Willem de Rooij's permanent installation for Bentheim Castle, Residual, features a transparent display case with one of Ruisdael's paintings of the castle, situated in Germany near the Dutch border. In addition to seeing the painting, both as image and as object, one sees the technical equipment that normally remains hidden. In many ways this work recalls Michael Asher's projects of the 1970s, it does not intervene in a recognized gallery or museum. More than functioning as a rather problematic retro-version of Institutional Critique, the piece announces a potential space for art; the intention is to turn Willem de Rooij's project into the 
starting point for an artist-in-residence project, with young artists being enabled to produce and exhibit in situ.
Exhibiting a Ruisdael painting at the site depicted on the painting, and exhibiting the exhibition of this work in a way that foregrounds its status as material artefact in a transparent case full of visible machinery, Residual can be seen to reflect on the relation between physical picture and immaterial image, and between thing and network. In my essay for the accompanying publication, I move from Barthes to Simmel and from Victor Stoichita to Craig Owens in order to analyse Residual's take on both seventeenth-century and contemporary "visual economies." From the final part of the essay:
'In the pre-industrial seventeenth-century Dutch Republic, painting showcased and 'doubled' the accumulation of wealth derived from Dutch mercantile capitalism. In the post-industrial Netherlands of the early twentieth century, visual production and the 'creative industries' are often presented as a partial replacement of industries that have moved overseas. Instead of manufacturing televisions or producing steel, the Netherlands now exports TV formats and fashion. In 2011 it became apparent that 'difficult' contemporary art is not part of this, as the Dutch government relentlessly cut funding for a number of crucial institutions, including the Rijksakademie, which Jeroen de Rijke and Willem de Rooij attended. New art isn’t as profitable as old art. The Rijksmuseum is hawking its wares even at Schiphol Airport, with the Rijksmuseum Schiphol, where Ruisdael and d’Hondecoeter are regularly featured.
"Of course Willem de Rooij’s practice is implicated in the current political-economic constellation. How could it be otherwise? De Rooij is a producer of surplus value through 'immaterial labour'; his work is part of the 'culturalized' economy. However, compared with blockbuster shows with readymade themes and famous names, this practice is too inefficient and marginal for the economistic Dutch cultural policy, which uses 'subsidised art' as a populist whipping boy alongside others, creating enemies for its perceived clientele of 'hardworking Dutchmen'. In such a situation, art can only be framed in two ways: either it delivers an unproblematic message of “Dutchness” or it is immediately and spectacularly successful as a cultural commodity. Preferably both. While the Rijksmuseum is hawking its blue-chip Dutch wares in its overdesigned box inserted into the bustling airport, Willem de Rooij’s counter-space at Bentheim castle – on the margins of the old water-merchandise complex, on the long train line that connects Berlin to Amsterdam – foregrounds its own properties and contradictions, and those of the object and the subjects that it contains."
This small essay is part of my "thingness" research project (as are recent texts on design, transparency, and on artists such as Daan van Golden and Stan Douglas). I hope to intensify this strand of research and develop what are so far mere sketches once the History in Motion book (which should see the light of day this fall) is out of the way.
Residual will be inaugurated on May 4 as part of the raumsichten exhibition project. The book is published by Walther König and can be ordered at amazon.de.
On the 12th of June, a new version of Louise Lawler's 1979 work A Movie Will Be Shown Without the Picture will be presented in Amsterdam, as part of a "Performance in Residence" project I'm doing with the curatorial platform If I Can't Dance, I Don't Want to Be Part of Your Revolution. The Stedelijk Museum is also a partner in organizing the Amsterdam version of A Movie.
From the If I Can't Dance site: "Performance in Residence ‘hosts’ a performance-related (body of) work for a substantial period of time, allowing a researcher to engage in an in-depth inquiry. A public presentation marks the start of the research, and the conclusions are presented at the end of the period in the form of an essay, exhibition, performance or other. With this programme, If I Can’t Dance aims to research performances as case studies and proposes to connect archival research to practice."
A small initiative such as If I Cant Dance's "Performance in Residence" research initiative is much appreciated at a moment when Dutch universities are actively demolishing pockets of research and reflection that had not yet been brought into line with the prevailing ideological-economical imperatives; it doesn't matter what you do and if it makes any sense at all, as long as it somehow pretends to stimulate "the creative industries."
A Movie Will Be Shown Without the Picture at The Movies, Haarlemmerdijk 161-163, 12 June, 7 PM. There will be a discussion following the piece, with contributions by Andrea Fraser and myself, among others.
Image: Poster for the 1983 version of A Movie.
The Office in Berlin has a series called The World According to, and The World According to Gert Jan Kocken is out now. It takes the form of a Bilderatlas compiling and arranging aniconic and iconic images of God—including of course His Incarnation.
Since I had a tiny advisory role, I guess I can plug the project here without turning this into an actual blog.
The publication can be ordered here.
Image: studio wall, February 2012.
Texte zur Kunst no. 85 (March 2012) contains a thematic section called "Art History Revisited" as well as a number of Mike Kelley obituaries, and of course the review section. I contributed a short review of Agency's exhibition at Objectif in Antwerp. From the review:
"As Agency is an agency with a generic name, so its exhibitions have a generic form: cheap foldable tables with one numbered 'thing' per table, represented by an object or image (labeled 'specimen'), lit by a single lamp hanging directly above the table, with a clipboard holding some sheets with information on the property lawsuit connected to the object in question. This generic format does in fact allow for a great variety, and when the number of tables is sizable, as it is here, the effect borders on the bewildering. Speculation on the protection of ideas leads Matthys to investigate both a robotic teddy bear and one minute of silence on a CD, both a logo for Olympic TV coverage and an abstract mural (which is, naturally, presented on the wall rather than on one of the tables). To one side, there is a wall of shelving with boxes containing additional things, which may be consulted by visitors.
"The visual appearance of Agency’s installations recalls the commodity art of the late 1980s, Haim Steinbach’s shelving in particular – with a hint of Mark Dion’s taxonomic displays. In fact, one of the boxes in the stacks contains thing 001574, a bookend based on Koons’ Balloon Dog sculptures. The producer was sued by Koons for copyright infringement—a remarkable turn of events, given that Koons was often on the receiving end of lawsuits. More recently, it was Richard Prince who was adjudged to have broken the law with his use of images from a book on Rastafarians. In general, Appropriation and Commodity art have increasingly been at odds with intellectual property law (copyright, trademarks, patents), which has taken on an ever greater importance in post-Fordist 'semiotic' capitalism. Contemporary art is of course an integral part of this regime, as reflected by the legalistic turn inaugurated by Conceptual art, when what was sold was no longer an object but a certificate, a protocol. This development is in fact at the roots of Agency’s interest in the contested nature of commodities."
www.textezurkunst.de
The Spring 2012 edition of Afterall (no. 29) contains articles on Wendelien van Oldenborgh by Emily Pethick and by me. My essay focuses on her three slide pieces Après la reprise, la prise (2009), Pertinho de Alphaville (2010) and Supposing I love you. And you also love me (2011).
The text is online in its entirety here.
A master in the art of the delay, Daan van Golden achieved a certain level of success in the Pop decade of the 1960s only to retreat from public activities following the 1968 documenta, using the Dutch subsidy system to make a living rather than a career. Having recommenced exhibiting his art around 1980, Van Golden's renown remained largely confined to the Netherlands until recently, with exhibitions at the Camden Arts Center, Greene Naftali, and now a carefully curated retrospective at Wiels in Brussels. Van Golden's work thus seems poised to arrive in the present, in the present-day culture industry. I was invited to contribute an essay to the catalogue of the Wiels exhibition, and I decided to use this opportunity reflect on the complex role of Van Golden's practice in (and often against) developments in the cultural economy since the 1960s.
From the introduction: "Daan van Golden’s works are marked by precise attention to the properties of the mediums employed by the artist. This would seem to invite a formalist analysis, or rather a structuralist one—for van Golden’s early Pop abstractions, the “handkerchief” and “wrapping paper” paintings, already mock the limitations of formalism, playing off form-as-form against form as a codified, signifying structure. While such works thus make it abundantly clear that they should not be regarded as self-sufficient forms, I want to argue that, since the 1970s in particular, van Golden’s work also frustrates structuralist readings that disparage the social context as extraneous to the production of meaning. What I propose to do here is analyse van Golden’s practice in the context of changing economical and social conditions—globally, but also, and specifically, in the Netherlands. Of course, the aim is not to read art as a mere superstructural or ideological reflection of an economic and social base. If anything, the point should be that the economy’s increasing dependence on intellectual and cultural labour makes the problematic—or dialectic—relation between these two more complicated than ever. Van Golden’s works can be seen as constituting a series of interventions in the changing conditions of cultural production."
The retrospective at Wiels is on view until 29 April; the catalogue will be ready towards the end of the show's run. The image shows an installation view with a dialogue between two exercises in framing and ornithology: an untitled 1965 collage in the foreground and Birds (1986) in the background.
[A note on the name: In Dutch the full name is "Daan van Golden" with a lower-case v, but when only the the last name is used it is "Van Golden" with a capital V. Since this is rather confusing to the majority of the world's population, Wiels consistently uses "van Golden."]
www.wiels.org
A call for applications for VU University's Research Master's Programme Visual Arts, Media and Architecture (VAMA) has gone out on the Art & Education list.
The conditions under which academic teaching and research take place are rapidly deteriorating in the Netherlands, and across much of Europe. In his farewell speech for visiting professor Jae Emerling before the holidays, my colleague Wouter Davidts invoked Adorno's short text "IQ" from Minima Moralia, "about the fate of intellectual labor in an era of an ever-growing technocracy," in which thought is constantly disciplined by being subjected to performance checks. One should not forget that Adorno's stark and total indictments were always coupled with what is fundamentally a labour of 
optimism: with teaching, and in doing so making the most of the framework, bending it to meet needs unforeseen by politico-economical imperatives.
All over Europe, faculties are trying to do just that, often against opposition from managers and members of the "support staff." As a two-year programme in which advanced students in art history and related disciplines can develop their intellectual capacities and their research skills and research agenda, I believe that VAMA is doing quite a good job at doing what matters. Due to a bit of classic bureaucratic obstructionism from a "communication consultant" employed by the university, a link to the blog that gives an impression of VAMA's activities was omitted from the announcement; it can be found here.
An announcement on an international mailing list such as this is itself a symptom of the economistic logic that forces us to grow or perish. But while this may not be the kind of internationalization that we aspire to, it does have good effects on the student population, which has become more diverse and ambitious. The real problem is of course that international students are increasingly seen as cash cows, with manifests itself in rising tuition for students from non-EEA countries in particular. There is, however, the possibility of applying for a VU Fellowship. Information on tuition fees can be found here, and on the fellowship programme here.
The deadline for applications is 1 April, or 1 March if you apply for the fellowship program.
Image: Wendelien van Oldenborgh, Supposing I love you. And you also love me, 2001 (production still)
starting point for an artist-in-residence project, with young artists being enabled to produce and exhibit in situ. 
