Metropolis M, special edition, summer 2001
POST-ALTERNATIVES, Critical Strategies
Charles Esche, Lisette Smits and Franck Larcade are three curators working as directors of different art institutions in different European cities. The Frenchman Franck Larcade is the director of Consonni, an institution for contemporary artistic production in Bilbao, that develops art projects within the socio-political landscape of the Basque Country. Charles Esche has been the head of Tramway Gallery and was one of the founders of The Modern Institute in Glasgow. Just recently he became the director of the Rooseum in Malmö, a venue for contemporary art in Sweden, while simultaneously in Scotland he is running the proto-academy, an initiative that was set up in conjunction with Edinburgh College of Art. he is also an editor of 'Afterall'. Lisette Smits is based in Utrecht, where she is the director of Casco, developing projects that challenge prevailing presentation models of art, and the editor of 'Casco Issues'. While all three share an interest in developing a critical programme stressing the 'alternative', this conversation focuses on their practice in the context of their respective local cultural-political realities. But despite these geographical differences, the main issue being discussed here is whether, in the light of global capitalism, alternative strategies and structures can be maintained at all.
Lisette Smits: 'Nowadays the formulation of a critical approach in the art field no longer seems to be at stake. Culture has been extensively capitalised, and economy has been fully 'culturalised'. One even speaks of a 'depoliticised society'. How does this relation between economy and culture effect critical artistic production?'
Charles Esche: I think we need to see the depoliticised cultural voice as a product of systemic forces in capitalism. However, even knowing this doesn't get us very far because, as you say, the idea of a critical cultural activity is swallowed up by this system as soon as it is articulated. So critique takes the form of effete, ironic parody or hopeless frustration - and much art of the 1980s and 1990s didn't bother with the critique at all but simply tried to make its way in the marketplace. I think there are partial solutions, like 'engaged autonomy' - which basically means using the license of cultural funding and capitalism's toleration of non-economic production methods within art making, to suggest small-scale , modest proposals about the production and distribution of wealth, information, skills, intelligence, secrets, physical assets and social capacities. It may also mean lying low or using diversionary tactics to displace the centre of attention. It is also temporal rather than spatial in effect - that is, some kind of alternative could exist for moments in time but cannot be maintained in space, it has to change constantly.'
Franck Larcade; 'Recently , several projects that we developed with artists in Consonni analysed copyright procedures and intellectual protection. It would really be a mistake to translate this interest of artists in economic fields into a traditional art concept, because it is tremendously political anyway. It constitutes a real possibility for the cultural and art field to interfere, alter, modify, and maybe even revolutionise the way both new capitalism and the art market are organised. Invention and copyrights, two areas that I feel are the fields in which culture and economy, artists and managers can meet, compete and struggle. This is why we must work with the real - good and bad - structures that society is offering us.
Esche: 'What effect does working outside the art centres of New York, London, Berlin have on your practice?'
Larcade; 'If I were member of the Basque Government I wouldn't appreciate a question like that because of the million of pesetas that were spent on building the Guggenheim Museum in order to turn into a world art centre! Bilbao is a typical example of an over-politicised place where the language you use, the way you use it, the way you dress and act has significance in the everyday political landscape. Working in a place like that instead of New York means getting involved in an non-consesual area where art, culture and economy still have a role in the construction of the future without being already inscribed into cultural policies. That is why Consonni exists in Bilbao and could never operate in Paris.'
Smits: 'Contemporary society leaves no possibility of an outside position - that is, we live in an era that is so much determined by technology and information that we cannot distinguish 'outside' or 'inside', 'periphery' or 'centre'. Even if Utrecht is not London id not Johannesburg, we are facing the same dominant ideology of a capitalist global economy in every part of the world. What happens in London is bound to effect what happens in other parts of the world. This is what the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek calls the 'political neutrality of economy'. So how can we re-invent political space in this era of globalisation? This is for me an important question. Why is it so difficult?'
Esche: ' I think we are right to point to the impossibility of an 'outside' position. But that doesn't mean the end of critique or the de-politicisation of the human condition - that is just a tactical manoeuvre we are driven to make by rightist philosophers and market advocates. Maybe one way towards finding this political space inside the existing system is through artistic projects and the space they allow for experimentation, though I think there are also others like certain kinds of direct activism and distribution, and these are increasingly linked to the art projects we all help to produce.'
Smits:'I am more and more interested in refusal as a form of more or less subtle resistance. In a seminar on 'Democratic Design', Casco recently organised, a speaker was talking about 'slack attack'. Slack Attack presupposes an indirect subversion of working time as for instance when employees use the internet for private activities in the boss' s time. The Kafkaesque situation that control is incorporated in the mind and body of the individual is here reversed into the idea that the private mind of the individual is incorporating control. I think the idea of boredom as opposed to busyness is becoming a real issue.'
Larcade: 'There are alternative forms of resistance. The Consonni project of Hinrich Sachs (March 2001) consisted of the organisation of an international auction of Basque Typefaces, its software and copyrights. It seems that nowadays the widespread phenomenon of copyrights demonstrates an excessive influence of market strategies in the field of immaterial property. Hinrich Sachs' project dealt with this issue. Basque typefaces were used for centuries by everyone as a public good, but last year someone translated their forms into digital formats. A new format for each letter generated new copyrights registered by the author. By organising an international auction, Hinrich Sachs was opening a wide debate through which a private person or a company could determine the status of this cultural heritage by participating in the auction - being kept as a public good or being turned into a private product. By the way, one can start wondering whether Basque symbols - like typefaces, flags, games etc. - are signs of identity or corporate images? Do they nowadays belong to the culture or the economy?
Smits: 'What are then the current necessity and function of alternative structures? What position can we take working within the non profit institutions we are involved with?
Esche: 'Is there really such a thing as an alternative when we all work within the same exchange system? This is such an involved but vital question for us as individuals. I think a position which might again be described as 'engaged autonomy' in relation to organisations we are paid by and are committed to is important. This might mean trying to find a somewhat detached or ironic relationship to our work as curators or organisers and also an awareness that an institution has its own agenda, which isn't necessarily one's own - however close it feels. But you have to understand that I'm saying this because I got my fingers badly burned by forgetting about the distance between me and an institution. I think this is also about the kind of critical atmosphere you choose to create within an institution amongst your colleagues. Conversation rather than communication and an emphasis on finding time to look at, think about and gather opinions on work that is being considered are obvious requirements but are too often overlooked.'
Larcade: 'I prefer to present myself as a producer more than a curator and from that point of view, a first step consists of assuming that every element of the project - economic, legal, material - is part of it, as well as the conceptual aspects. Every choice means something for the project. Where will the money come from? What can be done with it? I often say that the first choice as an artistic act of the artists, consists in deciding on how to use the money for a project. I don't know why I am orienting my answers so much towards money questions, but I can't think the notion of independence without relating it to economic dependence! Consonni tries not to depend on only one public or private entity.'
Smits: 'I once stated that I consider myself a dependent rather than an independent curator. To me the term independent curator sounds to free of obligations; a situation like that doesn't exist anyway. To call yourself a dependent means that all you do is related to the context in which you work, from persons to politics to money; dependency as something between responsibility and engagement . Between those lines, in the middle of negotiation, I think you can capture enormous freedom, as so many things are not determined. I am interested in the effects that art can produce, and for this reason I sometimes think that art is just a perfect excuse for entering other fields and peaking about other things.
more info:
www.consonni.org
www.protoacademy.org
www.rooseum.org