With Great Power comes Great responsibility

A bit of a delay in this update as last week I spent a few days in Munich with the other research fellows from the International Curators program. The idea behind the program is actually very cool; to infiltrate German collections with non-German curators as a way to introduce new ideas and discourses into these institutions. Of course there is always the critique that maybe we are somehow being instrumentalised and used as agents to re-inforce these institutions from within, but in this case I would say this does not seem like the dominant intention. Both the way the fellowship is run (with what feels like genuine freedom for the fellows) and the choice of other fellows (friendly but fairly fiercely independent individuals) has, so far, convinced me of the integrity of the program.

And it was very cool to personally meet the other fellows on the program. Working at very different institutions such as the Natural History Museum in Berlin, the Medical Research centre in Dresden and the Deutsches Museum in Munich, on projects which are very different in nature, ranging from participant observation of museum visitors, to archival research to the actual practical implementation of an exhibition, we are all somehow still faced with similar challenges. How, as an individual researcher, do you work with a large institution? How to maintain the integrity of your ideas in an ecology of bureaucracy? How to keep your process and research open and engaged with a larger research community? And then there were of course the other, perhaps less important but maybe more significant stories about the crazy paperwork and rituals to complete the contract. The whole thing was a bit like a mixture between the good bits in an academic conference (tea breaks) and what I imagine a Peace Corps ‘Rest and Recuperation’ week to be like.

This ‘academy’ as the meeting of the fellows was called, took place within the context of the yearly (i believe?) meeting of the Deutsches Museumbund (German Museum Organisation). I have to say here, that I cannot give a fair analysis of this 4 day meeting as my German is still not perfect. I had the impression that some of the lectures were pretty interesting. But by far the strongest impression was of the homogeneity of this community. The hall where we met was full with about 500 almost entirely white, largely male and mostly over 50 years old, Museum personnel. I’m not sure if you can describe a group of people as monolithic, but if you can, than this is a time I would. And from what I could glean from the presentations, and from what other fellows told me, the dominant ideology was certainly not ‘lets tear down the walls of the museums and radically re-invent this institution’. Which, I suppose is understandable, but it did make me wonder how all of the fellow researchers are going to fare in this world..

We also visited quite a few museums, some of which were just great. Particularly cool was the Lenbachhaus, an art museum with a brilliant collection of works by Die Blaue Reiter, as well as a  significant post 1945 collection (a bit too much Beuys, but that is just personal prejudice speaking). It has just re-opened after a resculpting session by Norman Fosters, who has dropped a very beautiful architectural appendage onto the original building. But what most struck me was the way the paintings are presented inside. Of course paintings are different from reproductions, but I was not prepared for the hallucinatory brilliance of the colours, of the ‘objectness’ of these paintings. Often presented on coloured walls, in intimate-sized rooms with genius use of natural light, they have both been treated, and elicit, a real reverence. In one room the paintings of Die Blaue Reiter are even shown on a brown silk background, apparently how they were originally installed. Both the moiree pattern of the silk and the way it seems to both absorb and reflect light made it an amazing backdrop/environment within which to see the paintings.

Also very cool was going into the archives of the Haus der Kunst. Going ‘backstage’ is always exciting, and this was particularly so in the context of a building and institution with such a difficult history like the Haus der Kunst. Originally named the Haus der Deutsche Kunst, it was built in the early 1930s and exhibits the typical grandiose and intimidating elements of Third Reich architecture. Huge columns outside and cavernous rooms inside which were intended to show the ‘beauty’ of German culture. The bunker underneath, with a 3 metre thick re-inforced concrete ceiling, is evidence of the increasing militarisation of the time. It seems that Hitler took a very personal interest in this project and apparently spent almost as much buying art here as the whole building cost. We saw a ledger entrance in the financial accounts of the Haus for 1.3 million marks in one year alone. So, certainly a cultural institution with a loaded past. But, it also seems to be a place with a certain dynamism in its contemporary approach. For many years after 1945 the architecture of the main hall was masked; the marble columns painted white and a fake ceiling installed. In the 2003 a period of ‘critical reconstruction‘ began, returning the Haus to its former state, to try to engage with, rather than hide, that history. This process continues today under the leadership of Okwui Enwezor.

On one of our tours we were informed that there are more museums in the ‘kunstarreal’ square kilometre in Munich than in any other square kilometre in the world. Impressive, in a way, but the feeling I had when walking around the cluster of Museums at Königsplatz is of how these museums and this cultural heritage became the scenography of a very specific Third Reich narrative of German History as has been seared into my, and perhaps a collective, memory by the films of Leni Riefenstahl. As Adam Curtis says in his documentary The Living Dead, Nazi propaganda intended to create a sense in the German people that they came from a great past and were going to a great future. Part of this process involved appropriating what were deemed ‘appropriate’ symbols of German culture and identity for their own means. In some ways has been so successful that I think many non-Germans find it hard to separate these layers of History. But what I learned in Munich is that Königsplatz and the museums there (the Glyptothek, the Propylea and the State Museum of Classical Art) existed long before the Nazi’s added instrumentalised this space and history (adding two ‘Honor Temples’  which were demolised in 1945).  These are amongst the earliest museums built in Europe (early to mid 19th century) were the brainchild of Ludwig I of Bavaria, a dedicated patron of culture who even wrote the first museum guide.

You could argue that Ludwig I was also appropriating culture for his own means, and of course patrony, power and culture have a deeply incestuous relationship. But there is something very very different between using culture to reinforce your power and the total choreography of ‘Germanness’ to support a fascist ideology. But these competing histories make Königsplatz a fascinating space, a very psychogeographic space. On one level, you can see the multiple strata of histories, different buildings from different epochs which in turn, visually echo previous epochs. Nazi buildings (now ruins) which harked back to the ‘German’ greatness of Ludwig I epoch, which itself was echoing the Acropolis in its Neoclassical style. And on the other, less tangible, perceived emotional level, (from my perspective anyway) there is this dominant present of one history, of the ideology of the Third Reich.

So what am I actually saying? That history and culture, both physically represented in museums and archives, can be manipulated for political means. That is no great revelation. But I suppose I am saying that sometimes those ideologies are obvious, and sometimes they are less palpable. Munich as a city has been re-inventing itself since 1945, I think very successfully. There seems to be a critical openness to it’s past that most cities in the world have not engaged with (London springs to mind). But the wealth of the city is palpable and the infrastructural apparatus in the cultural sector quite amazing. So I suppose I am just idly wondering what this all means? The cultural sector, and specifically museums as an articulation of history, are obviously not innocent institutions. But is there an invisible ideology that underpins this? Am I part of it? If so, how can I be sensitive to this? Can I invent a kind of Geiger counter for Ideology, a beeping box in my pocket that warns me when I am serving the interests of power. I guess it would beep quite a lot..

I’m not a conspiracist, well, maybe a meta-conspiracist (the only conspiracy theory which appeals is that maybe conspiracy theories themselves exist to give us the delusion of choice) but I do like to wonder. And I am wondering about my role is in this museum matrix. What am I lending my brain to? I believe that unused collections in dusty storerooms in archives and museums are dead and pointless. But at the same time, I am very wary about how you can make these live. Making musuems ‘relevant’ is not something that is without risks. True, I am working at a space that deals with African culture, so it would be difficult to use this collection to catalyse German nationalism. Or maybe not. But, is it silly to think about what the connections between our Mashup the Archive project and contemporary geopolitics might be? Is it going to far to think that there is a relationship between what we do in Bayreuth and the increasing potential of contemporary Africa as a market? Did I read Binyavanga Wainaina’s correctly today when he  posted on facebook a wikipedia article about the (nineteenth century phenomenon known as) The Scramble for Africa.

Idle perambulations of the mind…

 

 

For the archives 29.04.2013

Video documentation of seminar 29.04.2013. For topics see tags

The truth is out there

In our flurry of research last week after the first seminar session of Mashup the Archive, Nadine and I both stumbled upon a review of a new biography of the late David Foster Wallace. It’s a great article, and the author seems to use the biography as a springboard into the topic of what is post ironic. One of the points he makes is that the ravaged and recovering ex-alcoholics and ex-drug addicts in the AA and NA meetings that feature so prominently in Infinite Jest, Foster Wallace’s novel, seem to constitute an idealised audience. An audience who simply do not tolerate cynicism, ambiguity and fake sincerity. Weirdly enough, he then quotes one of the scenes that I distinctly remember from the 1000 page book;
“The thing is it has to be the truth to really go over, here. It can’t be a calculated crowd-pleaser, and it has to be the truth unslanted, unfortified. And maximally unironic. An ironist in a Boston AA meeting is a witch in church. Irony-free zone. Same with sly disingenuous manipulative pseudo-sincerity. Sincerity with an ulterior motive is something these tough ravaged people know and fear, all of them trained to remember the coyly sincere, ironic self-presenting fortifications they’d had to construct in order to carry on Out There, under the ceaseless neon bottle.”
Hype aside, Infinite Jest is an awesome book. It is also a very difficult book to describe, but the strongest sensation I had whilst reading it, is that it is kind of like a self-help book. Of course not a “10 steps to happiness” book, but at the same time, there is a “guide” like element to it. And a lot of it seems to rest on this idea that reality can be described, that the post-modern fog that we stagger around in is overrated, that cliche’s should not just be discarded because they are cliches. This jars with the very core of most intelligent people’s self. If I had to summarise I would say doubt rather than certainty, suspicion rather than hope, suggestive rather than definitive and versions as opposed to singleness would seem to be the dominant traits of the intellectual tradition.
Foster Wallace seems to be proposing another way entirely and uses Don Gately (he is the don, definitely my hero) a recovering substance abuse addict, and worker at Ennet House, the halfway house for recovering addicts to interrogate this through his experience at the Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. Initially Don finds the cliched phrases, the rhetoric and the mantras literally unbearable, and as a reader, so do you (or so did I). But slowly, through determined repetition of the language and rituals of AA, even getting on his knees to pray to a higher being each night, he seems to recover his self, his memories and his dreams.
I am not a recovering addict and I don’t think I could hack AA for more than a few minutes. I am deeply allergic to  insitutionalised rhetoric and I tend to bolt from meetings that have a slight scent of it. But, I feel Don Gately. In this novel Foster Wallace creates an immersive environment where Don Gately’s “conversion”, for want of a better word, just makes sense. I write about this now as I think for Contemporary Art in general and the Mashup the Archive project in particular, it seems so relevant. Both the style and content of Infinite Jest seem to suggest that conscious, intelligent, subtle and provocative cultural production does not need to operate purely on the basis of the references that it makes. Infinite Jest is often dense, long, constantly changes narrator, timescale, location, is set largely in the future and has 100 pages of footnotes, but is by no means inaccessible. And time and time again we return to the AA meetings, to the audience scanning for authenticity, to the ‘performers’ gripped with the delirium of re-delivered sobriety.
Far from the intertextuality of Contemporary Art, or certainly the art of the Nicholas Bourriaud’s stable, where reception of the cultural production seems to be contingent on knowing and deciphering the code of references. Having said that, in our seminar on Monday for the first time I was struck by how differently artists use artworks that preceded them. I think this is largely personal and I did not get a good sense of how coherent these feelings were within the group, but there seemed to be a whole ocean that seperated the intention of Rikrit Tiravanija’s work Untitled | Glass House (1997) and the work of Pierre Hughye Light Conical Intersect (1996)
Tiravanija rebuilt a classical modernist house of Phillip Johnson, in mini, in plexiglass. The images that we saw showed children colouring the walls with crayons. This use of both scale and material seems to suggest a somewhat a deeply cynical and derisory position to the referenced work, perhaps to the modernist project in general. I had an overwhelming sensation of either a lack of integrity on behalf of the artist, or a pointed dismissal of the referenced work. Hughye, by contrast, projected the filmed documentation that Matta-Clark took of his architectual intervention “Conical Intersect” on a wall of a nearby building to the original piece. I’m not sure if it is the use of original material of the artist and using original location but this work seemed to me much more of a homage than a reference, a celebration rather than allusion, a re-enactment, but still something new. Incidentally, in searching for images on Rikrit I found another person suspicious of his intentions and highlighting his very transactable art..
Which brings us back to the issue of our archive. On the one hand, how can we work with all the objects, the music, the films and the artworks in this archive and use them in a way that our audience can receive and experience this new artwork without necessarily having to know what the previous one’s were? And, on the other hand, how can we use this work with integrity, to respect both these works and their producers? If we bear in mind that this is an archive, not an art historical canon (although of course it is a canon of sorts) and that I imagine that not all the artists who are represented here even know that their works are here, this issue of respect becomes even more prevalent.
Which is why, even although it may seem tangental, the position of Foster Wallace is both important and pertinent to this specific project. Returning to the article again;
“But how does a novelist actually get outside the familiar stance of “self-consciousness and hip fatigue,” as Wallace puts it? How can he lodge a more powerful criticism of his television-enthralled times, a criticism that takes into account the corrosive effects of television-stoked cynicism itself? The experience of addiction and recovery allows Wallace to be able to imagine a situation—a type of private experience—in which dropping one’s self-protective ironic stance might be a pressing matter of survival. Through the stories of his addicted characters in Infinite Jest, Wallace dramatizes the moral urgency of simplicity and sincerity, and the potential hazards of overintellectualization and cynicism.”
How can we approach these works with sincerity and simplicity? It’s a difficult question and I don’t really imagine we will find one answer (hear my non Foster Wallacian tone..) Strangely enough, a couple of days after the seminar I was given an inkling of an idea. For Walpurgisnacht (which interestingly nobody seemed to be able to really explain to me, but everybody knew it had something to do with witches; it seems to be a traditional spring festival with its roots in pre-christian beliefs such as Beltane) we went to the Harley Davidson Freunde (Harley Davidson Friends Club?) in Bayreuth to see a Rockabilly band The Brassbound Rockets. I’m neither a huge Harley nor Rockabilly fan, but Bayreuth is a bit subculture-lite and it was next door to where we were screen-printing. So we went in.
It was very fun. Outside, it was drizzling and dark, inside was marginally warmer but still damp. The farm outhouse was draped with urban camouflage netting (around the inside walls) and 100-150 bikers were starting to rock out. But then, imagine these bikers were a mashup of families, hells angels, gay couples, polish, german and american biker fractions; there was a real plurality in this single subculture and a feeling that this music and these values seemed to make real sense for everyone there. I couldn’t imagine anyone there getting into dixie music next season; this wasn’t a trend but a passion. This wasn’t a self-conscious acknowledgement of previous culture, a knowing reference to a former cultural expression but something that had been adopted and made into their own. And, tellingly, even if I wasn’t part of the gang, neither was I made to feel unwelcome. I never had the feeling that the bikers having fun meant that I couldn’t.
I think this is an interesting example of how to re-inhabit art and culture from another time, with sincerity and integrity and I guess it is interesting to bare in mind for Mashup. It also made me think of the link from Nadine to Semionaut’s article on revivalism. And, incidentally, for the Infinite Jest fans there was a great character, Pontus J Back that reminded me of one of the bikers in the book.