Exhibition as School as Work of Art
- Anton Vidokle / Martha Rosler -
Unitednationsplaza is exhibition as school. I realize that this sounds somewhat paradoxical, yet it’s the only way to describe the project that was intended to start as a biennial (Manifesta 6), scheduled to take place on Cyprus in Nicosia in the fall of 2006. Instead, after much turmoil, it was realized as an independent temporary school in Berlin, and then crossed the Atlantic to continue under the name Night School at the New Museum in New York as an artist’s commission.
Despite being an artist rather than a curator, I was invited to join the curatorial team of Florian Waldvogel and Mai Abu ElDahab to develop the concept for Manifesta 6. Our thinking at the time was: why do another biennial? We felt that the incredible proliferation and monotony of such events has largely rendered them meaningless: while at a certain point they offer an alternative to the conservatism of art museums, in recent years, biennials have started to resemble white-elephant-type government projects that largely drain local budgets for cultural production, while offering a rather formulaic digest of participants and content. We decided to use the budget, resources and network of the exhibition to start a temporary art school. There were several reasons why we were interested in a school model rather than an exhibition. Perhaps a discussion of these reasons could shed some light on the relationships between art institutions, curatorial approaches and artistic practice today.
It is sufficient to list the titles of some recent large-scale international art exhibitions—for example, The Production of Cultural Difference (3rd Istanbul Biennial) or Critical Confrontation with the Present (documenta X)—to point out that there is a strong desire on the part of the organizers and participants of these shows to see their work as transformative social projects rather then merely symbolic gestures. Such language and positioning has become the norm, and it now seems that artistic practice is automatically expected to play an active part in society. But is an exhibition—no matter how ambitious—the most effective vehicle for such engagement?
In 1937, André Breton and Diego Rivera (and, it is believed, Leon Trotsky) wrote the manifesto “For an Independent Revolutionary Art.” They called for a “true art, which is not content to play variations on ready-made models, but rather insists on expressing the inner needs of man and mankind in its time—true art is unable not to be revolutionary, not to aspire to a complete and radical reconstruction of society.” 1 What may appear to be a naive call for all-or-nothing revolution includes a subtle and important justification for that demand: that we, as artists, curators, writers need to engage with society in order to create certain freedoms—to produce the conditions necessary for creative activity to take place at all.
But what precisely does it mean, the desire that art and artists should engage with all aspects of social life? Is it merely a democratic impulse to open up the places of art, a desire to bring art out of rarefied and privileged spaces and into more “real” contexts, or is it a move towards the further instrumentalization of art practice by assigning to it a concrete social use value?
Public exhibitions of art started at the time of the French Revolution. What actually happened was that the King of France was evicted from his home, the Louvre, and executed along with his queen. Shortly thereafter, a part of the palace—the Salon Carré—became the first fully public exhibition hall of painting and sculpture by contemporary artists. 2
The audience for this salon show was, in a sense, the first real “public”: a group comprised of citizen-subjects who had just violently gained political power and instituted the first republic. The works in this exhibition did not contain any explicitly politically or socially engaged art but rather traditional paintings of landscapes, nudes, mythological and religious motifs, etc. Yet the actual experience of being able to enter the royal palace to view art was surely political and was intimately connected to the Revolution taking place at the time. Perhaps attending the exhibition was no different from voting or going to a public hospital or visiting a state ministry for the first time—all part of the new political agency that citizens experienced, which allowed them to truly shape their communities and change them via political means.
What is of real importance here is that perhaps this situation simultaneously created new and unprecedented positions and opportunities both for artistic practice and for art institutions: the presence of the public for the first time offered artists the potential to transform community through art’s critical function, to engage groups and influence public opinion, which in turn can result (and has resulted) in tangible social and political change. It is in no way accidental that several decades later we see the emergence of such figures as Courbet, Manet and others who help to institute the paradigm of critically engaged art practice that we still follow today.
For arts institutions, the emergence of an art-viewing public implies a transition from private collections to a much more meaningful social function. In this way, both the artist and the institution suddenly manage to obtain a very sovereign position. Interestingly, all this was possible within a process of mere spectatorship: looking at art objects and representations. But there is a catch: by now, the spectators of art have largely lost their political agency. Even in the early 1980s, Martha Rosler observed that the public—in the sense of groups of engaged citizen-subjects—was being replaced by audiences. The difference between these two terms is easily imagined if you think of a situation like an opera house or a movie theater, where audiences sit passively in a darkened room, rather than situations where people participate in a more active way. In this sense, audiences are consumers of leisure and spectacle; they have no political agency and no necessary means or particular interest in effecting social change. My feeling is that what Rosler started to observe in the eighties is now a fait accompli: while the audiences for art became enormous, there is no public among them.
Consequently, while it is still possible to produce a critical art object, there seems to be no public out there that can complete its transformative function, possibly rendering the very premise behind contemporary art practice effectively futile or, at the very least, severely reducing its agency. If transformative function is what we are after, an exhibition of art may not be the place to start. Perhaps a much more complex model of art production and circulation is necessary to recuperate the agency of art in the absence of an effective public.
Martha Rosler, If You Lived Here…, 1989; installations and series of performances; Dia Art Foundation; courtesy the artist
Martha Rosler, If You Lived Here…, 1989; installations and series of performances; Dia Art Foundation; courtesy the artist
One interesting way out of this conundrum is suggested by the project If You Lived Here... by Martha Rosler at Dia Art Foundation in 1989. Located at the point of collision between the eighties real-estate boom in New York and the rampant homelessness that resulted from Reagan’s jettisoning of public-housing budgets, Rosler used two of Dia’s spaces in SoHo to stage a planning session, a three-part series of installations and “Town Meetings,” which were open for the public to meet, discuss and share research concerning issues of housing and homelessness. As Yvonne Rainer suggests, “The Town Meetings were remarkable for their capacity to accommodate disagreement, anger, crankiness, borderline psychosis, useful information, theoretical discourse, and productive networking, engaging people of all ages and from all walks of life.” 3 In the installation component, artworks by politically engaged artists were mounted alongside newspaper clippings, statistical displays and waiting-room-style furniture. As a whole, If You Lived Here... bluntly repurposed artistic context to reflect upon immediate social concerns and living conditions in an urgent yet oddly appropriate fulfillment of promises of open-endedness.
Recently, in conversation with Rosler, she clarified a very important aspect of this project: partly because of the hostility of the institution to her working there (despite inviting her in the first place), rather than presenting an exhibition of her “artwork,” she assumed the position of a curator and invited groups and individuals to take part in this project, included works by other artists, created resources such as reading and discussion rooms, as well as working and sleeping areas. In this way, If You Lived Here... is arguably not a work of art but an exhibition or a temporary institution curated and organized by Rosler. On the other hand, this project is one of Rosler’s seminal artworks, which influenced a generation of artists, including Rirkrit Tiravanija, Renee Green, Liam Gillick and numerous others, myself included.
Such use of exhibition space as a multifunctional, discursive production space is very sympathetic to the temporary-school model I have been working with these past several years. Art schools are one of the few places left where experimentation is, to some degree, encouraged—where emphasis is supposedly on process and learning rather than on product. Art schools are also multidisciplinary institutions by nature, where discourse, practice and presentation can coexist without privileging one over the other. The actual activities that typically take place in a school—experimentation, scholarship, research, discussion, criticism, collaboration, friendship—are a continuous process of redefining and seeking out the potential in both practice and theory. An art school is not concerned solely with the process of learning but can be—and often is—a super-active site of cultural production: books and magazines, exhibitions, commissioned new works, seminars and symposia, film screenings, concerts, performances, theater productions, new fashion and product designs, architectural projects, resources such as libraries and archives of all kinds, outreach, organization. These and many other activities and projects can all be triggered in a school.
However, unlike exhibitions, schools are most often closed to the public, with much of their programming and content available only to the body of admitted students. Furthermore, the academic structure of educational institutions, with their insistence on the necessity to comply with previously established rules and standards, often guarantees that for all the promise of experimentation and innovation, each successive generation of students evolves into a replica of the preceding generation—something that could be bypassed if a school was temporary. If the two models are combined, perhaps a new, radically open temporary school could be a viable alternative to exhibitions of contemporary art and could recuperate the agency of art by creating and educating a new public.
This was some of the thinking that led to the substitution of a biennial exhibition with a temporary school. Initially, the proposal was met with much enthusiasm, both locally on Cyprus and internationally. The Manifesta school in Nicosia was supposed to be structured in three departments, each semiautonomous and deploying a different model of education, ranging from a largely online, independent study program to a nomadic school with constantly shifting locations that would use existing spaces in the city, from movie theaters to bars. My part of the project, Department 2, was to take place in an old hotel building in the Turkish Cypriot neighborhood and was supposed to incorporate living quarters for participants with public production/presentation spaces. Several thousand artists, curators, filmmakers, musicians, architects, designers and others from all parts of the world applied to take part in the school, and approximately one hundred were selected to join the core group of the program and stay on Cyprus for the full one hundred days of the biennial. The school was supposed to be fully free of charge, and selected participants were to be offered financial assistance and modest production budgets.
Nicosia, the capital of Cyprus, is a divided city. The southern part is populated mainly by Greek Cypriots, while the north is largely Turkish. Following the end of Cyprus’ colonization by Great Britain and a period of bloody ethnic tensions between the two groups, including a failed military coup initiated by military junta in Athens, Turkey moved its troops into the northern part of the island to protect ethnic Turkish Cypriots. The northern side declared independence from the Republic of Cyprus in the early 1980s, and the two sides have been separated by a UN administered buffer zone ever since, which runs through the center of the city.
When we entered this complex political situation with our project in 2004, there was much talk about unification of the island, but it did not come to pass. Manifesta was to take place in the entire city and involve participation from both sides of the ethnic divide. The location of my part of the program in itself was not meant to be controversial. However, as we moved closer to the opening date, despite all the assurances and agreements made with local officials, progress stalled. Demands were made that the entire project be situated solely in the Greek Cypriot side of the city. Naturally, we refused, as it was inconceivable to us that a whole community was to be excluded from involvement in an international cultural event. As it became clear that our efforts were being blocked, and after numerous attempts to negotiate a solution, we spoke to the local press and were immediately fired by the Greek municipality that commissioned the project. The biennial was cancelled three months before the opening, numerous lawsuits ensued and any possibility of realizing the project under the auspices of Manifesta dissolved into the air.
For me, this was a very important turning point. The confrontation with Cyprus officials left everyone involved completely exhausted and demoralized. Furthermore, the mere threat of legal actions scared away virtually all the international funding institutions and other partners. However, I was really conflicted about letting go of the project without ever knowing whether an experimental exhibition as school would actually work. All of the artists and writers who had worked closely with me on developing this idea—Boris Groys, Martha Rosler, Liam Gillick, Walid Raad, Jalal Toufic, Nicolaus Hirsch and Tirdad Zolghadr—were equally curious. After some discussion, we decided to risk realizing this independently as a self-organized initiative in Berlin.
I have found it increasingly important to think of how to do things in such a way that one does not completely rely on existing institutions for audience, funding or legitimacy. It is not at all coincidental that many of the most important art schools, such as the Bauhaus and Black Mountain College, were self-organized by groups of artists. Sometimes I feel that it’s almost impossible to realize truly innovative ideas within the framework of already established institutions and networks, which is what an international biennial is, for example. Some people pointed out to me that even if Manifesta wasn’t censored by local officials, the experimental nature of the project could well have run into last-minute opposition from the establishment of contemporary art and the art market, which has very specific expectations of what an international art show should offer: the spectacle of national representation and new commodities, neither of which would have been offered by our school. So if we are interested in the kind of art projects that are not merely “variations on ready-made models,” it’s urgent to think of situations in which the work can exist and circulate on its own—framed by itself.
Berlin, with its complex history of isolation and half a century of division, was a particularly interesting location for our school-in-exile. After the fall of the wall, many artists from Germany and Europe settled in the eastern part of the city. This huge migration of cultural producers moved much faster than the development of any official art institutions. The result has been an incredible proliferation of self-organized exhibition spaces, collective venues and small independent institutions, which have now dominated the cultural landscape of Berlin for nearly two decades. In effect, these self-organized projects enjoy the same and sometimes an even greater degree of cultural legitimacy than the official institutional culture of the city.
I came to Berlin and quickly found a small building on United Nations Plaza (formerly Lenin Platz) in the city’s eastern section. To avoid additional legal problems with Cyprus and to reflect the radical change the project went through, we decided to name the school after the address of the building: unitednationsplaza. The structure of the school project was very simple: an informal, free university-type series of seminars, conferences, lectures, film screenings and occasional performances. The focus was on contemporary art; the length of the project: one year. It was open to all who came and projected its content through publications, a radio station and online. The program was duration-based: it was meaningless to come once; repeated visits were necessary to gain any value from the discussions.
Unlike a normal artist’s talk or a lecture, the seminars were lengthy: sometimes they stretched for several weeks, assembling every night including weekends. In total there were six of these seminars throughout the year. The topics ranged from the role of religion in a post-Communist situation to the history of video art as a social medium, the viability of a discursive frame, the possibilities of art in the context of war, the production of images after Enlightenment, among others. Unitednationsplaza also presented various film screenings and performances, hosted the Martha Rosler Library during the summer months and produced a film, A Crime Against Art, based on an unusual conference staged in Madrid. In the basement of the building was the Salon Aleman, a functioning bar put together by several artists involved in the project and open sporadically.
Lastly, unitednationsplaza functioned very much as an artwork in its own setting: an art project that did not need anyone to display it or promote and bring audiences to it—it did all that for itself. It can engage with an institution, as in this particular case the project did with the New Museum as Night School. It can also travel (as this one did to Mexico City), yet it does not completely depend on institutions to manifest itself. Of course, unitednationsplaza is not a singular example of such a practice: there is quite a long tradition of extra-institutional art projects, from Tina Girouard, Caroline Goodden and Gordon Matta-Clark’s Food, which was an informal cultural center in the form of a pay-what-you-wish restaurant in New York’s SoHo that lasted for more then a decade, to more recent examples, such as The Land Foundation in Chiang Mai.
Naturally, our program asked for a lot of time from its audience, and even more importantly, it forced some of the audience to articulate a position in relationship to the project. Reciprocally, it offered all who attended a stake—a certain kind of ownership of the situation: everyone who came could participate to whatever degree they wished. I would argue that this possibility of the audience having an active stake in the situation enabled the kind of productive engagement that is still possible, if spectatorship is bypassed and traditional roles of institution/curator/artist/public are encouraged to take on a more hybrid complexity. To me, this means that the public can be resurrected, and the modality of critical art practice can be preserved, given some changes to how art experience is conceived and constructed.
[Editor’s note: for more coverage of unitednationsplaza’s Berlin incarnation, see Hadley + Maxwell, “Find Us At The Kitchen Door,” Art Lies Issue No. 57, p. 18, or visit http://artlies.org/article.php?id=1583&issue=57&=1]
1. http://www.generation-online.org/c/fcsurrealism1.htm.
2. See Andrew McClellan, Inventing the Louvre: Art, Politics, and the Origins of the Modern Museum in Eighteenth-Century Paris (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 15.
3. If You Lived Here: The City in Art, Theory, and Social Activism (organized by Martha Rosler), Brian Wallis ed., with contributions by Yvonne Rainer, Fredric Jameson and Henri Lefebvre (Seattle: Bay Press, 1990).