Open emergency issue, "On the New Politics of culture"

September 22 sees the publication of an "emergency issue" of Open, the "cahier on art and the public domain" published by SKOR. As a result of the destructive cuts in Dutch arts funding, SKOR has announced that it will stop publishing Open after the May 2012 issue. This special Dutch-language edition is a magazine-style supplement to De Groene Amsterdammer. All subscribers of this weekly will receive it, and while it will be absent from in-store copies of De Groene, it will be available for free in a number of bookstores and art spaces. You can also download it as a PDF (but beware: it's in Dutch). 

Together with Jorinde Seijdel and Merijn Oudenampsen, as well as managing editor Liesbeth Melis, I was part of the editorial team of this noodnummer (a term that can also be translated as "emergency number," as in 911). Its title is  "Over de nieuwe politiek van cultuur," or "On the New Politics of Culture," and it contains a number of incisive analyses of the reconstruction not only of the Dutch art world, but of Dutch society as a whole. For me, it is a local and more action-oriented sequel to the international survey that was the "Idiot Wind" issue of e-flux journal.

Among the contributors are Bik Van der Pol, Charles Esche, Pascal Gielen, Arnoud Holleman and Gert Jan Kocken, Wendelien van Oldenborgh, Zihni Özdil, Willem Schinkel and Lidwien van de Ven. My own text, "Autonomie in actie," is connected to my participation in The Autonomy Project, as well as to a chapter of my book-in-progress, History in Motion. On September 23, there will be a public presentation at Plein der Beschaving, Tolhuisweg 2, Amsterdam Noord.

The English Open homepage is here. 

Image: Willem de Rooij, Chick, 2008.

Texte zur Kunst no. 83: Richard Prince

Texte zur Kunst no. 83 (September 2011) is dedicated to the collector—or more particularly that new breed, the contemporary mega-collector, a global player in an expanding market—going hand in hand, in Europe, with shrinking public funding--that has transformed the art world beyond recognition. I contributed a review (pp. 237-241) of Richard Prince's exhibition American Prayer at the Bibliothèque Francois Mitterand—the BnF’s sprawling fortress by the Seine. While this review is not part of the thematic section, it complements, for Prince's show showcased the artist-as-collector of books, manuscripts and cover art. From the review:

It is clear that the expansion of the art market since the 1980s has allowed Prince to collect not only first editions but also manuscripts on a grand scale. Perhaps it is only fitting, given the ascendancy of the curator in the neoliberal culture industry, that the role of artist and collector seem to be become ever more indistinguishable in Prince’s case. However, this erasure of borders makes odd class distinctions come to the fore: class distinctions between the books themselves, some of which are treasured as fetish-objects while others are integrated into the American English pieces; and between Prince and the viewers, some of whom may have similar interests but dissimilar budgets. As an art of conspicuous collecting, Prince’s work is implicated in the wealth redistribution from bottom (and middle) to top that marks the current phrase of capitalism. Few can afford Burroughs’ letters or Hunter S. Thompson’s manuscripts, and even when one finds a book that one owns oneself, Prince’s copy will invariably be more mint. Such social comparisons befit an exhibition that makes connections and comparisons by the dozens, from the explicit (UK version next to US version, cowboys next to cowboys, Brooke Shields next to Brooke Shields) to the gnomic." 

www.textezurkunst.de 

Smithson's Broken Circle/Spiral Hill Revisited

Welcome to the Indian Summer of Dutch public art. This fall sees a project called Land Art Contemporary, on and around Robert Smithson's 1971 earthwork Broken Circle/Spiral Hill near Emmen, Holland. Land Art Contemporary has been instigated by SKOR, the foundation for art and the public domain that will close down in 2012 due to budget cuts that are anything but apolitical.

From 17 September to 27 November, the CBK in Emmen will show the documentary exhibition Robert Smithson in Emmen - Broken Circle/Spiral Hill Revisited, as well as The Ultraperiferic, a show with work by three contemporary artists who respond to Smithson's practice and Broken Circle/Spiral Hill. Also on view at the CBK is Breaking Ground: Broken Circle/Spiral Hill 1971-2011, a video by Nancy Holt on the basis of Smithson's plans for a Broken Circle/Spiral Hill film, which was never completed. Some footage had been shot during Smithson's lifetime, but funding for several crucial extra shots was not secured; Holt's version combines old with new footage.

The final element is the publication Robert Smithson: Art in Continual Movement, which contains a rich collection of documents pertaining to Broken Circle/Spiral Hill as well as number of newly commissioned texts. Eric de Bruyn and I contributed a dense dialogue on Smithson and the cinema, which manages to take in a great deal of subject matter along its rambling way. Due not entirely to Eric and me, the publication has been delayed somewhat. Robert Smithson: Art in Continual Movement (published by Alauda Publications in Amsterdam) is now scheduled to come out in March 2012.


For more info see http://www.alaudapublications.nl/html/smithson_eng.html


Image (from the book): Lee Ranaldo at the fence. Ranaldo's notes on his searches for/visits to Broken Circle/Spiral Hill are referenced in our dialogue, and they are reprinted in this book.

Praxis 2011

The other day, Frieze asked me to select a favourite book from the last twenty years—the occasion being their twentieth birthday. I picked Hito Steyerl’s Die Farbe der Wahrheit (The Colour of Truth), a book that hasn’t been translated into English (yet). From my short blurb, which will be in the next issue and online soon: “As Steyerl notes in the postscript, the book’s essayistic structure and tone reflect an environment that is markedly different from academia: an international network of residencies and teaching jobs that produce essays that Steyerl herself reads as displaced and condensed expressions of an economy of interruption, of flexibility, and of constant de- and reskilling. As in her recent English-language essays in e-flux journal and elsewhere, Steyerl’s essays make the most of these conditions, reflecting and reflecting on them with lucidity and illuminating Gedankensprünge (which is one of those German words for which no really adequate translation seems to exist).”

Revisiting this book coincided with the drastic culture cutbacks in Holland, and with increasingly dark portents in my other biotope, academia. This conjunction offers much food for thought. Although my circumstances are different from Steyerl’s, my own writings too reflect (for better or worse; probably both) such an economy of short-term gigs. Combining a part-time academic job with freelance activities leads to a life in which the detour is the tour, as projects are shaped by whatever possibilities there are to finance them partially. I too have tried to make the most of these conditions, and attempted to develop a practice that is embedded and tactical. There are times when the strain begins to show. Periods of sloth time are few and far between, and the pressure to perform will trip you up from time to time.

My recent attempt at getting a research project funded having been squashed, it looks I will have to continue working the way I do—which will not become any easier in the Netherlands. Of course, I’m still relatively privileged. What is truly maddening is the situation of the bright graduates of today, whose possibilities in and outside academia have dwindled drastically. They will have to develop new forms that practice that are no, perhaps, fully imaginable as of yet. We know what happened to a certain German philosopher when, in the early 1840s, the Prussian clampdown on the Left Hegelians forced him to abandon his plans for an academic career—and to that other German intellectual whose Habilitation on the German tragic drama was rejected by more than one faculty in 1925. But the current upheavals may well mean that even those that will have a more or less conventional academic biography (in Holland or, the way things are going, more likely elsewhere) will reject a business-as-usual approach to scholarship. Marked by their present experiences, they will hopefully keep reflecting and acting on and against the limits and frontiers of their proper practice—thus making it a true praxis.

Image: scene from the second Autonomy Summer School (July 2011).

Stan Douglas & Gerard Byrne

Summer is taken up not only by work on my book-in-progress, but also by activities triggered by the dismal political situation in Holland. With Jorinde Seijdel and Merijn Oudenampsen, I'm working on an "emergency issue" of the journal Open, whose existence is under threat. This special issue will come out in September and be distributed as a supplement to a Dutch weekly.

Meanwhile, in other news, I have contributed more or less monographic essays to two upcoming publications. I don't write a lot of such texts, and one reason is the insane pace at which many exhibition catalogues and related publications are put together - with the commissioning of essays often being something of an afterthought. In the case of these publications on Stan Douglas and Gerard Byrne, the whole process was fortunately more professional and the time frame more generous. Stan Douglas: Abbott & Cordova, 7 August 1971 is a book that focusses on said photograph by Stan Douglas, and my text "Performing Photography After Film" investigates the interplay of media in Douglas's work and the dialectic of (immaterial) image and its concretization or "performance" in the form of a (material) picture. The book also includes an essay by Serge Guilbaut and a conversation between Stan and Alex Alberro.

Later this month a Gerard Byrne retrospective will open in at the Irish Museum of Modern art, and later it will travel to Lisbon and London. At one point the Kröller-Müller Museum, where part of 1984 and Beyond was shot (see image), seemed to be interested in bringing the show to the Netherlands, but this seems to have fallen through. What a surprise. The Kröller-Müller truly is heaven—if one's definition of heaven is the one given by Talking Heads in their song of that name. The catalogue is titled Images or Shadows. Rather than attempting to represent the work in question in the usual manner,  this publication examines it by deconstructing and rearticulating it in the form of a dense network of texts and images, including many reference images, complete with captions written in a mid-twentieth century magazine style. There is of course the danger of self-congratulatory referentialism, of slyly suggesting "importance by association," but the choices and combinations are sharp enough to generate an interplay, a dialogue, that itself takes on a real critical quality.

As editor Pablo Lafuente puts it in his meta-foreword: "All these works, the texts printed in this book and the images that accompany them present, hopefully, more than a set of intertextual references, quotations and allusions to literary, artistic and intellectual history, but a transtextual range of articulations that show not only how a work can explicitly refer to bother, but how it can also elaborate, expand, modify or transform the grounds where it stands."My essay, "Gerard Byrne's Talking Pictures: Different repetitions in New Sexual Lifestyles and 1984 and Beyond," obviously focusses on these two works and on their intervention in the shifting relation between the printed and the spoken word, as the Gutenberg Galaxy fades and a new orality and performativity gain strength.

A somewhat different version of this essay is included in Witte de With's Cornerstones book, a collection of more or less monographic essays, many of which (though not mine) have been delivered as lectures at Witte de With.

Polderland ist abgebrannt

The demonstration in The Hague against disproportionate, arbitrary and punitive cutbacks was a predictable failure in that it did not sway parliament. Zijlstra's plan was debated in the Second Chamber immediately after the demonstration ended officially. A smaller, unofficial demonstration moved from the Malieveld, where the large gathering had taken place, to the parliament buildings at the Binnenhof - where charming encounters with the riot police ensued. As was to be expected, the debate did not see the government budge on any of the major issues. A few symbolic sweets to the provinces outside the metropolitan Randstad area, but that was about it. All the institutions and media that have been mentioned before remain under acute threat.

That being said, the demonstration was a success in that it gathered seven to ten thousand people and instilled in them (well, perhaps not all of them, but lots of them) the need to engage in long-term activism that cannot simply be a fight for funding. Rather, they have to attack this coalition in its entirety, on points ranging from the crusade against halal meat to a flurry of measures that increase social inequality - and attack it with acts of the imagination that forge new social montages. Consensus-driven polder culture has been dead for some time now, and it is now patently clear that clinging on to the illusion of "business as usual" is no longer an option. (See also Dominiek Ruyters's piece on the Metropolis site, in Dutch.)

Of course, the material basis for a lot of crucial practices is still being undermined. It remains to be seen to which extent intellectual and artistic life will remain viable in the land of Wilders. That they will morph and mutate is certain.

Image by Gert-Jan Kocken (banner by Willum Geerts).

Protest in and between Rotterdam and The Hague

"Finally Less Art" was the massive June 22 front-page headline of a national Dutch newspaper whose "trendy" name, nrc next, says a lot about the state of the media and public debate in Holland. The article raised some valid points about the high number of art schools in the country, but the headline created the pernicious suggestion that the proposed cutbacks are a salutary measure rather than a destructive attack on an entire infrastructure. In general, even the so-called "quality newspapers" have hardly conveyed any sense of urgency over "Butcher" Zijlstra's measures.

In France or Germany, the middle class has still has a bourgeois self-image which, ideologically suspect and self-deceiving as it may be, makes appreciation for art de rigueur. The Dutch press response, such as it is, shows that the Dutch bourgeoisie has abolished itself, leaving behind a middle class defined in purely economic terms, without an ideological Überbau—apart from some perfunctory belief in a Dutch a "culture" that is identified with a whitewashed past. Attempts to mobilize the opera-visiting faction of the VVD (the right-wing liberals) have proven futile. Hence the rather desperate attempts from the cultural field to appeal to the only rationale for anything: the economic rationale. Hey, we're already generating extra funding! We're being business-like! We're part of the creative industries—they were supposed to be important, right? And in any case, if we're all going to be unemployed we'll just cost the state more money. Meanwhile, art institutions have predictably started a lot of individual petitions to save their respective skins. It is tempting to attack them and to accuse them of ditching solidarity for "each man for himself" politics, but the existence of these petitions is not the problem. Rather, the problem is the lack of a general strategy to influence what remains with the public sphere with a discourse that refuses to accept the ideological framework created by Zijlstra.

This also means that the art cutbacks in their present form must be seen as one form of social engineering among others employed by this government. Far from being a "natural" consequence of market imperatives, these post-political policies must be questioned—must be politicized. In the process, the legitimacy and necessity of art must redefined. One can no longer count either on nineteenth-century bourgeois reflexes or on late-twentieth-century narratives (that were historical compromises between social-democratic ideals and neo-liberal dogma) about the support of art as part of the creative industries. Obviously this is easier said than done, especially given the plurality of actors involved, and it is getting late. The decisive day in parliament is coming Monday, and the signs are not good at all - which is why everyone should support and participate in the last-ditch effort to mount a protest that will at the very least be highly visible. The so-called Mars der beschaving will march from Rotterdam on June 26 to The Hague on June 27; see http://www.marsderbeschaving.nl/. On Monday afternoon a big demonstration will take place on the Malieveld:

Update: Jorinde Seijdel has published an excellent analysis (in Dutch) on the Metropolis site. She stresses the bankruptcy of a certain Dutch art world habitus, which suffered from ideological over-identification with the state apparatus. The Dutch art world has long been riddled with members and voters of D66, the liberal-with-a-social-touch party that engineered the "Purple" coalition of the 1990s, whose "end of ideology" Third Way agenda suggested that a post-political paradise was within reach by combining liberal economic policies with a stripped-down version of the welfare state. The upheavals the Fortuyn era put an end to that pipe-dream, though D66 remained the party of choice for the managerial layer of the cultural field - the last stand of an enlightened bourgeoisie that refused to problematize its own brand of technocratic post-politics.

Bankruptcy has one advantage: structural problems can no longer be denied. As Jorinde suggests, the time has come to form coalitions with groups and individuals in other fields, and between fields; to organize. Issues of visibility have proved to be a fruitful point of departure for forms of aesthetic activism such as Petra Bauer and Annette Krauss's Read the Masks, Tradition Is Not Given, and the collaborations by Matthijs de Bruijne and others with cleaners and domestic workers. At the "Populist Front" symposium that Open organized in March (Open being the journal edited by Jorinde, which is now under threat), I was struck by the unwillingness or inability of many speakers to discuss concrete tactics and strategies. Apparently on March 18, Wilders-style populism could still be regarded as a quaint phenomenon in need of leisurely analysis. How things have changed.

http://www.metropolism.com/opinion/nederlandse-lente/

Image: Detail of Matthijs de Bruijne's Thrash Museum, installed at Hoog Catharijne in Utrecht as part of a manifestation of the Cleaners' union, March 19, 2011.