{"id":400282,"date":"2005-06-06T22:00:00","date_gmt":"2005-06-06T22:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/exindex.hu\/?p=400282"},"modified":"2005-06-06T22:00:00","modified_gmt":"2005-06-06T22:00:00","slug":"az-intezmeny-a-koz-hangja","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/exindex.hu\/en\/interju\/az-intezmeny-a-koz-hangja\/","title":{"rendered":"Institutions as the public voice"},"content":{"rendered":"
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At the beginning of this month, Maria Hlavajova, Clémentine Deliss, Joanna Mytkowska and Charles Esche were the invited participants\r\nat the conference \u201cShifting Parameters – Remarks on the Institutional\u201d, initiated by Lívia Páldi, and held in the Ludwig Museum,\r\nBudapest.
We conversed with Charles Esche, the curator of this year\u2019s Istanbul Biennial and the Director of the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven\r\non this occasion.<\/p>\r\n<\/div>\r\n

 <\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n

Edit Moln\u00e1r:<\/b> Though there were relatively few questions after the presentation yesterday, I do not think this indicates any\r\nshyness on the audience\u2019s part. I felt that perhaps the issues concerning institutional structures and the possibility of future changes within\r\nthe art system \u2013 what to do about traditional institutions and frozen structures \u2013 just did not match the experiences of the local audience.\r\nThere are no established institutions in the sense you were talking about them \u2013 the traditional model let\u2019s call it \u2013 so because of the\r\nhistorical differences we could not talk about these questions from the same starting points\u2026<\/i><\/p>\r\n\r\n

Charles Esche:<\/b> I am always a bit nervous when somebody says that things are missing or that there is in a way a kind of trajectory\r\nwhich should have happened and didn\u2019t.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

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\r\n\u2013of course I don\u2019t think that you literally mean it \u2013there is somehow a story of what should be, which is the normalization of the western\r\nmodel, 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\r\nnormalized situation because its own history has as many problems as yours but there are differences between them too. This applies to what I\r\nwas talking about in my lecture, the certain aspects of the bourgeois public space during the 19th<\/sup> century that were probably more\r\ndeveloped in the Habsburg Empire in many ways than in the Netherlands.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

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\r\nhistory of socialism is that it gives the ability to see, so to speak, with two eyes: having seen a system in complete transformation allows\r\nyou to understand that these transformations are possible \u2013which I think are forbidden to us in the west in many ways, as we see only the\r\ninevitability 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\r\npossibility that there could be other ideologies applied in the future.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

\tIn a sense it\u2019s quite a liberating possibility because people see that socialism existed, it functioned, it failed and capitalism\r\nexists, 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\r\nUnited States, which is one of the most monocular, one-eyed systems. But also in the social democratic version of capitalism that we had up\r\nuntil 1989 in Western Europe \u2013 because the changes of 1989 obviously affected the situation there as well.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n

M.E.:<\/b> Do you think that the awareness of failure can be applied as a category within the current system of contemporary art? Or that\r\nthis awareness of failure could be the engine behind all the different strategies we test in the way we work with art?<\/i><\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n

C.E.:<\/b> Optimistically we could say that the art system now is a kind of proving ground for different models for organizing culture and\r\norganizing social exchange, which culture is about basically. And we can think about the Biennale as one example, in particular with its\r\napproach to globalization, bringing globalization into the art sphere. That has positive and negative effects. We can analyze these effects,\r\nbut actually the problem is that it\u2019s often, to my liking, much too complicit with free market version of globalisation, which I\u2019m sceptical\r\nof. Because I think we should be sceptical of whatever system is in control. I think about globalization also in connection to\r\ninternationalism, which was evolved as a mythology by socialism, the idea of social internationalism being clearly something which predated the\r\ncapitalist version of internationalism. So we can imagine a future through the force of globalization. There is not only one form of\r\nglobalization. There is not only one form of free market, and there is not only one form of capitalism. The other possibilities I think could\r\nbe tested out more than they are, in the domain of art \u2013 art as a testing ground because it is quite an interesting place.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

The main question here (in Budapest) for instance is how you tested out your relationship to that socialist failure and your expectations of\r\nthe free market capitalist model. How can you imagine an institution which starts now, and doesn\u2019t try to catch up with an imagined \u201cnormal\u201d\r\nhistory, but rather starts with an analysis \u2013 that\u2019s why I was really encouraged what you were saying about the initiation of a new collective\r\nthat started working on a feasibility study of the Hungarian art scene \u2013 and try from that place to imagine institutions that are necessary\r\nhere. 1<\/b><\/sup><\/a> With this history, and with this particular environment that is Budapest, or\r\nHungary, or post-socialism or whatever, that might be appropriate. And I think that raises a valid question, which actually excites me at the\r\nmoment to develop an institution in the third way, a self-reflecting institution different from what has been developed in other places.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

M.E.:<\/b> 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\r\nto investigate what the museum could be, the rethinking of the function of a museum…<\/i><\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n

C.E.<\/b> Absolutely. And I think that what is interesting about it is that it always makes references to history, to the particular\r\nhistory of Eindhoven or the Netherlands and to the Van Abbe Museum. And you have to keep that particularity in the method working within the\r\ninstitution.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n

M.E.:<\/b> Do you find yourself sometimes in a schizophrenic situation being a director of a Museum, an institution with history and long\r\ntradition, but at the very same time you are also the curator of this year\u2019s Istanbul Biennale, curator of an international biennial that is\r\none of the most flexible, still-developing institutions…<\/i><\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n

C.E.:<\/b> For me the two are really parallel projects. They are not directly related, there are not so many connections between them, but\r\nthey both investigate similar questions.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n

M.E.:<\/b> But for me in a way these institutions embody the two poles of the art system.<\/i><\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n

C.E.:<\/b> You mean the museum and the biennial?…absolutely. What we do think about in Eindhoven is how the museum can respond to the\r\nBiennial. We imagine that most of the energy and internationalism and a certain kind of discourse taking place on the Biennial. But does the\r\nmuseum 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\r\nbiennial, 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\r\nfather-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\r\nbiennial? 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\r\nreally a part of this, as they don\u2019t have any: each biennial tries to reinvent and renew itself from scratch. There is not much built on what\r\nthe biennial was before, no real conversation between one biennial and the next. It is more about levelling of the ground again. The museum can\r\nadapt to the goals it has anyway, which is to preserve the objects, to preserve the memory of visual culture through the testing of the\r\nbiennial.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

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\r\nextract from it. Now we will extract works from it, and we will make an exhibition selecting works from the Istanbul biennials, rather to\r\nselect 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\r\nmade in the late 80\u2019 or in the 90\u2019 and still can communicate particularly strongly in 2005. That\u2019s one trajectory of this. The other\r\ntrajectory 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\r\ncommissions made in this particular period? It has something to say about changes in the city, about the way that city relates to art, how\r\nartists work on the idea of site-specificity, an issue that biennials always relate to. So there are the two elements from Istanbul that will\r\ncome to Eindhoven: one is a straightforward selection of the works we feel were strong in the biennial, particularly works in which the\r\nposition of the artists is very provocative, where the artists\u2019 universe is recorded, rather than a connection to a specific site or a specific\r\narchitecture. On the other hand there are works that deal with the city of Istanbul, perhaps works that only existed for the time of the\r\nbiennial.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

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\u2019s a\r\nlittle bit more provocative more than trying to represent a city by statistics, or by cartography or as a kind of urban legend, but actually\r\nrepresent the city through its museums, by its collection, developed here in that city museum.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

M.E.:<\/b> Sometimes I have the idea that in a way biennials and museums relate to each other like commercial galleries and art fairs. As\r\nyou said, museums, with their \u201csuperior\u201d position, are visiting biennials to see what happened in the testing ground and then select things\r\nthat they can safely work with.
\r\nBut 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.<\/i><\/p>\r\n\r\n

C. E.:<\/b> Exactly, you add to the reading of the museum collection a different angle, a different twist, a possibility to see with both\r\neyes, if you like, through its relationship to a biennial. And maybe the collection shows its limitations and its particularities. It is\r\ninteresting that there is a history of the Istanbul biennial represented in the collection of a small town.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

So there will be almost literally a show of the \u201cgreatest hits\u201d of the Istanbul Biennial, in a way you would make a selection from a\r\ncollection thinking about the biennial as a whole.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

Then the second part involves mixing the works closely related to Istanbul into the collection, thinking about what is missing from the\r\ncollection, about how this collection relates to Eindhoven, in a way that this part of the Istanbul biennial\u2019s history relates to Istanbul.\r\nThrough these comparisons, perhaps it will come out that we have a rather critical focus on the collection. Let\u2019s see what is missing from the\r\ncollection, or why it is not representing Eindhoven in quite a way that people want.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

M.E.:<\/b> Are you commissioning new works for the Biennial?<\/i><\/p>\r\n\r\n

C.E.:<\/b> 50 % of the works will be created in Istanbul, with the invitation of international and Turkish artists who are inspired by or have\r\n 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\r\n work but we don\u2019t know yet. The other half of the Istanbul biennial (always a kind of \u201ctwo eyes\u201d thing, bringing a broader perspective) is to\r\n bring work from other sites, urban sites of the world , artists obviously working with the question of their environment, whether it is\r\n California or Teheran, or Tel Aviv, bringing works from those areas to create a contrast to Istanbul. This will create a critical position\r\n towards Istanbul within itself. So you have both this kind of celebration with artists reflecting on the fascination of the city, which is the\r\n biggest city in Europe, maybe even the most crucial city in Europe, because it\u2019s on the border between Europe and somewhere else, but on the\r\n other hand, well ok, this isn\u2019t everything \u2013 what is the other story, what else is there?<\/p>\r\n\r\n

M.E.<\/b> As the former director of the Rooseum you obviously turned this kunsthalle<\/i> – through its projects and programming \u2013 into\r\nan investigation field for what a future institution can be. In one of your interviews you stated out that one of the less important functions\r\nof any kind of contemporary art institution is the showroom function. And now you have large showrooms and one of the most professional storage\r\nsystems on earth. I was fascinated by the professional computerized filing system of the Eindhoven collection. As a museum director how can you\r\napply your previous experiences?<\/i><\/p>\r\n\r\n

C.E.:<\/b> The bar-code you mean? Yeah it is amazing. I\u2019m shocked as well.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

M.E.:<\/b> So you basically have the perfect archive, where you can keep everything literally till eternity.<\/i><\/p>\r\n\r\n

C.E.:<\/b> I think both things apply. I don\u2019t actually see that there is a huge connection between what I did at the Rooseum and what I\r\nwant 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\r\nthe collection, which is a kind of weight, in that to move that weight takes longer, takes more arguments, and involves more of a consequence\r\nthinking of it: whether you can be experimental within that context, and you have to take care of two things: one thing is the collection\r\nitself, 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.\r\nIn a kunsthalle you can basically be experimental because you are talking to an audience which will forgive you for not really explaining what\r\nyou are doing because they are already familiar with this environment. You have a more specialized audience which makes a big difference. Hence\r\nin 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\r\nthey 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\r\nhave 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.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

M.E.:<\/b> Do you have the ambition to energize the collection through contemporary happenings and give a contemporary reading of it?<\/i><\/p>\r\n\r\n

C.E.:<\/b> 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\r\ncollection, but you have to do it certainly in a respectful way, which means that you cannot be too experimental, in the sense of being\r\ndisrespectful. You have to understand of its history, and to learn that history as well. But I think that the methodology I tried in the\r\nRooseum can be applied to the Van Abbe.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

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\r\nthe 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\r\nthink that that\u2019s 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\r\nmuseum, 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\r\nbring 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\r\nwhat 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\r\nwe 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\r\nway politicizing which thinks about mediation, how that work is mediated, and not just gathering the work together and placing it on the wall\r\nin a showroom environment, but activating<\/i> the museum \u2013 which is actually making the museum.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

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\r\ndifferent. We might end up with an exhibition, but that exhibition is developed while we articulate why we are putting on this exhibition \u2013 we\r\nare 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\r\nabout 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,\r\ninvestigating relationships to social democracy, but here the investigation will be about the collection. What and why we found something\r\ninteresting, why is Picasso interesting to us today, is he interesting, how it relates to contemporary painting for instance, or is it today\u2019s\r\nimage making? Those are the questions you can play with in a museum, because you have a collection making that process quite exciting. Doing a\r\nmuseum is about doing very different things, but with the same mentality.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

M.E.:<\/b> 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\r\nteborg. 2<\/b><\/sup><\/a><\/i><\/p>\r\n\r\n

C.E.:<\/b> Yes. It\u2019s nice that you know about that, I\u2019m always surprised when people know what I did. Actually I was very proud of it, how\r\nwe worked with a museum and with the collection and working with a specific moment of the 1900\u2019s and thinking back about how it might be\r\npresented is for me a totally valid model for what we are talking about now.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

M.E.:<\/b> How you imagine working with contemporary artists within the framework of the museum? Will you commission new works, like a\r\nproducer? Will you be able to create the dialogue situation working with them?<\/i><\/p>\r\n\r\n

C.E.:<\/b> What we will do is to commission works for the collection, which makes people very nervous, because you don\u2019t know what you are\r\ngetting. 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\r\nonly 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\r\nshow in a way that represents art contributing to imagining the world differently than it is now. This is fundamentally what I have always been\r\nbusy with. The level of imagination in today\u2019s world of speculations is really low. The currency of art its imagination, what we exchange. What\r\nart 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\u2019s this\r\nexcharge of imagination. There are two levels of imagination: one is the imagination of the subject, the work which makes me imagine something\r\nwhich 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\r\nthing, which is more exciting, is the imagination of the other, in other words if you imagine artists imagination, or imagine the imagination\r\nof the other.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

M.E.<\/b> That is an interesting and ambitious programme.<\/i><\/p>\r\n\r\n

C.E.:<\/b> It\u2019s absolutely ok. There are people who are working in Istanbul who imagine Istanbul in a third way. Or they might never have been\r\nto 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\r\nyou imagine Istanbul, but how to use their imagination. Maybe you have been to Istanbul, but maybe you haven\u2019t, but we all have a certain sense\r\nof 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\r\nthis 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\r\nwhat can be done with it. If we really allow something, really imagine something from the position of the artist \u2013 whether it\u2019s Istanbul or\r\nnot, then we\u2019ve 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.\r\nAnd that gives all the essentials that we have about questions like immigration or difference, the centralities of the nation-state or of our\r\nidentity, the imagination of the other \u2013 as Spivak<\/b><\/a> calls it, the \u201ctelepoesis.\u201d Its a kind of poetic possibility at distance.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

I\u2019m 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\r\nvery specific when you look at a Warhol, you are used to looking at it as an illustration-specific consumer society in North America \u2013yes you\r\ncan do that, you use Warhol as a way of imagining Marilyn Monroe and you look at it and imagine this relationship with that icon \u2013 yes you can\r\ndo 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\r\nsociety 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\r\nin that situation. If you start doing it in a direct relation to a specific work you already have three levels, and I don\u2019t think its too\r\ndifficult to get to imagining what the work means in a social and critical context. You use your imagination to speculate on the subject that\r\nyou see, and then you try to use your imagination bringing the first two together.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

M.E.:<\/b> 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\r\nin that process?<\/i><\/p>\r\n\r\n

C.E.:<\/b> I know what you mean and I feel very frustrated sometimes. I can get very frustrated at the speed. And that is potentially\r\ndestructive. 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\r\nto 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\r\ninstitutions are very much based on the idea that such institutions are the public voice or the public manifestation of our society.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

 <\/p>\r\n\r\n

Budapest, 02.04.2005<\/p>\r\n\r\n

Interview by Edit Moln\u00e1r<\/p>\r\n\r\n

 <\/p>\r\n

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 <\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n

1<\/b><\/a> KKKE, Association of Contemporary Art Curators 2005. Project for a feasibility study on the\r\ncurrent situation of the institutional structure of Hungary.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

2<\/b><\/a> Amateur, Konstmuseum and Konsthall, Göteborg, 2000. Curators: Charles Esche (Scotland), Mark\r\nKremer (Netherlands) and Adam Szymczyk (Poland).
\r\nhttp:\/\/www.artmargins.com\/content\/review\/polit2.html<\/a><\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  At the beginning of this month, Maria Hlavajova, Clémentine Deliss, Joanna Mytkowska and Charles Esche were the invited participants at the conference \u201cShifting Parameters – Remarks on the Institutional\u201d, initiated by Lívia Páldi, and held in the Ludwig Museum, Budapest.We conversed with Charles Esche, the curator of this year\u2019s Istanbul Biennial and the Director […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":630280,"parent":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-400282","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interju"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/exindex.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/400282","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/exindex.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/exindex.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exindex.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exindex.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=400282"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/exindex.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/400282\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exindex.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/630280"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/exindex.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=400282"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exindex.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=400282"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exindex.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=400282"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}