were changed whenever necessary. Museum workers even started to talk about the need for unconditional hospitality and visitors responded.

Strangely, the action spread across central Europe. For once, our disempowered citizens seem to shrug off their apathy and find a voice beyond the reach of administrative control. Of course, everything stayed on the local level, but a new spark was ignited almost daily and every week a new city fell into line. The speed of the change produced problems, most of which we still have today. When people failed to turn up for work, production initially fell by over 70%. But gradually provisional solutions were found, priorities were changed and people drifted back to work for two or three days a week anyway, just to make enough money to carry on. The corporations issued threats, sackings, even appealed for military action but there were no laws against public cultural attendance and the smart entrepreneurs quickly adjusted to the new lower level economy.

Now, it simply goes on like this. The museums are the new public forums, the remaining party politicians try to go there to make there point but mostly production and distribution take care of themselves, administered by the few who still take pleasure in the treadmill of wealth creation. The purpose of meeting seems to be changing. No longer about protest, it’s now about something closer to the old, perhaps mythical, idea of the agora. Exchange simply happens for its own sake and for the pleasure of the result.

Maybe we could say everyone’s an artist now, except hardly anybody uses that term, preferring other words, usually adapted from local slang still surviving in our international patois. Why did it all happen? If you ask me it’s pretty straightforward. It happened because there wasn’t anything else to do. We’d exhausted every other option and this was the one place left worth trying. Funny, I guess, but I don’t know why we never thought of it before.

Yesterday the Van Abbemuseum was proud to host the first of the three day symposium organized by The Autonomy Project. With lectures of Peter Osborne, Ruth Sonderegger, Gerald Raunig, Maria Gough and Tania Bruguera. In the afternoon we also gathered in the studio for a large debate on the current state of the arts in the Netherlands. For this associate professor Kees Vuyk joined us and artist Jack Segbars, who is a member of ‘Platform Beeldende Kunst’ (Platform for the Visual Arts), which played a central role in the protests of last summer. Parallel a master class took place with Tania Bruguera.

The content was too rich to summarize poignantly. From Adornean dialectics, via a collective thinking, to a historical overview of the relation between art and society in the Dutch context, to a poetic account of global protest today, to early avant-garde Sovjet art collectives, to useful art; it all came by and formed a rainbow of voices that together addressed that one precarious and complicate term – autonomy.

Today Rancière himself will speak, together with Thomas Hirschhorn, Isabell Lorey and Adrian Martin. Workshops in the afteronoon. The lectures will be web-cast, if the Internet doesn’t fail us.

So please join us, any way you can.

The Autonomy Project Symposium addresses the position of art in society today. The notion of autonomy, once designed to specify art’s place within society, has become a means of occluding its public relevance. This has become very clear when recently Dutch neoliberals and populists proposed large cuts on culture, arguing that art is primarily a private affair and has no real public function. The inability of the Dutch art world to mount an effective counter campaign has thereby made explicit the fact that the confusion   concerning the public nature of an autonomous art comes not only from without but also from within.

The symposium wishes to address the current situation through the work of the French philosopher Jacques Rancière. He has been committed to describing the function of art’s autonomy within public life today. Through a mixture of lectures and workshops the symposium explores Rancière’s valuable contribution both from theoretical and practical perspectives.

Dates: 7-9 October, 2011

Location: Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven

Participating in the symposium costs €45 for 3 days or €15 per day (including lunch). Students are charged €25 for the whole weekend or €10 per day.

The symposium is in English

Register

Preliminary programme:

07 October 2011
11:00 Introduction
11:15 Peter Osborne
11:45 Ruth Sonderegger
12:30 discussion
13:00 lunch
14:00 Workshops (2 running parallel)
14:15 Curating Autonomy
14:30 The Autonomy of Criticism
15:45 coffee (30 min)
16:30 Gerald Raunig
17:00 Maria Gough
18:00 oxygen break
18:30 Hito Steyerl – Sven Lutticken
19:45 drinks

08 October 2011
11:00 Introduction
11:15 Thomas Hirschhorn
12:00 Isabel Lorey
12:30 discussion
13:00 lunch
14:00 discussion on the Dutch situation
15:45 coffee (30 min)
16:30 Jacques Rancière
18:00 oxygen break
18:30 Pedro Costa – Adrian Martin
19:45 drinks

09 October 2011
11:00 Introduction
11:15 To be confirmed
12:00 Andrea Fraser
12:30 discussion
13:00 lunch (1 hour)
14:00 Workshop (2 running parallel)
14:15 Translation into a political strategy (positioning autonomy in the public sphere)
14:30 Teaching Autonomy
15:45 coffee (30 min)
16:30 Rosella  Biscotti
17:00 Franco Berardi
17:30 To be confirmed
18:00 drinks

A Picasso in search of a cause

The exhibition of Picasso’s 1943 painting in Ramallah is an auspicious occasion. It confirms the development of an already long-standing relationship between the Van Abbemuseum and the IAAP as well as between different colleagues in both institutions. More than that however, it represents a symbolic connection between European modernity and contemporary Palestinian culture; a connection that can serve, if understood well, as a way to imagine cultural globalism as mutuality rather than conformism to a single worldview. The story of modernity as told from Europe is aligned with colonialism and war, as much as it is represented by the liberating images of the artistic avant-garde. Palestine, like other non-European nations, was a bystander in the high modern world represented by Picasso and his comrades. Ramallah, Jerusalem, Hebron and many other cities in the region were, at that time, places to which things were done and rather than agents of their own destiny. First Ottomans then British, French, North Americans and European Israelis all took turns in determining the region’s future, as many of them still try to do today. But change is afoot, modernity is over and the reactive Palestine of the past is becoming step by step a proactive community, taking on the burdens of national and cultural responsibility along the way. Fulfilling the request of the IAAP both momentarily normalises the situation in Ramallah and still depicts the nature of its state of exception. As V.I Lenin pointed out in the 2^nd international Congress in 1920, ‘the imperialist war has drawn the dependent peoples into world history’. Now, a century later, world history is being shaped as much by the peoples of the then colonial countries as by the imperialist wars that still continue around and about them. How that future will unfold is, of course, as unclear as it was in 1920, but in its modest way, Picasso in Palestine is part of a welcome trajectory in the course of which people in Palestine and elsewhere in the changing Middle East become the subjects of world history and learn to write their own scripts for the multi-polar planet we need to share.

Making an ambitious claim about world history for an art project is naturally not without its dangers. This is, after all, only strictly concerned with the shipment of a small amount of wood, canvas and paint from one country to another. Yet the elaborate processes that have had to be engaged in order to achieve it – processes that took nearly two years to complete – demonstrate that something other than the simple presentation of a painting are at stake. This whole project began as a dual investigation. On the one hand, it was a seemingly simple loan request from one organization (an art academy) to another (a museum). The direct nature of the request required the museum to deal with it in the way any other application for borrowing a work from our collection would be assessed. Asking questions about the condition of the space it was to be shown, the security of transport, the regulations around insurance and all the other issues that emerged as we did so, unlocked the strange, ambiguous legal and cultural status of this eastern part of the traditional Palestinian territory that still remains under external occupation. Even as I write this text in fact, the final approvals have yet to be received.

On the other hand, the project is equally an artistic work by the Palestinian artist and teacher, Khaled Hourani. It was his insight into the complex meanings that the movement of a Picasso to Palestine would create that, supported by his colleagues and the students in the academy, allowed the project to negotiate all the hurdles put in its way. To be clear about the peculiar circumstances of this loan, it is worth recalling that lending a work to the Israel Museum some 25 kilometres away from the academy would have elicited very different responses from insurers, transporters, the press and the politicians. The simple act of contemplating going to Ramallah immediately created political and juridical questions on all sides, alongside an international media attention that was very welcome but out of all proportion to the capacities of a provincial institutions to handle. Dealing with these events one by one took patience, skill and hard work on behalf of everyone involved but it ultimately rested on the continued artistic drive that Khaled’s initial insight injected into the request from its inception. Without his commitment, we could never have completed the tasks at hand.

In this way, the project clearly reveals far more about the given situation than might be expected from its simple premise. In these circumstances, to claim that, by exhibiting a painting by arguably the most famous artist of the 20^th century in a country that is arguably the most monitored spot on the face of the earth today, we do indeed place art in relation to history-in-the-making does not seem quite so absurd. Yet this project does not only comment on or even create a real effect on the situation in Palestine. It also has an influence on the future of the Picasso painting and on the museum collection of which it is part. The Van Abbemuseum has invested time and energy in building relationships across the Middle East for the last 3-4 years, though much of this has been invisible to the visiting public. Behind the scenes however, we have slowly built a genuine exchange between very different cultural conditions, establishing mutual understandings where none existed before. Though the course of the meetings, we began to speak of the idea of a dispersed museum, one that was present in the relations forged across cultural regions rather than in the art objects held in the collection. That this dispersed museum should manifest itself elsewhere than Eindhoven was a logical consequence of that thinking and that it should appear not as the museum itself but in more co-operation with (one could even in the guise of) the International Art Academy Palestine was also an obvious if less publicly explicable development.

In parallel to this process of encountering new influences in the Middle East meetings, the workers at the museum have been investigating a separate but connected question for ourselves; that is, what are the potential capacities of the European art museum of the 21st century? While western modernist universalism and European cultural hegemony are discredited concepts, the image of what may come to replace them is still barely discernable. One result is that in Europe we are forced to think about what we want to preserve or pass on to an emerging cosmopolitanism from this modern culture for which we were largely responsible. We can assume that the cultural values in formation will no longer be only ‘western’ in origin, but we do not know which precise elements of former western ethical and cultural inventions will be valid for the future. To make an attempt to discover what might be appropriate, we felt at the museum that we needed to redeploy the collection in different public ways. We suspected that through the insights and actions of artists from very different cultural backgrounds we might understand what would otherwise remain unimaginable to us. Particularly, we wanted to think about what we had in our archives and how this might be used in ways to which we were simply blind.

Picasso in Palestine emerged out of the confluence of these two long-term trajectories. For the Van Abbemuseum, the most pertinent questions are framed by the project.  How a European art museum could become meaningful to a wider context than its own homeground? How can the works of Picasso, which have long since lost their radical edge and become familiar old classics, be reimagined or recontextualised in ways that would restore something of the old feelings of physical alienation and the sense of a strange yet close emotional distancing that they produced in their own time? We do not yet know what kind of 1943 Picasso we will get back once it has been shown in Ramallah. Materially it will be same, but will we address it in the ame way as before knowing where it has been and what it has come to represent? By flollowing this journey, we feel we are making a constructive response to the question of the museum of the 21st century. It feels like we are constructing new histories at the same time as preserving old ones. In the process, we are satisfying a request from a group of colleagues that we would never have dreamed of doing ourselves. The element of hospitality here, of, in Derrida’s words, “saying yes to who or what turns up” is crucial for understanding what we can learn from Picasso in Palestine, just as it will inform what we do in Eindhoven from this moment on.

I would like to thank all the museum staff who have contributed in many ways to this project and in particular Louis Balthussen, Christiane Berndes, Remco de Blaaij, Ilse Cornelis, Ulrike Erbslöh and Bettine Verkuijlen, Without them none of this would have happened. I would also like to sincerely thank our funders especially Doen Foundation in Amsterdam and Outset in London for their exceptional support and sympathy for the project at all stages as well as the Mondriaan Foundation for their support of A Prior and the film. Finally, a big thank you to Khaled Hourani, Fatima Abdul Karim, the IAAP students and all the funding gathered directly in Palestine from the Palestinian Authority and the local foundations.

But what is it that arrives and is this not something that oneself initiates in the first place? I’m here in the academy in Ramallah waiting for our painting to arrive and rethinking why we are doing this in the first place and how to tie what I see happening around me to this event. Already this in itself signals for me the connection of the endeavor to a structure that is much more sensitive to its efforts beyond taking in account only itself through acknowledgement of its own excellence, contribution to art history and its value in the magical market. It seems therefore that more issues currently at stake in different geographies can relate to this trip of Picasso’s Buste de Femme. Who could have think that an old painting could navigate us through these issues? A ‘top talent’ of sixty years ago who proved itself to the market! Thus, it makes me think about the current aggressive cuts in the Netherlands on (cultural) life, rather than only budgets, the cut of people not being able to mobilise themselves through territories here, the cuts and the Arab Spring that let new trees grow in the streets of Ramallah? A modern sign?

So what is it that these forms of modernity tell us really? One of the things we are saying to ourselves is that we see modern society fail continuously and rapidly in Europe. Its arrogance, mainly understood in postcolonial terms, of putting forward excellence and prevailing over others that are definitely not modern, is perhaps one critique of these networks and the traces that they leave. But bringing a modern icon signals much more the decline of ‘embracing’  or social belief that the only strive to accept is the one to be modern. The ability of organising this is showing us an equal exchange between a society in decline and one that is rising at the same time. A balanced injection here in the case of bringing it, hopefully for once will not leave any damaging marks or scars, but will bring understanding of modernity itself and the fragile situation it is in. But, I don’t now in how many ways and if we can speak on modernity in decline, some say we never were modern in the first place. Let’s wait for the toptalent to arrive and see and hear how it will speak further,….

Introduction

This interview took place on the 19^th April 2011, the day after the 75^th anniversary of the opening of the Vanabbemuseum in Eindhoven between:-

Charles Esche Director of the Vanabbemuseum, Eindhoven

Zdenka Badovinac – Director of the Moderna Galeria, Ljublijana

Lucy Byatt – Head of National Programmes, Contemporary Art Society.

The Vanabbemuseum – The Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven is one of the first public museums for contemporary art to be established in Europe. It opened in 1936 with the private collection of Henri Van Abbe as its basis. Throughout the last 75 years, it has continued to exhibit and collect contemporary art. Its collection is now one of the three most significant modern and contemporary public art collections in the Netherlands. Today, the museum has an experimental approach towards art’s role in society, focusing on the relations between art and social or political questions that have a particular currency in the Netherlands and north-western Europe. A radical approach, hospitality towards visitors and creating exchanges of knowledge between different institutions, disciplines and individuals are core values. In investigating the value and potential of the collection, museum uses itself as a model to test out how art from the past can remain active and inspiring, often working together with international artists and curators to develop displays and reassessments. We challenge ourselves and our visitors to think about art as a way to reflect on the state of the world. We respect the wishes of our artists and aim to present their artworks with integrity. We also address a range of subjects through art, including the artistic heritage of modernity, the cultural consequences of globalisation and the museum as a public site for the contestation of values the museum as a public site for the contestation of values. The Van Abbemuseum seeks to be as place for creative cross-fertilisation and a source of surprise, inspiration and imagination for its visitors and participants.

Charles Esche biog – Charles Esche (*1962) is a curator and writer. He is Director of van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven and co-director of Afterall Journal and Books based at Central St.Martins College of Art and Design, London. He is a visiting lecturer at a number of European art academies. In the last years, he has curated the following biennials 5^th U3 triennial in Ljubljana, Slovenia, 2010; 3^rd Riwaq Biennale, Ramallah, Palestine, 2009 together with Reem Fadda,  2^nd Riwaq Biennale 2007 with Khalil Rabah; the 9^th Istanbul Biennial 2005 with Vasif Kortun, Esra Sarigedik Öktem and November Paynter and the Gwangju Biennale 2002 in Korea with Hou Hanru and Song Wang Kyung. Before that he was co-curator of ‘Tate Triennial: Intelligence’ at the Tate Britain, London and ‘Amateur – Variable Research Initiatives’ at Konstmuseum and Konsthall, Göteborg, both in 2000. From 2000-2004 he was Director of the Rooseum Center for Contemporary Art, Malmö where he made solo exhibitions with Surasi Kusolwong, Nedko Solakov and Superflex as well as group shows including “Baltic Babel” and “Intentional Communities” From 1998-2002 he organised the international art academic research project called ‘protoacademy’ at Edinburgh College of Art. From 1993-1997 he was Visual Arts Director at Tramway, Glasgow. A book of his selected writings, Modest Proposals, was published by Baglam Press, Istanbul in 2005 in Turkish and English and he writes regularly for readers, catalogues and art magazines.

The Museum, Ljubljana – history and background to collections

There were a number of turning points that led to Moderna galerija changing into an institution concerned with the production of new narratives and local knowledge in the 1990s. The most important among them was the collapse of the communist regime in Yugoslavia and the subsequent war in the Balkans. Prior to that, Moderna galerija had been a rather rigid national museum of modern art. In the second half of the 1990s, it started working on redefining the art history of the region. The result was the first collection of postwar avant-garde Eastern European art, the Arteast 2000+ Collection, initiated in 2000. Another thing that has crucially influenced the concept of the museum of contemporary art which Moderna galerija has developed over the last 20 years was focusing on historicizing and on alternative ways of collaboration. Our museum of contemporary art is opening this fall, in the building of a former army barracks which has been allotted to Moderna galerija for this purpose. Starting this year, Moderna galerija will thus be operating on two locations: the activities subsumed under the designation ‘museum of modern art’ will continue in the old building, while the programme of the museum of contemporary art will be housed in the former army barracks.

Zdenka Badovinac Director of Moderna galerija / the Museum of Modern Art, Ljubljana since 1993. She has curated numerous exhibitions presenting both Slovenian and international artists.

She initiated the first collection of Eastern European art, Moderna galerija’s  Arteast 2000+ Collection. She has been systematically dealing with the processes of redefining history and with the questions of different avant-garde traditions of contemporary art, first with the exhibition Body and the East – from the 1960s to the Present, staged in 1998 at Moderna galerija, Ljubljana, and travelling to Exit Art, New York in 2001. She continued in 2000 with the first public display of the Arteast 2000+ Collection: 2000+ Arteast Collection: The Art of Eastern Europe in Dialogue with the West at Moderna galerija, (2000); and then with a series of Arteast Exhibitions, mostly at Moderna galerija: Form-Specific (2003); 7 Sins: Ljubljana-Moscow (2004; co-curated with Victor Misiano and Igor Zabel); Interrupted Histories (2006); Arteast Collection 2000+23 (2006); The Schengen Women, Galerija Škuc, Ljubljana (2008), part of the Hosting Moderna galerija! project, Old Masters, P.A.R.A.S.I.T.E. Institute, the P74 Center and Gallery, Ljubljana (2008), part of the Hosting Moderna galerija! project; Museum of Parallel Narratives in the framework of L’Internationale, MACBA, Barcelona (2011).

Her other major projects include unlimited.nl-3, DeAppel, Amsterdam (2000), (un)gemalt, Sammlung Essl, Kunst der Gegenwart, Klosterneuburg/Vienna (2002), ev+a 2004, Imagine Limerick, Open&Invited, different exhibition venues, Limerick (2004); Democracies/the Tirana Biennale, Tirana (2005).

Slovenian Commissioner at the Venice Biennale (1993–1997, 2005)

Austrian Commissioner at the Sao Paulo Biennial (2002)

Badovinac is the President of CIMAM (2010–2013).

Interview

LB: I’d like to start by asking you both, who is your museum for? Who are you addressing as you make your decisions about how to develop the programme? You’ve said that there’s a lot of debate about the type of programme you’re producing, which of course is very welcome, but you must have a very clear idea of how you want to shift the programme.

CE: Well there is an institutional and a personal answer to this question, though they are not unconnected. Institutionally, you could imagine the job is to keep the museum and collection intact and pass it on in good order. The museum is dependent on the people who pay for it, which in our case are the local politicians who contribute about 65% of the budget, so the primary financial question here would be how to keep them happy and giving us subsidy while providing a local public with a clear confirmation of their sense of taste. The problem we face is that today most local politicians are focused on the four years of their mandate and on keeping alienated voters from deserting them. Certainly if survival is the only motivation we had, then we could become a simple provider of services that we think would satisfy our political masters. This is afterall how democracy works today, basically short-termist and populist, and I see this lack of vision having an effect on other museum programmes in the Netherlands with their populist programming. But such an approach would probably have killed off the Van Abbemuseum years ago.

The 75-year history of this museum is bound to a much more international and durational ambition than the local can really bear, especially now. There was in all that time a fairly consistent attempt to educate and be present in a particular community while being connected to an international art world. This world is about a critical engagement with art’s relation to society and extending the possibilities of art to continue in some measure an avant-garde idea of thinking about and imagining the future. This wider ambition is mostly internally and personally driven, by me and my colleagues, and finds support in the national art community, the state arts councils and a few local individuals who see its value – the people who are usually accused of being elitist and leftist hobbyists by the populists here in the Netherlands. These represent a minority at all levels and are not able to carry a democratic mandate.

So, you can hopefully begin to see the tension right there and this is what we as directors have to try to resolve every day. If you ask me personally whom I do it for, I work in order to try and increase the imaginative potential of the world  – in quite an abstract way. I mean I would like to help people in general to increase their imaginative capacity and to think differently in order to develop progressive ideas and tackle the issues that are raised by economic and political decisions. I want to support a living, critical culture around me and I see art and the museum as means to this end. That’s the reason I started being interested in art – I was never that interested in being a museum director – but I saw art as a means to construct possibility in a world that seemed to lack it. This is still the reason I am willing to go through all the political negotiations and accept criticism from a conservative media and local environment. I hold onto the idea that we do our job for those people who want to imagine the world differently and to have a discussion with them, even if they are a minority in a city like Eindhoven.

LB:  You have worked with the history of the Vanabbemuseum haven’t you, as part of Play Van Abbe you represented the 1983 Rudi Fuchs show (Summer Display 1983). I thought that this show,  alongside other exhibitions in the Museum that were also part of Play Van Abbe reflected a distinctive shift in the way in which we have come to experience art – it certainly provoked lots of discussion amongst the curators that came with me to see the show.

CE: I think that’s part of the advantage of being in Eindhoven, this is a very provincial place in the south of the Netherlands, the Museum therefore has this possibility to have a personality and hasn’t had all the idiosyncrasies or awkwardness drained out of it by political correctness or by short-term thinking about how to pull in the punters in the quickest way possible. It can take chances and experiment, which is what Play Van Abbe was all about, because it did so in the past. We wanted to refer very precisely to our own history to remember it and also rewrite it for the present. It’s a little like a royal dynasty that derives its power from its ancestors (laughs). I certainly do look back quite consciously, referring to Rudi Fuchs, Jean Leering or other previous directors to make a point about why we do what we do today. That makes the Van Abbemuseum exceptional for a smallish museum. The fact that those other people were here and struggling to bring international culture to the city is a reason to continue, to be steadfast but their example also inspires us to experiment, take risks, be open to change and seek to generate discussions with new kinds of publics. The aim is to strengthen the tradition by renewing and reinventing it. The really important thing about the Van Abbemuseum is that it has always been a contemporary art museum from its foundation, even in 1936 it was talking about the 20s and 30s, so that forces us to be contemporary still today, not to fall back on classical icons. At the moment, the starting point for us is to try and create an awareness that the world changed in 1989 and then to try and explain how those changes have played by listening to the voice and ideas of the ultimate minority of one the artist who produced them. Maybe the main difference in terms of experiencing art is that we do much of this very explicitly, announcing the intentions of the institution in order to put our own status and right to exist up for public debate. This means quoting exhibitions or repeating gestures across time in order to understand where we come from as a way to thinking where we might go.

LB: Zdenka, in a way this question of who your museum is for was prompted by something we were talking about earlier, you were talking about the very import constituency, – that you develop your programme with and for, the community that surrounds you and the Moderna galerija in Ljubljana.

ZB: I would rather talk about dialogue than about addressing somebody, for me it’s somehow easier to answer your question if I follow the idea of dialogue. First, it’s a dialogue with oneself.  We are a public institution, but at the same time my work is very personal. This internal dialogue, the questions and dilemmas I face every day, this is very important for me because it gives me the energy to continue. You have to have your personal drama, otherwise you just repeat other professionals’ patterns; also the public feels and appreciates this. I would be putting on an act if I said I was only doing what I do for the public or the nation or the world. Of course this wider dialogue is absolutely more important than my own personal one, but nevertheless, everything starts with ‘I’. Then there is the local community. In Ljubljana we have the advantage of having started working in a situation on the border between different worlds, different societies, different generations. I became a director just after Yugoslavia and communism collapsed. When I started out as a young curator and came to work for the Moderna galerija at the end of the 1980s together with Igor Zabel and Lilijana Stepančič, we were three young curators, full of energy, who wanted to change everything, first the museum, then Ljubljana, and then the world. We started to think more internationally than the generations before us, which made the dialogue between the local and the international crucial for us, and we found that this was in line with the aspirations and interests of the most vital parts of the local community, especially the artists. In the 1980s there were many artists who were very, let’s say, self-organised in terms of taking care of the economic aspects, of trying to establish themselves internationally, promoting themselves, and similar things that institutions are normally involved in, and here we found common ground. At that time we learned more about the priorities of institutional work from people who were involved in different activities in the so-called alternative culture than from our colleagues at other institutions. That’s how we started a horizontal dialogue that related to the way we thought our museum should develop. What we were involved in was actually a kind of cultural politics, because in the early 1990s, when Slovenia became an independent country, it had no established, effective formal cultural policy. The old system had fallen apart and a new one hadn’t yet been created. There was a short period of political inertia, two or three years,  an important time for the way in which we developed our programme and our cultural community; it could have been very different  with a different sort of  director of Moderna galerija, as it was somehow possible to do whatever one wanted. That was a time of experimentation for different agents in Ljubljana, not just the politicians, not just the artists, but the broader community of intellectuals. Some very interesting people began to join our circle of dialogue, and this very quickly produced our peer public. When you do something new in a museum that has a broader appeal, it creates a field of reference, and then diverse energies and agents who were not much involved in your work before, or even in the same field, start to share your urgencies. Thus in the mid-1990s for example, we together tried to define the notion of contemporaneity. We recognized that contemporaneity for us meant a shift of paradigm; from the isolated artistic field to the political and the social ones. Suddenly we were in dialogue with different publics and we had stopped addressing just one, the elitist red bourgeoisie, as was the case before. There was a moment in the mid-1990s when we started thinking about three models of the museum; the modern, the post-modern, and the contemporary. So all these energies and all these issues culminated in the concept of contemporaneity, which is of course very much related to the dialogue between the museum and the locality. The museum thus became an expanded infrastructure providing better conditions for the local contemporary art and its international integrations. When you work in a museum in a small town, where you know almost everybody and you meet them in the streets, you feel somehow more connected and responsible, in a different way than in a big city or big institution. For the same reason, a distance to the locality and a meaningful dialogue with the international world are important.

LB: It seems to me that you were working within a very fast changing political and social context Zdenka, in this newly emerging country, therefore the idea of the institution was evolving, from an old structure into a new structure very quickly., In The Netherlands there’s been ongoing investment in culture for a long time through liberal ideals, it seems to me that this is the context for the Van Abbe which has enabled some of your programmes to be realised. For example Becoming Dutch presented challenges for your audiences because it questioned some of the accepted ideas around national identity and perhaps challenged the expectation of who the museum serves. Last night in your speech for the 75^th anniversary of the museum you talked about how important it is for institutions such as the Van Abbemuseum to be challenging, to be contemporary.

CE: Maybe to address this idea of stability versus instability first. You trace the history very well, but I think the interesting current aspect is that today we find ourselves in relatively similar situations in both Ljubljana and Eindhoven. Now, it is true that Ljubljana and Eindhoven have arrived here from very different routes but we’ve met up at last, at a metaphorical roundabout, where we are now going round and round and not yet sure which turning we’ll take or whether it will be the same one. I find this aspect of contemporaneity fascinating. I felt it equally when I’m in Indonesia, Barcelona or wherever – the contemporary is everywhere in a way in wasn’t 25 years ago. At the same time, we are much less sure what the economic and political future might reveal and whether it makes sense to keep such institutions as these museums intact for or not. That produces a strong sense of ‘presentism’ or how to understand the now as well as a tendency to look back and try to figure out how we got here.

For instance, the 40 years of stability that the Dutch experienced from around 1949 to 1989 is not the same today, as you see in the general sense of unease and fearfulness that is shared across the world. One of the ironic advantages in former Yugoslavia might be that it is very clear that there was a new situation after 1989 whereas here it took 15-20 years to become consciously understood. The shift from stability to instability has been very slow and almost hidden because we don’t have a shared timeline of the recent past. We know the dark side of this so-called superior Western culture. We know it produced mass, mechanic murder yet the memories of that are fading out of real lived experience. Since then, we seem not to have a clear sense of how time has past, or how we could choose to write our history. We have somehow landed in a suspended present, what Fukayama so thrillingly, but naively, called the end of history. But I think this is only because we have not yet been really engaged in writing the history of the last 60-70 years – a job that museums could take on themselves very easily. You know it would be impossible for anybody in Slovenia to say well nothing happened between 1988 and 1995 but if you talk to some students in The Netherlands about ‘89, they look at you in a confused way. Yet we are all living through the consequences of the end of ideology and the sole focus on individual satisfaction and material comfort that followed. We could learn a lot from each other if we open ourselves to international culture and how artists address the world we all live in.

Producing Becoming Dutch was definitely a way to take the temperature of this society, to look at its past and present and imagine its future through commissions and existing works by artists. In that sense it addressed instability as a constantly materializing condition that manifests itself in all sorts of different ways: through questions about the value of immigration; the loss of identity, security, a sense of interdependence; the entropy of the European ideal; the loss of the impulse to believe in a broad liberal education; the introduction of fundamentalist consumerism as the means to satisfy anxiety. These were all somehow present in the project in more or less overt ways.

LB: So this awareness of what took place in 1989 and its effect on the way in which artists are thinking and making work must have an impact on the development of the collection and the way in which you acquire works from artists that emerge from a whole range of different art histories.

ZB: There have been many changes already in various institutions in terms of the way they think when developing their collections. We can identify these changes and the institutions that are close to our understanding of redefining history with multiple art historical narratives rather than by continuing to adhere to a single one. I feel that most institutions in Western Europe or the United States have a different view on this, they recognize this ‘change’, but do so in terms of an inclusion-exclusion paradigm. So if you go to the Tate or MoMA for example, you can see  the social and political changes that had happened in Europe reflected in their collections, which now include works by many previously disregarded or unknown Eastern artists and artists from emerging spaces with ‘minor’ histories. But the way these works are shown is based on formal similarities without paying much attention to the specific contexts. Thus the existing system is not actually changing, it is in fact strengthening, because the new names, the new artists just somehow reinforce its apparent ‘openness’. We don’t see many efforts to learn from what we could describe as ‘the Other’, just attempts to incorporate the Other into something that already exists. Contrary to that, in Ljubljana we are trying to define our locality as one of many that tries to be equal in the global dialogue. There are the theoretical activities, there is the museum activity, and there is the collection. In 2000 we built the first collection of Eastern European art to give a broader context to Slovenian art, to define with which part of the international space we share most of the urgencies. This is what I call a meaningful dialogue; a museum collection cannot cover the whole world but it can create a resonance between the interests of its own locality and other spaces. This is just the opposite to the process of inclusion on the agenda of big institutions.

LB: This is an example of the workings of high capitalism, to see something and seize it, it simply becomes a process of absorption.

ZB: In my view, the big institutions are doing their work within the frame of their ideologies.  It would actually be much more difficult for the big hegemonic institutions to take a more self-reflexive approach. That’s possible in our museum, which is small, and in other rather small institutions that are still developing.

CE : I think that is really a crucial argument. We have upstairs in the Museum a work by the Museum of American Art, Berlin. It’s a key to unpick the whole of the museum in a way. It declares the Museum of Modern Art in New York to be a museum of antiquities. I think that’s the kind of process that we need to go through here and everywhere. We need to stop imagining that MoMA, New York can simply continue its narrative untouched but with the addition of a few exotic things from the East, (everything from Berlin to China), and South (South America, Africa, Asia). This is the inclusion model to which Zdenka refers but it doesn’t work any more.  To change it would mean to have to say that modernity and the modern museum came to an end, tragically or wonderfully depending on our point of view. It’s not a question of whether it’s a shame or a success that it came to an end, simply accepting that it did. Let us imagine that modernity were finally to be declared our antiquity. At that moment a modern collection like ours and of course the one in Ljubljana is completely redefined. It becomes largely a historical collection made at a time that is not just past but is substantively different – society thought differently, conclusions were based on premises we no longer can understand. To access this modern art, we have to build up narratives that explain that antique context, and we should try in that process to build a genuine narrative of equality in which New York is not the centre but a place amongst others, and where colonialism is something to be learnt and understood as our roots but not our reality. This is wehera project like Sarat Maharaj’s Farewell to Post-colonialism is so important as well. We would then have to acknowledge that we are in a strange transitional time where it’s not clear where and how the present is going to be told and what its abiding values might be. There are good and bad versions of the present and we have the chance to choose because there is no overarching narrative, neither cultural nor political – only a dull form of economic pragmatism.

I think the danger is that if we don’t acknowledge that moment of change then as a society we’re really in trouble, the lack of acknowledgment has led to this atmosphere where it is felt that everything that we are accustomed too, everything stable, is under incredible pressure, that everything is collapsing, and that the action we must take is to protect all that is familiar. This then leads to the kind of emergency calls to secure the state and therefore a reactionary politics that has huge effects on the European cultural institutions. Most right wing politicians want to preserve modernity. Telling the narratives of modern art from Demoiselles d’Avignon onwards while pointing out its blind spots and ideologies, becomes very important in those circumstances because it allows to respect that past more fully but also to leave it behind. The Museum of American Art, Berlin is the only project I know that does this so explicitly and brilliantly.

ZB: Today we shouldn’t be interested just in the history of art. We should also ask what had actually created the former narrative, the hegemonic narrative. What were the reasons why the alternative narratives couldn’t find a footing? When you ask this sort of questions, you immediately enter another field of reference, political, economic and social. The dominance of certain social and political systems, this is what has created the model of the contemporary art museum and has had an impact on how this relatively new model differs from the modern or postmodern museum. Unless we start thinking about a new model of museum, more open in its thinking in relation to how it creates space for the many narratives that have led us to where we are today, I can’t see any possible relevant answer to our dilemmas. We can of course try to answer the question why the big museums have adopted the inclusion-exclusion paradigm instead of being aware of these new theories. We could spend a lot of time thinking this through, looking for an answer, but we know that they cannot shift their thinking, they are too caught up in their existing project, which is to retain their centrality and to have a say over what can and can’t be included in the telling of all future art histories.

CE: Again I go back to this idea that they would have to become museums of antiquities, that’s important, something that they’re reluctant to do I think.

LB: We talked a little about instrumentalisation,  these large and powerful museums have  spent a lot of time persuading politicians, persuading their supporters that they are leading in terms of the narratives that they’re weaving .Perhaps their only option is to grow, to start being self-reflexive now is a great risk, this is the opportunity for the smaller museums perhaps? To generate new thinking and new models, these large dominant museums seem to find themselves now, in a double bind.

CE: I think you’re right they’re in a double bind. Yesterday when he gave his speech at our anniversary party, Nick Serota said that there isn’t really an equivalent of the Van Abbemuseum in England – why is this? It must be connected I think to the fact that many smaller institutions are not really allowed to be maverick personalities in own their towns and cities. They’re managed as ciy amenities subject to the general priorities of education, social inclusion and tourism. That traps them in terms of the development of new narratives for the future of art history or a relation to political and social change. I can imagine it is hard to argue yourself out of that situation, especially where politicians have taken over the agendas directly and the local museums are almost completely dependent on democratic sources of funding. Yet maybe the only option is to try and argue with city representatives for the idiosyncratic and perverse nature of museums and that democracy is fundamentally about the protection of minority interests and not the dictatorship of the majority.

LB:  There is great financial and structural change taking place in relation to these smaller museums in the UK, I should say that in most cases change is inevitable, it is the path that this change might take, that in some cases might throw up the opportunity for these institutions to be more independent, to have the space to be more maverick, to lead rather than to follow. I see this as a possibility on those optimistic days that occur every now and then. But of course you are right Charles,  it is a great problem in our cultural lives that many of the museums in the UK have not been given the possibility to teach through presenting, through catalysing new ideas.

CE: Well, all these institutions have is enormous amounts of money locked up in their collections. Maybe that can offer some relative autonomy?

LB: Ahh the taboo discussion! This topic only seems to occur at moments of hysteria, where the most important works that could fetch the highest prices are threatened by councilors lobbying to use this income to build a hospital. We rarely seem able to talk about this idea of reinvesting in the development of collections through the sale of works when not under pressure.  If we could only get the frame for this sort of conversation right this could be the key to enormous potential for the future of contemporary collections.

CE: You could actually say, ‘let’s sell part of this Victorian collection, though we’d like to retain important works to be able to tell the our history’.  If we can raise reasonable amounts of money and try and do something for the contemporary collection – maybe that’s an argument you might win? The question is, can you liberate the investment and start a new narrative without throwing out the baby with the bathwater, so to speak. Local museum were started at a certain point in the Victorian era often in order to tell a particular story that seemed relevant and important to their particular city and its richer inhabitants.  Now, the opportunity maybe lies with those collections together with an organisation like the Contemporary Art Society, to say we can use the value that we built up over those years of modernity and capitalize some of it in order to tell a new story for today. In the current situation I can’t see any argument against that beyond the hyper-conservative, and that’s often the problem, what’s left of the left is far more conservative than is healthy.

ZB: I’m inclined to see this as being more complex. There are collections that are forced to sell works that are relevant. There are collections that are in danger because they are put under various kinds of pressure. I think a very important question is how to discuss these issues.  At CIMAM we are trying to establish a code of ethics, some general principles of deaccession, to deal exactly with such questions. It has become urgent for us to find, together, a professional way of regulating such occurrences.

CE: If you sell works the money must be put back into rebuilding the collection. If you stick to that as a basic principle and it’s not used for running costs, for developing cultural buildings or to build a motorway, then I think there is potential.

ZB: Then there is also the history of the collection to be considered. The works that are in the collection of a given museum are the history of that institution. So how do you keep that? It’s not just about the collection itself and how you display it, it’s also the history of the institution that you risk when you sell the collection.

CE: For sure, but I think that we can be more productive about what we gain if we sell the work and not only talk about this risk.

LB: I’m interested to know, when we look back on this time and the collection here at the Vanabbemuseum, Charles, what are the works that you are acquiring for the collection that will see this new period reflected? What do you think the works that you have acquiring have done for the collection in terms of this new narrative?

CE: The purchase of Top Secret (1989-1990) by Nedko Solakov was a crucial moment. The work relates closely to the period of change just after the Bulgarian Communist party collapsed and how to come to terms with the past. It is a work of catharsis and moving on, and quite beautiful in its obsessive bureaucracy of hiding and preserving. Since then, we have expanded the geographic reach of the collection with an emphasis on post-socialist Europe, Turkey and the Middle East in particular. We have also collected many more video and installation works that tell a narrative. This has become much more necessary than before because the contexts in which works are made is no longer transparent in the way it had been during the period of modernity. An artist like Jan Vercruysse, for instance, perhaps the most interesting of the late modernists in the collection, makes artworks that assume a modernist public that understands where he comes from. It may still make sense today but that is because of the memory of modernity I think. In the future we will have to explain his Belgianness, his relationship to Magritte or Broodthaers, the strange quixotic art community that produced him etc. His work no longer functions in the old autonomous sense because the defences of European universalism or centre and periphery divisions that maintained that autonomy have now gone. For instance, in Top Secret there’s video beside it where Solakov tells a quixotic narrative about the work. A artist like Vercruysse or Art & Language for instance, who also produced lists and drawers full of papers, would never have done this because they didn’t need to – their public knew the references sufficiently to conjure them up in the presence of the work. So, we are telling narratives that are both geographically expanded and require new forms of presentation and spectatorship.

ZB: With your new display at the Vanabbemuseum you are answering the question of narrative in an interesting way. You are posing the question of who is creating the narrative. Is it the museum, the curator or the public? You have different choices. For me, as I understand it, there is also the narrative of the visitor. This is one way of presenting the multiplicity of the narrative. It’s the narrative of the professionals and of the visitors, of the professional public. There are different heterogeneous approaches to the presentation of the collection, which I think somehow have to be visible. And then there is the perennial question of how to present the context. For example: How do you present Eastern artists in a Western museum? Is it enough to write a text on a given context and put it on the wall? Of course this helps, but I think if you structure the museum so that you provide space for and make visible all these different narratives, you don’t need to explain over and over again that a work belongs to a specific context; the message that different readings are possible is automatically there. We can do a lot through exhibition dramaturgy based on heterogeneity without explaining everything with words.

CE: Yes, and in many cases the works themselves contain all the narrative that you need – like with Solakov. The only way that we can imagine the world differently is if we’re confronted with something we can’t understand. When the modern museum in this part of the world becomes simply a confirmation of existing opinions it dies. If it does not challenge the assumptions of the ‘still-modern’, it is not doing its job very well and the danger arises of becoming a mausoleum that preserves artifacts for a western society that feels the entropy of its culture. That’s what the right-wing populists feed on most strongly, the sense of slow deterioration.

LB: This populism that we see in Western Europe, is this going to flood into the east, in to former Yugoslavian countries? You’re opening a new museum this year Zdenka, do you feel there are going to be faced with these pressures?

ZB: We have a minister now who is the most supportive of all in the last 20 years. She does understand the situation, but even so her focus is on what she calls the cultural industries – we are not sure what the implications of this might be. Another one of these new liberal ideas that are entering all the former Yugoslavian and Eastern European territories now, that are associated with the bright shiny world of the West, is the big contemporary art museum. I was in Kosovo last week, a very poor country, nothing really functions there, but they want to have a big contemporary art museum of 12,000 square metres. They think that this will help them solve their problems.

CE: In Pristina?

ZB: Yes – so what does this mean? Everything has to be a spectacle – for me, this is the postmodern type of museum. I’m not denying the importance of the fact that in our region, in former Yugoslavia, we are also working on alternatives, but it is vital that we all try to define what we are doing. The organisations and individuals thinking about what alternative models could exist are very numerous, so it’s crucial that the definitions are clear. There is absolutely nothing wrong with the museums of antiquity, as Charles calls them, as long as they are described in this way, very clearly. For me it is very important to be disciplined in this sense, to keep the frame of reference as open as we can, while at the same time keeping the critical discussion progressive and at a level that will react in an articulate way when presented with the more reactionary views that persist.  This was also the question that arose when we were forming L’Internationale, our network organisation. It was one of the first questions actually: How open can we be and who can be part of the network? It was difficult to answer this question at the beginning, now I would say that those involved are those whose concerns resonate with our common ideas, for instance, how to create an institution that is able to activate the new and different narratives that are taking shape as a result of the political and social changes that we have experienced. If we talk about the future, the development of networks is really one of the possible answers to the question of how to work. So I can also envision a network in which also the big museums take part along with the small museums, but again, they have to define themselves and their position.

CE: I want to say one last thing about our Internationale network which includes both our museum, Barcelona, Antwerpen and artists’ archives in Bratislava and Warsaw. I know a little bit about the system in England because I was educated there, what surprises me is the lack of communication between local authority museums. There is such a huge danger of being isolated in small communities which aren’t particularly intellectual, Ljubljana is a capital city and it has intellectual humus where things grow. This is something that is completely absent here in Eindhoven, it’s a technological city, so the International network is a way to have a discussion with a group of people who are intellectually stimulated by the ideas that we are trying to generate.  I think it would be incredibly valuable for the local institutions in England if they were able to join forces and act together, collect works together and share expertise and knowledge across more than one site.

LB: Yes networks, something that I now know a very great deal about as I am at the helm of developing networks in the UK for museum curators, it is complicated still, ensuring that the discussion and debate that takes place can actually effect change. I think that this is a very good point to finish our conversation Charles, thank you both very much.

Propaganda by Monuments exhibition poster

After last Friday’s incredible events in Egypt – this journal-style account of my experiences trying to install an exhibition in the midst of such a radical movement may come a bit late. But I think that reflections once the dust settles must find their place amongst the debris. See the link to a South African online art journal where it is published:

Some musings from a curator accidentally caught in the revolution

Within this open dialogical format especially two points struck me. First was Galit’s suggestion that artists in the former East or Middle East are often using methods of archiving in their work. To Galit these strategies used by artists like Akram Zaatari, Lia Perjovschi, Zofia Kulik or Michal Heimann, resonate with a life in a region in which institutions are either absent or dubious. The political instability as result of the ruptured past challenge artists to not just add to an existing narrative, or work to an already given space (the museum, gallery, etc.), but to take responsibility for the structure itself and produce not just ‘a’ work, but a system that can organize the tense reality of today and its past.

The second point was a sense of discomfort of the students to associate with a political side when Galit asked them to do so. Almost nobody, myself included, presented themselves as straight forward leftish or rightwing. The stability of the local social-political climate in the Netherlands and neighbouring countries seemed to lead to a kind of reluctance to embrace explicitly an already available group identity, in this case of a political side. It seemed as if the organized nature of this geographic region produces its own kind of hesitance to associate fully with the present, collective structuring mechanism by for instancing coming out as left or right. One could perhaps suggest that in this the art students working here share a similar position to those archiving artist from the East as both are sensitive for any system that might swallowthem up, but this feels like a false analogy.

At the moment it cannot be more than a speculation, but in a somewhat crude division it seems that within the conflicted region of the East there is a sense that there is or should be a ‘right-side’, but it is only extremely unclear who is actually representing that side and what kind of political activity belongs to it. Whereas in the old West there is suffocating confusion about any sense of side leaving people only with a highly personal and specific idea of doing ‘good’ things that would matter for ones own direct environment. In this both sides are comprised out of a mixture of macro-political assessment and micro-political activity, but only in a quite different composition.

The climate in the old West seems to stimulate artists to neither subscribe to or instigate a new movement, but invites a careful mapping of ones own life and how it is permeated by vast variety of politics, economics and technologies. Macropolitical assessments are not a horizon to pursue but are lifelines between diverse communities. These assessments are not valued as horizon to maybe one day realize, but are only of use to the extent that they produce an actual change in specific lives. In other words, there is no belief in nor wish for utopian dreams of communists or other making, but an attention for the ways in which certain theoretical or practical habits structure daily life. The endless chain of institutes and structures that organize life are asked to be made visible in the specific lives of individuals, be they the artists him- or herself or another subject.

In the unstable and charged climate of the current East this kind of personalized working arena is difficult to subscribe to and feels far too passive, since the wish for radical change might seem utopian, but is still the only option that makes any sense. Here macro-political forces are identified as creating the mess the region is in, but nevertheless need to be mobilized if any change is to occur. Only the vehicle for this change cannot be found in the present formal institutes. The institutes, who in the West so kindly and silently marinate the community in the political ideologies with which they were once erected, in the East seem hopelessly unfit to instigate change. Here one has to build up analysis and discourse oneself in the accidental empty sites left open by the squeaking political structures. Using an almost guerrilla tactic of flexibility, small scale and speed, invites one to operate on a micropolitical level, where one can work delicately with marco-political ideas in one of the few environments that do not seem utterly corrupted.

Returning to the central topic of this course – autonomy – one can note that in both domains traces of this almost antique notion of art in modernity are manifest. Both the archivers from the East and the geographers of intimate lives in the West use the openness of autonomy as strategic vehicle to create a space where one can either insert an idea or observation, or mark how certain ideas or observations are inserted without it being obvious. Here there also does seem to be a certain commonality in the two working methods, since both sides use autonomy as a type of wedge to wiggle open some space that is necessary to come to terms with the world in which one is immersed.

But this situation does mark a departure from an older notion of autonomy that has to perish – on both sides – to make place for this strategic autonomy. In their use of autonomy, the (old, but established) idea disappears that autonomy is the hallmark of some universal strand of life, impossible to express, only manifested in art. The consequences of this can be found most explicitly in the type of reception that makes sense around these new works. These works or projects do not seek a public that comes to assess the aesthetic ‘rightness’ of the work or gesture. The old metaphysical discourse and practice around art that makes it a privileged site to experience some extremely convoluted and difficult describe resolution of the ultimate modern contradiction between subject and object, no longer is appropriate here. Perhaps one could state that the new art doesn’t inspire anymore a deep sensation of aesthetic accuracy and tension that was the last umbilical cord to the ‘sublime’ or a spiritualized sense of the ‘Other’. That type of art that understood autonomy to be the end of a conversation, wheras today’s artists, working under the conditions described above, use autonomy in diametrically opposed way as a starting point for something else.

How this changes the ways in which especially people in the old West engage with art is difficult to apprehend in the full, but one thing does seem clear and worthy of mentioning. In the current situation, even if it is called ‘globalized’, leaves no space for a ‘universal’ art or art history – and the idea of the universal does linger in the previous understanding of autonomy. Art projects all over the globe perhaps use similar strategies to wedge open a space to question or change ones reality, but they do not aim to generate a universal experience. If there is a sense of universality present it is not as spiritual, or utopic domain in which we find some form of relief. The universal, or better the global, in these projects expresses the interconnected reality in which we are living that makes almost everybody acquainted with similar ideas or technologies. The universality of these ideas of technologies, however, does not express some ‘higher’ reality, but is the arbitrary result of modern history. It is this arbitrariness that destroys the possibility of the universal to function as an answer, even if does not exhaust the possibility of universality completely. Today’s art as described here is situated in a specific place and does not aspire to be relevant to the whole of mankind forever and ever. It is just one way of dealing with life to maintain some form of agency that is not abstract but concrete. It may be very difficult for this art to find a way to have an impact that exceeds the small networks of artists and their direct friends, but I do believe that at the moment it is this type of art that is worth making.

Democracy sucks: a review of Manifesta 8: the Region of Murcia (Spain) in Dialogue with northern Africa

CLARE BUTCHER

“Democracy” has a long and complex conceptual lineage. Within western thinking it has been divvied up into a range of topoi – including the majoritarian, the partnership, and Chantal Mouffe’s recent conception of ‘agonistic’ democracy. Each of these versions relies on various constructs of individual versus general will. Majoritarian democracy is, according to Ronald Dworkin, the instatement of a particular law, person or process, based on the representative will of the greatest number of people – which by no means ensures that everyone is, in fact, represented. In partnership democracy (as the curatorial collective responsible for a part of the Manifesta 8, tranzit.org, would have us understand), ‘people govern themselves as full partners in a collective political enterprise’ where decisions can only be reached under certain preconditions, ensuring the equal interest for all involved. The recently opened Manifesta 8 in Murcia and Cartagena, Spain attempted an enactment of these very tensions between general and individual will, set within the framework of the site-specific, cultural machine of the biennial model.

Manifesta is a roaming European exhibition of contemporary art occupying a different European city every two years, under the guidance of a different curator (or [collective noun] thereof). Previously, the biennial has taken up residence in Rotterdam, Luxembourg, Ljubljana, Frankfurt and Trentino, to name a few. The programme is maintained by the Manifesta foundation, which operates between biennials via the Manifesta Journal on curatorship, as well as through a number of meetings and seminars.

For Manifesta 8 – spuriously subtitled ‘The Region of Murcia (Spain) in dialogue with northern Africa’ – the Manifesta Foundation invited the Alexandria Contemporary Arts Forum (ACAF) based in Egypt, the Chamber of Public Secrets (CPS), a `production unit’ organising cultural events internationally, and tranzit.org, a conglomeration of curators from Eastern Europe. Hoping to address the conceptual and physical borders between the post-colonial and the post-communist, the European and the non-European within the region, as well as the capacity of cultural production to move across these, each of the three collectives operated within their common framework via ‘autonomous curatorial contributions’. These were dispersed over separate locations and in a diversity of media throughout the two cities.

The juxtaposition of the terms ‘autonomy’ and ‘commonality’ provided the starting point for a general curatorial exercise in introspective flagellation: What does curating mean in cultural context? Have we been brought in to solve a socio-political crisis? Does criticality in this setting only cater to the constructedness of the biennial itself? Do you hear any dialogue at all with North Africa? The Chamber of Public Secrets chose a representative response to the structural situation of the biennial, comprising of projects created on-site in the city of Murcia, using various popular media to reflect more generally on the economics of cultural production. Their dialogue with North Africa consisted of Thierry Geoffroy/Colonel’s Penetration Room, installed in the former prison in Cartagena. The empty room was proposed as a space where the African artists painfully invisible in the rest of the show (save a few, such as Charles Mudede and Hassan Khan) could supposedly ‘penetrate’ the biennial’s borders. True to form, Geoffroy’s tongue-in-cheek tactics – hailing the visitor with statements such as ‘DEAR NORTH AFRICAN FRIENDS, PLEASE FEEL WELCOME TO USE THIS SPACE TO INSTALL YOUR ARTWORKS, SO WE CAN HAVE A DIALOGUE WITH YOUR PARTICIPATION AS WELL’ – made for an empty exhibition. Certainly the dialogue was not ‘democratic’ (in any of our earlier definitions) but Geoffroy’s hyper-exposure did nothing to make a solution more visible.

Penetration Space, the old prison in Cartagena, CPS Manifesta 8

In contrast, the works of Zimbabwean film-maker and writer, Charles Mudede (based the US), and the Egyptian artist, writer, musician, Hassan Khan, curated by ACAF, had little to do with making “Africa” more visible in a pan-European biennial. Instead their perspectives as postcolonial subjects subtly initiated a dialogue with the artists’ projects around them.

Mudede’s first art project, Twilight of the Goodtimes (2010) executed in collaboration with Michael Leavitt, researched by Roxanne Emadi, and scored by DJ Shingi, tracks the development of high-rise housing units designed by African-American architect, Robert R. Taylor, in Chicago in the 1950s and 60s and the dissolution and then demolition of this modernist dream of urban utopia in the following years. Next to a timeline of these events and behind a blank, vintage television set, is a projection of the American TV sitcom, Goodtimes. The Goodtimes material is spliced with footage representing more contemporary political progressivism: Thatcherism, speeches by Bush – whereby Mudede shifts the axes of evaluation concerning a Hegelian idea of social history. This is not only an American or African story. Mudede “penetrates” the space with his politics and yet he speaks not only as a diasporic African, but as a visionary, critical voice.

Charles Mudede, Twilight of the Goodtimes, ACAF Manifesta 8

Changing the terms of visibility, for change’s sake was not the intention of the ACAF curators. Instead of introducing a radical democratising of the biennial structure, as the only curators “representing” North Africa could be expected to, Bassam El Baroni and Jeremy Beaudry used a tentative Theory of Applied Enigmatics to decipher the agendas motivating the “beyond borders” exercises of cultural brokers in any context. These “enigmatics” took shape in selected artistic and design projects as well as a series of staged discussions organised by ACAF. The Backbench sessions (2010) carried out on the agora-like seating constructed by nOffice and later presented as a video installation in the exhibition space of the former Murcia post-office, saw various cultural producers painstakingly articulating the ethical dilemmas of globalised art practice. Their diplomatic travails culminated in a plaintive, beat-poet style Prayer for Art video piece (including prayers from Croatian curatorial collective, What How and for Whom, and Khwezi Gule).

Upon this curated discursive platform, ACAF also initiated discussions around the possibility of a Pan-African Roaming Biennial. The project, Incubator, is a year-long investigation done in partnership with a number of practitioners and institutions from around Africa – including the Contemporary Image Centre in Cairo, the Centre for Contemporary Art of East Africa (CCAEA) Nairobi, Art Moves Africa (AMA), and Gabi Ngcobo of the Centre for Historical Reenactments (CHR) in Johannesburg. Despite trying to contact key participants, what was actually discussed during the first meetings held in the context of Manifesta 8, and information concerning Incubator’s subsequent activities in the coming year, remain somewhat Free Masonic. The organisers seem refreshingly wary of divulging details before more of the project’s structures are in place to continue. This same collective caution extends to the tone of the abstracts of papers presented at the Manifesta discussions, which are (surprisingly) available online: http://www.panafricannial.org/symposium

Armed with an artillery of post-colonial subclauses and post-financial crisis qualifiers, the five speakers at the Manifesta discussions were assigned to articulate an historically and politically informed position on the relevance, efficacy and logistic reality of a nomadic African biennial. One of them, N’Goné Fall (curator of the Dakar Biennial 2002, and founding member of the collective, Gaw), seemed to take something of an agonistic stance, making an effective itinerary of the biennial or biennial-like events occurring on the continent in the last decades, followed by a comprehensive ‘For’ and ‘Against’ list. Primarily, like ACAF’s activities with Enigmatics, Fall questioned the validity of radical change merely for the sake of it. Yes, we need to address the monopoly of the idea of an ‘African’ biennial, as well as the fragility of most countries’ socio-economic structures (hence their ability to support an event of this scale). Moreover, a roaming African biennial would, Fall stated, enhance intracontinental artistic networks and actualise more democratic access for audiences in countries not able to host frequent exhibitions of international contemporary art.

Hassan Khan followed Fall in asking whether a repetition of the biennial structure was really the best alternative to the current networks of production and display already existing in Africa: whether, indeed an alternative rather than a substantiating of what is already there, was even necessary. The conception and logistics of an artistic Pan-Africanism were taken up by Ghanaian/USA/UK artist and organiser Senam Okudzeto. Her post-script challenge to the discussants and to Incubator as a project, was to think through a ‘biennial without bureaucracy’; to consider the unionisations, visa requirements and access that might enable audiences as well as participants to collaborate in the process.

Whether in an African or European context or somewhere in-between, it is a kind of democratic exhibition model – tentative and cautious rather than majoritarian and representative - that the beleaguered cultural producers taking part in global events seem to hanker after. For this very reason, I have delayed mentioning the final curatorial component of the Manifesta 8 until now. A Constitution for Temporary Display was tranzit.org’s means of decision-making and position-taking within the short-lived, potentially out-of-context Murcia exhibition. Their questions surrounding the establishment of a representative curatorial practice, like many of the Incubator discussions, detailed the direct links between the very logistical and the very symbolic nature of how these moments of display happen. Do we communicate by skype? How do we continue that dialogue in the physical space of the ongoing exhibition? What does the notion of opening hours mean to you?

Using these questions as cautionary guidelines rather than attempting to solve anything, tranzit.org selected artistic projects that also highlight acts of showing and narrative circulation. One striking example was the redisplay of Sarah Maldoror’s 1970 film made in Algeria, Monangambée, about the political activist, Luandino Vieira. Maldoror said herself that film was the only form of art with no boundaries. But it seems that by creating the conditions appropriate for a temporary display in the middle of a small city in the south of Spain, it was not only Maldoror’s film but a host of other art forms which were able to cross borders – political, spatial, conceptual. Perhaps this is the only form of democracy possible within exhibition-practice today: a time-based, fleeting democracy, prone to precarity, always conflicted in terms of what majority it represents and where, sceptical of commonality, and careful with the notion of autonomy. Perhaps this is the point at which the real dialogue with and within Africa begins.

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“The beauty of commitment” Nice title huh? Sounds compelling. It was in fact the theme of a discussion panel at the Liverpool Biennial which opened just some weeks ago. The panel consisted of a number of artists whose work takes place mostly in the “public domain”, as well as the biennial curator, Lorenzo Fusi. While I was not aware that it was possible for art to take place outside of at least some shape or form of public domain, there ensued a heated discussion about the way that art “should” be mediated when it occurs beyond the white walls of formal art spaces and the responsibility of the artist in all of that. Why only the artist? I asked. What about the myriad others within the network of artistic production, framing and circulation – that is to say, the arts educators, writers, cultural policy makers, politicians, not least curators? Is it an artist’s job to stand in front of their work and justify their decisions? Prove their commitment to their choices? The curator on the panel was suspiciously quiet during the entire debate. It made me wonder, whether it’s making an “artwork”, installing an exhibition or writing a press release, when do we commit, how do we show that sincerity and who is this “public” making up the public domain? There are as many different answers to this as there are art practitioners and some of those you will find in the projects presented in this edition of the Your-space newsletter.

During the last months and in the coming weeks Your-space has been, and will be, privileged to develop a series of ‘commitments’ not only to aesthetics, not only to a certain social/moral vision, or economic viability, but ones which commit to a complex composition of all of the above. These projects draw into the fray the various actors and issues inextricably linked with any contemporary artistic action within an urban context such as ours. And by that, each exposes another side of working in/with/upon/around the public domain in its multiple forms.

Plan V (Toos Nijssen and Ron Eijkman) have been working for months now, together with Your-space and as part of the Van Abbemuseum’s public programme, in Woensel West where they are also living. The project, ‘Collectie van de Wijk’ starts with the ideas of long-term engagement, trust and intimacy and from here, Plan V and myself are attempting to “collect” the neighbourhood of Woensel West in terms of its stories, the relationships happening there all the time as well as the material artefacts making up the area’s history, present and future. A research-in-progress exhibition can be found on the B-1 floor of the Van Abbemuseum, inviting those interested to keep in touch as the ‘Collectie van de Wijk’ grows.

Next to Plan V’s “living room” installation in the museum is Inass Yassin’s ‘Projection. Edition 1.01/Screening Failed’ – made up of a poster campaign developed by the artist in response to the demolition of a popular cinema in Ramallah, Palestine. Like Plan V, Inass Yassin looks at the changing space of an urban context and the ways this affects and is affected by social relationships and politics. As part of this edition of the project, Inass Yassin presented a poetic projection of the almost completely destroyed Ramallah cinema onto the side of an Eindhoven building set for demolition. This building was the site of many artists’ studios, including until recently Plan V. Yassin’s projection reflected on the ghostliness of the now empty studio block and what its eventual disappearance will mean for the area and those artists who had to vacate it.

These shifts in Eindhoven’s public domain(s) will then be taken up by Juul Sadée in her ‘The Gardener’s Last Song, 2×15 minutes’, opening in the Studio, Van Abbemuseum in mid-November. Juul Sadée’s playful, large scale, multi-media installation in fact conducts a very serious investigation of the drastic losses and substitutions of culture and identity in the city’s history – be it agricultural, rural, industrial, technological, creative. With a host of invited guests, discussions, tea parties and scripted monologues, the artist weaves together the threads connecting each of living in the city.

The ‘Instatements’ project by Uri Ben-Ari with Your-space, which opened on the Dag van de Architectuur in June, 2010, has now grown to include a much broader network of contributors. Uri Ben-Ari will be coordinating an exciting series of workshops and lectures during Dutch Design Week, at the end of October, 2010 – which will also include a presentation of the forthcoming publication documenting the activities and projects exhibited in June and a number of newly commissioned texts and interviews.

And finally, as a moment to reflect on the many assemblages and meeting points between projects, people, and spheres making up the Your-space programme this year, there comes a ‘Gathering Gathering’ in early November. For one night a small group of projects by invited contributors will appear around the museum. Through a series of subtle, surprising interventions, Alejandra Salinas and Aeron Bergman, Eshan Fardjadniya and Cindy Moorman explore what brings us together, when, why and what are the other ways we can imagine of gathering around one another.

A friend reminded me recently of the similarity between the situation in the contemporary art world and the social relations presented in the children’s story The Emperor’s New Clothes. Are we all dressing up our activities with see-through concepts, appreciated only by an elite few and in danger of indecent exposure? Or are we the ones, like the little boy in the story, who are committed to calling out the bull****, pointing out the truths, questioning unquestioned cultural assumptions and ideas about “quality”?

I invite you to commit with us to a last, sincere moment of gathering together what we’ve seen this year, and to showing more clearly what we think is already obvious and what might perhaps remain invisible.

The Black Atlantic was one of the key works of himself that he referred to many times, a work that for the first time, in 1993, opened up an understanding of the cultural travel, consequences of slavery, black identity in an ever existing diasporic and dispersed idea of living, in minds of people other than the ones that suffered from atrocities that officially ended in 1863 in Suriname as a colony of The Netherlands and as one of the last countries in Europe to do this.

The talk of Paul Gilroy pretty much took up everything that is written and argued about in The Black Atlantic and took up this idea of modernity and the forming of black identity more. From the esthetics of clothes of the slaves towards an interesting geneology of the human rights ( as a secular US idea of freedom that was offered to the world) Gilroy navigated us through the oceans of identity forming and the commercial selling of this identity in order to come to terms with certain pasts. Pasts that we don’t know anymore ofcourse, or at least deny that they existed in forms and scales of any importance. The talk gave a very nice image of how black identity was formed through different media in the light of amnesia and how this is propelled in our new-modern time, even to the strategy of diplomacy that we see in the EU and USA, where cultural diplomacy, development and defence is part of the argument to engage in military orientalism or building up something like a world citizenship.

For me and others in the room I’m sure, it was clear that we are left with a total amnesia and cultural denial, at least on the ‘white’ side on what happened roughly before 1863 and the 250 years before this. My feeling on this amnesia and denial was represented in one of the anecdote’s that Gilroy told us about an interview with a British soldier who fought in Afghanistan;

At some point we came to the village and we were swiftly received by the local community by the words;”It’s been too long that you were here, last time you burnt down our whole village!”. The soldier was confused, because their unit was never there before, so it must have been special forces that secretly did something in that village. He explained, but the villagers said, “no, no, it was 120 years ago that you were here, but we still remember very well”. It was in another war that same representatives where there to conduct these activities.

It was a simple anecdote that left traces for me that are very important to understand modes of time and the understanding of history. In the same I can recommend the book of Anton de Kom in whcih he constantly sees these modes of perception also in the Surinam colonial times where cruelties happened for hundreds of years too. It is a mode of perception that does not contribute at all to a ‘white’ idea of collective rememberance, because it cannot see beyond the borders of the individual. In Anton de Kom’s book ( We, Slaves of Suriname) it is referred to as this:”You, the white reader, should know that these cruelties have never been part of the books of your history, but it has been in our souls forever”. It made me clear once again that this directed and choreographed amnesia is part of the soul of us, I am white there is no doubt about this, and it’s not in our books. It seems to me that we have to keep fighting also beyond the borders of the university to enlighten our historical perception that still is propelling us into the future everyday. Hopefully if we can be able to at least accomplish this for a very small part we would see what the real effects of crimes committed in the past knew how they find their way to the post-colonial people, but never to the colonial ones. We need also action in this rapidly on the visual level, as I think the visual and imaginary is at least a border or door that as a tool is close to remembrance. We should grab every chance to contribute to this. Yes, to the initative, yes to much more initatives,…

Genk is a good reminder that material production didn’t stop with the new economy, it just relocated, mostly east and south but also to out of the way places like Genk. When we speak about flexible working, immaterial labour and the creative economy, it seems important to remember places like Genk and the manipulation of raw materials there that still forms the essential base for our service saturated economy.

What the visit to Genk really got me to thinking about however was the nature of that flexible, creative service economy that is understood to have replaced heavy industry. Our contemporary forms of labour are certainly very different. In the mines or the car factory, workers are clearly visible as such. There is a regime of discipline and order that keeps the human body circulating though a factory as efficiently as the goods it produces. Today, these clearly visible disciplinary structures – factory architecture, physical division between workers and management, masses of bodies moving to the same rhythm – are no longer present in much of the former western world. But the new economy could not function without some disciplinary controls in which most of the fruits of your labour, delivered by hand or by brain, can be plucked by the non-workers (the ruling class or (democratic) government) to use and invest as they wish.

After all, without this discipline why would we be persuaded to put in more than we take out of a system in which increasingly large groups work as precarious, self-exploiting employees or freelancers. We would have to be stupid to do that, and we are not. Yet especially when our business and financial leaders so obviously take out more than they put in, and even do this on a collective basis (think about recent bank bailouts, regular state subsidy of private business through infrastructure, tax breaks etc), we still don’t have the means to reform the status quo in any significant way.

Following the logic of this analysis, it is fairly reasonable to say that the site of this discipline must have moved rather than dissappeared. Let’s say it shifted from control of the (material) body to control of the (immaterial) mind – fitting in with the shift from material to so-called immaterial labour. Where once the worker was free the dream but constrained to move, many of the freelance producers in the creative economy today are caught in the opposite trap. The same goes for the role we play as consumers. It is the psycho-sociological techniques that shape desire towards economically productive ends that determine how we think and how far we can imagine. It is these conditions that keep us tense, active, looking for opportunities and, as a consequence, little time for focusing on the system itself. In this condition, is it any wonder that we seem to be so lacking in political or poetic visions of the future that are more than slight modifications of the present? Might we say that dreaming up a new paradigm for society is today as revolutionary as downing tools in the factory was in the industrial system? Certainly it seems as closely controlled as the early trade unions were, though by the very different, psycho-tools of the private media and their techniques of ridicule, cynicism, and dumb pragmatism amongst others.

In these circumstances, the task of intellectuals and artists (who are often the role models and ideal examples for workers in the creative economy) is to make the techniques and systems of control visible. The task for institutions funded through and thereby dedicated to the public interest is to provide the means to produce the analyses internally and to distribute them as widely as possible. Such institutions as government watchdogs, public universities and museums amongst others are limited in their reach, but they still can make a difference, as might be measured by the threats to their survival from neo-liberal politics and public service cuts.

Those of us responsible for such institutions need to defend them by constructing new, more urgent tasks than those they inherited from the past. In large measure we have to reinvent our ways of working and core objectives to address a society for which we were not originally established. This is difficult, but the chance of constructing wholly new public institutions in the current climate seems very unlikely, so we must use what we have. In the arts, that means understanding that leftist nostalgia for the avant-garde and top down social education projects is as wrongheaded as the conservative yearning for the old certainties of modernist essentialism and visuality. We have to leave both behind as we leave modernity to history, and find ways to depict and then defend ourselves against the core of the problem – the techniques of mind control and psycho-social conformism.

There’s an old saying that sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me. Today words and images are more deadly to the possibility of transforming future social relations than any artillery. Now, we have to find a way to produce those words and images so that can free our dreams and allow us to experience the joy of thinking for ourselves again.

Photo by Sander Buyck

Geographies of doubt

In a global community endlessly confronted by self-reflexive responses to topics that slide from inter-cultural exchanges to the geo-politics of emotion, a change needs to be registered in already existing methods and reactions. The arena of artistic practice with its ever-changing positions and knowledge of affect and implication seems to be urgent, but why? Why does a museum have an interest beyond the borders of its own geography?

Questions that began the series of activities I just narrated come from the belief that physical and mental boundaries exist and that nationalities, due to political conflicts, imply physical exclusion (the meetings I described are probably the most direct example of this). These boundaries have to come down in order to directly confront these issues and open gaps offering imaginable alternatives for an unknown future. Of course these systems cannot be changed in a moment, confined to the faults inherent in national regulations, restricted travelling and personal inhibition. But what are the practices of occupation and restriction that we come across? On what terms do we retrospectively see colonial motivations as we experience these places in the present? And are we ourselves repeating some kind of imperialism by our presence and activities there? Is it possible to offer new forms of criticality?

From the site of European Cultural Foundation:

Bringing people closer together through cultural cooperation and creative activities is at the heart of all we do. Our independence allows us to take risks, do things differently, and work where others might not go.

A very noble cause I would say, but can we not also think of modes of dependence rather than disconnection through ‘independence’? Is this not the greater risk? Collaboration and communality rather than exclusion and self-sufficiency.

Walker Open Field

CLARE BUTCHER

I’m in Minneapolis right now and have been anxiously anticipating my first encounter with the the Walker Art Centre. Having followed their programme, blogging, Herzog & de Meuron’s architectural feats – it was time for the personal experience. For the whole summer this summer, their public programming has taken a major risk, calling it an experiment in public space, and basically “loaned” their gigantic backyard space to museum users to do with what they will – creatively. The Walker Open Field project creates a kind of “common” where anyone from violin students to yoga instructors to anarchist reading groups can meet and share knowledge and time. I thought – nice idea in theory, but would it really work in practice? And it seems to. With very little control from the top. A simple kiosk at the front entrance tells you the daily programme (which you can also find detailed online) and you can also pick up some reading material, board games or an iPad from inside the museum. One local chef has also set up a grill bar serving veggie burgers and sauerkraut with local beers. Idyllic.

Well, maybe not. One group who are participating in the Open Field is a collective called, Red76 who are known for setting up Anywhere/Anyplace/Academies (AAA) using surplus building, shipping, storage materials. And this idea of recycling also applies to ideas – their discursive programme is entitled ‘Surplus Seminars’ where they revise old ideas in new ways, giving an ephemeral, do-it-yourself (truly American!) context.

Last night’s Surplus Lecture was delivered by Stephen Duncombe of New York University who spoke about ‘Utopia is a No Place’. You can see the video link here.

Taking the surplus nature of this phrase a little too far i.e. it ain’t the first time someone’s provided an exegesis on the etymology of the word Utopia – Duncombe did proceed to make some interesting assertions about art’s current obsession with speculation. Unconstrained by what he called ‘the tyranny of the possible’, Duncombe presented a project by the Yes Men’s fake New York Times edition which heralded the end of the Iraq War, free health and education for Americans and the end of poverty, as the perfect example of how contemporary artists are finding their footing between truth, belief and Utopia in order to reanimate the imaginative organs of (Western) society. He looked at some basic assumptions about ‘truth’ and how art is supposed to relate to these – that it has some revelatory function and that it should debunk the myths inhibiting that truth from being made known. He cited the story of the Emperor’s New Clothes, saying that usually, the artist is the small boy pointing the finger at the naked emperor. The truth however, is never a static thing – always ‘protean’ – and to remain dynamic that little boy must do more than point the finger.

“It makes me feel good when I critique stuff,” Stephen said as he bluntly spelled out the norm in most intellectual circles. But criticism is not generative in itself. He said what art can do, following on from the original Utopian, Thomas More, is present what could be as opposed to what will be. More never claimed that Utopia was a real place, or indeed one that could ever be achieved. He used his parable as a strategy to critically engage with the society that was, pitting it against an image of the one it could have been (one with no money, no debt, no lawyers, etc.) However, what Duncombe didn’t really address here was More’s position as the white, educated, lawyer living in the Western ‘civilised’ world. Imagination in this context, in the context of complex critique is…privileged. Despite Duncombe’s justification during the question and answer session that in fact the greatest act of imagination came out of poor black communities in America and resulted in the Civil Rights Movement, he did say that as soon as that Utopia of equality for all humans regardless of skin colour became a legal, administrative process, the Utopia was gone. He implied that, like the horizon, it cannot and must not be reached in order to be maintained.

Stephen Duncombe, Surplus Seminar

For me this was a disappointment. Not that Utopia can never be realised, but that this critical distancing, the privilege of pulling back from the imagined world when it is shown to be just that – imagined – as Thomas More might have done when receiving criticism for his ideas – means little for our sense of responsibility over that imagination, over that realm of impossibility. Why make the steps towards the horizon in the first place if we do not believe that by taking those steps we get somewhere at least? I think Duncombe was not advocating that we don’t get anywhere, but anywhere is not somewhere. Just as Utopia is a no place, we might adopt de Certeau’s notion of space instead – space is practiced place – when we take ownership, through enunciation, through bodily inhabitation, through personal risk of ridiculousness, Utopia becomes a space of imagination. A realm of the possible as well as the impossible.

Duncombe ended by talking a little about dialectics and the need for any substantial, Utopian artwork to simultaneously support two contradictory ideas – the possible and the impossible – without satire and without providing any ready made solutions to that contradiction. ‘A dreampolitik,’ he called it. And I wonder in the context of the Van Abbemuseum’s quest to imagine the world otherwise, how this dream actually works out, how it is made visible and how it is journeyed towards. What happens when we take a public with us, what, indeed, are the ethics of imagination?

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)

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

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

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

Reading these few paragraphs as I said earlier, struck me with a serious feeling of doubt. It left me in the middle of reading a naïve joke or a complex underskin form of self-reflection. Is globalisation really a phenomenon that can only be understood by the timeframe of ‘one’ age? Is there really an increasing number of artists as described and if so is there a core that accounts for a bigger part of others? If we need a biennial as most efficient instrument, should it be only open to the most innovative of our globe?

Many of these and other questions fuel that very sense of doubt and feeling of in-betweenness. Where are we standing after reading this and where is the maker of all this standing? It may very well be the only question that really positions myself and others in a critical rethinking of our positions, as the Lyon Biennale very much would like to see. The spectacle of the biennale is clear, it’s rethinking the traditional model that is not suitable anymore for it’s likewise traditional task of exhibiting new innovations. Instead we have arrived in a new era that suffers from globalisation and needs to come up with new techniques to cope with all these new influences, experiences and possibilities. But is it really? Are our experiences so contemporary and new like we did not recognize before. Could we think of art as a bridge between the reality of everyday and what happened in the past?

I guess the text offers me no more than rhetoric’s captured in very clear assumptions that leave you in between. The rhetoric’s in this text leave, at least for me, no room in thinking otherwise or offering alternatives for any of the suggestions made. I would like to argue if indeed we are so new to globalisation and if art, as understood through our spectacle, is the only spectacle worthwhile to consider in any case? The spectacle of everyday seems to be quite overrated here as an instrument, because it is simply always there. There is no alternative for everyday reality, but if you can name it, please do so.

The text is exactly acknowledging that the everyday is something special that should be embraced and taken with care, in this case in the form of art. The biennial offers us those instruments to do so, we only need to rethink our position a bit, because we live in another everyday reality than before. I’m unsure if this disconnection with everyday reality needs to be glued, it probably never existed. The text takes a very high ambition in changing the world and changing a biennial that has been sleeping for over twenty years. A biennial that will visualize fresh young artists that really have something to say and change about their lives and their contexts, regardless of where they come from, because we all know that living in Ramallah, West Bank is almost the same as living in Lyon, France.

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

The second room is white and open on one side. Here research is presented. Maps are hanging on the wall showing movements of troops in the Yugoslav area. On a table one finds grey books containing transcripts of radio conversations and letters sent in the years of the crisis. Finally, on simple bookshelves, several books are placed, dealing with the war in Yugoslavia in a direct or more indirect way. The books can be read or glanced through on a comfortable black sofa. Thoroughly studying the material would take weeks, if not months, or even years, but browsing to the material one is quickly caught by the directness of the documents. Especially the radio transcripts make a deep impact and have an uncomfortable addictive quality; one cannot really stop reading these often banal or cryptic conversations, in which each words silently articulates the word ‘catastrophe’. The ordering of busses becomes the preparation of mass murder. Questioning if ‘they are of military age’, is cut of with a harsh tone: the reference is too direct, the enemy may be listening (was listening, since we are reading these words now). One is fascinated and appalled; the documents in their straight-forward matter-of-fact-ness have a nauseating affect. The black sofa becomes a black hole in which one slowly disappears. Where was I? What was I doing? How can these simple, everyday words, be signs or even the origin of tragedy, of grief beyond imagination? There are no answers in those documents. And, when looking around, one realizes that the only and perhaps unsatisfying answers can be found on the shelves and the history books written about the disaster. The whiteness of the room is a whiteness in disguise: there is no clarity here; perhaps it’s nowhere.

When reading through these books, I encountered Remco, also visiting this venue and we started talking about this work, which had blown us both away. In a somewhat tentative manner we tried to find out what it was that made this work so troubling, so strong. Partly it was the personal involvement of Peljhan in the whole event. He was a radio engineer at the time of the conflict and was picking up these ephemeral signs floating through the air in Slovakia; signs, statements, that horrified and obsessed him. However, there was also something more personal about both Remco and my own deep reaction to this work, which seemed to say something more about us, since we are both of the same age, same generation: end twenties. What struck us was our inability to experience oneself as a historical subject, the incapacity to feel involved in history. Where the generation of our parents had been so overtly political, there is certain disengagement that determines our own experience of history, even if I don’t believe we are not interested. It is as though a thrust is driven between our inner world and the world at large and our voice is unable to bridge the gab, to ‘touch’, as it were, history. We are a generation of observers, onlookers on a tragic drama, which we realize is taking place, but which seems fully unaffected by any action we might take. We feel somehow like Benjamin, writing in 1940 when the shadows were closing in, on Paul Klee’s, Anglus Novus, the angle of history, who was looking at the past in which the rubble was piling up, being unable to stay, and make whole what was broken, for a storm was blowing from paradise.

Sitting in the lobby in our hotel in Istanbul we were watching on CNN how a suburb of Istanbul was being flushed away; 30 people died while we were drinking cocktails and moved with perhaps the most well-dressed community walking the planet. It was surreal. We got text-messages asking us if we were still alive, while sitting on a terrace in the sun. It feels like an uncanny parallel to Peljhan’s work. However, one thing felt different, for it seemed that dimly I felt the storm coming over us to be a historical storm, which asks, no demands, a response. I feel that somehow we need to try and touch history.

FROM: EVIL TORY
TO: GUARDIAN COMMENTS

It is the job of business, whatever business, to make a profit. Only by making profit can a company continue to run. Investors put up money to buy part of a business because they want a share of that profit; if said investors did not believe the business was fundamentally healthy, they would not put up their money. More successful companies generate more investment which in turn generates, if correctly used, greater profits and more often than not greater market share at the expense of less well-run companies. That’s basic capitalism. There’s nothing magical about it, and to attribute any sort of moral dimension is to misunderstand the nature of commerce.

So, first and foremost, it is not government’s business how or how much a company pays its employees. Nor is it any business of anyone else other than the shareholders of the company and the employees in question. Government is, regrettably, entitled to a share in business profit and employee remuneration via taxes. While I personally consider this to be legalised theft, I accept that there are certain necessities which can only be met via taxation (we probably disagree over what constitutes a necessity but that another argument). Thus when a company makes larger profits and pays its employees more, the government should be pleased because its taxation revenue increases.

Regarding the current recession and its most proximate symptom, the credit crunch, those banks which best weathered the crisis are now in a position to take advantage.

For example, Goldman Sachs, much complained of, did not bankrupt its competitors; they managed that all on their own. The analysts at GS saw much of the ‘toxic’ assets for the dangers they represented and smartly got out before the crunch hit. In so doing they saved their employer (thus securing their own jobs) and made a lot of cash for the owners of the business, and were rewarded accordingly. Good for them. Had their competitors done likewise there would have been no credit crunch at all.

Barclays managed to broker a deal which kept HMG out of their business. That’s good for their depositors and good for their employees and shareholders; HMG is a remarkably incompetent business manager as anyone who lived through the seventies should remember. Whether their new shareholders will prove a useful asset is a matter for Barclays, not anyone else.

HSBC has likewise put itself in an envious position, and in doing so can now take advantage- and its advantage works also to the advantage of the fiscus.

IMNSHO, it is utterly false for the ‘left’ to complain about the very same profits that pay for their cherished government programmes. Business is the engine that pays for the NHS, for schools and police forces and roads and armies and all the rest. Business – mostly it has to be said, small business – and the people who own it and who work in it, pay for the good things government alone has the structure to provide. They also pay for all the crap and waste of government; the endless petty bureaucracy, the uncounted milliards thrown away on unworkable IT, the tens of thousands of useless jobs for PC nonentities advertised at large salaries in the Guardian every week, the streams of pointless regulation and legislation emanating seemingly without end from an increasingly detached and incompetent Whitehall.

I’m sorry, but you’re all tilting at the wrong windmill. If you really want to solve the problems of this country, you should be attacking the government and its accompanying over-mighty and utterly wasteful State, not the banks or any other business.

But I don’t expect you to do that. And honestly, I don’t understand why. Maybe you could enlighten me?

FROM: CE
TO: EVIL TORY (and the rest of Guardian)

Evil Tory,
Ok I will have a go at answering briefly
.
YOU SAY:
That’s basic capitalism. There’s nothing magical about it, and to attribute any sort of moral dimension is to misunderstand the nature of commerce.

Herein lies one of the crucial failures of our current political system. I agree with your statement above but what follows from it is that capitalism should know its place in a system of values.. why know its place? Because society, neighbourliness, culture (call it what you will) needs an ethical system to give value to life.

The problem is that neo-liberal politicians have given capitalism the task to determine the ethical and moral order through the mistaken mantra that “free markets = free men”.

Historically, it is obvious that democracy and capitalism have nothing to do with each other, as China is proving very adequately today. But we in the Euro-America political zone have decided to elevate the free market beyond its role in determining trade relations between (small scale) private interests to a point where it is the arbitrator of our way of living and our system of values.

If, as you rightly say, capitalism has no morality, then that is why it produces the kind of insane and horrific dysfunction that we see across the world, with the huge waste of resources, conflict and environmental devastation. This comes about, I think, not because capitalists en masse want it (though many benefit) but because they have no ethical or moral reason to address it. Our social ethics have to come not from commerce and the free market but from some other source. Ideally that source should be some form of democratic government and that is what we leftists argue about (again ideally, but I won’t go there). Our questions are how to make the right collective ethical choices, which include whether bankers should throw their wads of cash around or not.

The evilness of the Tories is that you accept that capitalism has no morality but you are not willing to invest in making the right collective ethical choices on any other basis. This results in making only pragmatic solutions that keep the wheels of commerce turning. You then (generally) leave it up to religious guilt to take care of what little morality might be needed.

IMNSHO, it is business and capitalism that relies on a orderly, peaceful and social state (with provide such things as an NHS) in order to prosper. It is not, as you say, the other way around.

And finally…could we one day really look at what the great problem with the seventies was instead of hurling ignorant insults at the decade? If you look at the health, education, wealth gap, infrastructure figures there were mostly significantly greater improvements in these areas then than in the 1980s and 1990s. But I am only pleading from some more thoughtful research here…a Guardian article anyone?

I suppose my lack of contact with the commercial world has produced a relative naivety about how it all works. Throughout my career in the public sector, I have been told that commerce and private, shareholding companies are the pinnacle of our institutional ecology – the kings of the jungle. They are efficient, intelligent, responsive and sensitive to society and they can prove all these qualities because they make money. In contrast, we who are guilty of not making money are lazy, unproductive, wastrels (i exaggerate here) who should be grateful that efficient private companies tolerate our existence (and sometimes even sponsor us). They do this partly because it could be a good marketing opportunity for them to associate with  lazy creative types, and because they are so efficient as money machines that they have produced enough excess cash to pass some of it on directly or in taxes – and finally there is still a vague, old enlightenment expectation that ‘good’ societies should have ‘free’ artists and therefore our contemporary, ‘free’ market society must also have its cultural corner.

Nevertheless, art institutions, according to the logic I have been taught from the people who run our public services, should seek to be as much like a commercial enterprise as possible. To do this they need a bottom line to follow, like the simplicity and beauty of a profit and loss report – and so they should be made accountable to the magic market through something. Given that visitor numbers are the only quantifiable fact available from museums, and populist exhibitions are usually less troubling for the status quo, this has become one of the key ways in which arts bureaucrats judge us – usually applying the crudest but most politically dominant ‘free’ market model we have.

Now, yesterday’s experience did not change everything in this analysis but it turned round a few naive assumptions, gave me some pride back in what we do and reduced my cynicism in the above analysis – a cynicism that seemed the only response to Thatcher-Reagan economic fundamentalism and its ultimate victory in 1989. What it made clear above all, was that people in the commercial world are also questioning and serching for new patterns of behvaiour beyond the economic crisis and climate control.

I think there were three moments yesterday when things shifted for me. The first was a statement by one of the dinner guests there that basically money is made by buying things cheaply and selling them expensively and that most management is simply there to ensure this existing state of affairs continues. In other words, the majority of managers do not create value or even cash but maintain what exists through the nature of the business they are in. This statement, blatently obvious though it is, had the “wizard of oz” effect on me, suddenly seeing the small man behind the huge edifice. From the all rhetoric of conquering masters of the universe that managers had developed over the past 20 years, they are mostly cogs in bigger wheels – shifting gear from heroes to zeroes as the market itself dictates. ‘why do we have so much respect for management then’, I asked. The answer that came that managers are there to tell a good story when things go wrong suddenly seemed convincing.

This decline in my estimation of private company business was confirmed in different discussions throughout the evening. Two other points in particular stood out for me. At one point I started to describe the way many artists or curators (including myself) come to art through a moment or moments of critical reflection. This often amounts to an initial stubborn refusal to believe what is handed down to you as ineffable truths (such as the goodness of the free Market) but can also be about an ambivalent contact with art that simply made you ask questions further. I asked my new found friends whether this was recognisable in their experiences of teaching and working and none could really answer postively. Does this mean that managers and economists are essentially conformists? People not willing to confront the critical questions in favour of following the herd? It seems, at least as a postulate, worth considering that it is this lack of what Irit Rogoff would call ‘criticality’ (rather than creativity) that distinguishes the manager/economists from the artist/curator.

I have always tried to be modest and reluctant to priveledge art or other disciplines but this evening made me reassess if we should be so apologetic about our existence. This latter especially in view of the statements of the Dutch minister of culture in relation to art’s necessity to be relevant and welcome sponsorship with egregious gratitude. Is putting culture in such a weak, dependent position really good for business, let alone wider society.After all, as I was told in the car travelling to dinner, there is a basic mistake in the “free” market analysis. It is that three terms “open markets”, “free markets” and “perfect markets” are constantly confused. The first is, more or less, worth striving for (at least if it is not a natural monopoly), the second is ideology and the third is an academic fiction that has no relation to management decisions. The problem, my informant said, was no so much ecnomics as a discipline, but economists who believe their our soothsaying rhetoric. I guess every society needs its priests, but it is worth questioning why they the secret knowledge of our economic clergy is about something as mundane as money.

My final short observation was simply the degree to which I recognised similar degrees of uncertainty between art and business about where we are going. As the initial effects of the 2008 crash work their way through the system, it seems we are simply desperately trying to return to the status quo ante. This is as true of Basel as of Wall Street. The art field is simply not producing any vital new thinking yet. However If we don’t respond to this crash then, as one of my companions said, what happens in 5 years from now will be terrifying – with the continuing deterioration in the climate combining with a yet deeper financial collapse. What art can do about this is difficult to say directly, but throughout the next period of probable slow stagnation, we should try to imagine the future otherwise in the way that only art and artists can  – a need which it seems we can all share whichever discipline we come from.

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

Deze lastige situatie is in het Nederlandse publieke bestel opgelost door een bufferlaag van experts tussen parlement en veld te schuiven die vanuit een pseudoautonomie de regering adviseren. De kunstraden, stichtingen en fondsen functioneren als een soort witwas-machine voor overheidsgeld; publiek geld wordt autonoom geld. Los van staat en markt is het kunstenveld keurmeester van eigen waar en zegt gechargeerd: ‘Het is goed, want wij vinden het zelf goed.’ Deze onwenselijke situatie komt, volgens ons, voort uit het gebrekkige inzicht in het belang van een autonome kunst binnen het geheel van een democratische samenleving.

Wij begrijpen kunst als autonoom als het ten volle zijn mogelijkheden benut om zich vrij uit te drukken binnen het democratische proces los van specifieke politieke wensen of commerciële overwegingen. Zo kan kunst, volgens ons, een constructief onderdeel zijn van een democratie. Om dit te begrijpen moet eerst een algemene opmerking over democratie worden gemaakt. Een democratie velt an sich geen oordeel over iets, maar is een systeem dat oordelen mogelijk maakt. Een democratie heeft een actief volk nodig om tot oordelen te komen. Voor een functionerende democratie moeten de leden van de samenleving met elkaar spreken over gedeelde ervaringen om tot collectieve inzichten te komen. Het kunnen interpreteren van ervaringen is daarmee van cruciaal belang voor een democratie. Kunstenaars zijn professionals in het analyseren en creëren van ervaringen. Het bespreken en doordenken van deze werken is daarom van belang voor een democratische samenleving. Het voedt de noodzakelijke, publieke discussies over zowel maatschappelijke als economische voorkeuren.

Een zo opgevatte kunst kan ook floreren in het huidige systeem mits we het anders begrijpen. Laat de tussenlaag tussen politiek en veld de kwaliteit van het (democratische) gesprek dat ontstaat over het werk controleren, om zo de receptie van het werk te betrekken in de criteria voor subsidieverlening. Op deze wijze kunnen politici zich ook mengen in het gesprek over kunst, omdat het gesprek over kunst net zo open en democratisch is als het publieke debat. Het spreekt voor zich dat een dergelijke heroriëntatie een grote wijziging voor de huidige kunstpraktijk betekent op een manier die nu nog niet overzien is en die serieus onderzoek vereist. Maar alleen op deze manier kunnen we uit de impasse breken die de huidige interpretatie van Thorbecke’s principe creëert, om zo te komen tot een democratische kunstpolitiek.

Charles Esche en Steven ten Thije

online gepubliceerd op de website van het NRC op 18 juni 2009

http://www.nrc.nl/opinie/article2275391.ece/Kunst_en_de_Thorbecke-paradox

Questions to which the answer was always sought in a more and more complex and delicate language which so few people had time to engage with and learn the skills to read it in all its details. Still, I have a weakness for it, I couldn’t resist reading Damish, struggling with the web of metaphors he was building.

Suddenly, however, I landed upon a passage which somehow seemed to pierce right through the divide that was the origin of my own feeling of displacement. Damish refers to a passage in which Matisse explains his difficulty with drawing a tree. The central focus of these remarks deal with the difficulty of representing a tree. Matisse poses the problem in all its beautiful, insignificant splendor (what in God’s name is the relevance of being able to represent a tree and to think so deep on the difficulties related to it…?). Matisse takes the question seriously and notices how there is no way to subtract himself from the equation. He – his feelings, his history – is part of the drawing, they are part of the tree, if there is to be an answer to the question of representation, then the world in which the tree exists needs to be taken into account. And in this case it even means taken into account that this ‘world’ is also the world that asks for a representation; it’s both the world and the object and the question that seeks to unite both, that wishes to makes the one transparent to the other and vice versa. In the worlds of Matisse: ‘I have an object in front of me that exerts an action on my mind, not only as a tree, but also in relation to a lot of other feelings.’

Matisse his simple wish to ‘draw a tree’ to ‘represent it’ was troubled by his emotional response to the tree. He continues: ‘I couldn’t rid myself of my emotion by copying the tree exactly, or by drawing the leaves one-by-one in conventional terms…But after having identified myself with it, I had to create an object that resembled a tree, the sign of a tree.’ These sentences intrigued me. Matisse seems to suggest that the only way to establish a ‘sign’, a representation, was to allow somehow the entrance of his world in the process of representing – even if the focus was not lying on the side of emotions but in the simple wish to copy. There is an objective sentiment at work that simply wants to copy, but that is overtaken and informed by the emotional world of the agent that wishes to copy. We want to represent and have no way to place a boarder between that what still is appropriate for representation and that which is personal, private, not worthy of representation. The will towards a sign, deals with this impossibility to place the border, but only on the basis of that action can we discuss and relate.

Reading these sentences in the library of the Van Abbemuseum it was easy to read the world ‘representation’ in a second way, with a political ring to it. The action of drawing a tree obtained the status of type of micro-politics, making apparent, through this mundane quest to copy a tree, how representation is a complex, entangled game of drawing lines between that which needs stating and those empty spots where one can retreat into the nowhereness of a private space. Perhaps, I thought, Matisse somehow unwillingly gave us a quite accurate description of a political process? It was a comforting thought to me, for it suggested that the struggle for description that is at the core of the art historical and critical practice, the sometimes so ephemeral actions of artists, they are not something marginal to our type of society – even if we study it at the margin of our lives, when we take time to engage with art.

The founding partners of L’Internationale are: Moderna galerija, Ljubljana;  MACBA, Barcelona; Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven and  Július Koller Archive, Bratislava. Each institution has shown through previous projects that they are repeatedly concerned to negotiate different forms of local knowledge and experience with the central art historical narrative written in one or two western political/economic capitals. This initiative will enable us more effectively to connect our own stories together in new rhizomatic ways and to reconsider internationalism and translocalism as more sensitive measures of art and its relation to society.

The concrete aims of L’Internationale are to develop common platforms and methodologies for presentation, education and research dealing with the full range of museological fields including collections, archives, publications, public mediation and conservation. The plan anticipates a long term cooperation that will concentrate on replacing the institutional spectacle with a sense of persistent presence and would offer our publics regular connections between each specific context.

It is interesting to speculate if Centre Pompidou would have been willing to make such a clear connection between art and society if they had also included male art in the exhibition. In fact, you get the answer upstairs were the classical modernist works are shown in the usual way and in which the men remain firmly locked into their “l”art pour l’art” aesthetics while a few isolated rooms are given over the the pre-1960 women artists and photographers in the collection. It seems as though, while women’s art can carry its content proudly, men are the masters of form and must keep control in that field. Indeed, it is a shame that the directors did not have the courage to follow the logic of the first part of the presentation with the classic modernist displays. Was this in order to ensure the masses of visiting tourists were not disappointed? Is it patronising of me (and of them) to imagine that tourists only want to see what they already know? I am not sure, but I think the job of such an institution as the Centre Pompidou is not to affirm the known in art and cultural history, but to question it. Elsewhere in the building, the new Parreno was sadly broken and closed and the Grasso nearby mirrored the Palais de Tokyo that we saw later in its rather sad, and rather typically French, obsession with 1960s sci-fi B-movies – Alphaville meets Monsieur Hulot’s Holidays, with neither being improved in the process.

The second stop for me was Madrid where we had organised a conference on the forthcoming project “Former West” with the current partners: BAK, Reina Sofia Museum; MoMA, Warsaw and our researchers/curators including Kathrin Rhomberg, Boris Groys, Claire Bishop and Simon Sheikh. In between the meetings, I managed to  see briefly the impressive reinstallation of part of the collection including the excellent contextual presentation of Picasso’s “Guernica” I think that as a museum, some of us should go to Madrid to see these displays in more detail as they can teach us a lot in the development of our projects. Unfortunately, the conference kept me too busy to see more than a brief overview but cheap Ryanairs from Eindhoven make a collective return visit very worthwhile. Former West itself was clarifying, I think. A dense public session on the first day was enlivened by Simon Sheikh’s telling observations about the various “political imaginaries of the exhibition” and how these can be detected when not made explicit, by Boris Groys comments about our obsession with talking about and displaying art being the result of a loss of a future prospect and horizon after 1989 and finally Piotr Piotrowski’s important desire to “provincialise the West”, which would not only give other cultures room to claim some stake in the global narratives but allow the West to understand itself as part of history rather than the always having the responsibility and right to claim everything that happens in the world, good and bad, as it own. The next day, there were some useful accounts of post-Franco Spanish history in “Spain, for example”. It is interesting to understand that Spain was only really part of the West for 10 years (c.1979-1989) and is therefore, together with Portugal, the least experienced member of the Former West club of nations. Perhaps this accounts for the huge investment in museums and cultural infrastructure in the last years in Spain, where it was necessary to shift people’s self-perception from the passive, fascist “Volk” to democratic agents and citizens. In this process, cultural identity and disputed artistic positions are important for an institution to discuss, as it was for the rest of former fascist Europe in the late 1940s and 1950s (cf Van Abbemuseum in this earlier period). Marcelo Esposito, one of the too few artists in the gathering, also showed a valuable work looking at the history of the Fiat factory in Lingotto, Torino and the shift from Fordist manufacturing to post-Fordism. This is an important addition to our thinking about the Former West as the processes of deindustrialisation (deskilling) that begin in the 1970s form a crucial part of the story of becoming ‘former’. I would love to trace these developments in Eindhoven with the closure of manufacturing by Philips and how it was carried out. If anyone knows any studies into post-Fordist Eindhoven I would be happy to hear – they must exist. Pragmatically, the sessions were useful to embed Former West further with each partner and it is now time that we as a museum become involved at  different levels in this project and everyone gets some further awareness of what we are doing. There are opportunities from fundraising and network building to research that can be developed and we should start working on it.

Finally back ‘home’ to Istanbul where I spend some time with Esra Sarigedik, who is now blond (!), but was mainly there for a new general research topic that serves in some ways as a prequel to Former West, The project goes under the title “Sweet Sixties”. This project has been put together by Georg Schöllhammer, Wien and Ruben Arshavyan, Yerevan in order to look at this crucial recent decade in a new way. The sixties marked a passage of transition across the globe but each region has its own story to tell. Those stories from the USSR and also less documented Soviet republics such as Armenia or Georgia, as well as large parts of the Middle East, can shed a different light on events, especially the artistic and cultural changes that took place, and ultimately may be able to shift the main (western) hegemonic narrative of lifestyle liberation, political failure, hippies, yippies and the ‘me’ generation that has become the sixties consensus. The project is still in its early days, but it has options for exhibitions and publications as public outcomes and might even tie into our new l’Internationale network, details of which I will also post here. It is interesting to discover the extent to which the process of ‘provincialisng the west’ begins in the 1960s with the exclusion of the “east” and the former colonies from the main cultural narratives. The famous exhibition “When Attitudes Became Form” from Bern in 1969 is remarkable for excluding all position outside the US and the US European Zone. This was not the case with other such shows at the same time but “Attitudes” became the benchmark that began the story of conceptualism and minimalism told from one side. In a way, despite its claims to universalism and the West’s military and political engagement across the world, the 1960s also represent a drawing back into itself that needs to be thought through. It is maybe here that the West begins to shape its process of becoming former. After the Sixties, globalisation begins but in that decade an imaginative retreat is arguably made. Now we are dealing with the consequences and backlashes against globalisation from all corners of a world – corners that are no longer manipulable in the same old colonial way but rather in real, contested dialogue with western culture over the future. Interestingly, it seems this new plural world seems to see it as its own right to take postions in regard to the west’s histories and to incorporate it as thier own in some measure. This is just what the west did to the rest before, until perhaps that sixties moment of retreat.

Victoria’s enthusiasm was convincing but what struck me more was the obvious ambition to create something new and the idea of a dream of (call it) enculturation in the west of china. In contrast, Looking at the results of the European elections – and not only in the Netherlands – and considering our western European ways of thinking about how and why to organize cultural provision, the lack of new imaginative possibility in (former) western Europe, was a suddenly distressing – rather than only depressing – experience. Victoria’s plans forced me to ask myself what kind of dream would we be able to share and to build in west Europe today? What kind of aspirations are our cultures offering to our citizens? What do we – in this small euro corner – want to become in the next years? These questions came on top of a recent  observation that research into average Dutch attitudes reveals relatively high levels of contentment with the present but extraordinary levels of anxiety for the future. Moreover, it is this anxiety that is much more telling than their current ease for people’s actual political and social behaviour.

It seems to me that our potential to dream in this part of the world is disabled by this anxiety as much as it weighs on our everyday lives. Our dreams are disabled, limited, restricted in ways we probably cannot yet begin to comprehend. We cannot put this down only to the familiar mantras of failed political leadership, overcommodification of culture, state implementation of fear. These are also present in most other parts of the world. In Egypt, South Africa and Korea (to name only three) the failures to revive political possibility and the reality of precarious life is more apparent than here. In Europe, however, the cultural conditions of the imagination seem much worse even while the economy remains relatively prosperous. Here, it often feels as though dreams are seen as childish, idealistic in a negative sense, even dismissed with deep, entrenched cynicism. In culture, just as in politics, the functioning paradigm is fundamentally conservative, obsessed to keep what we have, not let the values of the past erode or change, and closing the mind to ‘unknown cultures’ that seem a step too far. In a recent review of our Sanja Ivekovic exhibition, the writer even when as far as to call for the rebuilding of the walls that once defined the now strangely cosy Cold War world before 1989.

It is so hard – and therefore so distressing – to think how we in west Europe might be able to shake off these feelings of insecurity, lethargy and fearfulness. It does no good to tell people they have never lived longer, been safer, had more material comforts. All that only seems to encourage is the fear that such a situation cannot last. Anyway, the whole idea that such a proposed information campaign or political action might achieve something is largely discounted. The meaningfulness of political debate is under attack, enough people take no part to make it seem irrelevant. Concepts such as consciousness raising or lifelong education are seen as patronising. Even raising awareness is under threat in a context where information is overabundant and mostly cynically (if willingly) received.

My questions about dreams remain and grow however. How do we think ourselves out of this condition? How do we challenge the cynicism of others? How to we make agreements to aspire for things in common and without personal recognition? How do we connect the world that is “only one world” (Badiou) to the ideas of making parallel worlds that was the subject of the curated show in the Venice Biennial?

Thinking about that show, it was clear that the start of an answer to my questions lay elsewhere. Between the Singapore, Korean and Palestinian pavilions perhaps, or in the tensions of Wodicko’s strange aesthetic projections and reality soundtrack. I don’t really know.

What I do know is that we curators and art institutions have to be attentive to a change in the tenor of the times at this moment. We have to look and listen carefully for attitudes changing and try to understand what they portend. In that way perhaps something of the possibility of dreams might return….and it cannot happen too soon.

“Uwaga Warszawa”

These were amongst the first words of Polish I heard and remain the few in my non-existent vocabulary. My usual attempt at clustering a handful of useful equivalents of “please” “thank you” “hello” “goodbye” “where’s the bathroom?” slipped through my fingers. The harder I tried to grasp “Na zdrowie” (the Polish “proost” or “cheers”) the more elusive the phrase and other strange sounds proved for my limited native English palate. The “sssshhhhs” and and “zjls” and “wizcs” on signage around Warsaw appear in a typeface developed in post World War II years – a simple sans serif font, slightly angular, designed purely functionally – being easily readable from a distance. The thick-set black letters on creamy lit-up boxes on train platforms and traffic signals are so distinctive, like the sounds of the words they give utterance to.

“uwaga” means “watch out” or “wait” – an interesting tension between two kinetic positions. “Uwaga” has also become the name for the lowest paid workers at the large Vietnamese market near Warsaw’s old Stadion. Under the impenetrable rows of corrugated iron roofs, the “uwagas” trolley half-dressed manikins, teetering towers of cheap stockings, containers of pirate DVDs – all of which the local government turn a blind eye to – back and forth, back and forth, shouting “Uwaga! Uwaga!” to newbies who get in the way. The Vietnamese intelligentsia who arrived in Poland during the 60s as part of Communist educational exchange stayed, brought over their wives, kids, mothers and with that the trade of soups and so-s which they hadn’t found amongst the pierogi and chlodnik of Warsaw. The market lies across the river, out from beneath the watchful shadow of Stalin’s “Wedding Cake” (or the massive Palace of Culture) dominating the city centre. It has its own radio station, its own language, its own timetable (opening at 4 a.m.) and its own trade system. A complete anomaly, the market has only recently become an “it spot” for some of Warsaw’s alternative crowd who slurp noodles in the sun before being chased off by the police when they clear out the stalls at 2 p.m. daily.

Eating Vietnamese with Joanna

In the thick of the market lies a major bus station, which over the years has slowly been swallowed up by the clutter of underwear, cosmetics and unruly piles of shoes. The market itself has taken on the name of the stadium that used to be the landmark there. Built out of Warsaw’s rubble following the Second World War, the stadium symbolised the literal reconstruction of the devastated city. Its architecture was of the familiar minimal, functional format of that era – excluding the impractically long tunnel which players would take 6 minutes to run through before being greeted by the crowd’s applause – thus further halving half time.
Its magnificence slowly lapsed behind the greater restructuring of the city both physically and ideologically beginning in the early 90s. The stadium’s rubble on rubble was then removed by private developers commissioned by local government, who then closed off the site in order to construct a completely new sport centre. The symbolism of this gesture and the simple chaos of the Vietnamese market seem to mimic Warsaw’s straddling and doubling over elements of agitated pasts, trying to layer them with wanted presents and futures.

Warszawa Centralna

We took the metro back to the Warsaw Centralna. Its neon lights and imposing socialist style interior jarred with the microcosmic third world we had just left. Platform 13 ½. The Muzeum of modern art was called that because the word “contemporary” was synonymous with “unknown” or perhaps more accurately, “dangerous”. Their temporary premises are in what used to be a furniture showroom before they relocate to their future building, next to the Palace of Culture. A neon sign, salvaged from a cinema that was demolished, is on the wall of the entrance. From a time older than the 70s brown mosaic weighing down the walls of the furniture shop, which Sebastian said they uncovered from behind a coat of plaster, and long before the contemporary internationalism which the museum now actively seeks to frame, the ever-so evident layers of history provide a new surface tension upon which art can materialise. These signs of change, overturn and inescapable catch-up-ism keep coming up, like the word “sztuki” – not knowing what this word meant we were confused by its repetition in most museum and gallery titles. We asked Lukasz Ronduda from the Contemporary Art Centre at the Ujazdowski, what it meant – a smile flashed across his eyes – what is the meaning of “art” indeed?

There are as many answers to this as there are practitioners in Warsaw. The legacy of a rigid institutional training for artists and historians seems still to hold sway, as reflected in the curatorial statements of Zacheta and in the work of many of the younger artists who we came across – manifesting their critique merely by rebelling against the white cube, rather than, what one feels is a wider return to that context as a symptom of the rest of Europe’s exhausting ten year obsession with site-specificity. Art in public spaces – that means, hotels, train stations, parks, office buildings – in post-World War II years, was put under the mandate of the PSP, a state appointed body which then controlled every attempt to intervene artistically in Warsaw’s cityscape and resulted in the censorship and interrogation of many liberal art practitioners until the early 90s. The imbrication of art in bureaucratic process is certainly not uncommon, but as with the rubble underneath the stadium and the mobile phone banners concealing socialist government department buildings, the palimpsest of art histories and to-comes is still being uncovered, filled in, rejected and owned. Many initiatives such as Raster, Fundacja Bec Zmiana, and the Laura Palmer Foundation are currently occupied with just these concerns, broadening the forms and functions of art and discourse production in both public and institutional space – through a dynamic set of ongoing discussions and publications – building a new vocabulary around this word “sztuki”.

Kraszinski Studio

The topfloor studio of Edward Kraszinski is one example of how these generational, political and practical approaches may coexist and even complement. This conceptual artist, contemporary of Buren and follower of Mondriaan, treated his studio as living installation and since his death in 2002, it has remained frozen in time, unchanging except for the slow deterioration of paper on chipboard and fading of the cobalt tape which covers almost every surface. The Foksal Gallery Foundation have taken responsibility for the space and around it, constructed a glass pavilion and project space for artists to hold screenings and discussions while on residency in the apartment next door. There is a staircase to the rooftop of the 10-story building, and what seems like the whole city is visible. Seems to be. But from here, it’s only the most recent layer. When thinking about Warsaw waiting, watching out, holding back, teetering on the next step, I am reminded of a statement by South African curator, Gavin Jantjes:

Those who do not want to put themselves through this exercise will always have to live in a world where the old ideas prevail, where the rule of behaviour between cultures [or ideologies] denotes that one dominates the other. They live in a world with fixed categories and hierarchies of culture that looks backwards as it tries to move forwards, remembering only what has been, rather than facing what is emerging. The dinosaurs that hold these views will stumble and fall over obstacles that could be avoided by just looking where they are going. The road we are going down is an old one, but we have not travelled it in a very long time, and so the world of tomorrow will be different…

Don’t uwaga Warszawa.

Tatlin's Monument revisited

Work of Carol Jackson at NEXT Art Fair, Chicago, 2009

It is only been 3 months since my last visit to the city and altogether the 7th research travel in the Heartland from Chicago to Detroit, Omaha, Kansas and back to the Netherlands. This time Stephanie and I further worked on the concept and artist projects of Heartland “Making the World You Want to Live In” at the Smart Museum in Chicago as well as on the Heartland publication that should be ready for the opening at Smart on October 1st.

Work of Carol Jackson at Next Art Fair, Chicago, 2009

My 2nd day in Chicago I spend in and around the Merchandise Markt, home of NEXT and Chicago Art Fair. At the fair I met up with Ruba Katrib, MOCA Assistant Curator. Together we visited the Freij Collection, one of the many private collections that the city has to offer. She is in preparation for CONVENTION at MOCA in Miami. She explains: “Convention examines forms of gathering in our society; every artist in the exhibition is examining this phenomenon from a different perspective.”

“In Miami, we have seen first-hand the enormous impact of events such as Art Basel Miami Beach, Miami International Boat Show, Winter Music Conference,” states MOCA Executive Director Bonnie Clearwater.  “In most cases, these mass gatherings alter the culture of the city.  Although the current economic recession is impacting participation in events such as these to a certain degree, conventions, meetings and informal social gatherings continue to play an essential role in effective networking, innovation, and serendipitous encounters.”

CONVENTION will feature performances, workshops, site-specific installations, and video projects by international and local artists examining the effects and roles of conventions, festivals, and other social and professional gatherings.  Participating artists include: Julieta Aranda, Fia Backström, Xavier Cha, Anne Daems & Kenneth Andrew Mroczek, Jim Drain, Fritz Haeg, Corey McCorkle, Dave McKenzie, Gean Moreno, My Barbarian, Christodoulos Panayiotou, Sean Raspet, Bert Rodriguez, Superflex & Jens Haaning and others to come. As pointed out by Ruba the exhibition’s interactive elements and open-ended format will actively engage the community and challenge the definition of a conventional museum exhibition. I am looking forward to the challenges that the museum encounters in a local setting that is mainly based on seasonal event culture.

The South Shore Drill Team

The great thing about art fairs is that you get to meet with a lot of institutional colleagues from all over the states that you just know through invitation cards, essays and word by mouth. Some of the extra events around the fairs make it possible to visit sights that you usually would not be able to access or be part of.  Such as a small tour led by curator Hamza Walker through the exhibition “ Several Silences”  at the Renaissance Society.
After the tour curator colleague Rosanne Altstatt from Purdue University and I decided to spend more time at the South Side, University of Chicago. As part of another “Our Literal Speech” event we watched the South Shore Drill Team perform, which marched at the mighty main Quadrangle at the University. Followed by a performance speech by Heartland artist Theaster Gates: “ To Be Pocket: Militaristic Effeminacy, The ‘Hood’ and Adorno’s Last Sermon, or, It’s Over When The Black Marching Band Goes Home.”

Chalk board of the auditorim, University of Chicago

Only two days later Stephanie Smith, I and the Whoop Dee Doo Kansas City team returned to the very same auditorium where the performance speech was held. This time though we came to scout sites in the vicinity of the University of Chicago for a possible performance/installation of Heartland artists Whoop Dee Doo in Chicago.

Jaimee Warren and Stephanie Smith checking the stage

DETROIT and the future of Transportation
“Hybrid Tech – Wasteband – New Physica Consequences – Detroit Unleaded – Electronic Stimulus Plan”
These are a few of the invite flyer titles that announce music events, debates, expos, shows and events in and around Detroit. Coming around in Detroit and see places is not very easy without a car. The public transportation system has been basically abandoned after the car industry conquered the city and implemented numerous highways in the city center. What would I have seen and done without my rental car, my navigation system as well as the various recommendations and tips of my great hosts Gina and Mitch of Design 99 and all the other great people that I met and got to know in Detroit? Thank you all for you time and helpful talks, discussions and insights into the cultural movements and real estate culture within the city.

Inspired by the spectacular media buzz about cheap housing and potentials for (social) art projects in Detroit it was dear to me to look into what the possibilities and responsibilities are of obtaining a house or some kind of real estate. This times visit to Motor City was dedicated to look into possible housing in the Hamtramck area, bordering Detroit downtown, a densely populated area with a great mix of people originating from places like Bangladesh, Poland, Lebanon and others. What is so unique of Hamtramck?  Community life is lived in this area. Walking from house to house, house to store is possible. Walking infrastructures let my heart shine; I am not looked at as a person just arriving from another planet since other people walk as well. Yeah. I enjoy the first sun rays and the blossoming of the trees and flowers in the neatly arranged gardens as well as the wildlife in the more abandoned areas.

Foreclosure Home, Moran Street, Hamtramck

Foreclosure Home, Pedro, Hamtramck

Spring Time – energy is up and the idea of the Power House is taking up more and more space in my head while I walked the streets and visited foreclosure homes in the Hamtramck area. The Power House was started by the Design 99 duo Gina Reichert and Mitch Cope in March of 2008 with the purchase of one house and two empty lots totaling $4,900. Strategizing ways of intervention while watching the foreclosure crisis, that is still continuing, their idea is to turn a negative value into a positive asset by reinventing the house as a Power House to serve two primary goals: First to develop a house as a model of architectural experimentation and secondly the house as social art project, a platform for communication between members of the community. “Every act that is made with the house is readily apparent to the neighbors and, even without asking, many neighbors give us materials, asks to take materials, offer to help, ask for help, and also help protect the house from thieves. The dialogue has already begun with just the few small moves already made.” (http://www.powerhouseproject.com)

Andrew Herrscher, Mireille Rodier and Gina Reichert in Detroit

The process to shape their neighborhood already begun, artists like Jon Brumit from San Francisco or Corine Smith from the Netherlands decided to move in and just recently the Detroit Unreal Real Estate Agency, worked with 10 students from the DAI (Dutch Architecture Institute) on site in the Hamtramck area. This project was initiative by architects Andrew Herscher and Mireille Roddier from Ann Arbor, University of Michigan, and Dutch based curator Femke Lutgerink as well as Partizan Publik’s Christian Ernsten and Joost Janmaat. (http://detroitunrealestateagency.blogspot.com)

Rhonda, my real estate advisor was very helpful and introduced me into the world of foreclosures. Acquiring a piece of land or a house as a matter fact is not too complicated, and yes very cheap, 1900 USD for a 3 bedroom house with a fair sized garden. As someone living in a country where real estate eventually becomes part of your life, like a relationship, the opportunity of getting a house for such a non-value, is triggering. But in a way this confronts you with your own cultural heritage and your capitalistic upbringing as well as your personal values of what you think you should do with it. Yet it is not about a quick investment at this moment in time, no, even though a tax consultant would not be able to understand that idea. Properties might have lost its monetary value, but the potential is there to create other longer lasting values with it.  In a time of economical as well as political uncertainty the drive to be involved and have a physical impact on something cannot be denied. Taking over property can be seen in relation to become part of something, be responsible for something and have an influence on something in the process of redevelopment and reshaping.  To be continued…

Disnelyland a la Hamtramck

Part of Dmytro Szylak's Disnelyland installation, Hamtramck

Detroit based artist David Clement pointed out the unique Disneyland installation in one of the back roads in Hamtramck. As a retired GM line-man, Dmytro Szylak’s, turned his hobby into let’s say an American folk art collection over the last 15 years in his back yard. Former Ukranian Szylak’s places American patriotic symbolism (the cold war is certainly one of the major subjects) crafted from wood and steel in combination with found objects and original art pieces.

David Clements, artist, photographer, location scout, who recently published the book “Talking Shops. Detroit Commercial Folk Art”, was very generous and took an afternoons time to show me his Detroit.  Together we visited some historic sites such as the Freer House located in the city center of Detroit.  The Freer house, once the private house of businessman Charles Freer that hold his art collection there with works by James NcNeill Whistler etc, is considered to be Michigan’s finest example of the Shingle Style, built in the 1890 and now part of Wayne State University serving as the Merril-Palmer Institute ( renown child development research group). The house is still part of the collection of Freer (Freer Art Gallery, Washington D.C.), which is kept in shape by the friends of
Freer House, who are dedicated to raise awareness of the global cultural legacy of Freer in and outside of Detroit.

Together David and I visited photographer Corine Vermeulen-Smith, who at that time was photographing around Lafayette Park, a large park and complex of apartments and housing cooperatives just east of downtown Detroit. This area is also part of the Mies van der Rohe apartment buildings, classic examples of the “International Style” and extremely landscaped areas. Thanks to Corine and her friend we were able to get a tour in one of the buildings and it was interesting to hear all the stories about in what way you are allowed to use the gardens and how you have to subscribe to the rules and conventions to keep this place an architectural monument.

Corine Vermeulen-Smith and David Clements

OMAHA
Stephanie and I meet up again at the Omaha airport on Friday afternoon the 8th of May. At first we gather with artist group Carnal Torpor to talk through their installation in the Heartland show at Smart.

See image Carnal Torpor

Afterwards the Bemis Center for the Contemporary Arts invited us to join the dinner of Austrian artist Paul Renner announced as :The Omaha Dinner “Gastrosophical Journey Through Europe”. The dinner was a presentation of art objects, a series of on site performances and nose-to tail cooking served to about 60 dinner guests in a six course array of culinary delights.

Ashley image

Instead of getting too drunk or in a food fight Stephanie and me saved our energy to see the concert of SSION at Slowdance (a bar in downtown Omaha) later that night. Cody Critcheloe, one of the Heartland artists, is the founder and lead singer of SSION.

The very next morning our great host Hesse Mac Graw (curator at Bemis) organized a tour through the Phillip Schrager Collection of Contemporary Art. It is a private collection, accessible upon appointment in the building complex where Mr. Schrager also established his business and office locations.

Visiting the Schraeger Collection with Hesse

MAY 9, 2009 – The quote of that day on behalf of the artist Matthew Dehaemers and his exhibition at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts titled (402) DisConnect/ReConnect is by Ellen Goodman:
“I have never been especially impressed by the heroics of the people convinced that they are about to change the world. I am more awed by the heroism of those who are willing to struggle to make one small differences after another.

Sean Wart, installation in progress, Bemis Art Center

Stephanie Smith and Kerstin Niemann at Bemis Art Center, Omaha

Later that day we enjoyed meeting with Sean Wart who is installing a site specific installation in a site building of the Bemis turning that space into “The Preconscious Europe Bar”. And yet, Sean, I hope to take up the discussion about the title once we meet again. The space and its installation will be used for events and performances in relation to the exhibition program at the Bemis Art Center.

The last night in Omaha Stephanie and I spend watching “Hunger”, the first feature film by Steve Mac Queen, at the newly build independent movie theater. Film Streams (http://www.filmstreams.org) is a non-profit organization devoted to the presentation and discussion of film as an art form. “Hunger”, an interpretation of the highly emotive events surrounding the 1981 IRA Hunger Strike, certainly was a counter program to our previous day spend at the feast.

Omaha impressions

Last stop Kansas City
Once I brought Stephanie back to the airport I drive from Omaha to Kansas to meet Kansas based artist, rocker and performer Cody Critcheloe, before returning to the Netherlands that day.

The navigation system assured that I arrive on time at Cody’s apartment, even though I got lost in the first place since Kansas City is not only in the state of  Kansas, but also in the state of Missouri. Cody luckily just woke up. His last performance with SSION took place only a few hours before my arrival in Kansas City. It is great to get to know the person that I just watched on stage 2 days ago – yet talking to an artist about his contribution for the Heartland exhibition at Smart.   Ssion is preparing to release its Fool’s Gold film in September and a new album, titled BENT, the following month.

Image Cody C

Currently SSION is touring with FISHERSPOONER (13th of May until 5th of June) on the west coast and in the Midwest. Please take a look at the videos of SSION (http://www.myspace.com/ssion or www.ssion.com) and if you are in the area make sure you don’t miss their action.

Kerstin Niemann

Continuing on the key-issue Charles already pointed towards in his comment, I wish to consider some questions surrounding the ideological position taken in by the representatives of Tate and Beaubourg. Both claimed in one way or another that they were not ideologically determined, suggesting that the walls and halls of their museums are no machinery for the reproduction of a certain organization of the social relationships within a, perhaps global, society. They wishes to consider themselves as open spaces where ‘a’ public could interact and exchange, learn and appreciate, an art no longer of only a western brand, but of global making. It is not hard to get a sense of the contradictions at work here. For the idea that acquiring art from all over the world and displaying it on one geographic location, for a global public, requires that an impressive segment of that public needs to travel a great deal to see works that once may have been in their own vicinity. Just as one can wonder how these workers behind the walls of these large museums, who select and collect these works, are able to make their judgments ideologically unbiased. Buying a work and placing it in a collection is by definition it seems an ideological act, for it affirms a certain order from which it derives. When we buy, we use our limited capital to affirm a certain work and defend this affirmation by using arguments that are as much inclusive as they are exclusive. It’s immensely naïve to think one could somehow surpass this situation, and it’s important to realize the uncomfortable position a museum find itself in, for it’s this feeling of uncomfort which is the beginning of any honest speculation on ones position and its possible potential.

This all may sound nice, but the challenges only begin here. For can we describe in more detail how the ideology of the museum functions? Let me turn to a somewhat forgotten French philosopher to explore this question: Althusser. In a text on ‘Ideology and State’, he distinguishes between two types of ‘machinery’ at work in society which maintain its status quo, on the one hand the ‘State Apparatus’ (police, army, judges, etc.) and the ‘Ideological State Apparatus’ (Church, school, certain forms of medicine, culture). Both function, according to the strict Marxism that Althusser inheres to, to reproduce the conditions and relations of production, which are the source for the profound contradiction underlying the capitalist society. Even if we believe that the communist response to this is likely to turn into similar contradictions, the analysis that a society continuously produces and reproduces imbalance is not such a crazy claim. So, even if we should not strap on our boots and start a long march, the workings of these two ‘Apparatuses’ should still interest us. In Althusser’s analysis their difference lies in that the ‘State Apparatus’ works ‘by force’, whereas the ‘Ideological State Apparatus’, works ‘by ideology’ – no surprise here. It’s understandable that the museum is part of the latter group, and that for those reasons our focus also lies there. So, we can ask ourselves now, what does this mean; how does ideology ‘work’ in this case?

Here a philosophical point is necessary. An ideology is the name we give to the principle which organizes the manner in which we arrive at representations of our reality. This may sound cryptic, but one can give a clear example of it in museum terms, in the sense that one can order artworks for instance by means of style or by means of chronology. If the principle (the ideology) at work is style one can place works of different periods next to each other and state: they are the related, for they are of the same style. A chronological order would oppose such reasoning and say: they may bear formal similarities, however, they do not belong to the same period and therefore are different. The representation of the art in the museum therefore is determined by the type of relationship which creates the organization of the category of art. One can attest that this is much more a fundamental principle of knowing something in general, and that this has little to do with the social organisation of a society. However, there are historical examples that suggest otherwise. For instance, when the Louvre was founded in the chaos of the French Revolution, the curators were confronted with the problem that they had to exhibit many works which showed signs of religious and feudal origin, which were considered counter revolutionary. If they would have organized the galleries following the principle of ‘subject’ they would create a display which would affirm a social organization that they were happily abolishing at the moment. Therefore to save the ‘grand masters’ from the past, they suggested that the merit of their work lay not in the symbiosis of subject and form, but solely in their form and that the gallery should be organized demonstrating the progression of form. This then new historical arrangement responded to the new organization based on the idea of the Republic. So the manner in which a museum decides to present relations between works is rooted deeply in the contemporary social organization of society. (For a detailed account of the formation of the Louvre, on which this argument is based, see Andrew McClellan’s exemplary study ‘The Invention of the Louvre’.)

An ideology is therefore close if not similar to an epistemology – a theory of knowledge. Which means that the way in which we know is related to way in which we behave in a society, for the result of these principles as we can see in the case of installing artworks in the museum, result in a particular type of action. And, in this case, it is hard to overestimate the banality in which this manifests itself. The form and type of language one uses, the way the architecture is structured and functions, the way in which we wear our clothes. They all are manifestations of ideologies. An ideology, therefore, does not ‘exist’ as a stone exists, but only exists in a practice: in the production, reproduction and implementation of it. There is no thing-like status which we can attribute the ideology as something that lies behind, or underneath, a certain event, but it coincides with it and only ‘is’, as long as the event exists and produces the same effect. Nor should we think that there is a type of knowing, a type of human conduct, which somehow escapes this situation and can be ‘pure’.

But what particular role does an ideology then play within the maintenance of the status quo? Again we may sense that it’s important, but it’s rewarding to take the extra step and try to think it through and formulate why. It’s clear that the easiest way to maintain the status quo in a certain situation is by force. If one wants to prevent an apple from falling to the floor, one has to oppose the force of gravity. In a similar fashion, if one wants to maintain a social situation of unbalance, one has to forcefully maintain it and threaten the other party in its survival if it does not do as told. Slavery being the clearest example here. However, these axiomatic cases, cannot be copy-pasted to a whole society. So a society in its wish to keep things the way they are, be they fair or not, needs a more elaborate structure to keep it functional. This elaborate structure is the ideology, which is not just available to the one with force, but can be ‘possessed’ by nearly everyone participating in the systems of representation and debate – all those who can ‘know’ and can apply that ‘knowledge’. For, if one is convinced of the correctness of a certain form of behaviour, one doesn’t need a gun pointed at one to act accordingly. The function of Ideological State Apparatus is to disseminate and reproduce this behaviour by making those who are participating within it liable to the current dominant organisational form and its logic. Tonny Bennett has in this line suggested that the museum in the modern society is not so much a apparatus of repression and discipline (to use the Foucaultian term), but is one of the mechanisms which transforms those who are subject to it in agents to the ideology inherent to it. By making the public connoisseurs of the type of relationships privileged by a particular type of social organisation, one makes them collaborators to the dominant form of reasoning and if that reasoning is coherent, chances are they will try to live up to and maintain that coherence. So if the repressive State Apparatus punishes and disciplines those who transgress, the Ideological State Apparatus produces consensus about what is transgression and what not. For details on the type of consensus produced in the museum one can look into Bennett’s study, even if the precise nature of the aesthetic consensus produced is in museum of art is not touched upon there in great depth. (Bennett, The Birth of the Museum, 2006 (first published 1995), Routledge)

This may all be, but it paints a rather depressive if not suicidal picture for the museum that somehow wants to act not just as an agent to the dominant ideology, but seeks to produce some form of resistance against it. The only logical action that seems to follow to this grim picture is abolition. If the nature of an institute as the museum is as described above, there is no escape. But, perhaps this is just another form of delusion, for if ideology is embedded in the way we know, then there is no outside to it which we can ‘know’ and one institute more or less will make only little difference. We will not stop knowing because of the closure of one institute. One can also ask if something which knows no outside, can be discussed in the way done above. For if there is no outside to it, how can we recognize it? For it is everywhere (where we know), which is the same as saying nowhere; and here being collapses easily into nothingness. Is not the whole debate on ideology a type of pseudo-debate, since it originates in an assumption that an ideology is something and therefore not everything, and that therefore there must be a domain of non-ideology. Or, formulated differently, does not the type of argumentation as followed above, continuously refer to a space beyond ideology, just by suggesting that it is repressive and that no one wants to accept such a state of affairs? So, is not the claim that an ideology manifests itself always when we start to know just a particular form of repression. For it suggest that we should revolt, but makes it extremely unattractive at the same time, by logically coming to the conclusion that it’s meaningless. Is this the unhappy result of an argument that started to drive down a dead end street?

No, there is a way, but not out, I’m afraid. On the conference one participant made the titillating remark, that a museum that wants to be radical forces itself to radical action, and to most radical of all actions is abolition. So, museum are confronted with a quite clear set of choices, either one prevails and seeks to remain in power, or one goes down. But, thinking this through, it seemed to me that answering one extreme by another one, is not radical but logical in an almost conventional manner. It is refers to a form of argument that knows only yes or no, a positive and a negative, and shows little sympathy for a more complex and – to use a new key-word of the VAM – entangled position. For it seems that resistance does not so much manifest itself in the radical refusal to participate, but in the complex attempt to explore the possibilities of ones position which stretches itself out towards a form of hegemony and reproduction of a certain system, but nevertheless constantly is confronted with the imperfections of its method and the ‘failures’ within the system. Considered discursively the museum might allude towards a conformative structure, but when looking at the practice of the museum, one has to realize that the harmonious clarity of its discursive imperialism al to seldom is achieved in an unambiguous manner. It seems that the possibility of the museum lies neither in its complete abolition, nor in a straightforward embrace of its ideological functions, but in the muddy, concrete practice that determines its being. In a sense we have to realize that we are a force and seek to investigate to what end we are using it unconsciously. For an action executed within the museum often, if not always, contain elements that refuse the logic of ideology. To give one example, for instance the conservation of an object or installation, constantly places one for a problem that the ideology of the museum would rather not have, namely that one needs to decide what is ‘true’ about the work and what not, what needs to be persevered and what not. One can deal with this problem in a unreflective manner and simply try to answer the question to the best of ones ability, but one can also see the fact that there somehow is an internal resistance within a work towards a clear incorporation into this ideology of preservation as a fruitful and interesting event and see it as a moment that allows one to consider how ones ideology is composed and what possibilities and challenges it contains. I think it is here that we should seek for the possibility of resistance: in the practice of the museum. It’s in the sheer resistance of a painting to hovering in mid-air demanding the continuous force that pins it to the wall, that we might find the most powerful form of criticality available to us.

It was also organized partly as a forum for thinking about the opening of the new Moderna Galerija and it’s planned sister institution, the new museum of contemporary art at Metelkova, a former barracks area in central Ljubljana where important shows have already been held.

The opening session bringing together the power players from the old colonial capitals was in many ways the most fascinating or revealing of all. Only in the case of Reina Sofia did their seem to be a deeper awareness of the issues involved in post-colonialist thinking, perhaps because the ambitions of this institution seem rather more precise than its two competitors. The Tate showed us what an inclusive vision of the universal museum in the 21st century would be complete with its “non-ideological’ context and it’s ambition to collect wirk from the old outposts of its empire. This latter attempt was particularly ironic given the rather beautiful confluence when, after the Tate lecture, we emerged into the lobby of the Ljubljana city art museum where the conference was held to be greeted by the enormous head of the emperor Napoleon. His collecting policy in Egypt immediately sprang to mind after all the images of middle East art from Sheena Wagstaff’s computer. A little sadly, the talk from the director of the museum in the centre Pompidou was rather less ambitious in his laying of geographic claims and concentrated on a forthcoming exhibition called ‘elles’ where only women artists from the collection – both those of a feminist persuasion and the others – will be shown to the exclusion of all men. In contrast to both however, Reina Sofia was modest and cautious, worried about what its attempt to include or help existing Latin American discourses and networks might do to the people concerned. In the discussion, the revelation about non-ideology of the Tate’s spaces seemed to emerge out of a rather innocent lack of self-consciousness. Here is maybe a perverse way in which institutions and people with experience of real existing socialism gives an advantage it that the ideologies of power, capital and politics at play in all presentations of art appear much more visibly and explicitly than to those with an Anglo-American or perhaps also pure western European experience. It is here perhaps that something of the more recent discourses around farewell to post-colonialism and our own ‘former west’ might be able to create some space for ourselves – though the money+power+lack of subject consciousness equation is a powerful hegemonic tool that can destroy the possibility of criticalist museums through relentless incorporation. Indeed, given the brazilian presence, Osvaldo Andrade’s Cannibalist manifesto seemed a suitable reference. It was also remarkable to me that despite the Tate’s or Beaubourg’s globalizing, inclusive ambitions, both speakers pointed beyond their own responsibility when asked specific questions. According to the Tate Modern, issues of post-imperialism and immigration were dealt with by curators at Tate Britain while the contextual and discursive programme of the beaubourg was generated by another department and not the museum’s competence. These are severe limitations, I would have thought, to museum universalism unless such issues are the very ones that might disturb such an ambition in the first place.

The chreography of the conference was remarkably effective and Zdenka Badovinac and Adela Zeleznik deserve to be heartily congratulated. Next up was an extended panel of ex-YU institutions that was equally fascinating it its diversity and similarity. Non- existing, closed, leaking or just about to open institutions were enumerated, the most problematic being the arsaevi project in Sarajevo which seemed still largely driven by the immediate responses to post-war trauma than a more sober cultural provision for Bosnian society today – but I have never been to Bosnia so I find it difficult to comment. The new museum of contemporary art in Zagreb was dissappointly presented as contentless architecture. Given the great strength of the Croatian art scene (Iveković, Malkjović, Stilinović shown in VAM, WHW as probably the most effective curatorial group in europe etc.), it was dissappointing not to here how art history could be rewritten from Zagreb, answering back to the new incorporating centralist narratives of the former West.

There is much more to say about the subsequent sessions – including a fascinating account of ‘modern’ and ‘contemporary’ meanings in Sao Paulo museums and the extraordinary proposal for a Guggenheim-Hermitage fluxus spaceship in Vilnius. So, more later but I also leave it to my colleagues to report further.

The first time I saw an image of the New Museum building I was confused. The New Museum building, shaped as a pile of white bright boxes, outstands in the landscape where it is located. It gives the sensation of a future fantasy. The potential of reality and its fantastic power to disrupt our sense of normality is what I find most inspiring. It is also interesting that such imaginary disruption may be provoked by a museum of contemporary art with its position within specific contexts.

This kind of surprising disruption in the urban landscape as with the New Museum has come up more than once here in New York City. Some places really create a sort of collision of time, reality and imagination. At least to me it is still unbelievable to conceive the construction of New York City bridges and tunnels happened a century ago while they are still future inspiration sources. The Brooklyn-Battery tunnel that was opened in 1950 is a good example. It connects Manhattan and Brooklyn allowing underwater traffic. That tunnel was still on construction when further uptown on the West Side of this island another fantastic construction had already been inaugurated, also extraordinary but rather inspired in Medieval times and more picturesque landscapes: The Cloisters of the Metropolitan Museum. A whole area of land was converted into a public park where the ‘cloister’ was built to host an art collection from the Middle Ages. The park, the building, most of its collection but also the land that creates the view across the Hudson River in New Jersey create an extraordinary site.

There is a powerful imaginary strength in NYC–I think stronger than in other cities. Such imaginary power I refer does not have to do (only) with the load of representations and remediation of the city in visual narratives that are part of our global popular culture. I write rather about the power of imaginary disruption that one can encounter within the city. NYC is for real as the extraordinary places I described, as its inhabitants, their needs, their work and their dreams. Other sort of disruption about normality but rather difficult to see because it hurts are, for example, homeless people that sleep at the skirts of the skyscrapers and global corporations. Many of those freezing homeless speak my language, and with some of them I may share more than a Mexican passport and the social inequalities that bring us in different ways here where we lack of ties that hold the imaginary community that is our nationality. Such imaginary community tears apart also at the border revealing the economic and social inequalities stronger. New York is a city of immigrants and yet many of them -expelled of jobs or newcomers- lack of home here and they are symbolically expelled from the places they left as it is the case of Mexico. NYC’s disruptions expose the intensity of a flow, its fruits and remains: of people, capital ideas and things. Such movement is intense. That may be its power.

To have or take a position in such a powerful space –reflective, political, symbolical- within it, I think, may be empowering. How would art, museums or artists allow us to regain power and build up humanly bonds from such human and economic intensity and its remains? I think that by actually lighting upon its extraordinary reality, by coming up with imagination to take an actual position as institutions, creators, individuals that as such are related to a social context, and by provoking to imagine and engage anew with our specific contexts that are immerse in a global flow.

Most inspiring proposals I found also here: by artists, educators, and creators. Such is the case of the work and approach of Teddy Cruz who was invited by Doug Ashford and Walid Raad to participate in the Interdisciplinary Seminar they both organize Cooper Union School of ARt. Teddy Cruz is an architect based in San Diego and whose work that is mainly concentrated in urbanism, lights upon San Diego and that specific context right at the Mexican-American border. His proposal addresses art, artists and institutions to re-think their audiences, to take and reshape empty spaces –as the public space or the holes of political responsibility. He points and occupies the gaps within the social structure that urban dynamic creates and that we tend to ignore. What Cruz expresses through his work is new ways to think and build up networks among people and organizations living together in such a city that grows at one side of the border but that expand beyond. Cruz is also working now on projects in New York City – where after time the very intense rhythm of ideas and work let little room for individuals and institutions to reflect and feel empowered.

Back on the Bowery, at the New Museum,more things and clues about the role of museums and art as building networks started getting together in the Museum as Hub. Be(com)ing Dutch at a Distance in this specific location with the contributions by Michale Blum, Johan van der Keuken and Lidwien van de Ven, with the input of the New Museum staff –specially the hub attendants, the education department, the docents, the information desk people, the security team… and its audiences opened up ways to reflect about past, present and future. We looked at the Dutch context as inspiration, as a case for reflection from a distance in order to re-think what it means here in New York City to live together, to be a citizen, a displaced or a refugee. This was an occasion to expand the discussion as in relation to art, museums, public spaces, identity, society, citizenship, displacement and migration. Here it was evident to me that doing so is nothing new at all neither exclusive of an institution but so necessary to create the occasion to reflect about ties, about the shared present and the possible futures. The closure reception with Annie Fletcher giving the keynote became such a situation and an opportunity to exchange knowledge and experience with the participation of the public that brought different people and curators of the New Museum and other institutions.

Museum as Hub in this occasion of Be(com)ing Dutch at a Distance, to me was also an occasion to continue working and exploring the museum as space of relationships and experimentation that are located in specific contexts, about its audiences, about its neighbors and its own communities. I think that the New Museum with its extraordinary outlook that provokes such an amazing disruption in its own landscape underlines the fact that museums do not end in their walls. The disruption it provokes opens up also a possibility to build new communities. It certainly creates another sense of public space that resonates as gentrification. Yet, and since such process is alive and when if the New Museum continues extending its educative work, its networks and audiences closer to its own neighbors as it has happened and is desired to happen, the process may be a very interesting one and hopefully a chance to create bonds among neighbors, beyond the museum walls, and across borders.

To have worked at the New Museum and to have lived in NYC has taught me possibilities to expand across borders, the need to develop links among people, to create new communities that take a position in such a powerful landscape. To have been part of Be(com)ing Dutch as a whole has been a way to learn from the extraordinary and have the certainty that it is possible to build a home, new communities there and extend them beyond.

The work by Michael Blum ‘Exodus 2048’ as part of Be(com)ing Dutch takes the whole education floor here. When I arrived to the museum about one month ago (already!) I sensed a big tension about the reactions towards that work among the museum staff -partly due to the way the public reacted after the first weeks, partly from their own readings. During the past four weeks I have had the chance to sense it closer while getting also closer to my new colleagues here. In the mid-time the tensions have diminished but the readings have pluralized in form of conversations and talks next to the work.

It is difficult that collective conversations happen spontaneously. So the effort of the education department staff is to generate such space not only by producing materials but also by stimulating people (the staff and the visitors) to do so by giving time and space, by giving and receiving input. So, for example: the hub attendants. Each of them brings their own knowledge, practice and view when they stand next to the work and when they come in talk with the public about the work. Shiva Krishna, Yvonne Olivas, and Jenna Dublin have an art-history formation. Rebecca Brown is an artist herself. They generate dialogues with the public sometimes right there, creating the spontaneous approach and, other times by organizing such occasions. Shiva Krishna, for example, invited a group of friends –also art historians- to develop a reading of the piece in open talk. It was fascinating to see how through that reading the art historians related the piece back to the Dutch Golden Age: to paintings of that period that depicted everyday life scenes and still-life paintings. Their reading was a sort of searching for Dutchness traces, and they did made such links. It was really surprising to see how in such an effort to encounter links with a specific nationality they brought up such a reading. More interesting to me was to enter into a dialogue with them about the present situation in which Michael Blum’s work was produced and challenge each other’s visions. Their reading made me reflect on how the 17th century paintings and the work by Michael Blum converge probably not in a certain national fixed ethnicity but in the power of bringing a space for reflection about ‘our life’, which does not stand still.

One of the challenges when working in the education department is to contribute to those readings and dialogues. My colleagues here (Cathleen Lewis, Joseph Kehn, Cris Corza, Stephanie Pereira) share an inspiring working force. They have also been kind enough to share with me and be open to hear and support my own ideas. Through them I met and talked with a youth group that explore the city as their classroom. This youth-group goes to museums and other sites where they discuss and learn. They are currently working on their own installations that deal with the concept of the utopia. We referred to the idea of places in relation to memory and to the future. I talked about the places that back in Eindhoven constituted spaces of memory but also of utopias: Evoluon, the stickers around the city, the museum. I heard about their own utopias here and as in relation to their school-work: some of them were building boats. Difference and similarities with the youth group in Eindhoven that I used to work with: ‘Gothzooi’ who just started their work again and, what a coincidence! They will also work around their own ideas of utopia. The youth-group from Eindhoven have also questions about NYC, two in special: how different were youth here and whether there were alternative cultural places here.

About their first question, I think that it is the maturity and urban wisdom of the youth in NYC the major difference. These differences, Anna Campos knows better. I met Anna briefly through my new colleagues. She is the deputy director of the Computer Resource Center of the City of New York Parks and Recreation in New York. Anna works with youth in the neighborhood. She told us about the talent, wisdom and abilities she recognizes in the youth here: for technology, for music, for creativity. They are great technology users and audiovisual consumers. At the same time, she says the main question is how to challenge that talent and creative openness to reflection. She works with youth groups that have a difficult economic and social situation: most of them are children of immigrant families. She is passionate about her work beyond naïve romanticism. She deals with institutional rhythms that are difficult while she does not always get the support of the youngsters’ parents for her educative work. The economical needs urge stronger than the educational aims. These young persons have to work here, earlier and harder. They are under pressure.

Anna has also testified the demographic changes in a neighborhood that has gone under the processes of gentrification, moving families out. She has a tough job and yet she keeps the passion for her work trying to keep spaces for educative and creative activities under such institutional economic and urban pressures. Within such friction of forces the new museum was built and is now located.

As it is the case now of Eindhoven and other cities, here in NYC even earlier the need of space for art institutions, artists and other creators has been either incorporated or continues carrying on processes of gentrification. And again, there are similarities and differences between both localities and from the position of both museums. The Bowery, where the new museum stands used to be the border of the gentrified zone in front: Nolita and Soho. That the museum stands now on the Bowery transforms the landscape and the sense of public space: bringing more tourists, new visitors to the area. I guess that Anna and other people that work within the neighborhood, with families and youth groups, resent the changing gentrification dynamics while still Anna keeps exploring the possibilities of working with such institutions as it is the case of her work with the educators in the new museum. They both explore on possibilities for its educative role through collaboration educative projects.

The second question the kids from Eindhoven had, was if there were any places for alternative cultures in New York and how they were. I definitely would like to answer to them, such an important question. I am still searching and again, I start realizing that those places exist but that are less obvious and I wonder how they may be either related or underneath the gentrification processes.

Williamsburg, for example, is one of the recent gentrified zones that have attracted a big amount of artists and creative people: there are organic cafes and restaurants built in such earlier industrial zone and also there are more bikes that move along such neighborhood that hostess also more galleries. There I met Yvonne Olivas and a friend of her to talk about other former utopias: squatting collectives that transformed and shaped the city and its cultural dynamics in the 80’s and 90’s. Squats are mostly eradicated from New York nowadays. And there we were, reflecting in the urban dynamics of displacement and incorporation that we share even when from different contexts and locations. As the kids, I guess we are trying to envision further utopias and ideas from here and now.
With the distance and many differences, both museums testify the gentrification processes of their own localities: a common global/local. I wonder whether the work of art and educative institutions from such within processes may be at stake of becoming either mute still life scenarios or opened up places that keep possibilities of reflection about our life situation. Such double bind might be the strength and danger of creative institutions in such gentrification processes. The still life scene opens up by re-reading, by giving time, space and input by sharing and bringing it back to life, to the social pressure and its secret in-depth beauty.

Installation at the Fotomuseum

The works were spontaneous, unofficial and perhaps slightly subversive in the way they exposed the mechanics of the institution itself – representing the representative work of the Met. As a result, nothing was written about the exhibition at the time other than press release and museum’s statement about Edward Milla’s work on a more general level. Ingelevic’s installation exactly reproduces Milla’s layout within the space of a small cube within the Foto Museum’s exhibition. The installation images of the Met snapshots may not perhaps be the best way of presenting the gap between these modes of display however the gesture is one worthy of revisiting.

There is something very strange, sort of random and yet very nice about this city: the actual encounters –with friends, with friends one come to meet through friends, with co-nationals and at the same time, with a wide-diverse population, even with famous people. Not that this island is paradise –not at all!- but somehow I come to think that New York’s ‘demographic situation’ may help to represent the populace of a contemporary Dante’s allegory of the afterlife: where you come together with all the people you knew, with the people you imagine that exist and those that you even didn’t expect to meet. And yet this is life –oh yeah! – and therefore people here deal everyday with it: with time, with economies, politics, imagination, with lust, love, and loneliness. People work hard, they work long, it is common to double work-shifts, while party and entertainment is important, and survival is a matter of fact. Here people struggle and still there is kindness around, there is a sense of feeling comfortable with being without pretending what you are when being around and so I think, that in a very strange way, the life here challenges us. Everyday life in this island goes along the skyscrapers and other engineering work as the metro system realizing how the ground and the sky become as real as never before: where my feet are, what height some human dreams can reach and how much struggle and pressure there is in the middle.

I am sorry I took you too much out of the museum this time, I have took you far from the exhibition and the different events going on there. But this is my way to bring you closer to how I start making some sense about me being there within: I realize here that despite of the distance, we keep links, relationships, and responsibilities with those we have met and that we keep on building up more relationships: as friends, as workers, as citizens, as human beings. The challenge is how to put them together, how to re-think what has been learned about relating and care.

The conversations with the public and the work encounters in the museum, for example, strength my relationship with the Netherlands, my own transformed identity after had my home there; my knowledge and ignorance about life that ‘home place’. Here I feel in between the Netherlands and Mexico and I realize how separated those two worlds seem from each other: not by distance but by ways to relate. The axis Europe-America dominates the art and intellectual scene. Last week, during the symposium about museums and civil society, the speakers’ pointed and such predominant axis situation but none made a specific statement about how to deal with it. Most intellectuals working on cultural analysis and cultural studies refer to theoretical developments that are developed within such axis and dismiss what theoreticians may have in other places to say.

While then, some political questions that are urgent in Europe and North America such as the debates around Islam, right wing rising and cultural diversity seem to concern less to other places such as ‘South-America’ for example. So where do we actually converge?… At the edge and the borders, I guess. Right at the edge that most people forget to think about (when they are ‘within’) and to mention: the political borders, the internal cultural borders, the places where people is abused and forgotten but also where people may create new situations and relationships.
I re-think from here about the political shifts in the Netherlands and about the fact that Geert Wilders’ with his increasing popularity among Dutch population is coming now to the United States this week while I look around and find Obama’s images, news and constant reminders of a global recession and look at people who we have managed to trespass ‘la frontera’ -legally and not. I have also met here new ways of being Mexican –people who do not necessarily talk Spanish, neither have been born or raised there, but who ‘feel’ and ‘recognize’ as such- showing me then new ways of sharing.

This city does not give clear-cut answers to my questions about how to relate with each other and yet at least being here makes me start re-thinking about relationships and responsibilities. Here something feels like shared and yet unable to retain: staying and belonging. Sharing the intense of everyday life here comes very fast, before even have completely landed here, before even realizing you do not belong here, before even considering if you want to stay longer: you share the intensity of life.

Look outside the window today, Sunday midday: sunny sky behind the high buildings, the sky scrapers. I live on a 4th floor; the dimensions are confusing in this city but the sun is shinning and it makes me think me about the departure from Holland when the airplane took off on a rainy day and the view over the grey plane landscape of fields and water –the landscape that became familiar, so familiar to me.

Seven hours is too short to measure the distance that we traveled on an airplane. The flight was smooth and it became all sunny from the moment we reached higher altitude beyond the clouds: I saw fields covered with snow in England, and rivers, and mountains, and then the oceans; I read the beautiful lovely goodbye-notes on my card, and it felt strange and unreal to think I was leaving. The movies and music on the airplane just added to the sort of fiction state… of flying. The same day, just ‘a couple of hours later’, I landed here and officially entered the USA. The small and big differences started opening up from then on, the sameness too, the expected and the unexpected her in New York City.

The New Museum of Contemporary Art is downtown, on a busy street loaded with history, traffic, restaurants-furniture suppliers and within an area that brings together the complexes of gentrification: close to Soho and China town among other neighborhoods. Time and people do not necessarily trace linear and uniform paths. The past-present-future here of Dutchness, for example surprise in imaginative and curious ways: the name of the street, Bowery, derives from the old Dutch word “bouwerij”- boerderij. There are traces also of relationships less obvious. For those who wondered about whether people here still speak Dutch, I must say yes, I have found people who speak Dutch here: I met two women who had lived in the Netherlands for years. They both felt really happy to talk in Dutch with me here.

The New Museum brings up a whole other world of similarities and contrasts: about work, relationships, ideals and dreams in relation to art, the museum, its context. It is another space and rhythm here: ‘Be(com)ing Dutch’ is now located in another site, geographical, institutional, artistic. Here, ‘Be(com)ing Dtuch’ takes place within the layered displayed of the New Museum along with ‘Urban China’ receiving the visitor on the ground floor, with ‘Conversations About Iraq’ going on the second floor, with ‘Crystal Palace’ by Mathias Poledna and ‘Minotaur’ by Daria Martin on the fourth and third floor respectively. ‘Be(com)ing Dutch at a Distance’ has brought up much attention that increased recently since there was a big opening of the whole museum last Tuesday. On the fifth floor of this museum, the Be(com)ing Dutch project is represented by Michael’s Blum piece ‘Exodus 2048’. The piece is ‘right there’ in front of the visitor once the elevator doors are opened, the imaginary refugee camp is there sort of protected by curtains that seem like a last cry for intimacy in this other location: more busy and intense than in Eindhoven…. And yes, less spacious.

The proximity to the piece, to the topic; the distance to an expected more literal idea about ‘Dutchness’ bring other sort of relationships with the visitor that form sometimes an uneasy reaction with a sort of urgency to take time off after a sense of discomfort, other times this situation lead or the visitor just engage in nice dialogues and interesting conversations. One of these interesting dialogues was held publicly in the theatre of the museum last Thursday February, 12th between Michael Blum and curator Regina Basha who explored along her questions the work thoroughly: about the origin of the piece, the problems and potential of the translation of the piece in this other context, about how facts may provide material for speculations and how speculations may allow us to think, rethink imaginatively the present, the history and the future.

In the same room and as a sort of inviting shore to come with questions, thoughts and reactions there is a hub-attendant who interacts with the visitor. They are volunteers (de vrijwilligers hier) that take care of the work but also of the sort of possible conversations. They have spent time with Michael Blum, with his piece and the ‘Museum as Hub’ project. They are four persons but I have met only Shiva, Vecky and Yvonne. They are doing a fantastic work leaded by Cris Scorza and the whole great education department in which Museum as hub is hosted under the direction of curator Eungie Joo. From them all I’m learning about the potential and relevance of ‘Be(com)ing Dutch at a Distance’.

On the seventh floor of the New Museum, at the very top of the building, there is not exhibition but a great view to the outside: it is breathtaking and maybe that is why they call it the sky-room. With that view from the top, the New Museum hosted a symposium last Thursday in which curators and scholars such as Dieter Bogner, Laura Hotpman, and Maria Lind, discussed the role of the museum in relation to the society and its future, the economic pressures, the strong axis Europe-USA with its contrasts and the need of challenges to think broader. In such context Eungie Joo, referred to Museum as Hub as a way to think such issues. As the view, the talk was inspiring. The challenge and, particularly for me now, is to envision concrete ideas about how to bring such aspiration to the ground, to this context and in relation to the possibilities of such museum as hub with ‘Be(com)ing Dutch at a Distance’.

This place as a hub, I think, can have its power from the relationships among people close to the museum, to its ground, from the people who engage there, from the confluence of creativity, life, knowledge, desires, ideals and from the unexpected.

There is in New York City a rush and a sense of energy around that pushes… hopefully towards good relationships and kind unexpected encounters.

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

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

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

© Bassam El Baroni

The first term was introduced by Florian Schneider, presented within a talk on the myth of ‘soul stealing’ – the old idea that primitive people believe that ones soul is stolen when they are photographed. This talk, with an immense wealth of material, presented analysis that were more open suggestions for further contemplation than fixed ideas that demand straight forward rejection or approval.

Meditating on the notion of copying, it developed an elaborate critique of an essentialist notion of identity. Schneider departed from the discovery that it is not the ‘primitive’ that has developed the notion of ‘soul stealing’, but that it were modern ethnographers who introduced this idea. This idea of the ‘primitive’ and its understanding of reproduction media is therefore itself a modern notion – a counter figure that was born as a sort of Janus-face of the modern subject. The ‘primitive’ in this formula is characterised by a natural aversion from modern forms of representation, which in a romantic fashion refers to the essential unity of the primitive identity. The ‘taking’ of an image, displacing, as it were, a layer of this unique identity into an object that itself can be reproduced ad infinitum and by doing so, destroy the uniqueness of the subject, is here presented as threshold between the modern subject (the one able to make and use reproductions) and the primitive Other.

In his talk Scheider explored how we can measure the abyss that is opened between a presupposed ‘whole’ subject and a reproduced subject that loses its identity in the endless proliferation of itself in an image. One of the theoretical formulas that he proposed to this end, was an idea of Bakhtin, who envisioned the subject (and its soul) as an aesthetic event, an instable formation of images that find temporary relief in an encounter which establishes a possible world. (I have to admit, that I represent this idea from memory and it could very well be that already in the course of 12 hours, my mind has warped the notion of Bakthin as presented by Schneider into perhaps a new ‘possible’ world.) The advantage that Schneider draws out of this complex notion of subjectivity is that it in a sense displaces the whole idea of a clear opposition between subject and object, for both are born out of the same formative event of establishing a ‘possible’ world. (An idea that seems to have also a close affinity with Heidegger’s concept of art as ‘world disclosure’, be it that he seems to privilege the work over the subject and in this sense still thinks in a hierarchical way.)

The clearest form of practicing this revised notion of subjectivity Schneider seems to recognize in ‘ownership’. A notion that he understands not in a static form as ‘possessing’, but in a dynamic, performative sense of being constantly forced the act up to that what one owns. One has to ‘own up to’ that which is owned, and present and represent it all the time, realizing that each presentation is in a sense a recreation, or perhaps even creation. For that which is owned does not exist in an abstract time of a singular ‘History’, but only has presence in the actualization of it in real lived time which is the flowing together of many histories.

At the end of the talk Scheider related this performative notion of subjectivity to that site where perhaps the most frantic copying and with it ‘creating’ of possible world is practiced: the pirate web communities. At this point also the beautiful notion of ‘noise margin’ is introduced. Schneider points out that our common perception of what happens when we ‘copy’ a file is based on error. For when we copy, we do not literally create a duplicate of all the zeros and ones that somewhere, in the depth of the laptop, constitute the file. The software making the copy analyzes the information and only replicates those elements which for this particular program are necessary to be able to recreate the file. The threshold that marks the point beneath which no information is copied is called the ‘noise margin’. In our everyday computer use we encounter this mechanism mostly in image and video files as jpeg. and avi., formats which limit the file size by means of a high ‘noise margin’. Within our computer world we therefore do not simply copy files, but in a sense by means of our software constantly find new ways to create out of the philosophically spoken ‘infinite’ noise of the file an image that is more a possible actualization, than that it is the presentation of a file we got stored on our hard drives. As a representation of this one can think of the opening sequences of the Matrix films, which show a dazzling journey through signs, constantly opening up a new possible world with a single sign that is raining down on the screen.

Before connecting these ideas to the museum, let me note that this ‘situational’ notion of subjectivity and identity was mirrored in a remarkable way in the talk by Jos de Mul. Where De Mul was first planning on giving us a presentation on Walter Benjamin’s classic text on ‘The work of art in the age of technological reproducibility’ trying to translate some of its arguments into the digital age, he ended up giving a presentation on the digital edition of the collected writings of Wittgenstein. This perhaps unlikely topic for a seminar on copy and original in the end proved to be very fruitful. The most charming argument within this lecture was the suggestion that there is an immanent affinity between Wittgenstein’s late ideas on language and the possibilities that are opened up by a digital, database of his collected work.

De Mul made this point by introducing a division in the work of Wittgenstein, which he coined, Wittgenstein 1.0 and 2.0. Wittgenstein 1.0 still believed in a fixed, single signification for a single word. As such following the platonic idea that behind the world of experience an ideal world is hidden of eternal ideas. Wittgenstein 2.0 however, comes back from this understanding of the relation between words and things, developing the theory that a word in the end is determined by the context in which it operates and gains signification – the famous language game. Meaning is therefore not fixed, nor is development linear. The meaning of a word, a sentence or idea, depends on the constellation in which it is (re)produced. An understanding of language that as De Mul suggested could be mirrored in a database-type presentation of the collected writings. For a database gives the possibility to find a new route through the text each time one enters a new organisational principle. Just as Wittgenstein in late fragments described his thinking as creating a web or network, the database of collected writings gives the possibility to read Wittgenstein in a web-like fashion, mapping out a new Wittgenstein with each new search entry.

But back to the museum. For what is the relation between all these ideas and the museum and its complexity of dealing with copies and originals? a patient reader of this blog entry might think. The most prominent possibility lays not so much in concrete proposals done in the lectures, but more in the possibility of rethinking familiar things as the work and its mediation by the museum. In a time of databases and its correlative notion of subjectivity and truth, the idea of presenting one single narrative on the basis of the authority, be it academic or not, of the museum, is outworn. Neither the work nor the collection can be reduced to one shining identity at the end of the tunnel of long academic research. Just as with the copying of files each re-installation of a work and the collection present a new ‘noise margin’ and break earlier ones. Each new installation of works draws out of the dark well of the ‘noise’ of the work and recognizes other elements that are worthy of inspection by the public. The task and challenge for the museum in the years to come is to be able to find ways in which one can determine the noise margin. What is the web or network that is shown? Who has the authority to make choices and could it be possible to democratize the process of making choices, without becoming populistic? For making a new web, replacing the noise margin, will always force viewers to change their own ‘software’ so to speak. And this requires effort and a transgression of boundaries, which are in contrast with the familiarity sought by a populistic approach. A genuine attempt to realize these ideas therefore do not mean a blunt opening of the gates of the museum, allowing everybody to show whatever one wants, but developing new skills to be able to have an open debate about what would be relevant for the community to see.

This leads to the second possibility that is opened up by the talks, which relates to the patron of the public museum: a political community. If the rightful ‘owners’ of the museum collection are the people that together form a political community which reserve public funds to establish an collection, then the practice of the museum exists out of a constant performance of what is ‘owned’ publicly. A museum collection is not a static image that shows – for once and for all – the cultural identity of a people (note the singular), but it is a stage which performs everyday again this question of where one can find a interpretation of that complex notion of ‘us’. The museum will need to function as space where this continuous production of ‘possible worlds’ can take place. A production that no longer can be guided by a singular idea of truth, but by the wish to create the most relevant and perhaps confrontational configuration out of the database that is the collection. It will be difficult to practice this communal notion of ownership if one can no longer hide in the ivory tower of a singular truth, but perhaps it will be necessary if one wants the museum to resonate with today’s database version of thinking something as instable as: we.

JÜRGEN STOLLHANS at the European Kunsthalle, Koln

But why it is then important, at least in my thinking, to avoid seeing new opportunity in every broken down neighbourhood. There are a number of reasons but I think it boils down to a sense that seeing decay as opportunity underestimates or alomost excludes what exists here already and how people are constructing “the world they want to live in” (as Stephanie Smith calls it) within the given situation. Talking to Andrew in Ann Arbor and involved with the Unreal Estate Agency helpfully asked us to see that decay and decline is also creation and growth of something else if we can reframe our expectations – for every empty lot there is another “tree of heaven”, to simplify it. This is an important observation and worth documenting in the way I think he plans but I am not totally sure that such organic growth is sufficiently socially engaged. It comes down again to human agency, the basis of both art and politics, and how much the collective “we” is able to shape its environment or simply respond top changes from outside. The collapse of faith in fundamentalist free market theology here allows for a new sense of this agency to emerge…and here the initiatives of our hosts Design 99 are crucial.

I want to suggest, without growing too rhetorical, that they are working on a new kind of artistic agency, in which relational art and site-specific production (even US land art traditions) are combined.In the area in and around Hamtramck, the collapse of house prices allows for a new way of shaping the urban environment with relatively modest resources. They are buying up property, generating community by inviting others to join while attentively responding to what is here. Their work has precedents in other kinds of intentional communities and projects such as Rick Lowe’s in Houston but it has a different taste, more modest, less openly artistic, crossing disciplines and often just about being in the world in this place and time. For me, it recalls some old thoughts I had around “modest proposals” as a viable artistic strategy in the post-1989 world of no new grand narratives – something that might worth reviving, I suddenly think.

An even more interesting issue for me (or us in the museum) however is if and how we as a museum and art collection should become involved in their process and practice. Some time ago, I talked about how we need to move from a collection of objects to a collection of (inter)relations – something we have begun with a turn to the archive and the museum’s own history, as well as new forms of documenting artistic practice. Design 99 set us a new challenge. To figure out how to “collect” their project (and in doing so, support it) because it seems to offer a new and more radical art form than most of the object production processes that the art market has sustained up until recently. Working out a solution to this will take some time and head stratching, but I am convinced, being here, that it is worth it. More to follow…

In curatorial and artistic practice there is a moment during which the work of art, its influences and possible outcomes appear to the surface. It is from this moment of ‘visibility’ that the work of art can be subject to response and perhaps even criticism. This point, perhaps perpetually in motion, can be called ‘a point of visibility’. Could this point be constructive in helping to realise that a work, an idea or their consequences cannot exist without revealing themselves to the surface? Is there the possibility of something greater achievable than the relationship between the artist and curator? Between the communities and histories that surround them? Are we at this very moment not talking about the appearance of the object itself, but about that what precedes the (pre and post) production and the point of visibility itself? What are the possible consequences for the future if we think of it like this? And finally, does judgement play an important part in generating influences and confluences?

As part of this investigation I would like to take a look at a work entitled Ground Control (2007/2008) by Ahmet Öğüt, which was shown in the Kunst-Werke (KW) as part of the 5th Berlin Biennial. But first I will start with a small anecdote in which this notion of the ‘point of visibility’ might reveal itself in a very physical manifestation. Following the recent election of President Obama I read an article that described the experience of an elderly lady who had cast her vote on the 4th November 2008. It described her experiences of racism and segregation, how she had never thought it a possibility that she would be able to vote for a Black President and her aspirations for the future. The article relayed that as she left the voting booth she had collapsed on the floor and was quickly surrounded by concerned crowds. At first is seemed that she was unwell but as time passed it became apparent that she had been overcome with emotion. At the moment that the woman had signed the ballot paper, history had became a very close reality. The moment of signing the ballot was this point of visibility for her where all experienced and known history regarding this vote confronted the possibilities of the future and in a most physical way.

Of course it is not only in everyday life that these moments occur, be it in less physical manifestations. In curatorial and artistic practice there is always a critical view towards everything that is contemporary, or everything that once was. Can we question this issue of currency or of the urgency of the ‘contemporary’? Where does it come from? What does it mean to be or act in the here and now, in the contemporary? In these practices and beyond it is clear that time plays an important role in researching the value of terms like ‘contemporary’, ‘modernist’ or ‘antique’. They have to start somewhere and concurrently are constantly under review and renegotiation under the conditions however that such critique is useful and timed in a good way.

It is by and through history, reactions and the actions and limitations of mankind, that we are connected. In this light it is not so interesting to spend the small amount of words at my disposal on discussing ‘time’ as a whole, but rather the small element of the ‘point of visibility’. This point probably exists somewhere along an endless line where a lot of our ability to think, act and judge comes from. I would like to think of it as the moment where a work of art is pushed to the surface and ready for display. At that very moment it becomes possible for everybody to respond with all the baggage from the past, in different forms and ways, that we have. It is perhaps this moment where the value of history becomes clear and where the ideas of the artist and curator get their first breath of fresh air.

Ahmet Öğüt – Ground Control
As one of the central works and opening scene in the KW during the 5th Berlin Biennial in 2008, I saw Ahmet Öğüt’s Ground Control (2007/2008) executed for the second time. In talking about the point of visibility I find this particular work useful because of elements of political and social conditions, (art) history, space and contemporary time itself that resurface here. As an ongoing moment, rather than a static work for only a one-time offer, Öğüt transformed the gallery space in KW into a blank space filled with a layer of thick asphalt supposedly there to stay. Ground Control not only speaks about the way, how, where and when a phenomenon like modernization or social structures can and will appear to us, but also about their own appearance, the road that it comes from and the future that is initiated by it.
On Modernist Conditions
Ground Control is deeply rooted in the history of social-political conditions that made asphalt an icon of modernism. It is not only important to understand that this history has an unmistakable influence on the work and is being transformed to an icon by the artistic action itself, but also to understand that history can become a visible moment that is clearly connected to what can happen in the future.
The asphalt speaks, in the words of Öğüt, about the arrival and dedication to modern times in Turkey. In the most rural places roads were poured with this new black material. Not only was this practically making it possible for people to travel, but it also controlled the areas that were now connected with ‘black gold’. Invisible places were now rendered visible and accessible for interpretation and re-interpretation. This did not only occur in Turkey, but also elsewhere as with the material concrete in the form of the Autobahn, which was also transformed into a similar icon in Germany in the 1920’s and 30’s. It was also the case here that practicalities such as transporting goods, people and generating services, was not the only rational for such infrastructure but also to illustrate the greatness of a nation.

Irremovability
Ground Control is physical work that is clearly irremovable through its enormous dimensions, its weight and bond to the room in which it is situated. It is quite a radical artistic act (perhaps it still is, even after sixties minimalism and conceptualism) in the gestural placement of black asphalt in a formerly white room. In its display, the work obviously becomes visible for the viewer. A fact that seems rhetorical perhaps but is less so if we look at it more closely. But before thinking about the ways of how this work was initiated and how it came to be place eventually in that space, it is perhaps also valuable to look and speculate about its consequences in the future. Imagination can help us clear this up.

Control on the power of visibility and the timing of this moment (the point of visibility) is in the hands of the artist, the actual duration of the moment is in the hands of KW and the curators. Is it possible to consider asking Öğüt to leave the work in-situ from now on and for every exhibition in the future? Surely removing the work has its degrees of complication. Also this might seem like a silly question, but just what would happen if the KW should decide to leave the work in the room? Is it possible that in extending the time of visibility the viewer will have another interpretation of the work or have another view? The moment of exposure will be extended allowing this to happen. A radical other approach is to acquire it for the collection where it will end up as a drawing in storage, never to see the light again if there is no suitable time. Even if Öğüt’s work will transform to something else by painting over it, pretend as if it is part of the space and basically ignore it, it is still there. It will continue with the spreading of influence to yet unknown targets.
In time, influences from outside will play an important and continuous role in the development and visibility of Ground Control. If we look retrospectively, it is clear that the work could not have been made without the presence of heritages like Brian O’Doherty’s essay ‘Inside The White Cube’, Walter De Maria’s work ‘A Computer that will solve Every Problem in the World’ or Huseyin Alptekin’s extensive imaginative project called ‘The Sea Elephant Travel Agency’. These sources of influence play with the ideas and actual work of Ground Control in an ongoing loop, it gives and takes, and sends information out also itself on another moment, most likely later to be understood as influence. It is this feeding ground that fertilizes Ground Control everlasting dialogue between influences themselves, ideas and the production of the work. Where this comes together and opens up for relevant or irrelevant judgement and critique, we could call the point of visibility.

In Ground Control, pouring the asphalt in the space of the KW and putting it on display gives us as viewers a moment of visibility and the possibility to interpret. Although these moments, also used by Öğüt himself in the process of making, and reasons which are possibly not singular; confluences appear in the development of this and other works by the artist. And yet we are reminded that this moment of visibility, this convergence of ideas and histories, for the viewer is not always the same moment of visibility for another person.
To speculate with some caution it seems that the point of visibility, the only moment in time is when results, beginnings and influences appear to us. How, when, why and its consequences are yet unclear at the moment itself and need to settle in time in order to become relevant for individuals as well as communities.

So where does the symbolic come into this? As I struggled up the side of one of the forementioned manmade hills (the only ones to be had in this part of the Netherlands!) the story of the little boy, Hans, who heard the sound of trickling water coming from the dijk behind his house. The story claims that every Dutch child knows what that sound means (questionable), Hans then promptly stuck his finger in the hole in he dijk where the water was seeping out little by little to prevent the impending flood. He stood there all night and was only relieved of his post the next morning when a priest passed by. He is the little boy who saved the Netherlands.

Now, it seems to me that there are fingers in holes all over the country, preventing certain social situations, economic tensions, potential cultural incompatabilities from spilling over. These plugs are not necessarily misplaced but are preventing the friche which could possibly bring these conditions to some sort of reckoning. As “imports” into the situation in Amsterdam North, with all its politiking, small town spats, large-scale social engineering – where is the sound of trickling water for us? My challenge for the moment is to imagine what would happen were our project to remove certain fingers, let the holes in dijks get bigger and change the ideological landscape a little. What would be required were we to relieve Hans from his heroic post? What would the flood look like and whose responsibility to channel the waters?



Het is duidelijk dat op het moment dat we het werk zijn plaats teruggeven en de historie van een abstracte categorie als ‘kunst’ vervangen door een geschiedenis uit concrete categorieën als ‘het werk in een tentoonstelling’, we de ondergrond van zowel de kunstgeschiedenis als het museum met voeten treden. De poging om de plek waar kennis vergaard wordt zichtbaar te maken en te proberen om de invloed die deze context uitoefent op die kennis te tonen en te overdenken, is een activiteit die tegen de grenzen van ons huidige ‘kennen’ aanbotst. Omdat ons kennen, al vanaf Hegel, bepaald wordt door een onoverkomelijke dialectiek, die zegt dat kennis niet gelijk is aan het gekende, omdat als ze dat werkelijk kon zijn er geen onderscheid meer mogelijk is tussen kennis en het gekende. Waarbij het kunstwerk met zijn onkenbare kern in wezen in de moderne tijd simpelweg de andere kant van de medaille is van deze ‘kentheorie’ (epistemologie) is. Dus waar het taalteken een representatie is van het gedachte, die in zijn eigen vorm ondenkbaar is als we de gedachte willen denken – we zien of de vorm van de letters of het woord, nooit beide tegelijkertijd -, daar is het kunstwerk het tot kennis geworden ding, waarin de ervaring als het ware losgekomen uit de door driften (behoefte in de economische terminologie) beheerste wereld en als louter ding aan ons kan verschijnen. (Heideggers ‘dingachtigheid’ van het ding dat voor het Westerse denken al met de vertaling van Grieks in Latijn achter onze horizon verdwijnt.)

Dit neemt niet weg dat het een zinvolle en misschien zelfs noodzakelijk onderneming is om als het ware een plaatsleer, een topologie in de termen van Groys, te schrijven van de kunst. Wie weet is de verschuiving in de status van het werk door de opkomst van de grillige figuur van de installatie wel een vruchtbaar aanknopingspunt om de plaatsloos gedachte kunstgeschiedenis van een plek te voorzien? Hoewel we natuurlijk voor een grote vraag van vorm en selectie komen te staan, immers, als we reflecteren op de plaats van de kunst, vanuit welke ‘plek’ kunnen we dat doen? Alle voorwaarde zijn daar om onszelf te verliezen in een aporie, een ‘oneindige regressie’ in het betekenisloze, door het ontstaan van een hypersensitiviteit die zowel ergens als nergens wil zijn. Of, om het risico te omschrijven in ene metafoor van Terry Eagleton, we lopen het risico om als het ware als acrobaten op elkaar te klimmen om uiteindelijk in een situatie te komen waarin we niet omvallen, maar ook geen enkele bewegingsvrijheid hebben om iets te doen. We zullen een manier moeten vinden om deze val te vermijden, waarbij één mogelijke manier die ik zie – het gesprek – kan zijn. Door als museum een conversatie te voeren met kunstenaars (curatoren, kunsthistorici) en publiek kunnen we beginpunten kiezen van waaruit de topologie van de kunst kan verschijnen. Misschien zal de verschuiving die wij invoeren er een zijn die in plaats van een object in het centrum plaats een subject naar voren schuift en als podium – of pagina – ruimte biedt om te spreken en te denken.

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

Seeing this art in a museum in a retrospective model puts an complicated and perhaps even at some points uncomfortable pressure on these artists. For what the retrospective model introduces is one element to which this type of artistic practice has a complicated relationship: time. The historical nature of such an exhibition, suggests to the visitor that one is looking back, evaluating something that has happened. The difficulty here being that the generation of the 90s was living in period ‘beyond’ history, since history was thought to have ended with the cold war, which was understood as the last great opposition in systems to organize society. Therefore this generation of the 90s had difficulty to think in terms of ‘time’ and ‘history’. The focus on situations and relations was a creative way out of this paralysing moment, suggesting that one should not think ‘time’ or ‘history’ any more in the large sense as a succesion of large systems, but as small and private element that only in the conglomerate of all the time of everybody installs a historical effect. The main difference therefore between this type of art and the art of the preceding generations was that here art was no longer a model or a suggestion, but a real social situation. In a sense one could even a state that they stopt considering themselves to be ‘avant’ the ‘garde’ for there was not future space of radical difference into which one could imagine oneself.

In New York the complexity of this position became evident within the framework of a retrospective show. In a way the artists remained loyal to themselves by not exhibting old work, but by creating new works, for this new situation. However, the context of the Guggenheim – one of the oldest and most renowned collections of modern art – almost silently forced the works to ‘objectify’. Perhaps in an ambigous way the current policy of the Guggenheim to create more events and experiences than academic, art historical exhibitions, did open up the space of the museum more towards an ‘situation’ and a ‘relation’, but here many question formed in my mind, for which I will need more time to answers. Especially the question: what type of experience the Guggenheim is instigating is difficult for me to say. Am I an a member of a public, moving to a social space, where I can encounter a fellow citenzen, or am I a customer, buying a product, and as such only interested in satisfying a personal demand? Answers to these questions can only come later (and perhaps will surface here in this space, on the blog).

University of Amsterdam – Spectres, Hauntings and the Archive Postgraduate Conference

Now is the Time – Belief with Terry Eggleton and Boris Groys 15 January

The Old Brand New Lecture Series

Master Class at the University of Utrecht “Curating (Beyond) Exhibitions: Critical Curatorial Practices and Contemporary Society” Lectures: Maria Hlavajova, artistic director, BAK.

Have you ever been stood up by a lecture, disappointed by a famous speaker or not so convinced of the expertise of the so-called “experts”? Have you ever wished you could be a more active member of the audience, engaging the usual suspects on matters at hand?

Announcing the first in a series of tongue-in-cheek (intellectually sound) non-lectures conceived to challenge the cult of personality and aloofness in the creative field, and to provide a platform for both experienced and upstart critical thinkers to exchange knowledge. This series uses the spectres of the usual suspects and the areas of research associated with their various oeuvres as a starting point for generating new conversations.

You are invited to participate in the first of these meetings taking place on Monday, the 26th of January, 2009 when Jacques Derrida will NOT be presenting an inaugural explication of the Art