Nathalie Zonnenberg
Afterall, issue 38, spring 2015
The following conversation explores the origins of L’Internationale, a confederation of six European museums, and how it functions as an alternative producer of knowledge. Moderated by Nathalie Zonnenberg, the discussion took place on April 4, 2014, in Ghent among the directors of the participating institutions: Zdenka Badovinac, of Moderna galerija (MG+MSUM), Ljubljana; Manuel Borja-Villel, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid (MNCARS); Bart De Baere, Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerpen (M HKA); and Bartomeu Marí, Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA). Charles Esche, from the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, and Vasif Kortun, from SALT, Istanbul, and Ankara sent additional observations.
Nathalie Zonnenberg: L’Internationale is comprised of different types of institutions that came together from various parts of Europe. I’d first like to ask how this configuration of institutions came about.
Zdenka Badovinac: It actually happened by chance. L’Internationale was conceived in 2010 after an unsuccessful bid to the European Cultural Foundation with a program of exhibitions on Conceptual art in Eastern Europe and Latin America. We were refused on the grounds that the form our collaboration would take had not been elaborated well enough, and this made us think seriously about the deficiencies of the existing models of inter-museum collaborations. We decided to give exactly the same attention to the form of our collaboration as to the content of our project in our next application, and we proposed a processual model of exchange rather than one just based on events. We wanted to focus on developing common visions of museum concepts, philosophies and methodologies, and also to look at horizontal collaborations that are not just institutionally organized.
Bartomeu Marí: We also got together because we felt we shared some values that could only be developed in partnership with other institutions, namely collaboration among museums not based on competition, property or ownership. We wanted to promote the notion of a common contemporary cultural heritage at a European level, and there was also a concern about creating another chronology and finding another vocabulary with which to write history, as the dominant Anglo-American model seemed unsuitable to describe our realities.
Bart De Baere: Many of us had worked together before, and there was, and is, a deep sense of trust. We share a dual commitment to society at large and to art and cultural values, and we continuously try to figure out how to combine these two poles in our actions. In some ways, this may be a more important base than the concrete values we promote or the operations we initiate.
ZB: What Bart is saying is very important. Viktor Misiano once said that art history is the history of friendship.1 I met Bart twenty years ago and I invited him to do an exhibition in the Moderna galerija. What I liked about him at that time, which is still present in his personality — although he is sometimes very combative and we don’t agree on many things — is his commitment to artists and to our profession. Our friendship is based on mutual respect of our differences.
NZ: That is a nice definition of art history. Although, as an art historian myself, I have a rather problematic relationship with the discipline of art history.
Manuel Borja-Villel: What you say about art history also goes back to what we share together. We are all art historians, but art history has not always been popular in museums. A few years ago the discipline of cultural studies was everywhere. The tendency was to consider art as an illustration of some general idea, losing therefore all its ambiguity and complexity. It was as if art had been absorbed by culture. This is important, since curating, which is a form of art history — after all, curating starts with Aby Warburg — is not about illustrating, it is about the communication of forms and relationships. As in poetry, what is relevant in curating is not so much the text in itself, in the abstract, but the text in its materiality, the physical act of its reading, its layout, typeface… the space between the lines of Mallarmé. The way in which we understand art history has nothing to do with the grand general history that has been hegemonic in the West for the last hundred years. Rather, we are interested in the contrast between micro- and macro-narratives, and in a history that includes different chronologies and places — a history that the narrator is also part of, since each time that this history is told or represented, it is somehow done anew.
That said, if you analyze the museums of the last hundred years, you will notice that the museums of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries put the emphasis on the objects; the museums of the late twentieth century emphasized archives; and now everyone is emphasizing the public, the community and education. It’s as if you had an orchestra, and you moved from the instruments to the score to the performers. Obviously these changes are not neutral. They clearly correspond to the move from a society organized around the factory and the production of goods to another, structured around consumption and cognitive labor. Today our own experiences and affects have become commodities. The general trend towards the performative has to do with these changes in society, as does the current emphasis on the ‘user’. We have to be aware of such ambiguities and the fact that often we are part of what we criticize, or that we might think we are developing progressive policies when in fact we are not. This acknowledgment and continuous self-reflection need to be fundamental in a structure such as L’Internationale, as I see it, if we want to keep our autonomy and independence.
NZ: How do you respond to these changes as a confederation?
MBV: As institutions we are part of the world system. Today there is a general tendency towards the privatization of culture, health and education. The majority of governments in Europe are abandoning the idea of public service. That is a fact. Education and health are now areas thought of in terms of business. Culture has been substituted by the cultural industries. This means basically two things. First, public institutions can no longer compete with the forces of the market, or at least not in a position of equality. Second, museums are organized more and more according to criteria that have to do with management efficiency rather than with the timing and procedures of education or art. It is evident that managers are replacing art historians and curators as the heads of institutions. Between the globalized world of the market and a society ruled by an administrative regime, we have to find a space of resistance, a space in common. There is also an element of urgency in this: together we are stronger and we need muscle at a time when the market and bureaucracy are so strong. You need the strength — the legal strength — of being together.
Charles Esche: Manuel is right when he says we are stronger together, but the question is, what do we want to do with our strength? Many museums use their strength to achieve more power or to ensure the survival of the institution. I don’t think that is our aim. It is rather to see how a strong platform of art can join in a more general discourse about where we are going, about how we choose to read and understand history and where we place Europe in the emerging global narrative. If museums are more focused on their publics these days, it is because they are becoming more storytelling machines than the preservation machines of the past. It is not enough to simply keep the objects of modernity in good condition. If we use them, we project a view of the world — different views in each of our locations — but we also have to be attentive to each other’s narratives as well as to those from outside.
NZ: If I may go back a little bit to one of your main motivations, one of the reasons that this initiative came about was dissatisfaction with how some of the bigger institutions are functioning. As you suggest, there is concern about the collection policies of franchise-based institutions like Tate or the Guggenheim. Could you elaborate on the implications of this effect?
CE: It is worthwhile distinguishing between Tate and the Guggenheim, though both are dominant in their fields — the one in England, the other in terms of global franchise. Recently, a CEO in Eindhoven said publicly that he would rather have one Guggenheim franchise than ten Van Abbemuseums. He was not interested in supporting a ‘local’ museum but only one that could guarantee international quality. Obviously, that is the logic of financial capital — which is committed to reproduction — but in art we should try to follow other necessities. As far as the collection policies of those institutions are concerned, there is a degree of imperial assertion in saying, as one Tate curator did, that ‘London is a global city that everyone can come to’ and therefore Tate is right to build an extensive Middle East or South America collection. They both reinforce the old idea of center and periphery and even the idea of a universal museum. The Eindhoven CEO then reproduces that model.
BDB: By their own nature institutions become self-serving machines: the more successful they are, the larger their engine becomes. How can we keep the intensity — which is the only life of art — going, and how do we avoid becoming trapped in our own institutional logic? In Europe, it is in the medium-sized institutions that contemporary art has historically been propelled forward; this intensity was there, and may still be there. That’s what you can do better when you remain specific and grounded. You can gain a better, more precise, more intense image if you work from plurality. If you bring in different perspectives, you find ways to meet and you end up with something that is much more interesting — and that is very urgent for these times.
NZ: Why is it urgent?
MBV: The reality of our time is that knowledge in general is a problem for society. Our society has economic benefit as its main goal, not education or the general well-being. This is so even to the point of self-destruction, to the point of not caring about anything else. The societal system is, in that sense, absolutely non-ecological. And since public money is progressively withdrawing as the main source of income, smaller institutions, which do not have the visibility of the big ones, will have a harder time surviving. But we cannot have a cultural system based only on big museums, producing one major exhibition of a major — popular — name after another. It does not matter how open these institutions are — a healthy society requires a plurality of voices, difference in contexts, constant interpellation.
Vasif Kortun: The network itself is a challenge when as classical institutions we are built as departments and fortresses, inner sanctums and facades. To probe these spaces in between asks for abandoning a proprietary understanding of one’s institution, maintaining an openness and readiness for a changeover. We can at times become our own worst enemies in our reticence to act together — we lose the capacity to consult a potential collective intelligence. The urgency is not for the network alone but for other comparable networks internationally.
CE: It is also urgent because we are losing biodiversity in the art world. Look at the commercial gallery structure: they are becoming like the big music labels or major publishing houses in the 1970s. The internet is not yet troubling them much. If museums go the same way, we will need a punk revolution to overthrow them. What preserves museum diversity is local funding and expectations, but, as I know in Eindhoven, some politicians and funders want to reproduce public success by importing it from elsewhere.
MBV: Together with the lack of public funding, the need to get support from private corporations — that often also have collections and certainly have their own agendas — makes it difficult to keep a separation between the private and public spheres, and to maintain the latter’s independence from the market. Of course, it is not much better when public institutions behave as if they were private, looking always for benefit in terms of visibility, tourism, etc. That is why we should no longer think in terms of the private or public but of the common. We should insist in fundraising laws that contemplate solidarity between institutions. Culture represents power both private and public; it is linked to real estate, to market and bureaucracy; it could also be a form of keeping people entertained. Major institutions often fall into the trap of the spectacle as they need more and more money to keep the machinery running. But an ecosystem can only survive when there is an articulation of spaces and structures of different scales and forms of organization. The need to look for new forms of institutionalism is imperative. We must be very clear about why our institutions are relevant. Not only in terms of conserving the heritage, but of being engines for knowledge and transformation.
NZ: Your concern with current developments in society is clearly an important motivation for the new forms of institutionalism you are trying to instigate. Could you be more specific about what kinds of strategies you are developing to provoke transformation?
BDB: The primary strategy is that you stick to the aspiration of public service. You have to, you are forced to see the relativity of the public’s relation to the state — in that the public is not necessarily the state, and the state is privatizing itself. On the other hand, there are foundations or NGOs that are, technically speaking, private but actually offer public services. It is important to continue to develop what you think society needs if art wants to remain an energy within it.
ZB: At the Moderna galerija, we come from a different context, that of the margin. What is produced here can easily serve the power of those who have the means to accumulate knowledge, and that is mostly rich Western institutions. To be more specific, I’ll use the example of the historization of the art of Eastern Europe. Over the last two decades, a lot of knowledge on the art traditions in Eastern Europe has been locally produced. But since there is still no proper infrastructure in our countries, this knowledge is easily incorporated into some other art system, which puts us, again, in a subordinate position. Therefore, one of the crucial questions for us is how to empower ourselves with our own knowledge in international dialogues. Our interest in this network is to remain sovereign in this process of historization and in the international exchange of knowledge. It’s not about keeping exclusive rights to historizing our own culture, but rather about having the possibility to operate with our own symbolic capital in the international world. If we lose this sovereignty, then the symbolic capital goes to the centers that accumulate power.
MBV: We live in a moment in which we are not only deprived of our labor, but of our knowledge and research as well. Thus, it is important to note that L’Internationale is not just about us telling our story and being able to tell it. It is also about ‘the others’ telling how they perceive their position in the world and how they perceive ours. There are very clear examples of big institutional machineries buying archives or collections and constraining the possibility for historical research, often limiting actual access to them, even for those from the country from which the archive derives. When the Getty, for example, acquires an archive they might not lend you all the material from it because they keep some of the things ‘in reserve’, for their own research. Or, they charge administrative fees — in a way, you have to pay for your own work. Also, the cataloging is done according to certain criteria on the nature of the document, on history and art, or the borrower might be forced to display the things in certain ways — this often becomes a political issue, an issue of hegemony and power.
NZ: We are now talking about the type of knowledge that you are producing and the way you are doing it. What I sense, in all of you, is that L’Internationale is still very much about art historical research in terms of challenging the canon. Bartomeu, your text in the L’Internationale publication is a very precise analysis of how canonization works.2 It is clear that the canon as we know it can only exist by means of an authoritative institution. How the Getty Foundation works, or how the bigger institutions work, in terms of collaboration between academics and institutions, is very important in this sense. It is about power structures; the bigger institutions write their own canon. But then again, every institution can write its own canon — like you suggest: it starts with the collection, the works that are being kept. So in this combining of forces, you are writing parallel or alternative narratives or histories. But aren’t you also making use of the same strategies by which the authoritative canon is constructed?
BDB: No, I don’t agree. Everyone can propose a canon, but if you continue to think like this, the question that follows is the extent to which that canon becomes part of a hegemonic system. We want to move beyond this paradigm and think instead in terms of plurality and the capacity for shared understanding. If that’s the aspiration, the exercises in the construction of a canon gain a different status; they’re a tool for exchange and sharing. In that sense, it is not about ending up with something, it’s about a performative understanding of knowledge, according to which heritage or anything we carry on as societies always has to be continued. Its beauty is in its being rethought, re-enacted, brought up over and over again. Our political position towards archives is symbolic of that. If the choice is between M HKA acquiring an archive as a donation or its staying with the people who are engaged with it and its being kept in the public domain, even if they privately own it, we prefer the second possibility. This is also what Reina Sofía has been trying to do: to assist this kind of public aspiration in society. In that sense it is not about the canon, but about an active plurality.
MBV: Canon or counter-canon is not the issue. That is too modernistic, it tries to disclose a truth, and our proposal is not about that. The separation of research, academics, theory — I have always hated it. Also between the artistic or scholarly side of the museum and its management. We have to break with this modern — modern since the seventeenth century — idea of subject against subject, or the subjective versus the objective, etc. It’s about something else — about relationships, about being in common, and not about absorbing one into the other.
CE: If anything, it is about displacing power and pluralizing the canon. Manuel’s point about the inadequacies of modernist thinking for today is really crucial. The art world in general has yet to respond to the end of modernity in terms of its structures and belief systems. Given the origins of all our institutions, this transition out of the ‘modern’ is hard and it is very unclear what a new progressive paradigm might look like. But all our efforts are in different ways engaged in this problem and how we can embrace it and yet maintain what we feel we need from the old system.
NZ: I wanted to emphasize the mechanics of canonization; indeed, it’s not about the canon or counter-canon. I believe the canon is a living thing, and you are all contributing to that canon.
ZB: I agree, we still think of canon in terms of the way canons were produced in the past, as functioning in a kind of dialectical way. For example, non-official art in Eastern Europe was completely marginalized until the communist regimes collapsed, when it became known and of interest to the Western market. And today we could say that it has become the canon. This non-official art is the only art associated with Eastern Europe today, despite there being many other practices that remain completely unknown and not part of any system, such as the so-called ideological art — that is, art that was official in the socialist period but then fell into neglect with the collapse of the regime.
BDB: Of course you can canonize everything. We are, for example, preparing a project with Robert Filliou that in some way also adds to his canonization, but we should be aware of the fact that canonization poses a tension to art in a lot of cases. The market in the last ten years has entered all the domains that were explicitly anti-canonical — concrete poetry, visual poetry, experimental cinema.
MBV: Sometimes we are sympathetic to the ‘other’ figures because we cannot economically, in terms of budget, be sympathetic to the major canonical artists. For example, Picasso. During the 1920s and 30s, his work dealt with many issues that are as relevant today as they were then: private space as space of possession, theatricality and absorption, biography, etc.3 You can see how he understood very clearly the changes that society was going through at the time and the changing role of the artist in it. But, as happens with the archives, museums very often behave as if the works in their collections were their own private property, making the conditions for loans very difficult and depriving everybody else (notably those institutions with no comparable collections to be used in exchange) of the possibility of constructing their narratives. In terms of museums, we have to begin to substitute the notion of property for that of custody.
VK: There may be some comfort in that sort of economic deprivation. Most institutions are deprived of ideas and turn the canonical into merely an autarky, like the rehang of the permanent collection at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The question of canon for us at SALT is how often we can irritate it. We are not keen on fixing categories, but in proposing other ideas, expecting that the rest of culture will take care of fixing them. There is, however, the potential that each instant of ‘re-evaluation’ may be followed by a process of marketization, entering immediately the network of cynical institutions. If you have a forceful argument about the importance of a work, an artist or an archive, you must also anticipate an ecology for them. Otherwise, museums become incubators for the market, and in order to survive have to incessantly consume new geographies, underappreciated artists and the next genius. Canon, for all the skepticism it generates, is not what it used to be. As sardonic as it may sound, ‘brand’ would be a more proper term.
BDB: The reason we would want more canonical, self-canonizing artists in M HKA is because then we could do with them what Reina Sofía is doing with Guernica. Of course this is a canonical work. The first time I saw it in Spain it was behind a big glass case in an isolated, huge room. It was like the Mona Lisa! What is Reina Sofía doing now? It has placed it in its original setting of an anti-Fascist protest, in the heart of public sociocultural and cultural-political questions, offering the capacity to question it as a living work of art.4 I think that’s amazing!
ZB: I think it is important to realize that an artwork is not only part of an absolute canon; it can easily enter another
vasıf kortun 