Firstly, thanks for the invitation here and particularly thanks to Claudia for organising the whole project. I think she’s done an amazing job.
I’ve called the talk ‘Can everything be temporary’ in honour of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. In 1919 he is said to have told Malevich when he was setting up the UNOVIS school in Vitebsk to make work in the public space but to make sure to ‘let everything be temporary’. In view of the subsequent history of communism I’ve taken the liberty of turning his statement into a question. Can everything be temporary? And what might we mean by temporary, particularly not when it comes to transitory space in the public realm but to the institutional public space of the museum, kunsthalle (art hall) or artists-run space, which is where most of my time is spent (so I have to think about it) but also, I believe has to be a constructive element in the remaking of art’s relation to the social in our now firmly post-avant-garde (post-cold war) times. both of which seem to predicate.
So, we can rethink the institution through the temporary - a term that might provide space for imagining alternative strategies as, especially in the case of the museum with a collection to preserve, institutions predicate themselves on long term, if not eternal, survival. These terms however, beg a lot of questions. With the temporary are we referring to some kind of resistance or difference in current institutional developments, or is it just a faster way of distributing and discussing art? Might the temporary actually provide the kind of alternative structural principle around which things should be different - just as Ade spoke about the ruangrupa exhibition space being different because it is organised differently. What I want to imagine then is this term temporary as a tool to open up WHAT WE MIGHT TERM INSTITUTIONAL SELF- CRITIQUE. It is useful because it concerns time rather than space and further the division of time into unspecified units during which institutions might adapt or adopt different personas, different identities for artists and its public.
I’m going to try to look at the idea of temporary strategies from two points of view one being in my capacity as director of the Rooseum in Malmö. I’ll talk about what we are doing there to try to shift some of the possibilities of an existing institution to respond to current conditions. The second will be to look at what are broadly called artist run galleries or alternative spaces to see how they have sprung up and been effective in various parts of the world. In doing so, I want to concentrate on the 2002 Gwangju Biennale in Korea that I am co-curating.
I want to start, in reverse, if you like by looking at the problems of the museum - held up as a representative of the system as it exists. Recently, I went to a lecture by Chris Dercon (BvB) who spoke rather depressingly about a general crisis for museums and kunsthallen.
He listed them as (if I remember rightly)
Crisis of Funding
Crisis of Audience
Crisis of Meaning
Crisis of Political Legitimacy
Crisis of art as an Avant Garde
Crisis of Architecture
Crisis of Market
Now, as one of my current jobs is to direct a kunsthalle in Malmö, I can sometimes I can understand his feelings very well. But I think we might also rethink the descriptions he offered us in less cataclysmic terms - not as crises but in shifts in the way art itself is produced, commissioned, developed, distributed and discussed. By that I mean that the very challenges that are raised by reduced funding and political support, or increased demand for community representation and audience engagement throw open the question of the purpose and mission of a traditional museum or exhibition hall in a creative and potent way, as well as suggesting other kinds of structures and organisations that could replace the traditional models of exhibition hall, museum with a collection and commercial gallery.
Firstly, to take the Rooseum as an example of an institution that is in the process of creating a potentially alternative strategy, I want to read out a statement that we issued at the start of the new programme in March 2001. The title is:
What's the point of institutions like the Rooseum?
It's tempting to say 'to offer hope, faith and charity in complicated times' but it's too glib. I used to wonder whether art institutions might find themselves constrained by the modifier 'art' and its popular meanings. Now, the term 'art' might be starting to describe that space in society for experimentation, questioning and discovery that religion, science and philosophy have occupied sporadically in former times. It has become an active space rather than one of passive observation. Therefore the institutions to foster it have to be part community centre, part laboratory and part academy, with less need for the established showroom function. They must also be political in a direct way, thinking through the consequences of our extreme free market policies. Secondary questions are whether individual institutions will have the courage to find their own balance in this mix or follow the old centre-periphery model and whether funders can be persuaded to drop the touristic justification for art institutions in favour of increasing creative thinking and intelligence in society.
The first step is to reorientate the direction of the organisation through shifting the identity of the architecture of the Rooseum. The three levels will be separated in terms of function with studios and a project room upstairs, a main hall for large scale exhibitions and productions, and a living archive and microcinema downstairs. The next five year programme will be provisional and temporary in as much as we will be learning practically how to use the building and develop an audience in the city and region. There will be around 25 activities of different sorts throughout the year, from talks and one night performances to studio residencies and major international exhibitions. End of quote
This statement was intended to set out an ambitious and identifiable mission for the Rooseum, as a site not only for artistic experimentation but also as an institutional testsite - a place where new strategies could be developed.
Let me show you quickly a few of the projects we have undertaken which try to bring out the time based nature of our activity
SLIDES and descriptions
Mark Bain
In March Mark Bain in a ‘stark act of removal’ picked up a 6m high wall that had divided the space since it’s opening and swung it through the space before laying it flat on the ground. On this impromptu stage, SLIDE Will Bradley organised his project ‘All the Needles R on Red’ in which local unknown bands were invited to their first recording session. A series of performances culminated in an electronic music night that was subsequently released on vinyl. SLIDES
In what would become the microcinema we made Martin Creed’s Half the Air in a Given Space - a space half full of balloons and we also set up the future archive, inviting all the artists we will be working with over the next years to contribute 10 items - books, CDs or videos - to what will build up to be an ecletic library of individual inspirations.
We also are introduced 2 artists’ studios (SLIDE of superflex), and a micro cinema where art films and discussions can be held into what was a basic showroom model.
These projects brought in particular sub groups of the audience and with the second project Vi - Intentional Communities we began to address an even wider range of the public. The exhibition brought together 20 contemporary artists with documentation from communes and social experiments from the 1910s to the 1980s.
SLIDES
Main exhibition x3
Joanna Billing
Pavel Althamer
Jasmila Zbanic
Social experiments
Overall
Christania
Friedrichhof
A vital part of this project was a series of intensive public meetings between the leaders of communes and autonomous squatting organisations in Sweden and Denmark. These developed into amazing conversations across the 1968 and 2000 generation about protest, the justification or non-justification of violence, the role of culture and the purpose of public spaces such as the Rooseum when it comes to direct action and the possibilities of social change. These have continued with the Íppet Forum where a group of about 20 people are working more intimately with us on the programme and how we might involve them practically and as a first audience for our ideas.
We have also just initiated a project called ARIES - an acronym for Art and Research into Economic Structures. It will be a long term project for the Rooseum, where we will try to create the conditions in which artists can carry out free research into the economic area that affects us all profoundly.
ARIES aims to ask some simple questions about art’s role and purpose in the world. These include questions of whether art can address issues of economy, discourse and resistance directly? Can it create a dynamic two-way engagement within a singular world model? What is research for an artist and how can it be brought into contact with viewers and visitors? So far, we have asked Jens Haaning to develop a proposal to look at industrial production in India. Looking at the acknowledged fact that Indian workers are far more efficient data processors and programmers than Europeans. He wants to try to find out why and whether a change in the self-image of what are basically lowest wage workers could change the relationships between the West and the other.
These spaces and initiatives are however themselves only temporary - the archive will disappear in January to be replaced by a new Superflex Project called the Speculative Machine. The micro cinema will become a fully functioning cinema space in February for art films, but also be the site for electronic club nights. The main space, which will largely be used for exhibitions, has already seen fluid projects such as All the Needles R on Red.
Leaving the Rooseum then, I’d like to ask the question could we imagine a contemporary art institution not as a mausoleum, a showroom or even an entertainment centre but as a fluid, open vector in which different groups, objects, individuals and information zones cross and divert each other. Fluidity, along with temporariness and also a term that came up in Christian Ferrer talk of art as a proposal of another world or, my term would be, a place of possibility, seem to me to be defining terms in relationship not just to the attempts we are making at the Rooseum, but to the common ground that many at the investigative, non-commercial end of art might be interested in. .
The need for fluidity, fluid institutions and, to use a political metaphor, rapid response, comes from, as I see it, both the changes in the way artists are working and the expectations that they have of the institutions they work with or establish themselves AND ALSO from changes in the broader political and social framework.
These latter changes are effected by technology, changes in the organisation and demands of capitalism and also changes in the sense of subjecthood that the art audience, or indeed Western citizens, are experiencing.
It seems to me still too easy to dismiss the collapse of real existing socialism as a defining sea change in our current situation. Unforeseen perhaps, what it has led to, simply put, is the end of explicit ideological battles in all fields: the economic, the political and the aesthetic. While we might superficially appear to be living at a time when ‘anything is possible’, at least in stylistic terms, in fact there are insistent totalising models for behaviour within the constraints of free market capitalism that determine much art (and other) activity. With free market capitalism being portrayed less as an ideology and more as a force of nature, the opportunity for intelligent, thoughtful resistance, for discourse, even for a pause to think again, is reduced. Institutions in these circumstances are no longer a site for the tussle of meaning between audience, artists and authorities but simply opportunities for product placement. This state of affairs has produced some of the museum’s more existential crises, as well as those directly related to political legitimacy and public funding, given that the children of 1968 see their (counter)culture feeding the consumer society all too easily and public provision being outdone in many areas by commercial galleries, private collectors and artists’ organisations. The questions I would like to pose are what possibilities does this situation create? Can these institutions and the strategies for art’s encounter with viewers be enlivened by the post-1989 challenge? Can they address issues of economy, discourse and resistance directly? How can art become difficult again while retaining its new degree of accessibility? How can the public space of the art institution turn itself into a meeting place for contesting views and a place where ‘thinking things otherwise’ is made more possible than it is elsewhere.
Parallel to this huge political and cultural change has been growing demands from audiences for involvement and accountability as well as a new self-consciousness about the roles we wish to play in various social situations. The market is already developing these tendencies fast - from Levi’s new customisable clothes through to the Nike’s write your own logo on your shoes, corporations are attempting to provide us with more and more active choices within the confines of profitability. Of course, making our own clothes or sneakers is not on the agenda, but maybe that is one way of relating art production back into the social stream, or at least thinking how the choices for a viewer of an art work are (or should be) more open, more engaging and more enabling that anything a corporation could offer.
Now, this development has something not only to do with the market but to do with a realisation of theories about the everyday theatricalisation of our lives that were developed by people such as Judith Butler or Hannah Arendt. They, and others, point towards an expansion of the idea of performance and performativity out of the theatrical and into social conditions. Even more so today, when we have reality TV, Big Brother and a huge increase in the acknowledged spaces for ‘everyday theatrics’, we must be aware that each of us acts to some degree as though we are always already being observed and even that a camera were recording our every move.
This heightening of the experience of the banal everyday, perhaps the end of the everyday as a useful category of experience to be replaced by mediated restagings of everyday life, has huge implications for the stage that is a gallery or museum. We are, if you want a catchphrase, a society where ‘everyone is an actor’ - a development that parallels, rather than replaces, Beuys’ ‘everyone an artist’ - and we are playing a role for which the script is written at the same momnent that it is acted. If everyone is both artists and actors, then the previous hierarchical relationship between artists and audiences breaks down. We are individually much more complex than audience usually addressed by the museum or art display, being at different times capable of playing roles as artists, viewers, curators, critics, conservatives, radicals, capitalists, activists etc. etc. Some of these roles conform to expectations, some provoke and some can be simply tried on for the pleasure of the change. One task I would suggest for the art institution therefore is to rise to the challenge of this potential new audience. We have to create the fields and the stages in which roles can be tried on in relation to art, if not least because artists are more and more asking us, who is your public, how can I get them involved, how can I meet them etc. etc.
So, we have these two changes - one the closing of options within the political-economic structure and the other towards more fluid conditions of reception that require a response from our cultural institutions.. These institutions are still rightly required through public funding grants available in Western Europe to serve and create possibilities for the society in which they find themselves. How might they do that today? I believe that one approach is to take our lead from the fluidity that runs through capitalism, performative identity making and is also at the heart of technological change. Change, provisionalism, temporariness are not words easily associated with museums, but they could be - especially with kunsthallen but I also think with institutions that have responsibility for collections.
So, in the Rooseum we are trying to make something that tests out the concept of a fluid institution. What does it look like? Well in some ways not so different, in others I hope quite altered. In theory, a fluid institution would be a self-critical, changeable, uncertain but also an undoctrinaire place in which, within the bounds of the law, anything imaginable is possible. That imagination comes of course from artists but also from the broad, piecemeal range of visitors and constituents that make up a cultural institution. We will try to provide the kind of terrain in which the audience feels liberated to try out different roles or identities, where the works of art shown trigger possibilities in their imagination that can be acted out (at a later date), where we encourage people not only to come back but to come back and do different things and where in the end the Rooseum becomes a kind of adult playground, though one through which the temporary roles tried out also can be connected back to the much more constrained possibilities of daily social life.
Having outlined some possible responses from the traditional institution but even more productive might be to make new institutional structures to carry art into a relationship with its public, or to permit artists to carry out something akin to research away from the demands of public accountability.
It seems to me that much of this potential is contained within the term ‘artist-run space’ or orgainstaion like the one that has invited me today. Particularly in what we might term art’s ‘off centres’, places where a major commercial art infrastructure of museums, galleries and exhibition spaces does not exist, places like Jakarta, Warsaw, Buenos Aires or Glasgow, the possibility for these locations to make an impact and for artists based these to have some sense of purpose and potential international appreciation lies entirely in such in proto-institutions. It is when an art community organises itself, ceases to feel marginalized but simply gets on with its own interests that something new happens. Extraordinarily for such an individualised activity, it is through groups of artists that these moments and sites of energy develop. If we were to think then about alternative strategies in terms of priorities for funding and for urban cultural development, then putting relatively little resources into these small-scale micro level organisations could be at least as effective as major cultural infrastructure projects in changing the perception of a city both internally and externally.
In order to test out these ideas of the significance of artists run spaces, I am involved in making the Gwangju Biennale in Korea a meeting place and global village of such organisations. We will invite around 25 of these ‘alternative groups’ mainly from Europe and Asia. Indeed, it is remarkable how international, indeed global this development is. From Yogyakarta, through Singapore, Bangkok, Hong Kong and Beijing to Seoul, or from Istanbul, through Sofia, Warsaw, Copenhagen Bilbao and Edinburgh - it is different forms of the same fundamental artist run space model that are the places where art is most acutely made and tested and where the visual culture of a particular city could be said to be formed, imagined, changed and sent out into the greedy global contemporary art circus.
By concentrating on the organisations and allowing them to auto-curate projects within the halls of the most established Asian Biennale we want to signal how significant these organisations have become. Our project will emphasize both the groups as integral elements and the possible exchanges between them. As I have said, these groups of artists have emerged as the key force in art making as artists have themselves chosen to negotiate a different basis for making institutions, organizations, the relationship between art and society and the position of art in the so-called global economy. One motivation for artists seems to be to create independent alternative spaces so that they can continue to exist without being dominated by the market or institution. This development is a very beautiful metaphor for the power of negotiation of the local with globalized economic power and the growing number of initiatives, not just in art but in politics and ECONOMIC MOVEMENTS TO FIND all kinds of effort to provide alternative solutions.
This question of the fluid, locally responsive and responsible institution is not then only a question for the art world but also a crystallization of a paradoxical movement both in the direction of global cosmopolitanism (or cosmospolitanisation as a way of expressing an active search for greater global miscegenation) and the assertion of local identities. In this regard, it seems to me that a form of identity based on urban cosmopolitanisation, (local and global and expressed in terms of the richness of a city’s cultural mix), is far preferable to what seems to be the alternative of essentialist ethnic identity.
What we propose for Gwangju then is to suggest this cosmopolitanisation through the construction of the Biennale. The floor plan of each space will be reconstructed using simple plywood walls and each group will auto-curate their own presentation. These will vary from solo and group shows, to historical exhibition of their home city and from performances to video presentations, websites or urban documentaries. In the end, we will create what I hope will be an extraordinary international meeting point with Warsaw standing next to Yogyakarta or Beijing next to Taipei. In such places, these meetings have the potential to make clear that one doesn’t have to imitate the same kind of art institutions as the mainstream centres. You can invent your own way to create art and to exist as an artist.
As a final word, I like to suggest one other possible metaphor that I came across recently by reading the Old Testament. I started to think about the Tower of Babel as a working model - a site for different types and orders of activity where the public and private blend. For instance, part of what alternative strategies are doing is to cease to try to define art and art institutions as separate from other kinds of public space. Instead they can share the attributes of the library and the internet network, or the community centre, the laboratory and the academy - all as sites of informed, intelligent and curious discourse.
In these terms, one aspect of the last thirty years of art that has been most important for me, has been its increasing permissiveness and even promiscuity. Art has become the home for creative activities that fall out of other categories - filmmakers who go too far away from commercial production show their work in galleries, the same with performers, musicians, even theorists who find pure philosophical discourse too constrained have started to move towards cultural studies and art investigations. This permissiveness is art’s greatest current strength, I think, and a movement that runs counter to the increasing specialisation of society in other fields. Our task in terms of alternartive strategies is then to create the institutions and devices that can respond to this permissiveness, creating physically those places of possibility and hybridity that the art of today seems urgently to require.