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Reinaldo Laddaga: - Your talk was very
stimula-ting. There are a couple of remarks and a couple of questions
I would like to ask you. To start with, I think the structure you
are describing is particularly complex. I wonder if you think that
it is a transitional structure, or if you think that we ought to
wish it remains as it is. I find it pa-radoxical. As you said, an
art museum is one of the central models of public space as a space
open to everybody, and to each individual. I would also say it is
open to the classical indivi-dual who is in contact with his fellow
beings, while you are talking about a stage of society in which
individuals are hyper individualized through a personalized consumer
structure and a de-personalization of choices. In a way this individual
who enters the structure you des-cribe... what you seem to be doing,
when you offer it to intentional communities, is carving a semi-private
space in a classical public space. I wonder if this is how we can
describe this struc-ture, as a place where this hyper individualized
person may still have access to his own wide range of choices and
at the same time bond with others from that hyper individualization,
and which is the relationship between these semi privatised spaces
that you build in the pu-blic space and traditional public space.
Charles Esche: - I would first like to discuss the transition.
It seems to me that we are in transitional terms in a more general
manner. If you think of the history of humanity, a sort of ideological
battle between two polarities has always existed, and now it does
not seem to be so -or, at least the second option has failed in
1989- so that I do not think that the current war represents a similar
type of cultural or ideological battle. That is, it has been put
forward as a figh-ting possibility or as a collision between two
civilizations, but I believe that ultimately it will rest in political
rather than cultural grounds. For the time being we have not considered
in-cluding it in the public domain, so that we are in a transitional
phase beyond what is simply institutional. In that sense I believe
that yes, the temporary character of what we do relates to this
transition that is taking place in society and in politics, in a
general way in culture, but spe-cifically in politics. I hope this
answers to... that is. Where does all this happen? I do not know.
It ought to quiet down and I do not what will happen. As far as
hyper individualisation goes it is interesting what you say, but
I would add that one notices that people are more and more interested
in group activities and that can be seen here in Trama. One can
see a counter-movement, paradoxical, of course, but a coun-ter-movement
against hyper individualisation, not only in art but also in other
spheres, where people seem to want to set their wishes at a certain
collective level. I think that what we are doing, by inviting this
electronic group, autono-mous organizations or this Christiania
group, is to tackle this movement in society, parallel to this hyper
individualization created by the de-sire for a capitalist free market
and marketing, so that I agree with what you are saying, but I am
not so sure that I am creating a space in which this hyper individual
-to give him a name- may find the links he might be looking for.
I think that what we are doing is create a platform to allow existing
groups to speak, and this speech is a minor effort, a fight against
hyper individualization. In a utopian context one would consider,
as I said yesterday -or as some-body else said- calling the community
to order. It seems to me that this only a rhetorical device. I believe
the real condition is that we are reflec-ting the existence of sub-groups
and people’s desire to work collectively, which is more and
more obvious as time goes by, and it is potentially interesting
grounds to question the way capitalism created desire.
Public: - Things happen at the museum that before happened in
specifically social environments. Could we say that the museum you
propose is the agora of the future?
Charles Esche: - There are many classical meta-phors that
go round in Argentina, and I do not know why... I do not know what
“the agora of the future” means. The agora public space
or public space that one could even call a cultural centre -in Swedish
there is a word that may be translated as “the house of activities”,
which is an expression I like very much- has been under great pressure
because they have not been able to provide an answer to the hyper
individuali-zation that we have been discussing, based in a collective
idea that is no longer present. Or at least, it is not present as
it used to be; in a way it justifies its survival. Therefore new
ways of collectivism have to find ways of expression and I do not
think that the place for it is the community space centre -I do
not know how to deal with the notion of agora, as it happened so
long ago- but the possibility of collective ex-pression has to find
an institutional frame or that new type of museum (this is not what
I called it, but if you want to call it a new type of museum...)
I think that the conditions in Athens and the conditions in Malmö
are so different that is difficult for me to call it an agora, even
metaphorically.
Gabriela Massuh: -Your judgement of time seemed to me very
important, I believe that the time/space classifications are always
related, the alteration of space modifies time as well right away,
that is to say, when the River Plate flows away from intermediate
constructions, the road we took as children to reach the river also
flows away, as does the road we shall take in future not to reach
the river. These dimensions always go together, space and time.
The thing is it is much more difficult to speak about time. The
second point: the public. It seems to me that one cannot discuss
the public without discu-ssing cultural industries. There is a universal
public that labours under greater threats than the public that attends
galleries or the public you describe as tourist, which is the public
that still thrives on the good products produced by the market.
Films, for example. This is a typical case: if the demands of the
US in every Uruguay gat/// meeting are successful, the only cinema
left will be that of Hollywood. The US proposal is not to subsidize
any more cultural products because they see them as entertainment.
So the public that still consumes cultural products that are not
entertainment is under a greater threat than the public you want
to protect, the fissures in the system let in this public you men-tion,
the public that is not let in is the one that relates to the fissures
in the market, and that seems a lot worse.
Charles Esche: -I can speak a little about cinema because
I think one of the answers is permissi-veness in art, that is to
say, the fact that art pro-vides a space where this type of cultural
expre-ssions find a place and a home is something we have to insist
on, and one has to insist on the existence of a type of film. You
say cinema, but what your referring to is what in English is called
art films -a conflicting term, I know- but what
I am suggesting is that that type of films may find a place within
a permissive and expansive notion of art. This would mean that the
type of public you are speaking of could be drawn towards the type
of public I am speaking of. These two publics could meet in the
public space of a museum or an institution, in such a manner that
it is not necessary to talk about preserving a cultural voice specifically
cinema oriented, as opposed to a more general artistic presentation,
in a way that would be necessary to stress the difference. I do
agree with you, however, on the risks and the threats that are raised
by the gat rounds, the same type of threats that will extend from
the cinema to all other cultural expressions. As the cinema is a
more commercial expression, it is one of the first expressions to
be under attack, but: how much does Hollywood lose because of the
Ar-gentine film industry? Very little. It is not only a question
of extending profitability, but it is also the current political
cultural agenda, so we have to understand clearly where, under the
name of capitalist free market, does the attack come from, and why,
coming under that name, it does not have the capitalist free market
as an objective. In that sense, I would say again that if there
is any hope in this situation -and it is very difficult to feel
this hope- but if there is any hope, it has to be linked to institutions
that have a privileged place within capitalism, such as ex-perimentation
places that are sufficiently relevant to be tolerated. Perhaps we
will end up as in the US system, in which everything has to be funded
with private means, or perhaps, we may go on defending the European
notion of public service. May be it is still possible to believe
that the future is not only the US. It is difficult to imagine this,
but it is not the only model. If we speak in more extensive terms,
social demo-cracy has been the massive failure of the last 20 years.
It has failed to produce an argument; it is not the coops that have
failed. It is the social democrats that have made a mistake: Blair,
Schröder, these are the people that have failed to make a solid
statement and now are paying the price of their incompetence and
sloth.
Fabiana Barreda: - I would like to thank you for the enthusiasm.
I am very interested in the pro-ject, but I would like to ask a
question: the first management decision was an architectural mo-dification
and the first summons were to turn space into a stage, so I thought
of translating Beuys “we are all artists” into “we
are all actors”. And I wanted to ask a pointed question on
a moment in which machines are allotted to people so that they can
suggest which are the architectural modifications related to space
re-commended by the community. I would like to know the needs the
community wanted fulfilled in relation to the space of that place.
Charles Esche: - The most important demand was that we allowed
the squatters to take the place over. The people of Copenhagen said:
it would be a good place to take over. Then we had a long discussion
why it was not such a good idea, as it was finally going to exclude
other possibilities. The truth is that we won, as one can tell now.
So we told them that it could not be done because they were going
to throw us out and then others were going to take over who would
think of worse programs. That was forceful reasoning, but we tried
discussing it. This was one of the proposals. Other proposals we
received were fairly interested, many were fairly conventional,
they followed the community centre model, that is, they were looking
for a space for community theatre groups, and we thought we had
to go beyond that. There was a group of more than 20 people that
took part in the discussion in this open forum -as we call it- that
had the dimension of an education program, though this appreciation
may be not quite accurate. What we really did was to go against
the original project and, as I saw the type of proposals that entered,
I realized that they fell into the participating art community model
of the 1960s and 1970s, which does not seem useful at present. We
tried to explain that we did not think the proposals useful and
that other models could surface, such as the Superflex model, of
the web transmission station, that would stimulate the imagination
in different ways.
The initial proposal of presentation of projects became another
debate situation, during which we tried to organize our ideas and
to listen to the ideas that we thought were interesting. It is a
democratic problem, if you will, but it is also a problem of keeping
one’s mind open and of a certain violence that is needed in
a given mo-ment to discard other options saying, “no, it is
not worth our while thinking down this road because it has been
tried in the past and it has not worked” I have tried to do
it through sta-tements, with debates and so far I have been fairly
successful. The next project relates to spe-culation machines. We
had people design a vi-sual identity of the museum through a sort
of graphic studio. We aimed at creating a visual reply starting
from the proposal of an artist in an open graphic context, in which
people could make posters with a Letraset type of machine, left
a poster and took another one. The question discussed was: what
were museums for, and what people developed were their answers.
So we have a sort of Chinese democracy wall where people placed
their posters. This is not a project closed within a definite time.
Does this answer your questions?
Andreas
Siekmann: A remark of sorts: in some cases it seems to me
it is too much “form fo-llows function” and in some cases
something was missing, content. It is what we call soft cri-ticism
of institutions, because the blind spot of institutional criticism
is the hierarchy of the ins-titutions themselves and the rest relates
to the representation of Utopian thinking. I believe there is a
very essential tendency and no room for other perspectives. I think
it would be more interesting if you did not think Utopian thoughts
in terms of essentialism but in more concrete terms, so that the
series of activities became more programmatic than what is happening
here. For example, with regards to your concre-te instance of the
Nike theme, The Sweatshop, there are more than 8,000 pages dedicated
to this event, and it is more than anything else looking for the
blind spot in Nike’s promise regarding production. In this
sense it would be important to underline the subjects in a way that
people realized or knew there are themes so that it is not a modernist
question of “form follows function”.
Charles Esche: - If this is what was understood, then it
is a mistake of the presentation, and this is because I had to cut
part of the talk.
I think that the critical idea was stronger in those questions of
intentional communities and I would not say that it might have been
understood as Utopian, it also transmits a very dark idea of what
communities may be. At the same time, I agree with you in that we
should be more political in our ambitions, and I think that we are
tending towards it. Nevertheless,
I think that the type of example that we presented through Nike
is one of the examples
of becoming involved that the web in Internet generates, but that
could also happen in real geographical networks under certain circums-tances.
What we were asking with our show was on communities; the next question
has to do with here and now, with the manner in which a place outside
the centres can account for globalisation. We are gong to ask a
series of artists from different places in the world and this is
only the beginning of the program in which we are going to ask questions
on how to account for the immigration that has taken place the last
few years, for example, a very specific matter that relates to the
population of a city that is it is not 50% Swedish, a very high
percentage of non Swedish inhabitants who are practically invisible
within the city. So as to make them visible, it is not enough to
invite them; one has to create the opportunities of dialogue with
the artistic communities of their places of origin. These are the
questions that are being asked.
Andreas Siekmann: - For example, it would be interesting
to reflect on the Goteburg Judge-ment, on the people who are in
jail for a long period of time with disregard to Human Rights. It
would be good for anti globalisation movements and I think that
art institutions have to grasp what is happening within the anti
globa-lization movement. May be I have to explain this: there was
a meeting in Goteburg where there also were anti globalisation demonstrations.
That was the first time before Genoa, and it was the first time
there was suppression. There were bullets and a lot of people were
taken prisoner, taken to jail for a long time without due process,
no lawyers, and now they will be penalised with stricter penalties
than they would have received in their respective European Community
countries. A very critical matter, and this happened near your city.
Charles Esche: - A month before Goteburg there was a similar
demonstration against a meeting in Malmö, in which many people
were arrested. We had two public meetings at the Museum against
what happened. We are not doing it with reference to Goteburg, but
we are doing it with regards to Malmö, and this has created
some problems with the Swiss social democrat party, from which we
have fallen apart comple-tely, which is a kind of success if you
consider the nature of the social democrat party.
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