Institutions as the public voice

 

 

Edit Molnár: Though there were relatively few questions after the presentation yesterday, I do not think this indicates any shyness on the audience’s part. I felt that perhaps the issues concerning institutional structures and the possibility of future changes within the art system – what to do about traditional institutions and frozen structures – just did not match the experiences of the local audience. There are no established institutions in the sense you were talking about them – the traditional model let’s call it – so because of the historical differences we could not talk about these questions from the same starting points…

Charles Esche: I am always a bit nervous when somebody says that things are missing or that there is in a way a kind of trajectory which should have happened and didn’t.

Because in a sense the trajectory that you have is a valid one, whatever situation you are in; its about dealing with that. Because I think –of course I don’t think that you literally mean it –there is somehow a story of what should be, which is the normalization of the western model, and there are stories which are not as normalized as this situation. This means we have to get out of this sense of the west being a normalized situation because its own history has as many problems as yours but there are differences between them too. This applies to what I was talking about in my lecture, the certain aspects of the bourgeois public space during the 19^th century that were probably more developed in the Habsburg Empire in many ways than in the Netherlands.

The period of socialism turned out to be an extremely fertile period because its now over and probably the advantage that people have with a history of socialism is that it gives the ability to see, so to speak, with two eyes: having seen a system in complete transformation allows you to understand that these transformations are possible –which I think are forbidden to us in the west in many ways, as we see only the inevitability of the free market system… But you can see it as an applied system and ideology and that allows at least in the imagination the possibility that there could be other ideologies applied in the future.

In a sense it’s quite a liberating possibility because people see that socialism existed, it functioned, it failed and capitalism exists, it functions and it might fail as well. Because imagining a failure in an easier way than it is within the hard-core capitalism in the United States, which is one of the most monocular, one-eyed systems. But also in the social democratic version of capitalism that we had up until 1989 in Western Europe – because the changes of 1989 obviously affected the situation there as well.

M.E.: Do you think that the awareness of failure can be applied as a category within the current system of contemporary art? Or that this awareness of failure could be the engine behind all the different strategies we test in the way we work with art?

C.E.: Optimistically we could say that the art system now is a kind of proving ground for different models for organizing culture and organizing social exchange, which culture is about basically. And we can think about the Biennale as one example, in particular with its approach to globalization, bringing globalization into the art sphere. That has positive and negative effects. We can analyze these effects, but actually the problem is that it’s often, to my liking, much too complicit with free market version of globalisation, which I’m sceptical of. Because I think we should be sceptical of whatever system is in control. I think about globalization also in connection to internationalism, which was evolved as a mythology by socialism, the idea of social internationalism being clearly something which predated the capitalist version of internationalism. So we can imagine a future through the force of globalization. There is not only one form of globalization. There is not only one form of free market, and there is not only one form of capitalism. The other possibilities I think could be tested out more than they are, in the domain of art – art as a testing ground because it is quite an interesting place.

The main question here (in Budapest) for instance is how you tested out your relationship to that socialist failure and your expectations of the free market capitalist model. How can you imagine an institution which starts now, and doesn’t try to catch up with an imagined “normal” history, but rather starts with an analysis – that’s why I was really encouraged what you were saying about the initiation of a new collective that started working on a feasibility study of the Hungarian art scene – and try from that place to imagine institutions that are necessary here. ¹ With this history, and with this particular environment that is Budapest, or Hungary, or post-socialism or whatever, that might be appropriate. And I think that raises a valid question, which actually excites me at the moment to develop an institution in the third way, a self-reflecting institution different from what has been developed in other places.

M.E.: It has a lot to do with what you are generally busy with as the new director of the Van Abbe Museum in Eindhoven, when trying to investigate what the museum could be, the rethinking of the function of a museum…

C.E. Absolutely. And I think that what is interesting about it is that it always makes references to history, to the particular history of Eindhoven or the Netherlands and to the Van Abbe Museum. And you have to keep that particularity in the method working within the institution.

M.E.: Do you find yourself sometimes in a schizophrenic situation being a director of a Museum, an institution with history and long tradition, but at the very same time you are also the curator of this year’s Istanbul Biennale, curator of an international biennial that is one of the most flexible, still-developing institutions…

C.E.: For me the two are really parallel projects. They are not directly related, there are not so many connections between them, but they both investigate similar questions.

M.E.: But for me in a way these institutions embody the two poles of the art system.

C.E.: You mean the museum and the biennial?…absolutely. What we do think about in Eindhoven is how the museum can respond to the Biennial. We imagine that most of the energy and internationalism and a certain kind of discourse taking place on the Biennial. But does the museum have to ignore it? That has largely been the case up to this point. The museum nowadays adapts a kind of superior position towards the biennial, say that while the biennale can introduce all the young energies, still we will make our selection from that. Or there is a kind of father-son response, as the older generation to the younger generation. Or is the job of the museum to try to analyze what is going on in the biennial? And we can say that its position which has historical lines and a position based on the idea of memory in which the biennials are not really a part of this, as they don’t have any: each biennial tries to reinvent and renew itself from scratch. There is not much built on what the biennial was before, no real conversation between one biennial and the next. It is more about levelling of the ground again. The museum can adapt to the goals it has anyway, which is to preserve the objects, to preserve the memory of visual culture through the testing of the biennial.

And when you say that, then it will be obvious what to do: to look at the history of the Istanbul biennial, and see what we as a museum can extract from it. Now we will extract works from it, and we will make an exhibition selecting works from the Istanbul biennials, rather to select works from the collection of a museum. So imagine that these collections of works run from 1987 to 2003, and then select work that was made in the late 80’ or in the 90’ and still can communicate particularly strongly in 2005. That’s one trajectory of this. The other trajectory is to investigate Istanbul as a city. Does the biennial say something about this city? And if so, what? What does it say through the commissions made in this particular period? It has something to say about changes in the city, about the way that city relates to art, how artists work on the idea of site-specificity, an issue that biennials always relate to. So there are the two elements from Istanbul that will come to Eindhoven: one is a straightforward selection of the works we feel were strong in the biennial, particularly works in which the position of the artists is very provocative, where the artists’ universe is recorded, rather than a connection to a specific site or a specific architecture. On the other hand there are works that deal with the city of Istanbul, perhaps works that only existed for the time of the biennial.

The Eindhoven part will be simply about the collection of the Van Abbe Museum. It can be used in a way to represent its city. Maybe it’s a little bit more provocative more than trying to represent a city by statistics, or by cartography or as a kind of urban legend, but actually represent the city through its museums, by its collection, developed here in that city museum.

M.E.: Sometimes I have the idea that in a way biennials and museums relate to each other like commercial galleries and art fairs. As you said, museums, with their “superior” position, are visiting biennials to see what happened in the testing ground and then select things that they can safely work with.
But in this project you try to turn the relation in a way upside down…bringing the idea of memory and collection back to the biennial.

C. E.: Exactly, you add to the reading of the museum collection a different angle, a different twist, a possibility to see with both eyes, if you like, through its relationship to a biennial. And maybe the collection shows its limitations and its particularities. It is interesting that there is a history of the Istanbul biennial represented in the collection of a small town.

So there will be almost literally a show of the “greatest hits” of the Istanbul Biennial, in a way you would make a selection from a collection thinking about the biennial as a whole.

Then the second part involves mixing the works closely related to Istanbul into the collection, thinking about what is missing from the collection, about how this collection relates to Eindhoven, in a way that this part of the Istanbul biennial’s history relates to Istanbul. Through these comparisons, perhaps it will come out that we have a rather critical focus on the collection. Let’s see what is missing from the collection, or why it is not representing Eindhoven in quite a way that people want.

M.E.: Are you commissioning new works for the Biennial?

C.E.: 50 % of the works will be created in Istanbul, with the invitation of international and Turkish artists who are inspired by or have other connections to the city. We set up this possibility for the artists to see what will happen; its not about control. Hopefully it will work but we don’t know yet. The other half of the Istanbul biennial (always a kind of “two eyes” thing, bringing a broader perspective) is to bring work from other sites, urban sites of the world , artists obviously working with the question of their environment, whether it is California or Teheran, or Tel Aviv, bringing works from those areas to create a contrast to Istanbul. This will create a critical position towards Istanbul within itself. So you have both this kind of celebration with artists reflecting on the fascination of the city, which is the biggest city in Europe, maybe even the most crucial city in Europe, because it’s on the border between Europe and somewhere else, but on the other hand, well ok, this isn’t everything – what is the other story, what else is there?

M.E. As the former director of the Rooseum you obviously turned this kunsthalle – through its projects and programming – into an investigation field for what a future institution can be. In one of your interviews you stated out that one of the less important functions of any kind of contemporary art institution is the showroom function. And now you have large showrooms and one of the most professional storage systems on earth. I was fascinated by the professional computerized filing system of the Eindhoven collection. As a museum director how can you apply your previous experiences?

C.E.: The bar-code you mean? Yeah it is amazing. I’m shocked as well.

M.E.: So you basically have the perfect archive, where you can keep everything literally till eternity.

C.E.: I think both things apply. I don’t actually see that there is a huge connection between what I did at the Rooseum and what I want to do with Van Abbe Museum. One thing I know: this will take a lot longer. Because there is much more history in the Van Abbe Museum, and the collection, which is a kind of weight, in that to move that weight takes longer, takes more arguments, and involves more of a consequence thinking of it: whether you can be experimental within that context, and you have to take care of two things: one thing is the collection itself, to make sure that the collection is represented in a way that is true to its period and respectful to its history and to its audience. In a kunsthalle you can basically be experimental because you are talking to an audience which will forgive you for not really explaining what you are doing because they are already familiar with this environment. You have a more specialized audience which makes a big difference. Hence in a museum you have a more general audience, and you touch the city in many more points. People come to it for lots of different reasons, for they are out for an opportunity to be engaged with art, not necessarily with the passion that they have in the whole of their lives, but you have to bring that audience with you. In order to do that you have to go slower. And you also have to be very clear with your arguments.

M.E.: Do you have the ambition to energize the collection through contemporary happenings and give a contemporary reading of it?

C.E.: 100%. I mean it will start with the Eindhoven-Istanbul and certainly this is what we want to do. You have to play with the collection, but you have to do it certainly in a respectful way, which means that you cannot be too experimental, in the sense of being disrespectful. You have to understand of its history, and to learn that history as well. But I think that the methodology I tried in the Rooseum can be applied to the Van Abbe.

For me the challenge is not so much to change the methodology, but its sharpness, its depth, and to be certain about what you are doing with the museum. But still to reject the showroom model in the sense that you put paintings on the wall and installations on the floor and that you think that that’s enough. One thing that I want to do is to bring a whole different set of names that had not been shown yet in the Van Abbe museum, but this is the inevitable part. What I really want to do is to change the way we work with these people. And to change the way we bring these people into contact with the public. So this all means a change in the structure. I am deeply interested in how we show art, and what art is shown. Its not about changing the names on the invitation cards, its more about the way we want them to be shown. So for example if we are going to make an exhibition with Andy Warhol, which is a possibility, we would do it in a way which is hopefully different, which is a way politicizing which thinks about mediation, how that work is mediated, and not just gathering the work together and placing it on the wall in a showroom environment, but activating the museum – which is actually making the museum.

A kunsthalle is more focused on the shows, but a museum, with its collection with its archival process, with its job of mediation, is quite different. We might end up with an exhibition, but that exhibition is developed while we articulate why we are putting on this exhibition – we are doing this in order to investigate these questions. That is part of the process. When we make an Allan Kaprow show it relates to a project about art relating to social change. In a way it is very similar to what I did in the Rooseum when we built one exhibition on top of another, investigating relationships to social democracy, but here the investigation will be about the collection. What and why we found something interesting, why is Picasso interesting to us today, is he interesting, how it relates to contemporary painting for instance, or is it today’s image making? Those are the questions you can play with in a museum, because you have a collection making that process quite exciting. Doing a museum is about doing very different things, but with the same mentality.

M.E.: As far as I can see this methodology stands very close to the process you applied in the case of the Amateur show in Gö teborg. ²

C.E.: Yes. It’s nice that you know about that, I’m always surprised when people know what I did. Actually I was very proud of it, how we worked with a museum and with the collection and working with a specific moment of the 1900’s and thinking back about how it might be presented is for me a totally valid model for what we are talking about now.

M.E.: How you imagine working with contemporary artists within the framework of the museum? Will you commission new works, like a producer? Will you be able to create the dialogue situation working with them?

C.E.: What we will do is to commission works for the collection, which makes people very nervous, because you don’t know what you are getting. But basically the idea is to invite artists to produce new work and we will buy it. In a way you have more sources. But a museum is only a tool. And it means that the architecture is a tool, and the question is just what you are able to do with these tools. I want to build a show in a way that represents art contributing to imagining the world differently than it is now. This is fundamentally what I have always been busy with. The level of imagination in today’s world of speculations is really low. The currency of art its imagination, what we exchange. What art gives to the world, what the world can take with it on its journey, what the public can take on its journey outside the museum. It’s this excharge of imagination. There are two levels of imagination: one is the imagination of the subject, the work which makes me imagine something which I could not have imagined without it. And then I take that imagination with me into my life, into a bar or into work. But the other thing, which is more exciting, is the imagination of the other, in other words if you imagine artists imagination, or imagine the imagination of the other.

M.E. That is an interesting and ambitious programme.

C.E.: It’s absolutely ok. There are people who are working in Istanbul who imagine Istanbul in a third way. Or they might never have been to Istanbul but imagine through this work what you would take out of the experience that they have, how you would relate to it. Not how would you imagine Istanbul, but how to use their imagination. Maybe you have been to Istanbul, but maybe you haven’t, but we all have a certain sense of cities like Istanbul, New York, Buenos Aires or Chicago, whatever you will. We have a kind of idea how these are alike, because we have all this information through the media, and then you see a most specific vision from an artist, a vision that is part of imagination, and you see what can be done with it. If we really allow something, really imagine something from the position of the artist – whether it’s Istanbul or not, then we’ve got to have an understanding or a comprehension of what it means to an artist or what it means to live in a city like Istanbul. And that gives all the essentials that we have about questions like immigration or difference, the centralities of the nation-state or of our identity, the imagination of the other – as Spivak calls it, the “telepoesis.” Its a kind of poetic possibility at distance.

I’m not sure how big this plan is when it comes down to the encounter between an individual and the work. Because at that moment, which is very specific when you look at a Warhol, you are used to looking at it as an illustration-specific consumer society in North America –yes you can do that, you use Warhol as a way of imagining Marilyn Monroe and you look at it and imagine this relationship with that icon – yes you can do that, but you can also use Warhol to imagine Warhol as a Slovak emigrant in the United States, kind of overpowered and in wonder at the society that he became part of, but at the same time bringing a very critical eye towards what is going on there and can you imagine yourself in that situation. If you start doing it in a direct relation to a specific work you already have three levels, and I don’t think its too difficult to get to imagining what the work means in a social and critical context. You use your imagination to speculate on the subject that you see, and then you try to use your imagination bringing the first two together.

M.E.: Do you think that it will be easy to find partners for that plan within the museum, do you feel sometimes a bit of frustration in that process?

C.E.: I know what you mean and I feel very frustrated sometimes. I can get very frustrated at the speed. And that is potentially destructive. But at the moment I am solid, and I feel its an 8-to-10-year project before I get where I want to go or before I get bored enough to leave or want to go somewhere else. But I am really committing myself to that. That was a decision to go to an institution, because institutions are very much based on the idea that such institutions are the public voice or the public manifestation of our society.

 

Budapest, 02.04.2005

Interview by Edit Molnár

 

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1 KKKE, Association of Contemporary Art Curators 2005. Project for a feasibility study on the current situation of the institutional structure of Hungary.

2 Amateur, Konstmuseum and Konsthall, Göteborg, 2000. Curators: Charles Esche (Scotland), Mark Kremer (Netherlands) and Adam Szymczyk (Poland).
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