By Charles Esche

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. Read more »

Fingers Crossed!

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. Read more »

By Charles Esche

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. Read more »

Some sharp words from Robert Smithson:

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. Read more »

Posted by Clare Butcher

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”

The following is an intimate exchange between two tired curators responsible for the coup which took place this last week (17th-25th October) in the Oudbouw of the Van Abbemuseum. The ‘Take On Me/Take Me On’ project comprised of various elements: four rooms featuring ongoing design projects by Orgacom, Conditional Design, Acclair and Metahaven; the TAKE A SEAT space which hosted various engaging and public discussions throughout the week between an audience and the design project facilitators; and a documentation station which replayed footage from the various events and presented printed matter such as the ‘Daily Whatever’ – an almost propagandistic style newspaper discussing broader issues raised during the week published each day of the exhibition (but not limited only to the exhibition’s duration!)

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

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By Clare Butcher

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 Read more »

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

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

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

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

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