November 30, 2008
re ‘experimental communities’ and park fiction
November 30, 2008
‘common’ – a linguistic history
Following on from Nina’s session, a nice history of the word ‘common’ for our thinking of notions of ‘community’. It’s only short and quite fun.
Keywords A Vocabulary of Culture and Society is Raymond Williams’ unique study of 131 English words with highly loaded meanings. Neither purely an etymology nor a glossary, the book instead attempts to track the changing social and political usages of the words that have moulded contemporary and historical thought. The words include ‘Democracy’; ‘Genius’; ‘Family’; ‘Anarchism’; and ‘Modern’. Here, we re-publish Williams’ take on the word ‘Common’. Illustrations here come from a google image search of the same word.
Common has an extraordinary range of meaning in English, and several of its particular meanings are inseparable from a still active social history. The rw [1] is communis, L [2], which has been derived, alternatively, from com-, L – together and munis, L – under obligation, and from com- and unus, L – one. In early uses these senses can be seen to merge: common to a community (from C14 an organised body of people), to a specific group, or to the generality of mankind. There are distinctions in these uses, but also considerable and persistent overlaps. What is then interesting is the very early use of common as an adjective and noun of social division; common, the common, and commons, as contrasted with lords and nobility. The tension of these two senses has been persistent. Common can indicate a whole group of interest or a large specific and subordinate group. (Cf Elyot’s protest (Governor, 1, i; 1531) against commune weale, later commonwealth: ‘There may appere lyke diversitie to be in Englisshe between a publike weale and a commune weale, as shulde be in Latin, between Res publica & res plebeia.’)
hip hop star Common
The same tension is apparent even in applications of the sense of a whole group: that is, of generality. Common can be used to affirm something shared or to describe something ordinary (itself ambivalent, related to order as series or sequence, hence ordinary – in the usual course of things, but also to order as rank, social and military, hence ordinary – of an undistinguished kind); or again, in one kind of use, to describe something low or vulgar (which has specialised in this sense from a comparable origin, vulgus, L – the common people). It is difficult to date the derogatory sense of common. In feudal society the attribution was systematic and carried few if any additional overtones. It is significant that members of the Parliamentary army in the Civil War of mC17[3] refused to be called common soldiers and insisted on private soldiers. This must indicate an existing and significant derogatory sense of common, though it is interesting that this same army were fighting for the commons and went on to establish a commonwealth. The alternative they chose is remarkable, since it asserted, in the true spirit of their revolution, that they were their own men. There is a great deal of social history in this transfer across the range of ordinary description from common to private: in a way the transposition of hitherto opposed meanings, becoming private soldiers in a common cause. In succeeding British armies, private has been deprived of this significance and reduced to a technical term for for those of lowest rank.
the common wombat
It is extremely difficult, from lC16 on, to distinguish relatively neutral uses of common, as in common ware, from more conscious and yet vaguer uses to mean vulgar, unrefined and eventually low-class. Certainly the clear derogatory use seems to increase from eC19, in a period of more conscious and yet less specific class-distinction (cf. CLASS [4]). By lC19 ‘her speech was very common‘ has an unmistakeable ring, and this use has persisted over a wide range of behaviour. Meanwhile other senses, both neutral and positive, are also in general use. People, sometimes the same people, say ‘it’s common to eat ice-cream in the street’ (and indeed it is becoming common in another sense); but also ‘it’s common to speak of the need for a common effort’ (which may indeed be difficult to get if many of the people needed to make it are seen as common).
Finchley Common in the 18thC.
notes
1 – rw= root word
2 – L= Latin
3 – here the abbreviation system of C=century and l, m, and e is in use which denote late, middle and early, followed by the number.
4 – Class has a very long analysis on pp60-69.
A VI form common room
November 25, 2008
Credit crunch information
From Christina - a user's guide to the credit crunch and mortgage crisis: http://www.thislife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?episode=355 http://www.thislife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?sched=1263
September 22, 2008
harder, better, slower, stronger – notes about the cp
Some hurriedly-typed notes during a presentation by Ann Demeester during the symposium Harder, Better, Slower, Stronger, at Matadero, Madrid, organised by los 29 Enchufes and SMAK. It was basically all about the cp, so was pretty useful for us.
September 3, 2008
BANFF Curatorial Institute Symposium
http://www.banffcentre.ca/programs/program.aspx?id=762
Banff International Curatorial Institute Symposium: Trade Secrets
Education/Collection/History
Program dates: November 12, 2008 – November 14, 2008
Conference Summary
The contemporary art world is undergoing a dramatic change. Against this backdrop, the latest in the ongoing series of the Banff International Curatorial Institute (BICI) conferences, Trade Secrets will re-focus the collective discussion about the curatorial profession by exploring specific issues regarding: the education of curators; the challenges facing collection-based curators; trends in curatorial research; and the writing of curatorial histories. It is commonly understood that the art market is leading the field and in turn legitimating what is significant with respect to the new, rather than the critics and curators who traditionally held sway. Paradoxically, while this power dynamic is widely acknowledged, there is a huge growth in the number of graduate curatorial programs and the contemporary art community has come to put an increased emphasis on exhibitions, and curators.
At this significant juncture, Trade Secrets: Education/Collection/History will critically examine the state of curatorial practice today. By bringing influential museum professionals, independent curators, educators, critics, students, and visual artists into dialogue, Trade Secrets will illuminate and identify strategies for the future.
This conference is made possible through the generous support of the Social Sciences & Humanities Research Council of Canada.
Registration information will be available soon, please check back for details, or join a mailing list for this program.
Conference Agenda
Wednesday, November 12, evening
Welcome Reception and Keynote Lecture
Thursday, November 13, morning
Education and its Discontents
This panel will be composed of recent graduates of several curatorial programs. They will report on the different schools, discuss current realities in the field and propose new approaches to curatorial education.
Thursday, November 13, afternoon
Trade Secrets: Top Ten Lists
In this session curators will present their current research in the form of a top ten list of influential or important sources of inspiration such as exhibitions, texts, books, artworks, films, and music.
Friday, November 14, morning
Collections and their Institutions
Curators and directors will discuss the current challenges of acquiring work for public collections and how they resolve these issues. They will present case studies focusing on recent acquisitions, so as to foreground the existing tensions within this highly important, but often overlooked area of the profession.
Friday, November 14, afternoon
Trade Secrets: Top Ten Lists
More curators share their trade secrets.
The Pioneers: Researching and Writing Curatorial Histories
Current graduate students from three different curatorial programs will present new research about curators who have been pioneers in the field.
A detailed agenda will be available soon, please check back for details.
September 3, 2008
Frieze, Sept 2006 Part 3
Bureaux de change
Many of the key independent curators of the 1990s are now running major European art centres. Their radical and inclusive approach to the function of the gallery has been coined ‘new institutionalism’
If the rise of independent curating is one of the key stories of the art of the 1990s, attention has since shifted to the effects many of those independent curators have had on institutions. Since the Millennium a number of curators who in large part made their names and developed their practices outside institutions are now running serious, medium-sized centres of contemporary art in Europe. Between 1999 and 2002, for instance, Nicolaus Schafhausen took over Kunstverein Frankfurt, Maria Hlavajova took on BAK in Utrecht, Nicolas Bourriaud and Jérôme Sans became the founding directors of Palais de Tokyo, Vasif Kortun founded Platform Garanti Contemporary Art in Istanbul, and Catherine David, Charles Esche and Maria Lind took charge of Witte de With in Rotterdam, Rooseum in Malmo and Kunstverein München respectively.1 While most of these individuals had previously worked in institutions, often on a curatorial rather than directorial level, all were also known for their freelance work in the increasingly flexible terrain of art in the 1990s, whether curating Manifesta (Lind and Hlavajova) or the Istanbul Biennial (Kortun in 1993) or co-founding an idiosyncratic art space (in the UK, Lind at Salon 3 and Esche at The Modern Institute), a critical journal (Bourriaud’s Documents sur l’Art) or a critical and curatorial studies programme (Esche’s Protoacademy in Edinburgh). Besides guest curating, these individuals had developed singular voices as critics and public speakers, especially with regard to articulating curating’s expanded field. The recent shift in institutional thinking, a phenomenon that has begun going by the name of ‘new institutionalism’ – a term borrowed from economics and sociology – is a consequence of formerly independent (or quasi-independent) curators taking charge of a significant number of venues concentrated on a social democratic axis in north-central Europe: the Nordic countries, the Netherlands and Germany.2
In the last year or two ‘new institutionalism’ has entered a second phase, with Schafhausen now directing Witte de With (Rotterdam) and the expiration of Bourriaud, Sans and Lind’s contracts in Paris and Munich respectively. Lind is back in Stockholm directing Iaspis (previously she curated Moderna Museet’s ‘Projekts’), while Søren Gramel and Katharina Schlieben, two of her former colleagues in Munich, now respectively direct and curate Kunstverein Graz and Shedhalle in Zurich – if its journal is anything to go by, the Shedhalle picked up where Kunsteverin Munchen left off.
With Esche now at Van Abbe Museum in Eindhoven, can ‘experimental institutionalism’ (as he prefers to call it) begin to re-shape museum culture, with its far larger publics, operational machinery and systems of accountability, as it has to some extent at MACBA (Barcelona) under Manuel Borja-Villel? Or are collection-based institutions by nature resistant to the ‘new institutional’ values of fluidity, discursivity, participation and production?
One of the defining traits of ‘new institutions’ is that exhibitions no longer preside over other types of activity. In the conventional kunsthalle the exhibition is primary, the centre that other activities (catalogues, guides, tours and so on) support. The ‘new institution’ instead places equal emphasis on a range of other functions. BAK, for example, describes itself on its home page as a ‘platform dedicated to thinking, researching, producing, presenting and analysing contemporary art’.3 This results in a redistribution of its resources, expressed both spatially and temporally in terms of how institutions’ hardware (their buildings) and software (their schedules) are apportioned. Platform Garanti bears this out, acting ‘as a meeting point in the city between contemporary artists, curators and critics. The building contains an artist archive, research and lecture spaces, Istanbul Residency Program and, on street level, a gallery.’4 At institutions such as BAK and Platform, production and reception co-exist with presentation on equal terms.
Many ‘new institutions’ run international residency schemes for artists, curators and critics under the same roof as their exhibition spaces, their guests being active during their stay in lectures, screenings, workshops, conferences and so on. Production may also take less conventional forms: CAC, Arteleku and Rooseum have all produced in-house television as art work and curatorial medium (CACTV, Arteleku TV and Superflex’s Superchannel respectively). Production doesn’t necessarily happen prior to and remote from presentation; it happens alongside or within it. Reception, similarly, refutes the white cube ideal of the individual viewer’s inaudible monologue, and is instead dialogic and participatory. Discussion events are rarely at the service of exhibitions at ‘new institutions’; either they tend to take the form of autonomous programming streams, or else exhibitions themselves take a highly dialogic mode, giving rise to new curatorial hybrids. ‘New institutions’ are deeply interested in education in its widest sense: learning consists of equal exchanges among a peer group in which the ambitious level of discussion is not compromised. This contrasts with government-directed, top-down models of education prevalent in American and British art institutions, much of which is aimed at children with a view to supplementing, or compensating for the failings of, the state school system. Compared with conventional museum education, the flat-line mutual learning systems artists and curators develop in some ‘new institutions’ are equivalent to the anti-psychiatry movement of the 1960s associated with the work of R.D. Laing and Félix Guattari.
The end of the exhibition’s hegemony within the multifunctional institution is also signalled by the abandonment of catalogues. Many ‘new institutions’ publish journals that bring together the strands of their programmes within a common interpretative frame or act as separate platforms for a parallel exploration of ideas through interviews and commissioned essays. ‘New institutional’ journals include Kunstverein München’s Drucksache, Shedhalle’s Zeitung, CAC Vilnius’ Interviu, CAC Bretigny’s L’Ed, Arteleku’s Zehar and Kiasma’s Kiasma. Not being fixed to a particular site, journals enable venues to communicate with a second, remote audience that in some cases is more receptive than their local constituency.
Of these, KM’s Gesammelte Drucksachen/Collected Newsletters 2002–2004 was the most ambitious, running to over 500 pages. As a resource on ‘new institutional’ theory and practice it is unmatched. Unlike the average kunsthalle leaflet, everything in the Drucksachen is enmeshed, making it difficult to distinguish one type of activity from another. Assistance arrives at the back of the publication, where there is a table dividing the programme into five ‘formats’, running the full three years: Exhibitions/Video Screenings (‘It is Hard to Touch the Real’)/Retrospective/Dispositive Workshop/Sputnik Projects. Time, the fourth dimension, was foregrounded at the Kunstverein, as it has been in experimental exhibitions of the 1990s, such as ‘Cities on the Move’ by Hou Hanru and Hans Ulrich Obrist, which evolved and mutated over time and continents. Drucksache editorials speak of wanting to work at different speeds, resisting the stop/go cycles of exhibition-centric programming, which begin each time with a blank slate: its five simultaneous ‘formats’ varied in duration from an evening to over a year. Christine Borland’s retrospective there was spread over time rather than space. Instead of showing the eight projects at once in as many rooms (which the Kunstverein couldn’t accommodate), the eight ‘stations’ were spread over 14 months in various parts of the building. One of the Kunstverein’s most distinctive innovations was the appointment of 14 ‘sputniks’ (travelling companions): artists, curators and writers who influenced its development in unprescribed ways, for example, by redesigning the lobby, curating an exhibition, devising a symposium or intervening in its communications system. The ‘sputniks’ crossed the divides between all of KM’s formats, blurring differences between staff and audience, staff and artist, artist and audience, the public face of an institution and its back-stage.
Kunstverein München’s self-reflexivity, and the extent to which its curatorial team theorized what it was doing, marked it out from other new institutions, with the exception of Esche’s Rooseum, although the latter’s equally political and prolific writing on institutionalism has different intellectual co-ordinates. At times a kind of institutional aesthetics seemed to emerge from KM’s auto-institutional critique, the institution threatening to become the focus of its own activities: ‘It does take some time for this type of programming to be discernible’, Grammel, Lind and Tessa Praun wrote in the editorial to the second Drucksache in the autumn of 2002. ‘Only after a while does a picture appear […] All these formats are intended to develop and from that to overlap, to complement, and to interact with each other, as threads in a loom.’ Shedhalle went one step further, describing its programme as a ‘dynamic cluster-like structure’ in the first issue of Zeitung (2004). ‘The modules alternate and cross, reflect and reciprocally comment on each other’, an image that evokes Deleuze and Guattari’s celebrated rhizome – a favourite curatorial conceit – or an anonymous abstract sculpture. The danger is that the institution becomes a kind of Gesamtkunstwerk ultimately authored not by artists but by curators, a charge Daniel Buren first levelled at Harald Szeemann and Documenta 5, which Szeemann directed, in 1972.
In some senses ‘new institutionalism’ represents the absorption of institutional critique as theorized and practised by artists since the 1970s. Seen this way, it is institutional critique practiced from the inside, exposing and opposing the ideological and disciplinary structures through which art in institutions comes to be mediated. But to most artists of the 1970s the idea of an institutional critique being practised by institutions themselves would have been oxymoronic: institutional critique, by definition, was something conducted from the outside (often literally so: artists closed galleries, wrapped them, plastered paper over their façades and so on).5 This mythical outside, which assumed that the institutional lay in buildings not discourse, led to a negative dialectic that essentially left art institutions unchanged, the white cube serving as a foil for critical installations. Vanguard artists of the 1970s abandoned the high Modernist doctrine of medium-specificity, but discipline-specificity remained mostly unchallenged.
‘New institutionalism’, and much recent art, side-steps the problem of the white cube altogether. If white-walled rooms are the site for exhibitions one week, a recording studio or political workshop the next, then it is no longer the container that defines the contents as art, but the contents that determine the identity of the container. In this, ‘new institutionalism’ has more in common with Liam Gillick, Philippe Parreno, Rirkrit Tiravanija and other artists associated with Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics, with whom new institutions have collaborated repeatedly, than with most institutional critique. When exhibitions evoke or function as factory assembly lines, film sets or fully functioning apartments, they cause the institutions they’re in to lose definition. For ‘The Trial of Pol Pot’ (1998) Gillick and Parreno invited a number of artists to hold conversations at Le Consortium (Dijon) with whomever they liked from any intellectual field. The venue was neither obviously open nor closed. What was it that visitors stepped into? The kunsthalle, one suspects, failed to convert this series of informal but exclusive transdisciplinary conversations into a ready-made, or an exhibition of works of art. Instead, the institution probably mutated under its influence, losing its prefix ‘art’ in the process, becoming part of a far larger institutional field.
Institutional reflection tends to be productive now, curators working hand-in-hand with artists, the shared assumption being that institutional identity is up for grabs. Artists’ space in institutions is no longer restricted to exhibition spaces: Gillick designed Frankfurter Kunstverein’s logo and the coloured suspended ceiling in its top floor gallery, for example, and Apolonija Sustersic designed Kunstverein München’s multi-functional lobby space; Rooseum’s ‘Future Archive’ is determined by artists it works with, whereas CAC Vilnius invites artists to intervene within its ‘Info Lab’. These fanciful names for libraries and archival facilities signal, performatively, the dynamic role knowledge production plays in these institutions. The artist-as-researcher is a privileged figure in new institutions; crowded with monitors, reading material, tables and chairs, exhibitions, at a glance, can look like unidentifiable classrooms worked by obsessives.
Artists’ groups and interdisciplinary collectives play a key part in the programmes of new institutions, particularly those of Esche and Lind; many of them make knowledge-sharing the cornerstone of their collaboration (e.g., Nomads and Residents, 16 Beaver, The School of Missing Studies, Copenhagen Free University).7 Usually political, sometimes activist, well networked at a local and international level, collaborative as opposed to hierarchical, self-organized rather than instrumentalized, flexible and quick on their feet, in many respects artists’ collectives hold up a mirror to new institutional desires. Their inclusion in new institutional programmes ideally results in zones of relative autonomy within the institution, the collectives operating according to their own internal patterns, the institutions serving as their hosts. The most politicized new institutions aspire to a similar condition of collective autonomy writ large. Many see their experiments as logical responses to the most pressing socio-political issues of the day: the shrinking welfare state, the erosion of the social bond, the privatization of public space, the global hegemony of neo-liberal economics and so on. For Esche the project of ‘new institutionalism’ is nothing short of resisting the ‘totality of global capitalism’.
It’s hardly surprising that new institutions tend to be concentrated around traditional social democracies. It’s there, especially in Sweden (still the prototype social democracy), that belief in the transformative potential of public institutions remains strongest, despite recent set-backs. The new institution, coinciding with art becoming more politicized and transdisciplinary, is sometimes seen as a kind of compensatory public space, an ‘oasis of openness’ or ‘forum of possibility’, in Esche’s hopeful words, where ‘things can be imagined otherwise’.8 The dissolution of the homogeneous public sphere of Enlightenment (as theorized by Jürgen Habermas), could, after all, represent an opportunity: ‘new institutionalism’ may be losing the bourgeois public whose values museums have represented for two centuries, but it may in time find a substitute for it in the form of competing publics in the plural, an ‘agonistic pluralism’ of adversaries (rather than enemies) that, according to Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, is a prerequisite of radical democracy.9 If ‘new institutionalism’ cannot create these publics, it will remain an ambitious prototype, as hermetically sealed as the white cube its shrugs off. Without these publics it won’t begin impacting on the real social forces beyond its walls.
Alex Farquharson is a writer and curator living in London.
1 Several ‘new institutional’ precedents in the 1990s include Künstlerhaus Stuttgart (under Ute Meta Bauer, then Schafhausen), Arteleku in San Sebastián (Santi Eraso), CAC in Vilnius (Kestutis Kuizinas, along with Deimantas Narcevicius and Raimundas Malasauskas) and Shedhalle in Zurich (Ursula Biemann, among many others).
2 Contributions to the developing discourse on ‘new institutionalism’ include: Verksted #1, 2003: New Institutionalism (Office for Contemporary Art Norway), ed. Jonas Ekeberg; ‘Institution Squared’ at Kiasma (Helsinki) in 2003, curated by Jens Hoffmann and produced by NIFCA; Claire Doherty, ‘The Institution is Dead! Long Live the Institution! Contemporary Art and New Institutionalism’, engage 15, 2004; and, most recently, Art and its Institutions, ed. Nina Möntmann, Black Dog Publishing, London, 2006. ‘Institution Squared’ took the form of an exhibition in which ten institutions were invited to represent themselves, which they tended to do through artists’ commissions. The discourse was generated in an accompanying conference co-organized by Möntmann.
3 http://www.bak-utrecht.nl
4 http://www.platform.garanti.com
5 See ‘The Gallery as a Gesture’, in Brian O’Doherty, Inside the White Cube, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1999
6 In 2001 Esche wrote that he wanted art institutions to become ‘part community center, part laboratory and part academy, with less need for the established showroom function’, an image that evokes the kinds of spaces Relational artists produce in their exhibitions. http://www.rooseum.se
7 For a critical account of the incorporation of artists’ groups in ‘new institutional’ programmes see Rebecca Gordon-Nesbitt, ‘Harnessing the Means of Production’, Verksted #1
8 ‘The Possibility Forum’, http://www.rooseum.se
9 See ‘Introduction: For an Agonistic Pluralism’, in Chantal Mouffe, The Return of the Political, Verso, London, 1993
Alex Farquharson
September 3, 2008
Frieze, Sept 2006 Part 2
Academic Questions
Educating the educators, ivory tower activism and an enlightening visit to the zoo
According to Genevan oral history, when Jacques Derrida visited the city’s university many years ago, he broke his arm falling off a skateboard on campus. Some weeks later a failed local poet by the name of Schlurick chose to confront the professor, saying: ‘Monsieur Derrida, you think you’re so bloody radical, but you never even leave the university – the biggest risk you run is breaking your arm showing off to the demoiselles.’ The philosopher reacted in a manner atypically abrupt: ‘Go ahead and hand out your flyers at the gates of the Renault factory – ils en ont rien à foutre [no one gives a fuck],’ he reportedly grunted; ‘the ideology of tomorrow is produced right here, at the university.’
I tend to repeat the anecdote whenever someone bemoans the horrors of élitist detachment, arguably proving the above skateboarder’s point by parroting his ‘ideology’ in a not too distant ‘tomorrow’. Still the quip remains remarkable as an undramatic, unapologetic circumference of angry grassroots activism or planetary pretensions by implying that effectively ‘inside the institution’ is ‘outside the institution’, and vice versa.
Liverpool University professor Jonathan Harris’ landmark survey The New Art History (2001) traces a rich genealogy of radical art historians – Marxist, Feminist, Queer, post-colonial – who all faced accusations of having institutionalized political movements, thus removing them from potential popular developments. Some remained unabashedly academic; others indeed hated the idea of being cogs in the teaching machine, doing little more than updating the software, merely adding more socio-political context, more theoretical finesse and more names to a canon that remains otherwise unaltered. Personally, I’d say if you achieve all this, you’ve already done an amazing job. On the other hand, in a period of unchecked institutionalization in all possible shapes and forms a plea for ivory tower activism is not exactly shocking.
Allow me to refer to an artist with a very shrewd take on such matters: Berlin-based Natascha Sadr Haghighian. In her video Villa Watch (2005) – made in collaboration with Judith Hopf – we see a lush garden estate somewhere in southern California, housing a lecture on the science of perception. The edifice is surrounded by TV journalists and by mystified friends and relatives of members of the lecture audience; their loved ones were last seen entering the institution, which they cannot or will not leave. Using a good dose of political sarcasm and the folklore of police barriers, newscasters and touching eyewitness accounts, the video turns ‘institutionalization’ into spectacle – rather than the banality it’s become, as predictable and inevitable as Don Henley’s guitar solo following the lines ‘You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.’
To take another Sadr Haghighian video, Present But Not Yet Active (2002) documents a performance preceding the Manifesta 4 where, instead of accepting the invitation to join the biennial bonanza, she invites the three curators to Frankfurt zoo to witness the innovative wildlife displays of Bernard Grzimek. The resulting interfaces between art and entertainment, visibility and authenticity, performance and representation, are too intricate to trace here; suffice to say that the gesture was obviously more exclusive than any participation in the exhibition would have been. Sadr Haghighian took a playful mass-educational apparatus to interact with key decision-makers only. There are many comparable examples I can only mention here: Carey Young’s curatorial workshops, the Fondation Hicter’s engagements with EU policy makers, Meg Cranston’s art-historical tours for art historians on the Sunset Strip etc. Or, to name a very recent event, Jean-Michel Cousteau – son of Jacques Cousteau, the famous underwater filmmaker – screening his film about the reefs of the north-western Hawaiian Islands at the White House, which prompted President Bush to dramatically declare the entire region a reserve preservation area. (He actually lived up to the promise last month.) Admittedly, top-down pedagogy is usually more time-consuming than this.
In sum, it’s not the festivalization of art and politics, or art shows with a popularizing bent, nor the elitist institutionalization of critical art that are the problem, but the tedious opposition between conventional trickle-down Enlightenment (institutions, lectures, essays, seminars) on the one hand and the communitarian, pedagogical picnic on the other. Sadr Haghighian’s visit to the zoo was itself a top-end playground exercise, and, at the risk of sounding like an advocate of caning in schools, it was an example of gentle condescension gracefully staged that makes for the most memorable moments of learning in any context. I loathe essays that end with a prim and proper synthesis all didactically spelt out. But here it seems appropriate. By the next issue, I’d like you all to sketch out three suggestions for clever didactics within the smaller circles of the art world.
Tirdad Zolghadr is a critic and curator based in Zurich.
Tirdad Zolghadr
September 3, 2008
Frieze, Sept 2006
Lessons in Perspective
Do we visit museums to be taught, amused, challenged or affirmed? Should curators legislate how they want their exhibitions to be understood?
Last spring London’s Victoria and Albert Museum staged a survey show of early 20th-century Modernist art and design called ‘Modernism: Designing a New World’. At roughly the same time Tate Modern held a two-man exhibition of Modernism’s celebrated pioneers László Moholy-Nagy and Josef Albers, subtitled ‘From the Bauhaus to the New World’. The coincidence was interesting for a number of reasons, not least because it raised fundamental questions about the purpose of exhibitions. Do we visit museums and galleries to be taught or amused, challenged or affirmed, unsettled or comforted? The blindingly and blandly obvious answer is ‘all of the above’, but the battles over the slightest shade of emphasis can be startlingly vehement.
Unsurprisingly, a number of reviewers chose to couple the shows, and the outcome was revealing. That Modernism and Moholy-Nagy/Albers appeared in a design museum and an art museum respectively brought up issues around how objects should be displayed in these two closely related but quite distinct contexts. At the V&A the curator, Christopher Wilk, in consultation with an extensive body of curatorial advisers, generated a theory about Modernism and modernity and then illustrated it with a series of objects, art works and films. At Tate Modern Achim Borchardt-Hume took a straightforward chronological look at the careers of the two Bauhauslers in a manner that acknowledged the educational and political intent of their work but foregrounded its potential to offer unmitigated pleasure. These differences in approach reflect assumptions that are fundamental to the two institutions. Curators at the V&A are required to explain; those at the Tate must supply us with redemptive experience. (And if they try to do otherwise, God help them. Remember the aftermath of Tate Modern’s infamously didactic show, ‘Century City’ in 2001.)
I wouldn’t want to argue that these distinctions are arbitrary or absurd. Exhibiting design free from explanation or any context other than that of the gallery itself makes little sense. Philip Johnson did it at MoMA with the 1934 exhibition ‘Machine Art’, where industrial objects such as ball bearings were shown on pedestals as if they were abstract sculptures. The consensus of design historians is that this show was marvellous, but nothing would be gained from repeating the exercise. While not set in stone, the divergent premises of museum shows of art and design are broadly accepted; it is just that in the case of exhibitions such as Modernism and Moholy-Nagy/Albers they become particularly troublesome. How can a curator justify following the conventions of either an art or a design exhibition when the objects of his or her attention were made by people whose very aim it was to eradicate such a division? Moholy-Nagy believed that contemplation should be a part of everyday life. How best, then, to show his work in an era when such reflection has come to be seen as a thing apart, something that takes place in white rooms, at well-judged intervals?
In dealing with this dilemma, whatever curators do, they open themselves to criticism. This Scylla-and-Charybdis situation was reflected in the collective joint reviews. In The Guardian Adrian Searle complained that the V&A show neglected ‘formal innovation and development’ in favour of ‘bigger and more nebulous themes’, such as ‘the healthy body culture’, ‘the machine’ and ‘national and political Modernism’. On the design side, in Grafik magazine critic Angharad Wilson argued that Tate Modern offered little explanation of how its objects occupied their place in the world. And coming in from left field, Anindya Bhattacharyya from the Socialist Review walked the museum with a fuming ‘Bauhaus fanatic friend’, angrily muttering, ‘This stuff isn’t meant to be in a gallery!’
Personally I wasn’t troubled by any such qualms at either venue. At the V&A I particularly enjoyed the first few densely packed, intensely informative rooms, and at Tate Modern the formal drama of the ‘Homage to a Square’ series was beautifully choreographed. Overall the two objects that struck me most were a sculpture by the Polish artist Katarzyna Kobro, a compellingly modest steel sculpture painted in primary colours, and Moholy’s unwieldy light prop, a construction of metal and plastic used for the refraction of light that the artist took with him from Berlin to London and then to the USA. The former presented an opportunity for satisfying reflection in a room dedicated to the explanation of Utopia; the latter prompted me to think about the trials of migration in a space primarily reserved for the contemplation of shadow and reflection.
I wouldn’t for a minute pretend I was doing something rebellious, breaking from the strait-jacket of curatorial vision or the like. Determining the exact purpose and weight of each exhibit is a terrible curatorial burden; recognizing that you cannot legislate how your audience will read it is a huge curatorial relief. The equation between how an object is displayed and how it will be read remains unfixed. To be a success in its own terms an educational show requires willing students, but equally a temple to art needs to be filled with worshippers.
Emily King is design editor of frieze.
Emily King
August 13, 2008
Construction of Place in Amsterdam
Hello all, thinking further about Amsterdam Noord, this article seems interesting. Will try and find a full digital copy but so far the abstract gives you the idea:
Cultural globalization and the identity of place: the reconstruction of Amsterdam
Jan Nijman
Department of Geography and Regional Studies, University of Miami
This article discusses the effects of cultural globalization on urban identities, and concentrates on a case study of Amsterdam. The theoretical part of the paper defines cultural globalization and outlines its effects on localities, including the ways in which the images of localities are transformed in the process of global information exchange. It emphasizes the importance of rapidly growing flows of people, in particular in the form of mass tourism, in the deliberate and spontaneous re-identification and changing meaning of places. The empirical part of the paper juxtaposes the historically grown urban identity of Amsterdam since the sixteenth century with the city’s re-created identity of recent decades. It is argued that Amsterdam’s present-day image as a city with very liberal attitudes towards sex and drugs emerged under the influence of global mass tourism, and that it is not as authentic as is often suggested or believed. The discussion concentrates on past and present cultural traits of Amsterdam in the form of Calvinism, commercialism, morality and tolerance.
August 1, 2008
Social Engineering in Amsterdam Noord – Volume, #2, 2008
You can find the relevant files on your WordPress ‘dashboard’ – go to ‘Manage’ then ‘Media Library’
