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

Last Sunday DAI-students met with Galit Eilat to discuss the exhibition ‘The Politics of Collecting, the Collecting of Politics’, which she curated for the third chapter of the four chapter program Play Van Abbe, and the work of Arthur Zmijewski. The session was organized and structured by Jeroen Marttin and Sander Uitdehaag, who aimed at a ‘real’ dialogue. And with ‘real’ they meant not an exchange of previously defined positions, but the precarious, fragmented and tentative act of thinking together out loud.

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.

The following is a piece about to be published in a South African online art journal, Artthrob (www.artthrob.co.za) but I thought I’d post it here for your feedback.

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. Read more »

*the usual sneak-peek intro from the upcoming Your-space newspaper edition #4 and what will be happening in Your-space in the last months of this year. As always, open to comments and feedback. The questions raised issue from a valuably, ongoing conversation between myself and Steven. We’d gladly invite more contributors to this.

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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. Read more »

Yesterday I was at the start of the Postcolonial Study Initiative, for unknown reasons abbreviated to PCI ( allthough some say it refers to the former Italian Communist Party). It was about time that initiatives were made and especially in this part of the world. Central speaker and former holder of the Treaty of Utrecht seat at the University of Utrecht was Paul Gilroy. I saw him several times speaking over the last couple of years here and this time it was no other than giving a smooth, understandable and urgent speech on cultural consequences so necessary to understand our situation we are in, maybe just for a little bit.

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,…

I was recently in Genk, Belgium – about 100 km from Eindhoven. The small city of 65.000 people was founded to serve three deep shaft coal mines. The city itself was divided into three sections following the employment patterns of the workers and it even used to have three football teams in the Belgian Premier League. I was told that this work-based identity has somewhat diminished since the football teams merged and employment in the three mines was replaced by employment in single huge Ford factory. In Genk’s case, ironically, post-Fordism meant the arrival of the car company, and a real post-Fordist future is looked on with fear.

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.

A small remark on my recent visit to Palestine, a part of a text that I recently used in a bigger one. A small alinea that I quite like in terms of thinking of the geography of an institution like ours.

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.

Read more »

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

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

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

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

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

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

More to come in the following days,…

East Jerusalem and Workshop at Al Ma'mal