ART IN PULIC SPACE - festival or not? |
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Type of project: conference |
Where: Old Town Hall, Gdańsk, Poland |
When: 17–18 May 2013 |
Lecturers:
Michaela Crimmin (GB), Julia Draganović (IT/DE), Dominik Lejman (PL/DE), Michał Bieniek (PL), Kuba Szreder (PL), Julita Wójcik (PL), Agnieszka Wołodźko (PL), Bettina Pelz (DE), Martin Schibli (SE), Torun Ekstrand (SE) |
Organizers:
Gdansk City Gallery, Gdańsk; The Baltic Sea Cultural Centre, Gdańsk, Poland |
Curator: Iwona Bigos |
With the comparatively recent trend for temporary rather than permanent artwork, comes the possibility for artists to make propositions that address a range of different audiences and issues; and for us, their viewers and sometimes collaborators and participants, to be more open minded in response to art in its increasingly diverse manifestations. Arnold Schoenberg’s provocation - “if it is art, it is not for all and if it is for all, it is not art”1 - rings increasingly hollow. Nevertheless, we should rightly and jealously guard artists’ freedom to comment or criticise, to obfuscate as well as to illuminate, to be independent of the vested interests of others, or to oppose hegemonies or the status quo as we are currently witnessing in Syria and in Egypt.
Over a decade ago in 2002, as part of the Lima Biennial
in Peru, artist Francis Alÿs, in collaboration with Cuauhtémoc
Medina and Rafael Ortega, made what was to become
for many an extraordinarily poetic, and moving,
work that depended on collaborative effort.
Named When Faith Moves Mountains, this was a direct
experience for the five hundred or so people, many of
them undergraduate students at the local university, involved
in a task set by Alÿs to move a 500-meter-long
sand dune a mere ten centimeters. For the rest of us, we
consume the work as a distilled image in the form of a
postcard, or as an image in a book or magazine; or as
a story told to us – almost a parable; or as a video that
the artist has uploaded onto his website. As art historian
and writer Claire Bishop says of this work, “to recount the
event, or to send and receive the postcard, reiterates one
of the work’s ambitions: to supplant the solitary romance
of Land art with a new horizon of social experience”.2 For
Bishop the title of the work seems to allude to a desire for
collective action – if enough people unite forces, believing
that change is possible, perhaps it can really come
about? The participants feature in the video; their voices,
their views, are captured and they become an integral
and continually present part of the work, artwork as a
potential generator of political and social change; a signifier
that collective effort is worthwhile and of the potential
efficacy of a collaborative venture between artist
and participant.
At the time Alÿs was commandeering students in Lima,
I was closely involved in a series of commissions for London’s
Trafalgar Square. The temporary artworks for the
so-called “Fourth Plinth” have been a means of elbowing
in imagination, ideas and energy to the heart of this
capital and cosmopolitan city.
The space of just 4.8 x 2.4 meters of London, the surface
area of the plinth, to date has hosted eight remarkable
and varied works, acquiring a visibility and a focal
and talking point each time a new work is installed. This
month sees the ninth work by the German artist Katharina
Fritsch, inevitably sparking fresh speculation amongst
the millions of people who see it.
We have such a rapidly changing world, with such huge
challenges that we need all the ingenuity of artists, and
the involvement by the rest of us in as energetic and
open a way as we possibly can. We can take a collective
responsibility to extend and amplify the values and questions
art brings. And not least to dream of new futures,
both solitarily and collectively. To end with another, more
apt, quote by Schonberg: “An artistic impression is substantially
the resultant of two components. One which
the work of art gives the onlooker – the other, which he is
capable of giving to the work of art”.3
Michaela Crimmin is a curator, co-founder and director of
Culture+Conflict. She is a course tutor on the Curating Contemporary
Art masters programme at the Royal College of
Art, London, UK.
References:
1. Schoenberg A. (1946 and 1985), Style and Idea, p.124
2. Bishop C. in LAND, ART(2006), A Cultural Ecology Handbook, p. 113
3. Schoenberg A. (1909), An Artistic Impression, (1985), Style and Idea, p. 189
The title of the Art Line conference Festival or Not? tackles not only the meaning of what we call “event-culture”, but also the problem of the sustainability of those art forms which are mainly presented in festivals of contemporary art in public space – art forms that are often time-based, ephemeral or process-oriented, rather than object-based. Things that do not last are hard to evaluate, as they mostly survive in various forms of documentation and in the memory of the audience and the people involved in their production. Sometimes, ephemeral art pieces change the way the audience perceives its surroundings – an effect that is even more difficult to verify and to measure.
The criteria for evaluating the success or sustainability of
temporary art interventions depend on the expectations
an organizer starts with: goals have to be set beforehand
in order to meet them.
Let me briefly present Ælia Media, a participatory art
project launched by Pablo Helguera, winner of the International
Award for Participatory Art in collaboration
with Katia Baraldi, Fedra Boscaro, Giorgia Dolfini, Vincenzo
Estremo, Matteo Ferrari, Nathaniel Katz, Marianna
Mendozza, Stefano Pasquini, Cinzia Pietribiasi, Anna Santomauro,
Alessandra Saviotti, Daniela Spagna Musso,
Annamaria Tina, and 19/20 (Fedra Boscaro, Federica
Falancia, Tihana Maravic, Linda Rigotti, Costanza Savini).
Ælia Media consisted in a self-organized journalism
school that took place in Bologna from spring to early
fall 2011 and in a temporary interactive radio station
presented in a transparent movable kiosk in Piazza Puntoni,
Bologna in October 2011. Pablo Helguera wanted
to share the prize he received for his career as a socially
engaged artist and for proposing to realize Ælia Media
in Bologna, with a group of young cultural producers, encouraging
them to study investigative methods, to share
the knowledge they acquired and to produce a radio program
together with people they did not previously know.
The proposal for the project took inspiration from the history
of Bologna, known for social innovations that, with
Radio Alice, included the first free radio station in Italy,
which experimented with open microphones as early as
the 1970s. Furthermore, Helguera wanted to create an
alternative information channel in a country that at that
time was still governed by media mogul Silvio Berlusconi.
The funding institution, the Legislative Assembly of the
Emilia-Romagna Region, had the goal of giving artists
the opportunity to develop new forms of collaboration
that would serve as case studies for questions like “what
creates the sense of belonging to a community?” and
“how can the awareness of common shared goods be
raised?”. Pablo Helguera’s project was considered a success,
as it created a temporary community of people
who successfully operated the radio station with a high
level of self-organization, and some of the participants
continued collaborations of various kinds even after the
end of the project. This might seem a meager outcome
for those seeking greater visibility, but for the goals set
at the beginning of the project, even the testimony of
eighteen participants who confirmed that a process that
had lasted for only for 9 months had changed the way
they looked at their environment and had influenced
their way of working and sharing tasks was considered a
decent success.
Festival or not? It depends on your goals…
Julia Draganović is a curator for contemporary art whose
interest is focused on new artistic strategies including art in
public spaces, socially engaging practices and new media.
She is in charge of the International Award for Participatory
Art launched by the Legislative Assembly of the Italian
Region Emilia-Romagna.
My presentation was an attempt to look at art in a public space in Gdańsk from a perspective of a practice named by Suzanne Lacy „new genre public art”. As she says, an aim of a today artist is not to decorate a space of a city but to bring back its public character as a place for debates, disputes and an exchange of ideas. According to his/her role understood in this way, the artist is no more a creator of art works but a public intellectual producing alternative proposals to a consumption-crazed society. My reflections were illustrated with examples of activities that have been undertaken since the 1990s.
In the mid-1980s, in the absence of own exhibition space
and in time of an ongoing boycott of the state cultural
institutions, a group of Gdańsk artists, including Grzegorz
Klaman, Robert Rumas, Marek Rogulski, Eugeniusz
Szczudło, Kazimierz Kowalczyk and Piotr Wyrzykowski,
organized its events on a ruined island called Wyspa Spichrzów
(Granary Island). Acting outside the reach of official
cenzorship, but also outside the official circulation
of information, they organized one-day exhibitions and
concerts, which attracted a large crowd of friends, fans
and supporters of independent culture.
In 1994 the same place became a subject of the International
Workshop Island Project organized by myself and
Grzegorz Klaman. We invited Polish and foreign artists
to participate in it. In the face of the intense social and
economic changes taking place at that time we wanted
to draw attention to a significant role of culture, which
should not be ignored when planning a future for the
Granary Island.
Next international workshop, entitled City Transformers,
was organized by myself, Grzegorz Klaman and Singaporean
art curator Jay Koh in 2002. It also concerned problems
of transformations of the urban space, but this time
we attempted to look at the city space in its entirety. Artists
from Poland, Europe and Asia spoke out on the processes
taking place in Gdańsk as well as the related conflicts
and were predicting possible scenarios of events.
A crucial element of the urban landscape of Gdańsk are
murals, in respect of which the city authorities decided
to adopt affirmative attitude. Among the abundance
of this kind of public statements, we have both a whole
range of work carried out anonymously and independently
on abandoned walls, courtyards and along the railway
line and those, that arise as a result of institutionally
organized festivals. From a critical point of view, mural
painters working in the framework of official events could
be perceived as „whipping boys”, accused of collaborating
with authorities. However, if we take a closer look at
these festivals and motives behind them, this case takes
more complex form.
The Festival of Mural Painting Kliniczna was organized
by the artist Piotr Szwabe in 2000–2007 on spans of a
viaduct at Kliniczna street. Collecting funds and soliciting
the necessary permits, Szwabe created a space for
creative expression for himself and many mural painters
from Gdańsk and other Polish cities. Later from this initiative
the Monumental Art Festival evolved, which has
been organized by Szwabe in Zaspa (a district of Gdańsk)
since 2009. After the political change, that took place
after 1989, a discourse on modernistic housing estates
revived. Connected to the traumatic period of communism,
it was presented in a decidedly negative light, and
residents of tower blocks were negatively stigmatized
as “blockers”. This status quo caused deep frustration of
inhabitants of these settlements, who in addition to an
apartment in a monotone, hardly comfortable surroundings,
fell to the bottom of the social hierarchy. The aim of
the Monumental Art Festival has been not only an aestheticisation
of Zaspa’s blocks, but it was also to lead to
a positive identification of the district. I must admit that
these assumptions are realized. As surveys show, thanks
to the new face of the environment, the residents have
begun to feel satisfaction from the place where they live.
Currently, the district has become the object of interest
of tourists coming to the city, who are helped by trained
local guides, leading them to the various murals.
Educating another generation of mural painters is the
aim of the artistic-educational-prophylactic program I
know. I don’t destroy. I create organized by Laznia CCA.
In its framework, curators Mikołaj Jurkowski and Hana
Lubert-Miodek run workshops with young people (ages
13 and older) and show them that creating graffiti can
have a positive dimension and need not to be used only
for destruction. The program has a form of an open competition,
the winners of which have an opportunity to realize
their projects in designated areas.
Last but not least, we must mention a particularly important
mural Shipyard realized by Iwona Zając in 2004 on
a wall separating the Gdańsk Shipyard from the rest of
the city. As a resident of the shipyard, having her studio
there, the artist collected 11 stories of shipyard workers
about their work in this place, cut out portions of their
statements in the form of stencils and painted them in
the place the workers passed in their daily way to work.
The mural disappeared during a demolition of the shipyard
wall, which took place in January 2013. This fact has
raised many violent emotions and initiated a public debate
on the direction of the city’s development.
The Outdoor Gallery of the City of Gdańsk, organized
periodically since 2005 by Laznia CCA, has quite different
character. It is a closed international competition
addressed to artists invited to create works for a gallery
located outdoor in a neglected and now revitalized
Gdańsk district Dolne Miasto (Lower Town). This initiative
is meant to change the image of this area and to attract
Gdańsk’s residents as well as tourists, who have so
far avoided it because of its bad reputation. Among the
competition works and projects are both those, that are
attempting to aesthetisation of the city space, as well as
those reflecting a critical approach towards the local reality.
The latter include LKW Gallery by Daniel Milohnic
and Lex Rijkers, a sculpture Leader Swing by Fernando
Sanchez and Korore Architekty by Bert Theis (the last two
projects have not yet been executed).
Another festiwal, entitled Narrations, was initiated in
2009 by the Gdańsk Municipal Gallery, which for its implementation
has invited German curator Bettina Pelz.
Now this event is organized in a collaboration with the
City Culture Institute and it attempts to draw the audience’s
attention to the fact, that temporal art works – using
light and projections on the walls of buildings – can
become a constitutive factor for the aesthetics of the city.
I concluded my presentation with a question about possible
artistic and institutional strategies: how to plan
them in order to make local residents feel they have a
say in what’s happening in their city.
Agnieszka Wołodźko studied at the Faculty of Painting
and Graphic Arts of the State Higher School of Visual
Arts in Gdańsk in 1980–1986. Currently, her PhD thesis is
in preparation on participatory art in Scandinavian countries
in 1990–2010 at the Faculty of Social Sciences of
Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań. Since 2000 she has
worked as an exhibition curator at Laznia Centre for Contemporary
Art in Gdańsk.
During the last decade, there has been increasing interest
in public art, sometimes described as “art in the public
domain”, and not only in Sweden. Every year there is at
least one major conference in the field, where participants
discuss how to work in this field. There are probably
several causes of this interest:
• A lack of ordinary/traditional exhibition spaces.
• Standardization, as more and more temporary
exhibitions in institutions tend to include projects
in the public domain.
• Increased interest in Activist Art, as most contemporary
art fails to encourage people to change society.
• Interest reaching out to a broader audience than
is possible in more traditional exhibition spaces.
• General disappointment with the quality
of today’s public art.
It might be a combination of these things, but what is
worth noting is that many artists, curators, etc. put a
great deal of energy into promoting the belief that it is
possible to develop the practice of public art. This also
means that artists and curators are also asking more and
more questions about the idea of public art. On a general
level, one might say that, in many ways, the transformation
taking place in the art world as a whole, the shift in
focus from aesthetic to conceptual aspects, has never really
reached the domain of public art in Sweden. Nor did
the postmodernist debate from the 1980s really reach
the field. Of course, there are exceptions to this, such as
the work of Gustav Hellberg (Obstruction and In your
head) and Lars Vilks (Nimis, Arx and Omphalos), both
of whom also have a strong conceptual side. When it
comes to public intervention, there are several examples
of works that have strongly provoked the idea of the public
realm, like the work of Anna Odell (Unknown Woman)
and NUG (Territorial Pissing), though these works were
not presented as strictly public artworks.
So, today we have the paradox that the increased interest
in and discussion about public art in Sweden during
the past decade – along with the resources being put
into public artwork and conferences – do not coincide
with the belief that a major change has occurred in the
process. I would suggest that there is still some kind of
disappointment with the present situation. So far, this
applies both to permanent works, and to more temporary
works, though the level of freedom in the latter is, of
course, higher.
Some premises
So one could make an assumption that something is
missing in the discussion about public art in Sweden. But
let me first introduce some premises for the Swedish context
of public art:
A: “Culture is not in our blood”. This means that culture is
not considered as a condition for a social society and its
future development. It is considered as more of a form of
leisure, and even something that takes resources away
from “important” things.
B: “The lack of discussion about Quality”. This could be
understood as provocative by many administrators of
public art, though this is not the only group discussing
public artwork. Using the term “quality” in discussions
of art is often problematic in the Swedish context. In
practice, quantity is preferred over quality in Sweden.
The term “quality” is problematic for two reasons. First,
it implies that art is not a democratic field, and secondly,
quality is often connected with the term “elite”, a term
that has negative connotations (except in sport). So, implying
the existence or lack of quality in artworks is often
considered elitist thinking, which should be condemned
because it is seen as being undemocratic. A consequence
of this thinking is that art also should not upset anyone,
and, on a general level, should be cheerful. Likewise, it is
worth mentioning that in Sweden there is no real division
between professional artists and amateurs, in contrast
to actors, where there is a clear difference between amateur
and professional theatre.
C: As a consequence of A and B, “Professional Knowledge”
within contemporary art is not 100% respected outside
the art world. On a practical level, many with decisionmaking
power about new public art projects do not have
a deeper knowledge of and/or an education in art. This
often results in an asymmetric structure between the artistic
and curatorial process, and the structures provided
by people handling public art. This also applies to many
cultural institutions in Sweden, especially those on the
peripheries.
Also, in Sweden, when it comes to decisions, many people
are consensus fundamentalists, which means that
everyone has to agree on a decision. This is something
that probably does not promote in-depth discussion
about quality or permit experimentation and new ways
of thinking to be promoted.
D: “An understanding of the concept of the site”. This
has rarely been discussed. Sweden, as opposed to most
European countries, does not have a specific site or location
that reflects the history of the nation through
thousands or even millions of tragic family histories (i.e.
sites like Katyń, Stalingrad, Berlin, Dresden, Utöya, or
Auschwitz….). Such sites immediately trigger thoughts
and emotions. I would suggest that this also results in a
different understanding of the idea of “site”, suggesting
that from a Swedish point of view, the idea of emotions
and connotations being linked to a certain “site” cannot
be fully understood.
E: “200 years of peace”. This is, of course, in most aspects
very, very positive – do not get me wrong – but perhaps
this is also one reason that knowledge about Sweden’s
history, including its cultural history – is lacking in contemporary
society. There are simply no war memorials
like the Völkerschlachtdenkmal, 1913 (in memory of a
battle outside Leipzig in 1813) by the architect Brunp
Schmitz 1858–1916 and the artists Christian Behrens
(1852–1905) and Franz Metzne. No sites in Sweden are
linked to family tragedies on such a huge scale, and we
do not have the baggage of former ideologies in which
a strong public art was devoted to authoritarian ideologies.
Although it could be argued that pre-WWII public
art in Sweden was also ideological, in the sense of bringing
the Swedish nation forward (often using mythological
motifs) and celebrating the idea of the healthy mind
in a healthy body. But due to the amnesia that occurred
in Sweden at that time, Swedish culture had to be de-
Germanised, which meant that many cultural references,
important for Sweden’s cultural heritage, were also lost.
We need to remember that Sweden was strongly linked
to the German cultural sphere before WWII.
These five aspects are rarely discussed when it comes to
art, but when added together, they suggest that Public
Art in Sweden has a different starting point compared to
that of other countries. In many cities in Europe, a specific
“site” is connected to a number of different histories,
which are often well known to the citizens. A public artwork
(permanent or temporary) will not yield a neutral interpretation,
but will enter into a constant dialogue with
all the positive and negative connotations – historical,
political and emotional – linked to that specific “site”. The
decision-making process will in many ways be tougher,
like in Germany, where professionals are usually involved
in making decisions, while other agents, like technical
staff, function as advisors on technical aspects, not as
decision makers on artistic quality.
Also, in many countries, like Poland and Germany, there
has been an intense discussion on how to relate to history.
This is, of course, necessary, but it also has implications
as to whether we think of public art as being permanent
or temporary. In Poland, there is a lively discussion
about how to relate to public art from the 1950s to the
1980s, and in Germany there is a huge discussion regarding
the memorial process that, in the end, resulted in Eisermans
Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden Europas in
Berlin, and increased awareness of the possibilities, impossibilities,
and the minefields in public commissioned
art in Germany.
Sweden – roundabouts
In Sweden, the vast majority of public artworks are
placed at locations that are usually more or less neutral,
such as a new roundabout, a government building
or a new blockhouse complexes, or a site is selected because
it is ugly, such as a tunnel under a street between
two blockhouse complex in the suburbs. There are very
few possible “sites” with a tense history that would create
a strong awareness today among citizens.
During recent decades, one of the most common spots
in Sweden for public art has been roundabouts. I am
not referring to huge roundabouts that are used as a
manifes- tation of ideologies like Mussolini’s roundabout
project in Rome. I am talking here about sites constructed
as a result of traffic planning. Public artwork is
often placed in the middle of these. The conditions of
these sites as a framework for the artist is that the work
should be based on visual aspects, but not provoke or
be a distraction for the drivers. In this sense, it should
be cheerful, and the work should be equally visible from
all angles. It will not be possible to interact with the
sculpture, since you do not want people walking around
in the roundabout. These sites are often outside cities,
so you only pass them by car…
The lack of historical, political and emotional connotations
to a site works both ways. In one way, this means
that artists are quite free to bring forward an artwork
that lives more on its own merits. They do not have to
consider different aspects of history, and how people
might react to these; on the other hand, perhaps it is
harder to create something of interest if there is no history
to play against at, or to interact with?
Who owns public space?
Another difference in relation to public artwork is
based on the question of who owns public space. In
this aspect, there are also differences between countries
in Europe. In Sweden, the usual belief is that public
space is actually owned by the citizens. In other countries,
public space means, more or less, the space of the
government. This also has implications for the interpretation
of a public commissioned artwork. In the former,
artists will mostly be considered the senders of an
artwork, even though it was publically commissioned.
Later, it will be understood as a kind of – perhaps not
propaganda – but as something that the government
will use more or less for ideological confirmation. Perhaps
this is the reason why non-commissioned temporary
art projects in some countries in Europe – by the
mere action itself – are considered more provocative
than in Sweden. You cannot fight for something you
already are considered to be the owner of.
The structures of society are well-defined
This question is also related to the question of who
owns the space, but one thing worth stressing here
is that the structure of Swedish society – due to 200
years of peace – is more defined in its boundaries. The
judicial system, sports, newspapers, the art world, etc.;
the boundaries of these systems are – I would suggest
– more clear cut in Sweden. These boundaries do not
exist to the same extent in some younger nations that
are still developing their political, economic and judicial
systems. The boundaries are more like that of an ongoing
game in a greyzone. This means that an art project
can easily be interpreted or even accepted as a political
statement despite the artistic intentions. However,
in Sweden it would be harder to integrate contemporary
art with other areas, or to really manage to create
a trans-boundary work that plays within two fields. A
publically commissioned artwork in front of a new judicial
building will mostly still be considered an artwork
in front of a building, rather than actually giving the
visitor any meaning or making people think about the
judicial system. These boundaries work both ways: the
positive side in Sweden is that there exists an area that
is accepted as the domain of art – a kind of freezone.
Within this area many things are possible that are not
possible in other fields. The negative thing is that most
critical art can easily be neutralized as a critical work
just by stating that it is art.
Permanent and temporary public artworks
The greatest interest in art in the public domain is often
seen in temporary exhibitions. There is, of course,
more freedom here, as the artists do not have to think
about aspects of the materials and other things related
to its having to last for a long time. And maybe more
importantly, artists and curators are also more free on
an artistic level to really test things and to experiment,
and to make changes and interact with the process
of how we think about contemporary art in the public
domain. In temporary exhibitions, ideas of conceptual
public artworks are discussed, works with a critical
standpoint, and sometimes even provocative works are
accepted. In recent years, one can say that temporary
exhibitions of public artworks have been a test field for
how to think about permanent public artworks, as well.
One thing worth mentioning here is that much of the
discussion about art in public space does not concern
artworks exhibited in the public space, but rather interactions
within this space. In recent years, the loudest
discussions in Sweden have been about works by Anna
Odell (Unknown Woman), NUG (Territorial Pissing) and
Pussy Riot (the action in the Salvation Church, Moscow
2012), all of which were based on interaction. In the
case of Odell and NUG, most people – including the art
world if they even spoke up – were initially very critical
towards the artists. Both of them used aspects of the
welfare system to make their art. Odell faked a suicide
attempt in Stockholm and was criticized for using the
resources of the hospital and the police when she was
taken to hospital. NUG documented the frenetic tagging
of a subway car in Stockholm, done as a kind of
performance. The critique: graffiti is not art, it is destruction,
and it costs money to clean cars. In the case
of Odell, she went through a transformation when people
understood that she really had an agenda: discussing
the welfare system and how it treats people who
have a hard time surviving. In the end, Odell became
very popular (outside the art world). In both cases, the
art world was not the main place where these things
were discussed; the art world was in general very quiet.
Paradoxically, support for Pussy Riot has been tremendous
in Sweden, and sometimes the same people who
criticized Odell, NUG and Vilks for doing provocative
things outside the box have been positive towards the
actions of Pussy Riot. This support probably has more
to do with Sweden’s relationship with Russia than with
real political support for Pussy Riot and their ideas, or
support for the idea of freedom in art.
Conclusions
My remarks should understood more as an imperative
to discuss the initial premises that produce the circumstances
for art in the public domain. One way to do this
is to compare different countries, like Sweden, Poland,
Germany and Russia, with each other in order to recognize
initial differences. If we start to discuss these
things, this will provide a starting point for considering
the idea of quality, which in the end would lead to more
interesting artwork, and not only in the public domain.
But this also requires increased respect for professional
knowledge by people in decision-making positions outside
the art world. In the end, this will be crucial for the
development of Swedish society and for raising the
level of culture in order to survive.
Martin Schibli a curator, critic and lecturer based in
Sweden. Worked as curator and director of exhibitions at
Kalmar konstmuseum between 2006–2012. During the
last decade he curated about 80 exhibitions in eleven
countries. Besides curating, he also lectures regularly at
universities and art schools.
In my presentation at the conference Art in public space
– festival or no festival?, I was supposed to talk about the
role and tasks of a curator who doubles as an organizer
of events (such as festivals) taking place in public space,
and who also commissions artistic projects. Nevertheless,
a presentation which preceded mine inspired me to
talk about a different topic, in order to oppose it. To offer
a counterargument to the theses presented by the speaker
before me, I focused on my own 10-year curatorship
and organizational experience working in public space in
Wrocław during the annual SURVIVAL Art Review festival.
I decided to highlight such aspects of my activities as
the transiency of artists’ works, the partial transparency
of some of them, their vulnerability to damage, and a
more or less intentional openness to viewers, a quality
which makes objects, installations and performances interactive
or participatory.
My aim was also to question the very notion of “presentation”
or “exhibition” in respect to art in public space,
especially “public art”, a notion that was often used by
speakers.
In the final part of my presentation, which was devoted
to organizational failures as well as failures of art curators
(such as the work of Hubert Czerepok Not only good
comes from above, which was taken down just before
the opening of the 6th edition of the SURVIVAL Art Review
as a result of the intervention of a local rabbi, or
Dorota Nieznalska’s work Construction of Race, which
was stolen from the place where it was being exhibited,
i.e. the Wrocław stadium, called Oławka by fans of the
Polish football team WKS Śląsk, who could not accept
the image of a fan of a competing football team being
displayed on “their grounds”), my aim was to draw attention
to the fact that every time art is presented in public
space, it should give rise to negotiations or even to conflict,
and it should do this by revealing the hidden mechanisms
that shape this space. It should raise awareness of
the complexity of so-called “property rights”, in this case
the right to space, reflected both in legislature and in the
less obvious symbolic sphere.
The “right to space” also means the right to put down
roots, to identify with a place, group, local community,
and so on. Even though some of these factors are obviously
difficult to predict, it is worth taking them into
account before coming up with an artistic proposal for
public space. Some of the less obvious, non-institutional
mechanisms that shape public space can be revealed
only in a confrontation with a new, foreign element, such
as a work of art.
This is the logic underlying many sculptures and monuments
that have become a part of public space in cities
and towns as a result of the actions of authorities and
group interests, and which, being products of different
ideologies and points of view, are not always uniformly
accepted. Therefore, even another monument of John
Paul II, strongly opposed by those who are tired of the
questionable aesthetics of these works, is more interesting
than even the best work of art that remains indifferent
to the space it inhabits and the people living in it.
The latter works are often placed in museums or galleries,
which are devoid of any context and are governed by
rules governing the presentation and circulation of art.
The basic reasons for artistic work in public space are
context, a willingness to engage in a dialogue, a desire
to learn from and about the environment, including, perhaps
most importantly, the social environment, and the
possibility it offers to negotiate, participate and, in some
cases, engage in conflict, provocation, and exposure. In
order to have such an effect, art must oftentimes resign
from the permanence that makes it subject to the market
forces of supply and demand. It must accept transience,
fleetingness and the unpredictability of reactions,
and appreciate them as important values.
As I mentioned earlier, the switch of focus in my presentation
was inspired by the speech of my precursor. He
talked about the principles of organizing festivals in public
space, where the “exhibition” should be narrowed to a
fenced-off or otherwise protected area in order to protect
the works. He also postulated limiting the number
of works to a few and, at the same time, limiting the
number of artists or “names” taking part in a given event.
The presumed result of the above would be increased investment
in such art and works and, thanks to this, the
works would also be more permanent. These postulates
are in line with the growing trend of treating art festivals
in public space like traditional exhibitions, a trend which
is responsible for increasing the distance between festivals
and the areas where they take place. This gives rise
to a kind of festival tourism – a situation where the same
names and similar works “travel” from one event to another.
This trend has been gaining prominence from the moment
art initiatives in public space started to be financed
with public funds, later coming into fashion and becoming
another offering of modern art museums and galleries
that treat this kind of art as an outdoor extension
of themselves. As a result, big-picture thinking that takes
into account such aspects as the relation of a festival to
its environment, is superseded by the logic of supply and
demand, with festivals becoming brands and promotional
tools for cities and institutions.
However, as dr. Gavin Grindon from Kingston University
in London reminds us, a festival can be seen as a critical
tool similar to a happening, event or potluck. In the
1960s, politically engaged artistic groups, such as the
Second Situationist International or Provo movements,
“wanted to create social movements in the West and experimented
with various forms of mass actions for this
purpose”.1 We are then witnessing a situation which took
place earlier in the West, i.e. the redefinition of the ideas
underlying festivals and assigning to them roles and principles
which contradict their previous roles.
Because both in this text and in my presentation, I adopt
a subjective and engaged point of view resulting from
my long experience of working in public space, I must
express my concern with the changes taking place at
the moment and with lack of understanding about the
nature of artworks in public space, as they, for certain,
neither are nor should be merely “exhibitions” placed at
various time intervals in “picturesque” locations which are
treated as a simple alternative to an art gallery or its extension.
As it happens, as I work on this text, the 11th edition of
the SURVIVAL Art Review is drawing to a close. Below
is a fragment of a review of this event, excerpted from
an anonymous blog called Krytycykultury.pl. It illustrates
perfectly the way of thinking I described above, a point
of view based on a fundamental misunderstanding:
“What worried us about this year’s SURVIVAL is the fact
that many works of art did not survive for even 24 hours
in an undamaged condition. Sure enough, some of the
onlookers walking along the Boulevard engaged in interaction
with the works of art so intensely, that the latter
were forced to give up and change their form. It is a pity
that they could be seen at their best only on the first day
of the exhibition. It does not suffice to open an exhibition,
it is equally important to protect and take care of
the exhibited works all the time”.2
Is there anything else to add? Maybe this: I believe that
each trace, each intervention in a work of art exhibited in
public space constitutes one more text (and test), a voice,
a point of view. Even acts of vandalism and other interventions
(some of which are prevented and some not)
which upset the artists and organizers are important and
should be seen as valuable, as they, in the end, provide a
diagnosis of the condition of public space, presenting us
with a true and clear picture, which is difficult to obtain in
any other way. Obviously, the knowledge we gain is not
always welcome, this picture is not always beautiful, and
our intentions are not always as honest and fair as we
would like to believe them to be.
Michał Bieniek studied at the Faculty of Painting and
Sculpture of the Academy of Fine Arts in Wrocław. Since
2010 he has been a Research Student by Project at the
Curating Contemporary Art Department of the Royal College
of Art in London, UK.
References:
1. I use here a text by Gavin Grindon which has not yet been published
and which was the outcome of the conference Polish art. In public
space, which took place in the Courtauld Institute in London on
December 6, 2012.
2. http://www.krytycykultury.pl/2013/06/11-przeglad-sztukisurvival-
trzeba.html, accessed 29.06.2013 r.
I started my lecture with the statement that I am a practitioner, a visual artist, for whom public space is the space most suitable for making art. I have been working this way for 13 years, and this way of working has deepened the understanding between me as an artist and those who have come across my art in the street. In the last few years, artistic performances in public spaces have started to be associated with festivals. This has introduced a new quality which is as challenging for artists as it is rewarding. The first advantage that comes to mind is access to the city’s main squares and central places. Until now, art has crept into areas which were neglected areas, on the outskirts, and quite invisible. Festivals give artists an opportunity to show their art in highly visible spaces, at the same time demanding that their performances be spectacular. Secondly, these performances must be temporary, although the examples I have selected show that artists are often tempted to extend the life of these works or make them permanent. I call this negotiating or entering into a dialogue with the viewers, as I have never wanted my works to become monuments. They are processual, and their permanent change is for me the most important aspect.
Bogactwo (Wealth)
As part of the TAK! Festival, I prepared a project called
Bogactwo (Wealth). The festival was organized in a public
space of the city as part of the National Cultural Program
of the Polish EU Presidency in 2011. The program was
prepared by the gallery Rondo Sztuki and financed by the
Ministry of Culture and National Heritage, the Ministry
of Foreign Affairs and the National Audiovisual Institute.
Additionally, all of these cultural events took place during
the competition for the European Capital of Culture,
in which Katowice presented itself as Katowice – city of
gardens! This city that owes its birth to the coal industry
has taken a new course for the future – saying “no” to pits
and “yes” to gardens. I decided that my project should
reflect this parting of the city with coal, but at the same
time, pay respects to this natural mineral which played
a central role in Katowice. Wealth – a range of goods of
great value consumed by individuals – became a mineral,
both literally during the performance and metaphorically
– the mineral that used to attract business and provided
employment for thousands of people, giving them a
good life during the communist period of Polish history,
and that now has become a source of nostalgia, disappointment
and hard feelings, as some coal mines close,
while others thrive thanks to effective management.
Katowice is once more a European industrial town on the
threshold of transformation.
At the Powstańcow Śląskich monument, I arranged five
tonnes of coal into the word
b o g a c t w o (in English
wealth) and left it to the disposal of the residents, announcing
via the mass media that they could take some
of the coal with them, and that it would be recorded as
an art project. As the finances designated for my project
would allow me to buy only two tonnes of coal, together
with the festival’s organizer we sought other support.
Thanks to the fact that in Silesia everyone has something
to do with coal mining, we managed to find a sponsor.
Katowicki Holding Węglowy gave us five tonnes of
high-quality, anthracite coal. Another goal was to involve
former coal-miners in shovelling the coal in exchange for
a day’s pay. Even though a few miners showed interest,
none of them turned up, but some people did come to
haul the coal away. So, we finally got to work together
with the gallery’s employees and those who had come
to help lay out the coal. After four hours, the word
b o g a c t w o (wealth) was formed. It immediately
started to disappear. Despite the organizers’ fears that
the coal would vanish immediately, the process lasted
three days – exactly as long as the festival. The organizers
were worried about exposing what makes the city
infamous i.e. people stealing coal from freight trains or
creating illegal coal-pits, called “poverty-pits” in Poland.
What the organizers aimed at was to distance the candidate
for the title of the European Capital of Culture from
anything related to coal.
Bogactwo became a major media success. Apart from
the national media, those connected with the mining
industry also visited the site. Coal featured in conversations
about those who worked in the mines, those who
escaped this tough labour, about closed mines, and
about those that are now reopened as museums of 19thcentury
technology.
On the third and final day, when the coal was gone, and
the place was full of ashes, there suddenly appeared
large crowds of colourfully dressed people. Whole families
flooded this public space, a space which was full of
billboards advertising a new 3D film about the Smurfs.
The remnants of coal were ignored, trampled under peoples’
feet. When you perform in public space, you never
know what may happen. I simply could not have dreamt
of a better ending for my performance. Coal is out, consumers
are in. Thanks to the festival I had just taken part
in, I had achieved all three goals. The performance was
ephemeral and disappeared after three days, I was given
the main square in the city, and I also formed a huge
word from five tonnes of coal, so it was also spectacular.
The only thing I did not do was give in to the pressure
of the organizers to alleviate the critical tone of my performance.
Happily, they were in a hurry, so they did not have enough time to properly work on me.
The mound of an unknown artist
In 2012, at the invitation of the Artloop festival in Sopot,
and as part of an artists’ exchange with Cracow’s
ArtBoom, Jacek Niegoda and I tried to persuade city decision
makers to let us make a Mound of an Unknown
Artist under the Mound of Krak in Kraków.
It is hard to imagine a bigger creative failure
than to be an unknown artist. Unknown means unrecognized,
undiscovered, forgotten. Does it mean a bad
artist? Galleries, museums, albums and books are full of
works signed: unknown artist.
We know who Krakus and Wanda were, but who was
Gallus Anonymous, who recorded the birth of the Polish
state? Without all those people who wrote, sang, painted
and sculpted there would be no art. It does not matter
what their names and surnames were – what matters is
the genuine beauty they created. Let’s prove, calling for
freedom and solidarity, that anyone can become an unknown
artist. Next to the signs of freedom and solidarity,
let’s erect a permanent sign of art.
Julita Wójcik and Jacek Niegoda
The mound was created within a week, but it was accompanied
by protests from the authorities of the Podgórze
district (where it was erected), who had it removed after
less than three months.
The Rainbow
Since the beginning of June 2012, Savior Square in Warsaw
has been host to The Rainbow, another of my works.
Having been set on fire a few times, it still stirs lively debate
on the role of such art in a city and its impact on
viewers.
Julita Wójcik a sculptor and initiator of artistic actions.
Graduate of the Faculty of Sculpture of the Academy of
Fine Arts in Gdańsk in 1997. Works in public collections:
Zachęta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw, Museum of Art
in Łódź, National Museum in Warsaw, Arsenał Gallery in
Białystok, Society for the Encouragement of Contemporary
Art in Szczecin, HorseCross in Perth, Scotland, and the Israel
Museum in Jerusalem.
While dissecting the apparatus of public art projects from the position of the expanded political and moral economy, it is important to consider several fundamental questions. One needs to ask what is produced and disseminated and how? What are the terms and conditions of this process and its internal contradictions? Who partakes in production and exchange and from what position? What types of labour are involved? Who is rewarded and who is not? Is the success of some related to the peril of others? In other words, do we experience exploitation, and if yes, who exploits whom? What kind of critiques and justifications does this situation prompt? How is the system legitimized?
Public art is an interesting case of cultural production
characteristic of what Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello call
the “new spirit of capitalism”. In fact, public art can hardly
be imagined outside project-making, an organizational
mechanism specific to a networked world of flexible accumulation.
Every project is only a temporary, yet highly
effective undertaking, a momentary burst of activity, a
nomadic flash of mobilization. A project links agents and
pools resources in one node of the network, freeing them
to migrate to a new enterprise after the current task is
executed. In this mode of production, the global art network
plays a vital role as a means of creating connections
between project makers and their potential employers.
It is the natural habitat of freelance artists, curators and
other art professionals, who roam the globe searching
for possibilities to realize their projects. Both precarious
and enthusiastic, these self-entrepreneurs are guns for
hire in a new symbolic economy, lingering on the verge
between vocational involvement, disillusion and depression.
They network to establish connections with commissioning
institutions, localized art scenes, engaged publics
or wider constituencies. Though every project is a marvel
of human interaction, a temporary burst of connectivity
and a genuinely collective enterprise, every project maker
moves between projects as an individualized and atomized
particle, free floating on the waves of a globalized art
world, competing for access to opportunities.
The art network is ridden by complex reputational hierarchies
that determine how resources and opportunities
are spread. Their distribution is overridden by vast inequalities
between what Gregory Sholette calls “artistic
dark matter” and a galaxy of art celebrities. The flow of
resources and various forms of capital (money, reputations,
social connections) is determined by a peculiar division
of symbolic, technical, administrative and emotional
labour. Partakers and stakeholders are stratified according
to several criteria, based on differences between mobile
and immobile, desired and disposable, famous and
neglected, recognized and invisible, authorial and anonymous.
These distinctions are quintessential for the reproduction
of injustice embedded in the networked mode
of artistic production. They constitute foundations for
networked exploitation between individuals and professional
categories, including artists, curators, technicians,
assistants, gallerists and administrators. The systems of
exploitation are possibly less direct than in the past in
industrial capitalism, however, paradoxically they result
in extreme inequalities. The globalized art world is dominated
by a tiny but extremely mobile elite that amasses
disproportionate wealth and garnishes global reputations.
At the same time, the majority of cultural producers
remains poor, locked in the lower strata of the network,
invisible and anonymous.
Kuba Szreder, a graduate of the Institute of Sociology,
Jagiellonian University (Cracow). Curator of the Free / Slow
University of Warsaw. As part of his curatorial practice he
organises public art and research projects, convenes seminars
and conferences, writes articles and edits publications.
Temporary exhibition formats in public space have a longstanding tradition in the arts. They respond to a world in constant change and have become an essential rendezvous to display and to discuss contemporary art. Internationally a heterogenic multitude of formats has been established. Although they gather under the roof of the same communication terms and channels, and often even share the same funding sources, in their specifics they often have little in common. Their characteristics are engendered in a mix of guiding interests of participating institutions and communities, leading personalities and funding partners. With their intertwining aesthetic approaches, conceptual agreements, economic and technical abilities, spatial options as well as communication and publishing qualities, their specifics form and define unique and often incomparable frameworks for participating artists, curators and visitors. As a format, they match the zeitgeist where new spatial flows and sedimentations associated with digital networks, transnational relationships, globalized economies and universal ecological needs are dissolving any simple equivalence between city, citizenship and urban space. In the mix of domains and interests, each festival needs a closer look to understand its specifics and qualities.
From the Venice Biennial, founded in 1895, to the Gdańsk
Festival Narrations – Installations and Interventions for
Public Space, founded in 2009, most of them include
miscellaneous urban spaces for staging artworks – sometimes
in addition and sometimes as a counterpart to art
institutions. Leaving the white cube and the black box for
projects and festivals, urban space, and its connotations
and atmospheres can become artistic materials. Artists,
who deal with urban situations, react to complex processes
that precede artistic interventions. They maintain the
idea of collecting and sorting as a form of artistic practice,
and they develop a special attention to found details, signs
and systems, frames and contexts. The amalgam, developed
over time, in which ideas and intentions, functions
and malfunctions are intertwined, is what interests them.
Function and wear, existing materials and the implemented
language of urban planning and architecture are the
subjects of their analysis.
Temporary interventions experiment with given situations,
existing architectures, sensory perception and allegorical
associations. In projects and festivals, they show
with often minimal or non-invasive means how architectural
ensembles and urban spaces can be used or viewed
differently. Artists read into the aesthetic vocabulary
that is visible in the juxtaposition and superimposition of
different times, interests and compasses. As much as the
choice of space is part of the artwork, the artistic quality
of the interventions develops along the depth of focus
and artistic sovereignty, which the artist can generate
working on a chosen location.
For the viewer, the known space serves as a recognizable
reference. It becomes a connecting link between the everyday
situation and the artistic intervention, and functions
as an anchor point to an artwork which might, at
first sight, be only fragmentary or partially understandable.
This moment of dysfunction contributes significantly
to the experience that blind spots of everyday perception
are resolved and awareness is reset. The familiarity with
the environment creates a kind of security and forms an
Ariadne’s thread to explore the artistic position.
Artists who prefer the complex structure of urban space
over the more neutral white cube, are characterized by a
keen sense for the relationship of continuity and creativity.
They contribute to the idea of regarding urban spaces
as open spaces and frames of possibilities. They render
visible not only opportunities but also deficiencies, which
is why temporary art interventions are often interpreted
as a criticism of urban development and architectural
conventions.
The focus on the interchange of space and its connotations
with artistic practice corresponds with the contemporary
needs of urban development, ecological awareness
and community engagement as much as with an
ongoing interdisciplinary dialog between the arts, sciences
and technological advances. The present festival
formats act as an ephemeral meeting point linking various
domains having a share in the public sphere. In their
ubiquity, they influence the co-constitutional process of
public scope, public values and public practice.
The plethora of festivals can be valued as a seismograph
of sociocultural activity in the public domain responding
to new spatial flows, cross-cultural and trans-national relationships,
which are asking for ongoing negotiations between
public space, political culture and civic responsibility.
The growing number of festivals worldwide indicates
that no alternative has been found yet. Temporary co-operation,
a variable set of partners, changeable focus, flexible
approaches, and limited duration all seem to respond
to the need for open spaces away from the institutional
conventions and to accommodate the potential to reflect
the state of the art as well as its cultural relevance. What
is missing is the idea of how to evaluate this.
Bettina Pelz, since 2000 the curatorial work of Bettina Pelz
has been dedicated to interdisciplinary projects in urban
space, postindustrial environments and world cultural heritage
sites.