Modest Proposals

Charles Esche

Translated by Tugba Dogan

Edited by Serkan Ozkaya

Introduction
This book is a collection of texts mainly drawn from catalogues and other publications
written over the past five years. During that time, certain issues and terms that I developed have
become clarified and the essays here show a process through which the potentiality in terms
such as engaged autonomy and modest proposals have been developed. Each text had quite
different motivating impulses and usually contains some specific references to individual
projects. I have generally left them in these edited versions, partly for the sake of authenticity
and partly to encourage readers to remember the close relationship between the arguments here
and the visual experience of an exhibition or a work of art. For this reason, each text has a very
short introductory paragraph that locates it in its own context. The book itself is divided into
two broad sections. The first set of essays outlines in broader terms some of the arguments
about arts role as a speculative tool for rethinking current social and political conditions. The
second part of the book, beginning with the Superflex text1, consists of considerations of
specific artists works whose practices seem relevant and can shed more concentrated light on
my general arguments while not being limited to them. This book does not include any writings
about the institutions of art and their potential for renewal or experimentation which we hope
will be the subject of another volume in this series.

Looking over the collection that Serkan zkaya has made, I hope certain themes emerge as
common threads across the book. There is a consistent use of political analogy and the
relationship between art as a propositional space and the wider condition of the political
economy is probed from a number of individual positions. This is rooted in the way art after
1989, as much else, has slowly come to occupy a very different role than before the overt
collapse of a communist alternative. It is interesting to note how the idea of artistic autonomy
had its heyday under the rubric of Abstract Expressionism, a movement supported by the US
government as an illustration of superiority of capitalist freedoms over centrally planned
economic and cultural control. In contrast, since 1989, art under a capitalist dispensation has
had more and more didactic expectations placed on it to encourage social inclusion or to
justify itself in terms of its productive contribution to the economy. Both engaged autonomy
and, modest proposals, are ways to think arts possibility under such conditions,
fundamentally asking how art can continue to imagine the world otherwise than it is. To do so
1

See Tools and Manifestoes in this book

2

is not to politicise art directly but rather to create a space within which artists can speculate
about new potentialities in the way it does best intimately in contact with its viewers and
changing the world by changing individual ways of thinking and the private boundaries of
ones own common sense.

Having blithely used the terms, I will attempt in this introduction to state shortly what
engaged autonomy and, modest proposals might mean. Engaged autonomy is a
paradoxical term that suggests is a creative tension between two traditionally opposed forms of
artistic thinking. It suggests that the old idea of artistic autonomy can only be maintained if the
idea of engagement is also fully sustained through addressing immediate conditions of
reception. This could include many particular approaches to making art, but all would be likely
to share some aspects such as close attention to the time and place of the presentation and the
abandonment of the idea of an ideal or universal viewer for specific invitations to whatever
communities. It might involve direct resistance to current economic doctrines through
channelling resources away from their stated purpose in order to fulfill singular objectives.
Engaged autonomy should also be read as an antidote to the dangers of the current political
move in art with its notion of artistic contributions to a wider critical or curatorial discourse.
Such frameworks can be valid only if artists themselves retain an agonistic relationship to
them, struggling to assert their own contrary position while acknowledging and actively
responding to the issues at hand. Furthermore, it invests the quality of autonomy with action,
understanding it as a state of being or doing, rather than something vested in the objects of
production. To act autonomously, both as artists and as institutional curators while
committing the results of those acts to specific contexts and conditions is one move that
might preserve the idea of the autonomy of art from either its total commodification as a
marketable good or its reduction to a social welfare project. It can offer resistance through its
uncertain and paradoxical status as engaged and autonomous. Its form is undetermined or
contradictory to its purpose, art can hide in the guise of other things or actions or, in the art
space, other things can hide in the guise of art.

Modest proposals, which gives the title to this collection, is a related term. They are
essentially speculative in that we imagine things other than they are now yet those speculative
gestures are intensely concrete and actual. They avoid the clearly fantastical as well as the
hermetic purity of private symbolism in order to deal with real existing conditions and what
might be necessary in order to change them. In different senses according to varying artistic
3

approaches, modest proposals at root, address the problem of necessity in relation to the free
imagination as a prerequisite to producing work. Indeed, the idea of new production itself is in
question much of the time. Artworks often make use of existing objects, conditions and
situations and manipulate the elements into different, more aspirational or purposeful
configurations. This concern for concrete necessity is the quality that defines the limits of the
term modesty in the expression, rather than the scale of the issue involved or the absence of
grand ambition for change. In doing so, these modest proposals exploit the bourgeois
possibilities of free, transformative and singular imaginations that art has reserved for itself
since the late eighteenth century, using it for different and necessarily undefined ends.

In writing these texts, I am indebted to many people who have helped me enormously in
different ways. Firstly, all the artists present and not present in this volume who have created
the possibilities for this kind of thinking in the first place. I would like to mention a few crucial
discussion partners, each of whom has significantly contributed to whatever quality the
writings here have. Otto Berchem, Will Bradley, Pavel Bchler, Lene Crone Jensen, Vasif
Kortun, Hou Hanru, Mark Lewis, Silke Otto-Knapp, Jewyo Rhii, Esra Sarigedik, Simon
Sheikh, Shepherd Steiner, Adam Szymczyk and Jane Warrilow have all been crucial in
different ways, though the errors are of course all my own. Finally, I would like to thank
Serkan zkaya for having the idea of publishing this book in the first place and finding the way
to get it done.

Charles Esche
Eindhoven, July 2005

Collectivity, Modest proposals and Foolish Optimism

A text that exists in various versions and to some extent speaks for itself. The version was
written for the catalogue Collective Creativity curated by whw, Zagreb for Fredericianum,
Kassel.
If the mind, while imagining non-existent things as present to it, is at the same time
conscious that they do not really exist, this power of imagination must be set down to the
efficacy of its nature, and not to a fault, especially if this faculty of imagination depend solely
on its own nature--that is if this faculty of imagination be free.2

I want to imagine a life without structural, instrumental, political fear. I want to

picture a set of cultural and social values different from the ones I see around me one that
gives priority to collective human aspirations rather than personal and national salvations. I
want politics to be on the side of liberty not control and I want to join others in finding ways
to make these changes happen because there still is greater possibility in the many than in
the one. But there, at this moment of constructive longing, I have to admit that my desire for
change suddenly hit a wall of impossibility. Democratic politics, as currently conducted,
offers less than nothing. Revolution(ism) has shown itself to be tragically inadequate.
Liberalism is fatalism and compromise by another name.

So, before I (before we?) plan how to resistbefore we consider how to begin to
actI think we have simply to deal with how to think? What happens if we ask Lenins old
question (or is it a statement?), What is to be Done in the same spirit but it the light of
today. Self evidently, much has changed. We cannot take for granted the very things trade
unions, class solidarity and political possibility that Lenin built his argument upon. The
problem is that, however strongly desired, there is no existing political force or structure that
could yet be imagined to articulate a coherent alternative. Or I cannot see one even on the
horizon.

The big scale, one size fits all left revolutionary programmes that defined the last century
were ultimately unmitigated failures. They simply failed to develop new social, cultural or

Benedict de Spinoza, Ethics, Prop. 17,

http://www.msu.org/e&r/content_e&r/texts/spinoza/ethics_part2.html#text18

imaginative possibilities in favour of defensive repression. Eventually, and arguably tragically, they
simply ran out of any viable options except collapse. Yet in many ways the subsequent victory of
capitalism was won by default and the successes of wild east capitalism have been mixed to say the
least. Yet in the political field, capitalist apologists wave away by rapidly arguing that any new steps
towards social equality and emancipation through collective action are figments of a twisted
imagination and lead step by inevitable step precisely to the Gulag and the secret state that the big
Utopias did indeed provide. Their prescription for an imaginable future, such as it is, centres solely
on personal economic satisfaction and private security. Society, culture, community are left to fend
for themselves under the control of commercial imperatives except where the obvious inadequacies
of a total economic solution are answered by ever more overt calls to faith in personal salvation
through God. In this way, the end of the political is effectively ensured because collective agency is
entirely denied and ridiculed.

Yet such a prospect patently ignores much human experience and desire. A substantial
part of our needs is fulfilled only in companionship and solidarity with others. We come to
know ourselves and our shifting identities through common cultural experiences. The
common sense of a society is not a fixed given but subject to change through imaginative
provocation in common. It is where and how art can in untraceable ways change the world.
In these terms, I understand Spinozas opening proposal of imagining non-existent things as
present as a form of deliberate self-deception that has always allowed art to function for both
its makers and its public. The question is, given our political desperation, can we use the free
imagination to articulate the desires that have no voice in the current capitalist settlement? Of
course, I believe can. To do so, we need to look to new models of social and cultural
behaviour, particularly when it comes to the public sphere of which art and its institutions are
perhaps one of the very few surviving elements.

what I call agonismis a different mode of manifestation of antagonism because

it involves a relation not between enemies but between adversaries, adversaries being
defined in a paradoxical way as friendly enemies, that is, persons who are friends because
they share a common symbolic space but also enemies because they want to organise this
common symbolic space in a different way.
(Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, London: Verso, 2000, p13)

We can choose to imagine in Spinozan terms that the art sphere can be that place of
agonism precisely because it deals in symbolic language and could provide models and what I
term modest proposals for friendly enmity at a time of superpower unilateralism in the wider
world. Modest proposals articulate themselves precisely in terms of this what might be
rather than what is. They are essentially speculative in that the imagine things other than they
are now yet those speculative gestures are intensely concrete and actual. They avoid the
clearly fantastical as well as the hermetic purity of private symbolism in order to deal with
real existing conditions and what might be necessary in order to change them. In different
senses according to varying artistic approaches, modest proposals at root address the problem
of necessity in relation to the free imagination as a prerequisite to producing work. They do
not abandon critique but take it as an a priori out of which prospective ideas have to emerge.
The idea of new production and original creativity is also in question much of the time.
Modest proposals generally make use of existing objects, conditions and situations and
manipulate the elements into different, more aspirational or purposeful configurations. This
concern for concrete necessity is the quality that defines the limits of the term modesty in
the expression, rather than the scale of the issue involved or the absence of grand ambition for
change. In doing so, these modest proposals exploit the possibilities of free, transformative
and singular imaginations that art has reserved for itself since the late eighteenth century.

The current abundance of artistic collaborations finds part of its motivation here. To
propose in the current state of affairs is to open up to the charge of naivety or worse.
Collective working provides strength to overcome such opposition as well as the means to
develop extended research and analysis of existing conditions in order to base the work on
necessity as well as imagination. Less instrumentality however, the reason for a growth in
collective art may precisely be because of its demise in most other areas of society. Art often
works countercyclically, expressing desires that are not easily articulated elsewhere. We
could speculate that collective creativity is the normal artistic response to a moment of
extreme individualism. Perhaps, in a necessary spirit of foolish optimism, it may be a
predictive step towards an idea of creative solidarity expressed not in a common political
programme but in shared speculative discourse within an agonistic art sphere. This is neither
the forced solidarity of real socialism or nationalism nor the vague shared interests of
geographic communities. Rather it is a willed and individual choice to combine and
communicate collectively without the need for clear, objective results. That, at least, is an
imaginative hope that this kind of exhibition can help to realise.
7

I will conclude with a third quotation that, in its simple grandeur, commits us all,
artists and not artists, to working for such a different, collective future.

if instead of continuing to search for a proper identity in the already improper and
senseless form of individuality, humans were to succeed in belonging to this impropriety as
such, in making of the proper being-thus not an identity and an individual property but a
singularity without identity, a common and absolutely exposed singularity if humans could,
that is, not be-thus in this or that particular biography, but be only the thus, their singular
exteriority and their face, then they would for the first time enter into a community without
presuppositions and without subjects, into a communication without the incommunicable.

Selecting in the new planetary humanity those characteristics that allow for its
survival, removing the thin diaphragm that separates bad mediatized advertising from the
perfect exteriority that communicates only itself this is the political task of our generation.
(Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community, University of Minnesota Press, 1993,
p63)
Optimistically, maybe foolishly too, this is the task that the community around art could first
choose to accept.

Modest proposals or why the choice is limited to how the wealth is

to be squandered.3
This text was written for the catalogue of the Berlin Biennial 2001 curated by Saskia Bos. The
exhibition included work by Dan Peterman and Superflex and I used their inclusion as a way
to set out for the first time some thoughts on the possibility for art to be a propositional field
for new social and economic models.
In Batailles The Accursed Share the writer sums up his explication of the limited terrain of
economic analysis in these words:

Shouldnt productive activity as a whole be considered in terms of the modifications it

receives from its surroundings? In other words, isnt there a need to study the system of human
production and consumption within a much larger framework? () In overall industrial
development, are there not social conflicts and planetary wars? In the global activity of men, in
short, are there not causes and effects that will appear only provided that the general data of the
economy are studied? Will we be able to make ourselves the masters of such a dangerous activity
(and one that we could not abandon in any case) without having grasped its general consequences?
Should we not, given the constant development of economic forces, pose the general problems that
are linked to the movement of energy on the globe?

His appeal is for a science of socio-economic wholeness, one that takes into consideration a
play of energy that no particular end limits: the play of living matter in general. Here we have a
major cultural thinker trying to grapple with the banality of mid-twentieth-century economics while
realising that its internal definitions will hold the key to future projections of society and human
relations, not just economic development. His argument, or one way in which it might be used, is
that rethinking social and economic analysis is a task for the artist, and equally, that cultural
discourse as well as production is largely determined by the imaginative capability of economics and
social science to think things otherwise.

This text is an attempt to build on the work of Bataille and many others who relate their
cultural commentary to the hegemony of capitalist economics, initially in the United States and
Western Europe and, since 1990, around most of the globe. Firstly, we have to define certain terms
3

This is the greatest line in Georges Bataille The Accursed Share, his simple statement of what the fruits of
capitalist production eventually amount to.

within the field. Capitalism is used in so many senses today ( free enterprise, industrial mode of
production or, more recently, as world economy) that, to quote Manuel de Landa, it would
seem the only solution is to replace this tired word with a neologism, perhaps the one Braudel
suggested, antimarkets, and to use it exclusively to refer to a certain segment of the population of
commercial and industrial institutions. What is interesting about the term antimarkets is that it
introduces variegation into the structure of capitalism. By creating differences within an economy of
the same, it crucially allows for other varieties or enclosures that might provide the kind of
possibilities we require to think things otherwise. At least that is the proposition of this text.
However, even allowing for the use of antimarkets as a term of distinction, the ubiquity of the broad
capitalist metaphor clearly extends deep into the heart of our culture - I would argue to the exclusion
of any other. The significance of Braudel and de Landa is their separation of the trading aspect of
capitalism from its monopoly antimarket variant and with it the possibility to rescue what is termed
low level exchange from antimarkets abusive behaviour as a power tool in democratic polities.4
This becomes exciting because it permits other models of human aspiration to exist within the
current economic paradigm. In other words exchange relations can be motivated not just by the
desire to make profit but also to make friends or even culture. While Bataille is most interested in the
moment of exchange (its temporal character) and Braudel in the possibility of a spatial location for
exchange relations lying outwith capitalism (i.e. non-capitalism), both observe that economics
cannot explain away the world. The problem is that its current hegemony in society can only be
challenged from within its own paradigm of value exchange and human-economic relations which
is where contemporary visual culture might enter the picture.

In the words of Fernand Braudel: We should not be too quick to assume that capitalism embraces the whole
of western society, that it accounts for every stitch in the social fabric that our societies are organized from top to
bottom in a 'capitalist system'. On the contrary, there is a dialectic still very much alive between capitalism on one
hand, and its antithesis, the 'non-capitalism' of the lower level on the other [This] lowest level, not being paralysed by
the size of its plant or organisation, is the one readiest to adapt; it is the seedbed of inspiration, improvisation and even
innovation, although its most brilliant discoveries sooner or later fall into the hands of the holders of capital. It was not
the capitalists who brought about the first cotton revolution; all the new ideas came from enterprising small businesses.
Fernand Braudel, The Perspective of the World, Harper and Row, New York, 1986, p. 631.
First of all, if capitalism has always relied on non-competitive practices, if the prices for its commodities have
never been objectively set by demand/supply dynamics, but imposed from above by powerful economic decisionmakers, then capitalism and the market have always been different entities. To use a term introduced by Braudel,
capitalism has always been an "antimarket". This, of course, would seem to go against the very meaning of the word
"capitalism", regardless of whether the word is used by Karl Marx or Ronald Reagan.
Manuel de Landa, Markets and antimarkets in the world economy http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/a-market.htm
Of course, I would argue that non-capitalism is simply part of the system, specifically the creative engine for
further capitalist expansion, but the point about the variegation of capitalism itself is well made.

10

The ubiquity of the capitalist metaphor to describe activities in the world is also partly a
consequence of the decline of competing models to understand and motivate behaviour in the late
twentieth century. Religious or military aspirations that previously held the merchant model of
exchange in check have largely been marginalised or understandably discredited. Thus, though we
might agree conceptually that the world is more complex than a balance sheet, it is difficult to put
this knowledge into appropriate action in terms of meaningful protest. This is the very effective
Catch-22 that capitalism has achieved. By defining itself not as a closed ideology in competition
with fascism, communism or the Catholic Church, but as a simple mechanism to accelerate the
exchange of goods and the development of productive resources, it avoids the pitfalls of
totalitarianism while maintaining its hold over social and political life. Thus, it reduces its exposure
to criticism , in recent times seeming to want to adopt the appearance of a natural phenomenon like
the weather. A force that comes and goes without any human agency to control it.

Antimarkets have also, successfully, associated themselves with liberal democracy, to the
extent that the use of focus groups, marketing surveys and other selling tools give the appearance
that what began as a mechanism of exchange has become a mechanism of consent and ethical
probity (if enough people buy it, it must be popular and good). This association has been very
cleverly managed because unarguably the concept of democracy predates free market capitalism by
thousands of years. Nevertheless, it seems impossible in the current circumstances to retrieve a
model of liberal democracy independent of antimarkets. The difficulty with liberal democracy is
that, rather like socialism, it has to be read not in its idealised form of toleration and freedom but in
its real existing variety. In those latter terms, it is incontrovertibly connected with capitalism, to the
extent that liberal democracy-capitalism, or, even better, democratic anti-market liberalism (DAML)
is the only possible usage of the term that bears a recognizable relationship to our current system.

Now, if DAML is really the fulfilment of the human dream as Fukuyama claims in The End
of History, then it must also be the end of human aspiration for a better world. I find this an
intolerable thought. Surely, the inadequacies and conflicts that DAML necessarily provokes can be
at least partially resolved only by thinking through another set of possible socio-economic human
relations. Clearly, there is no new Communist Manifesto or potential reform programme written that
yet provides a map to this possible landscape. Nevertheless, the acts of thinking through, questioning
and drawing interim conclusions are the only way to begin to provide the material with which it
might be written. It is also precisely the role that our society has been given at this moment in
intellectual and political history. This is our responsibility - to take the human argument to another
11

level, one that preserves the dynamic individualism of DAML and combines it with a concern for the
collective and social(ist). I believe this will prove to be not a reform of DAML but something else
entirely, an unknown development, yet perhaps even now imaginable in broad terms.

The further question is where and how the generation of these forms of thinking might take
place. Learning from twentieth-century history, we might expect the forum for discussion to be the
political party, democratic or not, through which the struggle of ideas can be played out and
collective, binding decisions made. Increasingly, that pattern of social development seems to have
run its course. If the pronouncements of the end of history are to mean anything, it might be the
death of party politics as a viable form of discourse about future socio-economic behaviours. If party
politics is unable or unwilling to satisfy the demand for a structure to address the failures of DAML,
then we have to look elsewhere. Older models of resistance such as religious belief leading to revolt,
or, more oppressively, internal military interventions, are very unlikely to be reactivated. In religious
terms, the organised churches of Christendom have invested too much in DAML and its economic
benefits to provoke questions, especially when they are numerically and morally weaker than at any
other time since the thirteenth century. Cults or heresies might perhaps occasionally coalesce to
provide moments of elucidation or active debate, but they are likely to remain too marginalised,
given a global context in which their smallest act of resistance will immediately be derided. Only in
the Islamic world is religion offering a coherent, broadly rooted alternative to DAML and continues
to thrive despite all attempts by the liberal democratic consensus to ridicule its beliefs. For the West
and for most of East Asia, where DAML has become the paradigm of choice since 1945, religion is a
mere entertainment or sideshow to the real business of monetary exchange. As for a military
alternative, the lessons of the thirties and forties are still fresh enough in our minds as a society.
Even though opposition of the Milosevic kind is likely to re-emerge from time to time, the appeal of
the military will, we hope, never again overwhelm the free market as a whole. Partly, this is because
the structure of a leader and a group of followers is out of sync with twenty-first-century technology
(there is no engine to drive the Internet). Perhaps it is also an effect of the extensive anti-nuclear
campaign of the last thirty years that might genuinely have reduced the dark attractiveness of mass
destruction.

In the face of this perhaps overly pessimistic account of where alternative thinking might
emerge, it might seem absurd to suggest that the marginal area of what we term visual culture
could actually be the model we are looking for. The traditions of visual art are less significant to this
argument than embracing the way art and artists function in the contemporary field. Certain of them
12

act and question in ways that bear striking similarities to social scientists or even economists but
without the ready-made meta-solution of DAML as a required objective. It might even be possible to
interpret the history of art as an active engagement with a succession of hegemonistic socio-political
structures. In these terms, the response to post-1945 developments has been to draw art away from
its association with the religious or the sublime, or the glorification of the nation or state at war.
Instead there has been an increasing concentration on mechanisms of exchange, of consent and of
ascribing value. This narrative could be read in terms of recent developments in art, beginning with
conceptualisms rejection of the market, moving through a period of reconciliation with capitalism in
the consumer critique of the eighties, and then in the slow development of a more nuanced, complex
relationship to the market of images in the nineties. What might now distinguish this Berlin Biennale
is the suggestion of the shift to a fourth stage, beginning with the overt collapse of real existing
socialism in 1989-92. This could be defined as a play with the mechanisms of the antimarkets no
longer working only in a metaphorical way, but with models that are actually descriptive in some
way of the systems they seek to critique.

Such an approach is initially interesting because it places the sphere of art practice out into
the world, in ways that compare with some of the seventies strategies for community-based art.
However, the differences are quite evident. The current set of practices generally eschews
ideological certainty in favour of a broader questioning of contemporary structures. At the same time
they are less interested in abandoning the category of art itself, but rather seek to use it to negotiate a
critical engagement. Importantly, they identify themselves as existing within the DAML camp but in
a tolerated enclosure called cultural experimentation. This enclosure offers an arguably unique
space in early twenty-first-century administration, one with which antimarkets are completely
complicit while allowing it to retain a crucially significant degree of autonomy from the systems by
which it is funded and through which it is distributed.

To define this position using the possibilities of being both within the camp and closed off
from its more rapacious demands, I would like to introduce the term engaged autonomy. This term
would define the concept of using the notional freedom that antimarkets allow to its culture to raise
questions about the economic order as a whole. The possibilities are significantly enhanced because
culture is to some extent defined as another to commercial imperatives. In some measure, this
concern to protect the otherness of culture must explain the wailing and gnashing of teeth that often
accompanies contemporary art works that seem to deliberately reject the idea of beauty and nonutility in favour of co-opted, yet also hopefully aesthetically pleasing, strategies. However, rather
13

than simply provoking this now predictable reaction, work that would qualify as engaged
autonomous would use the space to open an interrogation of economic and social value, exploiting
its externally defined otherness to examine the assumptions of DAML society.

At a second level, the concept of engaged autonomy provides support for the idea of a type
of critique that is not distanced or caught in the abstractions of theory but pragmatic and project
based. The possibilities of engagement in these terms allows for the production of real existing
models or what we might term modest proposals on a small scale and protected by the ramparts of
the cultural experimentation enclosure. Moreover, the value of the model is principally its weakness
as a real competitive entity within DAML. In other words, it does not need to be tested, and found
wanting, in terms of profitability or market share because it has no purchase on these terms. Instead
it can prolong its existence as a modest proposal to become the seed for varieties of critique and
alternate thinking about existing conditions. Manuel de Landas reading of Deleuze and Guattari
helps us to understand the value of models. In his book A Thousand Years of Non-Linear History, he
proposes the uses of models or engineering diagrams not merely as metaphors to explain the world
but as having common physical properties with the systems they are trying to describe. This concept
of the model directly commenting through its structure on larger mechanisms is useful in thinking
about the modest proposals of artists and their impact on wider fields. By actually picturing
mechanisms of exchange and consent as working processes, it enables viewers and/or participants to
imagine adjustments, pressure points or potential diversions that might be set up along the road.
Therefore rather than the monolith of DAML, the possibility opens up of small, experimental
changes to the system without having to project its complete (and only ever rhetorical) collapse.

Now, these modest proposals should also certainly be viewed in terms of critique, but
critique in terms of active experiments and ways of trying to think otherwise without knowledge or
even confident projection of an ultimate destination. An interesting book from 1989 called Fast
Capitalism by Ben Agger defined this territory precisely in terms of literary theory:

Critique is directly political action, nothing less. The notion that radicals can be scholars
is ludicrous when scholarship methodises thought in subtracting from it the Dionysian, the
passionate rebel driving any version of the world Instead, rebellion wants to rescue itself from
discipline, the excuse currently offered not to address a wider universe of concerns. We cannot just
do this write clearer, more popular books or turn away from the university. Where would we go?

14

Instead we must fight to advocate simultaneously the autonomy of thought and the driving passion
of thought to change the world.5

The current close relationship between academia and art has its own fraught history, but we
can easily imagine taking Aggers idea of intellectual work and/or art practice as both autonomous
and passionately engaged in changing the world. His comment on the pernicious influence of
disciplines and the inertia they provoke is also telling, in relation to the types of free exchange
permitted within the enclosure of cultural experimentation and especially those carried out under the
rubric of contemporary visual art. The permissive territory of visual art, welcoming, for instance,
performers and filmmakers who dont fit into the mainstream of their own disciplines, is a valuable
asset in the differing attempts to build models and modest proposals to examine DAML. Once again,
we might observe this space for experimentation as a unique and prized one within the existing
hegemony.

A number of artists within the Biennale are dealing with variations on these issues. As
exemplars of ways of working we might look at Dan Peterman and Superflex. Dan Peterman works
out of a recycling factory on 61st Street in Chicago. The community of interests sharing this building
vary from artists to bike repair shop workers, and the activities range from small-scale agriculture to
the publishing offices of Baffler magazine. If his identity as an artist can be allowed to encompass all
his dealings with this community, then the opportunity offered to contemporary art more generally is
considerable. The terrain of activity alone is instantaneously expanded to include recycling works,
local community enterprises, political publication and distribution as well as studio based art
production. Moreover, the context of this engagement is one determined by different attempts to
provoke or challenge traditional DAML exchange relations. Thus the imperative of free trade is
subordinated to local requirements, or the concept of profit is proposed as a mechanism rather than a
goal. As an example, 61st Street Bottle Cap Pasta will offer for sale pasta produced in the building
using a bottle cap as a cutting tool. As the proposal makes clear: Over time, this project will strike a
balance between its identity as a commercial proposition, a commemorative act, an interdisciplinary
critical strategy, a local kitchen trend, or an edible art multiple, but for the moment all of these things
are in play. and in play on an art/cultural industry pitch that permits its audience to read small
scale as model, and proposal as critique. Superflex are a three person collective based in
Copenhagen. Their projects include Biogas, a natural energy plant for use in unelectrified parts of

Ben Agger, Fast Capitalism, University of Illinois Press, 1989, p. 136.

15

the world and Superchannel, a flexible web-based broadcast TV station that has been used in
isolated tower blocks to generate different possibilities for disenfranchised communities to identify
themselves and communicate with each other. Their attitude to the work is encapsulated in the idea
of art as a tool to create certain productive situations. Basically, it is a question of what art is
capable of doing. Art is able to focus on various topics and discourses, and our way of doing it is to
go beyond mere problematising. We want our art to have clear social relevance, and we are
assuming full responsibility for the consequences. We are engaged in an operation that we hope will
be concretely relevant to an individual or a group of people.6

These practices and many more different but related experiments are where I believe the
possibilities for art lie. They are positioned in the territory between active political engagement and
autonomous experimentation, in that enclosure that is now marked out for contemporary art. How
that terrain will be defined remains open to question, whether the enclosure will expand or come
under pressure is also unclear, but, while we have it, it seems an opportunity, even a responsibility,
to use it in the name of a community of discourse interested in propagating a great variety of
possible futures. It is from amongst these that we, as a renewed democratic collective, might then be
able to make our informed choice.7

An exchange between sa Nacking and Superflex, Afterall, issue o, Central St. Martins College of Art &
Design, London, 1998.
7
I am very indebted to Shepherd Steiner and Jane Warrilow for reading this text at different stages and pointing
out the errors of thought.

16

17

Modest proposals and other pauses

A text written for the first volume of the Gwangju Biennale catalogue 2002 that I curated with
Hou Hanru and Song Wang-Kyung. This develops some of the ideas of the modest proposals
together with the idea of the Pause, the title of the biennial and a topic suggested by the
Koraen artist Bac Hi So to provide an antidote to the constant market consumption of new
names and artworks provoked by the biennale circuses. The final exhibition was perhaps
inevitably less of a pause than we had planned, but it did present various artist run and
alternative spaces from Europe and Asia that were engaged in long term production and
support for specific artistic communities.
Working with art and being concerned with its future often carries me into improbable areas
of knowledge, places where I have little or no experience or prior co-ordinates. The pure pleasure of
discovery is regularly marred however by the speed of its co-option or absorption into established
discourse. In terms of current practices, the range of information sources and the diversity of
conversations around them sometimes seem to overwhelm even the most studious worker, to the
extent that the terrain of vital, sensuous and intellectual specialisms is only momentarily glimpsed
before passing again into shadow. In return for the visit, the discourse of the art world often only
reaches a rather spurious, superficial analysis of a work, or an audience, or the interaction between
them. To be presented then with the possibility of thinking about something like Pause, and
confronting with other models what I guess to be Western driven notions of speed and excess,
appears very stimulating. It could even be that a term like Pause, marking perhaps a simple desire to
switch the sensory receiver off for a period, might come to be interpreted as a potentially radical
abnegation of existing capitalist values of consumption and innovation. To investigate the subject in
South Korea, a country founded in defence of liberal freedoms, makes the challenge and interest
doubly profound.

Yet, of course, this possibility of local difference (and ways in which it might be
acknowledged) has to be balanced with an equally sharp understanding of the global tendency to
sameness. Being in Korea is both strange and familiar, both known and unknown, at the same time.
Part of this sameness is, I hope, a reflection of our fundamental and common humanity but part is
also a product of the globalising force of capitalism and the way it intervenes, permits, resists and
creates different kinds of culture and cultural products. Capitalism is used in so many senses today
(free enterprise, industrial mode of production or, more recently, as world economy) that, to
quote Manuel de Landa, it would seem the only solution is to replace this tired word with a
neologism, perhaps the one (Fernaud) Braudel suggested, antimarkets, and to use it exclusively to

18

refer to a certain segment of the population of commercial and industrial institutions. The
significance of Braudel and de Landa is their separation of the trading aspect of capitalism from its
monopoly antimarket variant and with it the possibility to rescue what is termed low level
exchange from antimarkets abusive behaviour as a power tool in democratic polities. The allowance
for low-level capitalism might be politically dangerous if we want to try to rethink our economic
relations, but crucially what it introduce is variegation into the existing structure of capitalism and
how it functions for or against people. By creating differences within what might be read as an
economy of the same, it allows for yet other varieties or something we might term enclosures
within an existing model. These enclosures could then provide possibilities to think things otherwise,
something that our social reality and human history still requires of us. To be specific, art making in
its propositional mode could set the fire for notions of change or shift to take place within the
existing antimarket capitalist structure. These changes would not be radical impositions from outwith
capitalism, but little disturbances from within. Modest proposals, if you will, that might allow all of
us to imagine new directions while remaining firmly within the capitalist paradigm. This is perhaps
no more than an acknowledgement of what Susan Hiller has called social facts, things that are
known but have not been placed within contemporary systems of economic or social exchange. For
her it is parapsychology and close encounters with extra-terrestrials, for others it may be
relationships that are motivated not just by the desire to make profit but also to make friends or even
culture. And, to return to the subject of the Gwangju Biennale, it might be through this initial
invitation to pause that these facts suddenly become intriguingly visible.

The reason we have even to talk in these terms is, of course, a consequence of the history of
the last ten, maybe thirty years. The slow decline and rapid fall of real existing alternatives to the
free market exchange of goods and services, voter democracy and share owning capitalism is well
known. The ubiquity of the broad capitalist metaphor clearly extends deep into the heart of our
culture - I would argue to the exclusion of any other. It is also partly a consequence of an older
decline in competing models to understand and motivate behaviour. Religious or military aspirations
that previously held the merchant model of trade in check have largely been marginalized or
understandably discredited. Thus, though we might agree conceptually that the world is more
complex than a balance sheet, it is difficult to put this knowledge into appropriate action in terms of
meaningful protest. (Thus we have the wonderfully evocative work by a 28 year old Swedish artist
Johanna Billing called Project for a Revolution depicting precisely the urge and emptiness of many
contemporary gestures of protest.)

19

The politics of antimarkets is another issue we need to try to unravel. Capitalism, and
especially its antimarket form, has associated itself so closely with liberal democracy and, in what
can only be described as a brilliant strategy, even linked its sales devices (focus groups, marketing
survey and certain types of advertising) with the idea of democratic consent and ethical probity (if
enough people buy it, it must be popular and good). Now, unarguably the concept of democracy
predates antimarket capitalism by thousands of years, yet, in current circumstances it seems
impossible to retrieve a model of liberal democracy independent of antimarkets. The difficulty with
liberal democracy is that, rather like socialism, it has to be read not in its idealised form of toleration
and freedom but in its real existing variety. In those latter terms, it is liberal democracy-capitalism,
or, perhaps, democratic anti-market liberalism (DAML) that describes the field on which we are all
playing, whether we choose to or not.

If this seems pessimistic, I believe that, on the contrary it offers a huge opportunity, even
responsibility, to cultural producers and the generators of questions in all guises. It might seem
absurd to suggest that the marginal area of what we term visual culture could actually be the
models to which we might look for these modest proposals of change. The traditions of visual art
are less significant to this argument than embracing the way art and artists have functioned over the
last forty years. This historical narrative could be read in terms of conceptualisms rejection of the
market, moving through a period of critical appreciation of capitalism in the consumer critique of the
eighties, and then in the development of a direct relationship to the market and marketing of images
in the nineties. What might now distinguish this current period could be defined as a play with the
mechanisms of the antimarkets themselves no longer working only in a metaphoric or
representational way, but with models that are actually descriptive in some way of the systems they
seek to critique. This might indeed be part of the Pause we are seeking. Not in a romantic or escapist
way, but in terms of these modest proposals that take time, cannot be instantly seen and consumed
and that demand a kind of human pace of mind and body that the technology of the net or the
consumer brand seeks to disregard.

Such an approach might be described as one of engaged autonomy. This term would define
the concept of using the notional freedom that antimarkets allow to its culture to raise questions
about the social and economic order as a whole. The possibilities are significantly enhanced because
culture is to some extent defined as an other to commercial imperatives. In some measure, this
concern to protect the otherness of culture must explain the wailing and gnashing of teeth that often
accompanies contemporary art works that seem to deliberately reject their own independence or
20

status as objects of contemplation. However, rather than simply provoking this now predictable
reaction, work that would qualify as engaged autonomous uses this space provided by antimarket
capitalism to open an interrogation of economic and social value, exploiting its externally defined
otherness to examine the assumptions of DAML society. At a second level, the concept of engaged
autonomy provides support for the idea of a type of critique that is not distanced or caught in the
abstractions of theory but pragmatic and project based. There might be cause here to think about the
idea of the pause as a stretching of the timescale and involvement of an art project, suggesting ways
in which the impact is felt not at the moment of perception but through longer term contacts or
developing involvement. The exciting question here is how these modest proposals might be put to
the test in the situation of the now familiar global biennale.

Id like to suggest just a few. The increasing tendency towards group working and attempts
to find some engaged but autonomous ground separate from the patronage of institutions is one that
would need to find reflection. The group as a self-organisation, semi-open system of organisation for
cultural production seems to me a very valuable modest proposal for our current situation. It is
probably insufficient simply to invite such groups to present themselves within a biennale context.
Some curatorial construction is required. This might mean bringing together a very limited number
of groups to discuss and present their ideas to each other beforehand. It would also need to allow free
rein to the fundamental idea of self-organisation that is at the heart of such initiatives. This could
only be done through time spent together and working on like-minded questions from different
perspectives. The situation of DAML might provide the topic or field out of which responses are
made. What are the peculiar varieties of capitalism in your corner of the globe? How can they be
portrayed, questioned or provoked? Can they be represented within the limits of an exhibition
model? How can they be placed into a discursive situation for others? These are questions that might
find different but resonant answers from various existing artists groups, causing them to pause in
their collective practice, be challenged, upset or stimulated. As well, it would form a valuable
complement to works which seek a pause in the viewer as an initial requirement to further inquiry.

Id also like to imagine the notion of Pause as connected to a slower, longer term
trajectory of cause and effect, or stopping as a prelude to assessing a situation and allowing
for a possible change of direction. This would permit the idea, for instance, of contemplation
or duration to enter into the debate without being diverted into the cul-de-sac of romanticism
and utopian escapism. Such ideas could coexist with more rigorously social or interventive
works, providing both ask of the audience that our sense of time and space are shifted out of
21

the usual speed of flow and movement. Further, Pause might apply even more appropriately
to the act of conversation, the errs and umms of a spoken voice, rather than the confidence
of a written text. To create the ground for privileging conversation over communication, of
listening alongside speaking and of the expression of as yet not-fully-articulated ideas within
small groups but also within the territory of an international biennale is a task worth
attempting. It is within the paradigm of antimarket capitalism that I have tried to outline here
that the modest proposal of Pause and the invitation to converse might offer a surprising
radicalism.

22

Two into one wont go?

A text written for an exhibition called Dusk to Dust curated by Pontus Kyander for
Charlottenborg, Copenhagen. It was written in response to the title rather than the exhibition
and provides another historical frame, reaching as far back to the eight century, for some
thoughts on the traditions that contemporary art still calls upon.
the task of art is to represent the idea to direct perception in sensuous shape, and
not in the form of thought or pure spirituality as such, seeing also

that this work of

representation has its value and dignity in the correspondence and the unity of the two sides,
i.e., of the Idea and its plastic embodiment. This evolution within the art spirit has again two
sides in its own nature. In the first place, the development itself is a spiritual and universal
one, and, in the second place, this universal development of art is obliged to provide itself
with external existent and sensuous form, and the definite modes of the sensuous art existence
are themselves a totality of necessary distinctions in the realm of art. ... It is true, indeed, that
the necessary kinds of artistic representation are on the one hand qua spiritual of a very
general nature, and not restricted to any one material; while sensuous existence contains
manifold varieties of matter. But as this latter, like the mind, has the Idea potentially for its
inner soul, it follows from this that particular sensuous materials have a close affinity and
secret accord with the spiritual distinctions and types of art presentation.8

Hegels complex and wordy justification of romantic art is perhaps an unusual point of
entry into a contemporary art exhibition. The German philosopher saw art as a step on the
road towards reason and the rational understanding of life through philosophy. Yet his
description of the problems of the relationship between idea and its external, sensuous
form has surprising relevance to contemporary art and exhibition making. If we think about
the recent history of art we see a consistent oscillation between the demand to present the idea
and its embodiment in objects. This tension is resolved for Hegel by the fusion of Idea in
perfect shape, but for contemporary art this synthesis is fraught with difficulty, either because
of the controlling influence of the art market or through an attachment to primary selfexpression. What we find in Hegel in 1835 is a description of a moment of clarity in the
shadowy, (maybe dusty) battle between Idea and Shape that defines an ongoing discourse
between art and its relationship to viewers, functionality and the problematic idea of

ex: G W F Hegel, Lectures on Fine Art, 1829-30, http://www.gwfhegel.org

23

spirituality.

I turned to Hegel in this essay partly in response to the title itself - From Dust to Dusk.
The expression can be read as a classic Hegelian dialectic, a form rather underused today. The
title heralds both death in the closeness to the phrase Dust to Dust and, the daylight hours in
Dawn to Dusk. These familiar locutions hover at the edge of our hearing when the title is
pronounced, marking light and dark as well as spirit and flesh. From Dust to Dusk also
suggests movement - from a state of matter to a time of day, from a thing to a moment and
from the tangible to the experiential. Yet they share more than mere assonance. They conjure
up unspecific, indeterminate states between dark and light or solid and gas in which things
and times are in motion. Yet to imagine a classic Hegelian synthesis of the two is perhaps
rather fanciful. The experience of the exhibition itself, where differences in dimension, scale
and materiality can be elided, might provide a possibility. Alternatively, we can turn to a later
economic thinker to consider how dust and dusk might be related.

The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of

production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of
society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary,
the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionizing of
production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and
agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast frozen relations,
with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all newformed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that
is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real condition
of life and his relations with his kind.9

All that is solid melts into air has become the new catchphrase of the Communist
Manifesto, at least since workers of the world unite went out of fashion. The melting,
fleeting, profaned and disturbed world described by Marx seems to predict contemporary
globalization. For Dust to really turn to Dusk, we need such category overthrowing
understandings of how the world works and what place art can find in it today.

ex Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, Viking Penguin, 2002

24

Where Marx and Hegel irretrievably divide is over the importance of the religious and
the spiritual. Hegel hangs onto the concept of the Absolute meaning God or Spirit alongside
his insistence on reason a consistency that maybe allows him to wonder more profoundly
about the relationship between ideas, things and ritual, the stuff of art ancient and modern.
Hegel sought to reduce the role of things as intercessors between God and the individual. He
wanted to remove superstition and pagan survivals from church ceremony, partly to break
with mediaeval religiosity. Yet, he also wants to retain a place for art and materiality and
therefore he creates the concept of the idea and its separation from the object itself.

It is in response to Hegels thinking and its attempt at a very different time to achieve
a synthesis of Idea and Object that parallels backwards and forwards in time emerge. In
particular, certain ritualistic elements of the medieval Christian church and our current
relationship to contemporary art come to mind. The pre-Reformation church not only came to
terms with things but also invested them with great authority. Particularly in response to the
popular ceremonies of paganism, the church substituted old order idolatry with ceremonies
associated with the physical remains of holy men. These remains were to be venerated
(doulia) as opposed to the worship (latria) reserved only for God, but this fine distinction
is unlikely to have registered with many new converts. The perfect description of the
conversion process comes from the first Roman mission to England and Pope Gregory the
Greats letter to the new Abbot Mellitus:

Therefore, when by God's help you reach our most reverend brother, Bishop
Augustine, we wish you to inform him that we have been giving careful thought to the affairs
of the English, and have come to the conclusion that the temples of the idols among that
people should on no account be destroyed. The idols are to be destroyed, but the temples
themselves are to be aspersed with holy water, altars set up in them, and relics deposited
there. For if these temples are well-built, they must be purified from the worship of demons
and dedicated to the service of the true God. In this way, we hope that the people, seeing that
their temples are not destroyed, may abandon their error and, flocking more readily to their
accustomed resorts, may come to know and adore the true God. And since they have a custom
of sacrificing many oxen to demons, let some other solemnity be substituted in its place, such
as a day of Dedication or the Festivals of the holy martyrs whose relics are enshrined there.
On such occasions they might well construct shelters of boughs for themselves around the
churches that were once temples, and celebrate the solemnity with devout feasting. They are
25

no longer to sacrifice beasts to the Devil, but they may kill them for food to the praise of God,
and give thanks to the Giver of all gifts for the plenty they enjoy. If the people are allowed
some worldly pleasures in this way, they will more readily come to desire the joys of the
spirit. For it is certainly impossible to eradicate all errors from obstinate minds at one stroke,
and whoever wished to climb to a mountain top climbs gradually step by step, and not in one
leap.10

Such pragmatic realism is, of course, one reason for Christianitys early success, but
for us the more significant aspect of Gregorys approach is in its experimental approach. He
asks his representatives to test out new strategies on the English population; to see if by
careful direction they can gradually come to love God in the prescribed manner rather than in
the form of a Damascene conversion. The pontiff acknowledges the strangeness of Christian
belief to the pagan outlook and accepts that incentives are required to shift obstinate minds.
He does so by incorporation of familiar spaces and forms of ritual twisted io conform to the
minimum requirements of the new belief. Such an approach accurately describes, at least for
me, the effect of coming to terms with a new work of art that step by step unfolding of
personal significance towards something called understanding. Indeed, the methodology
might also be true for the artists themselves, as they struggle with the material at hand or the
actual space of the institution to which they are invited.

More prosaically, Gregorys acceptance of the value of relics and sites of pagan
worship are closely akin to our modern notions of cultural tourism and the auratic quality of
the art object and, by extension, the art space. Here might be partly what the From Dust to
Dusk exhibition is pursuing - the auratic quality that emanates out from the physical limits of
a work into the space and time around it. This auratic quality of art is challenged by mass
reproduction, as Walter Benjamin famously noted, in which familiarity reduces the image to
kitsch. But in case of the installation, and of the space of the art institution itself, this
phenomenon is not observable in the same way., The abiding formalism of art in relation to
space, architecture and the presence of the viewer, the unending motor of cultural tourism to
the actual spot where something happened, even the vitality of large scale art exhibitions, all
point to the aura weaving its spell over our contemporary consciousness.

10

ex Bede, History of the English Church and People, Book 2, Chapter 3

26

In many ways, the legacy of conceptualism is one of ridiculing the idea of the aura
as much as the autonomy of art. Lawrence Weiners dictum that the work of art may or may
not be made sums up the attitude of a 1970s generation that did not simply want to produce
objects for a market and no longer had a spiritual framework within which objects could be
greater than their commercial value. It is sufficient that the idea itself transports the work
from artist to viewer. Curiously, we find something similar in the words of our first speaker,
Hegel. When seeking to replace the holiness of external objects he calls for "... a new
mythology, but this mythology must be in the service of the Ideas, must be a mythology of
reason."11. Since 1970s conceptualism, the history of art can be understood as one of rejection
or acceptance of some of the basic tenets set out by Weiner and Sol Le Witt. We can see
rejection in the 1980s return to painting and the artist as genius/wildman and then a 1990s
recapitulation of much conceptualism but through the frame of the art market.

What begins to emerge in our contemporary situation is something slightly different,

or at least twisted from the art of the 1980s and 1990s. Politics has certainly returned to centre
stage, at least as strongly as painting, but could we start to think, in Hegelian terms again,
about a synthesis of previously exclusive categories. Can we imagine a contemporary art that
tries to reinvest an atheist notion of the spiritual into the ideas of conceptualism? It remains a
tricky task but one given some credibility by Hegels great contemporary commentator
Jacques Derrida. His injunction to find a saintly postmodern ethics in the moment of endless
waiting illuminates the boredom, the slowness and the thoughtfulness that surrounds much
western art of the early 2000s. Gone is the spectacle of the Sensation generation and in its
place comes subtler, more intellectual, yet nevertheless sensual ways of making art. From
Dusk to Dust seems likely to touch on these themes. Its success will be if it draws out both the
marginalia of everyday life and the physicality of the exhibition experience in ways that make
the visitors think about their spiritual lives without the requirements of dogma. It is an
exhibition to look forward to then, one that might take us step by step from dust to dusk,
solid to air, thing to idea and back again.

11

Hegel, System-Program, 87-88, http://www.gwfhegel.org

27

In the belly of the monster

A text written for Shifting Map, a book published by the Rijksacademie to discuss artist run
initiatives and particularly their own Rijksacademie International Network (RAIN) of spaces
established by former participants.
The globalisation that was ushered in by the collapse of real existing socialism has
been with us for over 10 years now. Yet it still seems that most of us are left breathlessly
trying to catch up with the juggernaut of free market expansion. Exactly what is it that is
going on, we ask ourselves? We can see some of the results, understand the attractions and
know that the ground rules of the world order are in rapid flux. But try to turn those
impressions into meaningful discourse and conversation and too often we seem to fall back on
clichs like crisis, intolerable limits, or just a shrug of the shoulders and a theres nothing
we can do. 12

The lack of nuanced responses to globalisation has deep roots, stretching into the
whole cultural and technological web that keeps us both informed and passive. It touches on
the way the media serves up our information, the way we relate to each other in a deterritorialised world and the blinding desires that global consumerism both generates and
satisfies. Confused in the thrilling yet numbing embrace of ultra-fast capitalism and seeking
some critical reflection, we sometimes resort to forms of oppositional fundamentalism. For
me, the dilemma was made clear in a fascinating eight-day meeting of artist initiatives and
independent cultural groups organised under the title Community and Art as part of the
fourth Gwangju Biennale in 2002.13 As the initiator of the meeting, I had hoped that through
the open-ended possibility of social exchange, some new understanding would emerge.
12

As Giorgio Agamben has said of the Italian media: One of the not-so-secret laws of the
spectacular-democratic society in which we live wills it that, whenever power is seriously in crisis, the
media establishment apparently dissociates itself from the regime of which it is an integral part so as
to govern and direct the general discontent lest it turn itself into revolution. it suffices to anticipate
not only facts but also citizens sentiments by giving them expression on the front page of
newspapers before they turn into gesture and discourse, and hence circulate and grow through daily
conversations and exchanges of opinion. Ex Giorgio Agamben, Means without End Notes on
Politics, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000, p125
13
The meeting was held at Pool Art Space and Yongeun Museum in Seoul and was organised by
Forum A as part of the Gwangju Biennale 2002. The following artist groups and independent
initiatives attended: Cemeti Art House, Yogyakarta; Flying City Urbanism Group, Seoul; Foksal
Gallery Foundation, Warsaw; Hwanghak-Dong Project, Seoul; Plastique Kinetic Worms, Singapore;
Project 304, Bangkok; ; Protoacademy, Edinburgh; Seoul Arcade Project, Seoul; Superflex,
Copenhagen; University Bangsar Utama, Kuala Lumpur. The meeting is documented in a Gwangju
Biennale/Forum A publication and at http://www.foruma.co.kr/workshop.

28

Instead we got to an impasse, albeit a constructive one.

The moment someone uttered the words Globalisation is evil an alarm bell sounded
in every one of us. We were sitting around quite late in the evening and, as the conversation
became more heated, we broke down into our language groups. The Koreans spoke amongst
themselves before translating a summary, the English speakers waited or switched from the
dominant tongue to Danish, Bahassa, Polish and back. People were arguing about who was
more third world, more oppressed, more dominated by unelected governments or by the
international corporations that globalisation has brought to low wage economies. The idea
that an economic process could be irredeemably bad had been hovering on the edges of the
discourse but to have it stated so clearly was a breath taker. If globalisation really was evil
then how on earth could we all be sitting here discussing it? If nothing else, the tangle of
connected developments in economic, social, political and cultural terms that we call
globalisation was responsible for this meeting taking place at all. We were its benefactors as
least as much as its victims, werent we?

That incident in a gathering of cultural groups neatly sums up the bind that anyone
who seeks to move away from fundamentalist descriptions of culture and its identification
with a nation or community has to face; namely, how to attack the monster that is
globalisation while still being dependent on its possibilities. There is no easy way out of this,
no ideological trick that can free us from a constant negotiation with and celebration of the
very mechanisms we would like to see transformed. It is wrong to say that these mechanisms
are evil per se. Instead, we can do nothing but consider each occasion of their application,
determine who loses and who gains, why and in what way - and then respond. In short, we
have to exchange global experiences on the micro-level and concern ourselves with microactions in relation to them, unless we want to turn back to the cosy protection of ideologies of
left or right that tell us who we are and what to think.

Group artistic projects like those present in Korea or organised through the
Rijksakademie International Network (RAIN) step into this messy zone of locality interpreted
by and within global conditions. The latter is a network of independent cultural initiatives set
up by former students of the Rijksakademie Amsterdam that has burgeoned in the last years.
The Rijksakademie as a whole is an extraordinary laboratory for observing the effects of
economic and cultural globalisation. From an almost standing start 10 years ago, the Rijks
29

leads the way as a genuinely international programme for artists. Now drawing applications
and participants from across the globe, the most recent intake includes only one European
amongst its non-Dutch quota. This level of global mixing is ceasing to be exotic. At the
Rijksakademie, and I would hope in many other places, it has become a normalised cultural
trend that permits an active process of what Ulrich Beck amongst others has termed
cosmopolitanisation or the active promotion of cosmopolitanism.14

This term cosmopolitanism carries many dangerous connotations. It might suggest a

post-modern relativism in which all values are equal provided you have access to global
information. It might equally indicate an internationally minded elite whose cultural network
provides a global judgement circuit. These are real dangers but the cosmopolitanisation from
below that can be seen to be operating at the Rijksakademie function in an ethical way,
mindful of difference, reflexive yet concerned with real exchange and sharing opportunity. To
stick with the initial term, the required attitude of cosmopolitanism has been described in
Anglo-American terms as one that: would not insist that all values are equivalent, but would
emphasise the responsibility that individuals and groups have for the ideas that they hold and
the pratices in which they engage. The cosmopolitan is not someone who renounces
commitments in the manner of, say, the dilettante but someone who is able to articulate
the nature of those commitments, and assess their implications for those whose values are
different.15 While we should remain watchful of the possibility that the cosmopolitan human
could be a clever translation of imperialism with a human face, it is one of the few
descriptive tools we have to describe a condition of cultural exchange distinct from either
nation-state bi-lateralism or corporate globalisation.

If we can accept with hesitation the term cosmopolitanism, especially if understood in

the plural, we should still have doubts about the mechanism of its coming-into-being through
independent artists initiatives and groups. There have been many sociological studies related
to group dynamic but, in short, groups have a habit over time of falling into certain patterns.
One trap is that in order to keep cohesion they identify and vilify external enemies, another is
the elevation of certain texts or positions to the level of unimpeachable truths. If
cosmopolitanism(s) at its best are about genuine openness and exchange then groups can be
14

See Ulrich Beck World Risk Society. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999.
Anthony Giddens, Beyond Left and Right, Cambridge: Polity Press, p130. I am very dubious of the
claims of the third way political philosophers, but I believe it is possible to retrieve
cosmopolitanism from their affirmative, pro-western stance.
15

30

about the opposite. Yet all social studies also acknowledge that groups are fundamental to
society. They make action and reaction possible in ways that the individual would be
powerless to do.

Within the art world, the group dynamic is constantly facing these challenges, just as
the threat and promise of globalisation is something artists from outside the developed
countries are consistently forced to deal with. Non-western art groups certainly have more to
lose and more to overcome whenever they enter into a dialogue with the west but the
alternative isolation is even more debilitating. Optimistically, we can see that the dialogue is
paying dividends for both sides of the economic development divide, especially if art can
think in terms of different benchmarks to commerce. Within RAIN, it appears that it is not
only a process of the included learning from the excluded but, in the kind of group exchanges
that have been developing in Buenos Aires, Jakarta, Mumbai, Durban or Bamako, the ideal of
genuine cosmopolitan collective exchange is being played out. By doing so, certain parts of
the art world might be the spaces in society where propositions for a global model of cultural
and social behaviour is being tested, If true, it has many potential repercussions.

To propose that these small-scale, local and independent cultural initiatives are a part
of the way forward within and around globalisation might seem absurd, or at least privileging
an activity that is always anyway trying to conform to the system, but that is (arguably) its
very condition of possibility. All the initiatives I have come across within the framework of
RAIN, and most outside, have sought ways to question current conditions avoiding the overt
oppositional critique of the anti-globalist protestors and refusing to rely solely on the power
of individual self-expression in the tradition of classical art. Instead, their projects are
interested in working through discussions, dialogue and a tangible play with the very
mechanisms of globalisation that allow them an inferior seat at the table in the first place. The
groups are engaged with their locality and with individual social actors within them, and in
doing so naturally propose changes in social and economic relations through art. This
intimacy with a particular environment acts as an antidote to the utopian tendency in art
today. Utopias are dangerous in many ways, not only if they are made real but even as a
proposal, when they seem too often to lead to a kind of lazy disinvestment in the existing
situation. Contrarily, there is always a danger of romanticising the local in which only
indigenous actors can act with legitimacy in the immediate environment. This tendency needs
to be tempered by a global exchange between different localities that acknowledges pluralism
31

and promotes reflexive criticism. This is precisely what a network such as RAIN provides
which can, at best, becomes a way of learning from each others experiences wherever they
originate, while consciously modifying that knowledge for local conditions.

As a result, the system of artistic production starts to have the potential to become
genuinely cosmopolitan in its best senses. This is in the face of a world order without
cosmopolitan institutions or the means to promote a cosmopolitan sense of self through
traditional political means. Globalisation is largely failing to shift the structural pressures on
individuals to conform to the nation state system and national cultural identity, while
managing economic flows in its own interests. We only have to look at the tenacity of often
short-lived nation states to cling onto power and the formation of personal identity, whether in
Europe, Asia or Africa, to see how far we are from an ideal democratic globalisation. Under
these circumstances, perhaps it is not so absurd to imagine (and therefore partly create) the
cultural sphere as the site for open, permissive and imaginative global experimentation. Of
course, these independent initiatives are often extremely fragile, being themselves dependent
on national funding. Yet despite this, through their focus on both locality and a global
network, and without privileging one over the other, they can act as an irritant to smooth
corporate globalisation without the reactionary reflex that we saw during that gathering in
Korea. These spaces are always already compromised and part of the process of evil
globalisation, but that compromised position is precisely their advantage.

32

Tools and Manifestos

The first artist text is also something of a transitional note, a personal response to the artist
group Superflex, with whom I have always felt a close kinship.
I guess the worst thing I can say is that Im writing this on the 1st May International
Workers Day. I should be out marching or something -but for what and with whom?

I didnt realise it before, but Mayday was officially declared a celebration as early as
1889 and has grown ever since as an international holiday. All that nineteenth century
creativity somehow puts the following hundred years to shame. What was the big idea in the
1900s? Science and Technology? Free Markets? Pragmatism? Mass Murder?

Anyway, in England, the country of my birth, they have a typical compromise for
Mayday where the holiday actually falls on the Monday nearest to the 1st May, so most people
just treat it as a day off. If they want to march they have to take a days leave from work, on
the holiday itself there are no rallies, no testing of the powers of the state, no politics, just
more consumption opportunities. If the 1st May could be seen as one of Superflexs tool
proposals (lets make a holiday for revolutionaries and see what happens) then the Brits
already know how to disarm it. It goes back to Edmund Burke I think and the conservative
reaction to 1789. It wasnt always true, remember Oliver Cromwell, but it is now and seems
assured of staying that way.

So, forget Britain, and see what tools could do somewhere less confident that it has all
the answers. At least, thats what I said to myself 18 months ago when I moved to
Denmark/Sweden (Malmhagen as someone said recently). Of course, Superflex were one of
the main attractions to the area. I could work with them, as I am, and maybe use their idea of
tools to think through some ideas for the art institution itself.

Tools in their terms seem to me to be an idea about underlying structures - about

how things can be different if you do something else with the engineering of a situation and
then stand back to watch the results. Applied to an art hall, the approach has to be equally
deep rooted in terms of what and how things are managed. It means changing the purpose of
spaces in order to investigate again their possibility. In the Rooseum in Malm we have a

33

building, a little money, a provincial city and a reasonably dynamic region. To adopt (and
adapt) the Superflex methodology, we have to ask what we can do with these raw ingredients
- though it can start to sound too much like cooking now.

How can we have a real and relevant role in this place and with the people here?
How can we reasonably impose art culture or expect people to seize the opportunity we try to
provide? How can we be friendly while still staying difficult - because difficulty in the end
cannot be avoided, can it? How can we turn the Rooseum from a place with set expectations
and limited possibilities into a tool for a community be that local, regional, artistic or
whatever? I dont want to answer that question here its for another time and place but
simply to point out how the approach (philosophy) of tools can be put to use - and not only
the actual ones Superflex themselves provide. At the least, thinking about tools in this way,
tells us that we can certainly no longer be guardians of a fixed cultural legacy, nor confident
arbiters of taste, at least not in any way other than as capricious gatekeepers of palaces for
calm continuity.

What thinking about these questions also provokes is a need to have some polar
opposites, or dialectics, with which to juggle. For me, two quotes from an artist and a
philosopher, provide one set of columns between which things can be constructed. Vito
Acconci in 1980 spoke about the gallery as a place where a community could be called to
order, called to a particular purpose Twenty years later, in a discussion on hospitality,
Jacques Derrida seems to have figured out the needs of the new century almost by instinct. He
talks about the need to simply say yes: Let us say, yes to who or what turns up, before any
determination, before any anticipation, before any identification, whether or not it has to do
with a foreigner, an immigrant, an invited guest, or an unexpected visitor, whether or not the
new arrival is the citizen of another country, a human, animal, or divine creature, a living or
dead thing, male or female. This call seems more urgent than ever in the light of recent
political events in Europe. How can we start to put a value simply on saying yes, on
welcoming and being welcomed, on hospitality for its own sake? Only, it seems, by speaking
clearly of its significance in our lives, of the pleasure of providing for others that global
capitalism can only phrase in terms of charity. If we can make places in the world where the
diversity of a city or a community is a key to its richness, where identity is based on
cosmopolitanisation rather than ethnic essentialism, then we can maybe celebrate globalism

34

rather than oppose it as a tool of profit-driven expansion. And saying yes to the stranger, even
in an art institution, could be its beginning.

Again in relation to Superflex, I have used another term to describe what they and a
few other artists seem to be doing. It also has some application in relation to institutions.
Engaged autonomy seems to me to provide a way of on the one hand avoiding the
Greenbergian reductivism that is, at least in todays depoliticised situation, more and more of
a conservative rallying cry; while, on the other, giving artists a certain (privileged) space to do
their own thing. What it can mean is best described in terms of specific artistic autonomies,
such as the economic autonomy granted by state funding of research or culture combined with
a low level integration of market opportunities. The Supergas project in which shares are sold
whilst the research is sponsored through both the art system and independent aid agencies is a
perfect example. Other engaged autonomies function is similar ambivalent spaces that are,
as with the tools mostly identifiable at a structural level. For instance, it may exist where
institutional critique crosses with an individualist, ironic and perhaps humorous detachment,
or where the production of the praxis of life in the art institution confronts sociological or
anthropological research (look at the way people behave in an art bar). This different forms of
engaged autonomy provide the means by which the slippery enclosure that is contemporary
art can have some purchase on the world without falling into crassness or affirmation of the
status quo, something that is a constant danger once market mechanisms are adopted or artlife barriers are crossed. In terms of institutions themselves, engaged autonomy provides
exactly that combination of real local effectiveness with a leftover modernist aspiration to
utopian escapism without which the sites of art can also descend into a related kind of
affirmative populism. Utopia of course should remain a problematic term, not least because it
can provide a vain intellectual with the means to justify the dullest kind of withering
cynicism. Yet its purchase on the imagination makes it hard to reject out of hand and the
genuine aspirational desire for such a thing has been behind most of the last centurys greatest
artworks, as well as its worst political tragedies.

Perhaps the most appropriate role for utopia today is as a ghost or a spectre. It cannot
be a coincidence that Marx in the opening lines of the Communist Manifesto already refers to
the communism as a spectre haunting Europe, an already dead idea revived for a new age.
Maybe the ghost can gain some weight and substance again today. Sitting in an office in
Malm, a city that, as William Burroughs noted, is built around a graveyard at its absolute
35

centre, I wonder how those polarities of local and international, relevance and experiment,
nihilism and possibility might be negotiated now. And I see in Superflex and their tools some
ways to move between these rocks and hard places. They can help us to move beyond the
legacy of modernism, to get behind the institutional surface not as a form of negative critique
but as a way of investigating other possibilities of what such places might become. I
remember the cry of the old Socialist Workers party Neither Moscow nor Washington but
International Socialism. Well, I dont have the end yet but Neither Utopia nor
Affirmation seems a good start today.

36

Beyond Institutional Critique: Modest Proposals Made in the

Spirit of 'Necessity is the Mother of Invention'

A recent text for a comprehensive catalogue on Lisbet Bik and Jos van der Pol that develops
the idea of modest proposals in terms of the work of one artist group.
The condition of art in the first years of the 21st century seems at once both robust and
exhausted. The market plays an overwhelming role in maintaining that robustness. A babble
of expectant chatter about the next major figure to spring fully formed from art school or an
as yet undiscovered location keeps the world of collectors on their toes. Quantities of money
are exchanged and in many ways artists and the art world have rarely had it so good. The
market for contemporary art has become sustainable by embedding itself sufficiently into
regular patterns of high-level consumption. And all this is fine and well. There is no reason to
criticize such manoeuvrings in themselves. They serve to give the means to artists with which
they can survive, think and produce.

So why feel any discomfort at all?

If only because when the commercial system works best, it is as a support to a critical
culture rather than the central rationale for art's creation that it is today. If art becomes
adjusted to the conditions of any other product in an entirely monetarized exchange system
then we all lose. In general, the art that is defined and defended by the market tends to have a
conservative feel. The aura of unique, singular objects that conjure a personal statement about
one individual's relationship to the world hangs heavy at the art fairs. Perhaps inevitably,
much commercial art often feels like variations on ideas that have already been played out
during high modernism. Once context, site and politics are eliminated or flattened, it is
difficult for work to stand out purely in terms of aesthetic originality. But how many
variations on a theme can the market take? If you are an art lover who looks for the
transformative and the surplus value in art, then will you find enough newness in this system
to keep coming back for more? In terms of art's role as a critical tool for rethinking, the
commercial art system appears to be on a rather slippery slope. It's in danger of crossing the
threshold of diminishing returns, a sliding scale of relative experimentation and advance that
breeds a tiredness in the face of over repetition at ever inflated scale and cost. This is where
the risk of ennui comes in.

37

It's possible, of course, that these fears are unwarranted. That the notion of an art that
helps with our (collective) rethinking of the world is itself misplaced. But if that is true now,
then art will have betrayed not only its own modernist past but also its very possibility in
today's society. It will survive, as a product, but the loss would be profound.

Instead, I want to hope that the system of selling will be able to transform itself and
rediscover risk, passion, even failure again. It might even be happening as I write. Yet I doubt
that it can grow from within the commercial network itself. It has to look elsewhere, not
outside the system as such but to parallel networks and ways of engaging with art. To the
spaces and situations in which artists like Bik Van der Pol (perhaps very like BVdP) work and
show. In fact, to turn to the slightly derided notion of the public sphere as a distinct location
of common interests and different forms of ownership. If it indeed does so, the commercial
system will have to admit dependence on the notions of publicness and common space that
may change the relationship between private and public for the better.

One of the many consequences of the collapse of socialism as a viable alternative to

capitalist economic management has been the growth of distrust in public structures in
general. Manipulated by the consumer driven and individually focused media, European
societies have lost their confidence in concepts like solidarity and collective interest in favour
of private solutions to common problems. For art, and especially for its institutions, this
presents a significant challenge. Art museums were established as central spaces within the
public sphere. At that time, the late 18th century, the bourgeois public sphere was still under
construction. The Louvre and its many successors were both spaces to show off the booty of
the bourgeois revolutions and sites in which the idea of public interest, public opinion and
collective belonging could be generated. Not only did the museum recognize and authorize
the bourgeoisie to be bourgeois but it also created its membership and permitted access to
individuals who could demonstrate the correct codes of behaviour. All museums today
necessarily carry this legacy with them, as one of a number of historical 'foundation myths'
which legitimize public spending on art. Consequently, any substantial diminution of trust in
the public sphere profoundly alters the museum's social role. The response of the most
successful museums has been to adopt the strategies of the commercial corporation branding, franchise, the desire for monopoly D while paying lip service to their public
responsibilities. It is hard to blame them, but equally it is possible that many will exhaust
38

themselves in the process. In due course, a new equilibrium for museums is probably bound
to come from out of a speculative reconstruction of a non-bourgeois public sphere fitted to
today's society. Such reconstruction cannot be done on anything other than the micro-scale of
specific people and identifiable communities, in line with the individualizing tendencies of
the general consumer culture.

To do so will require artists and institutions to move beyond the forms of institutional
critique developed in the 1980s and to collaborate in the name of a larger potential. On both
sides, there is a responsibility to avoid indulging in narrow forms of aesthetic essentialism
(the return to painting etc) or unconstructive critique. The hope is that through micro-scale
experiments, a new form of 'publicness' can be generated as a tool for the further investigation
of collective action on a larger scale.

I think that is a hope that Bik Van der Pol share to some extent. At least, the
motivation for their extensive projects appears to originate in an idealistic view of the
possibility of art. Projects such as Married by Powers, Proposition for Reclaiming a Space,
Nomads and Residents or even Sleep with Me comment on the institutions of art while
offering models for modest changes. Their works in general have a sort of catalytic potential
in which small gestures spark off chains of reactions, at least in ways of thinking. Yet it is
often the modesty of the initial intervention that is most striking.

Modesty is a great defence in the face of hyperbole.

That hype is not just restricted to the commercial art world but also to the claims of
contemporary capitalism in general and to its social and cultural benefits in particular. Such is
the confidence of capitalism as a system today that not only does it harness art's critical
creativity to its market forces but it also seeks to restrict our imaginative potential by defining
any new proposals solely in terms of their value within the existing capitalist cultural and
financial hegemony. It is true that this attempt is not 100% successful, but it reaches far into
the art world of today and challenges artists who seek to critique the effects of this
'fundamentalist' variant of capitalism to be precise, accurate and, I would contend, modest in
their proposals. At this moment, precise, small scale and specific observations speak to us
more than generalizing documentaries. Propositions about certain clearly defined conditions
go much further into our hearts than grand theories of change. As you read elsewhere in this
39

book about individual Bik Van der Pol projects, hold this idea in mind and see how it applies
in its specifics. Personally, I find a wonderful discipline in the way that they always keep to
the modest scale in terms of their proposals while allowing space on the imaginative level for
their viewers to project what might be from what is.

I have used the term 'modest proposals' a number of times in this text and elsewhere to
speak about art projects that articulate themselves precisely in terms of this 'what might be
rather than what is'. Having played with the term for a while, its qualities are becoming
clearer to me. Modest proposals are essentially speculative in that they imagine things other
than they are now, yet those speculative gestures are intensely concrete and actual. They
avoid the clearly fantastical as well as the hermetic purity of private symbolism in order to
deal with real existing conditions and what might be necessary in order to change them. In
different senses according to varying artistic approaches, modest proposals at root address the
problem of necessity in relation to the free imagination as a prerequisite to producing work.
Indeed, the idea of new production itself is in question much of the time. Artworks often
make use of existing objects, conditions and situations and manipulate the elements into
different, more aspirational or purposeful configurations. This concern for concrete necessity
is the quality that defines the limits of the term 'modesty' in the expression, rather than the
scale of the issue concerned or the absence of grand ambition for change. In doing so, these
modest proposals exploit the bourgeois possibilities of free, transformative and singular
imaginations that art has reserved for itself for different ends since the late 18th century.

Bik Van der Pol themselves often instigate action in response to a particular and very
concrete perception of need or necessity in many different contexts and situations. As
essentially nomadic artists, their initial response to invitations seems akin to the 19th century
'reformers' who sought solutions for social problems.16 Yet often what they provide
transforms into something else at the point of its reception - a quality that comments on the
conditions or concept of 'improvement' itself. Two examples will suffice to clarify what I
mean D one from within the art context and one from outside. Sleep with Me takes an existing
Warhol work and thinks through the consequences of its presentation. It is reasonable to
suppose that six and a half hours of a slow, basically repetitive film is likely to induce
16

After the French Revolution, the idea of non-revolutionary social 'reformers took hold in the AngloAmerican world. They were often drawn from religious orders and identified their mission as improving the
basic conditions of the working classes while upholding the essential social and economic status quo. They
campaigned on issues as various and specific as prison conditions, women's clothing and slavery.

40

slumber. The obvious requirement is to provide beds for sleeping while watching. Bik Van
der Pol fulfil this necessity modestly and precisely but in doing so create a transformed
relationship for and between the film's viewers. By sleeping together as well as sleeping with
the film, the intimacies on the screen step out of celluloid reproduction and into the living
moment. The blank resistance of the film to interpretation D an extension of Warhol's own
artistic persona D is undermined. What happens then is up to us viewers to grasp, from simple
sleep to orgiastic excess. We are provided with the means to take that specific Warhol work
and play it again for our own needs and, in this case perhaps, desires. A second work, Model
City, represents a 'modest proposal created out of necessity' in a broader context than art itself.
Here the model of an existing housing project serves as a speculative tool about its own future
D a version through which it is possible to gain an overview. However, given the apparent
lack of possibilities in that polluted site, the physical presence of the clean, rational model
effectively rebukes the reality of the place. Rather than continue to ignore the abandoned site,
the scaled down reproduction becomes a challenge to the authority of the idea of a model, an
overview, a plan - as well as to the planners who control such developments.

In these terms, the model that is a scale copy of an existing reality actually becomes
propositional. It suggests other possible views of the housing project even though it is
essentially an iconic form of what already exists. It may be useful to rehearse very briefly the
difference in semantic theory between the icon and the symbol here in order to understand
how Bik Van der Pol's model functions.17 The model in question is an icon because it has a
clear visual connection to the thing for which it is a sign. This quality of recognition
distinguishes the icon from the symbol, which has a completely arbitrary connection between
itself and the thing it signifies. What Bik Van der Pol do with this work is to include both
possibilities in a single sign. The model is effective as a tool for thinking about the object it
represents because while being instantly recognizable in iconic terms and thus avoiding the
barriers to effective communication of a more symbolic language, it also adopts the arbitrary
quality of association characterized by the symbol. As a symbol, it is freed from its
representational duty to adopt a new identity as something symbolizing the condition of
planning, industrialism and their failures in general. This double status of being a symbol and
an icon at the same time is equally fascinating if applied to other works by Bik Van der Pol
17

For those familiar with these Piercean definitions of the signifier's relation to its signified, I apologize for the
paucity of my explanation. For those unfamiliar, it would be better to read about Pierce in more detail but I hope
it introduces you to the technical meanings of icon and symbol that are important for the argument I am making
here.

41

and, on another level, to the particular form of institutional critique that serves as a more
general concern behind many of their individual projects. It can teach us about institutions,
architecture and even individual art works. It is at this level that they function as tools for
thinking, both as identifiable icons in the world of representational objects and as free
symbols able to be attached to ways of understanding abstract notions such as institution or
art.

In more concrete terms, the symbol and icon combination is something close to the
possibility that I believe a museum or any serious public cultural institution should strive to
become. If we can understand the museum not only in terms of its physical presence and
architectural function but also having both an iconic and symbolic relationship to itself then
we arrive at something quite unusual in terms of how a museum might perceive itself. The
museum as a 1:1 iconic model of a museum can surpass its role in simply representing itself
and take on first the position of a self-critical version of what it is as an icon, and then become
a symbolic site to imagine precisely the renewal of the public sphere that has been lost. This is
naturally a big claim for a modest proposal but at the level of the sign, it can allow the real
existing institution to realize something of its symbolic possibility and explain its role as a
different one from that of the shopping mall or the town circus with which it too often seems
to compete.

Are Bik Van der Pol the artistic saviours of museums then? Perhaps, though I doubt it
is their intention. It is in the paradoxical nature of their work that though the projects spring
from the identification of what is necessary in a given situation, we viewers end up making
use of THEM the way we want to. Again the icon-symbol conjunction comes to mind. As a
museum director, I take from a project about a housing scheme or a Warhol film symbols that
I can use for my own ends. The artists hand over the work at the end of the project not as a
finished entity but as something resembling a thought process. Now this book records the
work in order for more people to begin a critical appreciation of what they propose, with
criticality being an essential quality in this respect. Simple appreciation will go nowhere fast
in their work. In common with all 'modest proposals', artist and art viewer must share the task
of imagining things otherwise, in order for the work to be meaningful. Though demanding on
our time, a network of 'modest proposers' would surely be an element in society worth
constructing and articulating D and one in which, as a by-product, commercialism and
capitalism in general would have to find a more modest place in a new hierarchy of values.
42

Pavel Althamer
Wir brauchen einen Rattenfnger noch
The three texts that follow are about artists from the exceptional generation of Poles that
emerged in Warsaw and elsewhere after 1989. I first met Adam Szymczyk in 1998 and the
many conversations with him and his Foksal colleagues Johanna Mytkowska and Andrzej
Przwara have been a consistent inspiration. This text was written for Pavel Althamers solo
exhibition at the Bonnefanten Museum, Maastricht and Zacheta Gallery, Warsaw.
For he led us, he said, to a joyous land,
Joining the town and just at hand,
Where waters gushed and fruit-trees grew,
And flowers put forth a fairer hue,
And everything was strange and new;
The sparrows were brighter then peacocks here,
And their dogs outran our fallow deer,
And honey-bees had lost their stings,
And horses were born with eagles' wings;
And just as I became assured
My lame foot would be speedily cured,
The music stopped and I stood still,
And found myself outside the hill,
Left alone against my will,
To go now limping as before,
And never hear of that country more!"18

Browning, like many before and after, uses a mediaeval folktale to talk about
liberation, greed, fantasy and fear in his contemporary world. As Brecht, Apollinaire, Marina
Tsvetaeva and others, he takes liberties with the Pied Piper/Rattenfnger tale in order to speak
about something else. For this figure of the stranger, the classic outsider who arrives from
nowhere and disappears just as mysteriously, is a deep-rooted trope for societal disturbance.
He embodies both the threat and the promise of the unknown, his skill as an artist and
provider of public service (clearing out the rats) is balanced by his steadfast rejection of the

18

Robert Browning The Pied Piper of Hamelin: A Child's Story, first published 1849, England
http://www.ims.uni-stuttgart.de/~jonas/browning.html

43

burghers attempts to lower his payment and his elegant punishment of their deceit (leading the
children into the mountain). As a metaphor, the Pied Piper cuts an uncertain figure. He can be
understood as both Christ and The Devil, or the Sun and Death, at one and the same time. He
seems to contain both life-giving and life-taking possibilities and even in his powerful
rendition of the lame boys sorrow, Browning does not clarify whether it is a delusion or not.

It is precisely this ambivalence of identity that secures a relationship between our

piping hero or villain and the work of Pawel Althamer, one that I will expand on in this short
text. Given the instability of the signifier Pied Piper, and also given that he performs the
role of both outsider and popular leader (as charmer and avenger of injustice), he seems
consummately appropriate to use as a way of imagining what Althamer does and could do. To
start with, any close encounter with a work of Pawel Althamer is always slightly destabilising.
We are never quite sure which side he is on, or which point he is making. When he climbs a
tree and lives in his home-made arborial shelter for hours, even days, we dont know if he is
inviting us to join him or trying to get away from the hell of other people. When he smokes
dope in the bath wearing a cardinals hat, we are not sure of his attitude to the church - is this
an ironic critique or an attempt to excavate some of the essential radicalism that might still
persist in organised Christianity? When he invited Polish workers to Austria, is he exhibiting
the contradictions of the European system or taking advantage of both his hosts and his
invited guests? When he brings his children and their friends to Maastricht to be looked after
by the museum, is he serious about his work as critique or simply exploiting the invitation to
help his family?

In these questions, there is a greater ambivalence than the familiar contemporary art
fallback of saying its up to the viewer to decide on the meaning. Our uncertain reaction is
not born of simple puzzlement but rather of a quizzical moral position. The question is more
who does the artist think he is? rather than what is he trying to say? This seems to be
exactly the same reaction that the good burghers had towards to Pied Piper after he had rid the
town of its rats and the Pipers reaction seems to be a kind of bemused but sad
determination rather than an interest to debate our reaction. At least if we understand the
Pipers actions not as vengeance on the adults but as a liberation of the children from such
mean-spirited parents. Such an attitude would appear quite close to the persuasive persistence
with which Althamer approaches his quizzical audience.

44

Before we ascribe such motivation to the artist however, let us be clear that it is very
possible that Pawel doesnt know who he thinks he is, but is rather intrigued by the possibility
that he might find out through these subtle provocations. It also appears probable, given his
acceptance of the artists mantle, that the subject under examination in his work is as much
the art field itself and its clichd notion of the freedom of the artist. What does that freedom
amount to, if not the right to act in exclusive ways and to offer some people tangible benefits
in its name - and if not to offer those benefits to your family and the people closest to you,
then to whom else?

But there is much more to the Althamer-Piper analogy than simply one of the figure of
the mysterious liberator or renegade artist. If we look at other literary uses of the folktale, we
find some interesting reflections on the artists own approaches. In 1914, Apollinaire
published "Le Musicien de Saint Mrry"19. Though not explicitly mentioning Hamelin, the
story is clearly adapted from the Pied Piper. However, Apollinare places the events of his
poem on 21st May 1913, close to the date of its creation and therefore applicable to the
contemporary moment. The musician in the poem leads a group of the towns women into an
old factory with broken windows where they all disappear. By placing this magical
occurrence in the here and now, Apollinaire exploits a technique defined by Baudelaire as
surnaturalism. This condition of "a state of perception which intensifies the existence of
things, makes them hyperbolically themselves" seems to apply to much of the Pied Piper tale,
especially in its repeated use of a specific date and location, traditionally on 26th June 1284 in
Hameln (near Hannover) according to a wall inscription in the city itself. This precision about
a real date and place makes the appearance of the miracle or curse all the more wondrous.
The Piper becomes the agent for a surnatural moment because he sensitises his subjects to
their everyday surroundings (as with the lame boy ascribing a beautiful harmony to the
natural world) Life itself becomes open to the possibility of unpredictable transformation or
fantastic release.

To see Althamers work through the lens of surnaturalism is surely to understand a

fundemental aspect of his approach. When he announces that he will appear at a certain time
in a certain place (Berlin Alexanderplatz), he creates of a new state of perception that
19

Guillaume Apollinaire, Calligrammes (first published in 1918), trans. by Anne Hyde Greet; intr. by
S.l. Lockerbie and comment. by Anne Hyde Greet and S.l. Lockerbie (Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 1980), pp. 384-386.

45

intensifies the urban banality. Alexanderplatz becomes hyperbolically itself for a moment as
people look out for his familiar figure, introduced to us already in his many self portraits. The
same is true of his urban performances in which people are instructed to behave quite
normally in public, or even in his simple instruction to turn lights on or off in his own
apartment block to spell a huge 2000 on a dull day in February of that year. The
surnaturalism of his Documenta X performance in which he walked through Kassel dressed
as an astronaut and then invited a homeless Pole to live in a wooden caravan for the
exhibitions duration, is, I hope, self-explanatory. Through the work we are invited to see the
familiar anew, in a way that causes a compulsive estrangement while being materially
unaffected.

My final pitch for comparison between the Piper and Althamer is based less on the
formers position as convenient literary device and more on our folk memory understanding
of his personality. Whether good or evil, and the Piper (like Althamer) seems capable of
containing the possibility of both qualities, they are wandering sages with a wisdom that is
not quite of this world even while it is not necessarily religious. Althamers personality is
always at stake in his work, the intimate sphere of himself, his wife, children and wider
family is part of his expressive language. Consequently, we spectators are never quite sure
where the line between Althamer the artist and Pawel the human being is drawn. He places
his charm, his magnetism and his wisdom at our disposal. Like the Piper, however, his
seduction comes at a cost to both parties. We see it in the way he returns the scrutiny of
outsiders back to them with his naked sculptures of the artist and his wife with a video
camera. We see it also in his desire to escape to his treehouse. But finally, we see the trade
between attraction and manipulation in the way he calls other people into his work whether as
participants or implicated viewers. The workers, the homeless, passers-by, children and
family are all present. He seems to want to lead them (and us) somewhere, but the destination
is never clear, or perhaps only, in the words of the lame boy, somewhere everything is
strange and new.

46

Just pictures anyway

It seems important that painting is also represented here, perhaps in a back door way but this
text on Wilhelm Sasnal is an important one for me in thinking about the possibility of the
image per se, without any surrounding context or project.
I used to get dismayed by painting too often. Or at least by the way painting was and
often still is spoken about by the art historians, connoisseurs, collectors and sundry hangers
on who gather round it like eulogists at a wake. Its not even their frequent defence of a
tradition that is so dispiriting, but that fact that painting itself seems to be forgotten,
certainly as far as the simple, understated production of images that contribute to our way of
seeing the world. Painting simply fell into a comfort zone of mediation and critique and
didnt seem to be able to find its way out. It died in there, hence all those articles about its
end. Even as its crusade stayed alive in other places - like photography, video, other image
making media and with painters themselves.

Of course technique, brushstroke, composition, perspective etc. all contribute to ways

of making this seeing the world actual but they are accidents to the image not its cause. The
moment I first realised how destructive this discourse could be was at a Picasso exhibition
when I was 18. The works were all distorted, stretched, tortured pictures of women but the
guides, the labels and all the accompanying paraphenalia made no mention of this. Instead
they spoke about shape, cubism, the avant-garde, pre-war Paris and so on. This was some
form of context for sure, but not the eye-staringly obvious one I was seeking. The problem
was, of course, that as an 18 year old I felt my responses were illegitimate, born of ignorance
and misunderstanding. I was, if you like, the classic museum victim, made inarticulate by the
forces of authority at the buildings command.

Now, as a museum director myself, that experience returns to haunt me and its
presence always seems called up most effectively by exhibitions of paintings. To organise
painting exhibitions, even to suggest painters to show elsewhere, sometimes seem such a
Herculean task of removing all that prejudice before we even get to the work itself. Still our
default reaction with painting is to fall back on formalist analysis, to stand back or talk in
hushed tones and to suck in our breath in some imitation of admiration or dislike. Where did
its politics go? Its casualness? Its immediacy? It is as if talking about the image, responding to

47

it as one might to a photograph is somehow beneath the value of painting. This is why it often
dismays me and why, for a long time, I couldnt look at painting without glazing over with
fatigue, let alone make exhibitions with it.

It took an artist who paints on walls to win me back, and a series of conversations that
taught me to forget the museum again. Being politically motivated, doesnt mean you cant
think about painting, you know, aesthetic choices are just as political as any other. And, of
course, I can only agree with Richard Wrights perhaps misremembered quotation. He made
me look again at Holbein, not in terms of line and shade but in terms of subject matter and the
simple question of how to portray another human being and how to live with that portrayal.
Suddenly, this way of seeing became exciting again and it has stayed with me, though I still
have to fight down the temptation to dismiss it (painting) as anachronisitic or over fetishised
or both.

Which brings me, in a roundabout way, to Wilhelm Sasnal. I have never met the artist
though I have seen enough work to know there is something of that fascination for the image
itself and not only for its penumbra of quotations. Of course, it is knowing, in the way that all
painting must now acknowledge that simply stretching a canvas is making a work and
everything else is painted on top of this already existing monochrome. But, just for now, look
at what he shows us - after all these works are mostly taken directly from photographs and he
also works with video (and does anyone really want to talk about pixelation or the refresh rate
there?) These images are initially disrupting of the museums comfort zone of political
correctness. Here black men fuck white women, figures pose as hunters, some already
decapitated and Peaches stares out at us, half Warhol, half personal ad. The quieter works
show an isolated or distracted subject like athletes in lonely celebration or Anka turning her
head away from us all. Both moods can be seen as intimate and sexy but there is either too
much on display or the subjects are too introspective for such a simple interpretation to seem
sufficient. There is a kind of deceptiveness in each picture that marks them out despite there
use of the by now familar tone of the contemporary everyday and the language of
pornography and documentary photography. It is this deceptivenes that is precisely where the
political comes in, at least for me, as a possibility given to me by the artist and as a way of
looking at the image myself. Sasnals work, his pictures, are a denial of that old comfort zone
of interpretation not only because they are politically incorrect but because they ask you not

48

to care about art history while never losing the use and pleasure of the image itself. This is
their strength, they are just pictures showing us some kind of reality to which to respond.

49

Still occupied, though we forget

The third Polish text, published of the catalogue of Artur Zmijewski at the Venice Biennale
2005. The title is also a Joy Division quote, the band tha,t as I said in another text, made me
intelligent (if I am).
I guess we have all experienced the National Socialism of the heart. Those moments in
life when passion or hurt takes over and when we can never permit sympathy for or
imagination of the feelings of the other to alter our actions. Brute desire dominates, and we
commit many deeds for which we feel only shame and remorse afterwards. Whether personal
or the collective heartache of Nazism, the heart fully justifies its evil intent in terms of its
desire for compensation for the perceived evils done to it. Ultimately, it cannot avoid its own
destructive exclusion of other ways of thinking. So, to avoid the common Nazi instincts in our
being, we try to control these impulses by ourselves or we set up social contracts that do it for
us. Frequently these also fail and then we try, as the collective that can still unite around the
term humanity, to build the walls of civilisation back up again. Yet, in general, the heart
serves us well as carrying the blame for Nazism and other collective crimes. Identified as the
prime Nazi organ in our bodies it helps to excuse the motivation for certain historical actions,
or at least balances condemnation with understanding.

More problematic is the concept of a National Socialism of the brain. A hateful

ideology controlled by a thinking and self-aware consciousness is much harder to comprehend
and to bear. Partly, I imagine, that is because it permits absolute evil into the heart of the
civilising project of the Enlightenment. Partly because such terms of engagement with evil are
much harder to control through the traditions of discourse and democratic accountability that
we have built up to defend ourselves against its outbreak. Nazism has to be on the outside
looking in for it to be accommodated comfortably in our current worldview. It needs to be the
irrational other to the inevitable superiority of the democratic free market and the expressed
will of the silent majority. It can only provide a choice in times of economic desperation and
wounded identity, situations that can be overcome by individual economic security and a
national vote every few years.

My guess is that this is the worldview that Artur Zmijewski wants to disturb. His work
is described in detail elsewhere in this volume so I will only speak in general terms about it.

50

As such, we can see that his productions speak about the losers rather than the winners of
society, those that have incomplete profiles and physical dependencies. But he refuses to
adopt the classical response of guilty liberalism towards those afflictions. Instead of trying to
alleviate them he seems to wallow in their own qualities, emphasising what is missing and
exploring the individuals inadequacy to the full. That is why, after all, much of the video and
performance work is so compelling. We want to see what our art world liberal correctness
often forbids deaf mutes singing, paraplegics walking, guards abusing prisoners, artists
taking about God. At its heart, this work is anti-consensus. It breaks out from the oftenstultifying conformity of western social democratic discourse. In its place, it suggests that
abnormality can be represented on its own terms and contemplated without a tired humanist
reflex to feel sympathy for the victim or blind ourselves to what is lacking.

His work is at heart a challenge to the aesthetic expectations of certain dominant forms
of US and western European modernism for the middle of the last century. That old struggle
first to do away with representation and then to claim autonomy for the object from its
contextual production appeared lost under post-modernist revisionism but Zmijewskis videos
bring some of the background residual assumptions of western modernism into focus. Are we
still secret idealists, searching for a utopian social harmony, desiring our own tolerant final
solution to societys problems? To the extent that is raises that question, I understand
Zmijewskis work to be a provocation to the comfortable liberalism that inhabits much of the
European art world these days. It points out where social improvement becomes another form
of conformist manipulation of our expectations of human life.

Yet while it might seem out of kilter with much of the socially positivist art made in
the last 10 years, Zmijewski plugs himself into a much longer history of art. Seventeenth
century Spanish art regularly depicted the dwarves, buffoons and jokers that populated the
court as entertaining oddities. Those depictions of an existence that can only be imagined as
cruel and exploitative trod a similar path to Zmijewskis. Take one specific example,
Velazquezs Calabazas painted around 1638. The image is a portrait of a dwarf seen from
above, emphasizing his size and the viewpoint of the average adult. He seated on a low stool
with his legs folded under him, nervously wringing his hands together and peering up with an
uneasy grin or grimace. This is not meant to be a flattering portrait clearly, but neither could
be possibly be exploitative in its apparent realism. It is neither filled with sympathy nor with
derision but lets the beholder come to terms with the court buffoon as an individual and as a
51

representative of something other than normality something that Zmijewski offers also to
us in our own time.

In theory, the presence of such people in the royal courts of the seventeenth century
was intended to serve as a reminder to the monarchs of their good fortune and worldly power.
However, in practice they could be imagined to do rather the opposite, reminding the court
that perfection was not necessarily always a desirable aim of state policy, or at least that it
was a pointless exercise to pursue. It is at this point that the substance of the critique in
Zmijewskis work challenges the contemporary world of tolerant artistic speculation. By
depicting the awkwardness of human existence without sympathy, it questions the search for
certain utopian propositions, aesthetic as well as social. It is important that none of
Zmijewskis work provides a positivist solution to the problems it pronounces. Indeed, his
most recent piece theatricalises the conflict between the powerless and the structurally
empowered. In his work, the positivism of the able bodied and socially advantaged serves as
something of a categorical opposite. He refuses it in order to find out what it excludes, at the
same time giving action to those who would normally remain the passive objects of
contemplation for the able bodied world.

Perhaps it is my own wilful misreading but I would like to suggest a particular contemporary
reading of this work as profoundly un-American. By that I mean that it rejects the idealism and
optimism at the heart of the overwhelmingly successful American model. For those of us at least
sceptical of the current US governments policies, there is always the accusation that we are
opposing freedom and democracy while siding with repressive, dystopian regimes. At times
opposition to freedom and democracy in neo-conservative terms can feel rather like being asked to
attack the desirability of being physically and mentally complete. Of course that is not the point, but
Zmijewskis work provides an intelligent retort to that question by presenting us with works that
point out something of the compromises in lived reality for which the idealism of the neo-cons often
fails to account. I could only wish that I would have such a convincing argument to present about the
inevitable and perhaps necessary differences in human society that Zmijewski does for human
capability and physiognomy.

52

Accuracy and the mysterious ordinariness of everyday life

An essay about the work of Haegue Yang
Haegue Yang was one of the artists I met during the preparation of the Gwangju Biennale and
whose work and spirit remain with me as an ongoing influence.
if we regard everyday life as the frontier between the dominated and the
undominated sectors of life, and thus as the terrain of risk and uncertainty, it would be
necessary to replace the present ghetto with a constantly moving frontier; to work ceaselessly
toward the organisation of new chances.20

Perhaps, with hindsight, the situationists rhetoric appears rather pompous, even
vainglorious. Yet it remains a point of interest for a current generation of artists who want to
work on the small scale but see their work as having interesting political consequences or
new chances.

Haegue Yangs work certainly seeks to use evidence of everyday life in a way that
reveals what would otherwise be ignored. It is not enough to say that her work makes the
world a more interesting place because it also creates it own mysteriousness. Nevertheless, it
is true that her work helps us, her consumers, to step out of our accustomed sloth and look
again at things we have too often ignored. It is also true that she brings a Korean sensibility,
or simply upbringing in a different visual culture, to Europe and by doing so points out things
we first worlders too easily miss. Significantly too, she has recently brought such observation
back to Korea to reveal the possibilities of the undominated sector of everyday life there.
No, the problem with interesting is simply that Yangs work arouses more than that familiar
sense of curiosity. Rather, it conveys an odd sense of mundane mystery, a slight
destabilisation in the usual order of everyday life, without overtly changing anything. This
quality is then combined with an ambition for accuracy to become a defining aspect of all her
production.

To seek to be accurate is to avoid taking things at first sight but caring enough to want
to know more in order to be exact. The caring is inherent, stemming as the word does from
curare in Latin. It also suggests the need to take time to achieve precision as well as the
20

ex Guy Debord, PERSPECTIVES FOR CONSCIOUS ALTERATIONS IN EVERYDAY LIFE, 1961,

http://hamp.hampshire.edu/~cmnF93/debord.txt

53

desire to be right if challenged. All these nuances of meaning are present in Yangs work,
even in her personality, and they apply to anyone engaged in looking accurately at her work.

A small edition of hers, Grid Bloc, a textbook full of neatly ruled pages of graph paper
makes the point. Each page has been drawn to a different scale, each division representing not
an agreed measure but the artists own whimsical decision. Once her rules are established
however, the implementation is relentless and precise, enough to have any casual observer
mistaking this work for any other graph paper book on the school supply shelves where she
distributed it. The mystery, and the satisfaction for the artist I suspect, comes when the book
is used for the first time.

Sitting Tables is a mysteriously ordinary series of photographs from Korean city

streets. Observing the strange phenomenon, to Yangs now western-educated eyes, of low,
homemade tables sitting on the pavement outside shops and restaurants, Yang began to make
an inventory of their kinds and positions. The resulting photographs are very understated, a
simple grid of commercially printed images mounted on a wall. What makes them at least
interesting is their differences based in their amateur manufacture out of material found in
the immediate neighbourhood. What takes them beyond that, what makes them accurate in
the sense of the exact object to choose to talk about Korea, its history and everyday street life,
is the symbolic value they generate. These sitting tables are probably vestiges of traditional
Korean house design, where a platform around the house was used to rest or to meet the
inhabitants without having to take of your shoes and be formally welcomed. They are then
necessary social devices, ignored by the adoption of modernism during the frantic
industrialisation of the US backed military dictatorship. They reflect a kind of low-level
resistance by the population, something only readable from within the society and now, as
Yangs eulogy suggests, in danger of disappearing.

The use of the grid as a display device is common to a number of similar photoworks
produced recently. They all use the machine-processed prints of the smallest 9 x 13 cms
standard. The selection of images differs in each, either being taken from the artists own
archive, or generated through collaborations with others. The grid orders the ordinariness of
the images, often unremarkable urban street scenes. Viewers are invited to identify the
sources perhaps, or to find some kind of empathy with the author of the pictures. It is not that
easy to do this, until you realise that the task is less demanding than it seems. The sheer
54

quantity of images, and the anonymity of the individual components, requires a kind of
unfocused, osmotic consumption where the odd rationality of the collections affects the
unconsciousness. This is why in a work like Forget, Igret, Regret, made for the Akioshidai
residency in rural Japan, the photos are placed in the workers lounge alongside a number of
atmospheric changes to make the space more comfortably domestic. Even here then, in this
unfocused state, the term accuracy in terms of the choice of site and the appropriateness of the
images is again the most effective way of thinking about Yangs work.

The beautifully titled series Unrealistic to Generalise includes some of these grid
works alongside a number of different works about the urban environment and its
unintentional spaces. Some of these works take Yangs production beyond the documentation
of everyday life and into its symbolic reproduction. One is an anonymous public artwork in
Paris, subtitled Accidental Monument and made to Yangs rather open instructions by
technicians. They are free to interpret these and produce a work the specific form of which is
unknown to Yang and which subsequently encounters an equally unknown reception on the
street. The work itself mimics the conditions of the modernist monument it its form while
being mildly absurd it its public placement, becoming a suitably mysterious normality in the
Parisian streets. The chosen method of manufacture dilutes the creative ownership of and
therefore responsibility for the work between artist, technicians and public. This dilution is
only apparent to those in the know, of course, and really visible once the work is transferred
with its graffiti and damage to a gallery space. It is here that the poignant accuracy of the
work becomes apparent, the transfer to the gallery making the vainglorious attempt to
communicate on the street rather pathetic, while the public interventions of graffiti
emphasise a kind of general response, if not the one that public art desires.

The plans for the work for the Sonje Art Center are still in development but they
appear to develop this latter work to include a degree of organised public activity. Yang
intends to invite the audience to engage in specific activities around the hill, a reference
perhaps to the public function of Walker Hill in Seoul. From models, the oddness of the
sculpture conforms to Yangs other work, becoming a rude but appropriate intrusion into the
gallery, ordinary things made out of the ordinary in order to conjure up new chances for us
all.

55

56

Beti Zerovc interviews Charles Esche

- Curator, as we understand it today, is something that is relatively new, twenty, maybe thirty
years old. To whom do you feel closer: to the traditional curator in a museum, to the private dealer
or a critic? In my opinion the curator somehow developed or took something from all of these
positions.

Yeah, I think so. There is also the historical meaning of curator, which is related not only to
art. For instance, in Scottish law, a curator is actually a person who looks after a child when his
parents are no longer alive. They have responsibility for the care of a child, which could be quite
interesting in relation to the artistcurator exchange. Curator in its real meaning is also somebody
who cares for a collection. So, curators have existed since the eighteenth century, probably since the
beginning of the cabinet of curiosities. Theres a long history of that kind of curator and then there's
the new meaning of curator as exhibition maker, Ausstellungsmacher or whatever, which comes in
around twenty years ago. The latter is really a completely different concept to which the same word
has been attached; there is very little relationship between this notion of caring for a collection or a
child or whatever and the contemporary meaning of curator. So you could say we should actually
find another word, because I am not sure that that historical connection is very useful.

What I can say is that I became involved in curating because I got interested in art but was
not trained and do not think of myself as an artist. I fell into curating because that was what you
could do in order to be involved with art and not be an artist. So in some ways, I don't think very
much about what the word means and I often don't use it about myself because I could also be called
a writer and officially Im an editor, director and research fellow to my various employers. I actually
rarely have the title curator, but of course I'm always called it. In terms of my actual work:
sometimes Im more a facilitator of an artists project; sometimes I feel Im working in parallel with
an artist, where we are discussing the project from the start and I can see a real exchange of ideas;
sometimes I make exhibitions and recently Ive been most concerned with developing the idea of the
art institution itself rather than just its exhibition programme.

Often, as a curator you feel like you have to back away from any kind of creative
involvement, but I think we should admit to a real creativity implicit in this new term of curator.
Probably the reason we back away from it is because of the legacy of the historical use of curator that
pre-existed our activities. Now were actually involved in production and the creation of contexts and
57

opportunities, all of which have a creative element. And speaking personally, Im most interested in
art in the sense of a tool a tool to imagine the world otherwise. Im not so interested in aesthetic
values for themselves, and Im certainly not interested in art for arts sake. Its more how art engages
and changes conditions around itself, how it operates on the imagination. So the limitations of my
understanding of the possibilities of the curator are dictated by that personal and political agenda.

- You were talking about the beginnings of your curatorial work as if you emerged from some
point of nothing; that you just liked art and so on. But are there any people that you could call
forerunners or special events, which inspired you?

- Yes, there are such people, but theyre mostly artists. Well, I mean the reason I got into art
was an artist called Stephen Willats who was working on what we could now call social projects
from the 1960s onwards. In terms of forerunners, I think I have to be quite personal and say the
reason I got interested in art is through my disillusionment with politics. In my twenties, early
twenties at least, I was a member of the British Labour Party and very active on what was then called
the left. And gradually, particularly with the experience of the big miners strike in 84-85, I became
extremely disillusioned with the possibilities of politics its possibility to affect peoples
imagination, to affect changes in thinking and acting, to rethink globalisation, injustice,
emancipation, almost anything beyond the hope for the revolution or everyday management. It
seemed to me that the options were being closed down (particularly in Britain because at that time
my thoughts were still based very much on some kind of national understanding). I saw in art,
through somebody like Stephen Willats, a way of dealing with some of the questions I felt I wanted
to ask in the political sphere, but couldnt. And so my journey was from trying to change the world
through politics to becoming interested in art.

- But why couldnt you pose those questions in the political sphere?

Because things on the left seemed already set in an ideological stone and nobody was even
considering ideologys relation to observable realities. Nobody was prepared for instance to question
whether Marxism was correct, whether Trotsky was correct or not, you either accepted it or you were
out. Nobody was prepared to use politics, and that is still absolutely true now, in an imaginative or
speculative way. Ill tell you an example: in 1980-81 we were very involved in trying to support
Solidarnosc in some way, though many were troubled to be opposing a socialist government. Then
in 84 when the miners strike was on, we went down to the docks in Hull, which is a port in eastern
58

England, and tried to stop the ships that were bringing the Polish coal dug up by the same miners
who three years before had been occupying the mines to defend Solidarnosc. Yet, no one would
seriously discuss the irony of our protest or the relationship between what we were doing in 1981 and
1984. In the end, it seemed we were fighting anybody who opposed our British working class selfinterest, and I couldnt see a future in that position at all, because the idea of the self-interest of a
nation and class just didnt mean anything anymore. Nobody would discuss the possibility of a
thoughtful response to globalisation, to the complexity of community and what it might mean, even
to re-imagine a new International, nothing. It seemed everything global, economic or even
aesthetically challenging was evil, it was that simplistic and defeatist. The left was freaked out by the
end of a coherent class structure and was clinging to its wreckage. Everybody around was just stuck
in defensive mode, trying to protect the rights that have been won in 1950s or 1960s but that no
longer meant so much. There was no mechanism to imagine how global relationships could be
renegotiated, or how Reaganism-Thatcherism could be turned against itself by changing out vision of
the world. No, the future was fixed, we were in eternal opposition until the revolution and we were
almost happy in our defeatism and lack of responsibility to effect any real change.
So, there was (and is) no imaginative speculation available in politics. And thats the only
salvation that we have, actually to think the world differently. We have to start from the ground and
try to build up some different ideas of how we might want to organize ourselves as a society.
Otherwise we only have the one free market, democratic capitalist model. And for me it seems art
could be the terrain where that can happen today. Since the 1980s I am even more sure its not going
to happen in traditional party politics and other areas philosophy, science, economics are often so
carefully specialised they stop themselves from making effective statements. But this is another
story

- Please, continue with it.

- For me, art has possibility. Possibility is a very important word for me, because I think
thats what we have to grasp, to create possibility. Ernst Bloch said there are interests in the world
that try to deny possibility - so, possibility is a very political term. Possibility to change, possibility
to imagine, possibility to speculate, possibility to think things otherwise, these are very important.
Now, if we see art as a generalism, a field which can draw in various specialisms, bring them
together, perhaps misunderstand or misuse them, but create something else out of the combination
that speaks to a common interest, then I think the position of art is unique in its possible effect on
questions of commonality or community and a real tool to be used to think in that way. And thats
59

what excites me about it. Of course there are other aspects in this terrain of art that I have little
interest in, which have to do with commercialism or to do with the gallery structure or to do with the
way that art affirms the status quo or relates to fashion. Thats fine, I dont like them and I dont
dislike them, they dont interest me. The real possibility for art is to be a speculative terrain, to
imagine the world differently and to draw on other disciplines, whether its philosophy, physics or
football, to talk about our conditions and how they could be revised.

- So, taking all this into account, what exactly would be the task of the curator?

- The task of the curator is to cultivate that terrain of possibility, to look after it, to
build institutions on it or structures on it in which such a speculation can happen. To develop
an enclosure if you like, where some of these things can happen, within capitalism of course,
but a little bit defended from its destructive, mocking forces.

-I read something where you were explaining that the curator is an expert on art and that he
has real knowledge of art. Im really interested in what that knowledge would be?

- Look, on one level its a simple knowledge of different practices that are going on around
the world. I mean, curators are paid and expected to know what is going on at a particular moment
and place. So their knowledge base and understanding of current activities should be much wider
than somebody who doesnt spend all that time in the art field.

- So if you have somebody who has greater knowledge, does that mean that he would be a
better curator?

- I see what you mean ... No, because its about applying that knowledge. And how you apply
that knowledge comes from the specific position that you articulate as a curator. So the curator has a
specific position and specific interest. Ive tried to point towards that in my own journey from
politics to art. If you ask another curator, then youll have another position and so on. I would hope.

- So how can a curator be valuated at all or at best?

Against each other and also in relationship to terms I would use, like possibility, like notions
taken from Jacques Derrida and Klossowski of hospitality, of generalism, perhaps even of fluidity. If
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a curator wants to do an exhibition, the judgement offered might be: Does it create possibility for that
moment, for the place and for the artists? Does it work for an audience in a way, which is hospitable,
which encourages some kind of engagement? Does it function in relationship to a social situation,
which is constantly changing, or is it fixed? Does it address broad social questions or only arts own
issues? Those are the kind of judgements you might bring to an exhibition that a curator makes. I
mean there are all sorts of ways that you can judge but those would be the criteria that I would want
to use.

- Does that mean that you see a curator as an independent author?

- I mean it more as a mediator or a facilitator than an author. Of course you have your own
idea, I dont think we should deny the fact that a curator has a position, but your position is to
choose, select those artists or projects that you find compelling, interesting, that satisfy the criteria
you have and then to facilitate them and mediate them to an audience. Thats why the judgements
have to be about the context as much as the precise content.

- You often talked about your friendship with artists, the fact that you work very closely with
them, how important that is ...

- Yes, its important, vital.

- But that probably affects your choice, your selection to a great degree?

- Totally, totally, I wouldn't deny it for a moment. But why do you want some objective
criteria outside of myself? I mean if you invite me as a curator to do a project, I bring the people I
know, believe in, love and trust. Its based on previous experiences so the circle does grow
constantly, but Im not independent from those people and I dont think I should be nervous about
that at all. I have my own position. Like, if you want a building like Rem Koolhaas, you ask for Rem
Koolhaas, if you want a building like Frank O Ghery, you ask 0 Ghery. Because you know, they have
positions.

- Yes. But you can still ask Koolhaas why is he doing the particular house, why is he doing it
in such a way, etc. In the same way as Im asking you those things. So for you, in a way, friendship
and artistic quality are coinciding?
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- Not always. Because it depends: as you discover situations by research, by travelling, by

meeting people, by looking at work youre drawn to. Youre drawn to it for those criteria I already
mentioned, as well as for reasons of surprise, innovation, things you cant predict in advance. I see
something and go wow! thats really great. Probably its connected to particular social, political or
economic questions that Im interested in and I can see the artist is really investigating those in a way
that I had never thought about. Then my job is to get to know them, my job is not to say: Wow,
thats great, lets take that work. I might do that, of course, but in saying it I also want to get to
know who Im dealing with. So, the friendship, the politics of that friendship come out of the work
that I see and the work that interests me. In that sense, friendship is not a blind emotional reaction but
grounded in my interests.

- But do you see any problematic sides in this way of seeing things? For example, Viktor
Misiano also has some special and in a way very similar ideas on friendship as you do. But since he
is the strongest and if we emphasize a little, the only curator who is really working outside Russia
and in the West that means ...

- ... you have to be friends with Viktor in order to get out.

- How can we solve this?

- I think it may be slightly different in Western Europe because theres more pluralism; there
are other people that you can work with. The weakness of it is if there are only very few people who
are actually making these kinds of judgements. What we need are more people making these kinds of
judgements and more transparency or honesty in how it works.

- Lets say that Im a good artist, here from Slovenia, who you are interested in, but who is
now making you nervous because Im posing these questions. What would that mean? That I dont fit
in your exhibition? If I dont get along with you, does that then somehow affect the quality of my
work with you?

- I find this interesting because its making me think. So Im quite enjoying it and its more
likely Ill want to see your work. But then, Im not sure it really matters. My experiences working in
marginal places like Glasgow and Malm, is that the situation in such places (also like Ljubljana)
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only really functions if it starts to sustain itself by developing a supportive local community, a
critical mass of quite modest institutions and a self-confidence. Thats the energy that somebody
coming from the outside could see and get turned on by. So things are in your control as well, rather
than only waiting for the blessing of the international curators. In Gwangju, we tried to reflect this by
inviting 26 small groups and artist run spaces to represent themselves.

- You work in a museum. I read somewhere that you explained, before you started, that you
would try to move the ordinary existing exhibition program into something more various, that it
would have a more productive role. So, how far are you with that?

- The first thing that I did was basically to cut what has traditionally been a showroom for art
into different functions. We used the three floors differently and upstairs we made two studios that
are semi-private/semi-public. The artists who are there wont necessarily ever show in an exhibition,
but the invitation is for them to be present around the building. Meeting our visitors.
Upstairs we also set up a project room, which is a kind of a really boring idea and we did it
because we couldnt think of anything else. Now were running a course with the Art Academy in
Malm with eight students, four artists and four who define themselves as something else, curators or
critics or even with a background in sociology. On the middle floor is the main exhibition hall where
we try to use the language of the exhibition as interestingly and effectively as possible. However, in
April we will use it as a film studio and open in only occasionally to the public. Our technical team
will be used to build the sets or build the constructions that are necessary for the film. Then
downstairs were playing with the idea of an archive, so we have on one hand a Rooseum archive,
where people can see what we have been showing in the past, and a future archive, where we ask all
the artists who we work with, to give us a list of ten books, CDs or videos that are in some way
inspirational, influential or important to them. It builds up as a very eclectic, strange library in which
you can get to know the artist whom were working with in different ways because you can see,
maybe, where some of their ideas start or some of their points of departure for their work, whether
its classical books like Negris Empire or a Mad Max film. And then we have a
microcinema/discussion space where we have a video program, club nights and talks. So basically,
from the whole thing being a showroom, we now have four or five different kinds of space for
different kinds of activity. Those spaces themselves are always up to question. So, for instance, the
exhibition space becomes a film studio, the project room wasnt really good so we closed it down.

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- I think that in a way, now it is a trend of doing things like that, in a multifunctional,
laboratory way. Is there a successful museum or gallery working in this way that you could
mention?

- Hmmm, ....

- Because you know, Ive been to some places with such an inclination lately -like Palais de
Tokyo-, and I did not find them very inspiring.

- I really hope that were not like Palais de Tokyo. Not that I want to be critical, but I think
its very different working in a small town with a relatively small audience and doing something in
Paris. You have to take the context into account because if you dont then you miss half the reason
for doing the things that were doing.

- Sometimes such places, where theyre trying to be very open, they are at the same time
extremely closed, because they are maybe to concentrated on those few people they work with. And
when you come to such a place, its like ...

- You feel thrown out of it. I understand that. I do believe in what Im doing but of course Im
self-critical. I dont want to defend Rooseum automatically because the question is fair enough.
Again, Im going to answer you through rhetorical language of defining terms though I think our
projects like Superflex are real examples of this. One term, which I used before, is hospitality, which
Im very interested in trying to embed into the institution. At least in Derridas terms hospitality, is
saying Yes essentially. Its saying Yes to the other, to the visitor, to the unexpected guest, alive
or dead, vegetable or mineral, divine or human. He says its about trying to say Yes, trying to
learn, disciplining yourself to say Yes to the demands that come. Now I think that hospitality is on
one level, a very pragmatic aspect of welcome. So if you were to come to the Rooseum, I hope, what
would happen, is that you would feel welcome in a way that perhaps you might have not been in
other places ... In other words, somebody would come and actually talk to you. On another level,
hospitality means being responsive to your concerns, changing to accommodate the needs of the
guest to the point of giving up ownership or authorship. Now, how that works out in practice is under
construction but we have a programme called Open Forum that invites people from Malm to
propose and carry out their own projects. Its slow but it is beginning to work.

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- But Palais de Tokyo also promises that somebody will be there for you with whom you will
be able to talk if you want to talk, etc.

- But nothing really happens.

- Why is this happening?

- Well, if youve got that number of people coming in, its maybe difficult to deal with it on
such a level.

- But that means that we are faced with a model, which is by trying to be something, turning it
into the exact opposite?

- Yes, Im really sympathetic to you and Im thinking about these problems. But the attempts
are genuine ones. I mean, we might fail, I totally understand and we have to learn and be self-critical,
but I think the attempt to be hospitable is one thats worthwhile. The attempt to try, as Palais de
Tokyo is doing, to create an institution which does have a different sense of the time that you might
engage as a visitor, a different sense of the way that you might work with the artists, a different sense
of the possibilities of meeting - I think none of that is wrong. Perhaps the delivery should be
criticised but the fundamental approach is basically right. So, I wouldnt really want to criticise
Palais de Tokyo but I do think, in a strange way we have an advantage being provincial. Because we
can have a more intimate relation with our audience, were not a tourist city.

- Before you entered the institution you seemed very proud of the fact that you were an
independent curator, and you talked about that on numerous occasions. So, I would like to know:
Why did you return to the institution?

-I made a very deliberate decision to return to the institution because I did not want to be an
independent curator any more. And what you might have read was absolutely true then but I dont
think I have to be always consistent. I think time passes and I learn more how to achieve things.

- What were the main reasons for returning to the institution?

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- Very precisely: as an independent curator working in the institution you have very little
possibility to change the fundamental structures through which that institution is run. To a certain
extent you are a decoration on top of them. Youre invited to do your thing, whether its the Gwangju
Biennial or its the Tate, youre invited to do the thing for which you are identified as being
interesting and then you go away and the institution is left completely unmoved. What I became
interested in is not who to invite, is not this artist or that artist, but rather how that invitation is made,
in what way you have a conversation and create a possibility for an artist or a visitor. And that was
impossible to do as an independent curator because you were only moving from one site to another
and taking a crowd of artists with you (with this issue of friendship I would agree) but you couldnt
actually go very much further - all you can do is take them to another place. Now I didnt do it so
much, but I did it enough to realize that thats not my main interest. And actually I think with
Rooseum, my main interest is becoming structural the how you invite, whats the nature of the
invitation, rather than the fact of the invitation.

- When I spoke to Pierre Restany, he said that he sees a curator as a master of compromises.

- I understand that because youre dealing with the whole series of pragmatics. Coming from
the political position that I had before, and basically still have, makes me wary of compromise but, as
I said, theres no comfortable outside position any more. You have to get your hands dirty to achieve
anything you want to do, and that means compromise.

- Do you see yourself as a master of compromises?

- Not a master, I see myself as forced into compromises.

- Is that different?

- Yeah. I feel myself more as a victim of them, or them as an inevitable evil.

- In contemporary theory, people like Christopher Lash, Robert Kurz, Slavoj iek, speak
about our period as of a period of self-inscenated criticism, which is not a true criticism, but
more, an appearance, a stand to be seen by others? Do you think curators often use this appearance
of being critical and why?

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- Well, let me think about this because its complicated. If there is no externally validated
position to make critical judgements (socialist analysis or whatever) then criticism is staged to some
degree. And the art world is often self-validating with collectors sitting on institutional boards,
institutions supporting galleries and underwriting artists projects that then have to succeed etc. But
the question is: does the loss of external criteria make the activity invalid? Can we still think by using
self staged criticism or does it just affirm the status quo? My answer is that it does not only affirm
but also opens up new lines of thought that might produce the breakthrough to another way of
imagining the world. That goes back to our start, in a way.

- How do you see your position in the relationship with collectors and commercialism that
you mentioned and how do you see in them your politics of friendship, which could be problematic in
a similar way?

- I agree with that. But you know, first, I dont feel very engaged with collectors myself. I
think there is a social democratic position of working in an institution with public money, where we
have to find justification for why you receive that money. It is certainly not in order to flatter board
members collections or support the value of an artist. The justification of that public money will be
whether we create a real, active discourse, a speculative territory for artists internationally and people
living locally to test out some ideas about themselves and our society. Now, Im not ashamed to have
a close friendship with some of those people at all in fact I think it is necessary. I mean the
alternative would be to have a completely objective, scientific curator who has no relationships with
anybody, is completely dissocialised and relates only to the objects. Now that is to some extent the
old model of the curator, but I think thats more problematic than not acknowledging a social
exchange that affects your opinions. Though the work should still be the primary element that
facilitates that social exchange that leads to the friendship. I think an objective scientific view that
youre looking for just doesnt exist. If you want the curator to be outside the capitalist structure and
collection, to be outside relationships with artists, to be outside relationships with the institution ...
thats somehow taking a godlike overview, I think thats really mistaken. What Im talking about is
being in the mess of social, political and economic pragmatism and still trying to take a position and
create the place for art to contribute to social change and emancipation.

- So youre placing a great deal of importance on the difference between the involvement in
the private and public sector, the difference between private and public financing?

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- Yeah, I really want to defend some of those things, for instance I want to defend the
difference between consumerism and civil society, I want to defend the difference between public
money and private money, I think thats really important otherwise we abandon ourselves to the
worst parts of the American model, without their culture of individual responsibility.

- But at the same time as you are defending this model, you are involved in the private,
commercial art sector. Not long ago you were one of the British selectors for ARCO in Madrid?

- I mean ARCO was something that I would not want to theorize about too much.

- But if you have such a strong political stand, dont you think you have to be consistent,
otherwise we come exactly to self-inscenated criticism?

- Well, ... OK, this is a really good question. The reason I did ARCO is because it seemed to
be an opportunity to create a possibility for a certain number of artists who otherwise wouldnt have
their opportunity. The reason that I said Yes to it was because it allowed me to invite certain
people who I admired because of their work, through the mechanism of the gallery system. So what
we did was not to invite the classical commercial galleries, but many different kinds of artists run
spaces that hadnt always been at the art fairs before. I think that was worthwhile. Anyway, the
gallery sector is not bad in itself it depends how and what it does its possible for gallerists to
have an ethical position. I just find most of what they do uninteresting.

- Yes, but before you said to me: Look at the context. What's the special context here, why
should you do it?

- OK, ARCO is, in terms of its context, different from other art fairs. It was set up
immediately post Franco, as the first cultural phenomenon that introduced post-modernism and
pluralism to Spain. As such it occupies a special place in Spanish culture and it always had a very
strong educational element. In contrast to Basel or Berlin a huge range of people attends it, and they
come to look not only to buy. So, it does have a different local role than other art fairs. I also saw the
possibility of trying to recognise the energy of the artists' run and non-commercial, non-government
funded spaces that existed in London, Glasgow and elsewhere. So, there were specific reasons why I
did it.

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- On numerous occasions you discussed how art should have a special place, defended place
in the capitalist system and how the curators role is there to provide that. Providing art for art
fairs seems to me going exactly the opposite way. So, that's why ARCO fell into my eye.

- Maybe you're right but look, that special place is within capitalism anyway, so we have
to work from the same territory as the market anyway. The point is to use the structures against
themselves to some extent, not dumb opposition like we had on the left in the 80s.

- But you know, almost every art fair lately has a special thematic exhibition, special guest
national representation, is inviting young galleries etc.: also Basel and Berlin.

- Not to the same extent as we did. No, really not.

- Do you think that being appointed to positions such as the curator of the Gwangju Biennial,
could be seen as an award for being a loyal and diligent worker within the system? Usually you were
very critical towards the system and getting those positions means: I'm really very much in the
system.

- Yeah Because I don't think there's an outside of the system position. And I've said that
and written about it many times. You know, we're all at the same table. So, I'm not unhappy about
working within the system at all and I don't think that I've ever had a position outside the system I
have always been involved in it, even in the smallest initiatives in Tramway. What we were doing in
Glasgow was trying to a large extent to be noticed by the system. We were also critical of the system,
and not only because we were ignored, but it was reformist rather than revolutionary in its approach.
And I think that's probably the only position that you can adopt as a curator - a kind of reformist one,
rather than a revolutionary one. Because revolution is problematic at the moment though we need
to keep thinking about it.

- And a reformist position is not problematic?

- Of course a reformist position is problematic as well. There's no unproblematic position in

this mess, but I think reformism or, lets say working within the system but also to try to use the tools
that it provides, to offer or create different possibilities, is for me one that I'm happy with. I don't feel

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compromised so much by that because I dont see a productive alternative. But your reward thing is
probably quite true that we are rewarded for good behaviour.

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